Easter 2026

Rob and Dyce were kind enough to invite us for Easter dinner at their house on a gorgeous day, clear enough to see all the way to Mt. Adams in Washington. Some food was eaten. Some rosé was drunk. Some tales were told.

How Appropriate for Easter
Dyce's Deviled Eggs

Starter Cocktail, Hugo Spritz
Prosecco, St-Germain, Mint, and Soda Water

Hard to Beat Patty Green Tempranillo Rosé

Rob's Ham

Barbara's Asparagus
with a Sort of Pistachio Pesto

Potato Gratin

Carot Salad: Salade de Carottes Râpées
Found Everywhere in France

I Made Biscuits for the Ham

Ann Made Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Stunning Sunset: Three-Fingered Jack, Black Butte, Mt. Jefferson

Lamb Stew

There's nothing really novel about lamb stew. At heart, it's quite a humble dish of lamb, vegetables, and gravy. But there is a vast difference between how professionals and home cooks approach this dish. And a vast difference in the finished dish as a result.

Carefully Constructed Lamb Stew

At home, one often cooks all the stew ingredients together, meat and vegetables until done and then thickens (or highly reduces) the cooking liquid. The vegetables will likely go all at once into the pot once the meat is cooked to avoid overcooking them.

On the other hand, at a high-end restaurant, each ingredient will be pre-cooked just to the point of doneness, combined with a meticulously-made gravy when the dish is ordered, and reheated before service. In this way, each of the constituent ingredients is cooked perfectly with nothing overcooked.

Here's a sketch of how I made this batch of lamb stew which is pretty much identical to how we would have made it at the restaurant, if we could have sold something as pedestrian as stew. Fine dining customers, especially those for whom such a meal is an unusual splurge, usually want to order something "luxurious" that they can brag about to their friends: steak, lobster, foie gras, etc.

This tendency makes it really hard to sell something such as a stew, which you must do if you are running a nose-to-tail restaurant like ours that was based on whole animal butchery. Selling the non-glamorous parts of the animal at such a restaurant involves a precise combination of wording on the menu and pricing ("menu engineering"), but that is a topic that would require an entire chapter in a foodservice textbook. It is a topic in which I am highly versed but which is way beyond the scope of this, or any, blogpost. If you're a chef reading this and need help, I do consult.

Step 1: Make a Great Stock

To make the stock, I had been saving scraps of meat and bones over the last few days. This stock was made from lamb trimmings, steak trimmings, the backbones from spatchcocking game hens, the bones leftover from the roast game hens, and a few chunks of pork neckbones.

To start, toss the bones and some aromatic vegetables (carrots, celery, onions in chunks) with oil and roast in a hot oven (400-450), turning as necessary, until the bones and vegetables are really well browned. 

Stock Bones Before Roasting

Well-Caramelized Bones After Roasting

Once the bones were roasted (about 45 minutes with four turns at about 400F), I removed them to the stock pot, covered them with water, and then poured very hot water onto the sheet tray and scraped up all the brown bits (what we call in chef-ese the fond or "bottom" in French). I then poured the water and brown bits into the stock pot so as not to lose any flavor.

If I were making a super-fancy stock, I would pour lamb stock over the bones instead of water, which would be called a double-stock. I often make chicken soup by cooking raw chicken in chicken stock, yielding a double stock just to get a more intense chicken flavor, our poultry in the US largely being bland.

Once the bones and liquid are in the stock pot, I added other flavorings such as leek leaves, onion peels, parsley stems, a sprig of rosemary, and a couple sprigs of thyme. These items add depth of flavor; the onion peels also add brown color and they were used as a dye in olden days. I often collect these bits in a bag in the freezer to add to my stocks.

Step 2: Prepare Each Ingredient Separately

Once the stock had cooked slowly for about 4-5 hours, I removed it from the heat, strained out the solids, and returned the stock to the stockpot. While the stock was coming back to a light boil, I cut into bite-sized cubes the remainder of a lamb shoulder that I had roasted to medium rare.

I then cut a couple yellow potatoes and a couple large carrots into the same size pieces as the lamb and poached first the potatoes and then the carrots in the stock until they were done. Then I put a bag of frozen pearl onions into the stock to cook. I am not ashamed to admit that I use frozen pearl onions; the labor and cost savings in using them is immense.

At the restaurant, we would have focused on using baby vegetables rather than cut ones, just to up the wow factor of the dish. I would have asked my growers to harvest tiny carrots and new potatoes and my crew and I would have probably stood around and peeled small shallots in place of the pearl onions.

It's likely we might have used baby hakurei turnips and tiny chanterelle mushrooms as well, in the appropriate seasons. All these ingredients and all this work would yield what we call in chef-ese a very soigné ("carefully prepared" in French) dish, but man, that's too much expense and labor for home cooking!

Mid-Stream in Cooking Each Ingredient Separately

Step 3: Finish the Gravy and Reheat the Stew

Once all the vegetables were cooked in the stock (and thereby lent their flavors to the stock), I then continued to reduce the original gallon and a half (six quarts, roughly 5.5 liters) down to the final volume of gravy that I wanted, concentrating the flavors. I then seasoned the stock with salt and white pepper to taste. You really don't want to season a stock before it is reduced because you'll end up concentrating the seasoning and will end up with an oversalted stock.

A professional hint that I have passed on to many, many young cooks: if your highly reduced stock tastes flat, add a drop or two of vinegar (I like sherry vinegar for this) and see how that helps. Highly reduced stocks are likely to be flat and bland because of the highly concentrated amount of gelatin that they contain. Acid will bring new life to such a stock.

Once I seasoned my stock to my taste, I made a batch of beurre manié, roughly equal parts flour and room temperature butter kneaded into a paste. Kneading the flour and the butter creates a great sauce thickener that you can whisk into a stock, eliminating any worry of lumps in your sauce.

I added small lumps of beurre manié to my simmering sauce, whisking it in, until the gravy was as thick as I wanted. A decent rule of thumb is that one tablespoon of flour and one tablespoon of butter will thicken one cup of liquid to a heavy cream consistency.

A lot of chefs will skip the beurre manié altogether, opting to sauce their meat and vegetables with a glace or demi-glace, both highly concentrated and very thick stocks. I find these sauces to be too thick and too sticky for my liking, but that's just me. YMMV: your mileage may vary.

All that is left is to combine the stew ingredients with the gravy and reheat. You can do this in any fashion; this time, I put everything into a casserole and reheated it in the oven. At the restaurant, we would have assembled an individual portion up on the range top and then put the hot stew in an oven-proof serving dish into a very hot oven for five minutes or so before calling for a runner to take it to the dining room. [More than likely, we would have covered it with a sheet of puff pastry and baked it until the pastry was golden and risen.]

Lamb Stew, Ready to Serve

These are a few hints on how a professional chef might approach a humble stew with an eye to elevating it slightly. There's nothing difficult about this method, but it does involve a significant amount of time to do. If you have time to do this, it will elevate your stew game. If not, at least you may better appreciate all the pains to which chefs go to assemble even the most humble of dishes for you.

St. Patrick's Day 2023

St. Patrick's Day arrived three weeks after my foot surgery this year and I was in a cast, in pain, and not in a mood to cook anything. [And here I am 7 weeks later, posting, not having been up to even blogging]. Ann and good friends Rob and Dyce conspired to put together a nice meal to cheer me up. It so did cheer me up and I truly appreciated it, having been confined to the house for a month and fully in the midst of going totally stir crazy, not to mention being pissed off at having to sit on the freaking sofa all damn day every day.

St. Paddy's isn't a big event at our house. Ann's full Napoletan on both sides and my family is from Wales and England. But what the hell: everyone is Irish on St. Paddy's Day!

Co-Conspirators

Sadly, the day of St. Patrick's Day, Rob was ill and elected to stay home. We probably would have cancelled the event had Dyce not been up since early morning putting the corned beef brisket on the smoker. In addition to the corned beef, Dyce also brought some Irish cheese, a bottle of Irish malt, a bottle of Chassagne, a loaf of soda bread, and a small lemon curd cake. He went way overboard as he does always.

Irish Cheddar with Porter

My First Irish Single Malt: Pretty Good

We started the evening with a little Irish Cheddar and a shot of Bushmill's single malt. Though I've been to Ireland a couple of times and consumed my fair share of whiskey, it's always been a mild blended whiskey and not a single malt. As a great fan of Scotch, I had never really taken notice of the Irish cousin and was pleasantly surprised. It's not super complex or peaty or smoky, but it is a good dram. Not having had a drop of alcohol in a month, I nursed mine very slowly.

A Seriously Delicious Chassagne

Dyce's Corned Beef, Smoked then Braised

With the beef that Dyce made, we had an unusual wine pairing: Chassagne-Montrachet. I might have picked a light fruity red (Gamay) or even a Riesling or a sparkling white to go with corned beef, but when somebody brings a bottle of Chassagne to my house, all bets are off! That bottle is getting opened!

Italian Girl Cooks Colcannon!

When Ann and Dyce were planning this dinner, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard Ann say, "I'll make colcannon!" Really, I had no idea that my Italian bride even knew what colcannon was, let alone would volunteer to make it. I thought cabbage was firmly on her no-no list. Live and learn! Day of, I hobbled over to the counter and seated at a bar stool with a portable cutting board, I finely sliced two leeks and half a cabbage for her. She then browned both of these in leftover bacon grease and added them to her mash of yellow potatoes. Delicious!

Ann Slicing "Irish Soda Bread"

Dyce scored a loaf of soda bread from a local bakery. I've eaten a lot of soda bread in Ireland, made a lot of it, and even have a handwritten recipe from Alice O'Sullivan, my innkeeper and damned fine baker from my final visit to Killarney. Bottom line, what we bought locally doesn't look like pound cake and it sure as hell does not taste like pound cake. Irish soda bread is not sweet, often has a good portion of whole wheat flour in it, and traditionally is shaped as a round loaf with a cross cut into the top. We were fairly put off by this so-called loaf.

Corned Beef, Colcannon, and Soda Bread

Damn Fine Lemon Curd Cake for Dessert

I cannot reiterate what a lifesaver it was for me for Dyce and Ann to put together this dinner. It so elevated my spirits.

Gochujang-Roasted Carrots and Brussels Sprouts

I love gochujang, that somewhat spicy, funky, thick and sticky, fermented Korean paste of red chiles, glutinous rice, soy, and barley. Although many people would find gochujang highly spicy, in my world, it's pretty mild as spicy things go.

Gochujang-Roasted Carrots and Brussels Sprouts,
Ann: "Damn it! You're Trying to Get Me to Eat Vegetables!"

Back during the height of COVID sequestration, I started toying with the idea of gochujang and carrots, using those carrots as a base for a fish dish. Initially, I tossed the carrots in a gochujang-based sauce before roasting them, but in more recent iterations, I have taken to roasting the carrots first, then tossing them in the sauce after cooking, à la Buffalo wings. I prefer this method because I can roast the carrots just to doneness without having to worry about the sauce burning in the high heat of the oven.

Last night, in expanding on the theme I decided to do a strictly vegetarian dish of roasted carrots and brussels sprouts in gochujang sauce over rice. From the get-go, Ann was asking, "What protein are you going to serve that on?" She's not quite of the "if it's not meat, it's not a meal" ilk, but vegetarian is harder for her than for me. I could happily live on vegetables without any meat at all, but that would really test Ann's limits.

Gochujang Sauce

My new iteration of gochujang sauce shows some evolution from the original as well. Last night, I mixed a lot of gochujang with a little rice vinegar, some agave nectar to balance, a little soy for salt, a touch of sesame oil for complexity, and finely minced garlic. A couple of tablespoons of warm water helped make the sauce fluid enough. This would make a really tasty Buffalo wing sauce, come to think of it.

Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

Left over from our Easter feast, we had a great many grilled lamb chops as well as a good bit of sauce poivrade. It seemed obvious to me that the best way to make use of these leftovers was to make a classic lamb stew, termed a navarin in France. A navarin is a classic Easter dish all over France, typically made with shoulder and often containing turnips, navets, after which the dish likely took its name.

Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

The classic method sees raw lamb shoulder browned and removed from the pan. Into the pan go flour and tomato paste and then a sauce is made after these two items brown. The lamb goes back into the sauce and the whole goes into the oven to braise. When done, the vegetables are usually cooked separately, at least in higher caliber restaurants, and combined with the meat and sauce just at service.

The goal is to have an unctuous and richly flavored sauce napping tender lamb and perfectly cooked vegetables. The vegetables often vary according to the season, but carrots, potatoes, turnips, and onions are fairly standard. In the spring, a navarin printanier might also include asparagus, favas, or green peas.

Beautiful Plate of Stew Vegetables

This particular navarin that I made last evening had necessarily to be made differently, given that I was starting with cooked lamb and also because at home, I am not cooking each of my vegetables separately. Moreover, I was certainly not paring them into beautiful lozenge shapes as do the high end French restaurants. Sure, I can do it, but I'm not competing for Michelin stars here, just trying to get a delicious dinner on the table as efficiently as possible.

I started by prepping the plate of vegetables you see above. Because I intended to poach them all together in lamb stock until they were just done, I paid special attention to cutting them such that they would all cook and be done at the same time. I used potatoes, carrots, celery, and halved shallots. Were I making this at the restaurant, I would have used whole tiny potatoes, tiny baby carrots, whole spring onion bulbs, baby hakurei turnips, tournéed celery root, fava beans, a couple morels, and perhaps some fern fiddleheads, each cooked separately.

Next, I boned out the lamb chops and cut it into bite-sized chunks, then made a stock using the lamb bones, vegetable trimmings (and especially the shallot skins, which give brown color to the stock), a few parsley sprigs, and the leftover sauce poivrade (glace de viande, shallots, green peppercorns, and the reduced and strained red wine lamb marinade).

At dinner time, I strained the stock and returned it to the stove at a simmer in which to poach the vegetables. Once the vegetables were nearing doneness, I seasoned the stock, added the lamb cubes, and then proceeded to thicken the sauce with an addition of glace de viande and beurre manié. It is vital, when making a dish with cooked meat, to add it at the very end, such that it just heats through.

Beurre manié (literally "handled butter," meaning kneaded butter) is equal parts room temperature butter and flour kneaded into a paste. By coating the flour with fat, the flour does not lump when added to a hot sauce. It is one of the simplest ways to thicken a hot sauce on the fly and is a technique that every cook should know.

One of the principal tricks of making dishes with highly reduced and long-cooked stocks is achieving the perfect balance so that the sauce dances across the palate rather than lying there limp and listless. I spent a lot of time with my cooks in the restaurant walking them through the process. We would taste the sauce and most often it would start dead and flat. To counter this, I use two weapons, spice and acid, acid being the primary tool.

The tiniest little hint of bite in the sauce will help perk up the taste buds and to that end, ground white pepper is the saucier's friend. A tiny bit goes a very long way because ground white pepper is very piquant. I dusted the surface of my stew with a hint of white pepper and stirred it in.

Spice aside, what really contributes to a lively sauce is acidity. All the long cooking and resulting extraction of collagens creates a palate coating and dull sauce. A tiny bit of acid will fix this. I can remember tasting a dull sauce with my cooks, adding a few drops of good Sherry vinegar to the sauce, and retasting. Watching their eyes light up at the revelation of what acid can do for a sauce was a great reward.

In the case of my sauce last night, I was prepared with Sherry vinegar at hand, but because I made the stock with leftover sauce poivrade (made from most of a bottle of red wine, plus some of the green peppercorn brine, both wine and brine being acidic), my sauce was lively enough after adding the scant amount of white pepper.

Navarin d'agneau, what a great use of leftovers!

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

 

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

I've got this thing for roasted carrots with dobanjang and honey going on lately. I love the texture and flavors.

Last trip to the store, I bought some chickpeas and some carrots, knowing that Ann wanted to dip carrots into a batch of hummus for a light dinner. But the weather is still cold here in Central Oregon and I wasn't really feeling such summery fare. I thought instead to roast the carrots and serve them still warm out of the oven on a bed of hummus.

Right now, it is just too much effort to come up with a recipe for the two major ingredients here, hummus and the dobanjang honey sauce in which the carrots are tossed. Both of these I make at the drop of hat in the quantities that I want, spiced like I want. It robs my cooking of all spontaneity to measure and to assign a precise ingredient list to such whimsy. In short, codifying a dish robs all my joy. Sorry. Not sorry.

The hummus is chickpeas, lemon juice, pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives with some brine, garlic, pimentón, salt, a splash each of sriracha and sesame oil, with enough water to smooth it out to a rough paste. I'm not the biggest fan of super smooth hummus. It's great and all that, but I really do prefer more texture.

The sweet and spicy sauce could be made from anything spicy and anything sweet, but this version is about equal parts dobanjang and honey with a touch each of soy sauce and rice vinegar, to add salt and to tame the sweet a bit.

Maybe someday I will get around to codifying these two recipes, especially if I ever decide to write about creative vegan fare.

Boeuf Bourguignon

Ann has been asking me recently to make dishes for her that she has never had before. It's great for me in that I don't have to come up with an idea about what to make for dinner and I get to revisit some dishes that I haven't cooked in a while, a while extending to decades in some cases.

A couple weeks back, she asked me to make her the classic boeuf bourguignon, braised beef with bacon, mushrooms, and onions. It's a dish I know well, but not a dish that I have cooked very often (or eaten in restaurants) because it is quintessential French home cooking and not something that one eats out at restaurant.

At my own restaurant, we couldn't sell beef bourguignon because customers considered it too familiar and not soigné enough for a high-end fine dining restaurant. So we often made rabbit bourguignon rather than beef. Even so, we couldn't serve the rabbit bourguignon as the braise that it was. We had pull the meat off the bones and use that as a sauce for pasta, a filling for puff pastry or ravioli, or some other creative take on the dish. 

That's a long-winded way of saying that I love beef bourguignon and haven't cooked it all that much (and not at all in recent decades) because I couldn't sell it. And an even longer way of saying that I was very much looking forward to making it for Ann.

Boeuf Bourguignon avec Spätzle

Boeuf bourguignon is a classic slow-cooked braise of beef, a method of cooking meat that breaks down tough and less expensive cuts. That said, the point of braising beef is not so much for the resulting unctuously tender meat, but for the thick, glossy sauce. The long, slow cooking in a moderate oven breaks down the collagen in the meat and gristle, thickening the sauce, and at the same time giving it both a delightful mouthfeel and a velvety sheen. It is that sauce that makes braises so delicious and comforting.

In France, boeuf bourguignon is not served by itself, but with a starch designed to trap and intermingle with the silky sauce. Most commonly, it is served with potatoes of some fashion, often mashed, at times steamed or boiled, or prepared in other ways. Rather than potatoes, I prefer a more Alsatian approach and so I decided to serve my boeuf bourguignon on spätzle, which come to find out, Ann had not had before either.

You see the dish above, chunks of beef and pearl onions sitting atop spätzle, all napped with an unctuous sauce laden with porcini mushrooms, bacon, onions, and carrots. My only regret about making this dish now in the middle of winter is that I had no baby carrots with which to garnish the dish. For a primer on prepping pearl onions, see this post. For making spätzle, see here.

While the movie Julie & Julia did a lot in this country to popularize Julia Child's specific version of boeuf bourguignon, there are other versions out there, and I have developed my own method over the past 40 years that I'll outline below.

Browning Beef Chuck in Bacon Grease

Step one in almost any braise is to brown the meat well on all sides. In this case, I am browning a pound and a third of really nice looking beef chuck (shoulder) in bacon grease left from rendering bacon lardons. I chose this particular chuck because it is really well marbled.

Traditionally in France, the dish incorporates lardons, little bits of pork belly akin to bacon. It is often found plain and less commonly salted or smoked as is American bacon. Consequently, American bacon is often parboiled to help rid it of smoke, but I use a lightly smoked bacon and I don't mind the tiny bit of smoke that it introduces to the dish. It is hardly noticeable in the heady mix of flavors from the beef, mushrooms, and copious red wine in the dish.

I started by cooking in my cocotte three large thick slices of bacon, cut into lardons, to try out some grease in which to sear the cubes of beef. It took a good 15 minutes or more to brown the beef. You want to take your time when searing the beef, because this is what starts to develop really great flavor. Also at my house, browning more slowly on medium flame keeps the damned smoke detector from going off.

Brown the Beef Well on all Sides

You Want this Buildup ("Fond") on the Pan Bottom

Mise en Place

On the cutting board above, you see most of the other ingredients that are going into the braise: porcini mushrooms that are rehydrating, rendered bacon lardons, pearl onions, tomato paste, two carrots, and an onion. Once the porcini rehydrated, I chopped them into bite-sized pieces and saved the mushroom stock for the braise.

Deglazing with Aromatics

Once the beef is browned, remove it from the pan. You'll see a dark buildup on the bottom of the pan, which we call the fond, literally "bottom" in French. This is the point at which you add your aromatic vegetables to the pan. In this case, you can see that I have diced an onion and two carrots, the traditional vegetables for boeuf bourguignon. These go into the cocotte along with a few sprigs of parsley, a bay leaf, a little thyme, a tablespoon or so of thyme, three minced cloves of garlic, a tablespoon or so of tomato paste, and a bay leaf.

The steam generated from searing the vegetables should loosen the fond, all the good bits on the bottom of the pan. Scrape well to help loosen these flavor builders. Once the vegetables are cooked to the point where the onions are translucent, sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of flour on the vegetables and cook another couple of minutes, stirring well and frequently. This flour will help give the sauce its unctuousness.

At this point, I added the bacon lardons, the chopped porcini, and the porcini broth (making sure not to include any sand or dirt from the bottom of the bowl). Next, in went the better part of a bottle of red wine, local Petit Verdot if you must know, enough to come about 2/3 of the way up the sides of the beef cubes. When braising, you don't want to totally submerge the meat; that would be more technically a stew than a braise.

It is traditional to use Pinot Noir in this braise, but as I'll get into at the bottom of this post, my palate says that beef wants a more substantial wine than Pinot Noir. And I happen to have some inexpensive local Petit Verdot that will fill the bill admirably. I'll save the expensive Pinot to drink at some other time. I would never cook with a great wine. At the end of the day, you'll end up with a dish that tastes identical to that cooked with a passable wine and will have wasted an opportunity to drink a great wine.

Ready for the Oven

Out of the Oven at Three Hours

After adding the porcini stock and the wine, bring the braise up to a boil, cover it, and put it in a moderate (350F) oven. After 90 minutes, I pulled it out to check the liquid level which had evaporated to just about the level that you see in the photo above, about halfway, just where I wanted the finished dish to be. But I wanted to cook it about another 90 minutes to really bring out the best in the beef, so I added water to the cocotte to bring it back to the original level.

After another 90 minutes, I pulled the cocotte out of the oven. The beef cubes, as you see in the photo above, were really caramelized on the top. I flipped them over so that the tops could rehydrate just a bit as they cooled.

Browning the Pearl Onions

At dinner time, I put a bunch of prepped pearl onions in a skillet with a teaspoon of butter and cooked them slowly for 8 minutes, rotating them every couple of minutes. It is traditional when cooking pearl onions to add a touch of sugar to caramelize them, but adding sweetness is not my thing. If I had baby carrots, I would have done the same thing with them as with the onions.

In another pan, I reheated the spätzle with another tiny bit of butter, stirring now and again to prevent as much sticking as possible. While the onions and spätzle were cooking, I rewarmed the beef cubes in the sauce, then removed the beef and held it warm while thinning and seasoning the sauce to my liking.

All that was left was to put the beef cubes and onions on top of a mound of spätzle, then nap it all with the sauce. It was incredible eating!

It's Not Burgundy, But....

For wine with our boeuf bourguignon, Ann requested an older Bordeaux. The traditional wine for boeuf bourguignon is Burgundy, but we live in the Burgundy of the United States and we drink the local Pinot Noir all the time. Burgundy is therefore pretty much our day-to-day wine. I know: poor us! I also believe that in general, beef pairs just a little better with Bordeaux grapes than it does with Pinot Noir.

So I selected a bottle of Léoville Barton from 1990, one of the very best vintages of the last century. This is a bottle that was part of a case that I got on release in 1993 or 1994 for $240, less than the price of a bottle today! This wine never ceases to amaze me. Even though it was probably bottled sometime in 1992, it appears to be a much younger wine. Visually, it looks to be about 10 years old.

On the nose, the aromas of cassis and black fruits are still vivid, but they have a really pretty and funky (in the best sense of the word) background of secondary bottle bouquet, that unmistakable aroma that we all look for in an aged wine. On the palate, it is still going very strong, leading with black Cabernet Sauvignon fruit combined with still vibrant acidity. Further along in the palate, the older wine flavors of tobacco and leather come in, framed with extremely pleasant fine-grained tannins. It is by all measures a gorgeous wine.

This is a wine that, as good as it is today, is still improving. At thirty years old, it tastes like a wine of a mere ten years. I would love to be able to taste this wine in another thirty years. Given that another thirty years is not guaranteed, I think I will drink the last of it long before then. I don't want to leave this gorgeous wine behind.

It was great to revisit one of the classic dishes of French home cooking. Although I am well schooled in classic French cuisine, I don't cook it all that often and so this was good fun. More than that, I was really happy to introduce Annie to both boeuf bourguignon and spätzle, two dishes that she never had the chance to eat, growing up in a full Italian family. And that Léoville Barton really made the experience for us!

Chicken Pot Pie

My wife is a little crazy and I love her for it. This week when I had poached a chicken, she nonchalantly and quite apropos of nothing (that I could ascertain; who knows what was buzzing around in her infinitely circular brain?) asked me to make a chicken pot pie, saying that she would really like that a lot. Why not? Anything for her.

So I poach all the vegetables, make the gravy, make the crust, bake the pies, and get them to the table. Just before we dig in, she says, "I've never had pot pie before." All the while, I assume that she has asked me to make her a pot pie because she had eaten one and found it delicious enough to want again.

Don't you think that she would have said to me, "I've never had a pot pie before and really want to try one! Would you make me a chicken pot pie?" Nut!

Chicken Pot Pie

Pie Vegetables

You can use any vegetables that you want for your pies. I had planned to use celery, leeks, carrots, and green beans. When I got home from the store, I found that someone (not naming names) had roasted all the green beans that I was going to use in the pies. So I substituted some broccoli florets.

I brought some salted water to a boil and gave each of the vegetables a quick parboil. I cooked each vegetable in sequence until it was crisp-soft and put it in ice water to stop the cooking. Meanwhile, I picked a bit of chicken off a carcass that I had poached the day before.

Pies Ready for Topping

I brought the chicken stock that I had made the day before to a roiling boil and thickened it with a corn starch slurry. I poured the thick gravy over the vegetables and chicken, then seasoned with salt, plenty of black pepper, and a mound of freshly chopped parsley.

In retrospect, I should have used a beurre manié (flour and butter mix) to thicken the gravy. I was trying to back off the calories by using corn starch, but the gravy broke down in the oven later, something that flour will not do. Even an old chef learns the hard way (to be fair to myself, in my restaurant career, I did not get any experience in low-fat, low-calorie cooking!).

Pies Ready for Oven

We don't have any special dishes for pot pie and I thought that it would be nice to make individual ones, so I repurposed a couple of cereal bowls. I topped each with pie crust (recipe below), trimmed the crust, crimped it into the rim of the bowls with the tines of a fork, slit the crusts for steam vents, and brushed the tops with egg wash. 

The pies want to be in a hot oven (425F) until the top crusts brown nicely. I want to say that these took 35-40 minutes, but I wasn't watching the clock like a hawk.

Pie Crust Recipe

This is my tried and true all-butter super flaky pie crust. I would love to say that I learned it from my mother or her mother, inveterate pie bakers both, but that wouldn't be the truth. They were diehard Southerners and it was Crisco for their pie crust or nothing. I gave up on trans fats and hydrogenated shortening a very, very long time ago in favor of butter or (rarely) lard.

The following recipe will make a generous single pie crust (with generally enough left over to make a lattice top), depending on what size pie plate you are making. I measure my baking ingredients by weight in grams. If you do not have a scale, get one. It will be the single best thing you can do to improve your baking.

150 grams all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

140 grams cold butter, in small cubes

ice water as needed

Spin the flour and salt in the food processor for a second to mix it. Add the cold butter cubes and pulse. Pulse until the butter resembles really small peas in size. Add a couple tablespoons of water and pulse. Add water in dribbles and pulse in between. When the dough just starts to come together, bring it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a flat disc. Wrap it in film and refrigerate for an hour to cool it off. After this rest, it will be ready to use.