Christmas Dinner

Ann wanted to have a small Christmas dinner on Christmas Day at our house, despite our being at Rob and Dyce's the evening before for a wonderful fondue, of which I took no photos. After a series of holiday parties with a big New Year's celebration to come within the week, it was almost too much. Next year we need to slow things down.

We thought about doing a Feast of the Seven Fishes, but consuming such a vast meal requires a small army that we are not prepared to serve in our home. Moreover, outside of the restaurant trade, finding decent seafood in this food desert is nigh on impossible.

Instead, Ann hit on the theme of three pastas, each in the color of the Italian flag: red, white, and green. In the weeks before Christmas, we set about throwing pasta dishes at the proverbial wall to see what would stick. For me, it was important that we have only one dish made at the last minute, so that I would not be chained to the stove all night. After a couple of days of kicking ideas around, we settled on three dishes.

Cookie Fairy Making Rosemary-Orange-Olive Oil Shortbreads

Ann had already decided she was making shortbreads with rosemary, orange, and olive oil for dessert. That left antipasti to figure out, one with meat and one without. The without came easily enough: a green olive olivada (tapenade less anchovies) served with crackers and a neutral double or triple cream cheese.

Olivada, Crackers, Triple Cream Cheese, Grissini

For meat, somehow we got fixated on vitello tonnato. I decided to keep the meat raw in the form of a tartare and use the tuna sauce for garnish. I thought it was a neat idea; I was alone in this thinking apparently, judging from the amount of leftovers that I turned into burgers the next day. The tonnato sauce was the best I have ever made. I think I scared people with raw meat.

Vitello Tonnato
Veal Tartare on Crostini with Tonnato Sauce and Capers

For the red pasta, I stuffed conchiglioni (large shells) with pulled short rib that I braised a couple of days before in a really intense beef stock. I mixed the short rib with ricotta to lighten it just a little and covered the whole in a quick marinara.

Here's a tip for the shells. I bought really excellent quality shells with a recommended 16- to 18-minute cook time. The day before, I boiled them for four minutes, then chilled them immediately in cold water. After tossing them in a little olive oil to keep them from sticking together, I put them in a seal top bag in the fridge overnight. The next day, they were perfect for stuffing, pliable but holding their shape rather than flopping around and closing up like fully cooked shells.

Baked Conchiglioni Stuffed with Short Rib and Ricotta
Topped with Marinara

Ann insisted on potato gnocchi which we made the day before. I rolled out and cut the gnocchi while Ann boiled them in small batches. Before people arrived, I made a speck and parmigiano cream. While the green pasta was cooking, I browned the refrigerated gnocchi and then poured the sauce over at dinner time. Everybody loved these; they were too rich for my taste.

Potato Gnocchi with Speck and Parmigiano Cream

The green pasta for me was a no-brainer, the word green sending me directly to basil for which Liguria is famous. The Ligurians serve their pesto on their traditional cut of pasta called trofie, hundreds and hundreds of pounds we rolled out at the restaurant. Not wanting to roll out trofie for this dinner, I screwed up and ordered in some dried trofie, which despite being imported from Italy, was crap. I am still kicking myself for not investing the half an hour it would have taken to make fresh trofie. Nobody but Ann and me seemed to notice; still I do not like using second rate ingredients.

Trofie al Pesto with Torn Basil and Toasted Pine Nuts

I think we were all pretty much partied out by the time Christmas Day rolled around. Unlike several prior nights, it was not a late night. I think we were all stuffed too, but fortunately, I was able to send home some of the copious leftovers.

Here's My Plate with All Three Pastas

Buon Natale!

Steelhead Trout with Piquillo White Beans and Haricots Verts

A Quick Dinner from Leftovers

I know I have touched on this a bunch of times before, but it bears repeating: having leftovers in the refrigerator really helps put dinners on the table quickly. A case in point: I had a couple pieces of Steelhead Trout to cook for dinner and on rummaging the fridge, I found some roasted haricots verts, a little black olive tapenade, and a half a jar of piquillo peppers from various recent dinners.

Steelhead Trout with Piquillo White Beans and Haricots Verts

While the fish was cooking, I reheated the green beans and blitzed a can of cannellini in the food processor with the four or five leftover piquillos. By the time the fish was done, the plate was ready to assemble, a really tasty and nice looking dinner in under seven minutes.

Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade

Each time we go to or through Newberg, a town about 20 minutes from the house, we make a point to go to the fish market there. Although the prices are spendy, the quality is extremely good. On this trip, I bought a small piece of halibut for our dinner. 

With a mild white fish such as halibut, I love a salty element to complement it and tapenade is high on my list of salty condiments, being a mixture of olives, capers, and anchovies.

Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade
and Roasted Haricots Filets

Tapenade Ingredients: Capers, Kalamata Olives, Garlic, Thyme

While we used to buy salted anchovies by the kilo at the restaurant, I have no access to them here in the Willamette Valley. To compensate, I will often add a splash of fish sauce to those dishes that require anchovies. In this case, I had plenty of fish flavor from the halibut, so I went ahead without anchovies. For this quantity of olives and depending on the size of the anchovies, I would probably peel one filet off the backbone for this tapenade. If the anchovy were tiny as sometimes happens, I would use perhaps both filets.

Finished Tapenade

To make the tapendade, I just chopped all the ingredients and mixed them right on the cutting board. Tapenade really is that simple. I don't like to put small quantities in the food processor: the texture is better when cut by hand.

Green Beans Tossed in Olive Oil, Ready to Roast

French Black Steel Puts a Beautiful Crust on Fish

My Secret Fish Spatula

Years ago, I had a couple nice French fish spatulas, which seem to be all the rage among chefs, but they just never suited me. In the professional kitchen, you have a personal relationship with your tools and if something doesn't work, it is time to move on. I ended up giving my fish spatulas to two of my junior cooks.

My preference is a big perforated pancake spatula that I have cooked with for 30-plus years that suits my hand and has turned tens of thousands of pieces of fish and scallops. There are a couple of times when the big spatula is not the best tool for the job: in a pan that is loaded with closely spaced scallops and when cooking long, slender pieces of fish such as the halibut in the photo above.

In cases like this, I go into my pastry toolbox and get out a Matfer offset icing spatula which is a perfect tool, even if designed for another use. Being a sauté guy, I have turned way more fish with this spatula than I have iced cakes!

Halibut Deserves a Great Pinot Noir

Please don't tell me that red wine and fish don't go together. Please. Besides being utter nonsense, it is also utter nonsense. In America, we really focus on what wine goes with which food. Is it any wonder that a great many people are put off of wine because all these "rules?" Granted that some fish and red wine is a train wreck and some wine and food pairings are astoundingly more than the sum of their parts, but I had a real eye opening in France many decades ago. The French do things differently: except in the non-wine producing areas, everyone drinks the local wine with whatever they're eating, pairing be damned.

A case in point: on one trip to wine country, we ended up in a small restaurant in the town of Romanèche-Thorins, home to Georges Duboeuf, in the Beaujolais. For the table, we ordered a simply roasted Bresse chicken. And what did we drink? The same thing that all the other tables were drinking: Cru Beaujolais, red wine with roast chicken, something that breaks all the so-called "rules" in the US.

In any case, halibut is a mild meaty fish that loves to be paired with a lighter red wine. The earthy and salty flavors in the tapenade really help marry the wine and the fish. And of course, we're drinking local because we live (intentionally) in one of the very best wine growing areas of the world. For our halibut, we chose a wine from a small producer made from Coury clone Pinot Noir from one of the great vineyards in Oregon, planted in 1971. It was a great pairing.

A Clean out the Refrigerator Sunday

Sunday the 28th was mercifully without plans. I wanted to rest; I needed to rest. The mental logistics of bringing off a 7-course tasting menu for the entire restaurant on upcoming New Year's Eve were really sapping my energy. Physically too, I needed to rest for the upcoming marathon that is New Year's Eve dinner service.

Strange as it may seem, resting for me involves cooking. There is something restful and mindless about standing at the cutting board and plowing through mounds of mise-en-place. I know that most people see this as work and something to be minimized; for me, I find it very relaxing.

What makes it even more special is if Annie joins me and we can spend time in the kitchen together, which is what we did on Sunday after sitting around in the sun room having our morning coffee and watching the juncos and other birds on the feeders. She wanted to make a batch of white chili for dinner and after helping her prep that, I threw together a quick pasta for lunch.

Garganelli Mise en Place

I combed through the refrigerator and found all kinds of bits and pieces of things, some of which went into Ann's chili and some of which went into the lunch pasta.



Garganelli with Sage, Tomatoes, and Tapenade

For the pasta, I sweated a lot of slivered garlic with sage in butter and then tossed that with the garganelli, sliced tomatoes, and some leftover tapenade. I also added a half a cup or so of the pasta cooking water to loosen the sauce a touch and topped the pasta with grated pecorino.


Ann's White Chili

As for Ann's chili, while she sautéed chopped onions and ground chicken, and then rinsed the cannellini, I prepped the odds and ends that I found in the fridge and ground spices. A bit of cilantro stems, a mangy half poblano chile, a few shriveled green onions, some unwanted tomato sauce, and so forth: it's in there! After a few hours in the slow cooker, Ann added some pasta to make it chili-mac. And we thoroughly enjoyed it for dinner!

It's always good to plan a clean-out-the-refrigerator day once every couple of weeks and if I can do it with my beloved Annie, that's double joy for me!

A Favorite Dinner

Looking back through the years of posts here, I see lots of pictures of salame, charcuterie, cheese, and bread. And no wonder: that might just constitute one of our favorite meals. For my part, these are simply foods that I love and now that I cook for a living, the appeal of a no-cook, ready-to-eat dinner is extraordinary.

Saturday while I was at work, Ann told me she had a surprise for me and in the midst of Saturday dinner rush, I promptly forgot about it. It was only after we returned from Fireworks Pizza in Leesburg on Sunday that she reminded me she had a surprise: a batch of bread dough rising, hidden in the oven so I wouldn't see it.



Ann's Pecorino Romano Bread

Ann wasn't too pleased with the loaf of bread, but it had an extraordinary crumb and great flavor. We demolished it over the next couple of days.

Delights, Largely Thanks to Friends

Although we keep a drawer full of cheese and salame at home (doesn't everyone?), it had been getting a little low until just this week when Bill, Tom, and Steven came over to attend Carter's winter concert. Bill came bearing the Robiola a Tre Latti the you see in the center and the jar of chicken liver spread next to it. I made the galantine behind the chicken livers. I don't know where the big chorizo came from, but I know I contributed the 5-year old Gouda. Tom brought the big chunk of farmhouse Cheddar, the green peppercorn-studded goat cheese, and the nduja in the foreground. A wonderful meal and thank you friends!

Tapenade

Ann asked me to make tapenade for the bread, so I spent a while pitting and chopping olives. And then she ended up not liking it ("too fishy"). Bummer. More for me.

And so we spent the evening noshing with a bottle of Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon while watching back episodes of Game of Thrones. A great evening!

Honeymoon: Three Doors Down, SE Portland OR and Heading Home

Saturday May 4, SE Portland OR

After munchies with beer at noon on Saturday and so-so cart food later in the afternoon, it was finally around 8:45pm that we got somewhat hungry. For our final meal in Portland, Ann wanted a simple plate of pasta so we searched the web for the closest reasonable sounding Italian joint, which proved to be at Hawthorne and 37th, called Three Doors Down.

As an aside, how nice is it to go out somewhat late and still have lots of restaurants open? Living in small town Winchester VA, we are done with our dinner service by 9pm even at the end of June when the days are the longest of the year.

That said, I judged the crowd to be slow and asked our server about it. In Portland as in Winchester, it seems you cannot compete with Mother Nature. Because it was one of the first beautiful weekends of the year, so many were people out of town at the beach or otherwise enjoying the gorgeous weather and grilling out.

We commandeered a table out on the sidewalk and people-watched for a while with a bottle of Brick House Gamay Noir, which tasted exactly as Gamay should taste. If you told me I was drinking Beaujolais, I wouldn't have argued with you. But really, I don't know enough about New World Gamay to understand how it differs from Beaujolais.


Ribbon Ridge Gamay

Because we weren't super hungry, we ordered a couple appetizers followed by a plate of pasta. Both our starters were good. First up was a large slab of grilled bread spread with goat cheese and topped with arugula and duck confit. Yep, it was every bit as good as you might imagine, though an informed palate might be wishing it had some of our house-cured duck confit on it. There's no hiding the extra flavor that ours develops over the three-month curing process.

Duck Confit, Arugula, and Goat Cheese

Next up was a board of burrata topped with tapenade, some so-called jamón ibérico, and flatbread. We enjoyed this plate, but two things confuse me. First, look at the mash up of ingredients from at least three different cultures. How does this make intellectual sense? Second, look hard at the jamón ibérico. Really, if you're going to spend that kind of money on some of the world's best ham, are you then going to cut it thick and then partially cook it?

"Jamón Ibérico", Burrata, Tapenade, and Flatbread

By the time we finished our appetizers and the server delivered our plates (they split our pasta for us; kind of them, but they needn't have) of house-made ricotta cavatelli bolognese, it was really dark out on the sidewalk. Our server had brought us a candle earlier in the evening, but it was way too gusty to keep it lit, so Ann downloaded a candle app on her iPhone and set it to flickering.

I must say that the cavatelli was deftly made and deftly sauced but was desperate for salt. And doesn't anyone make true bolognese with shredded meat anymore? Really, you're going to the trouble to make cavatelli, but you won't do the same for your meat sauce?

In the end, it was a really nice low key dinner that we shared on our final night in Portland. We were very comfortable and enjoyed sitting and talking and watching the street parade. If I lived in Portland, I think I would like this place a lot.

Sunday May 5

Sunday the 5th is a day I would like to forget. I forced myself up at 0600 local time, trying to wean myself off Pacific time to help with the transition back to work on Monday morning. In retrospect, maybe this was a bad idea. We skipped breakfast at the B&B and hurried to return our rental car and get through security to catch our early morning flight to SFO. I managed to set off the millimeter wave scanner again: I'm simply too tall for the little booth. When I looked at the monitor, it had alerted right on the top of my head, the usual location, so I got my (lack of) hair patted down. All the TSA agents here were very friendly, unlike at Dulles, and the tiny guy doing the pat down started chuckling when I had to bend down so that he could reach the top of my head.

It proved that all that hurrying was for naught. Because of weather and because of weekend runway closures at SFO for federally-mandated safety improvements, our plane was over two hours late arriving at PDX. Our plane arrived at PDX *after* we were supposed to depart SFO for Dulles; how's that for late? The flight crews were bitching too: they have to deal with runway closures all the time and naturally, the brunt of passenger fall-out lands mostly on their shoulders. And their layovers are impacted as well. The whole situation is screwed up.

The weather continued brilliantly nice and we had awesome views of Mount Hood from the tarmac while we sat at PDX and the rest of the major Cascades peaks: Ranier, St. Helens with its flat top, Adams, and the Three Sisters down near Bend once we got airborne. We also saw Shasta and the peaks in California before weather closed in a few minutes out of SFO.

Mt. Hood from the Tarmac at PDX

We managed to get re-booked on a flight out of SFO that departed not 20 minutes after we landed (and need I mention that our inbound flight sat on the ground waiting in SFO waiting for a gate to open?). When we got to the Washington departure gate, mercifully only about four gates from our arrival gate, the monitor above the gate read "Delayed - Awaiting Inbound Aircraft"), which confused me because there was a plane at the gate. The plane had just arrived and so we stood around for about 45 minutes while they turned it around, giving me time to nip over to the concession just behind us and grab some power bars and a couple sandwiches. At this point, we had been going all day without food.

"Delayed:" Just What Every Traveler Wants to See

Once we boarded, we had to sit at the gate for about 20 minutes before ground control would give us permission to join the long line of jets waiting to take off. We were about an hour on the plane on the ground before we finally got underway to DC and with weather ahead of us, we were unable to take the most direct route in. We finally arrived at just after 1am and by the time we got our car, got home, and got the dogs walked, it was 3am. Waking up just three hours later to go to work was a doozy!

This is the final post in the Honeymoon series. We had a wonderful time at the Oregon coast, in the Willamette Valley, and in Portland proper, along with some of the most fantastic weather ever to grace the first week in May in that area. What an amazing trip!