Mouthing Off

I was on the Today Show over the weekend, suggesting wines not just for the big Thanksgiving meal but all the other activities that go on this week—parades, football games, recovering after being mashed and jostled at the mall, you name it. The clip isn't up yet, but here's a link to my November column, which was the spur for it.

That got me thinking that I should recommend a few other worthwhile wines to hunt down in the remaining couple of days—affordable bottles that will pair well with a wide range of foods, which is pretty much what Thanksgiving is all about (since turkey itself doesn't taste like a whole heck of a lot).

From Spain's Rias Baixas region, Albariño is a terrific food wine, crisp and refreshing, with a kind of saline minerality and juicy citrus notes. I was there recently, and among the wines I liked were the fragrant, focused 2007 Pazo San Mauro Albariño ($17 or so) and the complex, stony 2007 Do Ferreiro Albariño ($22 or so, find this wine). Another good white option would be the 2007 Hugel & Fils Gewurztraminer($18 or so, find this wine). It's less florid and in-your-face than many Alsace Gewurzes, instead dry and crisp with a little white pepper note at the finish.

I also tasted through a heap of California Chardonnays the other day, with almost universally disheartening results. Most of them seemed blocky and blob-like, with too much oak and too much alcohol—the kind of wine that beats up your food rather than partnering with it. But, for a splurge, I did find the 2007 Lynmar Quail Hill Vineyard Chardonnay ($35) extremely impressive, its clean peach character succulent and inviting, with soft creamy lees and oak spice notes. 

In reds, a couple of recent discoveries in the tasting room were the 2007 Pulenta Estate Cabernet Sauvignon ($25), a lush mouthful of blackberry fruit from Argentina with just enough light herbal character to keep it from being a fruit-bomb, and the 2006 Mazzoni Toscana Rosso ($16, find this wine), a firm-spined, tart, cherry-inflected blend of 72% Sangiovese and 28% Merlot from, well, Tuscany. As the name suggests. 

Finally, you have to have a value pick for turkey-day, and this year I'm in favor of the 2007 Vinum Cellars PETS Petite Sirah ($13 or so, find this wine). It's smoky and toasty, with that classic dark, spicy Petite Sirah fruit—think of a melange of blueberries, black plums and blackberries. Very drinkable, and a good deal, too.  

 

Inspired by a trip to Italy during which she walked and ate herself silly, Moira Campbell (a friend of mine, full disclosure) quit her job in restaurant PR this past summer to form Rum & Blackbird, a company that gives tasting tours in New York. She began taking groups around her Hell's Kitchen neighborhood last month, visiting stops like Xie Xie for seven courses' worth of food. This holiday weekend, the food will be inspired by Thanksgiving, with dishes like turkey empanadas with cranberry salsa from Empanada Mama, sweet-potato bourekas from Gazala Place and cranberry orange biscotti from Biscotti Di Vecchio. Next month she'll start having guest chefs along for the ride, including Alexandra Guarnaschelli and F&W Best New Chef 2001 Anita Lo, who will be on the December 5 tour at 3 p.m.

What can someone like me, a girl living in Queens, NY, possibly learn from a bunch of Park Avenue socialites with names like Muffie Potter Aston? A lot, I learned, after I read Park Avenue Potluck Celebrations, a new book by New York Times columnist Florence Fabrikant; it's a compilation of recipes and entertaining tips from some of the city’s most celebrated hostesses and members of The Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (proceeds from the book will go to the center). Here, a few surprisingly down-to-earth tips from high society that I'll actually adopt:

1. Be worldly—follow the Swedish tradition of eating birthday cake for breakfast on your birthday.
2. Drink a cocktail before party guests arrive—it'll loosen you up and make you a better hostess.
3. Be a gracious and unflappable hostess, unperturbed by spilled wine or a crying child. Note: See #2, which will help.
4. Lottery tickets make great place cards—that’s one way to make it to Park Avenue.
5. Note for next year: Hand out to-go wine cups for parents accompanying trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

Scrounging for a last-minute Halloween costume? Get inspiration from some of our favorite chefs’ ensembles in F&W's "Dress Like a Chef" slideshow, like Mario Batali's now-iconic look: red wig pulled in a low ponytail, baggy shorts and his signature orange clogs from Crocs.

I wound up on the CBS Early Show on July 4th, talking about beers for Independence Day. That, to my mind, meant craft beers brewed in America, as a kind of celebration of our country's history of small-business entrepreneurship and also as a celebration of the abundance of terrific beer being produced in the U.S. right now. Beer-fanatics will notice that I mostly picked bottles from the larger brewers on the craft side—Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Anchor Brewing, and so on. I'd love to have included some of my more regional faves, like Tröegs Brewery in Harrisburg, PA (big fan of their Troegenator Double Bock), Two Brothers Brewing in Warrenville, IL (Domaine DuPage French Country Ale—mighty good); Saint Arnold Brewing in Houston (look for the Elissa IPA), or Avery Brewing in Boulder (drink anything they make, seriously), but TV tends to want national—or near national—distribution, so I erred on the side of findability.

Anyway, here's a link to the segment on the CBS site. They don't seem to have the video up, but the content is there at least. They also left out the part where they had the anchors run a three-legged race while balancing raw eggs on spoons, with me standing at the finish line to hand the winner a beer. Really. 

After my appearance on the Early Show this past weekend, I got a number of emails asking for the recipes for the cocktails I mixed, all of which came from our new book, Food & Wine Cocktails '09. I should note that I definitely cannot take credit for the mixology-genius behind these drinks; mostly I hope I executed them in line with their creators' intentions. I can say that they tasted great on the set, though, even with the gale force winds that morning. — R.I.

So, credit where credit is due. Duggan McDonnell of Cantina in San Francisco created the following two drinks for Food & Wine Cocktails '09:

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Forget ham: The real reason to be excited for Sunday is that the Washington Post will announce the winners of their third annual Peeps diorama contest. Last year, they got more than 800 submissions. That means more than 800 people took time out of their busy, harried lives to construct elaborate, awe-inspiring tableaux of chick- and rabbit-shaped sugared marshmallows. The winner, 22-year-old Lauren Sillers of Potomac, Maryland, constructed her Tomb of King Peepankhamun with Peeps, Christmas lights and acrylic-paint Peeps hieroglyphics. If you ever need reminding of the wonders of humanity, if you ever need your faith in our collective ingenuity restored, flip through the Peeps Shows
of 2007 and 2008.

But, because ham really is the main reason to look forward to Sunday (and because we have no recipe for Peeps—yet), check out our own inspiring slide show of 15 delicious Easter dishes to serve with yours, including Mario Batali's clever asparagus with pancetta and Daniel Boulud's creamy pea soup.

My mom lives by the mantra that all-natural is always better. So last weekend when I went to visit, I found her in the kitchen ranting about Paas, the popular Easter-egg dye. After many years of Paas-stained fingers and perfectly colored Paas eggs, my mom was having an all-natural Easter-egg-dyeing epiphany. "Think of all the chemicals," she exclaimed. "Maybe we should make our own food-based dyes." And so our experiment began. We tried blackberries, beets, red onions, saffron, turmeric, each mixed with some water and vinegar. The eggs needed to soak much longer for the color to adhere, but the end result actually looked pretty good. We even blotted the blackberries directly onto the eggs to get a sponge-painted look.

"What about wine,” my mom asked? “Merlot, Cab, Syrah?" I had to laugh. F&W's Kristin Donnelly has been brainstorming ideas for what to do with a bottle of wine you don't like for an upcoming story. I don't think Easter-egg coloring will make Kristin's short list, but we decided to try it anyway. I went back to NYC and poured a bad Cab I'd left sitting out into a cup with vinegar and let a hard-boiled egg soak for about an hour. The result: A horribly ugly, grayish-brown hue. My mom texted me the next morning to say that her Merlot-dyed egg was a failure as well. We'll just have to stash the bad wine until Kristin tells us what to do with it and stick to fruit and vegetables for egg dyeing.

If retweeting is re-posting a twitter feed, what's the word for re-blogging a Facebook status update? Retatting? This is a retat. Last night I got so excited I mentioned this on my Facebook page. A vegan friend is coming for Passover, and while concocting vegan main courses and a dessert is fairly brainless (see these excellent vegan main courses from F&W and desserts from Babycakes vegan bakery), I got kind of addled at the idea that anyone might feel left out during the requisite courses of gefilte fish and matzo ball soup. The soup was easy: I made my vegetable broth look like chicken stock by browning the onions in a little olive oil before simmering them in water. Then I added big florets of cauliflower, which look a lot like matzo balls, and simmered them until soft.

Vegan gefilte fish was the stumper. Gefilte fish, for me, is mostly just an excuse to clear my sinuses: The bland quenelles of whitefish taste best swirled in peppery beet horseradish. (They're also a fun way to paint your plate purple.) So what's bland, holds together in quenelle form without eggs, and goes well with a peppery beet-colored condiment? It only came to me at about 11 pm: chickpea cakes! My recipe: Sauté a finely minced quarter of a white onion (or 2 large shallots) in 2 tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of dried thyme and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. Add the rinsed chickpeas from one 15-oz can, cover and simmer until just heated through. Remove the pan from the heat and let cool. Add 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest and season with salt and pepper. Mash the heck out of the peas with a potato masher and form into 1/4-cup mini-footballs. Cover and refrigerate before serving. We'll see how they go over at this evening's seder. But three of them made for a lovely midnight snack last night.

Easter is this Sunday. This means that my mother has started baking her annual batch of pizza rustica using a recipe from her aunt, a stubborn woman who, because of a lamp, did not speak to her sister (my grandmother) for six years. Per this aunt's instructions, my mother will whisk six eggs and some flat-leaf parsley with half a pound each of fontina and Parmesan cheeses before adding six pounds of ricotta and half a pound each of cubed salami, soppressata, prosciutto and ham. This will make three to four double-crust pies. Clearly, we’re not light eaters.

Curious about its origins, I discovered that pizza rustica is an Easter staple in Naples. Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of Cucina del Sole, has heard of it among the Pugliese and the Abruzzi and confirmed that it’s pretty widely eaten in the whole southern Italian boot. In my house we actually call it “pizza gain”, a phrase that’s an Italian-American corruption derived from pizza ripiena or piena, meaning “stuffed” or “full” in Italian. In short, piena, or chiena in certain dialects, became chien', then “gain” as it got passed down across generations (and an ocean). These pies, most made from some combination of cheese, meats and eggs in a sweet crust, are meant to break the Lenten fast by offering many of the rich treats given up as a sacrifice.

And break the fast it does. David Greco, who runs the Arthur Avenue Café and Mike’s Deli in the Bronx, makes a Neapolitan-style rustica based on his maternal grandmother’s recipe that’s very similar to my mother’s – and one that weighs in at a little over three pounds a pie. He’s been selling 200 a day for the past week. His secret is a touch of lemon zest in the crust. He also makes a Calabrian version from his father’s family with chunks of soppressata and thinly-sliced prosciutto baked into an eggy focaccia. Frank Generoso of the Royal Crown Pastry Shop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn says the key to his rustica is using the best quality ricotta that’s firm but still creamy. A thick ricotta, he says, will hold up and not run all over the place.

My mother's is still the best, especially a couple of hours out of the oven. I should start fasting now to heighten the enjoyment of that first bite.