Dinner party and a wine: Silver Lake 2008 Reserve Chardonnay

So, last weekend's dinner party recap: cream of celery soup; panzanella; crawfish etouffee; and apple pie with homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert.

I accidentally stumbled upon a very delicious wine pairing: this Silver Lake 2008 Reserve Chardonnay with the crawfish etouffee. My What to Drink with What You Eat told me that New World chardonnays would pair splendidly with crawfish, so I went to my wine shelf and selected this bottle, from Washington.

When I served the crawfish, we finished off the last of the sauvignon blanc we'd had with the first two courses, and I poured the chardonnay. A few bites into the etouffee, I took a sip.

Wow. When wines pair correctly, they really pair--both the food and the wine are suddenly more than they were. The sweetness in the wine brought out the taste of the crawfish, and the spices in the etouffee brought out the floral notes in the wine.

Not bad for an under-$20 bottle of wine.

Crawfish etouffee, redux

Okay, okay. I know I've already written about crawfish etouffee once (just about this time last year, in fact). But I made that version with some really terrible Chinese crawfish, and this time, I used good ol' Louisiana crawfish. Admittedly, frozen, but the difference was night and day.

Also, I used Donald Link's recipe, and it was so much better.

1 stick butter

1 medium onion, diced

3 celery stalks, diced

1 bell pepper, diced

2 hot peppers (I used jalapenos), diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 1/2 teaspoons each salt, paprika, black pepper, thyme, red pepper flakes, and cayenne

2 pounds crawfish meat

4 bay leaves

1/4 cup flour

juice of 1/2 lemon

4 cups crawfish or other seafood stock (I used a little fish stock and a little vegetable stock)

Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a large skillet. Add the onion, celery, peppers, garlic and seasonings and cook until softened, 3-4 minutes. Add crawfish meat and the rest of the butter and cook until butter is melted. Sprinkle the mixture with the flour and stir. Add crawfish stock and simmer 15-20 minutes, until slightly thickened. Add lemon juice, and serve over rice with fresh parsley and hot sauce on the side.

 

Cream of celery soup

I had a dinner party the other night, the last we'll have in the current place. In an effort to use up as much stuff in my fridge as possible before the move, I decided to start with a cream of celery soup (since I had about 3 pounds of celery I needed to use up, courtesy of my CSA).

3 tablespoons butter

1 lb celery, chopped

1 small onion, chopped

1 potato, peeled and chopped

Vegetable broth

1/2 cup cream

Melt the butter in a large saucepan and gently saute the onion and celery until softened. Add the potato and broth, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes or so, or until the potato is cooked through. Let cool. Puree in your food processor. (You can make ahead up to this step, refrigerate, and then heat through prior to serving.) Reheat gently, add the cream, and garnish with celery leaves or parsley. Salt and pepper to taste.

The Lauren: a new drink

The other night, I had the last dinner party I'll have in our current home. (Don't worry; there'll be plenty more in the new place.) I created a new drink for my friend Lauren, using Absolut Brooklyn (red apple and ginger-flavored vodka), the ginger syrup from the Whiskey Smash, and a squeeze of lemon.

She really liked it, so in her honor, I've dubbed it The Lauren.

2 oz Absolut Brooklyn
1/2 oz ginger syrup
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice

Shake, serve over ice.

Bacon Bloody Mary

It's just as good as it sounds.

A regular Bloody Mary (vodka or gin, tomato juice, spices--mine include Worchestershire, dry rub, hot sauce, and celery salt--lemon and horseradish) with cooked crumbled bacon added to it.

It doesn't really make it taste bacony, but hitting the bacon bits while drinking it sure is fun.

Boudin-stuffed cabbage rolls

I can't believe no one's ever done this before.

Traditional stuffed cabbage rolls (a Jewish staple) are stuffed with a mixture of ground beef, rice and veggies (onion, carrot, celery, maybe a parsnip) and slow-cooked in a tomato sauce. Hearty, filling, real winter fare. I was poking around in my fridge the other day and realized I had a head of cabbage that needed to be used up. But I wasn't in the mood for either slaw or soup.

"Stuffed cabbage rolls!" says I.

"But I don't have any ground beef," I told myself.

"Pshaw," I scoffed, "I have this boudin right here. All thawed out even."

And boudin, as we all know now, is a loose pork-and-rice sausage. All I had to do was add the veggies, and voila! Instant cabbage roll filling! With pork, and spices, and yumminess!

For those of you without boudin, any other kind of ground meat is just as good.

1 head of cabbage
1 carrot, diced
1 stalk of celery, diced
1 small onion, diced
1 lb ground meat (or pork, or boudin filling, or whatever)
1/2 cup uncooked rice
2 tablespoons tomato paste
salt and pepper
tomato sauce or juice

Core the cabbage by cutting out the core from the bottom, leaving the head intact. Put the head in a bowl and pour a pan of boiling water over it. Let sit.

Meanwhile, saute the carrot, celery and onion in a little olive oil until soft. Transfer to a bowl. Add the meat, rice and tomato paste and mix well. Season with salt and pepper.

Fill each cabbage leaf with a 1/4 cup or so of the mixture (you may need to cut out the bottom inch or two of the center vein) and wrap into a small roll. Fill a pan with the rolls. Add enough tomato sauce to just cover the rolls, bring to a boil, then cover and simmer 45 minutes. Serve immediately.

Freezes beautifully.

Beet cake with orange glaze

Yes, beet cake. Remember how delicious that zucchini cake with lemon glaze was? This is just as delicious, and may I add, a really wonderful color. If you have a little girl who adores pink, you want to serve her this cake. (It tastes like cake, by the way, not like beets.)

My version is not uniformly pink, probably because I used one regular beet and one Chiogga beet (the stripey ones). I imagine the stripey-ness created the rainbow hue, above.

From Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian:

2 medium raw beets, peeled and quartered
1 1/2 sticks soft butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1/2 cup milk

Grease a 9x13 pan with a little butter. Put the beets and 1/2 cup sugar in a food processor and pulse a few times to puree. Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl. In your KitchenAid, beat the butter and 1 cup sugar till creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each. Add the beet puree. Add about 1/3 of the flour mixture, then half of the milk, another third of flour, the rest of the milk, and then the rest of the flour. Stir gently until just mixed.

Bake at 350 45-50 minutes. Let cool completely before adding the orange glaze:

3 cups confectionary sugar
1/2 cup orange juice
a splash of vanilla (optional)

Mix until thick and smooth.