Welcome the 2016 New Year with Sybarite 2010

Happy Canyon Sauvignon Blanc
For a Very Happy New Year

Sybarite: \ˈsi-bə-ˌrīt\ a person in persistent or excessive pursuit of sensual pleasures and interests

Margerum: SYBARITE 2010

Sauvignon Blanc

Happy Canyon, Santa Inez Valley

Santa Barbara appellation

Bottle 16,328 of 41,000

91 Points, Wine Spectator

#82 of the Top 100 Wines of 2011

It’s really hard for DOUGLAS MARGERUM to get a bad write-up. He has always enjoyed positive reviews in Wine Spectator, so it probably comes as no surprise that his bottlings are sleek, shiny, and new looking—like the magazine cover itself. Really leading-edge, like the Plump Jack—and more particularly Cade—winery in Napa, owned by former San Francisco mayor, current Lieutenant Governor of California, Gavin Newsome, Margerum has staked out some difficult territory in Santa Barbara and keeps hitting the mark year-upon-year.

[Quick digression about Gavin: he and his sisters own the Plump Jack brand hospitality group which includes the Carneros Inn, which my SISTER assures me is just about the most incredible inn in the Napa valley. The restaurant there is called The Farm, and my sister says there are like four others on that property—each more dynamic and exciting to dine at than the next. Additionally, it’s a hotel/timeshare which can help make it more affordable to visit. Otherwise, as a hotel guest, it’s an expensive, $700-a-night, incredible experience.

Turns out, they own the Balboa Cafe and the wine-tasting bar/store called Plump Jack on Fillmore not far from Union Square in downtown San Fran. As you may not know, Balboa Cafe makes the best bloody mary in the city. But as I say, I digress.]

At any rate, my guess is that Margerum and the Newsoms should all be buddies, and probably are if Douglas’ wines are anything to go by. I find Sybarite reeks of Newsome's Cade-style wines.

[Another digression, and I promise, the last one for this post: if you do find yourself in Napa, take the extraordinarily out of the way trip to CADE, just so you can experience the luxury of their mountain-top views and their exquisite whites.]

For those of you who spend most of your Sauv Blanc time with New Zealand whites, California Sauvignon Blancs have a bright, lean acidity that often shun the bitter citrus notes of our Down Under friends’ blends. The great ones have a front palette that is crisp yet smooth, and by the time you get to the mid-palette, the taste is a terrific blend of lemon curd that melts into more or less grassy nose. Some say that the grassy notes are the citrus notes that I'm tasting, but I beg to differ. A great Sancere-inspired new world Sauv Blanc should taste like the California whites, not the N.Z. grapefruit bombs. There's a place for those too—for me they're "porch pounders"—but not in my passion for great Sauv Blancs.

Sybarite produces a glass that I remember:

• The weight of the wine in my mouth 
• The flavor itself. 
• It’s a white of substance and of grace

I cannot recall the last time I said that about a New Zealand Sauv Blanc.

I purchased this terrific bottle at NIELSEN’S SUPERMARKET. Located directly between that wacky town called Solvang and the creepy, one-armed bandit riddled Chumash Casino. The wine folks there appear to add minimal mark-up, and often know the winemakers personally. That’s nice, because you really cannot go to the Margerum winery, as he appears to purchase grapes from all over the valley.

Happy Canyon is home to Sybarite’s grapes in the hot end of the Santa Ynez valley and 43% of this wine comes from the Grissini vineyard alone. Apparently, if you plan ahead with the SANTA BARBARA COUNTY VINTNERS’ ASSOCIATION, you can have vineyard tours there at certain times of the year. Otherwise, there’s no way to get to see it.

Perhaps that’s part of the joy of this hideaway wine. It’s one for the pleasure-seeker. Make your week a Sybaritic one.

___________________________________________

Be sure to follow A Lunch Box Blog  

Twitter   *   Facebook  *  Tumblr  *  Google+

Louis de Sacy—Brut Grand Cru

Light and Fizzy, dry but gentle:  everything that the usual holiday party champagne at the office never is. For this year’s celebration, soak up this almost berry-like champagne. Most of us can’t usually afford quality champagne, but this non-vintage champers is a simple sipper with no weird, metallic aftertaste. At about thirty bucks, it’s affordable as well.

It was a night of celebration when ‘Topher and I opened her up. It was the end of a very long couple of months before a holiday break from his middle school students. Yesterday was a trip for him to the Temple Springs roller rink with 125 middle schoolers. On the return, they were trapped on the subway on the way home, and it was apparently a total hellscape, but now facing three weeks of freedom, even a non-union teacher can live well for a time. And then there were the holidays to celebrate while Vince Guaraldi Trio played on before he and I run off to different parts of California to reconnect with family.

This is the Rose Version

‘Topher came over for a night for celebrating our last weekend before the holidays begin, and so champagne seemed in order. Besides, I’d just been promoted at work, and it just felt right to open a bottle of actual Champagne from France. De Sacy makes it easy and affordable, thankfully. ‘Topher is actually a really good judge of fizzy wine, “It doesn’t leave an aftertaste like most champagnes people bring to parties at Christmas and try to push on you. I don’t feel compelled to pour orange juice in it. It’s a sipping champagne, not a champagne to get drunk on quickly at a gay brunch.”

So beware, Louis de Sacy Champagne can really knock you out.‘Topher was in fine form, and hadn’t had a dinner yet. That fact would probably explain how by the time we finished half the bottle and eaten a Mark Taper Forum-shaped-tian of fresh cream ricotta, extra virgin olive oil from Stonehouse arbequina olives, Maldon sea salt, cracked black pepper, and a pinch of powdered red pepper, we had some challenges motoring to dinner. We found ourselves more or less wiped out pretty early and ended up attributing it to a hard week of work and the champagne.

___________________________________________

Be sure to follow A Lunch Box Blog  

Twitter   *   Facebook  *  Tumblr  *  Google+

Leaders To Learn From 2016: A New Agenda for A New Year

Check out this cool agenda thingy for my next event with Education Week. It's not been officially announced, so you are getting a sneak peek.

Please note: Interim Sect of ED King is still pending, not confirmed, but otherwise...we are good to go!

 Onward 2016!
 

___________________________________________

Be sure to follow A Lunch Box Blog  

Twitter   *   Facebook  *  Tumblr  *  Google+

Making Viennese Bread Dumplings

Scoots moves into his new place

Picking up the story from the upcoming "the goulash backstory" below, I need to start at the very beginning. Sometimes a meal begins with a story. In the case of this goulash, that's particularly true.

I arrived to help Scoots move into his new place and found myself making him goulash with bread dumplings.

Trust, the experience of making dumplings is actually really fun, and it made me want to eat them all the time.

Yum!

They have a completely homey, welcoming feel and make you want to eat stews all the time! I’ll preface the recipe by saying that, ideally, you want to be able to cook the well-formed dumplings in the stock of the stew you are making as you go. However, often chips of bread will pop off into the stew, so in order to avoid the stew becoming full of pits of bread, you can boil them separately.

This action will make for a clearer stew, but not necessarily as flavorful of a dumpling. I tried doing something in between: boiling them first, letting the bread flake off in the rolling boil, and then placing them with a gentle “plop!” into the simmering goulash. The results were outstanding, and Scoots informed me that days later he ate the goulash and dumplings for lunch, and the meal reheated just wonderfully tasting like a million bucks! Gotta love feedback like that.

Boil Them Loosely in Your Pot

Viennese Bread Dumplings

Ingredients

2 c of diced white bread, use more or less in order to ensure consistency. Read rest of recipe of better detail. (I’ll be honest, I used all sorts of different dry/stale bread I had and it came out just beautifully; no need to obsess about the color of the bread, unnecessarily).

3 tolive oil

2 eggs

¾ c milk

3 T freshly chopped parsley

1 small onion

Freshly ground salt and pepper to taste

If really sticky, boil separately in a pot of water. If the dumplings are holding together well, then place gently in the goulash. As the goulash should be simmering nicely, they can sit in there for the last 10-20 minutes of cooking, so long as you keep turning them.Soak the bread cubes in a mixture of the eggs and about half the milk for at least 30 minutes. Be aware that depending on your bread, the dumpling “batter” can get soggy, so adjust the amount of milk based on how soggy the mixture gets as you add in the liquid. If after 30 minutes you can easily form balls of bread dumplings from the milk-soaked bread cubes, you are on the right track. If not, do what I did: add in bread crumbs. It was a messy job.

Well-formed Dumplings

Arriving with Bread Dumplings—Soaked for at Least 30 Minutes, I made my way into Scott's new kitchen to destroy it with the mess that is Viennese Goulash. 

The dumplings will soak up much of the liquid as you cook them, becoming really tasty. An added benefit? As they cook in the stew and stock, they will thicken the soupy flavorful liquid, making it into what you may know as goulash. Take the time, get creative, and make bread dumplings out of a bunch of old bread you have lying around or on your counter or in your freezer. It’ll surprise you how tasty you can make bread that starts out so stale and lousy.

___________________________________________

Here's the goulash backstory:

Again, Scoots found himself in need of a new apartment. After sending out an email announcing he’d be having a housewarming party on Feb 18th, I replied back, “Does this mean we won’t be seeing you until mid-February?”

No reply.

That’s because he is so busy running his own company that he basically only texts now. This modern technology thing has gotten waaaay out of hand. But after three days of texting back and forth, it became clear that he had moved into his new place ages ago, hadn’t really unpacked, and frankly, needed a hot meal and someone to help him put the giant, heavy top on the base of the dining room table and begin unpacking tons of shipping boxes. A cold December night seemed like the perfect opportunity to help out.

So I texted that he should pick something he’d like to have me make and then we’d cook it on the new stove in his rental. Turned out he secured a unit with a gas stove, and it was a fine kitchen for making bread dumplings. I mean, really! Who asks for Austrian Goulash and Bread Dumplings!?

Scoots has a penchant for that sort of hearty meal, probably because he’s an amateur competitive swimmer, so he can really work up an appetite. I usually can only bring myself to walk to and from the car, so I was less than compelled to make such a huge meal, but onward and upward I always say. I never make Germanic cuisine, and frankly, with THE SUDDEN RISE OF THE SCANDINAVIAN RESTAURANTS AND CUISINE, I figure Germany/Austria/Hungary are next on the food writers’ “discovery” tour, so I decided to get a jump on the competition.

German/Austrian/Hungarian cuisine is the next big thing. You read it here first.

At any rate, a few texts later, and I was off to the store to purchase what I needed for…

Viennese Beef Goulash/Wiener Rindsgulasch

Ingredients for the Goulash

3 T Olive Oil

1 ¾-2 lbs. shoulder or shank (beef cubed for stew, basically)

1 c finely chopped onions

1 T fresh chopped garlic

2 T tomato purée

2 T Hungarian paprika

1 t freshly ground caraway seeds (use a mortar and pestle for the best results)

1 t marjoram

2 bay leafs

2 c stock (I used chicken, but you could probably use beef as well)

freshly ground salt and pepper

zest of ½ lemon

Heat the oil, brown the beef. With a slotted spoon, remove the beef, brown the onions. At the end of the browning, toss in the garlic. Grind the caraway seed and marjoram. Add the ground spices, paprika, and tomato purée directly into the pot with all of the stock. Stir well, add salt and pepper to taste, grate in the zested lemon as the stock comes to a boil. Turn down to a simmer once it reaches a boil. Let the goulash simmer slowly until the meat is soft (approximately 1-2 hours, depending on the meat/fat content ratio).

At the end of the cooking, you will have a liquidy soup. This liquid may have boiled off a bit, so you can feel free to add in more stock, if you need to in order to make the dumplings, and in so doing, thickening the goulash.

Scoots can attest that it was a real wintery treat. The only thing that would have made it better would have been to have been out hunting rabbit in the Tyrolian hillsides, opening the cabin door, dusting off the powdered snow from our boots, and sitting down to a piping hot bowl of this treat.

Oddly, this meaty bowl serves really nicely with crisp, fresh greens.

___________________________________________

Be sure to follow A Lunch Box Blog  

Twitter   *   Facebook  *  Tumblr  *  Google+

Toddy’s Fabulous Flan

Brown 'n' Bubbly Quiche

Women’s lingerie probably rarely figures largely in blog posts about quiche-making. But years and years ago, Jet Setter Jon and his friend Toddy the Underwear Lady were in the kitchen making Sunday lunch.

Seeing just how incompetent Jet Setter Jon and I were in the kitchen, Toddy took the helm. She said making a quiche was easier than everything we’d been led to believe. She turned out to be right.

Toddy was often right; hell, she made a career for herself in lady’s lingerie and that was before Victoria’s Secret’s rise. As I recall and I suppose I’m really no expert, women’s lingerie was a thing hidden away in the upper reaches of department stores. Since the decline of the department store and Victoria’s rise, well, it strikes me as quite an achievement. That’s gotta be a tough field to compete in, let alone excel in before these shops appeared on every corner, next to every Starbucks in America. I remember living in L.A. when there was only porno shops and Fredericks of Hollywood where women could buy lingerie that was anything but utilitarian.

I also recall that traveling with Toddy in France was quite a daily round of random shopping experiences: food, lingerie, ice cream stops. That’s because she only needed the slightest provocation to stop everything and upon seeing a lingerie shop in a small country town, disappear for an hour or so until she’d bought bags full of the most exotic things–for work! She’d miss entire afternoons at the shore with us digging deep into the knowledge banks of the ladies who worked inside these shops.

Lingerie Lady in Brittany

I think that’s what I most loved about her–her ability to get lost in the fine detail and be as happy as others who’d gone on holiday in order to get away from it all. Simplicity drove her days. And simplicity drove her cooking.

Basically, for those of us who are neither fine French chefs nor willing to fill our bodies with tons of cream and cheese, I bring you “Toddy’s Fabulous Flan.” This quiche is basically a tasty mix of spinach with a bit of onion, garlic, tarragon, mustard, and Gruyère. The process only really requires that you cook up everything before it gets dumped into the pie crust, and ensure that you have eliminated as much of the water from the spinach as possible.

I begin by chopping spinach, quick frying it to reduce all the water out of it, and then setting aside. Fry up half an onion and a small squirt of garlic clove and again, quickly fry in the pan. In a mixing bowl add the milk, grate enough Gruyère to your liking, a touch of salt and pepper, mustard and tarragon, and pop in the hot oven.

In 40 minutes at 425 degrees, adjusting the temp in case the oven runs hot, like mine does, you have a bubbly browned quiche that is the hit of the Sunday brunch set.

It is a little tricky to reheat at work the next day, however. I have tried six ways to Sunday to figure out an ideal reheating strategy for these little 1/8th cut pie slices, but to no avail. Best bet is to reheat for about 30 seconds on high, then let sit for about a minute, then another 30 seconds on high. Place on tin foil and put in a toaster oven on medium to dark and toast. That will bring a little firmness to the soft quiche slices that the microwave has made. Because this is a spinach quiche, I usually serve with some fragrant basmati and my all-purpose soy/mirin/sesame oil sauce (2 parts to 1 part to 1/2 part) and with a drizzle of that on the rice, you have a simple, but fragrant lunch.

Toddy’s Fabulous Flan

Ingredients

2/3 c milk

3 medium eggs, beaten

1/3 c Gruyère cheese, grated

1/2 medium yellow onion, finely diced

1 small garlic clove, minced

1 t dry tarragon

1 t dry mustard or about 1/2 t Dijon prepared mustard

12 oz. baby leaf spinach, chopped well

1 pie crust

salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Assemble the cheese, tarragon, mustard, beaten eggs, and milk with salt and pepper in a mixing bowl. Fry the chopped spinach in a tiny bit of oil and a little salt in a non-stick pan until all the water cooks off. Remove the spinach, throw the onion in the pan and brown, in the last two minutes of browning, add the garlic. Mix in with the spinach, set aside to cool.

When cool, add into the egg, cheese, and milk mixture and then pour into the frozen pie crust. Pop in the preheated 425 degree oven. I have often found myself putting it in at 425 for about 5-7 minutes, and then turning it down to 350 for about 40 minutes. Then if the crust isn’t sufficiently browned, I turn it back up to 425 until the crust looks the way I most want it. Again, depending on the oven, I’ll turn off the heat and let it sit in the warm oven after I open the door for about 2 minutes or so.

Et voila! perfect “quiche” every time. Although, since it’s not really a creme-filled heart-clogger quiche, it’s really Toddy’s Fabulous Flan! Enjoy and share with friends. Bring to a brunch and impress your friends.

___________________________________________

Be sure to follow A Lunch Box Blog  

Twitter   *   Facebook  *  Tumblr  *  Google+