New Year's Eve, Part 1
Melissa and I spend our New Year's Eves quietly. Usually just a simple dinner (French Onion Soup is quasi-traditional), perhaps with some friends over. We had made plans for such an evening, doing a trial run on some dishes we would be doing for a dinner party three nights later.
At the last minute, we decided to invite my mom and her husband to join us. They are always so generous to us, and have us over for dinner quite a bit, so it seemed like it was time to return the favor, at least in part.
I did not precisely learn cooking while watching my mother in the kitchen, the common mythology all food writers seem to share, like some Jungian archetype. In fact, both my parents are very good cooks, and I took little interest in cooking until college. Still, from my mother I developed a deep love of the elegant. Her parties are a panoply of little hors d'oeuvres.
And so she probably understood perfectly when I said I would make a casual meal--one with only five courses. It was a bit of a change from our original plans, but such is life.
When they arrived, we had a platter of antipasti waiting. Salami sliced thinly, baguette pieces with a tapenade, and fried oranges. I've made the fried oranges before, but this batch came out really nicely. The idea comes from the Zuni Café Cookbook, one of my favorite cookbooks. Slice oranges thinly, dredge in flour, then buttermilk, then flour again, and fry in 350° oil. The buttermilk and flour forms a soft crust, and the orange cooks just enough to be warm; as you bite in, the acidity serves as a sharp contrast to the doughy exterior.
Everyone loves Champagne, and never more so than on New Year's Eve. But I rankled a bit at the tradition. Even so, I couldn't veer away from bubbly wine completely, and instead we served our favorite Prosecco. This sparkling wine from Northeast Italy is a current darling at restaurants in the Bay Area, but not without reason. It is distinct from its French cousin, more fruity and lighter. However it shares Champagne's affinity for food.
For the opener, I made individual soufflés with an orange, red onion, and chile filling. My mother and I share palates that are unaccustomed to food with the heat of spice, so the chile was just an accent, half a serrano minced and mixed into the filling. The soufflés were good, though the liquid core suggested that they could have used a bit more time in the oven. You may be noticing the orange theme in these dishes; a few days prior my dad and his wife had brought us a voluminous amount of oranges (both Valencias and Mandarin oranges) and so I felt a bit like an Iron Chef contestant, trying to use oranges as creatively as possible. Battle orange!
We didn't precisely pair wines with each dish. With only four people, you don't really go through a full bottle with each course. Instead we had a progression of wines which people enjoyed throughout the meal. After the Prosecco, we poured a 2001 Brundlmayer Gruner Veltliner from Austria. Brundlmayer is perhaps Austria's best producer, and we have a number of his bottles. Like nearby Germany, 2001 in Austra was a fine year, if not the showstopper it was further north. The wine was definitely funky, and at first we feared it might be corked. But no, I remain convinced that it just had a lot of interesting character. Perhaps not a wine for everyone.
And there I must leave you for now. Come back in a couple more days to read about the rest of meal.
- Bitter Orange Marmalade Recipe
You know how sometimes a whole crop of citrus is destroyed due to frost or unseasonably cold weather? If my mom had her way, none of that fruit would go to waste. My mother is the queen of finding a use for everything. I suppose it's a kind of variation...
- Citron
Any list of the ten nicest restaurants in Oakland probably contains Citron on College Avenue, just down the street from the BART station at Rockridge. A year and some change ago, Melissa and I took our friend Suzy to Citron's next-door neighbor...
- Casual Dinners
One of my un-New Year's resolutions is to come home early enough to have dinner once or twice a week. Most people assume that I come home and cook dinner every night, but in truth I get home so late, and I don't eat much anyway, that I usually...
- J & J 10 X 10
It was an email I didn't think I'd ever see. "Hey, what if we did a 10-course meal when James and Jeffrey come over?" Melissa is usually the voice of reason when it comes to dinner parties. It is not a coincidence that she is also the person who cleans...
-
Champagne and Venison "Challenge your notions about food and wine!" said the e-mail from bacar, a snazzy wine bar in San Francisco's SOMA district. Their first-ever wine & food pairing for the general public was going to feature...