Category Archives: Stevie

Food Travels: San Francisco

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I got out to San Francisco a few months ago to visit Stevie and Josiah in their new abode. We celebrated the end of spring’s bounty with some fabulous meals. Here’s a quick round up of some of my favorites:

Dinner at Bar Agricole with Stevie and Alli. 
Beautiful, refurbished industrial restaurant space with 
spot-on seasonal menu and a funky wine list.
Stevie and me on the tram through downtown SF,
one of the oddest public transit experiences of my life.
Ogling the goodies at the Ferry Building’s Farmers’ Market.
We picked up a few treats to make dinner. 
Mexican food at the market. Spicy and delicious,
with refreshing strawberry and ginger-peach aguafrescas.
Rabbit stew, made with broccolini, asparagus, potatoes, favas, peas, and more.
Topped with watercress and served with a California Fume Blanc.
This time, we left the pits in for the famed bitter-almond notes they provide.
We also used half of a vanilla bean instead of extract 
Last morning at Tartine, the famous bakery in the Mission. 
Those pains au chocolat are as big and as tasty as they look…

Celebrations: Chicken Tagine and Birthdays!

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Even before I left for South Africa, my friends Stevie, Alexxa, and I had been trying to get together for a dinner to celebrate our birthdays, which all fell within weeks of one another. This past Thursday, we were finally able to make it happen. We gathered at my house to cook and drink wine. Not a bad way to celebrate for three food-lovers.

 The lovely ladies
We’d decided to make an impromptu chicken tagine – Alexxa found an easy-to-execute recipe that used a lot of the ingredients that we already had lying around in our kitchens. She went to pick up three thighs at the Meat Hook, as well as some ginger and onion. Chez moi, we browned the chicken in my clay pot (thanks to my brother’s lovely Christmas present, I knew that clay was necessary for emparting a few key characteristics to the slow-cooked flavor of the dish), then removed the meat from the heat. We then threw in some white onion and garlic and let them simmer until soft. Then we added the spices – cumin, curry, coriander, cinnamon and shredded garlic – letting them coat the vegetables. In went chopped pineapple, which I had lying around the house. Next, San Marzano tomatoes and chick peas went into the pot, along with some homemade chicken stock. Finally, we added the chicken back to the dish and some farro and let everything meld together over medium heat for about a half hour.
Stevie and I had each paired a wine with the meal. She had brought a 2008 Kabinett riesling from Schloss Lieser, inspired by Eric Asimov’s recent article on the vintage.

Schloss Lieser, available at Crush Wine & Spirits :)
 

I served up a Glen Carlou 2006 Grand Classique, a Bordeaux blend from South Africa, gifted to me upon my visit to the winery last week!

 At Glen Carlou
 The 2006 Grand Classique, the winery’s flagship wine, 
a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec, and Cab Franc.

The riesling was a lovely wine leading up to the meal – easy drinking, light, a bit of acidity, and the aromas of the wine blended nicely with those coming from the pot on the stove. However, with the tagine, which we served with preserved lemon and parsley, the Carlou won hands down. The meat-y quality of the wine, which opened up into a smooth, almost chocolate-y dish of itself, was the perfect complement to the protein-and-fruit-heavy tagine.

The final dish

Happy birthday ladies!


South Africa, part II: Rust en Vrede

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Friday night, I was supposed to cook dinner for Stevie for her belated birthday present, but my partner-in-crime/sous chef came down with the stomach flu. Instead of canceling dinner plans altogether, we decided instead to cook together at her place. She and Josiah would provide the sustenance, I would bring dessert and birthday wine. I won’t go into detail about how deliciously perfect the steak with bone marrow butter was, since Stevie has already done so. I also won’t talk about the dessert, since I’ve already described it before. What I want to talk about instead is the wine.

For Christmas a few years ago, my mother gave me a wine club membership, where 3 unspecified bottles showed up on my hypothetical doorstep each month. Each wine came with a distinct recipe to pair with the wine, which still proves at times to be an interesting exercise in flavor combinations that had never before occurred to me. Some of these were easy drinking, less expensive wines, while others were a bit nicer and meant for laying aside.

One of the latter was a 2004 Rust en Vrede Estate Blend. I’d earmarked this wine months ago as one I wanted to try with Stevie, and her birthday/the delicious steak dinner that she had planned/the confluence of my upcoming trip seemed the perfect occasion to pop it. And boy was I right. The wine was a luxuriant, velvety, thick, balanced blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, and Merlot. It was big, bold, and fruity, with subtle tannins from the bottle age that rounded it out.

Josiah, who is a sommelier, said that it was the first South African wine he’d been truly impressed with – mostly, he thought, the wines tasted like an ash tray to him. And to be fair, there was an element of ashiness to this wine, which must be representative of the terroir, but it was so beautifully counterbalanced by the depth of the Cab, the fruit of the Merlot, and snazzy spice of the Shiraz that the wine just tasted…smooth.

Rust en Vrede is a 315 year old vineyard that was founded by in 1694 by the then Governor of the Cape, Willem Adrian van der Stel. The winery specializes exclusively in red wine production, producing full-bodied reds aged in new oak. The wines coming from this estate seem to defend the notion that Stellenbosch may be the premier region for red wine production in South Africa. The 2004 Estate Blend was pure deliciousness. Even the experts approved. Happy birthday Stevie!