Chick Pea Salad: My Legume Love Affair

If I had to choose my favorite legume, it would be chick peas. Or lentils. Or the peanuts in Reeses peanut butter cups.

Although my heart is warmed upon tasting homemade hummus laden with enough garlic to keep vampires away for seven nights and part of a twilight, and the manner in which Greek chick pea and lemon soup manages to taste like actual chicken thrills me like dandelions do a two-year old, when I cook chick peas, their destination is most often Salad City. And they don't just get tossed on some lettuce. I compose a salad around them. Or rather, I roast off what's remaining in my vegetable drawer right before it's time to go shopping again, add some olive oil and lemon, and call it dinner.

On occasion, for a super fantastic night, I go all out, think about flavors and textures, and put some fish on top. Like I am doing, for example, for the following event.

At the wine bar where I work, we have a winemaker dinner this weekend with Sergio Germano of Germano Ettore winery in Piedmont, Italy. I wanted to do something special because, well, he's one of the nicest guys in the winemaking world, and because his lemonesque, mineral, clean and sprightly dry Riesling, which we are serving with the first of four courses, deserves some extra attention. Extra special chick pea attention, that is. Since the My Legume Love Affair blogging event just happens to take place on the date of that occasion, I'm going to share a little chick pea love with the legume folks too.

The meaty chick peas carry the mineral, fiesty nature of Germano Ettore's Reisling well, and I made sure to pack the salad full of lemon, in zest and juice form to carry the citrus flavors and high acidity of Ettore's wine. For the event, I am cooking squid to top the salad. In the photo below, marinated anchovies that I used to top the salad another time are featured. Instructions for both preparations follow the salad recipe.


Chick pea, feta, and arugula salad

* Serves 4-5 people
* Soak legumes in water overnight or for at least six hours before cooking.
* Salad will taste best if all but arugula marinates overnight.
* In the salad photo, you might notice I tossed some carmelized onions into the salad. For the event, I choose to keep it a little fresher and omitted the onions. Include if like.

8 oz chick peas, soaked
bay leaf
rosemary sprig
zest of one lemon
juice from 1 1/2 lemon
2 - 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
5 oz French feta
1/2 bunch fresh chervil, chopped
1/2 bunch fresh tarragon, chopped
2 large handfuls arugula
salt and pepper to taste

1. Bring soaked chick peas to boil (in fresh water) in a medium-sized pot with bay leaf and rosemary. Once boiling, adjust heat to simmer and cook for 45 minutes or until legumes are tender, but not mushy. Drain, and discard herbs.
2. Once peas are cool or at room temperature, place in a large bowl, add lemon zest, lemon juice, and olive oil and stir until well-blended. Crumble feta and add to bowl along with fresh herbs. Salad may be set aside to marinate now, or before arugula is added.
3. Add arugula right before serving, and divide among 4 plates





Anchovies
This was my first adventure cooking at home with the sweet, oily little fish. If you want to top your chickpeas with anchovies per photo, do as follows.
Cleaning:
Wash the little guys in cool water. Make sure your cat is outside. Cut off head directly beneath gills. Glide fish knife from underneath the gills on the crease of fish's belly to the end of its tail. Open the fish, it should open into two flaps. Remove the organs. Pluck out the blones with the tip of the knife and pull out with fingers until removed. Cut the anchovies into two fillets.
Cooking:
Heat a sauté pan to high heat. Once hot, drizzle with canola oil/olive oil mixture. Gently place fish in pan, skin side down, and cook for one to two minutes each side. These fish are salty, salt with extreme caution. After cooked, set aside in small bowl and cover with thin lemon slices and olive oil to marinate until ready to serve.

Squid
Oh how I love calamari, in all it's glorious forms.
Cleaning
(thank god for video):
Cooking:
Cut into rings about half an inch thick. Heat sauté pan to high heat, and drizzle with canola oil/olive oil mixture. Add squid rings and tentacles to pan, and saute briefly. The key to cooking squid without going rubbery is to either cook the swimmer for under three minutes, or over thirty minutes. Cook here for two minutes or under, or until rings and tentacles are just firm and no longer translucent. Top the salad and drizzle the juice in pan around the plate.


Do you have a favorite chick pea dish you make at home or enjoy at a restaurant?

Cassoulet & Tannat: A Match Made in Southwestern France

Every year the wine shop/wine bar I work holds a dinner called "Cassoulet Night" that focuses on the Southwestern French dish of the same name. Although the title of the event leaves room for excitement, it is highly anticipated by hungry neighbors of the wine shop who start inquiring in September/October if we know what day Cassoulet will be served in February. Their fury, by the way, has only confirmed my long held belief that those craving the rich lushness of duck confit are a gastronomic force to be reckoned with. Our neighbors in particular start recalling the scent of slow-cooked duck in August and can't let go of the fevor until they sink their teeth once more into the sultry poultry in our cassoulet dish in February.

Normally a colleague and I split the cooking workload of our Supper Clubs. I'll sear the meat one Supper Club, and my co-cook will roast the pork loin the next. He'll (Matt) will cook the lentils for the salad one club, and I'll reduce the orange for the vinaigerette for the following first course. Yet the Cassoulet Supper Club is different.

I don't have the patience to cook the luscious cassoulet for 65 people.

Matt, however, does. He's a pretty patient guy who, when not making cassoulet, spends time running after his very active five year-old. Because of my lack of cassoulet stamina, what happens is that Matt cooks every step of the cassoulet for 65 people (I'm sorry, Matt), and I make the salad and the dessert. If you've every attempted to make cassoulet before, you know that I'm getting off easy. Three cheers to Matt.

Here's what he does to make this large batch of cassoulet: He cures the Liberty Farms duck legs weeks ahead of the event. Two to three days after curing, he renders duck fat and confits the duck on low heat in an oven for about five hours plus. Nearly a week later, he soaks cassoulet beans overnight. Then he refreshes the water, brings them to a boil, and drains them. Then, he cooks the beans again with seared hamhocks (in pot picture, above), bacon, and salt pork. At some other point he also purrees roasted garlic with herbs and other delicousness and adds it to the bean mix. On the side, he cooks sausages- those pictured above are the Toulouse variety from Fatted Calf. Before serving the cassoulet, he mixes all of the aforementioned food stuffs together, tops them with crispy breadcrumbs, and bakes the cassoulet until a supple crust develops over all the ingredients.

Personally, I'd pass out after hitting the thirty-person mark with Cassoulet making.



So after preparing the simple salad and flourless chocolate cake dessert, (see the amount of butter above used for 3 -or was it 2- of these gauteau au chocolates) my focus is to test the meal with wine. To figure out which wines will pair best with our courses. Matt and I normally do this together, but as he spends more time slaving away over a stove for this event than I do, I devote more time to thinking about wine pairing. Or maybe I just spend more time testing wines.

Anyhow, for Cassoulet Nights, we decided that to go with regional wine from Southwestern France. Something that the healthy French country folk- you know, the ones who eat duck confit and foie gras with dark red wine all the time who have lower counts of heart disease and cancer than Americans- would drink with cassoulet.

A grape that is dearly loved in Southwestern France, and at our shop, is Tannat. It's commonly used in the dark reds in the lower regions of France and Basque regions of Spain and is one the burliest wine grape in the world (yah, I'm talking to you, Petite Sirah), and it is oh so lovely with cassoulet. This rich, rich, rich dish dish can handle a rough, burly wine with big tannins. Something like this country grape of France.

We decided to go with two wines from Charles Neal- a great importer of le vin Francais. Both from Domaine Laffont, of the Madiran region. One wine, called Hecate was all Tannat. The second wine was a blend of Tannat and Cabernet Franc- just in case we had some wimps in the audience who were scared of the big bad grape. Most weren't worried about the potency- the Hecate was the best seller.

Because these were such big wines, we decanted them two hours before the event. This really helped to soften the tannins and oxygenate the wines so the dark cassis fruit could be released from the dark Tannat shell.

The pairing was pretty fabulous. My fav was the Hecate, because as my favorite saying goes, once you go pure Tannat, you can't go back. The strong Hecate broke down the fat molecules in the duck fat and reconstructed them so the protons were alligned with the bacon's neutrons and the breadcrumbs crisp glutonns, and really, it was just magic all the way.


Lastly, the Tannat grape is, to my surprise, also THE grape of Uruguay as well as Basque and Southwestern French lands. Apparently it does magnificently in Uruguayan soils, and I think that we all will be seeing a lot more of the deep grape from South America, at reasonable costs. If you're interested in a little history, insight of the grape down South, check out this video clip.


Cheers to Tannat, Cassoulet, Vin de la Table readers and participants, and for Supper Clubs at wine bars.

Supper Club Wines

(picture taken by Paolo Destefanis and featured in Saveur magazine)



We have this thing called the Supper Club (otherwise referred to by my dear friend Juli as the Super Club) where I work that we do every four weeks or so. Since our kitchen is likely the smallest and most inadequately equipped (yet highly loved) kitchen in the restaurant industry, four weeks is about how often we want to cook four courses for sixty people. But we love our Supper Club. We love the opportunity to cook for our beloved customers, which more often than not, happen to be our friends (through work, sure) or family.
My co-cook came up with the fantastic idea that these dinner should be called our "Passport Series," and that every time we have a Supper Club, we could visit a different regional cuisine. Last month was Spain. This month's is Italy.
Each Supper Club menu items comes with wine pairing suggestions from the same region or country. We put our heads together at the wine bar and discuss what we think would pair the miraculously with what. It is my hardship that I have to test-cook the four courses and drink the wines we have spouted might pair well with each dish to insure that our recommended wines for the courses are in fact good matches. Wouldn’t want to disappoint the customer.
I cooked our third course at home recently as a test run. The meat was Niman Ranch Pork Loin (swooooonnnn), cooked Sicilian style, rubbed with salt and cracked peppercorns and covered with finely chopped onions. It was served with creamy polenta, braised fennel, and wild mushrooms. We happened to serve a fruity Nebbiolo (the grape of Piedmont, famous for Barolo wines) on the wine bar the week prior that was ready to be tested. It was also free of charge because there was only a glass left and it was the end of the week. There also happened to be about 1/2 a bottle of Benati Rossodiverzella a Nerello –indigenous Sicilian varietal- wine left too. And I had set aside a Ladoix Burgundy for cellaring months prior. I took the two wine bar wines home for testing, and muttered "screw cellaring" to myself as I popped the cork on the Burgundy. Note to parents: did not finish all wine that night.

Notes from meal:
I threw some cherry heirloom tomatoes in with the pork last minute that looked like they would not last another night. These uber-sweet tomatoes and pork paired great with the Burgundy (Pinot Noir). It was aged Burgundy from 2001 and soft and ripe just like the tomatoes. The Nebbiolo also went well with the tomatoes- because, well, they just do. Most Italian wines go well with tomato dishes. They make them that way.
But hands down, the best pairing was the wine from Sicily with the pork dish. Unsurprising perhaps, because the best pairings are most often the wines and foods created in the same region, but amazing just the same. The wine was rustic, tawny and spicy, but just chocolaty and fruity enough to complement the sweet, sweet pork.
If you'd like to try this extremely easy and succulent pork dish, link to: http://www.saveur.com/food/classic-recipes/roast-loin-of-pork-52591.html