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Newsletter for February 2005 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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Every time something crazy happens at the restaurant, my employees say, “There’s material for chapter X of your book.” We’re up to 8 or 9 chapters now. Most of them are of the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction type, that only a Hollywood screenwriter could conjure up.
This is a long lead-in to the story you knew was coming. On Saturday the 15th, at prime time, with a dining room full, and a ticket board full, and the whole line on the verge of being in the weeds, our grill caught on fire. Minor grill fires happen all the time and die out on their own, but this one had a life of its own, fueled by several pounds of duck breasts. Smothering it with a sheet pan did nothing except to exacerbate the waves of black roiling smoke. Long story short, we had to move all the food off the line and break out the fire extinguishers. Bottom line, we stalled food coming out of the kitchen for 20-30 minutes.
If you were there, thanks for laughing along with us and thanks for your patience and good humor. We’ll all be chuckling about this for a long time to come. How come these things never happen on a snowy Wednesday night when the dining room is empty? Thank you Mr. Murphy!
I’m looking forward to a less exciting month in February. Come see us when you are able.
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
Wednesday February 2nd, 6:30pm, Spanish Wines & Tapas I am happy and sorry to say that our Spanish Wines and Tapas dinner with Jason Bise of Country Vintner sold out within a day of its announcement. With a limit of 24 seats, these dinners go quickly. We have selected four wines for this dinner: a Fino or Manzanilla Sherry, a Grenache Blanc from Terra Alta, a Tempranillo from Ribera del Duero, and a Cream Sherry. Because of the huge demand, we have added a second wine dinner in February, featuring French wines, and seats for that dinner will be offered to the wait list for the Spanish dinner before everyone else.
Sunday February 6th, 3-5pm, A Chocolate Affair, Daily Grind Creekside Come support us as we reprise our “People’s Choice Award”-winning effort at the Daily Grind, Creekside. We, and four other foodservice groups, will have samples of chocolate desserts. This is a benefit for the Shenandoah University Summer Music Theatre; tickets are $8.
Monday February 14th, Valentine’s Day Yes, we’re open on Monday for Valentine’s Day with a 4-course, $50/person prix fixe menu. Beverages, taxes, and gratuity are not included. You must reserve by credit card. We are doing a salad course, an appetizer course, an entrée course, and dessert. There are four choices in each course. If you need specifics on the menu, call the restaurant. We have a current working draft of the menu on the front counter.
Wednesday February 23rd, Rhône Wine Dinner with Guillaume Pourtalet of Kysela Père et Fils The 2003 Rhônes, by all accounts, are phenomenal. Get your first taste at our wine dinner. The wines, menu, and pricing are all still to be determined. Expect the price to be in the $75 per person range, especially if you want some top-class wines.
Wednesday March 23rd, Wine Dinner with Unicorn Winery of Amissville, VA. Never hear of Unicorn? Me either until recently when their winemaker Bree Ann Moore stopped by to taste me on their wines. Quite credible and worth tasting. Menu, pricing TBD. Book opens Feb 23rd. They have a blockbuster Chambourcin that reminds me of a cross between Norton and Sangiovese!
Wednesday April 20th, Wine Dinner with North Mountain Vineyard of Broad Run, VA. North Mountain’s Vidal Blanc (notable for being fermented all the way dry) and Chambourcin are paired frequently with entrées on our menu. These wines are not available at the winery, so come taste them with us. We like them and Krista, Brad, John, and the dogs too. Menu and pricing TBD.
Ten Essentials for Your Pantry
The well-stocked restaurant pantry at One Block West has hundreds of ingredients—everything you might imagine from rice flour to palm sugar to Tarbais beans. Here are ten essentials from our pantry to help you glamorize your home meals.
What is it? Chiles
What a boring world this would be without chiles to enliven it! Our kitchen staff and most of the crew at the restaurant are chile heads and I am the chief among them. We take our heat seriously. It took me a year of solid once-a-week training to train my favorite Thai chef in Fairfax to heat it up enough for me. Here’s a brief stream-of-consciousness primer on some of our favorites. We start with the fresh chiles and then move to the dried and condiment chiles.
I met local winery owner Juanita Swedenburg of Swedenburg Winery in Middleburg a couple of weeks ago and that reminded me of her direct wine shipping case that is currently before the Supreme Court, a case that has significant implications for the way wines are distributed and sold and significant implications for all interstate commerce in the Internet age.
The crux of the matter is that in many wine producing states, local wineries have the right to distribute their wines directly to consumers in their state, while out-of-state wineries do not. On the face of it, this smacks of protectionism and restraint of trade (the average man might claim, “No fair!”). However, this system appears to be permitted under current law. There is a mass of conflicting laws and issues that the Supreme Court is attempting to iron out.
Under the 21st amendment (which repealed prohibition) each state has the authority to regulate sales of alcoholic beverages within its borders. Under that authority, currently each state requires that anyone selling alcohol (including even little old One Block West) be licensed by that state. Most states do not license out-of-state businesses to distribute alcohol within their boundaries.
To sell their wines within a state, out-of-state wineries must contract with a distributor in that state or set up a licensed office and warehouse in that state. However, most distributors are not willing to distribute just a few cases of wine; they make their money on volume. And it is cost prohibitive to set up warehouses in the states where small wineries would like to do business. Thus, small out-of-state wineries are effectively denied the right to distribute their wines, while the local wineries, being local corporate entities, can obtain a license and, where permitted such as in Virginia, do sell directly to consumers.
This is a perfectly expected outcome of leaving licensing to the several states. However, the reason that the Supreme Court is involved is that the Constitution also prohibits restraint of interstate commerce in the so-called Commerce Clause. And clearly this situation is de facto restraint of interstate commerce.
The issue is which part of the Constitution should take primacy in this case, the 21st amendment or the Commerce Clause, a classic butting of the heads between the states and the Federal government. Recently, Federal district judges have issued many conflicting opinions. In general, however, the courts have not allowed states to use the 21st amendment to establish protectionist policies. And in 1984, the Supreme Court itself ruled that the states cannot hide behind the 21st amendment to protect local liquor industries.
As you might suspect, the real issues are monetary. Liquor distributors want to protect their industry and livelihoods and direct distribution by wineries infringes this. Before you say “aw, too bad for the poor little rich kids,” consider that the liquor distributors play a vital role in the market. They provide the sales force and the delivery mechanism to get alcoholic beverages to the customer. Not many wineries can afford to set up a nationwide sales and delivery force: this is the service that the distributors provide for them. By and large, we all benefit from this.
The other monetary issue arises from taxation. States make revenues from taxing the sales of alcoholic beverages and the current distribution system ensures them a certain, predictable, and largely stable revenue stream. Generally, the states get taxes when the distributor buys the beverage alcohol. Direct shipping threatens this, although not to any huge monetary extent.
These are the real economic issues that need to be ironed out. There are other less valid arguments against direct shipping. One of the most common goes: in the Internet age, underage kids can buy wine anonymously via the web. Show me the kid that is going to buy a case of Ridge Lytton Springs to drink with his buddies on a Saturday night, rather than get one of his older friends to get a 18-pack of beer at the quickmart. If this argument were not ridiculous enough on the face of it, wineries already require an adult signature to deliver the wine. Wineries have no more incentive to lose their license by selling to underage consumers than do any of the rest of us in this business. Without our license, we have no business.
This case before the Court has implications for many industries. Think about some of the things that you buy commonly via multi-tier distribution such as automobiles and pharmaceuticals.
I am not a professional Court watcher, but it seems clear to me that the current Court has little tolerance for the states hiding behind the 21st amendment. What is less clear is what the future holds should the court rule for direct shipping. One possible outcome is that wineries will be able to ship out-of-state as they are attempting to do now. Another possible outcome is that to level the playing field, all wineries may be required to ship through distributors. This would put both small in-state and small out-of-state wineries in the same predicament: total lack of distribution, clearly not the outcome Mrs. Swedenburg would like. The Court will likely rule in May.
[Postscript, January 2008. Mrs. Swedenburg did prevail in her case. The Court ruled in her favor in May 2005 as expected. The ruling caused the several states to treat all who would sell wine equally regardless of provenance, but left the details of implementation up to the states. Here in Virginia, that led to chaos for the small producers, because the Commonwealth forced all producers to use licensed distributors, including the small farm wineries that had been selling direct to restaurants and wine stores. The net effect was as I mentioned above: the small wineries were totally disenfranchised. Our list of Virginia wines contracted by a third.
Mrs. Swedenburg died in June of 2007 and she did not get to see the changes to the Code of Virginia that are slowly letting the small farm wineries self-distribute once again.]
It’s prime oyster season now and so many of you have ordered oyster stew at the restaurant. We had a group of guys from Richmond come in and wipe us out of oysters, two nights in a row. Oyster stew as I make could not be any simpler. This way-scaled down recipe makes a quart – you decide how many people it will feed. If I am fiending for oysters, it won’t even begin to satiate my appetite!
Oyster Stew
2 T unsalted butter ¼ lb bacon, cut into lardoons (slice the strips into ¼” slices, vertically) 1 leek, chopped 1 small onion, diced 1 stalk celery, diced 1 bay leaf cayenne, what will fit on the tip of a pairing knife 3 sprigs fresh thyme 1 c whipping cream 1 pt shucked oysters (I like extra selects) ½ c water salt and pepper to taste
Place the butter and bacon in the bottom of a small saucepan (big enough to hold a quart of soup) and cook until the bacon is about ¾ cooked. Add the vegetables, herbs, and cayenne and cook until the onions are translucent. Add the cream and cook about 10 minutes, to let the vegetables finish cooking and the flavors come together. Remove the bay leaf and the thyme. With the cream at a boil, add the oysters and stir well. Cook for 2-3 minutes until the edges of the oysters start to curl. Add water as necessary to correct the consistency. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Each week I get emails asking me about various cooking techniques and/or using ingredients. Every month in the newsletter, I will publish one or two interesting topics. Feel free to send email if there is some technique or ingredient that you need help with.
I poached a salmon recently for a customer (you know, one of the old school buffet deals with the cucumber fish scales, leek fins, and aspic glaze) and he wanted to know how to do it. I think the more important question for him was whether he needed to buy a $200 fish poacher. Absolutely not. You don’t think that we have the storage room, let alone the cash, for a single-purpose, once-a-year piece of equipment, do you?
There are two critical things in poaching fish (and one small timing issue!): first, having a pan large enough to poach the fish, and second, having a way to lift the fish out of the pan without breaking it, once it is cooked. As for the pan, you can use anything you might already have that is deep enough to submerge the fish in the poaching liquid: a ham boiler, a lobster pot, or a deep baking pan. If you just want to poach filets and pieces of filets, rather than whole fish, any kind of pan will do.
Now for the tricky part – the lifter. Wrap the fish in a clean, wet dish towel before poaching. Afterwards, use the towel to lift the fish. Now that’s high-tech! It works every time!
And for the timing. I have found that if I bring the poaching liquid to the barest simmering boil and then turn it off and add the fish, I can cook a one-inch thick piece of fish by letting it stand for 20 minutes. For a two-inch thick piece of fish, I add the fish and barely simmer for 10 minutes and then let it stand for 20 minutes. For a whopper fish, 15-20 minutes on the heat and standing 20-30 minutes does the trick.
Poaching liquid: water, stock, court bouillon? Each gives a slightly different taste and in the end, does it really matter? Not much. I use water to cover the fish with a cup of so of white wine, a few peppercorns, a few slices of lemon, a bay leaf, and some parsley stems – a court bouillon.
Try poaching some fish for a change. It adds no fat and you get pure fish flavor. I like to poach rockfish, refrigerate it, and serve it cold with a touch of garlic mayonnaise (aïoli) in the summer.
On Saturday the 22nd, thanks to the snow, I was relaxing in the bar catching up on some reading when I came across a disturbing ad in one of the trade rags. Uncle Ben’s is introducing precooked risotto that is “ready to serve in 90 seconds,” ninety seconds that I presume are all in the microwave. Silly me, I thought that you could always trust risotto to be made by a chef, not by industrial process. You can trust that we make ours from scratch and that I am training a whole new generation of cooks who will go forth and make their risotti from scratch.
And remember, even if it snows, we’ll still be open. Only if it is too dangerous for my employees to get to work will we be closed.
Although winter is a tough time for cheese, we have several new cheeses in the cooler or arriving in the next few days. Among the new arrivals that you must taste are a Trappist-style soft cheese and a blue goat cheese! Please help us support small Virginia dairies and their outstanding cheeses.
Finally, we’ve had sweetbreads on the menu recently and they are the best that I have ever had. None of my staff had tried them before and those that are not vegetarian are hooked for life! I didn’t want to bother everyone with an announcement about them. If you like sweetbreads or are willing to try them, will you let me know and I will create a separate mailing list to let you know when they are available?
Already people are asking me when shad roe will appear on the menu. Patience, my friends! My guess is about the second week of March. As soon as the shad start running, we will have roe on the menu.
Ed
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Copyright © 2004-2005 Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC |
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