|
|
Newsletter for August 2005 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
|||
|
Please feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends.
To subscribe to this newsletter, send us a note. To unsubscribe to this newsletter, send us a note.
Privacy Policy. We never disclose your email address to any outside party and we send the newsletter in such a way that others cannot see your email address (nor can you see theirs). |
||||
|
This August newsletter is very late, sorry, too many irons in the fire. As a result of some recent cooking demonstrations, I’ve come to realize that to a lot of people, certain highly valuable members of the onion family such as shallots and leeks are unknown. This edition of the newsletter focuses on the humble onion and its cousins.
Don’t forget that we close for the last full week of August to recuperate and re-energize.
Looking forward to seeing you again soon after we return from holiday,
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
Weekdays: Tapas from 5 to 6pm Each weekday, we serve a changing menu of tapas, small dishes of Spanish origin, smaller than appetizers. They are designed so that you can eat several of them without becoming totally full.
Summer Holiday, August 23rd to August 27th We’re closing to take a much needed break.
Sunday September 18th, Cooking with Herbs at Blandy Farm I’ll be doing a demonstration of cooking with herbs using some of the gorgeous herbs from the collection at Blandy Farm. More details in the September newsletter, or call Blandy or the restaurant for more.
We continue to honor gift certificates issued by the former owners of this restaurant even though we have never been compensated for these gift certificates. As you might imagine, this has been a significant financial and accounting burden. On December 1, 2005 as we enter our fourth year of business, we will cease to honor gift certificates issued by the former owners. We will not honor any One Block West gift certificate not signed by me, any Lynk Gift Cards, or other form of credit issued by the former owners after December first.
As an early reminder, we know that a lot of you give gift certificates as holiday gifts and holiday bonuses to employees. As we have done in the past, we will generate and mail certificates to your recipients if you provide us with a list of names and addresses. We do not charge for this service, but we ask you to help us by not waiting until the very last minute. December is our busiest month.
One Block West Rewards is our way of saying thank you to our loyal customers. We reward frequent diners with $50 gift certificates. For more information, please see our web site.
Save the Date. Wednesday December 14th is our 3rd anniversary dinner featuring the most popular dishes of 2005. OBW Rewards members will receive a 20% discount upon presentation of their OBW Rewards books.
Quarterly Drawing Winner. The winner of the second quarter Dinner for Two drawing is Dr. Hunter Gaunt of Winchester.
Free Medical Clinic. We donate one dollar of the registration fee for each OBW Rewards booklet that we sell. We will be presenting a $100 check to the Free Medical Clinic in September.
Where would a chef be without an arsenal of onions at his disposal? Where would your home cooking be? We rely on so many members of the Allium family so much that we take them for granted at times. Here’s a brief sketch of the ones that we use at the restaurant.
Yellow/Spanish Onions. These are the workhorse alliums in our arsenal. We use only very large onions because they’re easier to peel and yield more with less peeling. We don’t use white onions because they are more expensive, but they are generally slightly tangier than yellow onions. We do use some of the very sweet Vidalias (and other sweet onion varieties) in season, but mainly raw on salads.
Red Onions. For all intents and purposes, red onions are interchangeable with yellow onions. We only use them for the color effect, such as on our grilled portabella sandwich. Red onions tend to be sweeter than yellow onions, so we use red onions when we are serving them raw, as on salads. An incredible kind of red onion is the torpedo onion, named for obvious reasons, an excellent raw onion.
Cippolini. Beautiful, small, disk-shaped onions, these guys are hard to peel because they are so small and also because the tops of the onion are often depressed below the shoulders of the onion. They are excellent braised with meats or by themselves. Available in the fall, they come in just when I think of braising a roast. Braised pork shanks with cippolini and porcini, anyone?
Shallots. Shallots are woefully underappreciated by home cooks and yet they are an indispensable tool in any high end restaurant kitchen. They have a very delicately, slightly garlic flavor, making them ideal when you want a hint of garlic flavor, without the full bore effect of garlic. Convince yourself. Over high heat, sauté a handful of fresh spinach in olive oil with a pinch of salt and minced shallots.
Garlic. We use an awful lot of garlic at the restaurant, always fresh and always minced, never crushed, every day. There are hundreds of varieties in the world, some spicier, some milder, in two basic classes: the hardnecks (with the stiff center bloom scape) and the softnecks (no hard center scape). We see all kinds at the restaurant and the variety makes little difference. We have no use for so-called elephant garlic (actually much more closely related to leeks) with large, mild cloves. We use garlic when we want garlic flavor and shallots otherwise.
Leeks. Here’s another woefully underappreciated Allium that is found in every high end restaurant cooler. Leeks are a workhorse vegetable in all our mirepoix ( finely diced aromatic vegetables used to flavor dishes) for braises and soups. Leeks have a wonderful mild, just slightly garlicky flavor, a flavor all their own. Leeks are excellent braised, in vinaigrette, or even very thinly sliced and raw in salads. See below for how to clean leeks.
Green Onions. Most of us are very familiar with the beautiful little green onions found in every grocery store. We use them for color effect mainly, when we want green flecks in a light colored salad or a light colored food, such as our Thai crab cakes. Also called green onions or boiling onions or spring onions are immature onions harvested in the spring with a partially formed bulb. We use the tops of these as green onions and braise the bulbs (or the entire onion).
Chives. We’re constantly using tiny chives in everything from herb mixes to marinades to plate garnishes. We use chives not so much for flavor, but for color, although they are an indispensable part of the herb mayonnaise that we garnish our crab cakes with. Dried chives are useless.
Garlic Chives. These are a flat-leafed member of the onion family that resembles chives in growth habit. Not readily available except in Asian groceries where they are known as Chinese chives, Chinese leeks, or gow choy, they are simple to grow and once established, will prolifically seed themselves all over your garden! Start some from seed or let me know and you can have some of the escapes from my garden. With a pronounced garlic flavor, garlic chives are an excellent way to get both garlic color and green color. I always use them in the chicken mousse that I put in the center of pot stickers, Chinese dumplings. I also gather the prolific harvest of black seeds to decorate the top of naan, pan-Asian flatbread.
When it’s hot out, a good old fashioned Margarita sure hits the spot (lime juice, sugar or simple syrup, orange juice or triple sec, and tequila, on the rocks, no salt). In the winter, after dinner, I like to sip an añejo tequila, the Mexican take on Cognac, at much more affordable prices. Here’s a brief primer on tequila.
Tequila, like Burgundy, Chianti, or Pinot Grigio, is a denomination of origin, one that is closely controlled by the Mexican government. The name Tequila is a guarantee that the liquor is distilled from the fermented juices from the hearts of blue agave plants grown in the region around the town of Tequila in Jalisco state, where the liquor has been made for at least two centuries, since the Spaniards brought distillation technology to Mexico. Tequila is just west of the Jaliscan capital Guadalajara.
Just as Cognac is brandy produced in the Cognac region of France, not all brandy can be labeled Cognac. Similarly, any agave-based liquor is mezcal, but only mezcal made from the blue agave in the Tequila region can be labeled as Tequila. If you’ve ever been to the Southwest or to Mexico, chances are you’ve seen striking agave plants. The blue agave has long bluish green spiny leaves with sharp points and a large heart. When the spines are hacked off the heart, the heart looks amazingly like a pineapple, hence its name in Spanish, a piña. The piñas are chopped, roasted, ground, pressed, and then the juice is fermented for up to two days. The resulting wine is then fermented twice, yielding a clear liquor.
Four types of Tequila are allowed by law: blanco, oro, reposado, and añejo. Blanco (white) is bottled immediately after distillation. Oro (gold) is blanco with caramel coloring. Reposado (rested) is blanco that has been aged in cask between two months and a year. Reposado, while still very pale, has more color than blanco. Añejo (aged) has been aged more than a year in oak barrels and pick up more of the wood flavor and correspondingly more color. Some añejos are aged for 8, 10, or even 12 years, just like Scotch.
At the restaurant, our Margarita tequila is Cuervo Gold and our sipping tequila is Sauza Tres Generaciones Añejo. We’d like to carry more brands, but there is no demand.
Recipe: Four Onion Frittata
Here’s an easy dinner dish that is a take off on a much simpler Spanish tortilla that I encountered a long time ago. This frittata serves 4 people for a light meal or 2 people for a large meal.
2 T extra virgin olive oil, divided 1 yellow onion, sliced in rings 8 eggs ½ t fresh garlic, minced 2-3 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves plucked pinch salt and pepper 1 leek, diced 2 shallots, diced several slices of Manchego or other pecorino cheese
Preheat your oven to high, 400 or higher. Heat a 10” ovenproof sauté pan over high heat and add half the olive oil and all the onions. While the onions are wilting, beat the eggs with the garlic, thyme, salt, and pepper. Once the onions are translucent and soft, add the leek and the shallots and cook until they are soft. Remove the onions from the pan and wipe it down with a paper towel. Return to the heat and film with the remaining olive oil. Pour in the eggs and let cook for a minute to start solidifying the bottom. Arrange the onion mix on the frittata and cover with cheese. Once the bottom is well set, place the pan in the oven and cook until the center is set. Depending on oven temperature and the size of the eggs and pan, this will take between 10 and 20 minutes. Let cool briefly, slide onto a serving plate, and cut into wedges.
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 never realized until recently that many people are intimidated by leeks, simply because they do not know how to clean or use them. We’ll deal with cleaning them here and a recipe for using them is just above. Because leeks are grown in rich, often sandy soil, and most of the edible part is below ground, it is important to clean them well.
First, remove the inedible portions. In classical French cooking, chefs save only the white part of the leek and remove the tougher outer layer, for they prize on the very tender white portion of the leek. This is a pity for they relegate a very large amount of edible leek to the stock pot. The technique that I find the best for me is to remove the toughest outer leaves entirely and then cut or break off each leaf where it will break off naturally—the same technique I use for snapping asparagus stalks. Very little of the outer layers is without strings; by contrast, almost all of the very pale green inner leaves are edible.
Once the tough parts are gone, you must clean the leek. I know of two simple techniques. The first is to split the leek from the root end to the tips, leaving the root intact. Then rotate the leek 90 degrees and split it again. Now you can rinse it thoroughly under running water, root end up, so that the dirt washes out of the leek and not into it! Be sure to rinse your knife as well. Then you can chop as you see fit. The other technique is to slice the leek and drop the rings into a bowl of water, rinsing a couple of times. The dirt will fall to the bottom and the leeks will float.
I’m tired of the heat and humidity and am looking forward to some relief. Hopefully we can get in about six good weeks of dining out of the deck after Labor Day. My mind is already working on fall menus (pumpkin ravioli with sage butter, roasted pork loin, and sauté of wild mushrooms) and I am looking forward to sharing the change of seasons with all of you.
All my best and come see us when you can,
Ed
|
||||
|
|
Copyright © 2005 Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC sensational seasonal cuisine and the W logo are trademarks of Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC. |
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
