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Newsletter for June 2006 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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OK, you caught me. I skipped the May newsletter as many of you have reminded me. Sorry, but I took off a couple of Sundays to be with my family. Newsletter or family time? Tough tradeoff. Not!
June is here and that always means morels and salmon to me. Morels are good now and falling in price. Salmon is still overpriced. Softshells have dried up in the last week. Availability is hit or miss. But no matter when you visit, we’re sure to have something new and fun on the menu. Right now, we have wild French asparagus and some outstanding red snapper.
Tapas night, every Wednesday from 5-9pm, is starting to catch on. If you haven’t been out for tapas, what are you waiting for?
I hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter.
All my best,
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
Every Wednesday is Tapas Night Each Wednesday night, we serve tapas from 5:00pm to 9:00pm. Tapas are small, fun dishes, designed so that you can try a range of foods. Last week we featured 20 dishes, of which 9 were vegetarian. My favorite tapa was the Grilled Quail with Salsa Verde. Come see what we’re cooking this week.
Thursday, June 22, Linden Wine Dinner I’ve tasted most of the wine made in Virginia and I’ve decided that Jim Law of Linden Vineyard is the best winegrower and winemaker in the state. Jim will be with us to showcase some of his new releases and I will develop a menu to complement those wines. Any time spent with Jim is highly educational, so you are not going to want to miss this dinner. $65 per person. Reception from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. First course promptly at 7:00pm. SOLD OUT
Saturday, June 24, 10:00am – 12:00, Demonstration at the Clarke County Farmers Market Free! I’ll be at the farmers market in Berryville in the parking lot on South Church Street demonstrating dishes made with ingredients that I find at the market. I won’t know in advance what I’m making because I don’t know what will be there. This is your chance to ask, “What do I do with THAT?”
Thursday, July 20, Summer Harvest Dinner Hot weather is a great thing because it means a glorious bounty of summer vegetables. I am already dreaming about heirloom tomatoes and peppers, corn, Sicilian eggplants, squash galore, and peaches! Join guest hosts Gene and Beth Nowak of Mayfair Farm in Bunker Hill, WV, key One Block West suppliers, in a four-course dinner with matching wines highlighting the fruits of their labors. $55 per person. Reception from 6:30pm to 7:00pm. First course promptly at 7:00pm.
For our garlic dinner in April, a customer asked me to cook shrimp scampi, a contradiction in terms if I ever heard one. We all know what he wanted: shrimp drowned in garlic butter. But the request got me thinking about shellfish nomenclature. And what I found was truly bewildering. Around the world, we try to confuse each other with terms such as shrimp, prawn, scampo (plural: scampi), langostino, langoustine, and lobsterette. Let’s not even bring crayfish and spiny lobsters into the picture. I’ll try to sort out what I can for you.
Although technically separated by minor differences in body parts that only a taxonomist would care about, prawns and shrimp in common usage are the same thing. What you call the creature at hand is largely influenced by where you live. On the East Coast we tend to call everything shrimp and on the West Coast, they seem to call everything prawns. Except that even on the East Coast, we tend to call really large shrimp prawns. The rest of the English speaking world seems to prefer prawns. (Remember Paul Hogan in the ad campaign “Shrimp on the barbie?” That line was doctored from the true Oz-speak “Prawn on the barbie” so as not to confuse us already confused Americans.)
Many Americans think that scampo is Italian for shrimp, but it’s not. It’s Italian for the Norway lobster, which is called langoustine in French, langostino in Spanish and Italian, and, watch out for the dreaded P-word, Dublin Bay prawn in the UK. There we go again confusing ourselves. The langostino (my favorite word for the critter) doesn’t much look like the lobster that we know – rather, it looks like an orange-pink overgrown crawfish, with very long, skinny foreclaws that contain no useful meat as do the claws of the lobster. The meat is highly reminiscent of lobster in flavor and texture, however.
Here’s the menu from May’s Piedmont wine dinner for those of you who could not attend. The hit of this dinner was the second course, Asparagi et Carciofi Trifolati, thinly sliced fresh artichokes and thinly slice fresh asparagus, slowly stewed in butter, garlic, parsley, and pancetta until tender crunchy.
Menu
Leek and Pancetta Frittata La Slina Gavi 2005 ab Artichokes and Asparagus Sautéed with Garlic, Parsley, and Pancetta Orsolani Erbaluce di Caluso “La Rustia” 2004 ab Grilled Quail with Salsa Verde Benotto Barbera d’Asti Superiore 2000 ab Ossobuco of Bison with Porcini Risotto and Braised Rapini Vietti Barolo “Castiglione” 2000 ab Local Strawberries with Whipped Lemon-Mascarpone and Casorzo Zabaglione Fracchia Casorzo 2005
While going through the herbs in our cooler last week, I noticed that someone (he knows who he is) had labeled our cilantro as culantro, which it is not. That got me to thinking about this most common of fresh herbs, Coriandrum sativum. The entire plant is edible: leaves, seeds, and roots.
In the past, the leaves have been marketed as coriander leaves, Mexican parsley, and Chinese parsley, but we seem to have now standardized on the Mexican term cilantro in the US. In Britain, the Hindi term dhania seems to be gaining ground.
The dried round seed of the same plant is called coriander. The seeds taste entirely different from the leaves, with hints of lemon, orange, and spice. The seeds are the predominant spice in most curry powders and they flavor many sausages and gins as well.
Cilantro stems and roots are commonly used in Asian cuisines, especially as the basis for Thai curry pastes. While the roots have a basic cilantro leaf flavor, the stems are even more intensely flavored.
Although cilantro is most often associated with the cuisines of Latin America and Asia, the herb originated in the Mediterranean where it has been cultivated for thousands of years. The Romans spread cilantro to Europe and Asia. And then, the Spanish conquistadors introduced it to Mexico and Latin America.
The world is divided into two types of people: those who love cilantro and those who hate it. Those who hate it say that the leaves taste soapy or like burned rubber. Those who love it adore the green, spicy, citrusy, herbal flavor. Most researchers believe that the way you taste cilantro is genetically influenced, but this has yet to be proven.
Culantro (Eryngium foetidum) is a native to the West Indies and to me resembles a primrose in structure. The flavor is indeed similar to cilantro. I have rarely encountered culantro in the US, but it is common in Puerto Rico where it is used as cilantro is here.
Communicating with the Service Staff
Recently, thanks to more kitchen staff, I have spent more time in the dining room watching how staff and guests interact. I’d like to remind all our guests that while we are as attentive as we can be and that while we try to anticipate what you would like, we are not mind readers. And on the other hand, you may not know how our staff is trained. Here are a few situations.
Ready to Order. Every day, I see guests who make us guess when they are ready to order. Our servers are trained to take orders as soon as all menus at the table are closed. When you are ready to order, please close your menu. For dessert menus that cannot be closed, when all guests have put them down on the table, we will approach.
Finished Eating. We also have to guess frequently when you are finished eating, especially if you are not going to eat everything on your plate. Our servers are trained to wait for you to close your knife and your fork together on your plate at approximately the four o’clock position. For appetizers, where you use only a salad fork, they look for the fork in the four o’clock position, tines down. Similarly for other courses where you might use only one utensil. And, they are trained to wait for everyone at the table to finish eating before clearing any plates.
Special Requests. If you have expectations of the way that you would like to be served, please tell us. A case in point: last weekend, a couple ordered cocktails and upon the arrival of the cocktails, they ordered dinner. Their dinner was on the table six minutes later, much to the consternation of the couple who wanted to chat a few minutes before eating. How were we to know?
Need Something? If you need something that we haven’t anticipated, catch the eye of one of our staff. They are all trained to approach you in this case or to acknowledge your request with a nod of the head if they are engaged at another table, in which case, they will come as quickly as they can.
Recipe: Chizu
At every one of our wine dinners, there is always one dish that stands out for customers as the hit of the evening and it’s generally not one of the marquee dishes. In the case of our garlic dinner, it was actually this carrot salad/relish from Morocco that had people talking. We served this as a condiment with Tajine of Lamb and Whole Garlic on Orange-Mint Couscous.
1 lb carrots, in julienne 2 t freshly ground cumin 2 t sweet paprika ½ t cayenne 1 t salt ¼ t black pepper 8 cloves garlic, finely slivered (or minced) juice of one lemon 1 T wine vinegar 2 T extra virgin olive oil 4 T minced cilantro leaves
Julienne the carrots. Add all the other ingredients and stir well. Although you can serve immediately, this salad improves with a couple days of refrigeration.
With my apologies to Copeland Marks and his excellent book The Great Book of Couscous. I have deviated from his recipe to create something more closely akin to an Indian carrot pickle. I may not be too far off the mark, for Marks theorizes that Moroccan and Indian food are closely related simply because on their way back from India, early spice traders called in Moroccan ports and left both spices and recipes. By the way, all of Copeland Marks’ books are amazingly well done and worthy of reading.
The julienne cut results in long, thin strips that are square in cross-section, one of the basic knife cuts.
While the Chizu recipe above calls for julienned carrots, carrots are perhaps the most difficult vegetable to julienne, simply because they are hard and they want to roll. I suggest you practice on something easier such as a cucumber until you get the technique down. If you have never julienned before, it is going to seem awkward at first, but you will improve with practice.
For long items such as carrots and cucumbers, first cut them crossways into chunks as long as you want the julienned strips to be. Next, and most importantly, you want to create a stable base for all your remaining cuts. This involves cutting off one of the rounded edges to give you one flat side. For cucumbers, you can stand a chunk vertically on your cutting board and slice one of the sides off.
For smaller items such as carrots, you’ll need to lay it flat on the board and carefully slice off one rounded edge. When cutting items that are prone to roll, I always suggest to students that they anchor the tip of their knife in the cutting board just ahead of the item and then use the knife like a paper cutter. Even should the item roll, with the tip of the knife anchored in the cutting board, the knife is less prone to roll itself.
Once you have one flat edge, roll the item so that it lays on that flat edge. This is your stable base and the item will no longer roll. Now slice the item lengthwise into slices as wide as you want your julienne strips to be.
Now stack your slices on your cutting board, wide side down. Slice them again lengthwise the same width as before and you have your julienne.
After much begging and pleading, we have finally convinced our olive oil supplier to give us 500ml retail packages. Now those of you who have been asking where you can buy it in family-sized quantities (rather than the 18 liter cases that we buy at the restaurant), now you know where to buy it. As you know it’s outstanding extra virgin oil and very fairly priced at $9 per 500ml bottle.
Change is constant at the restaurant. We are known for having excellent bread. As good as it was, our La Brea bread was never quite as good as my own bread, which after 20 years of practice is pretty darned good. Alas, I cannot bake and run a restaurant too. But recently, I got samples of bread from a new bakery. I thought that we might test some samples in the dining room to see what customers preferred, but we never got to that point—the servers ate all the samples! This bread is so much better than I can make—this bread is scary good. If you come to the restaurant for no other reason, come to taste this bread. As Harry Potter would say, “It is wicked good!”
All my best and come see us when you can,
Ed
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Copyright © 2006 Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC sensational seasonal cuisine and the W logo are trademarks of Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC. |
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