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Newsletter for December 2007 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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Is Christmas really upon us? Have we really been in business five years? Gosh, it seems like ten! But that’s right—five years in the middle of December! My staff and I invite you to come celebrate with us on Thursday the 20th when we put on our annual retrospective dinner of the favorite dishes of the year.
I’m really sorry about the lack of newsletters this fall, but it’s been a choice between spending time with my kids or writing the newsletter. The kids keep on winning. I hope you enjoy this rather full edition of the 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 and your friends can try and share a range of foods.
Holiday Schedule Closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, otherwise open on our normal Tuesday to Saturday schedule. For those of you doing the math, this means we’re closed on Monday the 24th, Christmas Eve. I’m planning on working a short day and then Mrs. Claus and I are getting into the Champagne with a bit of lobster to chase it! You have fun too!
Thursday, Dec 20, 5th Anniversary Dinner It’s hard to believe that I have been at this for five years now. The food is getting better and better and we’ll feature the best dishes of 2007 in a five-course retrospective dinner, paired with wines. Cost is $65; $58.50 for One Block West Rewards members. I’m still winnowing through the thousands of dishes we have done this year to put together the menu. If you have suggestions, email me.
Monday, Dec 31, New Year’s Eve Come have a wonderful dinner with us before you head off to do whatever you’re going to do for New Year’s Eve. As usual, two seatings, four courses with choices for each course, price fixed at $75 per person. By reservation with a credit card only.
Thursday, Jan 24, Rhône Wines and Game Dinner This could be the most spectacular dinner that we put on in 2008. Five courses of outstanding wines from the Rhône Valley in the south of France, paired with game. Once I put together the menu, I will be able to price this dinner. I am thinking about $90 per person right now.
Nothing ever stays static at the restaurant, so you will notice a few changes the next time you come in. First, you’ll notice most dishes going out on plates that are anything but round, white, and boring. After many months of searching, wrangling with manufacturers, and requesting fabric swatches, the first batch of our new dining room chairs has replaced the worst of our old chairs, which were way beyond their service life. I tested a sample chair during a marathon Texas Hold ’Em game before purchasing, so I am sure you will find them comfortable. Sadly, I didn’t win enough to pay for the chairs. We’ve now put a table for up to six guests in our bar for small private meetings and dinners. It also hosts my Chef’s Tasting dinners, letting me discuss the tasting with my guests, without having other diners in the main dining room complain about me not spending enough time with them. This bar table is the first in a series of renovations to that room. After five years at the restaurant, I have finally decided what I want the bar space to be like and I am working towards that goal as I have time and money. Finally, you’ll notice the following scary wording on our menus: This advertisement is brought to you courtesy of (mandated by) your friends at the Virginia Department of Health, who are trying to keep you from harming yourself, while reminding you that we are not going to incinerate your steak even though they would like us to. Thanks for the help VDH! What would we do without you?
Most of you know that I am committed to sourcing as many ingredients as locally as possible. I like knowing who produces what we use at the restaurant and I like knowing how our goods were produced. I also like contributing to the local economy. We source a lot locally including produce, honey, corn meal and flour, maple syrup, wine, whiskey, hams and sausages, lamb, cheeses, organic eggs, and so forth. In addition to purchasing locally, I also insist that products be of the highest quality. I cannot tell you how many flavorless “pastured chickens” I have sampled and passed on, despite their being raised locally. Local does not always mean good, sadly. Our list of suppliers is ever changing as vendors come and go. Many hobbyists or foragers find that supplying a restaurant is hard work—we insist on fairly large quantities delivered to the restaurant with dependable regularity. It takes commitment on both sides. We have lost key vendors for dairy, fresh herbs, trout, and goat cheese over the last year. If you are interested in supplying the restaurant or know someone who might or should be, please get in touch with me. We are especially looking for local suppliers for the following: cream and milk, ice cream, rabbits, herbs, cut flowers, trout, goat cheese, wild mushrooms, paw-paws, snapping turtles, buffalo, fowl of all sorts, and cured and smoked meat products, grits and polenta, and so forth.
I did a few demos during October in which I featured creamed salsify as a side dish. We use black salsify (Scorzonera hispanica), also known as Scorzonera, Oyster Plant, or Spanish Salsify. The edible part is the long, slender taproot, about 14 to 16 inches long and no more than an inch in diameter, probably averaging three-quarters of an inch. The roots are generally filthy, so a good scrubbing is in order. Then you must peel the black skin away to reveal the cream-colored interior. Immediately upon peeling, you must place the salsify in acidulated water to prevent discoloration. Use as you would any other root vegetable: roasted, boiled and mashed, boiled and buttered, etc. At the restaurant, we typically cut the root into 3” lengths, boil it to tender, and then reheat it with double cream just before service. It has a mild flavor that some say reminds them of oysters, hence the common name Oyster Plant. I haven’t had much luck in detecting any oyster flavor, sadly. I cook salsify every fall, just to add variety to the menu, but out of personal preference, give me parsnips any day! I am absolutely nuts about parsnips.
Sometimes I think that I am a fool for putting on a tapas menu on Wednesday nights. It hurts when customers walk out of the restaurant because they “don’t want this tapas stuff,” even though they’ve never tried it before. It’s also a huge amount of work for our two-person kitchen crew. Despite all this, I am hard-headed and I keep encouraging customers to sit and eat more variety, more slowly, to share their meals, and to enjoy the dining experience (rather than the eating experience).
To that end, we’ve been tinkering with the entire concept from week-to-week trying to find what works best for us and what works best for customers. Lately, we’ve arrived at a menu that seems to work on both accounts. Our tapas menu has evolved into a small plates menu of 15-18 dishes that are the size of a traditional appetizer. Many of these dishes are scaled down entrées with entrée garnishes. Feedback on this new menu has been very positive.
Social Responsibility in the Restaurant Business
At some level, most of us are concerned about our impact on the planet and on society in general. It’s become the fashion for restaurants to proclaim loudly that they are doing their part. We just keep on quietly doing what we have been doing, but in response to questions from some of you, here are some of the things that we do:
Seafood Choices. Restaurants have a huge impact on the fisheries of the world. We try to make the best buying decisions that we can, buying from lower impact day boats when possible and buying less threatened species. We don’t serve Patagonian Toothfish, for example. You’ll know it as Chilean Sea Bass, and while it is delicious, it is horribly overfished. I prefer to serve equally delicious underfished species such as Sheepshead, Tautog, and Corvina. And I am convinced that most salmon farming as it is currently practiced, besides producing a nasty tasting product, is terribly harmful to the sea.
Health Consciousness. We don’t own a fryer and never want one. We use relatively healthy olive and grapeseed oils and minimal butter. Butter- and cream-based sauces are not our style—we tend to fruit and vegetable salsas. We try to source meats that are not given antibiotics and growth hormones—these things cannot be good for you.
Recycling. We recycle the bottles and cans that we use—hundreds and hundreds of containers a week. Sadly, we use a lot of paper. We’d love to go to a chalkboard format menu, but customer reaction to that is terribly negative. To minimize our paper use, we use our menu stock twice before recycling it—once as menus and then we print our inventory sheets and draft menus on the reverse side. And, all our ink cartridges go back to HP for refilling.
While we are not perfect, we are at least are conscious that our decisions do impact the rest of the world and we try to make the best ones that we can. Thanks for caring enough to ask.
Gorgonzola is a green- or blue-veined world-class cow’s milk cheese of ancient manufacture from the Italian regions of Lombardy and Piedmont and named after the town of Gorgonzola which is now a suburb of greater Milan. Gorgonzola along with Stilton and Roquefort are the three most renowned blue cheeses in the world.
Gorgonzola is made in two distinct styles: Dolce and Piccante (also known as Naturale or Mountain). The differences between the two are solely the result of aging. Dolce, which means sweet, is aged two to three months and is creamy and very mild. Piccante, which means spicy, is aged about six months or even longer, is denser and has some bite from the veining. Piccante is usually considerably denser, more crumbly, and a lot more veined than Dolce.
There is another style of Gorgonzola called Cremificato that is rarely seen in the US. The curds are left wetter yielding a very creamy, almost liquid cheese. I have had some that was extremely pungent.
I’ve heard customers say that the cheese selection at the local grocery stores is vastly improved over years past, so I went to check it out for myself. Indeed, the selection is wider, but all the cheeses appear to be hermetically sealed and most appear to be mass market factory cheese, not what I’m looking for.
The bulk of our cheese at the restaurant comes from local Virginia dairies, with Oak Spring Dairy in Upperville being the closest. The rest we buy from wholesalers who specialize in sourcing great cheeses made in small quantities by people who care about their animals, their land, and their products. Naturally, we have to buy quantities that are simply too large for the average household to consume.
So, where are you to buy cheese without making a long drive into Northern Virginia? Here are three cheese purveyors, two in New York and one in Cambridge, that I have used for fifteen years with great success. When you call them on the phone, there are real people at the other end of the line who know their products, can make recommendations, and know which cheeses are at their peak. And all three have web stores for easy ordering. I still call just because I like the staff to sell me something that they are really crazy about.
Formaggio Kitchen, http://www.formaggiokitchen.com/ Ideal Cheese, http://www.idealcheese.com/ Murray’s Cheese, http://www.murrayscheese.com/
Recipe: Butternut Squash, Gorgonzola and Sage Risotto
Risotto is one of the classic dishes of the Italian repertoire and here it is mixed with a classic American ingredient, the butternut squash. You can use any hard winter squash; we use butternut because it has the highest flesh to seed ratio—that is, we get more squash for less work. But we’ve put a big dent in Beth’s butternuts at the Farmer’s Market, so you may have to use another kind of squash. Don’t fret—they are all great.
Gorgonzola is a creamy green-veined cheese from Italy. We like it because it melts readily and is not terribly salty, unlike many blue cheeses. This recipe calls for fresh sage. If you don’t have it, just omit it and do not substitute dried sage. If you must substitute, try a sprinkle of fresh parsley at the end.
You shouldn’t be afraid of making risotto. It’s very simple and a great technique to have at your disposal. I’ve used the risotto technique very successfully with barley, Israeli couscous, and quinoa.
This recipe makes four substantial portions.
2 T unsalted butter or neutral vegetable oil 4 sage leaves, whole 1 medium onion in fine dice, about ½ cup 1-½ c Arborio rice 2 c winter squash, cut in ¼” dice ½ c dry white wine 6-7 c vegetable stock, chicken stock, or water 4-6 sage leaves, finely chopped 2 T unsalted butter, softened ½ c grated pecorino Romano cheese 2 oz Gorgonzola dolce cheese, crumbled salt and ground white pepper to taste
Add the butter or vegetable oil to a heavy bottom pan and fry the sage leaves until crisp to flavor the oil; remove the sage. Add the onion and cook about a minute, until it starts to become translucent, but do not brown. Add the rice and stir well to coat in the fat. Add the squash cubes. Stir and cook for another couple of minutes until the edges of the rice start becoming translucent.
Add the wine and let it almost evaporate while stirring. Add enough stock or water to just cover the rice and reduce the heat so that the liquid just bubbles. Add a pinch or two of salt at this point. Stir fairly frequently as the rice absorbs the liquid. The goal is for the rice to absorb the liquid rather than for the liquid to evaporate. Adjust the flame as needed.
As the liquid is absorbed, add more liquid one quarter to one half a cup at a time and continue to stir until the rice is done to your liking. My experience is that rice takes about 17 to 23 minutes to cook. If you like it more al dente, stop sooner. If you like the rice softer, cook it longer.
Once the rice is done to your liking, add the chopped sage, soft butter, and cheeses and stir rapidly to yield a creamy texture. You may have to add a splash of stock or water to correct the texture. The rice should not be soupy and it should not be stiff. Season to taste with salt and white pepper. Serve immediately—it does not hold.
Please come let me cook for you when you are able. And above all, enjoy this holiday season with your family. Merry Christmas from all of the OBW crew to you!
Ed
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Copyright © 2007 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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