Chicken Salad; Beef and Polenta Stew; Pork with Polenta and Pomegranate Reduction

Since our last post we have hosted my parents for a week-long visit to enjoy the New England autumn colors, and both of us experienced a considerable up-tick in the work to be done in the lab. Fortunately the cause is positive -- Melissa just submitted her latest manuscript for review and I am diving headlong into data analysis from some very important experiments. However it does cut down on the time we have for serious eating...

These are some pics we took in Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire -- two from my dad (single leaves) and one of mine (canopy shot). Evan also got some really nice photos near Franconia Notch recently, as well as on a day trip he took with Melissa and me with my parents to Newburyport, MA.

We had a beautiful day for that trip, and our lunchtime picnic fare consisted of roast chicken, fresh ciabatta, cheeses and some local apples. These was all store-bought, but the next evening, Melissa made a light dinner of the leftover chicken and her own arugula and pecan pesto. She served the chicken salad on a bed of fresh arugula with rosemary au gratin potatoes and a bottle of 2008 Bogle Chardonnay (CA). Yum.

This past week Melissa has been experimenting some more with polenta. The first dish she made was a beef stew on soft polenta. The stew was made with browned chuck steak, potatoes, onions, fennel, garlic, whole black peppercorns and a red jalapeno from our garden, all in a chicken stock base. The soft polenta was a cornmeal base with Parmesan cheese and some New Zealand butter Melissa recently discovered at the grocery store. It was topped off with reduced grape tomatoes and a fennel-frond garnish. That polenta was amazing -- rich and creamy with plenty of flavors bleeding in from the stew. And the reduced tomatoes provided a sweet and tart counterpoint to the beef, garlic and onions. Between the whole peppercorns and the jalapeno pepper it packed a punch, but the heat wasn't overpowering and added a nice extra dimension to the dish. We had the stew with a 2006 Ku de Ta Malbec (Medoza Valley, Argentina), which was big enough to stand up to the dish, but was a little too young and tannic for us.

The second dish was pan-fried pork loin with a garlicky pomegranate reduction, fresh arugula, reduced grape tomatoes and a thicker polenta with lots of roasted garlic. The pomegranate reduction was the same one used for the lamb and eggplant dish Melissa served for a recent dinner party, and it's so good I think I would eat it on cardboard. Fortunately I don't have to, since Melissa is a real expert with pork loin. The line between cooked through and overdone is diminishingly thin with pork, but Melissa always gets it right on the nose.

Classic Spaghetti; Pork and Eggplant Stir-Fry; Hot Chicken Pockets

After the great fun of hosting a large dinner party on Friday (Sept 26), we had a weekend of cleanup and recovery. Two broken wine glasses (one by me), a few Cabernet stains on the carpet (don't just clean it -- OXYCLEAN IT!), and one curtain rod torn from the wall kept me busy on Saturday. A couple of four-inch wood screws and a little drywall repair got the curtains back up well enough to last another year or two of rental, and the rest of the rainy weekend was spent resting up and doing a bit of routine cloning in the lab. Molecular biology can be surprisingly relaxing...

Monday night Melissa pulled out a classic spaghetti with tomato meat sauce. We had about four boxes of angel hair pasta left over from the dinner party (better too much than not enough), and it will all be put to good use eventually. In this dish Melissa used a base of canned diced tomatoes with garlic, onions and a whole lot of fresh basil from the garden. Chuck steak minced in the food processor added a fine meat base that melded into the sauce without being too omnipresent. A 2005 Villa Cerrina Montepulciano d'Abruzzo (Abruzzi, Italy) was really nice with this pasta dish. This wine is one of Trader Joe's best sellers when it's available -- a great budget Italian red at $5 for the bottle.

Tuesday we supped on Beth's famous buffalo chicken dip and warm chocolate chip cookies at our regular game night with some HMS graduate students. While Melissa and I kicked ass at Trivial Pursuit that night, I have to say it is generally surprising how bad a bunch of Harvard-trained scientists can be at this game.

Wednesday dinner was a great dish to use up the leftover eggplant from last Friday while also powering through the arugula and grape tomatoes that will otherwise soon rot in the garden as colder weather sets in. On a thick bed of said arugula, Melissa served up a pork loin stir fry seasoned with sea salt and liquid smoke and accompanied by a roasted garlic, eggplant and grape tomato puree. The smoky pork, sweet caramelized garlic and tart tomato flavors filled out the eggplant base and complemented the spicy arugula just perfectly. Melissa will attempt to reproduce this recipe upon request, but she says it's been too long since she made it to remember exactly what was done. Clearly a not-so-subtle suggestion that I get the blog posts up in a more timely fashion...

By far the most tastebud-jolting dish to come out of the kitchen last week was Melissa's spicy chicken pita pockets. Chicken thigh meat was marinated for a couple of hours with a Mexican chili powder mix, dried chili flakes, crushed garlic cloves and lemon juice, then pan fried and stuffed into halved pita bread with a fresh salsa made of tomatoes, basil and jalapeno peppers (all from our garden) with a bit of lemon juice and some tasty Australian olive oil. The jalapeno peppers we grew were hotter than we expected, and the whole thing snuck up on us like a mouthful of blowtorch. When the 2007 Villa Maria Riesling (Marlborough, NZ) we had with dinner failed to cool us down, we resorted to a glass of whole milk. The flavor was Texalicious and the pepper-storm was, well, cathartic.




When our tongues were sufficiently cooled and the last tears were wiped from our eyes, we went back for more...