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.