Chicken with Pomegranate Tartlets; Steam-baked Tilapia with Ribboned Zucchini

As colder weather sets in there is less fresh, in-season produce to get excited about, but Melissa manages to find inspiration nonetheless. A recent dish inspired by a leftover fruit from the pomegranate martinis we made for my birthday cocktail party featured marscapone and pomegranate tartlets as accompaniment to chicken thighs with Lima beans and green peas. Grilled boneless chicken thighs were seasoned with simple chicken stock paste and ground pepper. Melissa sauteed some chopped onions with coarsely chopped bacon to add to the soaked, boiled Lima beans and briefly boiled green peas.

The tartlets were a real treat. Not being very experienced with eating pomegranate, I've only sort of chewed the flesh off and spit out the seed. In this dish the seeds and flesh were together in the tart on top of a generous cushion of marscapone cheese. The result was a light crunch from the filo shell, a rich creamy base from the marscapone, a jolt of tart from the pomegranate fruit, and a coarse crunch from the seeds. A panoply of textures and flavors. Melissa baked these for about 12 minutes at 400F in a mini-tart pan.

We had a Sbragia 2004 Home Ranch Merlot (Sonoma, CA) that we already had open with this meal. Someone brought this wine around on my birthday (who are you?), and it was fantastic. What a rich, fruit-driven, velvety-smooth wine. Backed up by vanilla and oak, it was really nice with the tart and savory mix in this dish.

On another recent evening we stopped by the store on the way home to forage for some dinner ideas. Before even reaching the store we discovered we were both thinking fish. And since we were also thinking inexpensive, we brought home some tilapia fillets and Melissa made an old stand-by of ours: tilapia fillets (it works equally well with whole cleaned trout) are seasoned with sea salt and ground pepper, then wrapped up in foil pouches with lemon, garlic and tomato slices and a generous pat of butter. We often cook these on the grill (which is how I learned it while trout fishing in the Rocky Mountains), but it also works in the oven. Melissa served the fish with ribboned zucchini (cooked covered in the microwave for three minutes and seasoned with a sprinkle of chicken stock powder), and some fresh sliced grape tomatoes, the last remnants from our garden this season.

We had a bottle of Guy Saget 2007 Vouvray (France) with the fish. We were hoping for a nice dry chenin blanc here, but this wine is off-dry to sweet. It's a little frustrating that the bottle doesn't give any indication that it's "demi-sec," but I still have good impressions of Vouvray whites from the handful that we've tried of late.

I recently read that Australia makes some fantastic ultra-dry semillon, so I think we will soon be on a mission to try those out...

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A quick note on another great budget red we found at Trader Joe's a couple of weeks ago: Epicuro Beneventano Aglianico (2006) from Italy. A deep ruby-red wine; the nose was deceptively similar to gamay (think Nouveau Beaujolais with its light, red Jello aromas), but the flavors in this wine were all rich blackberries and black cherries, with a decent backbone of tannin and bit of pepper and earth to back it up. This was surprisingly good for a $6 bottle. Seriously -- I think I'll buy a case of it soon. It would probably even improve a little by sitting on the shelf for a year or three; not that it'll last that long at our place...