Valentine's Day Dinner

I've been away for the last week for a conference in Santa Fe, NM, so I didn't get a chance to post our Valentine's Day Feast before leaving.

For Valentine's Day, I brought home a bouquet of mango calla lilies I had the flower shop around the corner order for me. We had these flowers in our wedding, so I thought they would conjure some great memories. I have nothing against roses, but I find a lot of other flowers more interesting...


We started with a prawn cocktail recipe Melissa found online -- it's one of Gordon Ramsay's and it was really tasty. That sauce is made up of Japanese (Kewpie) mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and cayenne pepper, among other things. Served with sliced avocado -- perfectly ripe since my allergy didn't pop up -- and shredded lettuce.

With that prawn cocktail starter we made some blood orange mimosas. We ran into this variation at an After Hours event at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here in Boston. These are great events where you get to wander around the incredible courtyard and gardens in this very unusual art museum with a glass of wine and listen to special short lectures on particular pieces. We have gone to quite a few of them, and it's right around the corner from Harvard Medical School, so it's a very convenient after-work destination.

The main course was a spectacular lamb shank dish with a spicy tomato sauce. As usual, Melissa cooked the shanks to perfection. They need to braise for a good 3-4 hours, but if you take the time to do it right, the meat just falls off the bone and melts in your mouth. The spicy sauce was a new experiment that came off really well. Mexican chili powder, ground cumin and smoked chipotle peppers gave the lamb a deep, smoky flavor and a nice kick. Melissa topped it with fresh chopped cilantro and served it with cilantro rice. We initially thought we would pair the lamb with a pinot noir, but with the extra spice in the dish we decided on a California Zinfandel for something a little heftier. This 2005 Oriel Hugo old-vine zinfandel (Russian River Valley, CA) fit the bill just perfectly. The deep, rich black cherry and spice with a slightly sweet finish made this one of the best zinfandels we've tried, and probably the best food pairing we've made in a long time. Price-wise, it was in the mid-range of the better zins at about $25.

Dessert was a strawberry souffle with strawberry-rhubarb compote and raspberry white chocolate truffle ice cream (Haagen-Dazs). Melissa got this recipe from Cuisine Magazine online, and although rhubarb was not particularly easy to find in the middle of winter, Whole Foods came through for me. Melissa served the dish with a brandy-rhubarb concoction on the side (shot glass). What a sweet finish.

Melissa's recipe for the braised lamb shank dish can be found at the end of the post.

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Lamb Shanks

3/4 green bell pepper

1/2 onion

(sautee until soft)

1 tbsp of peppercorns

1 tsp of coriander seeds

(grind and add to bell peppers and onion)

2 small lamb shanks

(toss in pan with onions etc and brown)

1 tsp of salt

1 tsp of mexican chilli powder

1 tbsp of ground cumin

1 Can of whole tomatoes

2 tbsp of canned chipotle pepper

1 cup of water

(puree and pour over onions and lamb shanks in cassarole dish - braise at300-350oF for 3 to 4 hours, turning shanks every hour and a half)

Chopped cilantro

Steam rice in salted water with 2 tbsp of chopped cilantro.To serve shanks remove from cassarole dish. Stir in fresh chopped cilantro andtop shanks with sauce. Serve with cilantro scented rice.

Four Great Chicken Dishes

We have had a streak of successful chicken dishes recently, so I thought I'd put them together into a theme post.

First up, a colorful Asian-inspired grilled chicken salad. Here, Melissa has marinated skinned, boneless thighs in soy sauce with sesame oil and sambal oelek, then broiled them under the oven element. The salad is a bed of mixed greens with sliced red capsicum and enoki mushrooms. Melissa made a delicious dressing by mixing the chicken drippings with a small amount of balsamic vinegar. Great salad with a light Kiwi sauvignon blanc.

For a dish more suited to cold winter evenings, Melissa made roast chicken thighs with curry-spiced green peas and garbonzo beans (chick peas). For these types of dishes Melissa always uses bone-in chicken thighs -- it's a tiny bit more trouble and a little extra fat, but all that gets you an infinitely better flavor and texture in the cooked meat. She first pan-fried the the chicken thighs to get that nicely browned skin, then moved them into a covered sauce-pot with frozen green peas, canned chick peas, chopped onions and some curry spice mix. This was cooked on medium heat until the chicken was done, and served as shown. Simple, hot and satisfying.

Another great winter dish: chicken thighs with garlic and zucchini (courgette). Melissa first rubbed the skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs with chicken stock paste for extra-rich flavor. In a medium wok-style Calphalon pan, she browned the skin of the chicken in olive oil with chopped onions, then added a half-cup of chicken stock and sliced garlic cloves, and covered to cook the poultry through. Finally, she added large slices of zucchini and finished in the covered pan to soften them up and soak in the flavor from the broth. The chicken was plated on top of a smattering of zucchini and broth and served with a glass of 2006 Black Mountain Gravel Bar chardonnay (Napa, CA). Not a bad drink for a $6 chardonnay; nicely balanced oak and fruit.

The final entry in this series of chicken dishes is a stuffed, turkey-wrapped chicken thigh with green peas. We recently hosted a poker night at our place, for which we had bought deli meats and cheese for sandwiches -- after all, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich invented the food in the mid-18th century so he could eat with one hand while continuing to play cards without getting them all greasy, or so the story goes...

At any rate, Melissa made great use of the leftover deli fare for this dish. The chicken thighs were skinned, boned and beaten out flat, then rolled up with a stuffing made of fresh chopped tomato, onion, dried sage, chopped deli slices of smoked turkey and swiss cheese, bread crumbs, salt and pepper to season and a bit of water to bind. The rolled chicken was then wrapped up in a thin slice of said turkey and cooked in the oven in a deep casserole dish. When these were finished, they were set aside so the frozen peas could be cooked in the leftover juices and bits of stuffing that had escaped during the cooking process. The stuffed chicken was served with a scoop of peas on the side. The tomato from the stuffing makes a nice visual contrast with the peas.

We had a bottle of 2005 La Patache Medoc cabernet sauvignon with this dish, which was quite nice after decanting, but we certainly could have done well to leave it on the shelf another few years. Alas, we are not yet well practiced at leaving wines on the shelf -- they tend to meet their end in our glasses in relatively short order...

Beef with Bulgar Wheat, Asparagus and Enoki Mushrooms

Well, we intended to get more than one post up in January, but such is life. Rest assured, the recent paucity of entries has less to do with lack of material than with the ass-dragging winter doldrums that make it difficult to get things done in this part of the country during the dark days of December and January. Seriously, while I thoroughly enjoyed the two weeks of New Zealand summer weather we got to experience over Christmas, the getaway may have made it that much harder to get through the rest of New England winter. Here in Boston, we're scheduled to warm up again sometime in June. I know there are plenty of places that have it worse, but that won't stop us from complaining...

On the upside, Melissa recently made a nice, hearty bulgar wheat dish that was unquestionably blogworthy: the grain was boiled to a perfect consistency and then drained and mixed with a little pepper jack cheese that we had in the freezer (a nice save from a holiday party at Harvard where the cheese buyers got a little carried away) to make a thick cheesy mix. She then combined the wheat base with sauteed slices of flank steak, red onions, garlic and asparagus, and topped it with a small bunch of enoki mushrooms and cracked pepper.

This dish went really well with a bottle of Kathy Lynskey Casto Reserve pinot noir (2004, Marlborough, NZ). Amanda's parents left us with a bottle of this beautiful boutique pinot when they visited for Christmas, and we recently bought another from Huntingon Wine and Spirits ($25, and worth every penny). This is a floral, earthy wine with deep fruit and woody notes -- it really picks up the mushroom and asparagus in the food. It's definitely worth a try if you come across it in your bottle store...