Tuesday, August 31, 2010

#111 - Jerk Chicken & Goya Products With NV Brut Rosé


Jerk Chicken is kinda fun to say.

Not as fun as Jerk Turkey, though.

Something about the repetitive 'ur' that gets me back to my Iowa roots. "Wur gunna eat sum braaat-WURst with sum mus-turd...and maybe sum catsup. After that, we gunna worsh the flatboat."

I can do this all day.

Food: Jerk chicken thighs with goya empanadas and croquetas and a tomato/pomegranate seed salad

It's frozen food/eat-the-leftovers week in the Ney house with the big 2010 vacation just a week away. Mrs. Ney promises a week of food weirdness.

The jerk marinade from Saveur using soy sauce, onion, scallion, chiles, cloves, five-spice, allspice berries, nutmeg, S&P, thyme and veg oil, slathered all over chicken thighs and marinated for 24 hours.

Big fans of jerk here and this was no exception. Maybe got more of a liquid all-spice with this one along with more of the allspice berry. Something more berry-like kicked up.

If you haven't, get to know Goya products. Solid Latin frozen food options, this time with plantain and cheese empanadas that are deliciously earthy and ham and cheese croquetas that are a great, mushy, hammy mess.

Topped off with a cherry tomato, pomegranate seed, parsley and arugula salad.

Easy meal. Monday meal. Tasty and Good meal. And it made room in the freezer.

Wine: NV Lucien Albrecht Cremant D'Alsace Brut Rosé ($18 - Whole Foods)

100% Pinot Noir, smelled like strawberry donuts right out of the bottle. Respectable bubbles and a subdued strawberry fruit note that mixed with a good core of red berries. Not big and fruity, though. Dry, clean finish with good length and structure. Almost elegant. Almost.

We both liked for $18. Recently we had an utterly delicious Schramsberg 100% Pinot Noir Napa Sparkling at Ad Hoc that retails for $40 and, for half the price, it satisfied a lot of sparkling Pinot Noir rosé yens I've had since the Schramsberg. Wasn't terribly distinctive or memorable but had enough guts and gentle openness to warrant the dollars and work with the food.

Pairing: 87 Not too shabby at all.

We just weren't in the mood for red with more Chicago hotness on the weather menu for the night, but a Mas De Maha might have been spectacular.

In some ways, this was like trying to squeeze a square peg in a round hole with jerk and non-red wine but we ended up happy. Oddly, the ham and cheese croquetas were the only thing that didn't work with the wine. Fell flat.

The rosé's subtle fruit and dry backbone was the winner, standing up just fine to the jerk, getting cozy with the empanadas and shining with the salad. More of a catch-all type pairing than something the utterly sung. The wine admirably fielded everything thrown at it with a certain panache and gamesmanship and was good enough that we might even do it again.

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