#286 - Roast Chicken & Endive in Rosemary-Balsamic With '11 Ponzi Arneis

Continuing the theme.

A lot of Michael Symon and Jamie Oliver lately and this meal was no different.

A simple meal with Symon chicken we've chronicled here a few times already and a easily made endive (chicory) salad with rosemary and balsamic taken from Jamie Oliver's 30-Minute Meals. Oliver garlic bread that eschews butter to top off the goodness.

Wine thoughts: red and chicken is boring to us. Sparkling might have been nice but we like a wee touch of spice or a bread and cheese leader to counter/play with bubbles. White wine was the leading candidate to start but the meal needed acid in the wine to stand up to the balsamic and the roasty caramelizing, the major flavor drivers on the plate. Balsamic's Italian, lemon and bay in the chicken are common Italian ingredients. Garlic bread. What's more Italian? Arneis has acid and it's Italian. So we drank Italian...from Oregon.

Food: Symon chicken and Oliver chicory salad with garlic bread

I'll plagiarize myself: Go here to see the prep. "Lemon peel and bay leaves shoved under the skin (with that, garlic and onions put up its rump) has made for a better whole roasted chicken experience. Juicy thigh, delicious salty, lemony skin, bay leaf flavor flyin' everywhere."

It's better chicken. Onions cut in half and stuck in the pan with the chicken to roast. A caramelized wonder, my friend.

#285 - Fish In Shrimp Sauce & Maduros With '01 LdH Gravonia Blanco

Or filhote com molho de camaroēs e bananas, if you want to practice your Brazilian Portuguese.

That meal, the third in today's roundup, came off so utterly surprising that we vowed to eat fish once a week from this point out. With a recipe like this and eating it with a wine like the 2001 López de Heredia white, that might be something that lasts longer than the mere proclamation.

Hot Chicago days brought about food from hot climes this weekend.

Monday saw skirt steak in green sriracha sauce (Food & Wine - Susan Feniger), sweet potato fries, mayo for dipping and arugula salad with 2008 Orin Swift Saldo ($26 WDC).

It's a meal that naturally follows the utterance, "I want something California blendy, maybe something Zinfandel-ish." Grab some cheap cut of beef, maybe marinate it, maybe not, get a good char on it, throw on some interesting sauce you found on the interwebs or in a magazine like green sriracha sauce, toss a bag of sweet potato fries in the oven, whip up a fancy mayo for dipping (like pan juice mayo), finish with an arugula salad and drink something New World, big and blendish. Orin Swift, Villa Creek, Owen Roe (the Ex Umbris started this business).

Very little kitchen pain, flavors galore, tastes like a fancy BBQ and everything comes in under $50. This meal is our "let's just order a pizza and drink something we have in the house." It's essentially the same price, same amount of time, only a bit more work and delicious as all get-out. Green sriracha is something delicious. Doesn't resemble sriracha in the traditional sense. It's more of a broad definition akin to an Asian chimichurri or pesto, led by basil, coconut and lemongrass and worth a look. The Saldo more stayed its delightful self than offering a whole lot in the way of real, true-blue enhancement but that's all what really wanted. No clashing and tons of juicy dark goodness. Pairing Score: 88

#284 - Farmers' Market Jubilee

Two Lincoln Square Farmers' Market-driven meals with two adult wines.

Huge haul of veggies for a mere $14! And we have a boatload of snap peas left!

Meal #1 - Indian Carrot Salad. Recipe here (another Jamie Oliver recipe). Last eaten here (wanted a bigger Oregon pinot expression with the wine there and got it with this one). A base of Minnesota wild rice topped with ground lamb gussied up with garam masala and mixed with carrots, carrot greens, cilantro, mint, sesame seeds and topped with pomegranate seeds. A dressing of olive oil, lemon, cumin, shallots and ginger drizzled over the top of the massive mound of mouthwatering goodness.

A pretty perfect blend of spice and earthiness with this meal, edging more towards earthy with that earthiness brightened up by the zing in the dressing and pomegranate seed pop. This was a huge plate of food that never felt like too much because of its freshness, vacillation and interplay of flavors. Coriander in the garam masala led the spice march with the carrot greens (a product that has the evocative smell of whacking weeds in Iowa on a hot August day) taking things down to a garden-y quality without making it taste too Garden-y!

Just great stuff that made us feel so clean.  And the wine helped make much of that happen.

#283 - Gigante Beans & Scallops In Pea Purée With '11 Palmina Pinot Grigio

We were thinking last night that if a person could have only two sources of recipes from chefs/food people in which they had to eat, nothing else, that person would eat quite well with Jamie Oliver and Michael Symon.

It would be the trifecta: cheap, diverse and heavily herbed food goodness that would never get boring.

Mrs. Ney takes from oodles of sources in many forms in our apartment and on the interwebs, but anytime we see those two on TV, either from the bevy of Jamie Oliver's BBC shows or Symon's Suppers on The Cooking Channel ( a show that seems to be rounding into a Jamie Oliver-type show for the American audience), it gets both of us instantly excited to Eat. That. Food!

Another source Mrs. Ney found that she's starting to see as a pretty great little thing is the Palmina website recipe page. It's Italian food with a California edge catered directly to the wines Palmina makes; tried-and-true recipes made specifically not only for the varietals they offer but more for the specific expression of Palmina's Italian varietals. In other words, Italian wines with a California edge. Palmina took the time to get in there and find what works with their wines and that's a good thing. Our last experience taken from their site, polenta panini & roasted beet salad with the 2010 Palmina Malvasia Bianca was something pretty great - fancy, delicious patio food and wine.

This one was no different.

#282 - Michael Symon Chicken & Delice de Bourgogne With '05 Jobard Meursault-Blagny 1er Cru

Unbeknownst to us, Monday was National Cheese Day.

I'd like to thank the Maker that we accidentally had cheese with dinner. Can you imagine the humiliation if we didn't?

It was even more nice that we had a cheese we love, Delice de Bourgogne, with chicken we love and white Burgundy, which rounds out a true (and easy) favorite over the last couple of years.

Our white Burgundy collection isn't anything deep or broad, but we usually have a few on hand, nothing radically profound, but a couple that are age-worthy.

That became a problem couple of weeks ago when we read this from Matt Kramer at Wine Spectator:

"Starting with the 1995 vintage, that "better tomorrow" often didn't arrive. White Burgundies that should have been gloriously fresh-tasting, vibrant and dimensional five or seven years after the vintage proved to be nothing of the sort. In fact, they were dead, victims of what has come to be called premature oxidation. Affected wines have a dark yellow hue (where they should be a vibrant lemon-yellow); the scent is oxidized, almost Sherry-like; and the flavor is flat, devoid of fruitiness, essentially shot. This for wines that should just be beginning to become mature."

Premox. We had no idea. Might explain this. White Burgundy for us has been a recent dalliance but that's a big blind spot. Places like Burgundy and Barolo are regions put on the back burner due to the price, making for big holes in our knowledge of those places and, apparently, a large thing like this evaded our wine news radar.

Don't think we would have dropped the bucks on this bottle had we known. But we did and got lucky.