A Step-By-Step Guide To A Great Food And Wine Week

A map to a week of flavors:

Day 1: Make David Leite's Portuguese orange-olive oil cake. Because it's the best snacking cake on the planet. Breakfast, mid-afternoon, after dinner. It covers all your snacking cake needs for the week. DO NOT eat it the day you make it. This is best after a day or two or three. Soak five pinches of fenugreek seeds in water overnight.

Day 2: Drain fenugreek seeds and toss in the processor with garlic, cilantro, salt, green chile, lemon to make a paste. Forget to take out the seeds from from the chile. Enjoy the mouth burn. Set aside.

Glaze some marcona almonds that have to be eaten and roast them off for Day 3 vadouvan-bee pollen pork with beet-pickled rhubarb salad and griddle cakes. Wonder if they will come off remotely resembling Ubuntu's vadouvan almonds circa August 2011.  Nope, but still delicious.

Begin Afghani leek-scallion fry bread recipe. Roast some leeks, chop some scallions, set aside. Make the dough. Knead for 10 minutes. Think this is quite relaxing for eight minutes. Get sick of it. Ruminate about how impatient you are in life. Let sit (the dough and the rumination). Dump your fenugreek paste into a bowl with a 1/2 lb. of shrimp that's been in your freezer for weeks.

Make a fry bread dipping sauce of honey-lime-cilantro-garlic-walnuts. Taste it. Like it. Set aside.

Galician Tuna Empanada With 2012 Forlorn Hope Que Saudade

Savory pie and salad. It's a house favorite.

Here's a great version, brought to the world by Anya von Bremzen from her cookbook The New Spanish Table. When Ms. von Bremzen tells you how to make a dish, that's how you make it. Don't be dubious or "creative." She knows more. Make it once, see how you like it, and THEN maybe think of different fillings you might use.

Saffron dough. Filling of tuna, peppers, onions, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, paprika, you see the recipe link. Make the dough, sauté up the filling, compile it into sheet pan pie and place in oven. Not super-easy, not super-hard in the least, just takes some time. Just don't make mahmoul and ham balls at the same time. It leads to a feeling of a kitchen prison from which you seemingly will never escape.

We loved the snot out of this. Just went crazy for it. The tuna got lost just a wee bit, but all the other "stuff" made up for it. Perfect touch of saffron. Cleansing arugula salad on the side. It has it all. Savory pie and salad. It's so damn Good.

And for some reason, savory pie and salad usually makes for a very good wine pairing in this house. Maybe it's something about the dough/crust that softens the edges of the food, allowing the wine to do some talking. It did here with a bottle of 2012 Forlorn Hope "Que Saudade" Sierra Foothills ($28 - Pastoral). 100% verdelho, principally a Portuguese grape, but grown in Australia, the Loire (just found that one out), and increasingly in California.

I'm getting kinda sick of describing tasting notes, something I didn't agree with when I read Asimov's screed against "the tyranny of the tasting note" in his book How To Love Wine. I'm starting to fall into his camp. It's just too much and accomplishes little. Works for some to remember how it tasted. Sometimes, it's just fun to say, "This tastes like the cat got into the barrel. It's not urine, it's cat hair. Tastes like cat hair!" But mostly, I'm finding myself using hand gestures to describe the path of the wine with a bite of food, which probably makes me look like a crazy person.

This Forlorn Hope brought wonderful texture, perfect acid zip, nice freshness and lovely presence. With a (hands moving up) voooop, then a (hands moving out) aaaaaaah. With an empanada bite, it choose a broad path, widening out and expanding into a fennel flesh note without the anise, or cinnamon tinge without the cinnamon, if that makes sense. Stuff like that. So pretty, so delicious, and we'll be buying more. Buckets.

With less minerality than we expected in the wine and less tuna presence in the empanada, this meal tasted more like a land-based dinner in some restaurant in a tiny town, like in Rioja or something, where every flavor jumps and you feel like you found a surprise.

Big. Fans. Savory pie and salad with delicious wine. There's little better.      

Vitello Tonnato with 2012 Ponzi Arneis and 2013 Bastianich Rosato di Refosco

We had to pick something up downtown today, and figured a Purple Pig lunch was in order, since we were already down there.

The Pig does so much right. Oodles of well-made flavors, great wine list, nice atmosphere. It's a fine restaurant that feels like a mini-vacation.

But after we had this dinner, Purple Pig didn't feel necessary. We had our mini-vacation right here on the plate, with a busload of flavors done oh-so well and six layers of flavors in each bite that kept changing, moving and surprising.

Great food at home. It's what's Good.

Vitello tonnato (Saveur), with olive oil-poached tuna (Sur la Table) instead of a can. It's a pain in the ass, but utterly worth the effort, according to Mrs. Ney. Veal prep followed to the letter and turned out gorgeous. Bittman herbed-up red potatoes tossed in a mustard vinaigrette. Asparagus tossed with the tiniest bit of the same vinaigrette and thrown under the broiler. Carrot and celery garnish. Parsley over everything. And the surprise of the night, deep-fried lemon slices to top (thank you, Ms Clark). A bite of these with some veal and tuna sauce was so gosh darn superlative, I have no words.

Spring's here, windows are open, fresh air in the apartment, shorts and skirts, gloves and hats put away, and then great food like this. All that crap.

And the wines didn't detract, serving more as a funky counter overall than bringing the pairing love, but we didn't care. The 2012 Ponzi Arneis ($30 - Winery) is still kicking, but barely, offering a well water mixed with older fruit note. Still some acid, still nominally solid. We needed an arneis for this meal, we had one, so we drank it. Downright funky, even a bit strange then strangely good, with a veal-tuna bite. It got lost with the fried lemon rind, but rounded out rather nicely with the potatoes, which were the food pairing winner of the night as the 2013 Bastianich Rosato di Refosco ($15 - Whole Foods) excelled with them as well. The Bastianich, a house fav for specific meals, brought a spicy, floral, slightly funky garden dirt quality, and had a more fully developed personality than the Ponzi. More life here. Both weren't great with the food, but both offered just enough angles and cuts to the meal to leave us mostly satisfied.

It's been a weird year. Meals like these make it less weird. For that, we're thankful.

Jambon au Chablis And Gougères With 2011 William Fevre Chablis Vaudésir

Every once in a while, we eat something that tastes like "a thing," the sort of "thing" that tastes like people have been eating this combination for decades, because it's capital-G Good. And they drink the wine made down the street with it because, decades ago, they tailored the food for the wine. And vice versa.

Maybe it's not "our thing" all the time, because this meal had buckets of heavy cream by the...bucket. But, together with a higher-end Chablis and plenty of tarragon, jambon au Chablis with three-cheese gougères came off oddly light. We'll be forgoing the cream bucket dinner for at least a year, but this was a freakin' delicious meal.

Saveur recipes for both (links above), from their Chablis piece. Cheap ham from Aldi and recipes followed to the letter with one exception - didn't strain the sauce, cuz we like chunks of tomato-shallot goodness. Note: make sure your eggs fully come up to room temperature. My pâte à choux didn't come together until the very last egg. Felt like magic unfolding in the face of disaster.

Eat a bite of ham. Dip one of the gougéres in the luscious sauce. Rinse with fancy Chablis. Repeat 20 times. Finish with arugula salad. And you have yourself a winner-winner Ham-cream dinner!