Quick Hits

Highlight of the late-week: savory doughnut fry bread!

If you're making dinner and want to incorporate doughnuts into it without sending yourself into a shame spiral, Blackfeet fry bread is a perfect alternative. Top it with goat barbacoa, pickled onions, spicy tomatillo salsa, sour cream, mint and cilantro, and you got yourself goat flatbread that tastes just like it sounds.

But we lost the goaty-ness of the goat. The cascabel-guajillo-ancho chile blend and slow roast made for a very rich slather that obscured the brightness goat needs in order to strut to goaty goatness. Very good one-off, though. We were excited about eating it, it was satisfying, but if given blind, it might have been pork. The Argus Cidery Tepache Pineapple Wine ($15 - Lakeview Liquors) helped things along though, finding its strut with this food. The goaty richness pumped up the clove-cinnamon spices and turned the pineapple flavor into PINEAPPLE! Good stuff. Saved things in a way. Kept things interesting.

Jamie Oliver Greek Chicken with herby vegetable couscous & tzatziki has a very specific flavor for me. It was the lunch I had right after getting back from sequestered jury duty. A weird day, that one. Flavors: allspice, fresh oregano, lemon zest and juice, mint, peppers, sweet corn (added), avocado (added), cucumber, yogurt, feta, black olives, watercress (added), green onions, couscous... so...Stuff. Thrown together. Then eaten. A "15-minute meal" that took me an hour. Fine enough version. Had all the vegetal-spice joy that we wanted after rich goat. Served with a bottle of 2012 Casa de Saima Reserva Bruto Bairrada ($20-ish - Perman), a bical-maria gomes-chardonnay blend. Pretty tangerine skin and bright cream with fine bubbles and medium length. We liked it. Fresh, moderately complex, nice. We'd buy another bottle if we were at Perman, but wouldn't make a special trip for it. Fit well with this food. Something strange going on with Greek food and Portuguese wine. Always seems to work.

Sausage and rapini, a house staple that we have about once a month, is BFFs with minerally, poppy, Italian white wines and occasionally something juicy, red and Italian. Opened a Matthiasson Tendu Red to start and got only "wine" from first sip (lil flat, sorta Life Saver-y). So we went with a new favorite, the 2013 Charles Smith Vino Pinot Grigio Columbia Valley ($13 - Binny's). It has all the goods. Length, cut, polish, juicy exotic fruit without screaming, "I'm pinot grigio! Aren't I cute?" and that sorta gaseous-delicious mid-palate that expands everything to a point of such happiness. It's just G-O-O-D, and it was again here with sausage and rapini. Turned good food into a long and leisurely meal.

Hey, I kept a three-meal roundup kinda short. I'm growing.    

Thanksgiving Week

The week leading up to Thanksgiving, and a good time after, means easy meals in this house. One of the worst work weeks of the year and an impending family visit makes that necessary for sanity and general well-being. So, a round-up of such.

#1 Red-wine-rosemary hanger steak (Martha Stewart recipe) and potato pancakes with crème fraiche for slapping on top, served with 2004 Chateau Faugères St.-Emilion Grand Cru ($22 - Binny's)

Baller meat. Just the best. One of those rosemary meat preps where the rosemary gets into the medium-rare meat and juice so perfectly. Trader Joe's potato pancakes (ideal starch for such a week) with a whipped-up horseradish/blue cheese crème fraiche to slather. Very good meal.

Bordeaux is in the house. Gotta drink it. We stated that this may be the winter we gulp down a good amount of all the Bordeaux sitting on the shelves. After this one, like so many in the past, we may have to backtrack a bit on that statement. This bargain St.-Emilion brought an earth-first joy, with a medium body, happy textural presence, everything one would want in this price range. Unfortunately, it was schizophrenic with the food. Mildly interesting at times; tinny, backwards, limp at others. Sometimes, it was super concentrated but short. Other times, it was almost quite good. But it was too all over the map to find that place of pairing enjoyment. We never knew what food step to take in order to find its happy place.