#272 - Polenta Panini & Roasted Beet Salad With '10 Palmina Malvasia Bianca

Winery website recipe eaten with a wine from the winery recommended for the recipe.  Or the other way around.  Potato, potahto.

They usually get it right.  And this one was right, delicious, pure, springy, new and just gosh darn wonderful.

I was thrilled enough with two Palmina reds to join their wine club because we typically have a jones for varietals grown in places not typically grown.

Palmina covers much of the better-known Italian grape spectrum and our experience with three of them, a nebbiolo, barbera and this malvasia, has just been the tops.

Lunch:  Polenta-anchovy-caper panini with lemon-yogurt dip and roasted beet salad

Fish Cakes, Chermoula, Beet-Carrot Salad & Dill Rice With 2010 Forlorn Hope La Gitana Torrontés

We drink well in Chicago.

The selection has been fine enough in many respects. Most of the time, we feel lucky to be offered more than so many places in the country.

Then I read Jon Bonné's book, The New California Wine, and I got a bit irritated again. I go wine shopping now and (again) all I can think about is how there's so much sameness on the shelves in the city.

So when we took a trip to Lush recently and saw a bottle of Forlorn Hope Torrontés on the shelf, even if it was a 2010, I bought it.

Bonné wrote about Matthew Rorick (Chronicle profile here) and Forlorn Hope in that book. I'd heard of the name, never tried any of his wines, and certainly wanted to after reading Rorick enjoys making small-production wines from grapes rarely grown in California.

That's one of our wine loves, drinking wine from grapes not typically grown in a particular wine region.

"California torrontés? What? Put it in the cart!"

And we drank it with food that Mrs. Ney never thought would be this delicious while she was making it.

365 Days Of Food And Wine: Week #2

It continues...

El Carrito, on Peterson and Lincoln, makes solid Mexican street food tacos that don't skimp on ingredients and are priced right. Two steak tacos and a southwest salad for $7? 

Yep. 

My bi-monthly drive right by that intersection makes it an option.

And...creepy clown alert! A bit close to home.

Total food and wine cost for the week: $92 for food and $118 for wine = $210


Sunday: Pick-n-Choose Meat, Cheese and Bread with NV Elvio Tintero Grangia Favorita Blend 

Food Details: Speck, salami, provola, arugula, Provençal mustard, and baguette. Pick and choose your combination of food-types on the plate to put together for each bite and go to town.

Did We Like It? Yep. It's a long, meandering meal perfect for Sunday night (the end of my week, second-to-last for Mrs. Ney). No cooking. Just throw a bunch of stuff on the plate, dress your arugula, cut your baguette, pour the wine, eat and enjoy.

How Was The Wine? Might be my new favorite cheap white. Piedmontese favorita blend (50% Favorita, 25% Moscato, 20% Arneis and 5% Chardonnay) that's light (11.5%), ever-so-slightly fizzy, lightly sweet, and deliciously mouthwatering. And it's $10! Great gaps and pauses here that extend it out nicely. Tastes like walking through an orchard on a surprisingly chilly morning.

And The Pairing? Quite good. Mustard messed with it on occasion, but the salty cured meats and this wine really like each other.

Cost: $15 for food, $10 for wine = $25         


Saturday: Southern Chicken Sandwiches with 2013 Charles Smith VINO Pinot Grigio Columbia

Food Details: Breaded Southern-style chicken breast sandwiches with pickles, mayo, kumatoes, onions and lettuce on pretzel buns. Olive oil chips. Sandwiches and chips.

Did We Like It? Oh, my, yes. For me, after a crappy work shift clouded by the general annoyance of watching people chew for a living, coming home to jazzed-up, sunny, picnic food wiped the slate clean.

How Was The Wine? We don't like pinot grigio, but we like THIS pinot grigio. Its 2013-ness makes for a wine that's losing some of its distinction, sparkle and polish, but the acid and citrus blossom notes are hanging on enough to 'bring the happy.' We'll be buying this one until Mr. Smith stops making this one. It's $13.

How Was The Pairing? Good. Enough. After two days of terrible wine, The wine's quality was more than welcome. The pickles messed with its segues a bit for me.

Cost: $12 for food, $13 for wine = $25  


Thursday and Friday

Wifey worky pool party on Friday. She ate food there, with jug Aldi Lambrusco, probably. It's fruity and tastes like the 80's in not a bad way. Or when you go to someone else's church service that's much more wealthy than your church, take communion, and realize that even their 'blood of Christ' is more fancy. I ate work pizza and drank a glass of chilled gamay from Thursday. Still...not good. Bit like chilled wood polish.

Meatloaf and potato salad on Thursday. Opened a bottle of wine that's been sitting around the house, WELL past its drinking window, the 2009 Gilles Bonnefoy Côtes de Forez Gamay, and it was just that. Good stuff a little over a year ago. Not so much now. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Cost: $8 for food, $12 for wine = $19


Wednesday: Fried Haloumi, Yellow Beet Salad with Walnut Gremolata and Garlic Bread with 2013 Palmina Sparkling Malvasia Bianca Larner Vineyard SBC

Source: Beet salad recipe straight from Palmina's website for malvasia pairing (this beet salad is a house fav)

Food Details: Yellow beets, roasted. Slathered with a walnut, garlic, lemon-orange zest and juice and anchovy blend. Put on top of arugula. Haloumi fried off in mini cast-iron with parsley and olive oil. Jamie Oliver garlic bread. Rip, cut, dip, eat.

Did We Like It? Always. The beet salad is a 3x a year thing. It's stupid-great and stupid-easy. Fried haloumi, same. Who doesn't want fried Greek-Cypriot cheese? It's delicious even after it gets a bit waxy. Plenty of bread to do as you do. Arugula to keep it lifty. Complete and satisfying meal.

How Was The Wine? The star. Loved it. More fresh on New Year's Eve, but we liked it better here, as its malvasia-y floral notes became FLORAL notes! Apricot blossoms to start with oodles of dying white flowers backing it up. Bubbles just barely hanging on, but I got something akin to a great Cava-like mineral finish occasionally. Turned into a delicate sour-bitter beer about halfway through and we loved it. Nutmegged pear fruit in the background throughout. It was like a Haruki Murakami novel. It took about two minutes to realize that this was going to go to deliciously odd places and we're going to love it.          

And The Pairing? So great with the beets. Less so with the haloumi but still happy. A leisurely meal with loveliness at every turn.

Cost: $15 for food, $36 for wine = $51


Tuesday: Uzbek Lamb Plov and Kumato/Onion/Arugula Salad with 2010 Abacela Tempranillo Umpqua Valley

Source: Recipe here, via Cucee Sprouts

Food Details: Lamb, chickpeas, carrots, barberries, garlic, cumin, tumeric, basmati rice. A one-pot meal that's considered the national dish of Uzbekistan. And boy, does it have people that are passionate about the assemblage of it, right down to the carrot cutting. I heart the tyranny of the authenticity brigade. Recipe followed to the letter, but left out the raisins and used barberries fished out of the torshi seer. Kumato, onion and arugula salad to finish.

Did We Like It? The result was a delicious, savory, light, homey, country, lamb and rice dish that both of us utterly loved. And will be having again. Probably soon. Very easy to make. The kumato salad rounded out of perfectly great meal. We're beginning to think we gravitate more towards land-based Mediterranean-Middle Eastern food instead of something more sea-based. Gets into our bones more.      

How Was The Wine? Tempranillo from southern Oregon's Umpqua Valley. Abacela has two, one for aging and this one. Happy, round, fresh dark cherries, getting plummy later. Smooth texture, medium length, nice acid keeping everything lifty, enough tannin to keep everything in place.

And The Pairing? The wine served as a pleasant supporting actor to the star on the plate. Missed that third-level, Spanishy, Ribera, lamb-and-tempranillo complete greatness, but got kinda close. Liked it.

Cost: $10 for food, $30 for wine = $40


Monday: Nando's Peri-Peri in Lakeview

Food Details: Full chicken platter for two, fries and mashed peas. Chicken slathered in peri-peri, heaping mound of fries with peri-peri mayo for dipping, mashed peas with mint parsley and chili. Open on Monday and straight-through from lunch to dinner, if we want spicy chicken and fries and don't want to make spicy chicken and fries, Nando's does it well. At 3pm, because we're old.

Did We Like It? Like other souped-up, fast-casual places out there, it's just good enough to say "this will work and it's cheap enough to justify the expense." There's some flavor, preservative or otherwise, that all of the Shake Shacks, Five Guys, even Urban Bellys of the world use that make it taste somewhat similar. Something there we can't quite pinpoint. And all of this can be made at home at 1/2 the price, but no kitchen time + no dishes = why not, once or twice a year. $15 more and we'd make it at home, but it's not. Amsterdam Falafel still reigns in the fast-casual category, though. That's The Stuff.

How Was The Wine? the 2013 Cara Viva Lisbon Branco is probably a wine made specifically for Nando's. Zippy, easy, with enough guts to stand up to the hot sauce. No complaints at all. Tasted like Portugal in nice ways. They probably pay $3 a bottle for it and charge $17 but who cares?

And The pairing? Refreshing. It helped in the overall impression of the meal.

Cost: $32 for food, $17 for wine = $50

Birthday Week

While half the customers in the place resemble a Match.com commercial, Tanta, a Peruvian vittles, wine and cocktails restaurant downtown, has the pleasant aspect of not feeling like anything in Chicago. The rooftop bar feels like Spain and the restaurant feels eerily Californian in scope, minimalism, pop and chatter. Get anything ceviche-related, don't get the beef cheeks. Get the cocktails, don't look at other customers  - they're looking around enough for both of you. Eat the plantain chips, make sure your servers and bussers don't take away things that aren't finished. We went to Mr. Gastón Arcía's restaurant in Madrid and liked it muchly. Very similar punch here. We'd go again, which is saying something in our restaurant visits of late. Best thing: the rooftop opens at 3pm, has a full drink menu and enough lil noshes to make it a meal. That's probably our next play, should we return.

This week's food:

Quick Hits

Quick Hits in a true quick-hit manner.

1. Enough Said occupies a rare place in film, particularly of late. It shows all the natural sloppiness, resulting terribleness, and enduring hope that comes with...existing. And living with the history of being yourself for so long, a unique thing in an age where constantly reinventing yourself and TEDTalking your way to happiness seems to be the path to...something. Enough Said is genuine without ever shining a light on its attempt to portray that. I've always thought, in the discussion of older women not being able to land juicy roles in Hollywood, that looking to Juliette Binoche and Kristen Scott Thomas (who's done amazing work in a slew of smaller films) should be the template. Both have aged so damn gracefully as actors by taking roles that never shy away from being juicily complex and flawed as characters. James Gandolfini is very good here, and gets much of the press as this was his last film, but this is a star turn for Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She lets so much in and, as a result, gives so much.

365 Days Of Food And Wine: Week #45

Three-day consumption of fiber:

Monday: Beet greens and barley...

Tuesday: Yellow beets and curly endive...

Wednesday: Cauliflower and arugula...

Equals...wow...yep...FI-ber!

Total food and wine cost for the week: $79 for food and $136 for wine = $215

Sunday: Ottolenghi Meatballs and Fregola with 2015 Viñas Chilenas Reserva Rosé Valle Central

Food Details: (Ottolenghi Guardian recipe - second one down) Meatballs and fregola with alterations: lamb instead of veal, feta instead of ricotta, basil instead of oregano, and nutmeg instead of all-spice. It's use-stuff-up, what's-in-the-house, done up Ottolenghi style.  

Did We Like It? Oh, my, yes. Big bowl of adult Spaghetti-O's. And not necessarily a one-off. This was quite good, and highly adjustable to what's we have siting around in the house and needs to be used up.

How Was The Wine? This is $4, fresh, fruity, round, bouncy and delicious for $4. Cabernet-syrah blend done up rosé style. One glass for each of us. We're trying to cut down.

And The Pairing? Fine.

Cost: $12 for food, $4 for wine = $16

Saturday: Cuban Black Beans over Rice with 2014 Charles Smith Velvet Devil Columbia Valley

Food Details: NYT Cooking Cuban black bean recipe. Alterations: swapped out the ham hock for a big beef marrow bone; poblanos for green peppers; fresh oregano; cider vinegar; honey for brown sugar; half the beans, hence half the garlic (it's only two of us). Over white rice.

Did We Like It? This. Is. Delicious! Absurd complexity here. Highly recommended and most certainly with enter into the food rotation. It has all the Cuban happiness anyone could possibly need. A Cuban mother would be proud.

How Was The Wine? Quickly abandoned the Alloy grenache rosé (no bueno) for leftover Velvet Devil Merlot, which at least (VERY least) offered a textural match-up that offered a minimum level of moderate enjoyment. No wine for me.

And The Pairing? See above.

Cost: $8 for food, $0 for wine = $8  

Friday: Vegetable Tart with 2015 Trader Joe's Grower's Reserve Sauvignon Blanc Napa

Food Details: Buckwheat flour tart shell. Filling of carrots, onions, smoked sun-dried tomatoes and basil, mixed with mustardy-garlicky cream cheese, finished with parmesan. Herb salad on the side. It's bistro food!

Did We Like It? Missed a bit. Sandy buckwheat flour and a filling that didn't pop. Tasted vaguely Italian, actually.

How Was The Wine? Formerly a house $6 fav, this is the third or fourth vintage in a row that tastes like a watery, melony, white Napa mess. No order, no presence. This had a good run a few years ago, bringing the cheap-and-solid goods. No longer.

And The Pairing? Meh.

Cost: $8 for food, $6 for wine = $14

Thursday: Chimichurri Chicken over Brown Rice

Food Details: Freezer chimichurri as a marinade for chicken breasts, with fennel, onion, tomatoes, olives and parsley, with more chimichurri to finish. Over brown rice (one potato added). It's Use Stuff Up dinner!

Did We Like It? Herby, zingy, vegetabley. A fine meal for a Use Stuff Up dinner. No bread here, either. Sorta taking a break from bread, at least in the volume with which we've consumed it over the last few months, cutting it out where it's not needed. Not going gluten-free, just that "nobody needs this much bread!"

How Was The Wine? No wine. Nothing was in the house could have shined with this meal, so why jam it in?

Cost: $6

Wednesday: Goat Kofta and Roasted Cauliflower Salad with Two Vintages of Alloy Wine Works Grenache Rosé

Food Details: Ottolenghi goat kofta with roasted cauliflower-hazelnut-pomegranate seed salad with arugula. Pita. Tahini. Rip, top, eat.

Did We Like It? We've been over this. It has everything everybody could ever want in a bite of food. There's little else I can say. Multiple versions here.

How Was The Wine? We haven't been shy about telling the world that the Alloy Wine Works grenache rosé in the can from Field Recordings is rather silly-great. We went through probably a 36 cans of the 2014. The 2015 just came out, so there was much rejoicing. So, vintage throwdown. The 2014, while its fruit is muddled and overall zip waning, it still has most of the pop, grit and grizzle it's had in the past. It (still) has a personality, a strut. The 2015 is less so. It's rather quiet, missing what the 2014 brought: an in-your-face guava and strawberry burst, following by such friendly bright dirt and pop. This year tastes like more of an attempt to Old World it, with more graceful layers and breeze, but so far - and we will have more - the thing that made 2014 so cheap-happy gets lost in the translation for the 2015. We started to do a cost-benefit analysis comparing this and other cheap weekday rosés. The one-liter Innovacíon at $10 brings similar enjoyment for half the price.

And The Pairing? Fine and good. No complaints. Nothing special. Who cares. The food was stupid-great.

Cost: $12 for food, $18 for wine = $30    

Tuesday: Rabbit Croquetas and Yellow Beet Salad with 2014 Jolie-Laide Trousseau Gris Fanucchi-Wood Road Vineyard Russian River Valley and 2013 Palmina Malvasia Santa Barbara

Food Details: Chicken stock week, so it's clean out the freezer time. Leftover-freezer, Jose Andres' rabbit croquettes, and Palmina yellow beet salad with walnut-anchovy-zest gremolata over curly endive. Pan con tomate using ciabatta.

Did We Like It? Sort of a mishmash of two favorites that don't really go together but still bring all of the happy goods. Croquetas still freshy-fresh. Yellow beet salad that's always good.

How Was The Wine? I overbought the Jolie-Laide, last year's wine of the year, and we may have put it in the "save" category a few too many times when thinking about food pairings, as this wine isn't one that's going to last forever. But the result was surprising. A beautiful leafy-tea note has emerged. While the fruit is fading, and the acid slowing down as a driver, this now has some gray-hair grace to it that's delicious. The Palmina has been a perfect pairing in the past with this beet salad, and we had one more in the house that also HAD to be drunk. It's slower now, creaky, like it's had two knee replacements, and the acid is also slowing, but what we thought would probably be rather dead brought a modicum of beet salad-Palmina malvasia goodness to enjoy it for what it was.

And The Pairing? Plenty of delicious elements on the table to pick and choose our food-wine adventure, which led to a compiling together of a dinner that felt like a buffet of enjoyment. Nothing spectacular here, but certainly was a Happy Bounty.

Cost: $8 for food, $63 for wine = $71

Monday: Calabrian Quail and Orzotto with 2012 A Tribute To Grace Grenache Santa Barbara Highlands

Food Details: The Guardian quail, marinated in currants, passito, thyme, red wine vinegar, olive oil, s/p. Substituted chorizo for nduja. Cast-ironed quail, chorizo crisped up, pan sauce over all of it. Barley orzotto with beet greens (no mascarpone or wild garlic).

Did We Like It? This isn't "our food," but it was quite tasty. There was a sweetness from the currants here that we don't gravitate towards, but it didn't get in the way in the least. Nice balance, and delicious orzotto - creamy, woodsy, hardy and a nice counter to the sweetness. We liked this.

How Was The Wine? This wine  has been sitting around the house for a bit. The food demanded a lighter red with guts, and we didn't want pinot noir on this night. Beaujolais? Maybe. Lighter dolcetto? Possibly. Baga was what we wanted but we didn't have one that was ready in the house. This bottle was opened wearily, as it came off a bit light last time. Not this time. Lightly smoky, lightly meaty, lightly spicy, and darker in tone than last time. All of that together brought a more robust presence than it showed with lamb rosettes 18 months ago. Very happy with the overall result.

And The Pairing? Not perfect, not great, but very nice. A fine length remained with some of the more robust flavors on the plate. Best with the orzotto, but held its own with the quail and chorizo. We're probably not going to remember this meal or pairing next week. That's okay. Enough deliciousness here to chalk it up to a nice Monday dinner that made for a leisurely, happy meal.

Cost: $25 for food, $45 for wine = $70