Thursday, September 20, 2012

#299 - Two New House Favorites With Two Wines

Back to home flavors after Rioja with two meals that epitomize new home flavors.

New in the sense of taking old favorites and tweaking them, moving old faves forward, keeping them fresh and new.

The first meal, Symon roasted chicken with down-and-dirty salsa verde and a tomato-corn-arugula salad, has become new with the weekly visits to the Lincoln Square Farmers' Market. Where roasted chicken used to reach such great heights with a simple roasting of the bird and tossing down some Fancy French cheese with good bread to slather with said cheese and sop up bird juice (that phrase sounds weird), the newness of the new comes in the impeccably fresh salad ingredients in various forms that become more than just side salad.

To wit. Here, the tomatoes were stupid-ripe and bursting with proper tomato flavor. Take advantage now. Not much time left in that realm. And it's corn season, folks. Use it and abuse it until you're sick of it. Predicted to be the worst crop in 17 years (news that piques an Iowan's interest, like me, because that was the de facto, 'the sky is falling,' grocery store-coffee shop-Casey's conversation everyday growing up), here was delicious corn complementing the tomato in great ways.

So...Michael Symon roasted chicken (chronicled many times on this here blog), this time an enormous Whole Foods five-pounder with a shimmering golden skin and juicy (even the breast) meat. One of the better ones of late. Tomato and corn salad with an arugula bed which was more about the tomato and corn than the arugula. Salsa verde, It's salsa verde in a different form, loaded with dirty delicious anchovy-caper flavor that's cleaned up in such a new, lifty way by the parsley-mint-olive oil driver (plagarized myself there). It's the thing on the side that sits there, saying, "Use me how you like. I don't care. Salad? Sure! Taste that! Chicken? Yep! Told ya. All of it together? That's what I'm about." Whole Foods Seeduction bread with butter to round things out.

Monday, September 17, 2012

#298 - Rioja

Getting away and coming back always leads to a state of precariousness. How do you maintain the sense of calm and exhale you find the moment you set down in a foreign land upon your return? Or more realistically, how do you conserve at least a piece of it? How do you stop it from too quickly transitioning from a feeling to a memory?

It's never a perpetual suspension. Never an enduring sensation floating weightlessly on the right side of that line. It's always merely a delay.

This trip, a trip to Rioja, wine country that has become so dear to our wine hearts over the years, left me with a sense that the feeling will stay a feeling a wee bit longer. It will float for a bit, holding steadfast for a period of time acceptable. Because Rioja has that thing, that Spanish thing making it so Spanish as we know and love it. A way of moving that tastes like the food and wine taste. More Spanish than Barcelona, even Madrid, more languid and wonderfully meandering, more something that took us out of life here to a restful there. To a place that became very "there."

And to our relative surprise, it was never really about the wine.

The highlights: