Appreciating Wine, Even If It Costs Little

Tom Shroder, former editor of the Washington Post Magazine, was a wine newbie, so he decided to enlist the help of a trained wine expert to help him determine the difference between Two-Buck Chuck and a more expensive bottle of wine. What she told him might surprise you. Here's part of his article. For the full article, click here. 

Kathy Morgan, head sommelier for Michel Richard Citronelle, one of Washington's finest restaurants, and the master of a 6,000-bottle wine cellar.

Given her morning activities, I felt a little silly about what I had planned for her next: a blind taste test of two wines, a Two Buck Chuck cabernet and an $18 cabernet I had already tested and didn't like.
As she sat at my kitchen table, back straight, two wine glasses set before her, professionalism swirled around her like a mist. I offered her a glass of water to cleanse her palate between sips.

"That's the worst thing you can do," she said. With no preparation, the acidity and tannin in the wine shock the palate. Water just resets the mouth to neutral, she explained, so you react with shock all over again. It's best to sip another wine first, eat some bread, or just take two sips, ignoring the first.
She swirled the first glass, stuck her nose in it, sniffed. She did the same with the second, then sipped and swirled.

Something in her eyes flashed, and I knew she saw the wines as plainly as if their labels were etched in the glass. Now it was time for her to be kind.
"When do you usually like to drink wine?" she began.

I explained that I sometimes had a glass with dinner, but more often, after a day at work, I sat on the porch and sipped as I watched the sun dip behind the pines.
This answer seemed to explain something, and she continued.
"Number 1 is more astringent. Number 2 is softer and fruitier. So, if you are drinking without food, you'd most probably prefer 2."

Number 2 was the Chuck -- the one I, in fact, preferred.
"Number 1 changes with food," she said. "The tannins soften up. Number 2 is manipulated in the fermentation process so the tannins, which is what makes wine astringent, soften without food. For a cabernet to be this low in tannin, well, it's done on purpose."

In other words -- I was going for the bubblegum music of the wine world.
"I didn't say that!" she said, laughing. "And I really don't mean manipulated as a negative. They do in the winery what otherwise food must do for the wine. [It appears to involve centrifuges.] Number 1 is made in a more traditional way, intended to drink with food. That's why steakhouses have a huge cabernet list. Astringency needs food. Do you have any roast beef?"
I didn't. But I had ham, and I put slices on a plate.

"Take a bite of the ham," she said. "Then sip Number 1."
I did as she asked. It was ... amazing. The sharp, unpleasant scratchiness in the wine that I didn't like had vanished, replaced by an interesting spicy warmth. It wasn't that the taste of the food complemented the taste of the wine -- which is what I had always assumed when people told me that certain wines went with certain meals -- it was that the taste of the food changed the taste of the wine.
"Now take another bite of ham and taste the Number 2," the Charles Shaw, she said. I did, and nothing happened. The Charles Shaw was immobile, inert. It had the same cheery fruitiness as it had before the ham -- if anything it was even fruitier -- and suddenly it seemed ... insipid.
Again, it was as if she was reading my thoughts.

"I'm not saying this wine is of no value. It's a very friendly wine. It's very smart of them to make this wine. It's a style that can be done successfully for $3.59 a bottle."
And it can be done at $3.59 a bottle, she explained, because it can be produced on a large scale, with the conditions identical each time; whereas the traditional fermentation process changes with every batch of grapes, might take shorter or longer depending on the crop, has to be watched carefully and can't be predicted. Then, it takes time to cure, and often requires barrels made of expensive materials, such as oak, to complete the process.

Yes, there are some wines that are poorly conceived and poorly made and fail on every level. But in general, she insisted, you can't judge wines on any absolute scale. Different wines have different purposes. Just as you wouldn't take a Maserati off-road and use it to ford streams and climb steep mountain trails, it made no sense to sip a $300 Burgundy, meant to make rich meals with red meat and heavy sauces incandescent, on somebody's porch at sunset with a dish of peanuts.

"Best of the Blogs" — We Made It!

Fine Cooking listed the Best of the Blogs for 2010, and we're proud to say that Eat Well, Eat Cheap got a mention as one of the best Penny-Pinching Blogs! No other category could have made us happier. Thank you, Fine Cooking.

Back to the Land of the Eating...

Man, it's been a rough few weeks: head colds, a sinus infection, pulled muscles, and medications that pretty much destroyed our desire to eat. At first we could manage only a few bites of rice, then a fruit smoothie now and then. Even water tasted weird. But slowly, slowly, our appetites are returning, and it's been interesting to observe this. First we wanted vegetable broth, then broth with a little pasta, then plain white beans. We managed a shepherd's pie the other night, and last night we wanted more pasta. In the process, we discovered a dish that helps bridge the sad non-fresh-tomato winter months.

Right now, Costco and other stores are selling Campari tomatoes, which are slightly smaller than Romas, with a sweet, almost-summery taste. Last night, finally feeling hungry—in fact, almost feeling ravenous—we decided to try roasting them.

We halved each tomato and set it cut side down on a baking sheet drizzled with a few tablespoons of olive oil. Then we sprinkled the tomatoes with salt, pepper, and thyme and roasted them in a 375-degree oven for 45 minutes. When the skins looked dark and caramelized, we pulled them out. The skins were easily plucked off and discarded.

The tomatoes had cooked down to a sweet paste and merged with the hot olive oil, resulting in a silky, satisfying and incredibly easy sauce for linguine. For the first time in weeks, we had seconds.

Perhaps most exciting was the realization that the winter months don't necessarily mean canned tomatoes.

Red Knot Shiraz 2007

Some wine lovers like to keep their finds to themselves. Obviously, if we were like that, we wouldn't be writing a public blog about where to find great tasting wine values for less than $10. 


The only complaint is that the more obscure the source, the less likely our readers are to find the wine buys we love. A couple of months ago we wrote about finding 12 highly rated wines (90+), each for less than $10. 


One of the wines we bought was a 2007 Red Knot "Zork" Shiraz from Australia. What we liked was the middle ground it walked between a good fruity sipping wine and a very good food wine with the right dryness to make the food and the wine come alive. It's a medium-bodied wine, fairly dark red, with spice and a bit of strawberry and cherry and currants — but enough acid and tannins to hold its own against a steak or a plate of pasta with tomato sauce.


We found it on the Internet, at a retailer we use once in a while, and figured we'd never see it anywhere else, ever again.


Then, on our recent holiday slog through bronchitis and chest colds and wrapping paper, we were stuck one night in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere with Thai takeout and our two dogs. So on the way back from picking up the green curry and rice, we stopped at a forlorn liquor store to see what we could score. 


Not five feet inside the door, there it was on a "specials" rack for $11.45, a bit more than the $8.45 we paid online, but not a bad price for a walk-off home run. To make it even better for the road, good old Red Knot doesn't need a corkscrew.


It's nice when you find one of our obscure buys in a most unusual place. Some days the road rises up to meet you.

A Good Resolution for the New Year

Sorry for the scanty postings lately, but between the holidays and the World's Worst Head Cold, we haven't been able to write. We hope to be back in the kitchen in the next couple of days, our appetites restored. In the meantime, here's a fine article by Salon's Francis Lam, who has resolved not to eat cheap, unhealthy, inhumanely raised chicken in 2011,

Regardless of whether you eat chicken, Lam's thoughtful reflections on how we eat are very much worth reading.

Bargain Wine of the Week: Chateau Ste. Michelle Chardonnay 2008

Chardonnays can be as grassy or light as a Sauvignon Blanc -- or as thick and buttery as fresh-squeezed fruit juice. Depending on your mood or what you're eating, either type might work very well.

Chateau Ste. Michelle's 2008 Chardonnay is somewhere in the middle between these styles. That's not a bad thing. For fish especially, sometimes you want a wine that won't overpower the food. After all, at dinner, wine is supposed to be a rhythm guitar, not the lead.

We tasted it next to the very California, very buttery, very thick and very rich Sonoma-Cutrer Chard, which we love. The Ste. Michelle could sit in the band right next to the Sonoma-Cutrer if the food isn't too rich.

This is an $8.45 bottle of white that rated a 90 by Wine Spectator, which said, "Bright and jazzy with pretty pineapple, grapefruit, elderflower and spice flavors that linger on the finish without excess weight."

The good news: this wine is widely available throughout the United States.

The bad news: it should be drunk before 2013 to be at it's best.

Bargain Wine of the Year: Odfjell Armador Cabernet Sauvignon 2007

Chilean wines are among our five current regional defaults for great bargain buys: Washington State, Australia, Rhone River in France, Spain and Chile.

The only problem with Chile is that there are still enough swill wines coming out of South America that you have to be as careful as you would be picking fruit in a grocery store without being able to touch it.

Here's a sure thing from Chile, and it's a whopping bargain to boot. Armador Cabernet Sauvignon from the Odfjell Winery in Chile's Maipo Valley was one of Wine Spectator magazine's Top 100.

We defy anyone to taste this blindly and not guess that you're drinking at least a $20 to $30 bottle of Cab. At $8.45 a bottle, it is far and away our Bargain Wine of the Year. This isn't an overly complicated wine, but it's got light cassis and berry fruitiness, and it'll make you smile every time you drink it -- if not from the exquisite flavor, then from the incredible steal you've got in your hands.

Bargain Wine of the Week: Di Majo Norante Sangiovese 2008

Italy's Tuscan region is one of the most civilized and beautiful in the world. Florence is full of great paintings, world-class cathedrals, tremendous culinary offerings and centuries of history.

South of Florence, in the Tuscan countryside, vineyards of Sangiovese grapes cover the hillsides and form the basis of Tuscany's celebrated wine.

These red Tuscans can be expensive, but unlike France's Bordeaux, there are bargains to be had if you search for them. Many are obscure, and take some undercover work to find. One way to get a great Tuscan-style wine without the high price is to search for an Italian Sangiovese in a neighboring region such as Molise, southeast of Tuscany.

One low-priced and very tasty Sangiovese from Molise that we love is relatively easy to find in small wine stores throughout much of the U.S.

We've been buying this wine for at least three years and have noted it before: Di Majo Norante Sangiovese. We found bottles of the 2008 edition online for $8.95. This is a wine that critic Robert Parker gave a 90 rating.

While it's a good enough food wine, it's fruit-laden tastiness also makes it great for conversational sipping and enjoying with friends. No sharpness in this pleasing pasta and meat wine, and a finish long enough to carry you to the next course or topic.

This wine was one of the fantastic 90-plus bargains we found last month online. If you see it at your local wine stop, by all means pick up a bottle for your next Italian dinner.

Mulligatawny Makes You Feel Better

There are many upsides to being a vegetarian, but one undeniable downside: it's tough to find comforting soup when you're getting sick. There's simply nothing that can compare in restorative properties to chicken soup. At least, that's what Ruth always thought, until weekend before last, when she started feeling bad.

She wasn't sick exactly, just achy and sniffly, with all the warning signs of an impending head cold. As it happened, Tim was craving Indian food—not just any Indian food, but the food served by one of our favorite local restaurants. The wind was cold and blowing in circles, so we bundled up and trundled off.

Chilled and cranky, Ruth only wanted soup, so she decided to try mulligatawny for the first time. Why had she never tried it before? Maybe there was always something more enticing on the menu, but that night, after the waiter assured her it was vegetarian, she hopefully ordered a big bowl.

She was glad she did.

Hot, lemony, subtly spicy from cayenne and subtly sweet from coconut, the soup made her feel better instantly. The next night she made a big pot at home, working off several Internet recipes. She intended to freeze half of it, but there wouldn't be enough left to freeze: in a cold, achy week, mulligatawny was the only thing either of us wanted.

But that head cold? It never happened (note: sadly, it did happen, not long afterward—R&T). Mulligatawny might work even better than chicken soup.

This recipe seems infinitely adaptable—some versions call for apples, some for green peppers and cabbage—so feel free to experiment. Just aim for a balance of spice, sour, and sweet.

Mulligatawny

1/4 cup vegetable oil
3 cups chopped onion
5 chopped garlic cloves
1 1/2 T. garam masala
1 1/2 t. ground coriander
1 t. turmeric
3/4 t. cayenne pepper
a couple of whole dried red peppers (optional, depending on how much heat you like)
2 bay leaves
2 cups dried red lentils
8 cups vegetable broth
1 medium-size potato, peeled and chopped
1 big carrot, peeled and chopped
1 1/2 cans coconut milk
4 T. lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste
lemon wedges

1. Heat the oil in a big pot over medium-high heat.

2. Add the onions and cook until starting to brown, about 15 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for another couple of minutes

3. Add garam masala, coriander, turmeric, cayenne, dried peppers, and bay leaves. Stir for a minute. Add the lentils and stir until they are coated in spices.

4. Add broth, potato, and carrot and bring to a boil, then simmer until the vegetables and lentils are tender, about 20 minutes. Discard the bay leaves.

5. Using either a hand blender or a regular blender, purée the soup until smooth. (If using a regular blender, do it in small batches to avoid burning yourself.)

6. Add the coconut milk and lemon juice, and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve with lemon wedges.

Easy Peasy Roast Chicken

Guest Blogger Amy Friedman shares her recipe for a classic comfort dish:

Every recipe book says roast chicken is THE easiest thing to cook. However, according to my friend Ruth, the lovely lady who helps run this fab blog, roast chicken is actually surprisingly tough to do well. For everyone, the tough parts are different: is it having moist meat? Tasty meat? Crispy skin? Hating basting? Could even be as simple as just takes too much darn time and attention. 

After several years of experimenting with various techniques, I finally hit on a surefire way to get a lovely moist roast bird with an absolute minimum of fuss and bother. Warning: If you're a huge fan of crispy skin, skip this recipe, as there won't be a lot - just some over the breast and around the legs.

The most important piece of equipment you'll need is a three-quart Dutch oven with a lid. 

Easy Peasy Roast Chicken


1. Buy a 3 1/2 -pound chicken. Unwrap, take out the giblets, and rinse. 

2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

3. Put the chicken, breast side up, in the Dutch oven. If you want, you can dice an onion or two and sprinkle on the bottom. Sometimes I do, sometimes no. Put the neck (if it came with the giblets) next to the chicken.

4. Sprinkle the chicken inside and out with your favorite mix of spices. I like black, red, and white pepper, garlic powder, oregano and dill. 

5: This is important: Take a largeish whole onion, slice off the top and bottom, skin it, and put it inside the chicken. This will keep the chicken from drying out. If you don't have an onion, an apple works fine. The onion's better, because you can eat it after the chicken has roasted.

6. Once the oven has heated, put the lid on the Dutch oven and stick the whole thing in the oven. 

Timing: 20 minutes per pound, plus an extra 20 to 30 minutes. If you've got a three-pound chicken, the bird will be in the oven for about 1 1/2 hours. 

For crispier skin, it's okay to remove the lid for the last half hour or so. However, I've found I get enough crispy skin for a happy husband without lifting the lid.

Once the timer bings (always use a timer!), turn off the oven, let the chicken sit in the oven for about ten minutes, then take it out. Uncover the chicken, let it rest for about 15 minutes, then remove it from the pot. 

Every time I've used this method, I've gotten very tender, moist, falling-off-the-bone chicken with nicely spiced, crispy top skin. If the chicken's fatty, I also get a lot of nice drippings, which I save and reuse.

The last chicken I cooked this way must have been an athlete, because there weren't a lot of drippings! What there was, however, was densely flavorful, so I used it to cook the snow peas I was serving with the bird.

The cool thing about this method is that you can break up the cooking time. For larger chickens, I've started it the night before, on very low heat (250 degrees), turned it off in the morning, and then restarted it at 4 p.m., turning the oven up to 375. (I leave the chicken in the oven during the day; the Dutch oven retains a lot of heat, which keeps the cooking process going almost like a barbecue.) 

Moist meat, crispy skin, no basting, no fuss. Pop it in, do your laundry or take a nap, and awaken to a great dinner. What could be easier?

Mushroom Sauce without the Can of Campbell's—Easy and Much Better

The stores are always full of cremini (button) mushrooms, and often they are on sale. They're always good for you, and we've found that prepared correctly, they can enhance many, many dishes. So why do we insist on using canned cream of mushroom soup as a liquid binder in so many recipes when the glop is nearly tasteless and always too salty?

It turns out that making your own mushroom sauce or cream of mushroom concentrate is really easy—and it tastes so much better.

We purchased a bunch of cremini mushrooms and another bunch of shiitakes for a faux-chopped liver appetizer and had about two cups of each left over. We also had lots of turkey and lots of cooked green beans from our Thanksgiving feast. Sounded like a casserole to us, so we decided to make our own cream of mushroom soup to hold it all together—with a bit of help from our trusty old New York Times Cookbook.

We chopped the mushrooms roughly and chopped a good-size onion as well. Then we melted two  tablespoons of butter (we used Earth Balance Natural Buttery Spread, which is remarkably like butter and doesn't burn when used this way) in a saucepan and heated the onion until transparent. We tossed in the mushrooms and sauteed them another ten minutes, until they had given up their liquid and started to dry out again. Then we poured in a half cup of white wine and a half cup of red wine and simmered the mixture down to a slightly wet sauce.

At that point, we took the mixture off the heat and stirred in three tablespoons of flour, a teaspoon of leftover gravy and a teaspoon of Braggs Liquid Aminos (for flavor). We added added a bay leaf and two turns on the pepper mill and a cup and a half of water (we'd have added stock, but we didn't have any handy). We added the water slowly, stirring constantly, and put the saucepan back on the burner to bring it to a boil before then reducing the heat and simmering the mixture for another five minutes.

After the five minutes of simmering, we removed it from the heat, removed the bay leaf and had a beautiful silky mushroom sauce that we could have served with steak, or pork chops, or chicken filets. We put it in our turkey (and faux turkey) casseroles with the leftover beans, dressed up with a half cup of cream and a pinch of kosher salt.

With double the stock and cream, we'd have had cream of mushroom soup. But our sauce was perfect for, well, a sauce—and for a casserole. It would work just as well in tuna-noodle casserole or any of those comfort-food favorites that we have stopped making because want to avoid the salty can of Campbell's.

Breakfast Rice

Sometimes necessity is the mother of deliciousness. Last week, caught up in Thanksgiving lists and plans, we forgot to buy fruit and bread for breakfast, and we also forgot to make granola. One morning we woke up with virtually nothing to eat.

As we never, ever, skip breakfast, this posed a challenge.

Foraging through our overloaded pre-Thanksgiving refrigerator, we found that we had leftover brown rice and soy milk, and we remembered a dish we used to make, from the undelicious-sounding but very good Ayurvedic Cookbook, by Amadea Morningstar. You simply simmer cooked white or brown rice with an equal amount of milk, along with a shake of cinnamon and a handful of raisins, for a delicate-tasting and surprisingly hearty breakfast dish. If you start with leftover rice, the whole process takes about five minutes—just long enough for the rice to absorb some hot milk and for the raisins to plump up.

We've said it before, but this experience reinforced our conviction: never, ever, throw out leftover rice.

Giving Thanks

Today, as we prepare our Thanksgiving meal and look forward to dinner with dear friends and a houseful of dogs, we are grateful for many things. Among them: the faithful readers of Eat Well, Eat Cheap (particularly Belinda, the world's best commenter!). Thank you all. Hope you have a great holiday.

Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good

This time of year, sugar pumpkins (also known as pie pumpkins) are in abundance, prized not only for their decorative value but for their sweet, velvety flesh. Listening to NPR one evening, we heard Dorie Greenspan share a recipe that immediately captivated us, both because of the ease of preparation and the NPR interviewer's rapturous description.

Dorie Greenspan calls this Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good, because you can put pretty much anything in a whole pumpkin, bake it, and wind up with something delicious.

The first time we tried it, we used the NPR recipe, which relied on breadcrumbs. It was good, but we should have doubled the amount of filling to fully stuff the pumpkin, and we should have used a lot more cheese. The second time, we used wild rice, brown rice, and almonds, and made sure to fill the pumpkin cavity, and it was wonderful.

In both cases, we served this as a main course, accompanied by a green salad. But it would make a great addition to the Thanksgiving table.

Retro Aprons Will Put You in the Mood to Cook

We're not very big on oversized and overequipped kitchens, having sadly observed over the years that there is too often an inverse relationship between décor and deliciousness. Give us some sharp knives, some good pans, some reliable heat, and a little bit of counter space, and we're generally pretty happy. But every so often we see something we covet, because we know it will make cooking more fun.

Case in point: Becky McFarlan Schreiner's wonderful retro aprons, which are available online and can be viewed on Facebook. For their anniversary this year, Tim gave Ruth an old-fashioned number with big red buttons, polka dots, and blenders (yes, blenders) on it, and she feels like Lucy Ricardo every time she puts it on. The apron is a daily reminder that cooking should be fun, and that even the occasional kitchen disaster can still be good for a laugh.

Shake Your Wine?

Who ever heard of shaking a bottle of wine to make it taste better?

The people at Mollydooker Wines in Australia claim that they use nitrogen in their winemaking so that they put in fewer sulfites. Shaking the bottle allegedly puts flavor back in the wine. It's like instant aeration.

You would not, of course, do this with sparkling wine. And, in fact, you really need a screw cap to guarantee that you don't dribble wine all over the place, because the secret is pouring a little wine out of the bottle, then recapping before you shake upside down for about 5 seconds or so.

After the first shake, open the cap to release any pressure, close it up and shake again. Let the resulting bubbles settle for a minute and pour.

Here's a link to the Mollydooker website page that contains a video of the owners showing you how to do "The Mollydooker Shake." Once on the page, click on the video link and have fun shaking your Mollydooker — or other inexpensive red wine for the matter.

Surprise Dinner Guests? Try This!

We've all been there: Beloved pals drop by for a surprise visit around dinnertime, and although you're delighted to see them, you're not sure what to feed them. Ro Ann Redlin rides to the aid of Eat Well, Eat Cheap readers with this quick, easy, delicious dish:


She notes, "If you have a well-stocked larder, this should be no problem. Suspend your thoughts about anchovies. The anchovies will dissipate in this recipe, leaving a deep, smoky flavor." 


Ro Ann didn't provide a name for this dish, so we kicked around a few, including Pearl Harbor Pasta and Apache Linguine. But finally, in the interests of offending as few readers as possible, we decided upon a name that seemed to describe the ingredients as well as the circumstances:


Delightful Surprise Linguine 

7 to 8 ounces dry linguine
high-quality olive oil
2 to 4 ounces good bottled or canned anchovies
2 cloves minced garlic
chopped flat leaf parsley to garnish



1. Cook linguine until al dente (it will continue cooking a bit), drain, and turn into a large pan. 


2. Add anchovies and olive oil to taste. The pasta should be nicely coated. Cook until the anchovies "melt" and add the minced garlic at the very end. 


Serves 3 to 4. 


Note: Do not add cheese. Anchovies and Parmesan are both 'braggarts'' and together can overwhelm your dish.

Bargain Wine of the Week: McLaren Vale of Australia

We're going to break the rules here just a bit to give you an overall hint that will serve you well in the wine aisles of your local store.

Here it is: Look for wines from McLaren Vale in Australia. These are wines of conviction that will always go with everything on the table. But you will always be surprised and pleased. They are never boring and very rarely a disappointment.

We thought of this because we saw a promotion for Cape Barren Wines Native Goose from McLaren Vale for $14. It reminded us that we can't remember the last wine from the Vale that we weren't absolutely gushing over. This one is a GSM, common wine lingo, especially in the Vale, that means it is made with Grenache, Shiraz and Mourvedre grapes.

This wine rated a 90 from Wine Spectator and here is what it said:

Deep crimson red in color, the nose delivers intense plum and prune aromas with a hint of cassis and five-spice. A big, tightly structured style offering dense black fruit flavours complimented by anise and mocha accents. The palate carries a long length of persistence with a hint of savoury oak and a delicious fruit sweetness on the finish.

Look for wines from McLaren Vale for something that will dance on your palate and wake up your taste buds.

A Carnivore Prepares A Vegetarian Meal

Vegetarian main dishes also make great vegetable sides.

Our friend Paul, who has been a guest poster a few times, recently volunteered to cook dinner for a bunch of vegetarians. Before you carnivores all run off to the next web site, remember that vegetable dishes good enough to be main dishes make stupendous vegetable sides. And these days, more and more of us are having to cook for vegetarian friends.

He didn't include recipes, but these dishes are self-explanatory to good cooks — or are the sorts of dishes that are easily found on the Internet. Many, like the grilled corn and tomato salad and the mango salsa and roasted potatoes are pretty easy.

Either way, this menu is good food for thought.

Hors d’oeuvres

·  Crostini (grilled ciabatta with toppings: garlic roasted with balsamic vinegar, mushrooms in
       butter and herbs, tapenade, roasted red peppers, mozzarella in garlic/herb infused olive oil)

· Sautéed zucchini blossoms stuffed with herbed ricotta or bufalo mozzarella

Pass-around main dishes

· Brown & wild rice with toasted walnuts, scallions, and dried apricots

· Butternut squash ravioli with toasted walnuts, chives, and apple-infused butter

· Grilled zucchini/summer squash layered with shaved goats-milk Gouda and fresh herbs
· Grilled corn and tomato salad
· Pan-roasted Portobello mushrooms with red pepper sauce and pecorino shavings
· Insalata Caprese with heirloom tomatoes and bufalo mozzarella
· Roasted potatoes with homemade pesto on arugula
· Mango salad or salsa (chunks of mango, cherry tomatoes, scallions, jicama, bell pepper, and mint)

Dessert
· Grilled white peach halves filled with mascarpone and fresh blueberry/port reduction

See Paul's other posts: Red Pepper Sauce, Tapenade, Italian Salsa Verde (All-Occasion Green Sauce), and Make Your Own Chutney.

Bargain Wine of the Week: 2008 La Mano Mencia Roble

La Mano Mencia Roble is another of the 12 wines we purchased that had been rated 90 or better by a wine magazine but cost us less than $10. See our post about the wines we bought. This one was less than $8.

The Bierzo region in Northwestern Spain is not one of the country's well-known wine regions. It is home to the Mencia grape, one that we'd frankly never heard of. That's probably why a highly rated wine costs so little. The red Mencia grape so closely resembles Cabernet Franc that the local synonym is "Cabernet."

After some airing we discovered that this wine drinks much like a Cabernet Sauvignon. It's crimson color is deep, but the wine is not inky at all. We thought it smelled a bit of coffee, but the winery insists it's an earthy note. Either way, it keeps the wine's blueberry hints from being too fruity.

This is not a complex wine, but we had it with ribs and a pasta with heavy garlic on successive nights and it danced quite nicely with them both. The spiciness of the wine cut through the Bar-B-Q sauce and the heavy garlic.

Robert Parker gave this little-known gem a 90 and said it "has extraordinary depth and concentration for its humble price. We agree.

Wine Bargain of the Week: Pillar Box Red 2007

A week or so ago we offered up a recent wine order in which we bought 12 bottles of wine, all rated 90 or higher by a wine magazine and all selling for less than a 10-spot. This is as close as it comes to a fool-proof way to buy good-to-great — and cheap — wine that you haven't tried before.

We suppose it would be possible to buy this way at a fairly big discount store with well-marked counter cards identifying the wines that were highly rated. But the easiest place to to it is online, as we did with our recent order.

We've now tried a few of these bargains to bark about, and today we want to celebrate one that frankly surprised us. Pillar Box is a winery in South Australia that has been putting out award-winning wines for more than a century.

The winery is named for the proprietor of the 19th century mail service that picked up its boxes of wine for delivery elsewhere. The Padthaway area winery also makes Henry's Drive and Parson's Flat wines, but its Pillar Box Red refers to the color of the wine cases, which had been all hues of the earth until someone finally said all would be identifiable red.

The famous wine critic Robert Parker loves the Pillar Box Red and consistently gives it high ratings. We bought the 2007 red, which is a mix of 65% Shiraz, 25% Cabernet Sauvignon and 10% Merlot. Parker gave it a 90. We bought it for $9.95, but we've seen it a bit higher elsewhere. Even the winery's Reserve Red — also high rated — is less than $20.

The deepness of the red color scared us when we opened the wine. This was not the color of blood, or even dried blood, but a deep mountain lake filled with dried blood. It is so red, it's purple. But the flavors are wonderful. It was perfect with the homemade mushroom soup and popovers we were serving, because it is earthy, spicey, full of black currant sharp fruitiness.

We find unfamiliar Australian wines a crapshoot because the Aussies love to make distinctive wines of conviction. That means they are often unique, and sometimes just don't work on many people's taste buds. But this is one beefy, deep red, hearty wine that is great with lots of different foods.

Speaking of beefy, this wine would be perfect with a medium-rare steak or a lamb chop.

Video Recipe: Pasta with Pumpkin, Sausage and Kale

Here's another video recipe by our friend John Ross. This one was shot for Fine Cooking magazine. Now you have something to do with those leftover jack o lanterns. The recipe is for pasta with pumpkin, sausage and kale. Click the link or the video arrow below.

Good Cheap Cookware and Kitchen Supplies: Discount Retailers

We've written about how great discounters like TJ Maxx, Ross, and Marshalls are for marked-down oils, spices, and oddball gourmet items. After scouring our three local stores, we're convinced that these are also great places to buy cookware.

Our Marshalls outlet, for example, currently has a fairly wide selection of half-price Le Creuset. Some of these pots are marked as factory seconds, but we couldn't detect any imperfections. A nine-quart Dutch oven that costs $300 from the manufacturer can be had for $150 at Marshalls; a large oval French oven that retails for $400 was selling for $200. Marshalls also had half-price nonstick Calphalon (we couldn't resist the $60 large sauté pan, which came with a nice heavy cover).

There was also a good selection of baking dishes and pans, including Le Creuset casseroles, as well as knives and a wide assortment of kitchen implements that ranged from measuring spoons to mixing bowls.

If you need cookware, first check out your local discount stores; you may be able to find just what you need for a lower price than you would pay at a department store or kitchen store.

Comfort Food for Fall: Popovers

Now that the weather has turned cool and the days are shorter, we find ourselves craving soup: mushroom, vegetable, barley, miso . . . any kind of soup works for us. But soup barely makes a dinner by itself, so to supplement it we often make cornbread or cheese toast (stale bread, grated cheese of any sort, and a broiler; nothing simpler or more frugal). Lately, though, we've been making popovers.

Do people still make popovers? They remind us of the June Cleaver 1950s, maybe because we use a recipe from the old New York Times Cookbook. Or maybe because our mothers made popovers. In any case, we like them so much we invested years ago in a popover pan, which has deeper wells than a muffin tin. (Nothing against muffin tins—that's what our moms used, and they still work just fine—but a popover pan gives you bigger popovers.)  


Here's our version of the Times Cookbook recipe:

1 cup flour
2 eggs
1 cup milk*
1/2 t. salt
1 T. vegetable oil

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Oil popover pan or muffin tin and set it aside.

2. Measure all the ingredients into a bowl and, using either a rotary mixer or a hand blender, mix until the batter is very smooth. Don't be afraid of overbeating; you want it very well mixed.

3. Fill the cups of the pan about half full and bake for 30 minutes. DO NOT PEEK before that, or you might make the popovers collapse. After the time is up, take a look: if the popovers are brown and rigid to the touch, they're done; if they're still a little pale and wobbly, give them another five minutes.

4. When you remove the pan from the oven, pierce each popover with a knife to let the air escape. This will prevent them from getting soggy, especially if there are leftovers.

Leftover cold popovers, dressed with butter and marmalade, make a fine breakfast.

* One day we were out of regular milk, so we apprehensively subbed soy milk, and the popovers came out lighter and crisper than ever before. If you have soy milk on hand, give it a try!

Pasta with Tapenade and Veggies

Back in Connecticut, in the days when we visited more restaurants, we loved Carole Peck's Good News Café in Woodbury. Carole specializes in fresh, organic ingredients and always offers a selection of great vegetarian dishes. We adopted one of our favorites for home use, and over the years it has evolved into a dish we make any time we have nice firm green vegetables on hand—a big bunch of asparagus, say, or a bag of velvety green beans.

The recipe features three ingredients: very small pasta (sometimes known as "soup pasta"), such as tubettini or ditalini; a lightly boiled green vegetable; and a dollop of tapenade. You can prepare it in the time it takes to cook the pasta.

Pasta with Tapenade and Veggies

1 pound small pasta (such as tubettini, ditalini, or acini de pepe)
1 pound or so firm green vegetable (green beans, asparagus, and broccoli all work well), cut into bite-size pieces
3/4 cup tapenade (you may want more or less—if  you're not sure, start with a half cup and work up from there)
2 T. olive oil

1. Start boiling water for pasta and the veggies. You can cook the veggies in the pasta water before cooking the pasta, if you like, or you can use a separate pot to speed things up.

2. While the water is heating, trim and cut the vegetables. Cook them if you are using two pots for the pasta and veggies.

3. If you don't have tapenade on hand, now is a good time to make some.

4. When the water comes to a boil, toss in your pasta and cook until done. Drain it, place it in a good-size bowl, and toss it with the olive oil. Then add the veggies and tapenade, mixing thoroughly.

You can serve this either hot or at room temperature. Feeds four moderate eaters or two to three people of strong appetite.

Love Potatoes? Don't Try This

Sorry for the scant postings of the past week, but it's been crazy around here. We'll try to catch up over the weekend. In the meantime, here's a hilarious if disturbing story about the executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, who in a misbegotten attempt to prove the deliciousness and versatility of his product, went a bit too far. Reading it, you may never want to eat potatoes again. We hope he recovers soon.

Bargain Wine of the Week: 12 90s under $10

We don't really care where you buy your wine. We like buying ours from the local wine store. We happened to have good ones in both of our most recent places of residence. In Connecticut, it was a little shop that loved wine so much it had two big tastings for charity every year. In Virginia, we go to a big Mid-Atlantic chain that has a huge selection.

But we also buy a lot of wine online. We buy from an Internet outlet when we find a good bargain that we can't find anywhere else. We've already told you about the convenient way that you can search for bargains at most of these online retailers.

We're getting low on under-$10 reds (thus not many reviews here lately), so today we went to two of our online regulars and threw the dice. First we went to liquiddiscount.com and asked for all of their under-$10 wines that were rated 90 or higher by a wine magazine. The results were pretty much a bust. Nada.

The advantage of doing this is that it takes a lot of the guesswork out of wine buying. Very seldom will you dislike a wine rated 90 or higher. And if you can find such wine for less than $10, you can figure you're getting a good-to-great wine at a bargain price.

Next we tried empirewine.com, another of our online faves. Jackpot. The results listed about 20 highly rated wines selling at less than a 10-spot. We knocked out the sparkling wine and all the other rosés and whites but one. That left us with about 15.

One we recognized because we've written about it before and remark how great it is every time we open a bottle. Bodegas Sabor Real 2006 made from 80-year-old vines in Toro, Spain, $9.95. We just drained our last bottle a week ago. So we ordered a case of that.

We put together 12 individual bottles for another case. We'll write about each as we open them, but here's what we ordered. Again, all rated 90+ and all selling for less than $10:

Las Rocas de San Alejandro Garnacha 2007, delightful Spanish red we've had before and loved, $9.95.


La Mano Mencia Roble 2008, another Spanish red, $7.90.


Red Knot 'Zork' Shiraz 2007 from Australia, $8.45.


Di Majo Norante Sangiovese 2008, a Tuscan-style from the Molise region of Italy that we've had before and loved, $8.95.


Odfjell Armador Cabernet Sauvignon 2007, Wine Enthusiast Top 100 Best Buys, $8.45. This is a crazy value.


Yalumba Y Series Shiraz Viognier 2008 from South Australia, $8.95.


Urban UCO Malbec Tempranillo 2008 from Mendoza, Argentina, $9.45.


Bodegas Lan Rioja Crianza 2006 from Rioja, Spain, $9.95.


Pillar Box Red 2007, a blend of Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot from Australia, $9.95


Bodegas Olivares Monastrell Altos de la Hoya 2008, inky purple with smell of Indian spices from Jumilla, Spain, $9.95. Another crazy value.


Montebuena Tempranillo 2009, "a sneak peak of the great 09 vintage in Rioja and Northern Spain," $9.95.


Chateau Ste. Michelle Chardonnay 2008, the lone white, but we know we like it, $8.45


We think that this is a smart way to buy great bargain wine. We'll let you know if there are any clinkers in the box. 

Fast and Easy Appetizer: Spiced Nuts

Most people have a favorite quick-and-dirty recipe they pull out when they need to make a fast cocktail snack or party appetizer. For us, it's spiced nuts. We found this recipe years go in Martha Stewart Living, adapted it a bit, and have been relying on it ever since. As Costco shoppers, we always have big bags of nuts on hand, so this is very easy for us to pull together.

Any kind of nut works in this recipe, but we've found that nuts with lots of nooks and crannies, like walnuts and pecans, deliver the best results, as they can hold a lot of spices.

Spiced Nuts

1 large egg white
1/4 c. sugar
1 t. chili powder
1 t. salt
1/2 t. cumin
1/2 t. cayenne pepper*
1/4 t. allspice
2 1/2 c. mixed nuts (though they don't have to be mixed; if all you have are almonds, those will work fine)

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

2. Place the egg white in a medium-size bowl and rapidly whisk by hand until it is foamy.

3. Stir in the sugar, chili powder, salt, cumin, cayenne, and allspice.

4. Fold in the nuts, taking care to cover each nut with the spice mixture.

5. Spread on a baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the pan and stir up the nuts with a spatula, then return the pan to the oven, reducing the temperature to 250 degrees. Bake for an additional 10 to 15 minutes, until the nuts are lightly brown and no longer wet.

6. Remove the nuts from the oven, stir, and let cool. They will keep for a couple of weeks in a covered container. They also freeze well.

* The amount of cayenne pepper is really a matter of taste. This amount works well for an average group of people with average heat preferences. Heat lovers will want more spice, though, so feel free to add more—Martha's recipe calls for 1 3/4 teaspoons!

Another Reason to Avoid Fast Food

Yep, we're bashing on fast food again. But how can we not, when we read stories like this? (Check out the photo gallery!)

Rave Review: "Artisan" Lettuce

OK, first off—we don't much care for the term "artisan," which is to this century what "gourmet" was to the 1970s and likewise is indiscriminately applied to everything from mass-produced bread to gummy Costco cheeses. Nonetheless, the sudden appearance of "artisan" lettuce, as it is obnoxiously labeled, in our local stores and, yes, Costco, has dramatically improved our salads.

Our longtime problem with pre-mixed salads is the high spoilage rate: the mixture of lettuce varieties always means that some leaves decay before others, forcing us to either pick out the slimy deadbeats from the remaining crisp leaves or toss the whole package, an act we find unacceptably wasteful. Still, because these packages are often economical despite the spoilage, we've continued to buy them.

But a few months ago, packages of "artisan"—sorry for the quotes, but this term really grates—lettuces began to appear in our local supermarkets: tight-packed whole heads of red and green varieties. Not only did these cost less than the typical mesclun mix, they had a much longer shelf life.

Last night we apprehensively opened a two-week old box with one remaining head, which had been neglected on the back of a refrigerator shelf. Astonishingly, the lettuce was crisp and entirely usable.

A one-pound box of lettuces runs less than $4 at Costco.

Summer's Over — Time for Soup!

Fall not only means the onset of cool weather—sweet relief to those of us who broiled in a summer heat wave—but truckloads of ripe vegetables. The harvest is in, the leaves are turning, the nights are chilly, and it's time to make soup. 

RoAnn Redlin offers this simple but delicious menu for a fall dinner, using classic seasonal ingredients. 
She says: "I had a great dinner last night. I made the quiche lorraine from the New York Times Cookbook and a new soup: cream of carrot/parsnip. I had to make a dessert out of what I had on hand, so I sautéed some apples in butter and brown sugar. Then I threw the leftover pastry from the quiche on top of the apples with cinnamon sugar. Voilà! A great meal. I loved the soup." 

Cream of Carrot Soup

4 T butter
1 package baby carrots, chopped
1 pound of parsnips, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 32-ounce boxes of chicken stock
1/3 c. uncooked rice*
1/3 c. half-and-half
Sage leaves (optional)

1. Sauté first butter, carrots, parsnips, and onions for 15 to 20 minutes. 

2. Add the broth, and bring to a simmer. After about 40 minutes, add the rice. 

3. Once the vegetables are soft and the rice is cooked, purée the whole thing with a hand blender or in a food processor. Add warm half-and-half. Garnish with chopped sage leaves. 

* All I had was wild rice, and it added an exotic flavor.

The Frugal Pantry: Fermented Black Beans

"Fermented black beans" probably sounds better in another language,* but despite its unappetizing moniker, this Chinese staple (also known as "salted black beans") gives a quick and cheap flavor boost to any stir-fry.

This week we were too busy to shop or plan meals, and in any case we had no energy to cook them. One night we wrapped up work late and wondered what we could quickly make for dinner. We had little in the way of produce except some elderly green beans, onions, garlic, tofu . . . and ginger! The ginger tipped the balance: we would make a stir-fry.

We've learned how to make an all-purpose stir-fry sauce from oyster sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, mirin, and chili paste. Still, with our lackluster vegetable lineup, we knew we needed something else. So we reached for the fermented black beans. A couple of tablespoons, quickly mashed with the side of a heavy knife, tossed in with the garlic and ginger at the outset of the stir-frying, made all the difference, lending a flavor that was earthy, pungent, and unmistakably Chinese.

Don't make the mistake many before you have made and substitute canned black beans; you'll end up with something completely different. Fermented black beans are dry and velvety and can be found in any Asian grocery. One bag will last a long time; as far as we can tell, they last forever . . . except in our kitchen.

* Actually, it's douchi, but to our immature minds that is hardly an improvement.