April 8, Dinner - Grilled Steak and Roasted root vegetables.

April 8, Dinner - Grilled Steak and Roasted root vegetables.

Suzette made a lovely salmon and goat cheese omelet for breakfast and then we planted asparagus as the first action to making our back yard into a sustainable garden.  We also started cleaning out the old formal garden and in the process Suzette pulled all the turnips left from last year’s planting.  So we had a pile of turnips and one beet.

 Suzette and I discussed dinner in the early afternoon and we agreed that a steak would go great with the Summers Cabernet Sauvignon left from Saturday’s dinner and we could roast root vegetables to accompany the steak 

After a ride and a rest, at around 500 p.m. I started cutting up Yukon Gold potatoes, several of the turnips and the beet from the garden, two old carrots and one old beet from the fridge.  I cut up one medium onion and several cloves of garlic and tossed the vegetables in PPI olive oil and salt left from an earlier meal in our ceramic casserole.  I then covered the casserole with aluminum foil and put it into a 350° oven for 45 minutes.  When Suzette checked the vegetables after 45 minutes she said they needed an additional 30 minutes and uncovered the vegetables and put them back into the oven.

 I suggested that we add an herb to the vegetables and went out to the back yard and picked six or seven fresh sprigs of rosemary and tossed them into the vegetables and I fetched the bottle of Andrianna’s Cuvee Cabernet Sauvignon from Summers Vineyard produced in Knights Valley, near Calistoga, from the fridge to warm it to room temperature.

After another twenty minutes Suzette grilled the steak and when it was done I uncorked the Summers Cab and cut up the bone-in rib eye steak and we plated up the steak and vegetables and enjoyed them with the Cab.  As I quoted from Summers Vineyard’s commentary in last night’s meal review (April 7, 2012) the wine with its “bright red fruit with smoky oak aromas that lead to a mouthful bursting with blackberry and spicy tones.” went beautifully with the grilled steak and roasted vegetables.

This is another example of California Cuisine.  The ingredients are allowed to show their fresh flavors without the addition of any sauces.  Their preparation is simple and done in a way that accentuates the ingredients’ natural flavor.  and the other part of the equation is that the ingredients are married to Northern California wines that complement the ingredients so that the wine becomes an important component of the meal.  When I think of great French food I think of the food first and only think about a great wine as a complement to the food.  With California Cuisine I think of the wine as an active ingredient of the meal that stands in parity or exceeds in importance the food ingredients. 

Bon Appétit