Simple is wonderful and easy if you have great PPIs. Monday’s dinner was a good example of that principle; a hot hearty soup and a light French white wine. On Sunday we had eaten Dungeness crabs and kept about 1 cup of crab meat as a PPI and made the crab shells into a stock with the intention of making a crab soup. We had a discussion Monday evening about what kind of soup to make and mentioned my Mother’s crab and ham and corn soup and then Suzette said she wanted crab chowder, because we had potatoes that needed to be cooked.
The kale and parsley in our garden was shooting up and I had to pick the tops off to prevent it from going to seed and ended up with about two cups of leaves. I cleaned and de-stemmed about 1 cup of the leaves while Suzette went to the basement and fetched a bag of frozen corn put up last year and chopped up the potatoes. I also picked about 2 tsp. of fresh thyme and a few sprigs of parsley that I chopped up. Suzette added some whole milk to the broth and then threw the potatoes, and corn and a few pieces of old French bread (to give the soup more body) into the pot of crab broth. After the chowder cooked for a while, she added the kale and fresh herbs and about ¼ cup of white wine.
I had brought up a bottle of Muscadet sur Maine
When the kale had cooked for about ten to fifteen minutes, we opened the Muscadet and Suzette added about 1 Tbsp. of butter and I added a couple of drops of Worchestshire sauce and ladled the chowder into large pasta bowls and garnished the soup with chives and served the soup with chilled white Muscadet.
We are going to be in the Loire Valley in France in August, where Muscadet is grown, so I was interested to see how light white wine went with the heavy soup and the answer was, pretty well.” The Muscadet was light and crisp but not much flavor or character I can see why it is the preferred wine for oysters It was almost as light as a blanc de blanc champagne.
Bon Appétit.
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