Suzette came home around 5:30 p.m. and seemed to be ready to
cook. She wanted to sauté a mixture of
vegetables with some of the roasted chicken she had brought home on Friday and
serve it over pasta. She started boiling
water for the last ½ lb. of penne pasta and then diced 3 Tbsp. of onion and
several stalks of asparagus. We then peeled
three small cloves of garlic from our garden and Suzette chopped up about 1 lb.
of chicken breast and, since she could not find a fresh bell pepper, she cut up
a canned pimiento from Spain ($1.45 for a 7 oz. can at Ta Lin) and a PPI baked sweet
potato from last night’s meal.
After adding the pasta to the boiling water and started another pot of water on to boil and added the chicken carcass and a chopped up carrot and onion to the pot to make chicken stock. Then Suzette started
sautéing the onion in 1 Tbsp. of butter and 1 Tbsp. of olive oil and pressed in
the garlic and then added the chicken, the asparagus and the sweet potato and about
½ cup of white wine and 1/2 cup of the chicken stock and sautéed them for at least twenty minutes (I am not sure
how long the mélange cooked because Suzette took a call and I was in the other
room shelling fresh fava beans and watching the news on T.V.). When the fava beans were shucked Suzette put
them in a small pot of water. When she
started talking, I took over in the kitchen and drained the penne pasta into a
colander in the sink and put the fava bean pot on the pasta burner and brought
it to a boil.
I went to the basement and found a chilled bottle of
MacMurray Ranch 2006 Sonoma Coast Pinot Gris that had been given to me by
Ashara, one of my Westland work mates back in 2007, in exchange for helping her
with some small legal matter. I opened
the bottle and tasted the wine and it tasted tart at first but after a minute
of warming in open air its fruity texture began to show. I put our new pouring stopper on it and put it
in the fridge. When Suzette was finished with her call, we discussed finishing the chicken dish with crema or cream or cheese and decided to grate some cheese. So, I grated 1/2 cup of Swiss Gruyere cheese while Suzette filled pasta bowls with
the penne and then topped it with a mound of the chicken mélange and a handful of cheese.
I filled glasses with the
Pinot Gris. The wine was a beautiful balance
of tart minerality and apricot fruitiness that complemented the light
clean tasting Mediterranean style dish. Pinot Gris may
be this year’s newly discovered wine, like Chenin Blanc was last year’s wine of
the year. We will need to drink several
more before we make a determination but we are on our way because at the
manager’s recommendation, we bought a bottle of Kudo’s Pinot Gris from Oregon
at Total Wine yesterday.
After dinner as we watched the second segment of Antiques
Roadshow from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, while I de-husked the fava beans. I have discovered recently that fava beans
are covered with not only a thick peel, but also a thick husk around their soft
center. For example, I have made the mistake before of not parboiling and de-husking
dried fava beans' husks and they remained tough. The center of the fava bean was so soft that it
crumbled to the touch if not handled with care. I put them in a container and into the fridge for
later use.
Bon Appétit
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