May 31, 2013 A Fun Food Day: Japanese Kitchen, Total Wine Tasting, and Lamb Chops with Mint Sauce and Creamy Polenta and sautéed Kale, Onion and Mushrooms

It finally feels like we are back in the food groove at home.  We bought lamb chops at Costco earlier this week and yesterday I replenished the produce larder with lemons and onions at Pro’s Ranch Market.

Today, I made a large arch of travel to accomplish five diverse tasks starting at I-40 and Louisiana and then progressing up Rio Grande to Alameda and then along Alameda both west and east.

I started  by calling Robert Mueller to see if he wanted to get some sushi and talk about a case and he said yes.  As those who have read my blog know Robert is my sushi guru.

So at 12:45 we met at Japanese Kitchen and Robert ordered a Dinner Chirashi ($22.00) for each of us.  This time I was able to substitute yellow tail for the red snapper and mackerel, so had a much happier ordering experience.  The only problem was that we did not designate whose dish the extra yellow tail would be placed on and the chef put the two substituted pieces off my chirachi but put the two extra yellow tail pieces on Robert’s .  As elegantly as I could, I reached across the table and plucked the two yellow tail pieces off Robert’s bowl of Chirachi.   A few more times and Japanese Kitchen will get my weird substitution regimen down.  I guess in Japanese Culture, it is considered impolite to adjust what is offered or the form in which it is offered, which is very Zen like, but not very American Bob like.

I finished lunch around 2:45 and drove to Kaspia’s office and spent an hour on a new issue of theirs and then went to visit J.B. Bryan’s office just off N. Guadalupe Trail.  J.B. Bryan is one of my zen meditation group members and I spent an hour discussing his problem with him.

Then I coordinated with Suzette, who was in Rio Rancho to meet her at the Cottonwood Shopping Mall Center Total Wine store for its Friday afternoon 4:00 p.m. wine tasting because it was offering Northwest wines.  When I arrived I looked around a bit and when Suzette arrived, we tried the four white and three reds being tasted.  There was a $14.95 Courvalis Vineyards Pinot Noir that I had never had that tasted light and fruity, just like you would expect a good Oregon Pinot to taste.  All the other wines were not great.  By around 5:15 p.m. we had tasted all the wines and looked around a little bit.  I decided to check out the ciders and saw that they had Magners‘  Irish Apple and Pear ciders, so I bought a six pack of Mangers' Apple Cider for $7.49.

Suzette said she felt the same about Total Wine as she does about Pro’s Ranch Market, it rarely offers good quality and a good prices together, so you can not rely on it exclusively and is frustrating to shop there if you are trying to find items that are both inexpensive and good quality.  Of course, that is how I feel about every place I shop.  That is why I mainly rely on ten different places for all of our food and wine needs (Food- Pro’s, Sprouts, Costco, Ta Lin and Lowe’s )and (Wine-Costco, Trader Joe’s, Jubilation, Total Wine and wineries.)

We then drove east up Alameda past I-25 to near Ventura, where AppCITYLife, one of my new clients was holding an open house.

At around 7:00 p.m. we left the open house and went home and decided to cook lamb chops and, since we were out of Bulghar wheat,  polenta for dinner and also roast three chicken hind quarters, I had thawed out.  Suzette took prime responsibility for the lamb chops and polenta and I for the baked chicken.

We went to the garden and filled a basket by Suzette doing some much needed topping of kale and my snapping of some garlic scapes and I plucked some tarragon.

I was going to follow the simple recipe that celebrity chef Mark Murphy demonstrated at the NRA convention for cooking with children.  He coated a chicken with olive oil and stuffed a lemon in its stomach cavity with an herb and baked it.  Since we had leg quarters, I laid the leg quarters on a bed of garlic scapes and slices of lemon and then pushed sprigs of tarragon under the skin and then squeezed lemon juice onto the skin and baked it for 45 minutes in a 350˚convection oven.  

Suzette found a creamy polenta recipe that generally involved bringing water and milk to a boil and then adding polenta and cooking until soft and then adding cream and grated cheese to it.  In this case she grated Pecorino Romano.  I de-stemmed the kale leaves and sliced four baby portabella mushrooms and about ¼ cup of white onion, chopped 1 Tbsp. of garlic scapes and a plucked the leaves from a sprig of tarragon.  Suzette heated 2 Tbsps. of olive oil in a large skillet and then sautéed the onion and scapes, and then added the mushrooms and sautéed them and finally added the kale and tarragon.  Suzette brushed the lamb chops with mint jelly and then grilled them on the pre-heated outdoor propane grill.

We decided to drink a good bottle of wine so I went to the basement and fetched a bottle of 2003 Perrin and Fils Château-du-Pape “Les Sinards” and uncorked it and let it sit open for a few minutes while the rest of the meal was cooking.  The back label is illuminating about the quality of this wine.  It says that the Perrins own Chateau de Beaucastel , which is one of the greatest wineries in the world, and that some of the grapes from Beaucastel are used in the making of this wine and that is what gives it a lingering rich fruit flavor and dark ruby color.  This wine is the exception to my normal rule that wines made off premises by negociants mixing lots of different grapes from one region are not worth buying.  This exceptional wine was made by one of the most respected wine making families in France from superior grapes from some of the best vineyards in one of the greatest wine making regions.  The reason why this exception is possible is because in the Chateauneuf-du-Pape appellation the mixing many different grape varieties is allowed and even encouraged in the making of its best wines.  

The wine was incredibly smooth to say the least, yet fruity and the fruitiness did persist after the wine was swallowed.  A great wine.  Thanks to Anne Sesler and Carol, who ran the kitchen at the Center for Ageless Living six years ago and gave us the bottle on my 60^th Birthday in July 2007. 

When the lamb chops were cooked to medium rare, Suzette removed them from the flame and turned off the heat under the polenta and we ladled a scoop of polenta onto each plate and then garnished the polenta with the sautéed onion, mushrooms and greens.  

The lamb was a light red color and juicy and especially delicious with small bits of mint jelly.  The real surprise was how delicious the polenta was and its consistency.  The cream and cheese completely masked the grittiness of the polenta.  It ran a bit when ladled onto the plate, but then stopped running and looked like a congealed puddle.  The sautéed vegetables also gave it a varied taste that was pleasant.  I count this as a very successful meal.

 When the chicken timer went off we turned off the heat in the oven and after dinner Suzette squeezed the juice of ½ lemon over the chicken and I put the chicken into a freezer bag with some of the baked scapes as a PPI for another day.  We also have about 30 oz. of polenta for a PPI and three lamb chops, so we could repeat the same dinner again.

Bon Appétit