Champagne and Caviar

2013’s New Year’s lentil recipe has the dual advantages of being vegan and also using up any leftover champagne you might have lying around after the New Year’s Eve festivities. It’s also a wee bit clever, given that they’re beluga lentils. (Incidentally, this is the only kind of caviar I could tolerate even before becoming vegetarian, since I was never able to share my mother’s wild passion for genuine beluga.)

This is a perfect mid-week pasta dish for the rest of the year, since it comes together in about half an hour if you time it right, and you can substitute any white wine or even a dry hard cider, French or even plain old brown lentils, and essentially any sort of green vegetable. I was originally going to add broccolini, but it was missing from the crisper when I went to cook, probably because I added it to soup mid-holiday week and forgot. No matter, since the leeks worked fine, as would any leafy green or brassica.

The only thing I’d recommend not messing with if at all possible is the fresh shiitakes, because they go so satisfyingly crackly at the edges when seared, and add so much meaty savoriness to the dish. Regular button mushrooms would not be quite the same.

Pappardelle with Beluga Lentils, Seared Shiitake Mushrooms and Leftover Champagne
Serves 4

½ cup black (beluga) lentils
5-6 tablespoons olive oil
8 ounces fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, roughly sliced
2 medium leeks, white and pale green parts only, thoroughly cleaned and thinly sliced
1 cup leftover champagne or white wine
Salt and freshly cracked black pepper
8 ounces dried egg pappardelle

Cook the lentils in a small saucepan with sufficient water to generously cover until just tender, around 20 minutes.

While preparing the sauce, set a large pot of water to boil for the pasta, salting it well once it has reached the boil. Add the pasta and cook to al dente according to the package instructions.

In a large, non-nonstick sauté pan, heat 3 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium-high heat until shimmering, then add the shiitakes. Sear the mushrooms until deep golden and crisping around the thin edges, adding a bit more oil if the pan gets too dry. Remove the mushrooms but don’t worry about any brown bits that cling to the pan.

Add the remaining oil to the pan, lower the heat to medium, and add the leeks. Sautee until they begin to brown a bit, then deglaze the pan with the champagne, add a generous amount of salt and pepper, and simmer until the champagne has mostly reduced away. Add the lentils and taste, correcting seasonings as necessary.

Drain the pasta, reserving about a cup of the pasta water. Add the pappardelle to the pan and toss with the lentils, loosening it with the reserved pasta water as necessary. Serve in warmed bowls with a quarter of the seared mushrooms mounded on top.

Notes:

If using fresh pasta instead of dried, you’ll want to double the quantity by weight. Also, if you don’t use leeks, I’d throw in a couple of cloves of minced garlic along with your green vegetable of choice.

It’s important not to use a nonstick pan because you want to be able to use high enough heat to sear the mushrooms properly, and you also want to be able to scrape up all the yummy browned bits when you deglaze with the champagne.

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Birthday Pie and Sangria

It’s been a quite busy couple of weeks, and although I’ve been baking for two birthdays and the usual Monday scene, I’ve been too scatter-brained to take pictures, so we’re going to have to make do here.  I’ll do a bit of a round-up of the baking, then offer what you’ll have to take on faith is quite a photogenic, in addition to easy and well-received, sangria.

So first things first: His Lordship’s birthday came ’round again, and as usual there is no cake for you! because he turns up his nose at cake and demands pie instead.  Since it’s prime apple and pear season, he usually gets some variation on one or the other, and this year, I found this perfect recipe by Tartelette at exactly the right time.  Since I don’t currently have tart molds, I made it as one big tart instead, with locally-grown Cameo and Pink Lady apples baked with maple syrup instead of honey.  It was quite fabulous, especially the frangipane custard layer.  The one change I’d make next time is to slice the apples just a smidgen thicker for a more toothsome texture, even if they won’t layer as prettily as they did in the (sadly mediocre) picture above.

For the other birthday person, who thankfully does not ‘meh’ cake and asked for anything chocolate, I made dark chocolate cupcakes from the same Scharffenberger base recipe behind my uber-coconutty German Chocolate Cupcakes.

As part of the birthday celebrations, there was quite a raucous get-together for which I improvised some sangria, since I don’t do beer and the amusing set of liquor laws here makes wine readily accessible at the supermarket, but hard alcohol means an extra trip to a separate store.  By popular demand (by which I mean two people asked for it), here is the recipe:

Ice-Breaker Sangria
Serves 6-8

2 bottles inexpensive, non-oaky white wine
1/3 cup sherry
3 oranges, 1 sliced thinly and 2 juiced (preferably blood oranges, but navel or valencia are fine)
1 lemon, sliced thinly
1 lime, sliced thinly
1 eating apple, sliced thinly
1/4 cup sugar, dissolved in an equal amount of boiling water

Combine everything in a large pitcher and refrigerate for at least an hour to let flavors combine.

Serve over ice.

Notes:

I used California pinot grigio here, but it’s a really flexible recipe and you could use whatever strikes your fancy, including swapping red or rose for white. I’d just add two cautions: don’t use chardonnay unless it’s aged in neutral barrels, because the oak will overwhelm the fruit, and don’t waste your best wine here.  You actually want  to use the cheap, unobtrusive stuff in sangria.

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Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

All Items Must Go!

As I noted in the updated “About Me” section, I am leaving the job that interferes so inexcusably with my blogging time — and, let’s be fair, also provides the captive audience for my weekly baking experiments — in favor of an accelerated masters program to set up my next career move.  Since said program is on the other coast, His Lordship, the puppy and I are hauling ourselves all the way across the country, again, for the next year.

(I should probably mention that my shifting career was also the cause of the last cross-country move.  Yes, His Lordship is a saint who amply deserves perfect birthday pies preceded by meatapalooza birthday dinners. But I digress.)

The point is that we need to clear out the pantry in the next six weeks.  I’m going to have to forcibly restrain myself from buying anything except weekly staples and start thinking of creative ways to use up what’s already in stock.  Given my tendency to accumulate and hoard esoteric items, this is probably going to result in some interesting meals and might be fun to watch in a freakshow kind of way.

Shall we get started?  Fabulous.

This first entry might not seem like a pantry-clearing dish, but I’m definitely counting the liquor cabinet as part of the brief, especially since it contains both our purchases and legacies we took on when other friends moved away.  Since neither of us is much for drinking at home, we consequently have enough booze stockpiled to run a fairly creditable speakeasy.

I’ve said before that I’m a mad fan of sour cherries and am giddy as long as they’re in the market, which is about two weeks in an average summer here.  This summer’s harvest having been so delayed, I’m snatching them up with even more frenzied desperation than usual.  The last quart was made into a cobbler, but it occurred to me as I was digging the luscious fruit from under the disappointingly under-cooked puff pastry top that the filling would have shone much brighter on its own.

Which brings us to this sauce.  The original cobbler recipe included red wine, but as I didn’t feel like starting a new bottle when we were already going to a wine party, I substituted a recently-opened port.  The port gave the cherries a lush, grown-up character, while the sourness of the cherries ensured that the thickened port didn’t veer into insipidity.  The bottle still being mostly full, I made the filling by itself with a second quart of cherries Saturday evening, to serve over the cheesecake His Lordship picked up.

Essentially it’s Cherries Jubilee, but headier and easier.  All the decadent flavor, none of the scary open flames, and it can be made ahead and reheated before serving over ice cream, cheesecake, or pound cake to your appreciative guests.  If there are leftovers the next morning, it makes a self-indulgent breakfast over yogurt.

This is hardly an inexpensive dessert, since sour cherries and good port are going to cost you, but in the sense that it used up a bottle I’d otherwise have had to dispose of when we move, I think it qualifies as frugal!

Sour Cherries in Port

Sour Cherries in Port
Serves at least 8 generously

1-2 quarts sour cherries, pitted
1 1/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Pinch of salt
1 cup port, plus sufficient extra to make 3 cups of liquid with the cherry juices
1 3-inch cinnamon stick
1/4 teaspoon almond extract

In a large bowl, combine the sugar, cornstarch and salt.  Stir in the cherries and 1 cup of port, cover with plastic wrap, and leave to macerate for 30 minutes.

Drain the cherries into a colander set over a large glass measuring cup, then set cherries aside.  Add additional port to make 3 cups of liquid and pour into a saucepan with the cinnamon stick.  Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring frequently.  Add cherries to the pan and return to a simmer, cooking 10 more minutes, until sauce has thickened and cherries are softened.

Remove from the heat, take out the cinnamon, and stir in the almond extract.  Cool to slightly warm or room temperature before serving, or refrigerate until needed.

Notes:

I had just one quart of sour cherries, which produces about a two-to-one port sauce to cherries ratio, but if you’re feeling extravagant, two quarts of cherries would be ideal.

The port I used up was an unusual Malbec-based one from Sonoma, but a regular good ruby port should be fine as long as it’s not syrupy-sweet.  You could also revert to the dry red wine of the original recipe.

Outside the evanescent season for fresh sour cherries, you could make this with frozen or jarred sour cherries in juice (not syrup).  I’m afraid that using regular cherries would probably result in a sickly sauce, but you’re certainly welcome to try and let me know.

Serving Suggestion

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Bah. Humbug.

As anyone who has known me longer than one full year knows, I hate New Year’s Eve. No, I don’t merely hate it. I loathe it. I loathe the counting backwards to the inevitable anticlimax, I loathe the freight of expectations that can only end in rapid disillusionment, and I loathe the desperate pressure to find someone to partner with, no matter how momentarily, just to avoid being the only loser with no one to kiss at midnight.

New Year’s Eve is a stupid pointless holiday based around a completely arbitrary turning of the clock within an archaic and irrational calendar. (A sensible calendar would put the start of a new year either at the solstice OR some time in the spring, not two weeks after the solstice and before two to four more months of bleak nothingness). There’s nothing special about staying up past midnight or getting blitzed on champagne. As far as I can tell, the only purpose of this holiday is to get people to drink too much and reflect on their inadequacies so that they can start the next year hung over and loaded with guilt that the diet, exercise, self-improvement and finance industries can milk for the next month and a half.

Since I’m also usually in a post-Christmas, pre-return-to-work funk by this time, while everyone else is wearing silly glasses and hats and waiting for the big glass sphere to fall, I’m either stewing in my own bile and pontificating about the contrived inanity of it all, or defiantly asleep before midnight.

Mind you, I’ve never let my personal bitterness stand in the way of a good meal, so that doesn’t mean I don’t also mark the random turning with food. Indeed, a good murky black mood can be a piquant seasoning. This year it seasoned an easy and yummy dinner of lentils in red wine and aggressively garlicky mashed potatoes, with sausages for His carnivorous Lordship.

The lentils have become a New Year’s tradition by default chez Disdain. Although we never had them for the holiday while I was growing up, some years back I learned that it’s an Italian tradition to eat lentils on New Year’s, since their round shape evokes coins and therefore prosperity in the coming year. I don’t put much stock in sympathetic magic, but as I both love lentils and am mostly Italian, I seized the excuse to make one of my favorite winter dishes. I’ve been making the same recipe from Deborah Madison’s The Savory Way since college, and despite dabbling with other versions, this is still by far the best use of lentils and red wine that I’ve ever found. It’s unpretentiously sophisticated, basically effortless, and wonderful as a side dish or the center of a meal.

I can’t make you share my contempt for the stupid pointless holiday, but everyone I’ve shared this recipe with has loved it, and there are plenty of winter days left for you to make this warming dish.

Braised Lentils in Red Wine, for New Year’s or any other arbitrary winter’s day
(Adapted from Deborah Madison, The Savory Way)
Serves 4 as a main dish or 6 as a side dish

1 cup French green lentils
1 tablespoon each butter and olive oil
1 small onion, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 bay leaves
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1 teaspoon tomato paste
2 cups hearty red wine
1 1/2 cups water
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Wine, sherry or balsamic vinegar to taste

Heat the butter and olive oil in a wide skillet and add the onion, garlic, bay leaves, thyme, and half the parsley. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the onions have begun to color. Stir in the tomato paste. Add the wine, bring to a boil and cook for 1 minute.

Add the lentils, water, and a sprinkle of salt. Return to a boil, then lower the heat, cover the pan, and simmer until the lentils are tender, approximately 40 minutes.

When the lentils are done, add salt, vinegar (to sharpen), pepper, and the remainder of the parsley.

Notes: I find I rarely need to add much more than a splash of vinegar at the end because the wine boils down and has enough acidity by itself, so you could probably omit it altogether. I prefer to use green French or black beluga lentils because they keep their shape better than ordinary brown lentils, but the latter will taste just as good if that’s all you have on hand.

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The Food of the Gods: Zabaglione

It is, quite frankly, a little nuts to make zabaglione on a Monday, but I had three leftover egg yolks after making chocolate amaretti (recipe to follow) for the Sunday cookie baking, and they weren’t going to get better after another 24 or more hours in the fridge. And really, there is no higher fate an egg can aspire to than zabaglione, the frothy, foamy, heady alchemy resulting from the combination of nothing more than yolks, sugar and wine. Custard is comforting, creme anglaise is elegant, but zabalgione is transcendental, like tasting the rose-tinged golden clouds that accompany the sun as it sets over the wine-dark sea.

I used to be a purist and would insist on beating it by hand just to show off, but even in my pre-soft-and-lazy days, I still wouldn’t have been crazy enough to do it the hard way on a Monday. By all means, use a handheld mixer, Monday or not, unless you really want an upper-body workout.

Marsala is my usual choice for zabaglione, but I didn’t have any, thanks to the stupid archaic blue laws that infest this part of the country and make even a functional teetotaler like me want to stockpile booze just to avoid making another trip to the state-run store. I used port, but you could use almost any sweet wine or liqueur that you desire, although the advantage to the Marsala, besides the wonderful honey-caramel flavor, is that it won’t stain the zabaglione quite as dark as port. Next time, I might even try Kahlua.

Monday Evening Zabaglione
Serves 2

3 egg yolks, at room temperature
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons port

Set a medium-sized pot containing an inch or so of water on low heat. In a bowl just bigger than the pot, combine the yolks, sugar and port, and beat at high speed with a hand-held mixer or a whisk until combined and foamy, then place over the water and beat over the heat until the mixture thickens and triples in volume. Continue beating at high speed for an additional three minutes, until very viscous and warmed through.

Divide between two stemmed wine glasses, and serve with fruit or plain cookies, such as ladyfingers or amaretti.

Notes: Be careful not to let the water boil, since it might scramble the yolks. If it looks like that might be happening, pull the bowl off the double boiler and continue beating while lowering the heat under the double boiler, then replace the bowl once things have cooled off.

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