Just in case summer ever comes, after this bizarrely chilly spring!—boy, am I ready.
In fact, I’ve been ready every June, since time immemorial…because, without doubt, my favorite gastronomic thing to do in summer is sit around a table piled high with cooked whole crabs…sucking on an electric bottle of dry Riesling!
Here’s a great recipe I created for my upcoming Wine Manifesto (you’ll be hearing about this soon!). I developed it to go with elegant Champagnes that have yeasty-toasty character…but I’ve been making it at a million dinner parties now that I’ve got it! It is easy, elegant…a quick path to modern three-star food coming out of your kitchen! You will need to go to a Japanese grocery to put this one together…and make sure to find a super-elegant smoked salmon, such as a good Scottish one.
In the 1970s, the Italian-American restaurant dish that announced “we have moved beyond red-sauce Italian” was Pasta Primavera, a combination of pasta, cream and vegetables. It was when your local Italian restaurant became a “ristorante.” Le Cirque in New York City made the dish famous, but it became a nation-wide menu staple soon after that.
Tacos on the street in Mexico are one of that country’s great gastronomic delights. Most typically, each taco is made from 2 soft and warm corn tortillas, folded together, filled with a little meat and salsa. A little further north, in the world of Cal-Mex, predictably, things change. The tacos are stuffed a little fuller, they’re less greasy and more salad-like.
California is home of many legendary movie star desserts. Of course, there are those who claim that this recipe goes back to the royal Romanovs in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
