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.
Hoo-hah! Big news! I am getting into bed with Languedoc-Roussillon! I have long been fascinated by the wines, the red wines in particular, of this vast territory in south-central France.
And…as you perhaps know…I made the decision a year ago to start working on wine imports (I’ll STILL be wearing my journalist hat at the same time, of course!). I was just gettin’ tired of seeing the kinds of wines I love for food…so little available in the U.S.! So I grouped the hard-to-find, food-lovin’ wines into ten categories.
Julia Child, ever-reigning goddess of French gastronomy in America, passed away in 2004 at 91 years of age. But almost a decade later she is still stirring food passion, and still stirring up food controversy.
Ask any Mexican restaurant owner in Santa Barbara, California, and you’ll get an earful.
