SparrowsFall

Just got Brasa's monthly enews. Be afraid. Be very afraid. ====== Tamara has returned from Spain refreshed and ready to delight you with some new and exciting dishes. She and her staff are eagerly working (more like playing) on the new summer menu influenced by her recent travels. :: The Communal Table :: Wednesday, June 11th Dinner starts at 7:30 pm Joseba Jimenez from The Harvest Vine is joining Tamara in the kitchen and they are cooking tapas, tapas, tapas. For those of you who are not familiar with Joseba, he is the Northwest's authority on Basque cooking. A meal at his Madison Valley restaurant is a must. You will absolutely fall in love with him and his food. Join us at our table and spend the evening eating, drinking and visiting with Joseba, Tamara and friends. Bryan will be pouring from the Northern region of Spain's remarkable wine country. The Communal Table seats 24 guests, so please call soon to reserve your spot. Credit card information will be requested when you make your reservation. Joseba, Tamara and Bryan look forward to seeing you. Dinner and wine is $75 per person. This includes, food, wine, tax and gratuity. This promises to be a very fun evening. Not offered with any other promotions. :: Cooking with Tamara :: The Catalan Country Kitchen Saturday, June 21 Class begins 10:30 am Lunch 12:30 - 1:30 pm ish Join Tamara in preparing food from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean seacoast of Barcelona. Catalan cuisine is cooking from the heart. It encompasses flavors we all love-tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, onions, nuts, dried fruits, lots of fresh herbs, fish and shellfish. You will learn new flavors that you can easily incorporate into all your summer outdoor cooking. Please bring an apron and your favorite knife. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday and the first day of Summer! Classes are sixty-five dollars per person, all inclusive. Classes are limited to 12 students. Reservations accepted with your credit card. A 24- hour cancellation notice is kindly requested.

I'm in! Left a message last week including my CC#, didn't get a call back. Left another message three days later, asking for confirmation callback. Got one that day. If he's been screwed on getting people signed up and paid for these things in the past, maybe his staff's poor followup has something to do with it....? Might pass on a word to the wise.

What you guys said (except T Square). I think HV is one of the best reasons to live in Seattle. Not a bit surprised to hear Tom and Thierry eat there. Haven't heard mention of the wine list here. It's like somebody spent twenty years collecting obscure Portugese, Spanish, and SW French wines, then put his cellar on sale at pretty reasonable prices. (That is, in fact, about what happened.) An astounding selection of wines you've have never heard of, many with utterly unpronounceable names that begin with "Xt." The waits are legendary. I have a business appointment in that neck every month or two, and I always arrange it for end of day around 4:30 so I can wander into HV and sidle up to the bar. Eating dinner at this hour is, I acknowledge, contrary to all civilized behavior, but I make an exception for Harvest Vine.

The two times I've been to Nell's I've been quite pleased with the food. Not the most prepossessing ambience, but okay. The wine's list's bit shy on continentals, but otherwise pretty smart.

Heck yeah, count me in! Hi everyone. Haven't been around for a while. I promise to be less incommunicado in the future.

In general I've been disappointed with Au Bouchon. (Some of you can imagine how happy I was to find a french-style bistro close to home.) It reminds me of the run-of-the-mill third-rate street restaurant in france. The carbonara, for instance, is pretty insipid and very soupy. (Go down the street to Asteroid if you want the best carbonara I've ever had, as long as you don't mind salt.) It's not bad food, it's just uninspired and predictable. The wine list is a travesty of boring standard big-brand names--Duboeuf, Jaboulet, etc. Campagne's cassoulet is wonderful. (And if you haven't had their Oeufs en Meurette, you haven't lived.) Im thinking of moving in. I think I'll go to Stumbling Goat tonight and see what they have, try out the Cassoulet if it's on the menu. I went once when they first opened years ago and wasn't impressed, but they've had a chance to get it together now. And it's crawling distance to my house.

Absolutely run screaming. '67 was an execrable year. Parker's rating (FWIW) is the same as the year. Nuff said. Steve

Coarse-ground black pepper (I use a mortar and pestle), coarse salt, finely chopped fresh rosemary, and Dijon mustard. Combine and rub all over its body.

Re: Jumbo this sunday: I think I'm in....

Nightscotsman, others seem to agree with you. A fellow named Scott Marlowe (who is qualified to judge because has a web site) sez: Heard Fong Chong in Portland was the best dim sum between San Francisco and Vancouver, BC? Wrong. The best dim sum south of Vancouver, bar none is Jumbo's. Best value. Fresh, light, variety of ingredients. We meet here the first Sunday of every month. It's a ritual. Seattle Weekly: Best new dim sum Here's a place that screams kitsch--not just the restaurant but also the newly opened mall that surrounds it: the Jumbo Chinese Restaurant (4208 Rainier S, 760-9200). For starters, the building is painted a cotton-candy peach. Besides food you get extravagant furniture, doll-like wedding gowns, and artificial flowers--all apparently popular with a certain segment of the southeast Asian crowd. But it doesn't pay to be snooty. The dim sum here is fresh and varied. You'll find all the staples: humbow, shrimp and pork dumplings, taro cakes, rice noodles filled with barbecued pork, egg tarts, stuffed eggplant and peppers, and much, much more. You'll also find some surprises, like pungent Chinese broccoli and a melt-in-your-mouth sesame bun that seems like the Chinese answer to cinnamon rolls. Dim sum is served every day till 3pm, and Jumbo's ample seating means no lines.

A query elsewhere by Blue Heron reminded me that I've meaning to ask: what dim sum places do you like best? I've only gone for dim sum once in seattle, after fairly constant forays in New York (Sunday morning--old chinese guys drinking very black coffee, smoking endless cigarettes, and eating indescribable things). CitySearch has a pretty long list, but what do egulleters think?

That's great to know. I'll give it a try. Thanks, Steve

Blue Heron, thanks for your wonderful account. That kind of up-close-and-personal time with Bruce (and his mushrooms) must have been a real treat. He's a sweet guy, and he knows from duck stock. I've been to only one of his cooking classes, which was a treat. Hang out in the kitchen (maybe eight people fit?), watch him cook, drink wine, eat the results. What's not to like? He does them I think the last Sunday afternoon of the month. Let him know you're interested and he'll call to remind you a bit in advance.

I agree that those scrubbers are the best. In fact, they're one reason I don't ever buy non-stick pans: you can't use that scrubber on them. Also, I almost never feel the need for a nonstick. At risk of sounding out-of-it (and going off-topic, but it's related), I'm a big fan of Revere Ware. Because: o It's stainless, which I find incredibly easy to clean using those scrubbers (plus metal cleaner if you care how it looks). o It's available in aluminum disk models (when you want the evenest heat, but with slower response time) and copper clad (when you're willing to sacrifice some even heat dispersion for fast heat and cool). o When I researched it about 15 years ago, Consumer Reports gave both versions top marks over the expensive brands for even heat distribution. My experience bears that out. o It has those nice black plastic handles that feel good in the hand, and heat and potholders are never an issue. (Downside: can't put them in the oven.) o It's cheap. o There's a 25-year warranty, but they don't ask for receipts. I sent a pan back that had a loose handle, and they sent me a new one. Took a little over a week round trip. o My mother's still using the Revere Ware pans she got for her first wedding in the 1940s.

The two primary cost-related items I know of that contribute to ageworthiness are low yields and (supposedly) aging in new oak barriques. Clearly, new oak is unecessary to create age-worthy wines. Low yields and careful selection are fairly widespread in less expensive wines. I would suggest that the primary additional cost is the cost of property. That's why California wines, and the top Bordeauxs, are so overpriced, and why inherited family properties throughout Europe are able to produce such good wines at such good prices. What the Bordelais say may well be true--there are only a limited number of terroirs where great wine can be made. Hence the cost of those properties may be justified. But there may well be a self-perpetuating cycle at play, as well--or instead. While I agree that my search may be fruitless, I wonder what other winemaking techniques are required to make these wines, that also significantly increase the cost of production.

Here are the the premises: o A single large Bordeaux chateau makes more wine than all the Cote-Rotie producers combined. o There are zillions of small, quality Bordeaux producers, putting out good wine at good prices. They've benefited from the dissemination of scientific winemaking techniques (I distinguish this from the Parker influence), so you'll rarely encounter the flawed plonk they sometimes put out before the 80s. So it seems that some of those producers might be producing Bordeauxs that will age well, at decent prices--$12 or $18 bottles that in ten or fifteen years will deliver a good bit of that wonderful aged-Bordeaux experience. Problem is, if you start testing now, you won't know for fifteen years. I didn't start searching for these, laying down twosies and threesies, until a few years ago, so I'm afraid I won't be able to share discoveries for some years yet. Has anyone found any of these--perhaps by accident? Bottles got lost in the cellar and turned into real surprises?

I'm pretty much a northern Rhone guy myself, but Bordeauxs have been among my greatest wine-drinking experiences--along with quite a few disappointments. Bordeauxs often seem less dimensional than Rhones. They don't seem to have those prominent multiple flavor and aroma vectors. (I think of the '91 Clape Cornas, for instance--half a dozen different wonderful things happening together in that juice.) Just because they're less prominent, though, doesn't mean they're absent. Often more subtle and "elegant," but for me they're still there in a remarkable way. And there are quite few Bordeauxs that do have those prominently diverse flavors and aromas. (One reason I like Gruaud a lot, over a Pichon-Lalande for instance: I like sauvage.) On that point, I very much beg to differ with tonyfinch . Because 80s-and-before Bordeauxs are so tannic and tightly knit does not mean they didn't know how to make wine. In fact, I generally figure if California goes through a few centuries of trial and error, they may catch up. At every top-flight wine tasting I've attended (where you find folks who've drunk scads of great wine), I've taken an informal poll: "Think of the greatest wine-drinking experiences you've ever had--the ones you could still taste the next weekend, that you'll remember on your deathbed. Were any of those California wines?" Nobody has ever answered "yes." And as you'll see from my recent Gruaud thread posting, I think that what many of these winemakers have learned is not some secret to making good wine that they were too backwards to grasp, but how to pervert their remarkable, terroir-imbued wonders into something that tastes just like most of the other well-scored wines in the world. Gruaud is only one example of many. I have to wonder how Parker or anyone else can say what today's Bordeauxs are going to drink like in 20 or 30 years. They are completely different wines from those made in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. My guess is that they will not change nearly as much as those older wines, or get as interesting. I don't expect anything within the wines to overcome the oak chips. (Key distinction that the wine writers generally fail to make--how long will it improve [which is what matters] versus how long it will *last* [which doesn't really.]) Steve, I thought you were pushing things with the 35-year minimum; I do agree on 12. Many open up nicely and drink well at that point, a lot at 15, most by 20. '81 Gruaud has been fabulous for nigh on ten years. I had the 90 Beaussejour Duffau last year and if I had any, I'd be drinking it up with relish--yummy and ready. I agree the '85 Bordeauxs are wonderful, and have been for some years. OTOH, I'm still waiting to drink the one bottle of 61 Latour my dad left me--not time yet. The 66es I'm going through slowly. I had the '81 Beauscastel two years ago in Avignon, and I found it excellent but slightly on the fade. The rich fruitiness I remember from drinking it in '94 wasn't there as much for me. I also tend to find more disappointments in old wines. For every six bottles I experience like the 61 Trotanoy--absolutely untrammeled by time, gorgeous red, richly fruity, still working on generating all of its dimensions (this is a 30-year-old *Merlot*)--I run across one bottle with faded fruit, fading color, etc. (This is partially because I generally haven't had the funds for the great wines in the great vintages, so tended to work the margins looking for [hopeful] bargains, with a fair amount of success.) The emperor is certainly wearing far fewer clothes than everyone says he's wearing. And the prices, pushed up by label-chasers who don't even know what they like, make Bordeauxs iffy ventures at best. Those margins I've been working to find bargains have been vanishing like wetlands for years now. Which leads me to start a new thread, which I hope bears fruit.

I adore Gruaud Larose. And Bordeaux-wise, it's a bargain. But I should put that in the past tense. I've drunk many, many bottles, vintages from '61 through '94. Consistently a big, strapping, tannic, non-"elegant" wine, which rough edges turn into tobacco, leather, cedarbox, smoke, and various other "how did they ever get this out of grapes" kinds of tastes and aromas. Gruaud was sold to some international outfit around '96. I was worried, but what I read about the '97 sounded damned promising--especially in such an inauspicious year. Because of that, I guess, I found six bottles of the '97 online for $28 a bottle (plus shipping). Drank one last night. Sigh. Overoaked. Overextracted. Tongue burning. Totally new world. All sorts of parker code words like hedonistic come to mind. In fifteen years this wine will taste just about the way it does now. It will never do what Gruauds of the past have done so miraculously. Wave a sad farewell to another one. Meanwhile, I'm seeing prices now for the '97 between $42 and $80. Sigh again.

I saw this on America's Test Kitchen and had to give it a try. It really intensified the flavor of the tomatoes - almost too much. It also added a lot of depth and complexity since they actually start to carmelize in spots. I don't think I would do it with dead-ripe home-grown tomatoes, but for supermarket specimens or even canned it would be a huge improvement. Cooks Illustrated (the folks behind ATK, of course) recommended this for winter tomato soup made from canned tomatoes, I think. I haven't tried it. But what nightscotsman said. My approach to this with really good tomatoes is to cook them as little as possible, with the goal to retain as much of that fresh summer flavor as possible. I've even food-processed then strained them without cooking; they get cooked a little when you heat up the soup in February.

Mixed results. Sometimes when it comes out I have to run it through the blender or food processor to smooth it out. I make the cream sauce then sieve the tomatoes into it. Stir. If the tomatoes are not the perfect sweet things we all dream of, I have been known to add a touch of sugar to offset the acid.

Cream of Tomato soup. One cup of cream sauce (2Tbsb butter, 2 Tbsp flour, one cup milk) absorbs an *amazing* amount of tomatoes. Just cook the tomatoes enough to squeeze through a seive or food mill. A little salt. I freeze it in ziplocs with all the air out (freeze 'em flat to optimize freezer space), and you actually get a lot of that sweet fragrant summer tomato flavor in the middle of winter. Great with grilled cheese.

I have the impression that "Pinot d'Alsace" signifies a blend of some type. Any clues, anyone? Edit: Z-H makes one, I know.

Yeah, I guess I was thinking of where my friend was living--northern Ballard/Crown Hill. I love, Thaiku, by the way (formerly Noodles in Fremont). They have a greens side-dish which is just dishy. Steve

I find absolutely nothing similar between a CNdP and a CH. As for "pay the extra $5 and get a decent CNP", I am not familiar with many decent CNP's in the price range, unless by decent you mean mediocre. I don't think we were saying they're similar. But in terms of price/performance, I've been happier with CnPs in the $20-25 range (Benoit Truffiere, Bois du Boursan) than with CH's in that range. I've never had that northern rhone hillside-syrah experience from a CH. (even the '90 Graillot, when I had it back in '94 or so, struck me as a good solid Rhone, but not so special.) But I'll try out some of the others suggested here. I'm always dying to find (even strong traces of) that experience under $20 It seems to me that Syrah has two expressions (at least in the old world)--what I call the flatland Syrah, which is spicy and robust, like wine from other Rhone varietals. Then there's the [insert Ron Johnson's favorite words here] style, which comes from the hillsides--Hermitage, Cornas, Cote Rotie. This is not universal--quite a bit of Noel Verset's land is down on the flats, for instance and Domain des Grand Devers does some amazing Syrah juice way down in the flats of Valreas--but do others experience those two fairly distinct expressions?

My experience with Crozes (and to a lesser extent St. Joseph) is similar to Gigondas--almost every one I've had is a very good, spicy, robust Rhone--but at a higher price than a CDR would command, and without the complexity of a CNP, Cote-Rotie, Cornas, or Hermitage. I feel the same about the Clape CDR, Chave's Mon Coeur and Offerus (and other St. Josephs), and other high-ticket CDRs from big-name producers. The price-performance ratio isn't there for me. There have been exceptions, of course.