Norm Matthews

I have not had unfiltered wine, or I should say I have not had wine that said that on the bottle. My impression is that it is fairly new product,possibley a passing fancy, but I wouldn't know because I am not much of a wine drinker anymore. Organic suggest to me that it is free of sulphites and that alone can contribute to wine tasting off because wild yeast is unpredictable in how wine turn out and un filtered can just mean the wine is allowed to settle and is siphoned off into bottles without disturbing the sediment. No problem there that I can see. In my wine making days, that is how I bottled my home made wine all the time.

My impression of the piece is that it is a New Yorker picking restaurants he knows as examples of how food was received throughout the history of America. Here in Kansas City, my 72 years of growing up left different ideas of restaurants which educated how we thought of food. There was the lunch counter at local department stores. Katz was the one I remember the most. Dad worked for the railroad and some of the fanciest food I experienced was on board the train dining cars and Harvey's at the Union Station. Campus Hideaway in Lawrence was the pre-curser to Pizza Hut. Winesteads on the Plaza was where I had my first cheesecake though it was a hamburger joint before McD's was ever imagined, the Tamale stand guy that came around the block once in a while in the evening and the couple who served the first tacos I had out of their upstairs apartment in the Argentine district. I had my first loose meat hamburger at a drive-in restaurant. Mom grew up in Arkansas during the Depression and her food was pretty close to what people call soul food today. Oh yeah, there was the tavern across the street that on Meatless Fridays served New Orleans style peel your own shrimp.

Beaujolais is made with gamay grapes and Morgon is in the Beaujolais region. That wine is meant to be drunk young. Beaujolais nouveau is a very popular wine that is fermented for just a few weeks; released immediately and drank as soon as possible. It is just about all gone within two months after release. I think 3 years is the longest regular Beaujolais is normally kept. I guess your wine was not labeled as Beaujolais because being organic and unfiltered, it did not meet the legal standards to be called by that appellation.

I have never heard of organic, unfiltered French wine but from the way you described its color and taste, It sounds to me to have been a problem because it was improperly handled and stored rather than having been bad right off the bat. Most red wine is ready to drink in about 3 years, some less. Only some really tannic wines benefit from a lot of age so being too old would have added to the problems you describe. If it wasn't a vintage wine, though, it might be hard to tell how old it was. PS was this wine a specific grape or was it a blend?

I buy the premise of the magazine but the lead-in to some of the articles are misleading or lack a fully rounded presentation of the information.

I have the issue and have been reading it all the way through, little by little. I am almost done. I have tried three or four of the recipes. The very first one was good but needs some tweeking, Imo. The others were not "Keepers". All through the magazine I keep thinking about two quotes. One by Johnny Carson " You buy the premise, you buy the bit" and the other by Ernest Hemingway, about a "crap detector" in his head, something related to faulty logic principles. Kind of the same thing with Cooks Country, et al.

Son requested lasagne for dinner tonight. He usually leaves it up to me to decide but he does ask for this about once a year. Also included is the last of some sourdough French bread made a couple days ago.

I wanted to try the pork tenderloin tapa recipe in the new Milk Street issue. I have never been to a tapas bar and only have a vague idea of what it's all about. I had no intention of trying to create an authentic menu but did want to round out the meal with other bite size offerings. I had shrimp scampi, stuffed mushrooms, three kinds of Spanish cheeses, hard cooked eggs, Italian salami, rice, cherry peppers, and olives. We thought the pork tapa was good but it might have been better if I had cut the pork in smaller pieces, then refrigerated and marinated in the dry rub over night.

The weather put me in the mood for corn chowder but I made it a little heartier by adding some ham and mushrooms.

I made East Coast Grill's cornbread for the first time a couple weeks ago. We both liked it a lot.

A co-worker with my son gave him some ground deer meat and I made some meatloaf with part of it. I started with a recipe for deer meat loaf from 1949 called Meta Givens Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking and updated it with a few additions which included some onion and carrot and topped with brown sugar and tomato and a bacon weave.

I plan to try the Pinchos Morunos (pork tenderloin tapas) after a little while. We had pork loin twice in four days and I want to wait a little before trying it.

Once many years ago, I had sort of an epiphany. I had seen many cooks hawking their new cookbooks on TV shows by presenting a recipe from their new book. I had bought a few of them. Christopher Kimball (who I didn't know at the time) (and I wondered how could someone so skinny could be a good cook) appeared on one show with his new cook book (Yellow Farmhouse, i think it was) with a fried chicken recipe. I tried it and it was really good so I bought that book and found that there was no other recipe in the book that I wanted to try. The other books I'g got were similar: The featured recipe on the TV show was the best recipe in the whole book. Since then I have been happy to try the recipe presented by a new cookbook and not buy the book. The same is how I feel about the premier issue of the magazine. They probably spent a lot of time making sure the magazine is going to impress enough people to sell subscriptions. I have tried two recipe from the magazine so far and am not impressed with either. One was for scrambled eggs and one was for cheese and pasta. Neither one was very good so I imagine the future recipes won't be either.

This is the second time in a few days that I have made pork chops but this one looked good and I wanted to give it a try. It's called Lemon Thyme Pork chops. The green beans are Southern style like mom made. The pasta recipe is from Milk Street magazine. We did not care for it and didn't keep the leftovers.

The Kansas City Star had a grilled pork chops recipe from a BBQ hall of fame member. It was (brined?) without any salt and the sauce was a combination of apple sauce, cranberry sauce and maple syrup. The coleslaw and potato salad recipes were supposed to be light but they tasted too light for my taste so I added a little mayo.

I tried two new (to me) recipes tonight. One was similar to the Martini Chicken that I've often made, but this one was easier. I added mushrooms to the sauce on a whim. The other one is cornbread from East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass. We liked both.

Sometimes things just don't work out like I hoped. I tried a Marcus Samuelsson recipe for fried chicken and it was moist and delicious on the inside but I got the outside a little too well done. The first batch actually was burnt. So I made up for it with tacos.

Any Texans reading this may wag their finger at me or even shake their fist because this chili is made with pulled pork and has beans in it. It was topped off with cheesy cornbread dumplings.

I have been attending my 50th college homecoming this weekend and happy to get back to eating at home. Sunday dinner was a beef pie made with phyllo, beef, onions, spinach and cheeses and the rolls were made with sourdough starter, white whole wheat flour and had a couple minced apples.

I am going to have to give in and get one of those instant pots. PS that cup looks like it has some of the glazes I used when I still made pottery.

A friend was telling me about an old time recipe for spinach-strawberry salad with poppy seed dressing and it sounded good but I didn't want to make anything with it for dinner that would take a lot of time or effort, so when i went to the store to get the stuff for the salad, I saw that strip steaks were on sale and that clinched the deal for me.

I made a copycat recipe for Zuppa Toscana. I didn't copy where I got the recipe but I think it was from the NYT. I had some for lunch but it's for dinner too.

Dinner tonight was flank steak pan fried and served with a sauce of soy sauce, garlic and ginger. We also had golden beets, and rice.

CORRECTION I have a I have a horizontal off set smoker, not vertical and fired it up to about 280º-300º with charcoal and oak split log along side for smoke, put the chicken in (on foil) and maintained the temperature for about an hour and a half. I did not keep close tabs on the time because I took it off when an instant-read thermometer read 160. The sauce I marinated the chicken with is 4 tablespoons soy sauce 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons sesame oil 2 tablespoons sesame salt 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper 6 cloves garlic, crushed 2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger 2 tablespoons sake or dry sherry 2 tablespoons red pepper flakes Use red pepper paste instead. 8 green onion, sliced diagonally1" toasted sesame seeds At the table we used a dipping sauce consisting of sesame oil and salt.

Son is working late so dinner won't be for a while yet but I marinated a chicken with a Korean Teriyaki sauce in the refrigerator for a couple of hours then smoked for an hour and a half. We will also have rice and Cherry Clafoutis.