blood’s a rover

On the day before I headed to Europe, with Portland heavily blanketed in snow, my friend Marissa and I prepared what might just be my new favorite comfort food: Russian borscht and cabbage rolls. It was the last meal of the year that I prepared at home.

We started out with:

Borscht
3 beets
2 hanger steaks
2 carrots
1 cabbage
1 tomato
2 potatoes
1 onion
1 quart beef broth
1 bunch parsley
Salt & pepper
Dill & bay
Sour cream

Cabbage Rolls
1 cabbage
1 carrot
1 onion
1/3 lb mushrooms
1/3 lb ground pork
1/3 lb ground turkey

Begin the borscht by filling a large pot with all of the beef broth and several cups of water, set the burner to high. Wash and shred the beets, and slice the parsley, carrots, onions, potatoes, tomato, and beef.

Add the parsley, onions and tomato, bay leaf, and dill to the broth. Lightly sauté the beets in a little olive oil and then add them to the broth and stir well.

 While that begins heating up, sauté the potatoes and carrots until nearly tender. For some reason, carrots don’t cook through very well when you boil them. Also, cut up the hanger steaks into bite size pieces and begin simmering them on low, adding some of the liquid from the beef to the soup as it collects.

When the carrots are ready, add them to the soup. Cover, reduce to medium-low and let everything cook together for a long while. 

Now is a good time to prepare the cabbage rolls. First, steam the cabbage lightly until the outer leaves are flexible. Shred the vegetables and sauté them together, just enough to mix the flavors. 

Next, mix the veggies with the ground meats in a bowl with your hands. If you don’t want to use your hands, just have Marissa do it. She’s very tactile.

Next, remove several outer leaves from the steamed cabbage and begin rolling the filler in them the same way you would make salad rolls.

Last, stack the cabbage rolls together in a small, deep pot. Add enough water to cover them along with some salt, pepper, and sour cream. The cabbage rolls below are red because we tossed a little borscht broth into the pot.

By now the borscht should be coming along nicely. Now it is time to purée the soup. It might be a good idea to let it cool a bit first, but I didn’t. Working in batches, slowly ladle some vegetables and broth into a food processor and puree well. Then empty it into a different pot and do some more. If your like me, you lost the top to your food processor and have to use a pot lid instead, which means that your shirt and kitchen will be lightly borscht splattered in no time at all.

Return the puréed soup to the original pot, and then add the beef, which should be perfectly tender by now, and salt and pepper to taste.

Note: If you’re planning on serving any of the borscht cold set some aside before adding the beef.

Finally, dish up the borscht with a dollop of sour cream and the cabbage rolls over rice, plain, or topped with sour cream and a little borscht for color.

Приятного аппетита!  (Bon appetit!)

(You can make your own Obamicon HERE)

Prior to 2008, I rarely cooked more a pack of ramen noodles for myself. Then two important events occured:

1. I got divorced and had to either cook, or eat out all the time, or starve.
2. I returned from traveling around the world with a deep respect for regional cuisine and cooking traditions, and realized that I’d acquired a rich cookbook-of-experience from which to draw.

In response to those two things, I decided to make cooking a priority in 2008. Here’s how it went:

There were homemade pizzas:

Tiny turkey dinners:

Beef stews:

Tandoori prawns, red curry prawns, and prawn salads:

Dishes that I ate for one week straight:

One week of Pad Kee Mao

One Week of Phở

Numerous sandwiches:

BST (Bacon, Shiitake & Tomato) and G&T

Aged gouda cheesesteak

Roast beef with stilton and pear raisin butter sauce on rye

Lots of pork:

Herb encrusted pork shoulders on a bed of onions and apples

Paprika rubbed pork chops

Melon wrapped in prosciutto

Scallops wrapped in bacon

Plenty of seafood:

Squid stuffed peppers

 
Cod ala pil-pil

Seared ahi on a bed of shaved fennel

And then the real highlights:

Clambake with chicken breast, dungeness crab, steamer clams,
chorizo, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, jalapeños and sweet corn

Steak Oscar (filet mignon and dungeness crab in a terragon butter sauce)

Confit Byaldi

Coq au vin with grilled asparagus

Bacon apple pie with bourbon and maple syrup filling

Beet & Beef Borscht

But if I had to choose, my favorite dish of the whole year was this:

Ultimate paella with chicken, pork loin, chorizo, squid,
sole, mussels, and shrimp, cooked over a ceramic grill.

At the beginning of 2008 I hosted a couple of dinner parties and the wine bottles accumulated quickly. Rather than toss them out, for some reason I began lining them up along the wall in my kitchen. I liked how it looked, and in the back of my mind I planned to take account of what I drank at the end of the year.

That time has come, and the breakdown is below.

Total: 70 bottles, price range $10-$75, averaging about $20 each.

Red vs White? 

Red Wine: 40, White Wine: 30

The Red/White ratio was about what I would expect, because there are a lot of white varieties that I really love.

Location, Location, Location:

Oregon - 21 bottles
France - 17 bottles
Spain - 15 bottles
Italy - 6 bottles
Argentina - 4 bottles
Australia - 3 bottles
New Zealand - 2 bottles
Germany - 1 bottle
California - 1 bottle

This list is exactly what I expected- I drink a lot of Oregon wine because I can get better quality wine for less money by drinking locally. That said, I love French and Spanish wine almost equally, and drink a lot of those as well. I like Italian wine but I don’t drink a lot of it, mostly because I don’t cook a lot of Italian food. I still get cravings for steak and Agentine Malbec sometimes. FYI- none of the Australian bottles were Shiraz, and I’m surprised at how little New Zealand wine I bought considering how much I know and like about it. How did that California bottle get in there?

Varietals are the spice of life:

Pinot Noir - 21 bottles
Tempranillo - 9 bottles 
Reisling - 6 bottles
Gewürztraminer - 4 bottles
Italian red blends - 5 bottles
Cava - 3 bottles
Albariño - 3 bottles
Malbec - 3 bottles
Chardonnay - 3 bottles, all white Burgundies
Cote du Rhone GSM blends - 2 bottles
Pinot Gris - 2 bottles
Rosé - 2 bottles
Sauvignon Blanc - 2 bottles
Chianti Classico - 1 bottle
Morgon Beaujolais - 1 bottle
Tocai Friulano - 1 bottle 
Rutherglen Tokay - 1 bottle
St. Jeanette - 1 bottle

I’m a little surprised that I drank twice as much Pinot as anything else- I mean, I do live in Oregon, but still, I’m not one of those “Pinot’s the greatest” people. I like Gewürztraminer more than Reisling, but I think some of those were brought over, not bought. Also, what’s with no Bordeaux? I’ll have to do something about that in 2009. 

Writing travelogues is very time consuming, and unfortunately I don’t have a whole lot of time left to be consumed of late. That said, I’m planning to begin the recaps by the end of this week.

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even gone through all of my pictures yet, though I’ve been pretty happy with a lot them, including these:

Early this morning, I woke up with a start and could not figure out where the hell I was. After running through a list of possibilities, it finally dawned on me: I was home, in my own house, in my own bed. This realization made me feel like I’d actually managed to accomplish something meaningful during these last two weeks, and after recalling that old T.S. Eliot quote, I happily drifted back to sleep.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Today I head to Salzburg for an afternoon of wandering around a beautiful old city and taking pictures- because I haven’t done enough of that on this trip. Then, later, I’ll take an overnight train to Frankfurt that completely misses the point of overnight trains- to sleep. It has two connections, and one four hour layover in Munich in the middle of the night. Awesome.

Tomorrow I’ll be in Frankfurt for the day, and the morning after that, I’m flying home. It’s been a great, exciting, exhausting couple of weeks, and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, but right now I’m happy to be headed home.