fried chicken and Champagne

It's funny how it can sometimes take a long time to try something out.  No, not fried chicken, or Champagne.  Please!  I've had them each plenty of times.  I don't think I've had them together, but the combination absolutely makes sense to me.

No, I mean, it's funny that a restaurant can open in your neighbourhood, and you can walk by it dozens of times, and yet, it takes a couple of years to go in.  So, my apologies to Holy Saints! for taking so long.

In fact, Conrad and Van had dined there once when I was out of town, and they did enjoy it.  And I have tried twice to go but found myself stymied by something or another.  So it took me a while.  We have our favourites, as you should know from this blog, and we try to keep up with them instead.  Just the same, it is nice to try some place new.  Van was on their mailing list and learned about them doing a special dinner tonight, so we went.

The good:  the fried chicken was excellent.  A half chicken between the two of us, and with the hot sauce on the side. 

Can I confess?  I don't get having something crispy fried and then dousing it or drizzling it with something wet.  Makes no sense to me.  The cacio e pepe mac and cheese was tasty, too. 

I liked the radicchio and fennel slaw as well - a nice little bite of mustard in the vinaigrette. 

And the biscuits

were nicely baked but perhaps not as fresh out of the oven as I would have wanted so as to make the barbecue butter melt into them.  Oh, and the Champagne was fine.

The bad:  nothing.  Nope.  Great service, no protracted wait for food, all of it was good.  OK, one small thing - we needed a bigger table!

Van and I had a lovely evening, and I will want to go back there to try their regular fare.  My summer of eating well continues! 

May cocktails

Tonight was the monthly cocktail online happy hour for the gang, and yay for that!  May means mothers, and that was our theme.  Because today coincided with the sale of the Rancho Mirage house (closed!  no longer Van's!), we toasted that at our end with Mumm's champagne (get it?). 

I veered into pulling out a cordial glass I got from Mum and poured a little apricot brandy, which was one of her drinks for years. 

If only I had found the Barbara Ann cocktail before the end of cocktails tonight.  Ah well.  I finished us off with The Mother cocktail, which was tastier than it had any right to be. 

A beer float?  Madness!

Next month our theme is Lionel Richie!

chin chin!

Although I guess, given that we were drinking Champagne, it should have been à votre santé...

It's off to the desert and more online meetings today and tomorrow.  I'm heading into a busy period of association work, conference, and travel.  Which could make for good blogging!

But for now, cheers.  If you are finding your way to this renewed blogging, thank you.  Cheers!  And more!

dinner in honour of Brian

Sad, but true: our friend/neighbour/teammate Brian is leaving Chicago. His partner, Giuseppe, will be in Chicago next weekend to help Brian finish off the last bits that need finishing and then export him out of the country. No more Project Runway nights or other casual dinners out. A nice piece of our social lives here in Chicago, gone.

Happily for us, though, Brian is moving to Vancouver. Last night's dinner in honour of him promises not to be the last dinner I make for him.

I think it may only have been once that I made us food for a Project Runway night at Brian's place, and it was a bunch of baby back ribs. When Brian, Daniel, Conrad and I were together recently - was it at Nightwood or a team brunch - the recollection of those ribs came up, and we decided that I would make us more on the evening of the team going-away party. Food first, then off to a gay bar. I rather enjoy ribs, so I was up for it.

Four of us became five with the addition of Rudy, and Conrad and I shifted plans for dining from the kitchen to the dining table. Cooking and set-up was not too difficult, and by the time the guys arrived (and nope, no photos of them, sorry), we were relaxing. A bottle of Champagne chilled, a few things to nibble on. Conversation started.

As for the food, well, it was fine enough. A rundown:

When I make ribs, I season them with salt and pepper, wrap them in foil, and bake in a low oven for 2+ hours. I don't have a standard sauce recipe. I usually mix up some sweet, some sour, some salty, and taste as I go along. The sauce yesterday had a mixture of garlic, ginger, sriracha, ketchup brown sugar, oyster sauce, soy sauce, and white wine vinegar. I usually unwrap the ribs then brush on the sauce a few times as they cook a while longer.

I don't make rice or pasta or potatoes for me and Conrad when we're alone, but I made up rice yesterday, returning in spirit to something we used to do at the restaurant, firecracker rice. I cooked basmati then tossed it with green onion, pine nuts, currants, diced red pepper, and a sauce mix. I reheated the rice before serving and placed mounds on each plate.

I'm a brassica fan - the vegetable sides give me away. Broccoli unadorned to add some green to the plate. A red cabbage slaw to add some purple. The slaw used a vinaigrette with a bit of sesame oil to tie it to the vaguely Asian flavours of the ribs and rice.

It all made for a satisfying plate of food, I think, I hope. And I didn't stop there, of course. A simple dessert of a ginger cake plated with a thin, quick creme anglaise and dried sour cherries soaked twice in brandy.
Best part of that is that there is a nice, big piece of extra cake leftover, and I'm mildly tempted this morning, before Conrad gets up, to slice a bit and toast it up for my breakfast.

A good meal, and as I noted, not the last meal I make for Brian, I am sure. As for Daniel and Rudy, well, they both liked the food AND cleaned their plates, thereby meeting the the conditions for being invited back.

Christmas meals at home

This Christmas marked only the second one that Conrad and I had together in our home, and the first where we were all alone to ourselves. Deliberately so, in fact. Oh, we'd mulled the idea of Christmas brunch or dinner at a good hotel restaurant, but ultimately rejected those thoughts. Our Christmas, our home, ourselves. It worked out well.

Three meals that day, though the way things were spaced out, we might think of them as four meals or more. Which is fine, really. By the time we went to bed, we felt contented, not overfed or over-wined. A good feeling.

The meals sort of started on Christmas Eve. Sort of in the sense that we set a bunch of things up: the dining table for dinner
(complete with crackers, of course!) and the kitchen table for breakfast. Some holiday colours in among the Fiestaware added to the spirit of it all.

Breakfast. I'm not a breakfast cook, I have decided. I need more practice with eggs, but mostly it's that I don't want elaborate breakfasts. Poached eggs on dry toast are my ideal morning meal; cereal with yogurt is my usual. Christmas morning, then, it was a tasty enough but perfunctory meal of bacon, scrambled eggs (Conrad's preferred way of having them), scones gently reheated, and coffee we brewed ourselves.
We ate somewhere around 9:30, I think.


Then came stockings. A stroll in the neighbourhood (despite the rain). A nap.

Lunch took place after the nap and some phone calls. I think it was around 2:30ish. No cooking, just a plate with a bit of a goat cheese coated in herbs, some jamon serrano, a bit of bread, some nuts. And a half bottle of a rose Champagne. We ate and sipped in no great haste at all, and while we did so, we opened presents.

More phone calls. Listening to music. A bit of tidying. Somewhere around 5, the first dinner course came out of the kitchen: a Dungeness crab salad.
We sat down at the dining table, opened the crackers, put on our crowns, and dug in. Our plan was to have with dinner a bottle of a 2003 Burgundy that Kenn and Cliff had given us some time back, so we opened that and poured a bit to breathe. Luscious, perhaps too much so for the crab. Happily, there was a partially consumed bottle of a Beaujolais Nouveau hanging around, so we poured a glass each of that lighter wine and sipped it.

Then into the kitchen with me again. For years I've been dying to try a recipe in a British magazine for salmon baked in pastry. This was the year to do it. It's a rich dish - I won't say how much butter is in it, but between the pastry and the flavoured butter (currants and crystallized ginger in it) that is slathered between the layered salmon fillets, there's a goodly amount. For a first effort at it, I was pleased with how it looked coming out of the oven.

While the fish baked, I made the sauce messine recommended to go along with it. Wow, whipping cream. More richness. I didn't sauce the meal too heavily, and I made the simplest and lightest of side dishes: steamed red chard.
Smart move.

In the end, the wine and salmon were a fine match though not an outstanding one. This is a small quibble. We ate dinner around 7:30 and continued sipping wine for a while. It was a delight, sitting with only the candlelight and the glow of the tree nearby.

Ah, but there's a little more to come: dessert! Christmas means steamed pudding to me, though I hardly wanted to make up a real Christmas pudding with hard sauce. Keep it simple. Instead, I found a recipe for an orange pudding, and though it took a little extra encouragement to escape the mold once it was cooked, it was a good idea. In fact, I've snacked on some leftover pudding, cold, this morning. It might have been more festive to add custard sauce or whipped cream, but in truth, we only wanted a little something by this point. A small piece each with a bit of dark chocolate quickly shaved over it. Just right!

It's all too easy for us, with our love of finer foods and the like, to go overboard at Christmas. Timing was one key here, but I think I made smart food/wine choices. Our first Christmas alone together, and really, it was a lovely one through and through.