Saturday, August 09, 2003

Today we bought a grill!!   . . . in preparation for the next onslaught of our home-buying saga, which promises to come to an end next week at last.   Perhaps it was the good news that the waiting will soon come to an end that brought about last night’s sudden extravagance as we walked the aisles at Fairway Market.  Perhaps it’s just that we’ve abandoned salads and have decided to COOK again which in itself is probably a result of last week’s fresh produce extravaganza, or just the outward expression of the sentiment we have air conditioning – let’s use it! Or maybe just the admission that a couple of gourmands can only live on salads for so long.    Anyhow, dinner ended up being sautéed shrimp and scallops, with a sauce of sweet corn (cut off the cob) cherry tomatoes, a couple of crimini mushrooms (for depth), some of last week’s fresh onions, and lots of fresh thyme, cooked with little fish stock from the freezer and a little of the cheap Pinot Grigio delle Venezie I’d sold earlier in the day. (As an aside, this wine turns out to be a great cooking wine – nice and acidic and not too much alcohol, plus I don’t feel guilty about using it for cooking, nor is it too nasty to drink if you can’t resist a nip before dinner.)  All this cooked together nicely and made a nice fresh sweet-and-crunchy sauce for the soft, sweet and scallop-y scallops and the crunchy shrimp-y shrimps.  I realized as we were eating it that I had A). forgotten to add some butter to thicken up the sauce and make it richer and B). forgotten to buy more butter at Fairway, which is probably why I forgot to put it in.  (And I call my self a Julie/Julia reader?!)   Would the sauce have been that much better with the butter?  Yes, it would have – the sauce would have been thicker, and it’s true what they say:  fat is flavor.  The corn would have tasted brighter, for sure (ooh corn loves butter!).  But y’know what?  It was nice that there was no butter because after we each ate a heaping plate full, plus a little more, we felt satisfied, not stuffed full, which was nice.  I reiterate – nothing like a heaping plate of summer vegetables!  (even if they came from Fairway since it was the end of the week and we <sigh> have no garden yet!)   And the lack of butter was fully made up for by the fact that we had a bottle of the new Bregeon (2002) Muscadet to drink.  Now, don’t get me wrong – the 2001 was amazing stuff.  Rich and yeasty and full, where most Muscadet is sharp and acidic and metallic.  I’m surprised they even let him call the stuff Muscadet, truth be told, since it’s so different than what anyone else makes in the appellation.  The 2002, on the other hand (while it still had that nice yeasty nose and smelled just a bit more minerally than any other Muscadet can manage) had the prickle of effervescence and the light body and alcohol that says “I am Muscadet” and just cries out for seafood!!  You know, this wine must explain the reason why I held out for the extravagence factor.  I think I must have noticed the bottle in the fridge while I was peeking to see what we needed at the store (did I even peek? Surely I would have noticed that we needed butter!) and that’s why I insisted that we HAD to have scallops with corn and cherry tomatoes, no matter how dear the scallops.  Or maybe I had just read the entry in the Kermit Lynch newsletter earlier in the day that described the wine like this:  “light in alcohol, bone-dry but not sharp, fresh as a daisy, a true thirst-quencher that lends itself to larger-sized swallows, everything a fish or shellfish needs postmortem, a pleasant price. . . .” and so was in the back of my mind concocting the perfect meal to go with this wine, not realizing we had a bottle. . . .   At any rate, I wish ALL Muscadets were that good.  The world would be a far better place.  And it would also be nice to have scallops every night of the week, especially served with corn and cherry tomatoes!  I’m sure I’ll change my tune once (come the weekends, anyhow) we can grill lamb chops on our glorious Weber (22” – gotta have the large size!) in our very own back yard and serve them with lettuce so fresh it’s still kicking.  What will we drink then?  Hm, I think a nice cool Cru Beaujolais?  Perhaps a spicy Cotes du Rhone, maybe from one of the villages that turns out more elegant wines, like Sablet?  Something from Provence?  Stay tuned. . . .   For now the grill is in its box on the landing outside our hallway, dreaming of its future uses, we hope.     7:00:43 PM    comment []