Wining in the year

Yesterday I stopped at QFC and picked up a bottle of moscato d’asti, our favorite special occasion sparkling wine. If you’ve never tried this wine, I highly recommend it–it’s light (5.5 alcohol), tastes like a peach, and has soft, refreshing bubbles. (In Italian, it’s *frizzante* rather than *spumante*.)

Ideally, at least. The bottle I bought had gone flat. “Do you think I should return this?” I asked Laurie.

“I think returning a bottle of wine on New Year’s Day and saying it didn’t have bubbles is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she replied.

Here’s to 2009!

The arepa guy

When I was a teenager, my mother’s father, Alex, married a woman named Carmen and moved to his new wife’s hometown of Caracas, Venezuela. My family went to visit them, and Grandpa Alex, a Jewish New Yorker, had clearly found his niche. He took us all over the city on foot–in his late 70s, he was in much better shape than any of his descendants–and to all sorts of Venezuelan restaurants. This was before South American all-you-can-eat beef restaurants became ubiquitous in the US, and what I remember best were the *churrascarias*–and the *arepas.*

Arepas are Venezuela’s daily bread. We ate breakfast every day at a place called Doña Arepota, which loosely translates as “she of the big arepas.” (I find this just as funny now as when I was sixteen.) I’d order a dish called, in Spanish, something like “cowboy eggs”: fried eggs with spiced beef braised until falling apart, served with arepas. The puck-shaped corn cakes were pan-fried and then baked. Made from parcooked corn flour, they had a crusty exterior and moist, doughy interior. We each ate several arepas per day.

Not long after we returned from Venezuela, Grandpa Alex died. I’ve never been back to Caracas, and I figured arepas would have to stay a blurry memory. Then I picked up the new Cook’s Illustrated book, The Best International Recipe, and there they were. The corn flour (*masarepa*) was easy to find at a Latin grocery in downtown Seattle, and I decided to make arepas for Christmas lunch at my parents’ house. They have few ingredients (corn flour, salt, baking powder, water) and are simple to form. I made two fillings: diced chicken thighs with lime juice, cheese, scallions, and cilantro, and braised flank steak with tomatoes and onions, a simplified *ropa vieja.*

The arepas were a hit–crunchy and hot, with piquant fillings that helped to counteract the effects of too much Christmas candy. Iris wanted hers with chicken and lots of lime juice. My younger brothers (who were twelve when we went to Venezuela and are now, absurdly, twenty-seven) noted that my arepas were smaller than what we had in Caracas. I can explain that. I’m Don Arepita.

Now who wants pie?

So, Matthew, how’s the book going?

Fine, thanks for asking. As you can probably tell, I don’t want to talk about it much until it’s done. I’d rather not wear out its welcome before it’s actually, y’know, published.

But I do have to mention this. My friends and former Seattleites Anita and Cameron over at Married with Dinner are testing some recipes for me. I sent them my recipe for beer-braised short ribs with wheat berries, and I’m glad I did, because they made it with 100 percent local (to the Bay Area) ingredients, they made it look much better than it ever looks at my house, and they called it an “unpublished masterpiece.” Check it out!

I’m not just horn-tooting, though. When I forwarded their post to Laurie, she said, “That’s nice, but when are you going to make the pot pie?” Chicken pot pie with cheddar biscuit crust did sound pretty terrific. So I made it for dinner tonight. It was great, and I can explain the reason for its greatness in one word: parsnips. I mean, I enjoyed the biscuit topping, made with leaf lard and two kinds of cheese, but the parsnips were a brilliant touch. Potatoes would have made for a really boring dish. And you can get top-quality parsnips this time of year; ours were from Willie Green’s.

The pie was so good, it’s practically a published masterpiece.