Last year here on the blog, I wrote two posts on picking wine for Thanksgiving. It was the first time covering the subject for me, but it’s a tried and true annual staple for wine writers. And it’s often one that is forced and full of clichés from “there are no rules”! to “you must follow these tips!”

So instead of rehashing all of the suggestions and tips, I’m just going to keep it simple. Here are the links to last year’s posts:  Critics’ Tips and My Tips.  And below you’ll find two of the wines that I’m bringing to this year’s Thanksgiving dinner.

But first, here’s the MOST important tip that you’ll ever need – make sure you buy enough wine!

WHITE WINE PICK

2010 Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc + Viognier – $12

From the Winery: “This unique marriage of two varietals that would never share the same bottle in their native France unites the crisp, honeyed fruit of Chenin Blanc with the plush body, light floral aromas and juicy stone fruit notes of Viognier, for a wine that is both sophisticated and easy to enjoy.”

RED WINE PICK

2009 Erath Pinot Noir, Oregon – $19

From the Winery: “This lustrous beauty showcases aromas of raspberry pie with pleasing hints of mint, citrus and a provocative suggestion of smoke. Fresh and bright flavors on the palate are balanced with a blend of juicy cherry and racy pomegranate. An easy sipper yet enough acidity to pair beautifully with your favorite dish.”

Today is Food Day, so I thought I’d post a few things. First, if you haven’t heard of Food Day,  check it out.

Luckily for me, my job allows me to work on food issues full-time. Right now I’m working to improve U.S. food and farm policy (i.e., the “Farm Bill”) by expanding local and regional food systems. Back in August, one of my colleagues at UCS put out a great report, “Market Forces,” on the economic benefits of local and regional food. Since then we’ve been working on legislation to bolster federal support for local agriculture, which is going be introduced within the next week by Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (from the great state of Maine!) and Senator Sherrod Brown. You can read more about it in this press release from Congresswoman Pingree.  So to celebrate Food Day, you should click on this action alert from UCS and tell  your members of Congress to support this legislation.

Lastly, take a look at this excellent video from Chipotle (featuring a great Willie Nelson cover of one of my favorite Cold Play songs). It pretty much sums up what my day job is all about.

What would summer in Maine be without lobster? I’m not sure I can answer this question considering that the concept is entirely foreign to me.

A couple of weekends ago, I made the trip up to celebrate my parents 40th wedding anniversary. The night before the big festivities, and after two long days of preparation, we settled in for a classic Maine lobster dinner. Plain and simple – boiled and served with drawn butter for dipping. Add some corn on the cob on the side and it was a perfect meal.

Also, for future reference, eating a lobster dinner outdoors is pretty much mandatory. It’s always easier to clean up the inevitable mess and if it’s summer in Maine, so why not eat outside?

Fill a large pot with enough salted water to cover the lobsters. Bring to a boil and add the lobsters one by one. Cook for 5 minutes for the first pound and then 2-3 minutes more for each additional pound (For example, if you have three pounds of lobster, cook for 9-11 minutes). The lobsters are done when they are bright red or, for the technically minded, reach an internal temperature of 140 degrees.

Serve with drawn butter for dipping.

When people think of blueberries, they usually think of Maine. Rightly so. During the summer months, you can pretty much gauge the passage of time based on what berries are in season. And you know what’s in season based on what the roadside stands are selling. Luckily for me, we had a few well-cared for blueberry bushes at our house that turned out dozens of pints of berries every summer (they still do). Thanks to my mother’s excellent baking skills, we always had a bounty of blueberry pies and cakes to feast on.

While I might be a little bit ahead of blueberry season here in the mid-Atlantic, I couldn’t pass up the organic blueberries that were on sale at Whole Foods last Friday. At $2 per pint, it was too good a deal to miss. Some friends were hosting a barbecue on Sunday too, so a blueberry pie was in order.

After a phone call with my mother and consulting a few recipe books and blogs (The Joy of Cooking, How to Cook Everything, Simply Recipes), I gained two bits of essential blueberry pie baking knowledge. First, a butter crust is the way to go – forget the Crisco (this goes for all pies). Second, use flour with the berry mixture in order to prevent a soupy pie. Follow this advice and you’ll be on your way to a delicious pie. This was my best effort yet.

Blueberry Pie

Combine the flour, sugar and salt in a food processor and pulse for 2-3 seconds to combine. Add the cubed butter and process until blended and the mixture is corse, about 10 seconds. Put the mixture in large bowl and add the water. Combine with your hands until you can form into a ball. Cut the dough into even halves. Shape each half into a 4-6 inch disk, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Be sure to rinse the blueberries ahead of time and remove any remaining stems. In a large bowl, combine the blueberries, sugar, flour, lemon juice, lemon zest and salt and set aside for 10-20 minutes.

On a floured surface, roll one of the pastry dough discs into a 12-13 inch circle, about 1/8 inch thick. Fit the dough into a 9 inch pie pan, trimming any extra around the edges and leaving a 1/2 inch overhanging. Fill the pie with the blueberry mixture and dot with the small pieces of butter.

Roll out the second pastry dough disc to the same size as the first.  Carefully cover the pie with the crust and trim the edges to a 1/2 inch. Tuck the top dough under the bottom dough and crimp the edges. Whisk the eggs together with the water to make an egg wash. Use a pastry brush to and fully coat the top of the pie. Cut a few 1-2 inch vents in the pie. Place the pie on the middle rack in the oven and bake for 55-60 minutes.  You’ll also want to place a baking pan on the rack underneath to catch any spillover.

Let the pie cool completely before serving.

Pearled barley has become one of my new favorite ingredients and it’s great in risotto style dishes. The technique is essentially the same, but it requires a little less stirring than a traditional risotto. I found this recipe via Salon.com, but the original comes from the blog What Would Cathy Eat ?. As any and all bloggers and home cooks do, I improvised a little bit.

In a stock pot, bring 6 cups of salted water to a boil. Add the asparagus and cook for 2 minutes. Drain the asparagus into a colander and rinse under cold water for 1-2 minutes. Set aside.

In a large skillet or dutch oven, heat the olive oil. Add the onions and sweat for 3-4 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook for another 3-4 minutes, seasoning with salt and pepper as you go. Meanwhile, bring the vegetable stock to a simmer in a sauce pan.

Add the pearled barley to the skillet,stir until coated with oil and mixed in with the onions and mushrooms and cook for 1-2 minutes. Add the wine, stir to mix and cook until most of the wine has reduced and evaporated.

Add one or two ladles of stock to the skillet and cook until mostly evaporated, stirring occasionally. Continue adding the stock in this manner until the barley is tender but still a bit chewy. This should take about 30 minutes. If you run out of the stock, feel free to add water until you get the barley is done.

Once you’re finished adding the stock, bring the heat to low and stir in the butter and Parmesan cheese. Mix in the reserved asparagus, parsley and lemon zest. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

As with the wine used in the recipe, I recommend serving with a nice Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand.

Wishing a very Happy Mother’s Day to Pam, Melissa, Paulette and all of the moms out there!

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Quick post today, but I wanted to throw out a few wine picks in advance of this weekend’s Easter festivities. As with most holidays, Easter dinner is front and center and a time for family and friends to come together (after attending church, of course…). Most meals traditionally feature a main course of lamb or ham, so I recommend using that as your guide. For lamb, pinot noir or a merlot-dominent Bordeaux are great picks. For ham, you can’t go wrong with a dry reisling or any white with bright acidity.

4 Wine Picks for Easter

Last weekend I bought a cow. Not a whole cow. And no, I’m not keeping the cow out back – I bought the meat.  I was lucky enough to be included in a group of people who bought a half-share of a sustainably raised grass-fed cow. My friend Kirstin, a frequent commenter here on the blog, hooked me up with the group. The beef came from White House Meats, a DC area company that helps bridge the gap between farm and consumer by bringing locally raised meat to market. Read more about them and what they do here.

Our prized steer was one of the cows in the photo above; although we never found out which one, exactly. All told, the half-share came in around 120 pounds and with a variety of cuts, including ribeye steak, roasts, hanger steak, sirloin, hamburger meat, flat iron steak, liver, short ribs, marrow bones, and even the tongue. This is what we had to choose from:

Since it was the first time buying such a large share, the organizer of our group enlisted nine people to divide up the meat. This made the size more manageable and also provided an easy way for the group to particpate in the nose-to-tail, farm-to-table process. We divided up the meat through a draft – it was just like a fantasy baseball and tons of fun. Kirstin and I were stuck with a middle number, which wasn’t ideal, but we had a good strategy: pick the best cuts on the board with the most weight. That way, we could maximize the quality of our choices even if the options were limited because of our draft position. It worked well and I walked away with a couple of ribeye steaks, sirloin tips, a chuck roast, a good-sized piece of mock tender, a package of hamburger meat, and the prized liver and tongue. Prized in the sense that I was the only one that would take it. But I’ve got plans for those, don’t worry.

The meat had been butchered the day before we picked it up and was about as fresh as it could be, so I had to cook up one of the ribeyes on Saturday night. How did it taste? It was great. I kept the preparation simple with a seasoning of salt, pepper and thyme, and cooked the steak in a cast-iron skillet to medium rare. Many steaks can be bland and fall flat in terms of delivering a clear steak flavor, but this grass-fed steak had a very distinct flavor profile. And while I hate to sound hokey by saying that the steak tasted “of a certain place” or had a “nice terroir,” it was clear that the way in which the cow had been raised had imparted a unique flavor profile that set it apart from a conventional steak. Combined with the knowledge and appreciation of the fact that the cow had been sustainably raised adds another layer of satisfaction too.

This isn’t to say that I don’t like a well marbled steak and the flavor that comes with it – I do. But I think grass-fed can have a well-deserved place at the table as well. And from a personal perspective, supporting sustainably raised meat is important to me.

I don’t normally talk about my job here on the blog, but a few months ago my work life started to line up more with my personal interests in food and food issues. In January, I began working as the Washington Representative for the Food & Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS is a leading science-based policy organization with a 40-year history of working for a healthier environment and a safer world. In my new position, I’m responsible for managing the policy and legislative advocacy side of my program’s work on issues related to sustainable agriculture and promoting a safer food system.

Which brings me back to grass-fed beef. Grass-fed directly intersects two issues that I now work on at UCS – reducing agriculture’s contribution to climate change and eliminating the unneccessary use of antibiotics in farm animals. Grass-fed beef scores high marks in both regards. On the first, it’s widley known that the agriculture system as a whole contributes signifcantly to global warming. Unfortunately, it often goes unnoticed. But recently, one of my colleagues at UCS put out a great report, called Raising the Steaks, that examined beef production’s contribution to global warming and, more specifically, how pasture and grass-fed beef can be a big part of the solution.

As for antibiotics, limiting their use in farm animals is incredibly important for protecting public health from the threat of antibiotic resistance. All told, agriculture is responsible for the consumption of 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States. This is due to the fact that our industrial scale agriculture system is largely unsuitable for properly raising animals for meat. So they pump them full of drugs. But that comes at a cost. Higher antibiotics use leads to antibiotic resistance and superbugs that can spread to people on the farm and through our food. That’s bad news bears, especially if you get sick due to an antibiotic-resistant bacteria infection, which is much more difficult and costly to treat. Lately I’ve been spending much of my time pushing for legislation that will require the FDA to limit this unnecessary and dangerous use of antibiotics in farm animals.

So that’s what I do. And luckily for me, my grass-fed cow was antibiotic free and climate friendly, so all the more reason to buy grass-fed beef!

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To bring it back to the beef, please do check out White House Meats. In addition to beef, they sell pork and poultry products as well. The prices are great too – around $9/pound for beef and $5/pound for pork. Shares in various sizes are available through their draft events, which are held a couple of times a month, and you can also arrange for a custom order. The drafts and pick-ups take place on scheduled dates at A.M. Wine Shop in Adams Morgan, Christ Church on Capitol Hill, and Cross Fit in South Arlington. Click here for more details on how to purchase.

There’s nothing better than returning home to the smell of freshly baked bread. You just don’t notice it as much if you stick around while the bread is baking. So after I popped this loaf in the oven, I went out for a quick run. It was a cold day too, so returning to an oven-warmed apartment that smelled of bread was a major bonus. It always reminds me of close family friends – their house is always filled with the smell of bread, pie or whatever delicious baked good they have whipped up. They also keep a very well-stocked cellar with shelves and shelves of canned goods and preserves, but that’s for another post.

In the French toast post from a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had made the sandwich bread myself. Here’s the recipe. I recommend using the bread as soon as you can, ideally while still warm. Two days at most.

Using a stand mixer with the dough hook, combine 1 3/4 cups flour, the salt, yeast and sugar in the bowl. Turn the machine on low and mix together for 5 seconds. With the machine running on low speed, add the oil or butter and milk. Increase to medium speed and mix until the ingredients form a smooth mixture. Reduce speed to low and slowly add the remaining flour. Return to medium speed and mix until a sticky ball forms and it pulls away from the side of the bowl.

Knead by hand on a lightly floured surface for one minute and shape into a ball. Grease a large bowl with a little oil, add the dough and turn until coated. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise until it doubles in size, about 1-2 hours.

Punch down the dough to release any gas. Again, working on a lightly floured surface, shape the dough into a ball. Cover and let rest for 15 minutes.

Using just enough flour to prevent the dough from sticking, flatten the dough and shape it into a rectangle. Fold the long sides of the dough to the middle and pinch together with your fingers. Fold under the ends of the loaf as well.

Grease a 9 x 5 inch loaf pan with oil or butter. Put the loaf in the pan, seem side down, and flatten with the back of your hand. Cover and let rise until the top of the dough is nearly level with the top of the pan.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Brush the top of the loaf with water and place in the oven. Bake for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool the loaf on a wire rack.

One of my New Year’s food resolutions for 2011 is to make more bread. While I mentioned keeping a sourdough starter going throughout the year in the resolution, the general idea is to focus more on yeast breads. And with a new KitchenAid stand mixer now firmly positioned on my countertop (partly because there’s no where else to put it and mostly because it’s so heavy), prepping bread dough is now a whole lot easier.

A couple of weekends ago I decided to try my hand at a loaf of sandwich bread. Plain old sandwiches weren’t my main objective, although I did make myself a mean grilled PB & banana sandwich at one point. No, I had bigger plans in store – namely French Toast. For most people, I think, French toast and waffles sit on a lofty perch reserved for the breakfast entrée elite. They’re the special breakfast dishes that your parents would make on lazy weekends or the every so often calorie loaded brunch binge. And while I’m sure there are firmly established camps on both sides of the French toast and waffle divide, I’ve always been in the middle. Deciding between the two usually comes down to whatever I’m craving at the moment. And once I decided to make sandwich bread, I knew I wanted to make French toast.

The recipe for this French toast is fairly traditional and comes from the Joy of Cooking. I added the walnuts and bananas, which are a perfect match with French toast and something of a standard option on the brunch circuit. On related of a side note, I highly recommend reading the chapter from Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life that tells of her father’s version of French toast. It’s a great read and not just for those that love French toast.

In a bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, rum and salt. Fully soak the bread slices in the mixture one at a time and reserve on a cooling rack set over a baking pan.

Heat a large skillet to medium-high and add equal amounts butter and oil, about 1 tablespoon each. Once the butter foams, and working in batches as needed, add 3-4 slices of bread to the pan. Cook until nicely browned on each side. Repeat with the remaining slices, adding butter and oil to the pan as needed.

Meanwhile, toast the walnuts in a pan over medium heat, tossing frequently for about 5 minutes.

Serve two slices of French toast per plate and top with the banana slices, walnuts and maple syrup.