10/10/10 - Chicken Piccata!

One issue we have with LA that we believe we have mentioned is the lack of good Italian food at a reasonable price. So, we have taught ourselves to make some of our basic favorites. Tonight we take on the chicken piccata. Our version is very close to a chicken francese

The Wine Kitty recommends the Zaca Mesa '07 Z Blanc to go with the chicken dish. While Zaca Mesa is mostly known for their delicious Syrahs, this is a buttery, oaky, golden white drinks like a high-end Napa chardonnay but is a blend of 74% Roussane, 22% Grenache & 4% Viognier. You can only get this wine at their winery or through their online store. It retails for about $32 ($29 if you are a member of ZM's wine club).

Chicken Piccata


2 large skinless boneless chicken breast halves
2 Tbsp butter, room temperature
1 tablespoon all purpose flour
2 tablespoons olive oil
¼ cup dry white wine
¼ cup chicken stock
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
2 Tbsp drained capers
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
Salt/pepper

Place chicken between 2 large sheets of plastic wrap. Lightly pound chicken to 1/2-inch thickness. Salt and pepper chicken pieces. Coat each chicken piece in flour.

Heat 1 Tbsp oil and 1 Tbsp butter in a large skillet. Add chicken and cook until golden and cooked completely, about 3 minutes per side.

Transfer chicken to plate and keep warm.

Mix 1 Tbsp butter and 1 Tbps flour in small bowl until smooth. Bring wine, stock and lemon juice to boil in skillet over medium-high heat. Whisk in butter-flour mixture and stir for a minute until sauce thickens. Stir in capers and parsley. Season to taste. Pour sauce over chicken and serve or toss chicken in pan with sauce and serve.

We paired the piccata with our grilled romaine leaves. If you are carving some carbs, you can also whip up a side of spaghetti or penne and use the extra lemon butter sauce on the pasta.

Saturday, September 4 - Cocktail Time!

Here is a refreshing cocktail to get you through a hot summer day. Mike bought a variety pack of Absolut as Costco today for $30, so we had to figure out a fun drink to make while we were watching the US Open on television (all day).

RASPBERRY SUMMER PUNCH

2 shots ABSOLUT Vodka
1 shot Black Currant Liqueur
1 shot Fresh Raspberry Puree
1/2 shot Fresh Lemon Juice
1/2 shot Simple Syrup
Champagne
1 Whole Fresh Blackberry

Add vodka, black currant liqueur, raspberry puree, lemon juice, simple syrup and crushed ice. Stir. Fill with crushed ice. Top with champagne. Garnish with a blackberry.

We served with a small snack: pecans, topped with a mixture of maple syrup, salt and cayenne pepper, which we roasted in our toaster over for 8 minutes.

For dinner, we made our orange teriyaki salmon with grilled romaine.

GRILLED ROMAINE

1 head of romaine hearts
2 tbsp. EVOO
2 strawberries
5 cherry tomatoes

Dressing:
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
salt
pepper
celery salt

fresh oregano
fresh parsley

Halve romaine hearts. Brush with olive oil. Put on grill for 5 minutes.  Add cherry tomatoes, sliced strawberries, drizzle with dressing.

Saturday, August 21 - Ode to Syrah

Tonight, we'd like to ramble a little about Syrah. 

For dinner, we went with a favorite that you'll find in one of our previous posts, a big fat steak with our basic teriyaki/honey marinade.  We grilled a 16 oz. ribeye, split the steak between us and plated it with grilled onion, zucchini and mushrooms.  A simple and perfect meal on its own; an over-the-top meal when paired with an incredible small-lot syrah.

Tonight, we went with a 2006 Calcareous Syrah.  Calcareous Vineyard is located in Paso Robles, CA and they make several wines -- mostly cabs, pinots, syrahs and chards -- of under 1,000 cases. 

This wine is dark in color with big cherry flavors and a soft vanilla finish.  It's extremely fruity for a syrah, but it remains big and bold and worked really well with our steak and veggies.

Laura and I both love big red wines; syrahs and syrah blends definitely fall into that category.  Most of our experience comes from our ventures to California wineries, especially those in the Santa Ynez area, Paso Robles and Napa/Sonoma.  We'd like to talk about a few of our favorites.

Pipestone Vineyards is a small family winery in Paso Robles, CA. They make delicious, hand-crafted, small-lot Rhone-style wines.  Their 2006 Syrah and 2005 Reserve Syrah go for $32 and $45 respectively; they both rock! 

When in Paso Robles, we always make sure to stop at Pipestone; it's our go-to winery.  They have quaint grounds and cozy tasting room, and every time we have visited, the owners have both been in the tasting room pouring wine.   We love their friendly style and we love their wines.

This past trip to Paso Robles, we stumble on Calcereous.  We now have another must-visit winery on our list when we return.

Sunday, September 5 - Just for the Halibut

HALIBUT GRIBICHE

Ideally, this should be served on a bed of wilted spinach, but we didn't have any in the house.

We served with a 2007 Trefethen Harmony Chardonnay.



INGREDIENTS

For the gribiche:
1/2 cup diced tomato
3 tablespoons minced onion
3 tablespoons minced cornichons
2 tablespoons capers
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Salt/pepper
1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon
1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley
1 scallion

For the fish:
2 - (6- to- 7-ounce) pieces of halibut fillet
Salt/pepper
Olive oil



To finish:
1/2 cup minced onion
2 large garlic cloves, minced
1 pound baby spinach
Coarse salt
4 large eggs, poached

PREPARATION

For the gribiche:

1.Stir the tomato, shallots, cornichons, capers, olive oil, vinegar, and lemon juice together in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Leave it at room temperature.

For the fish:

Season the halibut on both sides with salt and pepper.

Cook fish in a frying pan with a few tablespoons of oil and a touch of lemon juice.

Just before serving, heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Saute onion and garlic until soft. Add the spinach and saute, stirring constantly, until the spinach wilts. Season it with salt and scrape it into a strainer to drain.

Stir the tarragon, parsley, and scallion into the gribiche.

Make a bed of spinach on each plate. Remove the fish from the oil with a fish spatula and blot it dry with paper towels. Set it on the spinach and place a poached egg on top of each piece. Spoon some gribiche onto each egg and around the plates. Serve immediately.

Sunday, August 1 - Salmon with Orange Teriyaki Glaze

Cherry Tomato Salad

1 lb. cherry tomatoes, sliced in half

1 Tbsp garlic, minced

1 tsp crushed red pepper

5 basil leaves, minced

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

¼ lb mozzarella, cubed

Salt/pepper

Cut tomatoes in half and season with salt and pepper.

Combine salt, pepper, garlic, pepper, basil, olive oil and vinegar and whisk together. Refrigerate until chilled.

Combine tomatoes with mozzarella and spoon into 4 martini glasses. Spoon 1 tablespoon of the dressing over tomatoes and mozzarella in each glass.

We like to serve these in a martini glass. We got the idea from the amazing & delectable Lahaina Grill in Maui, where we went for our honeymoon. Mike still raves that meal was one of (if not THE) best meal he's had in is life. If you visit their website, their heirloom cherry tomato salad is shown on its front page!






SALMON WITH ORANGE TERIYAKI GLAZE


12 oz. of fresh Alaskan wild caught Coho salmon

1/3 cup orange juice
1/3 cup teriyaki sauce
3 tbsp. sesame oil
2 tsbp. fresh chopped ginger
1 tbsp. fresh lime juice


Mix the ingredients together in a baking dish. Marinate the salmon in the liquid for 1-2 hours. As the fish is about to go on the grill, give it a light dusting of sesame seeds.


Grill the salmon no more than 5 minutes per side. A full 10 minutes will make the salmon a medium to medium well. If you like your salmon a bit rarer (which we don't), only grill it for about 7 minutes total.


We grilled a few mushrooms (with some extra sauce poured over them), and then steamed some broccoli to add to the dish. We tossed the broccoli with a little butter, lemon juice, salt & pepper. Also as a side dish, we added a lemongrass rice that we picked up at Sprouts for about $2 a packet. It was a cheap shortcut, and we wished we had put a bit more effort into the rice!


To offset the citrus in the sauce, we chose a spicy but smooth Pinot to go with the dish...(Sabrina helped us pick it out.)

We were driving through the Santa Barbara area and couldn't help making a quick trip up to Santa Ynez tp stock up on some of our favorites (Curtis & Gainey). When we were waiting for the restaurant in Los Olivos to open for lunch, we happened upon the Byron tasting room. We normally avoid tasting rooms in town since we much prefer the experience of visiting the vineyard, but sometimes that's not an option. Byron's wines were absolutely delicious. They are best knows for their chards, but they also make a killer Pinot. We pulled out their basic Pinot which retails for about $25, but we also HIGHLY recommend their Julia's Vineyard Pinot (more expensive at $40 a bottle)....this wine comes from the same clone vineyard as the Pinots we love from Cambria. Dare we say Byron does a little better job with their Pinot from Julia's Vineyard than Cambria does...

Sunday, July 18 - Surf and Turf / Zaca Mesa Syrah

Today, Laura and I indulged in a mid-afternoon dinner.  It was a big, colorful meal, a surf and turf dinner with 4 sides - grilled onion, green beans, spinach and sweet potato.

We did the usual with the lobster tail and the NY strip steak ... melted butter and paprika on the lobster and broiled for 7 minutes - teriyaki, honey and pepper on the steak.  The onion was drizzled with oil and seasoned with salt and pepper and grilled 6 minutes a side just like the steaks.  The spinach was wilted in a large frying pan and tossed with a touch of butter, salt and pepper.  The green beans were steamed for several minutes and tossed in a small frying pan with the same. Most of our veggies came from a new farmer's market that opened in Culver City called Sprouts. The lobster tails were on special this week for $4.99 each. The green beans we grew ourselves from seed in our outdoor patio garden. They were delicious!!

Our meal deserved a killer wine. We paired it with the Mesa Reserve Syrah from Zaca Mesa, an incredible central coast winery on Foxen Canyon Road in Los Olivos.  This particular vintage ... 100% syrah, ...726 cases produced ... 93 points from Wine Enthusiast .... delicious and smooth as silk.  Deep and dark in color with flavors of blackberries and smoky oak, it retails for $42 a bottle and can be enjoyed now or over the next 10 - 12 years.

Simple, easy, and delicious.

Now we're off to the movies to get our minds bent by "Inception"!!

Saturday, July 17 - Locanda Positano Review

OK, we've been gone a while. A trip to the Jersey shore with lots of yummy clambakes. Now we're back in LA-LA land, and decided to go out to dinner tonight to the newest restaurant in our neighborhood. Anything with the name "Positano" in the title, where the owners are from Florence, and everything is supposed to be fresh-fresh-fresh, sign us up!

Locanda Positano opened 3 months ago in a tiny space that used to be a dingy Mexican restaurant. It's on a less-than scenic strip of Lincoln Blvd. in Marina del Rey, a few doors down from Walgreen's. (In fact, we recommend parking in the Walgreen's lot, because parking in their lot is dodgy at best.) Make a reservation on opentable.com, because there are only 10 tables in the restaurant. The inside is decorated in shades of pale yellow and cream. It's quite charming, but the tables are very close together. You'll be greeted with a hearty "Buona Sera" when you walk through the door, and it seems like everyone working in the restaurant speaks Italian better than English. There are a few nightly specials written on a small chalkboard. We had to try the melone prosciutto with fresh mozzarella. In fact, we ate it so quickly, Laura forgot to take a picture! The melon was succulent, and the mozzarella was perfect.

We don't know our way around Italian wines as well as we do around California wines, so we asked our server for a recommendation. We love a big Amarone, but their least expensive Amarone was $88 on the wine menu. The server really didn't know what she was talking about, but recommended a Brunello that she said was similar to the Amarone. It was $60.

We weren't blown away by the wine...it was too licorice-tasting and acidic, but you can't win them all. This wine was also available but the glass, so we would have been better served by being offered a taste first before committing to the full bottle.

For our second appetizer, Laura ordered the artichoke salad and Mike ordered the simple insalata mista. Mike thought his salad was over-salted, and Laura didn't like the fact that they put red onions on the salad, because she is allergic to red onion. However, the artichoke salad -- in Italian the Carciofini Con Scaglie di Parmigiano e Arugola di Campo-- ($11.50) did not disappoint. It was quite unique and delicious. It was dressed with olive oil, lemon, salt, pepper and parmesan. It also came with a little bit of rocket (arugula) and some purple cherry tomatoes. Yum! Laura ate every bit of it as well.

For our entrees, we stuck with our favorites. Laura ordered the linguine con vongole ($18), because as she has said before, she can tell a good Italian restaurant from a bad one based on how they make either linguine vongole or a veal piccata. Mike got the seafood risotto -- the Risotto Positano -- for $20. Both our our seafood was a little disappointing. We both had a few soft and gritty pieces of clams or mussels.

The risotto was not cooked to perfection. It tasted a little bit like a rice pudding! So, both our entrees missed the mark a bit.

We were full after meal, so didn't have room for dessert. Still, dinner was $150 plus tip. Not cheap.

We couldn't help but compare Locanda Positano to Mosto Enoteca, which is right at the end of our street in an incredibly unimpressive strip mall. If anyone reading this has ever come to visit us, we have taken them to Mosto, and have never had a bad meal there. While we are always in favor of supporting local businesses, I think the next time we're craving Italian, we're going to blow our $150 at Mosto....