I made this delicious dish this evening.
Ingredients:
Reduce a good red wine, adding honey and the lemon zest. Assemble the prosciutto over the bread or brioche. Top with figs, and then drizzle with wine reduction sauce.
Top with the cheese and serve, room temperature.
I enjoyed the movie Bottle Shock, about wine, and a curious “contest” of wines held in France in 1976.
Learn more here, and how California emerged on the world wine scene.
I’ve always been a fan of waffles. Best I got, likely growing up, were Eggo’s. My mom would always exclaim “I don’t like Belgian waffles, yuck.”
So — we avoided eating anything like that. I am not sure what Belgian was, or what the ingredients were that made it taste bad, but I too stayed away from Belgian (style) waffles until at least in my 20s.
Of course, I don’t know what a waffle tastes like in Belgium. A friend insists they are made with whipped egg whites. For me, it’s all the shape. Big holes, thicker. Yummier, in fact.
So, I recently found this post from Blogger extraordinaire, Orangette. Lots of comments. Lots of netizens who like waffles. Good people, every last one.
She suggests the following recipe as a favorite, that will work in your thin or Belgian-style waffle maker.
I would like to suggest a few changes.
First, use ¼ Buckwheat flour and only ½ cup all-purpose flour. Second, skip the white sugar. Use brown sugar. And Molly suggests splitting the milks, 50% between Buttermilk and regular (whole) milk. I’d go 75%/25% on that. Following a commenter’s suggestion, more buttermilk means more lift from the baking soda and powder.
Cornstarch was a new ingredient for me in a homemade waffle, but I think it works great for that super texture.
Waffles! Celebrate life.
Visit Carytown here in Richmond, and you can dine with other localvores at Mezzanine 3433, a restaurant serving creative, locally-sourced cuisine.
I started with their tomato stack (a seemingly reconstructed sliced tomato, with slices interleaved with cheese), a play on a caprese salad, which was good. Even better was a refreshing cocktail that was icy cold (apropos for the night I dined here) and tart.
The fried green tomatoes were good too, but overall there were far too many tomatoes and too little of the accompanying crabmeat salad. Both appetizers needed salt.
For my entrée I tried their special featuring two large crab cakes with a bacony potato salad. The potato salad came with a serious kick of spice that I enjoyed, but since bacon was a featured ingredient, I could have used more of that. Again, salt was needed to really flavor this food. The crab cakes were well-browned, but ultimately too big consider the amount of sauce presented on the plate. That really is a very weak complaint. The sauce was good. Provide more!
I wouldn’t have ordered this dish again, if it became mainstream: there were too many instances of finding shell in my crabcakes. That turned me off.
We also ordered a menu entrée of short ribs, and that was stupendous. It has a delicious sweet sauce, and the short ribs weren’t too greasy, and had that most tender texture that’s hard to come by, without any bones getting in the way.
So, while not a perfect first visit at Mezzanine 3433, I will go back. Seasoning can always be corrected with a stealth salt cellar and I really support using fresh, locally-provisioned ingredients.
With summer being a ripe time for tomatoes, I created this composed salad.
The asparagus was marinated in lemon juice after being parboiled for 3 minutes to set the color. Prosciutto, salame, basil/EVOO-marinated mozzarella cheese, three types of tomatoes, and a olive-y dressing complete the dish.