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  • Restaurant Redux Part 2

    Did that last post inspire you to gather your recipes and put together a business plan? Have you been thinking "I throw great dinner parties and I make a heckuva salsa, why don’t I open my own Tex-West place?"

    Whoa there, Nelly. There’s more to it than you think. Thank goodness the BBCA is around to provide you with the proof.

    Last Restaurant Standing is a new show in which 9 amateur food lovin’ couples try to open and run their own restaurants. They’re judged by a panel of "inspectors" who’ll dole out challenges to the three lowest-rated (unlike real inspectors who’ll just pad-lock your doors like they did a few weeks ago to the new cowboy in town).

    What could happen? Water pipes might burst over the newly set room just weeks before opening (that happened last month) or the armored car could get lost and just give up for the day, leaving you with no cash on hand (that happened last year). Through all the pressure and inevitable foibles, the teams must outlast each other for a chance to win backing by Raymond Blanc for their own, real restaurant. If they still want one by then.

    Grab a sneak peek on Feb 7th at 8pm.

  • The Three Pointer: Two Straight

    Copyright 2008 NBAE (Photo by David Sherman/NBAE via Getty Images)

    Game #41, Home Game #19: Phoenix 107, Minnesota 117

    Season record: 7-34

    1. About That Small Lineup…

    I can argue that three players are operating away from their natural position, that the defense is terrible, that opponents who play fundamentally sound "playoff style" basketball will destroy them, and that this is clearly not the best way to build for the future. But coach Randy Wittman and any other proponent of the small lineup the Wolves have been trotting out lately can offer up a pretty strong rebuttal: With Al Jeffeson at center flanked by Ryan Gomes and Rashad McCants as the forwards and the dual-point backcourt of Marko Jaric and Sebastian Telfair comprising the starting five, Minnesota’s record is 3-3. With every other lineup, the mark is 4-31.

    During tonight’s whupping of Phoenix–the game wasn’t nearly as close as the 117-107 final margin–the Wolves certainly didn’t play "small." They completely dominated the battle of the boards, essentially splitting the rebounds of their own misses (grabbing 22 offensive boards versus the Suns’ 23 defensive rebounds) while owning their defensive glass by margin of 26-3. The backcourt fed the paint: Jaric and Telfair had a combined assist-to-turnover ratio of 18/2, while the frontcourt was merely 6/6, and the Wolves racked up 56 points in the paint (versus 44 for Phoenix) and 26 second chance points (to Phoenix’s 6). Oh, and for the second time in three meetings this season, "center" Al Jefferson absolutely destroyed "center" Amare Stoudemire when the Wolves had the ball.

    More than any game thus far this season, Jefferson played offense with a killer instinct. The raw numbers are pretty revealing: 39 points, 14 free throws, 8 offensive rebounds. Stoudemire was helpless. Or, better put, the Suns starting giving him a lot of help, with as many as two or three others collapsing on Jefferson when he received the rock, and it really didn’t matter. If for some reason Jefferson didn’t succeed at first, he got the ball back and tried again. The dude finished with 29 FGA (making 15) and 14 FTA (making 9) and it didn’t feel like he was hogging the ball. That’s when you know you are having fun.

    A brief pause here, while I drop a fly in the punchbowl. Jefferson’s utter lack of defense was nearly as monumental as his voracious offense. Stoudemire was 14 of 16 from the field and one of his two misses was a meaningless trey chucked with three seconds left in the game. He scored 33 points in the 29:40 that Jefferson was guarding him, which is why Jefferson finished the game with a team-worst minus -4. That doesn’t change the fact that Jefferson was the dominant force in a Wolves’ victory, because he most indisputably was. But it does neatly encapsulate the spectacularly half-assed season Jefferson is putting together. Okay, let’s move on.

    In fact let’s conclude this first point by giving Wittman the chance to explain why he likes the small lineup, in response to a postgame question from the PiPress’s Rick Alonzo. "I just like the spacing with Ryan at the 4 and with having our two ball-handlers in the backcourt, not turning the ball over." Earlier, Witt had opined that flexing Gomes between the 3 and the 4 may have something to do with his current resurgence: "He can get open more easily on the perimeter with a 4 on him, and he can post up more easily on a 3."

    2. Kudos Chorus Line

    However Gomes is stepping up his game, it sure is fun to watch. Wittman mentioned two "huge" shots he made, a left-handed flip from 5 feet out cutting across the lane late in the third period, and a baseline jumper midway through the 4th quarter, both of them after Phoenix had cut the lead to 11 and were threatening to get it beneath that psychologically important double-digit deficit. For me it was the way Gomes mixed it up in the area from directly underneath the hoop out to the sidelines; keeping rebounds in play, chasing after loose balls, making the right interior pass, constantly moving without the ball, and laying a body on his man on defense. It seemed fairly obvious that Shawn Marion mailed this one in–he attempted just three shots and grabbed three rebounds in 32:33–but Gomes’s dogged demeanor successfully encouraged that malaise. Put it this way, when Marion’s matchup outscores him by 7, outrebounds him by 6, and gets just as many steals, blocks and assists, the Suns’ odds of winning drop dramatically.

    Kudos also go out to Marko Jaric, the man I have nominated to head to the bench in favor of a center Chris Richard. Wittman has done exactly the opposite, sitting Marko a grand total of 3:48 *combined* the past two games. And in those two victories, Marko has compiled remarkably similar stats, registering 15 points, 8 rebounds and 10 assists tonight after going for 16-8-10 versus Golden State on Monday. For a man who hates to come out and pouts when he isn’t playing and/or the team is losing, Marko needs to cherish the current harmonic convergence of his Iron Man status (others include superrapper Ghostface Killah and comic book superhero Tony Starks, neither of whom have supermodel Adriana Lima at his elbow) on a team with a winning streak, however modest. Life is good, even when the thermometer says -16.

    Kudos also to the trio coming off the Wolves’ bench, and to Wittman for keeping the rotation down to 8. How many times have we seen the Wolves and their opponent feel each other out, play on relatively even terms, and then have the opponent explode for a 10 or 12 point splurge in the second quarter to open up a formidable gap that essentially dictates the course of the game from there on out? Wasn’t that pretty much what happened when Minnesota travelled to Phoenix less than a week ago? Well tonight it went the other way, the way of the Wolves, and the splurge-makers were the subs, Corey Brewer, Antoine Walker, and Craig Smith.

    I must confess that I still cringe when Brewer goes up for a jumper. But unlike, say, Bassy Telfair, who seems to weigh the validity of his missive on the shot-selection chart even as he is leaving his feet, Brewer continues to play as if he knows damn well what is or isn’t a good shot, and if it’s a good shot in the flow of the game, then he’s going to take it. And guess what? Tonight’s 6-11 FG makes him 38-82 over the last 16 games (a pretty solid sample size), which is 46.3%, or better than the NBA average of 45.3%. Yeah, the fact that he hasn’t hit a trey since Dec. 11 makes that eFG% pretty paltry, but paltry is two or three levels better than the clanging albatross stage when he couldn’t make 30% of his shots for nearly three weeks.

    Just as he put invisible training wheels on Gerald Green’s game when the two shared the court a few weeks back, Antoine Walker is mentoring Brewer in ways large and small lately. ‘Toine knows, even if Brewer doesn’t, that the thin rook’s biggest flaw is shooting, and so tonight he laid at least three or four shots for Corey on a platter, mostly in transition, in the form of dishes for bunny jumpers, or on a drive-and-kick to the corner, and once on a very sweet feed that Brewer, the throttle all the way down, couldn’t help but to rise up and slam through the hoop. Then ‘Toine would twinkle-toes his way back upcourt, secure in the knowledge that the experiences he was generously doling out were accumulating karma points that, in all fairness, should be paid out in the form of a trade to a contender before next month’s deadline expires. The man has done his penance for gluttony, or whatever sins troubled the fevered brow of Pat Riley down in Miami, who, speaking of karma, is currently riding a 14-game losing streak. Anyway, as much as he likes to feign delight in rearing players up here on the frozen tundra, young’uns who were four
    th-graders when he first broke into the league, you know ‘Toine itches for a meaningful hardwood milieu come May and June, perhaps for a playoff team in need of postseason experience who plays in a warm clime, such as Orlando. No doubt he has been a boom-or-bust commodity thus far this season, but when he’s on he can be a maestro, orchestrating the development of potential into performance–Brewer was plus +13 in the 21:40 he played alongside ‘Toine tonight and minus -2 in the 8:15 he played without him. And even when he’s off Walker remains a highly respected presence in the locker room and a good-vibes pom-pom guy on the bench.

    3. Hype On the Horizon

    The next game is the Celtics, in Boston. We have a tendency to focus on Garnett, obviously, but in terms of the Timberwolves, the team’s two best players, Jefferson and Gomes, are going back to the only NBA home they ever knew before this season, and to a rabid fan base that will dole out the love and hate with vigor. The won-lost records offer a strong rebuke to the current worth of Jeff and Gomes, one I imagine they will be very determined to counter. Assuming Witt maintains his version of smallball, that puts Jefferson on Kendrick Perkins, an opponent he surely has faced, and bested, many times in practice; and Gomes on KG, who is larger and faster, etc, etc. How do you match up Marko and McCants on Pierce and Ray Allen? It doesn’t seem like it will be pretty, but then again the C’s have hit a bit of a trough–they lost to Toronto at home tonight–and the Wolves, well, these Wolves are playing better than ever before. Or, as Wittman says, We’ve beaten the best team in the West (at least record-wise) twice now, let’s see if we can beat the best team in the East.

  • "There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer." —RWE

    ART & PERFORMANCE
    Performance
    (career ender)

    Claude
    Wampler     hates the word "performance." She believes in muddling the
    line between audience and "performer" as much as possible, and testing
    the boundaries of the stage. She is known for giving the visual
    arts a theatrical twist, and often treats her audience like actors. For instance, in her show Bucket, Wampler hired attractive people
    to sit in the audience and walk out in a huff during the show to test the audience’s
    commitment. Her show at the Walker is entitled Performance
    (career ender)    ,     because she is fascinated with the concept of "going
    out with a bang." She invented the show with the thought, "if
    I had to make a final piece, what would it be?" What will it
    be? There’s only one way to find out… —Kate Leibfried

    8 p.m., Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-375-7600; $20.

    SPECIAL EVENT
    Chinese New Year Spectacular

    A
    feast for the senses, the Chinese New Year Spectacular is in full gear this evening
    at Northrup Auditorium. Over one-hundred artists will come together
    to create one firecracker of an event. Come, not only for the skilled
    dancers and musicians, but also for the beautifully crafted, dazzling
    costumes. The Chinese New Year Spectacular is put on by the Divine
    Performing Arts of New York    , an exciting new company receiving rave
    reviews in New York City. We are lucky to be hosting them in Minneapolis,
    but make haste! The Chinese New Year Spectacular is playing for
    one night only, and tickets are bound to go fast. —Kate Leibfried

    7 p.m., Northrop Auditorium, 84 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis;

    652-393-2837; $38-$120.

    MUSIC
    Vampires, Beasts, and Deacons

    Check out First Ave for a solid triple bill, starting with Minneapolis newcomers Vampire Hands. This quartet of longhairs delivers a visceral wallop of noise-boogie intensity, heavily steeped in ’70s Stooges-esque proto punk. Gay Beast’s jagged rhythms, complicated interplay and deadpan panic approximates a sort of diseased musical articulation, and their crazy dynamics should sound great in the main room. Baltimore’s Dan Deacon headlines along with some weird audio/visual deal called Ultimate Reality. It’s described as a collaborative DVD, performance, and "Dominant Pansexual Ubermyth." Not sure what that means, but it sounds like it’s gonna be pretty cool. —Christopher Hontos

    6 p.m., First Avenue, 701 First Ave. N., Minneapolis; 612-332-1775;     $10.

    BOOKS & AUTHORS
    Hari Kunzru: My Revolutions

    Having adopted an alias, Michael Frame, the character at the center of My Revolutions
    is living a carefully constructed life of suburban mediocrity, hiding
    his radical history from a capitalist career wife and a stepchild who
    dreams of nothing more romantic than a gig as a corporate lawyer. As
    always seems to happen in such stories—whether in real life or
    fiction—ghosts come calling and Frame is dragged back into the past.
    That’s admittedly a tired premise, but Kunzru—one of Granta’s “Twenty
    Best Fiction Writers Under Forty”—has a pretty good track record at
    making something stylish and memorable out of unpromising material. His
    previous novels, The Impressionist and Transmission, seemed like cool, logical outgrowths from his work at Mute Magazine, a nifty British rag that focuses on the exploration of globalization and “network societies.” From the sound of things, My Revolutions is a sort of ambitious departure, and a meditation on the fluidity of time, identity, ideology, and necessity. —Danielle Cabot

    Available today in bookstores nationwide.

    ART
    The Best Local Illustrators

    This evening is the official opening of the latest CVA Gallery exhibit, described by Rake illustrator Hugh Bennewitz as "the first serious illustrator show in the twin towns in some time." Illo.Minn features work by more than 25 Minnesota illustrators — along with some fabulous boxed wine and other great things, I hear.

    6-8 p.m., The CVA Gallery, 173 Western Ave., at the corner of Western and Selby avenues, St. Paul.

  • Fanfare for Food Fight

    [A response to various blog posts about Mpls./St. Paul Magazine food critic Andrew Zimmern: "Ode to a Sycophant," "Zimmern’s Complaint," and "A Bone to Pick with Andrew Zimmern." See also "I, Too, Have a Bone to Pick with Andrew Zimmern."]

    Just read the whole three-tiered back and forth! Love it. Laughed my ass off. Am proud of my culinary community. I love The Rake — Mitch Omer (such balls!). And Tom Bartel’s response was just absolutely nuts-on: "I¹m beginning to think we should have a test before we let people read The Rake. First question: What does the word irony mean?" What an asset The Rake is to our watery, wussified, fear-laden journalistic scene here in the Shitties.

    “Name Withheld by Request”
    Letter

  • All Hail Hicks

    I had to write and let you know how much I enjoyed Dylan Hicks’s short story in your December issue ["1984 Dodge Ram Roadtrek II – $4500"]. It was like reading a combination of S.J. Perelman and Steve Rushin. Thanks for making the holiday brighter!

    Amy Scott, St. Paul
    Letter

  • Arrivederci, Brix

    Italy is out, Texas is in.

    A visit to the website of Brix Wine Bar & Bistro confirmed a tipster’s report: Brix Bistro & Wine Bar in Saint Louis Park has closed, and will be replaced by Laredo’s Tex-West Grill & Cantina, a "Tex-West" theme restaurant:

    "Laredo’s
    will feature unique Tex-West entrees, authentic Mexican dishes &
    mesquite-grilled steaks in a fun, energetic atmosphere. Laredo’s
    Cantina will feature our soon-to-be famous Margaritas & ice-cold
    cerveza. We promise to be fun & affordable, but still provide
    great service with only the freshest ingredients on our menu.f you like the local food in Austin, TX, San Diego, CA and Cabo San Lucas as much as we do, then you’ll love Laredo’s! We are shooting for an early March opening."

    The ownership remains the same: the Collins Restaurant Group, which also owns the adjacent McCoy’s Public House.

    I’ll reserve judgment until I visit the new restaurant, but this seems like a real shame. When when I reviewed Brix, soon after it opened, I was impressed – and surprised. Brix offered authentic Italian cuisine, prepared with a level of skill and sophistication rarely found on the suburban dining scene.

  • I, Too, Have a Bone to Pick with Andrew Zimmern

    At any rate, what’s my big problem with Zimmern? Where to begin, where to begin? First, I should admit that I really don’t know who this Zimmern fellow is. I mean, I really don’t know who the hell he is, just as, I’m sure, he doesn’t know who the hell I am. I got wind of a recent dust-up in the blogosphere, however, and felt curious enough to search Google for images of the man. I start there whenever possible, because I have no problem at all judging a book by its cover, being a firm believer in that old business about a picture being worth a thousand words.

    At any rate, I spent some time looking at photographs of a man alleged to be Zimmern and quickly concluded that a thousand words were something like 975 words too many; a couple dozen, I should think, would suffice.

    I can definitely tell you that I don’t like the cut of Zimmern’s jib. I think he eats too much, and given that he apparently spends so much time eating, I also think it’s fair to presume that he eats bugs … no, wait—he does, it seems, eat bugs, but what I meant to say was that it’s fair to presume that he talks with his mouth full. I don’t care for that.

    I dug a little deeper to find out more about this Zimmern character, and discovered not only that—as I suspected—he eats too much, but he also eats almost entirely at places I’ve never heard of. I’m not a big fan of people who make a habit of eating at places I’ve never heard of, then proceed to go on and on about how great those places are.

    I’m guessing that Zimmern has never spent a morning hanging drywall and then, with dust all over his hands (and under his fingernails), eaten the hell out of a Manwich and a can of Pringles. I’m also guessing that he’s never spent a cold afternoon in the garage skinning muskrats then driven his truck to the Arby’s drive-thru and polished off the 5-for-$5.99 roast beef special all by his lonesome.

    Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe Zimmern has, in fact, laid drywall and eaten the hell out of a Manwich and a can of Pringles. Maybe he has skinned muskrats and gone to Arby’s to gorge solo. But I’ll say this: if I’m correct in my suppositions—and I feel confident that I am—then I’m also correct in saying that this is a man who doesn’t know a diddly-damn thing about truly great food and the supreme pleasures and surprises of eating when you’re flat-out hungry as shit.

    Answer me these questions, Zimmern, you hot shot:
    • Have you ever eaten a pie from Beek’s, King of Pizza?
    • Under the right circumstances (very, very hungry; very, very stoned and/or drunk; etc.) could you rave for hours about the wings at Shorty and Wag’s?
    • Can you name, with appropriate enthusiasm, a favorite brand of canned chili?
    • Could you, do you honestly think, tackle the Tremendous Twelve at Perkins?
    • Have you ever been so fucking hungry that you’ve eaten a microwave hamburger from SuperAmerica and felt like you’d died and gone to heaven?
    •Might you, as I did this very evening, mix together cans of Progresso vegetable beef and beef barley soup and eat the whole damn pot while seated on the kitchen floor?
    • Have you ever spent hours driving along a freeway praying for the appearance of a Taco John’s?
    • Do you agree that Tootsie Rolls and pretzels are often as not a perfectly suitable lunch?

    If you answered no to even half of these questions, Zimmern, you’re not only a piss-poor food critic, but you’re also a pussy.

  • Scratch That One Off

    I love a to-do list. In fact, I am such a master at list-making I can make lists of my lists. I can subdivide errands, chores, and activities ad infinitum. Sometimes I go numerically, by order of importance to my day. For example:

    1. Work out
    2. Breakfast
    3. Phone calls

    Other times, I mix it up to build in fun when I anticipate that drudgery and boredom will be looming:

    1. Return emails
    2. Make appointments
    3. Make a prank phone call to someone you know from sixth grade
    4. Laundry

    During periods of depression, my lists have taken on a rather frightening level of detail:

    1. Get up
    2. Shower
    3. Brush teeth
    4. Get dressed
    5. Go to work
    6. Come home from work
    7. Stay out of bed until it is dark outside

    I don’t imagine that I would have forgotten that those things needed to be done, but at those times in my life I needed to be able to cross them off one by one. A scarily basic daily to-do list was one of my only tenuous links to normality.

    I have had four vacations in my adult life. I am so connected to my lists that even on vacation I make a list of must-do fun things, or must-see interesting things. Here are three items cherry-picked from a list made during a trip to New York City:

    4. Go to a bar and don’t talk to anyone you know
    5. Talk to at least six people
    6. Do not touch anyone

    That kind of list has a “double dog dare” effect, catapulting me into social situations that would never have occurred otherwise.

    When I do stand-up I make a set list and carry it with me, even if I don’t look at it or reference it directly. These lists have a terrific surreal quality. If I am ever in some kind of accident, the paramedics will strip away my clothes to find that I am wearing dirty, sweat-stained, unmatched underwear with holes in them. They will pump my stomach and find a semi-digested handful of Sour Patch Kids, four rum-and-Cokes, and an entire rotisserie chicken. And instead of proper I.D., I will have a list in my pocket that says:

    1. Clorox Gel boobs
    2. Big Lots’ three-legged-pet store
    3. Margery Johnson’s Keebler elf pie

    The list, of course, will be given to my children, who will understand immediately.

    I like to cross things off lists, but I enjoy making them just as much. It gives me a false sense of security, like everything is under control. The greater me realizes this is folly, yet also indulges my compulsion to write down what I hope will, and should, happen next.

    By the time you see this article, I should be about one month into the Big Kahuna of lists, my New Year’s resolutions. I make them annually (duh), with widely varying results. There are efficiency experts who tell you not to make big promises to yourself or you’ll just get discouraged. I’ve made yearly lists of very specific things to do, with very excruciatingly detailed steps. I’ve also gone the route of putting only three things on my yearly list so I won’t be overwhelmed.

    Who knows if any of this year’s planning will pan out? Maybe yes, maybe no, and I’m OK with that. Two years ago, because of a New Year’s resolution to learn an instrument, I took four guitar lessons. Now I know how to play Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” which would have solidified my status as a hot chick to teenage boys in 1972, but in 2008 makes me feel a little embarrassed when I play it at parties. It’s like I’m Grandma come to call, kicking it old school and playing “Surrey with a Fringe on Top.” But I do it anyway. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be following the resolution that makes it to the top of my list every year:

    1. Bring all of you, everywhere

  • White Wine for Men

    It is a pity there’s no reason to believe King Arthur actually existed. True, there was a sixth-century monk called Gildas The Wise who penned a wordy jeremiad that mentions a battle at a place called Mount Badon where the Celtic remnant of Roman Britain stemmed the tsunami of Anglo-Saxon invasion. It is also true that, long afterwards, Welsh monks with well-developed imaginations placed at Mount Badon one of the twelve victories they ascribed to Arthur. If you think that adds up to evidence for a historical Arthur, you probably also think that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda.

    Of course, not necessarily existing is no barrier to being influential, as critics of the Ontological Argument sometimes discover. Imaginative folk of every era since Late Antiquity have peered back into the Age of Arthur and summoned the mythical monarch from the fifth-century mists, calling into the old world to redress the balance of the new. The monks of medieval Glastonbury felt they had solid evidence that Arthur would one day return and put old England to rights when, in 1184, they discovered a lead coffin allegedly containing the king’s bones. It was inscribed with his name and the motto “rex quondam rexque futurus.” Some 300 years later a Warwickshire country gentleman called Malory, in jail awaiting trial on a long list of charges including affray, deer-stealing, and carrying off a neighbor’s wife, wrote a long and eloquent account of King Arthur and the Round Table, lamenting in marginal notes to his manuscript that the age of chivalry was dead and that knights no longer had the noble souls they had of old.

    Later poets, too, have found ideals to feed their fancies at the court of the once and future king. The opera of Purcell and Dryden, King Arthur: The British Worthy, is as insubstantial as spun sugar, but no less pleasingly sweet. Alfred Lord Tennyson, gentleman-poet, sought high moral rectitude at the Round Table and found it in Sir Galahad, whose strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure. (Did anyone less pure-hearted, one wonders, try to warn the old boy about his earlier line, “‘The curse has come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott”?) In living memory, Charles Williams found in the Arthur stories a mystical means to understanding the coinherence of human and divine life.

    And then there is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I loathe this book. Instead of parting the curtains of time to catch sight of Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye, Mr. Twain sends there a cocksure moron of his own era, a nineteenth-century firearms manufacturer yclept Hank Morgan, who turns the armored knights into sandwich-board men advertising soap and, as a final gesture, mows down rank on rank of mounted men-at-arms using an electric fence and a nest of machine guns. The message is: Whatever happens, we have got the Gatling gun and they have not. Mr. Twain (yes, I know it is a nom de plume) is no more imaginative in this book than the creators of the Flintstones, who assimilated even the Neolithic to the contemporary suburb, a habitat as specialized in its own way as that of any dinosaur, and therefore ultimately just as fragile.

    What is more, Hank Morgan’s is the sort of mechanical machismo which gives masculinity a bad name. Until his time, men in love with speed needed to develop “good hands” and a lasting relationship with a horse, an animal with more mind of its own than a supermarket trolley, willing when treated well but tricky if bullied. They could not simply pull a metal throttle and blast off into the sunset. Chivalry, as the etymology of the word suggests, involves not only strength but also the gentleness necessary for equestrian manipulation. For Arthur and his knights, manliness was more than force.

    Which is why, when I describe the 2007 Sauvignon Blanc from Mount Riley in New Zealand as a masculine wine, I do not mean merely that it knocks your socks off. It is a constant surprise that New Zealanders can make from this variety of grape, so evanescent when the French turn it into Pouilly-Fumé, a wine so muscular in character. The Mount Riley Sauvignon Blanc is bright and clear, the color of pale straw. It is strong and fresh; it is not sweet, but it is not unsubtle. It made me think of the taste of peaches with the sugars taken out. I detected also hints of pepper, such as you sometimes encounter in kiwifruit. A glass or two with a hot fish stew could help redress the balance of your world.

  • The Sweetest Simmer

    Now we’re fully settled into the bland, grayest days of winter—a time when I seek to imbue my life with more flavor. After all, woolen sweaters and bestsellers can only go so far in fighting the battle of the blahs. If I’m to be trapped indoors, then the kitchen had better be sending forth seductive smells of warm, satisfying dishes that make me happy to be holed up at home. That’s usually why, particularly at this time of year, the Sunday meal becomes a big braising event.

    Braising is one of those cooking terms that sounds technically daunting to the uninitiated: Do I need a special pan? Will it require kitchen string or a unique thermometer, neither of which I have on hand? But in truth, braising is so easy that, once you’ve mastered it, it starts to feel like cheating. Better yet, braising consistently produces soulful, and even good-looking, Sunday meals—meals that come for far less money and with a lot less mess than your typical fried, roasted, or sautéed productions.

    The basic technique requires slowly cooking a cut of protein while it is semi-immersed in liquid in a covered pot. But don’t confuse braising with stewing; braising relies more on the combination of liquid and steam to bring out the best flavors.

    Typically, braising is done with tougher, lesser-quality cuts of meat. In fact, braised classics like osso buco and coq au vin were invented for the very purpose of enhancing the flavors of such meats. The moist heat of braising breaks down the connective tissues in tougher cuts, melting the collagen and contracting the fibers. Those tissues then absorb some of the liquid along with the melted fats and flavors, giving the meat the tender, fall-apart quality that is the hallmark of a braised dish.

    Preparing the week’s capstone meal in a single vessel cuts down on clutter—and saves time. In the same pot, you can quickly sear the meat (giving it a nicely caramelized crust), add the liquid, and toss in some vegetables. Cover the whole thing and put it in the oven on low temperature. For the next few hours, while your meal develops many layers of flavor and your kitchen fills with warm and comforting aromas, you’re free to read a book, do your taxes, or just get on with your life.

    Cuts of meat that braise well include lamb and veal shank, poultry legs and thighs (think chicken cacciatore), country-style pork ribs and beef cuts including chuck pot roast, short ribs, flank steak, and eye or top round roast. That’s not to say you must have meat; sturdier vegetables like cauliflower, endive, leeks, and rutabaga braise quite well, as a matter of fact. The liquid component can also be varied. While most recipes call for a base of stock, the addition of wine, port, and beer is also common. During the coldest months, I like to braise pot roast with rosemary and Guinness. But the moment I sense the light of spring, I switch to braising chicken with citrus, white wine, and stock.

    In the meantime, as cold days continue to keep the family cooped up together all weekend long, there is likely to be a bit of sniping. But by braising a huge pot of short ribs, the cook can gently infuse the domestic surroundings with the smell of subtle spices, working a little homespun magic against the winter blues.


    Spiced Braised Short Ribs

    1 cup all-purpose flour
    2 tsp. salt
    1/2 tsp. pepper
    1/2 tsp. cinnamon
    1/2 tsp. unsweetened cocoa
    6 pounds bone-in beef short ribs,
    cut into 3-inch sections
    1/4 cup butter
    1 large onion, chopped
    1 1/2 teaspoons ginger
    4 cloves garlic, minced
    1 3/4 cups beef stock
    3/4 cup red wine vinegar
    1/4 cup packed brown sugar
    1/2 cup Sriracha (or chili sauce)
    1/3 cup tomato paste
    1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce

    Combine flour, salt, pepper, cinnamon, and cocoa in a large zip-lock bag. Add ribs in batches and shake to coat. Melt butter in a large pan and brown ribs on all sides. Remove ribs to a larger baking dish.

    In the same pan, over medium heat, sauté onion with ginger until translucent and soft; add garlic, stirring until fragrant. Add stock and vinegar and bring to a low boil. Add sugar and stir until dissolved. Add remaining ingredients and bring back to a low boil. Remove from heat and pour over ribs. Cover dish with foil. Cook in a 300-degree oven for four to five hours, or until the meat is easily pulled from the bone.