Author: John Fladd

Cornmeal crepes with strawberries and mascarpone

Crepes

  • 1¼ cup (285 g) whole milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 3 Tablespoons butter, browned
  • ½ cup + 2 Tablespoons (80 g) flour
  • ½ + 2 Tablespoons (100 g) cornmeal
  • 1 teaspoon coarse sea salt
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla

Mascarpone filling

  • 2 cups (1 16-oz container) mascarpone cheese
  • 4 Tablespoons sugar
  • Large pinch of fresh-grated nutmeg
  • Strawberry preserves, homemade or jarred
  • Finely minced basil for garnish

In your blender, mix the milk and eggs together. Add the browned butter and mix again. Add the dry ingredients — the flour, cornmeal and salt — and blend yet again. Add the vanilla and blend one last time. (Making crepe batter in a blender makes things go extremely smoothly — if you put the ingredients in in the right order. If you were to put the dry ingredients in first, with the wet ingredients on top, there is a good chance that the batter wouldn’t mix properly, and a gelatinized blob of flour would sit at the bottom of your blender jar, mocking you.)

Put your blender jar in the refrigerator and chill the batter for at least half an hour.

If you have a small, non-stick skillet, this is its big moment. Place it over medium heat, and melt a lump of butter in it.

Take your crepe batter from the refrigerator and give it another spin in the blender to make certain that everything is well mixed. Because the cornmeal is heavy and is prone to sinking to the bottom of the batter, you might want to reblend the batter after every two crepes.

Pour about a quarter of a cup into the hot melted butter, and swirl the pan around to spread the batter over the entire bottom of the pan. Return the pan to heat, and cook your crepe until the top surface isn’t shiny anymore and the edges start to brown just a tiny bit. Then lift a corner of the crepe with a spatula, and flip it over with your fingers. Cook the B-side of the crepe for another minute or so, then transfer it to a plate.

If you are using a non-stick pan, you will not have to rebutter it. If you are using a different species of frying pan, you will probably want to regrease it between crepes. Cook crepes until you have used up all your batter.

Separately, mash the mascarpone, sugar and nutmeg together, and stir until they combine into a very stiff mixture.

Now you have a choice. If you want sweet dessert crepes, fill them with strawberry preserves and top with the mascarpone topping. If you want a less sweet, slightly savory crepe, fill it with the mascarpone and top it with strawberry preserves. Either way, garnish with minced basil.

Serve with ice-cold milk or sparkling wine.

Featured photo: Cornmeal crepes. Photo by John Fladd.

Try the wine and meet the makers

New Hampshire wine week offers tasting and learning opportunities

The annual New Hampshire Wine Week features tastings including at New Hampshire Wine and Liquor Outlets, special wine dinners and culminates in the New England Winter Wine Spectacular, an expo featuring dozens of wine makers, importers, exporters and dealers.

This year’s Wine Week also features a new event.

“It’s called Sommelier Select,” said Justin Gunter, the Liquor Commission’s Wine Marketing Specialist. It will be a blind tasting event held on Wednesday, Jan. 21, in Concord, he said, and guests will taste a number of wines, guided by three professional sommeliers. “Our three somms will be leading a panel on that evening with 120 guests. And they will blind taste all nine wines, in three flights.”

Representatives of some of the makers of the wines tasted will be on hand, Gunter said. “They’re going to be there for a kind of a meet and greet at the end, to answer the questions that come up during the tastings.”

The goal of New Hampshire’s Wine Week overall, and of the Sommelier Select event in particular, Gunter said, is to help customers develop a personal relationship with the wines they buy.

“It’s a challenging time in the beverage industry,” he said. “We want to make sure that we have a strong footprint in the state of New Hampshire for wine and what it can bring and the social aspect of it. So we want to make it as interactive as possible.”

The following evening, Thursday, Jan. 22, the 20th Annual New England Winter Wine Spectacular will be held at the Doubletree Expo Center in Manchester.

“[I]t’s looking absolutely fantastic for this coming year,” Gunter said. “We have 154 tables for sampling [in the main exhibition space], plus we have another 24 tables in our Bellman Cellar Select Room, which is the higher-end, more exclusive lines.” One special aspect of the Wine Spectacular, he said, is the opportunity to meet wine makers and vineyard owners who produce the wines being sampled. “As of right now, we have around 40 wine personalities that are scheduled to be here, and that’s going to be owners, winemakers, just representatives of the wineries that are very near and dear with these offerings that we have.”

“One thing that we introduced this year is we’re introducing pavilions within the Expo,” Gunter said. “We’re trying to create a little bit of a wine tasting within the wine tasting, so that brokers can feature wines with a restaurant of their choice. They’re selecting the restaurant to participate in their pavilion, so they can pair the wines with the actual food served at the restaurants that feature them.”

New Hampshire Wine Week
The Sommelier Select event will take place Wednesday, Jan. 21, from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the Grappone Conference Center (70 Constitution Ave., Concord, grapponeconferencecenter.com). Tickets are $65 each; see nhwineweek.com.

The 20th Annual New England Winter Wine Spectacular will take place Thursday, Jan. 22, at the Doubletree Expo Center (700 Elm St., Manchester). General admission tickets are $75 each and have a 6 p.m. entry time; see nhwineweek.com.

La Sanse is a taste of Puerto Rico

Nashua event celebrates the San Sebastian Festival

If we were in Puerto Rico right now, the holiday festivities would not be over yet.

“The San Sebastian Festival is a street festival that started in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the 1950s as a celebration at the end of the holidays,” Brandon Caron said. Caron is the chief operating officer of Spectacle Live, the management company of the Nashua Center for the Arts. La Sanse, as it is more commonly known, “is a big street festival with lots of arts and music and food,” Caron said. “We’ve had the opportunity with some various people in the community to try to bring that inspiration back to the community in Nashua.”

To that end the Nashua Center will host a La Sanse celebration Saturday, Jan. 17, featuring Puerto Rican food, music and dance.

“We’re some of the first people in the Northeast to do this,” Caron said. We’re [holding] it the weekend that Puerto Rico celebrates. And one of the big components of that is trying to be as authentic as we could with the music and the food. You know, that is such a key part of the culture. And so we are working with Tony Elias and Rice and Beans 603, which is a Nashua-based restaurant catering business. They’re going to [make] authentic Puerto Rican plates for people. And then we’re also going to work with Empanellie’s and a few of the other restaurants in town to feature various street bites. So that way we can have a full, well-rounded, authentic Puerto Rican food offering.”

In addition to Puerto Rican food, La Sanse will feature music, dancing and visual arts.

“There’s going to be a few different forms of entertainment,” Caron said. “We’re going to have El Grupo Chevere, a Massachusetts-based salsa band. They’ll be coming to do authentic Puerto Rican music, as well as some DJs from Latino Vibe 94.9. And we have some authentic dance troupes as well to do some cultural dance displays. We’re still working with some various partners within the community to try to highlight various forms of art as well, within the theater. We’re just really excited to be a part of this event. Just to be able to really celebrate this culture and really feel the energy and vibrancy of the Puerto Rican culture is really special. And I also think, in a quieter time in the winter, having a big event like this that can draw people from a wider radius; that will help not only our business, but hopefully, you know, be able to spur some economic development within the community at other restaurants and establishments nearby as well.”

La Sanse Nashua
When: Saturday, Jan. 17, at 4 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, 800-657-8774, nashuacenterforthearts.com)
Tickets: $25 through the Nashua Center’s website; kids under 12 free with purchase of an adult ticket.

The Weekly Dish 26/01/15

• An even blinder taste test: LaBelle Winery Derry (14 Route 111, Derry, 672-9898, labellewinery.com/labelle-winery-derry) will host a blindfolded wine tasting event, Wine In the Dark, Thursday, Jan. 15, from 6 to 7 p.m. Tickets are $40.

• Wine and dinner at BVI: There will be a five-course Ferrari-Carano Wine Dinner at theBedford Village Inn (2 Olde Bedford Way, Bedford, 472-2001, bedfordvillageinn.com) Wednesday, Jan. 21, from 6 to 9 p.m. Rebecka Deike, the Senior Winemaker of red wines at Farrari-Carano, will be on hand to lead discussion about the pairing choices. Tickets are $135 per person and must be purchased in advance.

• More wine pairings: NH Liquor & Wine Outlet Store #69 (25 Coliseum Ave., Nashua, 882-4670, liquorandwineoutlets.com) will host an exclusive one-night-only edition of Perfect Pairings, described as an elevated, chef-led experience this month featuring Chef Ed Aloise and Chef & Winemaker Maria Sinskey. Tickets are $20 through eventbrite.com. All attendees will receive a $20 off coupon with the purchase of three or more featured Robert Sinskey wines, along with a recipe card and complimentary wine glass.

• Food from many nations: Georgia’s Northside (394 N. State St., Concord, 715-9189, georgiasnorthside.com) will hold an International Night Chef’s Collaboration on Friday, Jan. 16. This event is focused on making culturally diverse and affordable healthy meals to go. Collaborators include 603Meal Prep and Sue’s Kim Bap, Analog Pizza, Teenie Wienies and the Teenie Weenie Canteenie crews. There will be Korean, Italian, Brazilian, Irish, Mexican, West African and Greek dishes, and more. Meals are packaged individually and are priced from $10 to $12.

• Laissez les bons temps rouler: The Franco American Centre will hold a volunteer appreciation and Mardi Gras celebration on Sunday, Jan. 25, at Diz’s Cafe, 860 Elm St. in Manchester, from 2 to 5 p.m. Enjoy games and prizes, a buffet including Creole-inspired dishes, cash bar and more, according to facnh.com, where you can purchase tickets.

Virgin Mary, Quite Contrary

It is said that the three hardest things for a man to say are “I was wrong,” “I need help,” and “Worcestershire sauce.”

From time to time recipes will call for Worcestershire sauce, and it’s one of those ingredients that we shrug and add without a lot of thought. The other ingredients in a bloody mary — or, in this case, her alcohol-free-but-still-a-party-girl sister, a virgin mary — are all pretty self-explanatory:

The tomato juice is there to provide an acidic, savory base for the other ingredients. It stands up well to strong flavors and doesn’t taste washed-out as the ice melts and it gets diluted a bit. The lime juice is also acidic and is there to give extra zing to the tomato juice. The various spices and flavorings are there to give layers of flavor to the tomato base, which really is very good at carrying complex flavors.

But the Worcestershire sauce is a bit of an enigma. It is there, it turns out, to add umami, a savory quality. Yes, technically tomato juice is a fruit juice, but it is at its best when it leans into savoriness, not sweetness. And Worcestershire sauce, which is made largely of anchovies, adds another layer of salinity and savoriness to the production. (Yes, I know you could have happily gone the rest of your life without knowing about the anchovies. Sorry.)

A 5.5-ounce can of tomato juice

1 Tablespoon pickled pepper brine – I like the liquid in a jar of pickled banana peppers or pepperoncini

1 Tablespoon fresh squeezed lime juice – about a quarter of a lime

1 teaspoon ginger paste – I use pre-pulverized, jarred ginger paste. If buying an entire jar of ginger paste seems like too ambitious a purchase for you, peel a knob of fresh ginger root, and chop it finer and finer, until it collapses on itself and turns into paste.

1½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1/8 teaspoon onion powder

1/8 teaspoon garlic powder

1/8 teaspoon celery salt

Chili/lime powder for the rim of the glass

Garnish – This is where many restaurants lose their minds. Do an internet search for “bloody mary garnish” and brace yourself; some bloody marys have more garnish than actual bloody mary. Since we’re skipping the alcohol this time around, wowing your guests with garnish might be the way to go. This time, I’ve skewered a half-sour pickle, a large olive, a lime wedge and a chicken nugget.

Sprinkle some chili/lime powder onto a plate. Wipe the rim of your glass with a lime wedge to moisten it, then turn the glass upside-down and swirl it around in the powder, to coat the rim.

Add all the remaining ingredients and ice to a cocktail shaker. Shake to combine and chill.

Strain over fresh ice into the prepared glass, and garnish to whatever degree you can justify.

If you wanted to have a bloody/virgin mary party, you could easily make a large batch of this, and lay out garnish stations.

Featured photo: Virgin Mary. Photo by John Fladd.

Oreos and what?

A podcast experiment goes for the slam dunk

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

Nick Sands, the host of the podcast and YouTube channel “Nick Sands Presents,” had an idea. Looking back at it objectively, he said, it wasn’t necessarily a good idea, but like many things in the podcasting world the Oreo Dunking Project seemed like a good one at the time.

“It is exactly what it sounds like,” Sands said. “I take Oreos, I dunk them into anything but milk, and then I eat them and rank them on a scale of one to 10.” Milk, he said, because it is perfect for cookie-dunking, would be a 10. “A one would be inedible,” he said.

“I don’t really think too much about the things I do [on the podcast],” he said. “I just kind of do them and hope they work out. And I don’t know, everything’s so serious, so terrible right now, it’s just kind of nice to do something stupid and do it in such a way as to maybe make someone laugh.”

Sands said the dunking got adventurous pretty quickly.

“I haven’t had a ‘10’ yet,” he said, “but something that was surprisingly good was mayonnaise and Oreos. It almost ended up tasting like a cream cheese frosting. Sort of. It was a little like a chocolatey cream cheese frosting, which was a big surprise. I did not expect that. A lot of people said it was good, and I did not believe them for obvious reasons. Obviously, when you’re doing this kind of thing, people try to trick you into doing stuff. Unfortunately for them, I’m dumb enough that they don’t actually have to trick me. …”

Which is not to say that Oreos and mayo are a combination that Sands would deliberately seek out. “I gave it a 5 out of 10,” he said. Less enjoyable, Sands said, was Liquid Smoke. “It was awful,” he said. Sands’ initial run of Oreo experiments lasted just over a month.

“I think I dunked for 35 days,” he said. “I took a little break, and I’m coming back to it soon. …” Because he still hasn’t found a 10.

Oreo Dunking Project
All episodes of Nick Sands Presents, including the Oreo Dunking Project, are available on most social media platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

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