Bedside wine reading: 'A Carafe of Red' from Gerald Asher

Down with bronchitis last month, I languished on the sofa, catching up on some reading I never seemed to have time for before. From the top of the pile I picked up “A Carafe of Red” by Gerald Asher (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012, $21.95 paperback). It’s a collection of pieces Asher wrote mostly in the early '90s for Gourmet magazine, back in the day when magazines had the space and the will to publish long-form writing on wine.

I like that he hasn’t rewritten the pieces. They read as they were published, with an update at the end. I opened and read at random and was at Asher’s side when, as a young man in the British wine trade, he arrives — after midnight — in Jerez de la Frontera. “To my northern amazement, groups of men were still drinking and talking at tables in front of the bars and cafés of Calle Larga as if they intended to remain all night, while streams of people, young and old, crowded the narrow sidewalk.” The next morning he reported to a sherry house where he became fascinated with the intricacies of making sherry. No one else has explained flor better. He manages to fit in a bullfighting bit too, and how and when to drink a fino or an oloroso. Good stuff. 

In other chapters he relishes visits to Côte Rôtie and Condrieu, recounts the revival of Priorato, instructs us in grape clones, and celebrates California’s own Zinfandel. 

A wonderful prose stylist, Asher found in wine that “the more I read, the more I traveled, and the more questions I asked, the further I was pulled into the realms of history and economics, politics, literature, food, community, and all else that affects the way we live. Wine, I found, draws on everything and leads everywhere.” Amen.

Forget scores. His wide-ranging, astute appreciation is where it’s at.

“A Carafe of Red” offers a window into what this wine writer — and yes, connoisseur, in the best sense — holds dear. And I do envy him his adventures on the wine roads.

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-- S. Irene Virbila

Twitter.com/sirenevirbila

Cover of “A Carafe of Red”; courtesy of University of California Press.

Test Kitchen tips: Storing knives in a knife block

Quick tip on storing knives: If you have a knife block with vertical slots, like the one shown above, consider storing your knives so the edge of each blade is facing up. This will help to keep your edges sharper. When knives are stored with the edge facing downward, the edge has to slide along the bottom of the slot as the knife is housed, dulling the blade.

You might also consider a horizontal knife block (the slits run side to side); I picked one up a few years ago for my extra knifes at home and fell in love with it. Or do as Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila does and go for a magnetic knife rack.

If you have any kitchen tips or questions you'd like me to explore, leave a comment below or email me at noelle.carter@latimes.com.

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-- Noelle Carter
You can find me on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter

Photo credit: Noelle Carter

The Great Dinnerware Exchange at Heath Ceramics

For the month of August, Heath Los Angeles is offering an irresistible deal: Bring in your tired old dinnerware and get 25% off on the equivalent piece of Heathware. So if you’ve had your eye on a cobalt blue cereal bowl ($28) or a cardoon soup bowl from the Chez Panisse collection ($37), now is the time.

Here’s the way it works: Bring in 10 of your lightly used dinner plates and receive 25% off 10 new Heath dinner plates. Bring in eight mugs and get 25% off eight new Heath mugs, and so on.

What happens to your old plates and bowls? They’re donated to the Skid Row Housing Trust, which develops, manages and operates homes for the homeless of Los Angeles. A formerly homeless person and/or family will be set up with what they need for their kitchen.

Heath Los Angeles Studio & Showroom, 7525 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, California
(323) 965-0800; www.heathceramics.com.

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-- S. Irene Virbila
Twitter.com/sirenevirbila

Image: Courtesy of Heath Ceramics

 

Kasuri-inspired Kyoto placemats from Chilewich

When Sandy Chilewich came up with a technique for weaving extruded vinyl yarn into floormats and placemats, the textile designer had a business.

I still have the silvery Chilewich floormats I bought to protect the floor in front of the sink and stove years ago. Since then, her vinyl placemats have been a runaway success with restaurants, and she’s branched out into coasters, bags, window shades, pet mats, iPhone cases and more.

Every year, she comes up with new designs. I’ve been disciplined, though, and haven’t added to my stash of placemats until now. When I spotted the newish Kyoto pattern,  which mimics the Japanese ikat called kasuri, I had to have it. When I couldn't find it in any local cookware or other stores, I looked online. Eventually, I turned up some from Design Public, a set of four for $67 -- and free shipping.

They come in three colorways -- ghost (a silvery gray), cocoa (a warm brown) and cinder (charcoal and brown).  The genius is that these are reversible.

Available online from Chilewich at $16.75 each, or in a set of four from  Design Public, for $67.

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-- S. Irene Virbila

Twitter.com/sirenevirbila

Photos: Chilewich Kyoto placemat in cinder. Credit: S. Irene Virbila/Los Angeles Times.

Bored by conventional wine writing? Read this

My summer binge reading has been the brilliant Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, all four of them, plus, the newly publish fifth, “At Last.” They’re harrowing and hilarious, and the prose is breathtaking. 

Bored by conventional wine writing? Read this passage from the second of the novels, “Bad News.” In New York to see to his father’s remains, the young, drug-addled main character, Patrick Melrose, slips into a high-end restaurant for dinner alone, and orders a Corton Charlemagne. (Keep in mind that he has had a privileged, albeit brutal, upbringing.)

“The first taste made him break into a grin of recognition, like a man who has sighted his lover at the end of a crowded platform. Raising the glass again, he took a large gulp of the pale yellow wine, held it in his mouth for a few seconds, and then let it slide down his throat. Yes, it worked, it still worked. Some things never let him down.

"He closed his eyes and the taste rippled over him like an hallucination. Cheaper wine would have buried him in fruit, but the grapes he imagined now were mercifully artificial, like earrings of swollen yellow pearls. He pictured the long sinewy shoots of the vine, dragging him down into the heavy reddish soil. Traces of iron and stone and earth and rain flashed across his palate and tantalized him like shooting stars. Sensations long wrapped in a bottle now unfurled like a stolen canvas.

"Some things never let him down. It made him want to cry.”

Good, eh?

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-- S. Irene Virbila
Twitter.com/sirenevirbila

Image: Scan of  "The Patrick Melrose Novels" cover. Credit: Picador Paperback

 

The aperitif hour: Marseille's panisse

Nice has its socca, those thin chickpea pancakes. Down the Mediterranean coast in Marseille the classic is panisse, or fried chickpea cakes. I love them both. And while I often make socca, I’d never tried making my own panisse until a few days ago. I hauled out my well-thumbed copy of “Made in Marseille: Food and Flavors from France’s Mediterranean Seaport” by Daniel Young (William Morrow Cookbooks, 2002).

The Francophile author explains that “panisses were particularly trendy in the 1930s around Marseille’s Old Port as a snack, or paired with a salad as a meal .... Prepared with a porridge-like batter of chickpea flour, the interior of a fried panisse is almost comparable to fried cheese in its creaminess.”

Basically, you’re making a chickpea porridge, stirring all the while just like you would for polenta, but in this case, it takes only 10 minutes, not 40.

I opted for the easy method of cutting them -- spreading the porridge out on an oiled baking sheet, chilling it for a couple of hours and then cutting it into shapes with a cookie cutter. 

You don’t need a deep fryer, just a good skillet with 1/4 inch of oil (I used grapeseed oil.) It’s really very easy. The only trouble I had was that my porridge was lumpy. Lumpy! So after it finished cooking, I passed it through a coarse sieve. I emailed Young to find out what I did wrong: Instead of adding the flour all at once as I did, the trick is to sprinkle it into the water, stirring all the while. [Recipe follows after the jump.]

For the wine geek who has everything: the cork presenter

Designed by graphic arts superstar Milton Glaser, Alessi's new cork presenter is polished stainless steel and will set you back just $30. 

Not for a casual meal at home, though. 

This may be more appropriate for those engaged in a formal entertaining style. The Alessi cork presenter was, in fact, designed for Eleven Madison Park, the highly lauded New York City restaurant helmed by Daniel Humm who won Outstanding Chef at this year’s James Beard Awards. Outstanding service is one reason the restaurant did so well -- in addition to Humm’s meticulously elegant American cooking.

I can’t quite picture using a cork presenter myself at home, but who knows, there may come a day.

 

Available from Unicahome.com in gift box, $30.  And at the Alessi Store at Diva, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 276-7096; alessi@divafurniture.com. 

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Make ahead dessert: April Bloomfield's rhubarb fool

-- S. Irene Virbila
twitter.com/sirenevirbila

Photo credit: Alessi

 

Make ahead dessert: April Bloomfield's rhubarb fool

A couple of Sundays ago, I was invited to a glorious run-through of the contemporary music pianist Gloria Cheng would be playing at a concert on the East Coast the next week. It began at 6 p.m. at the new Steinway Piano Gallery in Pasadena and I’d invited friends to dinner after the concert. Since I had no idea when we’d be finished, I had to make everything ahead — fried chicken, coleslaw, succotash — and for dessert, rhubarb fool.

I’d bought some rhubarb at the farmers market intending to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie. But in the end, felt like trying something new, namely this recipe from April Bloomfield (Spotted Pig, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room and the John Dory Oyster Bar in New York). The Brits really know how to do these kinds of desserts, and this recipe from her new cookbook is a keeper — easy, meant to be prepared ahead and delicious.

You can make the rhubarb the day before and then layer it in the glasses with the cardamom cream and pistachios hours before you’ll be eating to give it all a good chill. The cardamom is brilliant with the rhubarb (which is also dosed with a little rose water), giving the sweet a Middle Eastern harem vibe.

One note: I divided the recipe into six servings and still had half the cream left over. No matter, I served it the next day with ripe fresh figs.

You might want to halve the amount of rose water, too, depending on your taste. 

Rhubarb Fool with Cardamom Cream and Pistachios (adapted from “A Girl and Her Pig: Recipes and Stories” by April Bloomfield, Ecco Press, 2012, 333 pgs, $29.99). Follow the jump for the recipe.

Freshly made tortillas into the afternoon at Super A Foods bakeries

Eastsiders alert: Now that Tortilleria Santa Fe in Echo Park has closed, where to get fresh tortillas? The best place I’ve found is Super A Foods (one of a chain of some 13 locations) on York Boulevard in Highland Park (between 52^nd and 53^rd).The tortillería department makes tortillas fresh all day from about 8 in the morning until at least 1:30 p.m. Most days — and on the weekends until as late as 3 p.m. That means if you stop in for a stack of corn or flour tortillas, they’re freshly made, and probably still warm. 

Depending on the day’s demands, the resident baker will sometimes make flour tortillas flavored with spinach and or jalapeño which give them a beautiful green color. Occasionally, you’ll find ones made with chipotle, too. Plain or flavored, they’re perfect for quesadillas filled with cheese and greens, avocado and, of course, a roasted tomatillo salsa.

Super A, 5250 York Ave. (between 52^nd and 53^rd Avenues), Highland Park; (323) 551-6884; Open daily 7 a.m. To 11 p.m. Other locations with in-house bakeries include the stores in Temple City, Montebello, Los Angeles, Paramount, South Gate and Fillmore. 

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-- S. Irene Virbila
Twitter.com/sirenevirbila

Photos: tortillas at Super A Foods. Credit: S. Irene Virbila/Los Angeles Times.

Now live: Food & Drink category at Apple App Store

App developers got the news weeks ago and now the Apple App Store has gone live with a new category: Food & Drink.

As of this writing more than 7,600 apps are gathered willy nilly under this category. That's a lot of browsing and, like any category out there, some of the apps are useful and even brilliant, others not so much.

But that's for you to find out. And be sure to let us know if you uncover some indispensable app out there for food and wine lovers.

Meanwhile, I'm sticking with favorites like Evan Kleiman's Easy as Pie, Gilt Taste, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and Patricia Wells' The Food Lover's Guide to Paris, not to mention Weightbot.

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-- S. Irene Virbila
Twitter.com/sirenevirbila

Photos: The Food & Drink app offerings at the Apple App Store. Credit: Apple