One of the highlights of the evening was walking the grounds. We checked out the greenhouses and their neat rows of every leafy thing imaginable, and made some new furry and feathered friends (none of whom were featured on the menu). Here’s a little photographic tour, with pics courtesy of my better half:

Up close and personal with an actual Blue Hill Stone Barns chicken. Bet he’s all like “this backyard urban chicken trend is total BS. Country chicken livin’  is where it’s AT.”

We got into a staring contest with some sheep.

And woke up the sheepdog. Sorry, buddy.

Me, posing awkwardly in front of a greenhouse. Feel like I’m in that scene in Talladega Nights where Will Ferrell doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

Idyllic, no?

One of the many types of lettuce/greens they manage to pack in on this compact plot. We got to nibble on some delicious mizuna and mustard greens, too.

If you look closely, you can just see the teeny-tiny strawberries — unfortunately, they were too teeny-tiny for us to try.

The Farm depends on student participation (ie, free labor.) Friday afternoon pizza made in this wood-fired oven, and topped with whatever’s best that week, serves as an excellent incentive.

The Farm features unheated greenhouses, where hardy greens brave the Connecticut winter.

While I hate the word “sustainability” and all the fuzzy thinking and greener-than-thou-ness that surrounds it, I’m going to give these guys a pass. It’s hard not to be impressed by what they’re doing. The Farm is but one piece of the whole program, which includes supporting local farmers, donating food to shelters, and ensuring that 40% of the food in University cafeterias is sourced from local and/or sustainable producers. (Although not from the Farm–it’s too small to provide food on a large enough scale, and they don’t want to compete with the local suppliers they’re trying to support.) Putting my cynicism aside, if there’s anyplace for unbridled idealism, it’s a college campus. Plus I’m sure the wood-oven pizza is awesome.

To make the dough:

Place 2 cups of  flour and 1 teaspoon of salt in a food processor.  Add 2 sticks unsalted butter (diced and frozen) and pulse until butter and flour form pea-sized chunks. Add ½ cup ice water and blend until it just forms a dough. Let the dough rest for a few hours before rolling out.

Roll out the dough and press into a 9 or 10 inch non-stick, oven proof skillet. (Lisa doesn’t specify, but I’m guessing here based on experience and what we were served.)
Top off the dough with 1 cup shredded Swiss cheese, chopped & cooked bacon, (Lisa doesn’t specify how much, but really, I’d guess the more the merrier here) sweet spring onion, chives & tomato and then drizzle a mixture of 2 eggs, ½ cup heavy cream, salt and pepper on top of it, and bake it for approximately 25 minutes at 425 degrees.

Serving suggestion: cut into slices and serve to a dozen hungry wine bloggers, accompanied by Ravines Argetsinger Vineyard Riesling poured into tiny paper cups.

I also have a NYE wine pet peeve: drinking too much champagne without food. As a drink on its own, a glass or two of champagne can of course be delicious. But after that, diminishing marginal returns set in. On their own, the wine’s high acidity and bubbles can be rough on the palate — but paired with food, they’re refreshing and restorative. This is particularly true if you’re drinking champagne with salty, fatty and/or fishy foods, which really need the cleansing bite of a sip of champagne. Let me go on the record here by saying that dry champagne with desserts and chocolate makes no sense to me: the sugar in the food will make the champagne taste tart and thin in comparison. No, champagne really comes into its own when paired with savory things. The solution to this New Year’s Eve dilemma then is to set out something salty and snacky before the countdown begins. Potato chips would do the trick nicely, but if you’re looking for something fancier, then I’d recommend this easy salmon spread. It’s champagne’s best friend, you can make it ahead, and any leftovers will be delicious on bagels the next morning.

As for champagne to pair it with, you can see some of my holiday sparkling recommendations here. And if you’re looking for the full multi-media STBNY experience, check out this video tasting of the Georges Gardet NV Blanc de Noirs ($39) I did on Food52. (It’s my first foray into video, so please be kind. Or not. Let me know what you think!)

The recipe comes from Patricia Wells’ The Food Lovers Guide to Paris, although I’ve modified some of the proportions and added a few of my own touches.

One other thing: this dish is luxurious, but no single ingredient is horribly expensive. True, it does call for Cognac, but you can pick up one of those tiny bottles of Hennessy at the liquor store — absolutely no need to splurge on fine brandy here. And please just use whatever decent white wine you happen to have lying around to poach the fish. As always, my editorializing is in parentheses.

Salmon spread

1/2 lb skinned fresh salmon filet

1 c. dry white wine

1 tablespoon olive oil

3 tablespoons Cognac

salt and black pepper to taste

1/2 lb smoked salmon

9 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 teaspoons fresh thyme

toast for spreading (go Nordic — those little rye bread squares, toasted, or else Wasa crispbread are both good)

1. Cut the fresh salmon into bite-sized pieces. In a small saucepan, combine the fresh salmon and wine and bring slowly to a boil over medium heat. Remove from the heat and drain the salmon, discarding the wine.

2. In another small saucepan heat the olive oil and add the fresh salmon. Cook gently over medium heat for about 3 minutes. Do not let it brown. Add the Cognac, salt, and pepper. Remove from the heat and set aside.

3. Cut the smoked salmon into bite-sized pieces. (You’ll ultimately put this in a food processor so don’t be too fussy about the size here.) In (yet another) small saucepan over medium heat, sauté the smoked salmon in 5 tablespoons of butter until it is heated through, 3-5 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool. Then blend in a food processor, adding the remaining butter.

4. Working by hand, combine the fresh salmon and smoked salmon mixtures with a fork in a small bowl until well-blended. Check for seasoning. Transfer to a serving dish. (I used 4 4-ounce little ramekins and still had a little left over. For aesthetic reasons I’d recommend using a few small dishes, if you have. There’s something about a huge mound of this pink stuff that puts me off — I think it looks much prettier and more sophisticated in tiny vessels.) Carefully smooth the top. Refrigerate at least 12 hours before serving.

5. To serve, remove from the fridge about 30 minutes beforehand. Sprinkle with thyme leaves on top and serve with toast.

As they say in Trading Places, Merry New Year!

Case in point: these lamb shanks I whipped up over the weekend. Lamb is my favorite red meat, but even I find lamb shanks off-putting if not prepared in a way that offsets their gamey tendencies. I remembered a straightforward lamb recipe I had seen in one of my favorite cookbooks these days, The New Spanish Table, by Anya von Bremzen, that featured white wine — and damned if it didn’t work just perfectly. The white wine really mitigated the richness of what is an undeniably fatty cut of meat, and the dish came out a beautiful tawny color, a nice change of pace from the murky reddish brown that comes from cooking red meat in red wine. It’s also simple, the kind of thing you can put in the oven and check up on every so often while, say, trying to recover from a cold and catching up on your DVR queue.

A few words on matching before I give you the recipe. (Somewhat theoretically: I was sick when I cooked this and don’t drink when I’m feeling under the weather, so ended up matching this with tap water.) The rule of thumb is to drink whatever you’re cooking with. I find this impractical, as I’m usually cooking with odds and ends of 3/4-finished bottles that happen to be hanging out in my fridge. In this case, I used the last of a bottle of Alsatian Pinot Blanc I had sampled earlier in the week. Pinot Blanc is a pretty neutral grape and the wine worked well in the recipe, but as a drinking partner, it would have been totally overwhelmed by the lamb. However, the robust tanginess of this dish makes it a potentially good partner for a fuller-bodied white that could stand up to the meat. An Oregon Pinot Gris (I love Torii Mor) definitely has potential as an unconventional match. In fact, I offered this wine at Thanksgiving a few years ago as an option for non-red drinkers and it worked wonderfully with roast turkey and my mom’s sherry-infused sausage stuffing. If you just can’t wrap your head around red meat with white wine, no problem. I’d keep it local and try a Rioja.

Here’s the recipe as it appears in the book (with my notes in parentheses and italicized) — I easily halved it as I was just cooking for me and Paul.

4 large lamb shanks

1 onion, cut in half, each half cut into 4-5 wedges

2 small carrots, cut into chunks

5 small heads of garlic, 4 heads with outer layer of skin removed, 1 head separated into cloves, each clove peeled and lightly smashed (this is a lot of garlic — take her advice on “small.” I used tiny heads of garlic from the Greenmarket, if you’re working with regular supermarket garlic, opt for 2-3 heads instead.)

olive oil

1 large rosemary sprig (eagle eye readers will be able to spot that I used some thyme, too — I already had some in the fridge, why not?)

3/4 cup dry white wine (whatever you have in the fridge is fine, as long as you enjoyed drinking it)

About 1 1/2 c. chicken stock or broth

1. Preheat the oven to 475 F.

2. Rub the lamb with salt and pepper. Choose a heavy, deep, flameproof baking dish that can hold the lamb and vegetables in one snug layer. Scatter the onions, carrots, and smashed garlic cloves on the bottom of the dish, season them with salt and pepper, and toss with some olive oil. Brush the lamb shanks all over with olive oil and place them on top of the vegetables. tuck the heads of garlic and the rosemary sprig (and thyme) between the shanks and brush with olive oil. (Not sure why this last brushing is necessary, but I did it anyway.)

3. Bake the shanks, uncovered, turning once, until the meat and vegetables are nicely browned, about 45 min. Check after 25 min, and if the vegetables in the bottom of the dish are beginning to burn (mine weren’t), add a little water and reduce the temp to 425 F.

4. After 45 min, add the wine to the baking dish and enough chicken stock to come about halfway up the meat. Cover the baking dish tightly with its lid or a double layer of aluminum foil if it doesn’t have one and reduce the oven temp to 325 F. Bake until the shanks are very tender and the meat begins to pull away from the bone, about 2 hours. Turn the shanks once or twice as they bake and add more stock, if necessary, to maintain the level of liquid.

5. Transfer the lamb, vegetables and garlic heads to a serving platter. Skim the fat off the pan juices, then transfer the juices to a sauceboat or a small pitcher. If you’d like the sauce to be thicker, place the baking dish over medium-high heat and cook until the sauce is reduced to the desired consistency. (I like a thinner sauce so skipped this step.)

Turns out there’s some scientific evidence saying it may not be the tannins at all.An article in last week’s Economist summarizes some experiments recently published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry showing that it’s the iron in some red wines that creates this fishy aftertaste. Unfortunately, there’s really no way to know how much iron a wine contains. However, the research also suggests that very acidic wines, regardless of color, work well with fish because the acidity seems to counteracts the iron-induced unpleasantness.

These findings will encourage me to experiment even more with matching fish and red wine — and you should do the same. High acidity reds like Cabernet Franc from the Loire or Long Island, Pinot Noir, even a Sangiovese (which, who knows, could work really well with a tuna in a tomato and garlic sauce) are all possibilities. And don’t be afraid to pop open a white too and see which combination you like better.

It was kind of a tale of two cities. Paris had a few highlights — this very simple fig and mozzarella salad at Autour d’un Verre, a little wine bar in the 9th arrondisement, was awesome. The mozzarella was insanely creamy (I have a theory it was actually burrata, which is mozzarella enhanced — as if it needed any help – by cream in the center), the figs were perfect, and a drizzle of olive oil brought the whole thing together.

The restaurant itself, however, was kind of my worst nightmare. The crowd was somehow hipster-y and yet uncool – as if they had all just stepped off a Lucky magazine photo shoot.  The tables were lined up tightly against both walls and you couldn’t help but jostle your neighbor. Between that and the dingy yellow lighting, it felt like dining on the R Train at rush hour.

Despite the “wine bar” tag, the waiter was absolutely zero help when I asked him to compare and contrast two bottles on the list. He said the equivalent of “they’re both fine” and left it at that. I ended up going with La Treille Muscate, from Corbières in the Languedoc, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

It delivered a nice smoky, herbal, blackberry kick, and for about $30, the price was right. Our mains were fine, we both ordered a kind of Scandanavian meatball concoction. OK, yeah, I know, so that was kind of a misorder on our part, but it was either that, fish in creamy sauce — my nemesis — or confit de canard, and at that point we were thoroughly duck-ed out. One of the few other upsides of the place was that we bonded a bit with our neighbors about the surly waiter. Nonetheless, we left feeling harried and unsatisfied.

Bandol, on the other hand, was dreamy. We stayed Les Quatres Saisons, this bed & breakfast near Le Castellet, a slightly Disneyfied fortified medieval village a few minutes away from Bandol. The Web site truly does not do it justice — this is the first time I’ve ever been to  a hotel that looked much more beautiful in person than it did online. Our little duplex suite, which had a spacious deck looking out onto the vineyards of Bandol, was beyond charming, and the setting was incredibly peaceful.

However, the highlight of staying at Les Quatres Saisons was the nightly dinner 3-course dinner. No choices, just whatever happened to look good that day at the market. Always a gamble, but luckily, the market highlights during our stay included pretty mainstream selections — no snails or liver or sea urchin. There were some welcome stylish touches — a very cool “tapas de volaille” starter that was a variation on a theme of poultry: smoked duck over spicy couscous, a tiny, zesty chicken wing, duck sausage over deliciously olive oil drenched vegetables, a chicken and duck terrine with a chunk of foie gras in the center — but nothing was overworked. Desserts were exceptional, and I managed to get a shot of Paul’s moelleux au chocolat before he devoured it.

Extra props to Didier and Patrice for making such an effort with the food when, as you can see from the lead photo of this post, they really could have phoned it in. The could have relied on the beautiful setting to justify the 40-euro per person price tag and left it at that. Instead, they put forth a million elegant little touches — the very aromatherapeutic logs of pine burning in their outdoor oven, the apéritif of local vin d’orange (orange-scented fortified wine) and Muscat to open the meal — that made the dinners so memorable. My dream for my 40th birthday is come back here with Paul and a few of our besties. Presumably at that point I’ll have even less tolerance for BS, and Didier and Patrice’s no-fuss elegance will be that much more welcome.

There are, however, a few exceptions. My favorite one — actually, one of my favorite foods, period — is pesto. Not the slick puree you find lubricating too many mediocre chicken wraps or limp pasta salads, but the real thing: an herby, nutty, garlicky sauce with real texture and presence. I like to make it with whatever nuts and herbs I happen to have on hand. A few nights ago, I tossed three cloves of garlic, a few handfuls of roughly chopped roasted (unsalted) almonds, about two thirds of a bunch of parsley, a small handful of mint, and a generous grating of Pecorino in a food processor. I whizzed it a few times until it was chopped but still a bit chunky, then poured in some olive oil while the motor was still running. Once it had the right texture — somewhere between a liquid and  a paste, with a little grittiness thanks to the almonds — I stirred in some salt, a little lemon juice, and a splash of pricey, peppery extra-virgin olive oil from Napa and then stirred it into some rhombi pasta, cute little rhomboid ribbons. It could not have been easier or, frankly, more delicious.

Obviously, this isn’t so much a recipe as it is a set of guidelines. The garlic, cheese, and olive oil are imperative, as is getting the texture right, but otherwise it’s pretty flexible. In the winter, I like walnuts, parsley and Parm. I bet pistachio and basil would be interesting, too, although my house’s resident improviser is also, unbelievably, a basil-hater. A dash of red pepper flakes wouldn’t hurt, either.

The tart did not disappoint. I am not very adept when it comes to making food look camera-worthy, but even with my slightly spazzy tendencies, the tomato slicing and overlapping came out beautifully. The tart suffered a slight structural breach after we blind baked it, but the layer of cheese helped prevent any tomato juice seepage through the wide fissure that opened up on the bottom of the crust. I’d argue that this would be a good template for other vegetables — zucchini or mushrooms, perhaps? although of course you’d have to cook them first.