Wine In My Kitchen: Cooking and Reading Everyday

By Karen Tripson

Wildwood: Inspired Pacific Northwest Food and Wine

Restaurant cookbooks can be ridiculously challenging for the home chef with mysterious ingredients, missing instructions and recipes that were not tested in a home stove. But it’s worth the struggle if you glean a good tip on how to build flavors that take your breath away. Chef Cory Schreiber makes it easy for us amateurs with his first cookbook, Wildwood — Cooking from the Source in the Pacific Northwest (Ten Speed Press $39.95) based on the food served at his restaurant in Portland, Oregon. The ingredients are available at the regional farmer’s markets and the instructions are all there that lead to a finished product that wows the audience in the time frame described. Kudos to the team that accomplished this complex translation from high-style commerce to your kitchen table. Here are a few things I learned that are indicative of his style.

Keep it Simple
Pan Roasted Halibut with Red Wine Butter and Red Potatoes gives the home chef two techniques that are easy and can be used for the rest of your life. Simply grill or roast fresh fish, vegetables or poultry. Smear wine butter on top. Serve. Very tasty. Very easy. Any red wine you enjoy drinking will work in the recipe he says, but a northwest pinot noir seems to go naturally with northwest fish or produce. The wine is reduced to a syrup which intensifies the flavors and then is pureed with butter and seasonings. It stores conveniently in the refrigerator or freezer for the next time you need a jolt of flavor without any effort on your part. The next smart thing to be learned from this recipe is starting the fish in a hot pan on top of the stove and finishing it in the oven, which makes room on top of the stove and frees your hands for other last minute chores. The halibut was the first recipe I tried from this book and it was such a big hit at my house we kept making it and not trying anything else. (Here is the original recipe in an easy print PDF format. If you do not have the Acrobat Reader 5.1 installed, get a free download at Adobe.)

Serve it On Toast
One dining rut my modest lifestyle — and vanity — will keep me out of is creamed crab on toast, but I did try, more than once, Creamed Crab on Wildwood Brioche with Wild Mushrooms and Thyme. I omitted the mushrooms after the first rendition because they seemed like gilding. Dungeness crabmeat is so rich and sweet on its own I seldom do anything to it except a squeeze of lemon and a dab of sour cream. But how could you resist this reduction of heavy cream, which according to the chef, is the perfect consistency for a sauce for crab and will warm your soul on a winter day. Take it from a frugal home chef, fresh crab in any weather lets your company know what you think of them in your soul and this technique makes a little go a long way. I plan to serve it soon to dear friends as a hot crab dip. This recipe could bring creaming back from the past as a hot new trend. So many things can be creamed into a delicious result and then served on toast to invoke that comfort food casualness — or on brioche — for the full deluxe effect.

If It’s Good with Chicken Legs...
Extra points go to the chef who calls for the humble chicken leg that’s easy to find on sale and becomes worthy of Christmas dinner when Braised in Pinot Noir and Blackberries with Fennel Purée. Obviously, if it works with legs, imagine what other meats might be gently braised to such a fine finish. Other successes that I found to be simple, but sublime:

• Whole Roasted Rockfish with Celery, Fennel and Thin Potatoes;
• Wilted Spinach Salad with Hazelnuts, Smoked Trout and Oregon Blue Cheese;
• Mushroom Bread Pudding; and
• Roasted Pork Loin with Gewürztraminer-Apricot Compote and Vegetable Barley.

Anytime you see fresh fish or produce at the market and want to know how to present it at its best, you will get good ideas from Wildwood that can be accomplished at home. The same is true for wine. This book will inspire you into drinking and cooking with varieties produced in the Pacific Northwest that you might not have thought of otherwise. The professional pairings of food and wine show you how to get started making your own pairings.

How to Beat the Fickle Restaurant Crowd
Oysters are a big part of this book. Fruit desserts are a big part of this book. I love oysters in all guises, but I’m not going to shuck them. I love cobbler, pie , fool and shortcake, but I seldom cook dessert. So, I finally had to go to the restaurant for lunch. Not everyone who reads the book lives a few hours up the road and a visit is not essential to enjoying the book. I had a good experience at Wildwood: warm welcome, stunning food, pleasant service. I ate great oysters and phenomenal crumble that I would never make at home, but what hit me over the head as a fundamental truth about the restaurant business was clear in the pinot gris and pinot noir by the glass. Ordering by the glass frequently penalizes you with uninteresting selections that are moderately priced and don’t enhance the food or the mood; or top of the line selections that are so scandalously priced it ruins the mood. The Wildwood choices were high quality and paired so well with the menu, I doubt you could go wrong in that way. They were reasonably priced. They were generously poured in a substantial glass. Bingo! No wonder his family has been in the business for about a hundred years.