Spice Glazed Lamb Chops with Red Wine and Coffee Sauce

I love coffee and red wine.  So putting them together in a sauce sounds amazing.  I've used ground coffee in spice mixes and rubs but I've never brewed up a pot of strong coffee and poured it into a sauce.  I was skeptical at first because I thought it would be bitter, but it was really good!  I couldn't taste anything that was identifiable as coffee.  It was a wine sauce with a nice earthiness to it.  It's definitely important that the coffee be strong.  I used the "strong" setting on my coffee maker and it worked fine. The ancho chile powder added a little bit of heat but the sauce as a whole blended really nicely. Next time I'd serve it over polenta or rice pilaf or something.  Normal people would probably make mashed potatoes (ew).  I used more pearl onions than the recipe called for, it seemed silly to use half a bag.  Plus they went really well with the sauce.  This dish wasn't actively quick, but it didn't take terribly long.  I would say it's doable on a work night if you aren't very busy.  I will definitely make this again because the sauce was fantastic.  I made a full recipe of sauce and didn't use it all.  

The asparagus was completely an afterthought.  

Rib Eye with Gorgonzola and Hazelnuts

I don't cook steak very often since I don't eat a lot of red meat.  That said, every once in a while, I crave steak.  Perhaps it harkens back to my college days when I subsisted off substandard salad bar and ramen because the "meat" served in the cafeteria was of dubious quality and cooked beyond recognition.  Whenever my parents came to visit I wanted STEAK every night.  I'm sure Outback made a killing during Parents' Weekend. 

This recipe is from The Wine Lover Cooks with Wine, which is a great book if you like using wine as an ingredient.  This steak dish also lets me eat blue cheese, which is one of my favorites.  The original recipe called for Roquefort cheese, but the store was out of it and I bought some blue cheese instead.   I also topped it with hazelnuts instead of walnuts.  It's served with a side of jalapeno roasted potatoes, which are simple to make!

The wine sauce has a great flavor, and the cheese goes very well with it.  It's also a good match for the potatoes.  Looking back, I don't know if I needed to keep them separate in a bowl, the sauce was good on them!  

Anniversary Dinner! Pasta with Lamb Ragu and a Nice Bottle of Bordeaux

This weekend was my seventh wedding anniversary!  After all these years, my husband and I are as in love as we were when we met in law school (we met in torts, how romantic!).  Sunday was our actual anniversary, but we went out on Saturday so we didn't have to care about being out late.  Conveniently, A Game of Thrones premiered on Sunday night and we took the opportunity to cook something tasty and geek out in front of the TV.

This pasta dish is something we make a lot in the winter.  I've altered the original recipe a bit to make the spice mixture more to my liking and eliminate some waste.  Instead of using one rib of celery, I use a shallot because I always have one around and I rarely find a good use for random celery.  I added a clove of garlic and some extra ground fennel seed.  The fennel seed makes the sauce smell heavenly and it brings out the lamb really well. Instead of buying a tub of ricotta that would sit in the fridge until it achieved consciousness, I used grana padano.  Sometimes, we make our own pasta to go with it.  This time, we bought some fresh pasta from an Italian deli up the street.

This meal is a good excuse for a nice bottle of red wine.   Wine is a hobby of Dave's, so he decided to pair the dinner with one of his special bottles that we've had for a few years.  He picked a bottle of Chateau Tour St. Bonnet 2005 Médoc, which smelled wonderful and went well with the cheesy, fennel-y goodness of the lamb ragu. I lack the vocabulary to adequately describe the wine, it's definitely worth a try if you can get ahold of it.  It sells for around $20.  I would link to the official website but (1) it's in French and (2) it looks like it was designed in 1997 and my eyes can only take so much of the blink tag. 

Before and After: Chicken Paprika

One of the very first cookbooks I bought was The Wine Lover's Cookbook, which is divided up by type of wine that pairs well with each dish.  Some of the dishes were extremely ambitious for someone learning how to cook.  When you don't really know what you're doing, an ingredient list with more than a dozen things can be pretty daunting.  But, I figured out that a lot of the ingredients for this Chicken Paprika with Almond Relish were spices and small things that got chopped up and tossed into a bowl, so I decided to give it a try.  It was also paired with viognier, which is one of my favorite types of white wine.  One of my favorite viogniers is Yalumba's Y Series Viognier.  It's fruity, but not too sweet like some Rieslings can be.  Also, the price is right at $15 or less. 

The picture below is from two nights ago.   After the jump is my version from 2007, guest starring Dave's lap.  When I was first learning how to cook, making more than one thing at a time was a little too complicated, so the result was a chicken breast plopped on a plate and covered some sauce and a ton of relish.  If you squint, you can see that there is, in fact, some chicken under the mountain of relish.  :)  The book suggests serving this with egg noodles or spaetzle and I always have egg noodles around, so now I put the chicken on top of egg noodles with caraway seeds mixed in. 

As the book says, having both hot and sweet paprika really makes this dish tasty.  Back in 2007, I omitted the mushrooms because Dave hated them.  Since then, he's decided he likes mushrooms so long as they're thinly sliced and not used as a meat substitute.  The mushrooms add a depth to the sauce that was lacking without them.  I don't really like peaches, and I've always got dried apricots around.  They're a good source of potassium and they keep forever.  So, my relish is always with apricots.  The caraway seed in the relish stops it from being too sweet and ties it into the sauce, which also has caraway seeds.