Terlato White Wines & Kerrygold Cheese

I believe this is the first time that I've received cheese samples along with wine, and it's a combination that I hope to see again before it gets too hot outside. The wines are from the Terlato portfolio while the cheeses are from Irish producer Kerrygold.

The cheeses are lined up with the suggested pairings, though at any gathering you're going to see a lot of mixing and matching. I took all three cheeses, the Pinot Grigio, and the Beerenauslese to my family Christmas gathering, while I saved the Sancerre to enjoy with two dozen raw oysters. I'm sure it would have been wonderful with the Reserve Cheddar, but I had a craving for Sancerre and shellfish that just had to be satisfied, and it was wonderful.

2011 Terlato Pinot Grigio
Russian River Valley
100% Pinot Grigio
$16, 13.8% abv.

Ripe citrus with a touch of musk, firm acidity, bright on the palate. My sister-in-law loves Pinot Grigio and enjoyed this one, while I enjoyed the complexity--there's a lot of boring Pinot Grigio out there, and this one definitely held my interest.

2012 Château de Sancerre Blanc
Sancerre AOC, France
100% Sauvignon Blanc
$29, 13% abv.

This one opened up with very gentle grapefruit aromas, hints of bright citrus peel flavors, and a few floral undertones. Great minerality and a lingering finish. The salty oysters only amplified the enjoyment of the wine, and it reminded me how long it had been since trying a Sancerre. Highly recommended.

2010 Kracher Beerenauslese Cuvée
Burgenland, Austria
60% Chardonnay, 40% Welschriesling
$35/375mL, 12% abv.

Classic botrytis aromas of Honeysuckle and lemon, with dark honey flavors. Sweet but not cloying, with very firm acidity. It does not cling to the glass but works out quite well as a dessert wine. It's an interesting blend of grapes when you think about the more common Riesling, Sauternes, and Tokaji implementations.

And now for the cheeses! These are all in the cheddar family but were a lot of fun to nibble on with the wines. With wide distribution, these should be fairly easy to find throughout the United States.

Red Leicester is a traditional English style that is colored with annatto extract like cheddar, but made in a little more crumbly form. I like it with a little summer sausage on the side.

The Reserve Cheddar has been a family favorite for a while. White with crunchy calcium lactate crystals, it has a rich flavor and a fascinating texture.

Our last cheese, and a beautiful pairing with the Kracher, was the Aged Cheddar with Irish Whiskey. It's much softer than the others, almost like a blended Stilton. The Irish Whiskey is barely present, meaning that it enhances the flavor of the cheese without being overwhelming. It was my favorite of the three, and definitely worth checking out.

Note: These wines were provided as samples.

St. Patrick's Day Lunch

What percentage of me is Irish? Blond hair, red beard, freckles, short and stocky... I'm some combination of Scottish/Welsh/English/Irish thrown upon the shores of the New World, but I can say that when I was in Boston I blended into the crowd in a way that was unique amongst my many travels upon this green Earth.

As a Protestant I do not celebrate the feast day of St. Patrick for religious reasons, and as a responsible citizen I do not head out to bars where good beer is adulterated with blue dye to produce pitchers of green piss. However, I do enjoy cooking something Irish on this particular day, and my meal began early with a batch of whole wheat soda bread, using the unique pint glass recipe from Saveur magazine. The result is a dense and chewy bread with a firm crust that marries well with soft butter and molasses. Though it is heavy, I've always enjoyed a wedge of soda bread when it's cold outside.

Instead of just boiling a chunk of corned beef or making potato soup, I decided to go for a proper lamb dish combined with traditional colcannon. For the latter, I used Yukon Gold potatoes, rendered lamb fat, kale, and onions. The result was rich and savory, and the use of kale instead of regular cabbage was the choice my father made earlier in the week for his holiday colcannon. The lamb fat meant that no additional butter was required.

I broke out the mortar and pestle to make a good spice rub for the rack of lamb. Peppercorns, coriander, allspice, sea salt, and dried lemon zest. I rubbed that on the ribs and let them rest for a good hour before slow roasting the rack in the oven. A quick blast of heat at the end to crisp up the edges, and we were done.

Lastly, I drizzled the ribs with a reduction of Guinness Stout, honey, and balsamic vinegar. Cooked down to just above the syrup level and carefully poured over the tender ribs. It provided a sweet and piquant contrast to the savory and fatty lamb.

The end result of it all was decadent and delicious... Earthy and savory flavors of lamb and potato and kale combined with great spices and sauces, all enjoyed on a quiet Sunday afternoon rather than in a bar with a hundred green-clad miscreants spilling beer and trying to sing along to faux-Irish music.

St. Patrick's Day Lunch

I've never really celebrated St. Patrick's Day other than the obligatory wearing of green to avoid getting pinched, but that's more of a good touch/bad touch issue than ethnic pride. Out of respect for the history of brewing I've never touched green beer, out of general self respect I've never dressed as a leprechaun, and because I want to respect myself in the morning I don't go to places like Hjálmar McGillicutty's Norwegian-Irish Chucklehut for loud singing and happy hour half price Irish nachos (made with potato chips instead of tortilla chips).

I was in the mood for cooking something different (I'm trying to exercise the culinary muscles these days), and as it had been so long since my last foray into the cuisine of the British Isles, I decided to make an Irish meal for Saturday lunch. I started, of course, with a very Irish appetizer: various American cheeses like hard aged cheddar from Fiscalini in Modesto, California and Bayley Hazen Blue from Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vermont.

The blue cheese was soft and tangy, but I loved the aged cheddar, with lots of crunchy tyrosine crystals. Rich and nutty and such a wonderful mouthfeel. And I had some naturally bright green Castelvetrano olives from Sicily, because I thought the table did need a little hint of holiday color. These are delicious olives, and are apparently quite trendy these days. A little salty, a little sweet, a little savory, and so cheerfully colored that you'll forget the fact that you used to own a jar of model airplane paint called olive drab.

OK, nothing Irish about any of that, but lately I've really been digging a nice round of cheese and olives with a martini before dinner. It is far from an original concept but it's often easy to neglect the classics in a rush to plop down an aluminum tray of frozen grocery store lasagna on the table.

Earlier on Friday night I made a simple lamb stew with a pound of shoulder, bacon, a can of Guinness Draught, some beef stock, onions, and a few other odds and ends. A few hours of braising and then I let it all cool and rest in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning I removed the rendered and solidified pork/lamb fat and slowly reheated the remainder. Fortunately these cuts of shoulder had nice thick marrow pieces, which I made sure to distribute throughout the sauce as it reduced.

In the morning I made colcannon, a simple dish of potatoes and cabbage. The more complicated part was making boxty, a class of potato pancakes that come in various forms from latkes to crepes. I decided to go the crepe route, stuffed with the stewed lamb and topped with a little sour cream. The boxty took forever to cook. Each pancake took a good 20 minutes, and I started getting annoyed at the whole process. I was successful, but it was much harder than making crepes or fresh tortillas, and the final product wasn't as flexible as any of the various wrapper flatbreads of the world. This is perhaps entirely due to my inexperience with a potato-based flexible wrapper, but frankly I'd prefer lavash or mu shu or blinis or injera over this particular form.

I grated a little green apple into the batter, and despite the difficulty (I only made four pancakes in the 80 minutes of griddle time), the combination of the potatoes, eggs, apple, lamb, and sour cream was really wonderful and filling. Washing it all down with cold and smooth dark beer was fun as well, and I was finally able to relax after hours of cooking and ponder the question of overthinking the peasant fare that I adore. Remember the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. It probably would have been a better idea to do the simpler latke-style boxty with a combination of mashed and grated potato, and I still could have topped it with lamb stew and cream and even a decorative garnish of microgreens that looked like tiny shamrocks, but it wouldn't have taken anywhere near as long.

But at the end of the day, I had a great meal, good company, delicious beer, and didn't have to wade through a horde of idiots wearing "KISS ME--I'M IRISH!" buttons. Instead, it was a quiet meal between a Scots Presbyterian (yours truly) and a redheaded Irish Catholic (Julia) that didn't involve warfare, internecine domestic violence, or the mediation of Bill Clinton on the public stage. Rather, I think that the Irish and most folks around the world would prefer a gentle and respectful celebration of their holidays by non-residents, and I hope that I have done so in this post.

Boru Vodka

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a good time and has recovered from the holiday. I'll do a roundup of the sparkling wines from the weekend for Wednesday's post, but today I'll post a brief vodka review.

Julia enjoys a vodka tonic, and as I was grabbing a few odds and ends from the liquor store I needed to get some vodka. In my neverending quest to try new things from new areas, I almost laughed when I saw an Irish vodka named after the legendary king Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig.

Ireland makes more than just beer and whiskey, though this product is much smoother and more refined than the Emerald Isle's version of moonshine called Poitín (sometimes anglicized as Poteen or Potcheen). Here I'm trying the standard vodka, but they also produce varieties flavored with lemon, orange, and "crazzberry" (cranberry + raspberry).

Boru Vodka
$22/1.75L, 40% abv.
Distilled from grain, though if there was ever a candidate for a potato vodka... It's got a basic clear spirit aroma with a good bit of a kick to it on the initial taste and the finish. For that reason, I'd recommend this as more of a mixing vodka for cocktails. In the vodka tonic it worked out well, and I found out that it also made for a decent screwdriver. While it doesn't really stand out great on its own, there's a huge marketing potential out there with the many thousands of Irish pubs in the US. Why not replace all those Russian bottles with the clear cool spirit of Éire? It's last call and there's a round of Boru shots during that tearful singing of "Danny Boy"...