Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you a simple Chicken Liver Salad to see us through the summer.

Like other forms of offal, chicken livers languish on supermarket shelves largely ignored by soccer moms and dads doing the weekly shop and chosen only by the frugal pensioner and the odd foodie. (After all, we can’t eat at St. John’s every night or drag ourselves to Smithfield’s each morning.)

It’s a shame too, really; because far more than most any other offal, chicken livers are both delectable and versatile. Consider this: in the past four years, I’ve managed to have chicken livers on lemongrass skewers in a restaurant on the Kowloon peninsula of Hong Kong, in pasta at a little Italian eatery hidden on the first floor of a rather non-descript Melbourne side street, as chopped liver served al fresco at a kosher trattoria in the Jewish quarter of Rome, and with salad in a Spanish tapas bar in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

While my favourite method of preparation would most certainly fresh from the pan with a touch of salt and gently fried in olive oil, they are remarkably good served with a slice of orange or Mandarin and few choice leaves of salad, making them perfect for a light summer luncheon.

Most often, people will recommend pairing liver with a big tannic red wine, the tannins serving as a safe partner for the savour flavour of the offal; however, an occasionally considered alternative — especially in the case of foie gras — is Sauternes, a sweet and acidic French dessert wine made of botrytised white wine grapes.

As with the French Sauternes, the Hungarian Tokaji Aszú is another well known wine made of botrytised wine grapes occasionally matched with foie gras to excellent affect. Given Hungary’s culinary acuity when it comes to all things liver (many consider the country’s foie gras among the best in the world — even France imports it), I decided to pair the Simple Chicken Liver Summer Salad with its dry Tokaji Furmint cousin, hoping that the drier wine would better suit the flavours chicken livers and salad.

Although, not quite the perfect match that I had hoped, but still a very good one all the same, the 2004 Oremus Tokaji Mandolas Dry Furmint (13%), £13.50 from Planet of the Grapes, is honeyed and buttery with an strong citric edge and a bit too much of an oak-y aftertaste that clashes slightly with the strongly textured flavour of the liver. This is a very impressive wine, nonetheless, and a rarity to find most places outside of Hungary to boot. Those seeking a white wine outside the realm of the overfamiliar Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc could do a lot worse than this. It would pair nicely with soft, flakey fish and seafood or make an excellent wine to enjoy on its own. It also maintains its form once openned, its oak-y aftertaste only marginally increasing over a few days.

Now, because InterWined is sometimes asked to ascribe numerical value to the wines it tries like judges at a sporting competition, let’s give this one some sort of score that suggests an excellent near miss, close the bullseye — something like 8.whatever.

(For more on InterWined’s complex ratings system, be sure to visit the Ratings page.)

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

There are few things nicer than a warm slice of bread and a good glass of wine. So, this week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you both with its very own Olive & Parma Bread.

I’ve made this bread several times and in many different ways, as a bâtard, as a baguette, and as a kind of stromboli. This recipe makes the stromboli-style.

Accompanying the stromboli is a simple glass of Italian wine in the form of the 2005 Remole Frescobaldi (12.5%), £7.49 from Oddbins, made from a blend of 85% Sangiovese/15% Cabernet Sauvignon. Oddbins describes the wine as a mini-Super Tuscan and it’s hard to disagree. The flavour is earthy and tannic with a nose that smells of cherries and summer fruits. Together, the two work well and find balance — the bread with its strong olive, salt, and cheese flavours smoothing the tannins found in the wine.

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Just because UK food prices are their highest in more than a decade doesn’t mean that we can’t eat well. In fact, in some ways, it might mean just the opposite.

Here’s how: we all know that necessity is the mother of something, be it outright invention or the simply act of taking chances, as a quick search of Google will assure Mark Twain once apparently said; and when it comes to the kitchen that something is prized as culinary inspiration.

For most, if not all, of the world’s great culinary achievements – those techniques that transform ingredients into dishes that speak to our hearts as much as to our stomachs – were born of a necessary kind of culinary inspiration. From salting to smoking to pickling to stewing and offal to sausages to bean curd to…you get the picture…necessity has given us some of our most popular dishes and culinary techniques to help us see out the lean weeks and wait for the happy return of opulence and excess and imported non-seasonal fruits and vegetables.

So, in the spirit of the credit crunch, put down the ready-meal, unplug the microwave, and learn to re-embrace one-pot dinners and the hasty return of leftovers, as ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you its Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

And, sure it might cost more than a fiver (No offense Jamie; I’m sure shopping for spaghetti with you is very rewarding.), but it’ll definitely last a couple of meals.

Pork is a staple of the Spanish and Latin American diet, which dates back at least to the reconquista of Al-Andalus in 1492 — the year ol’ Cristóbal Colón went sailing to India and landed on the island of Hispaniola (the island divided by the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

The history of this dish isn’t that old, but it’s close. In Spanish, the words Olla Podrida literally refer to a rotten pot of meat. But names can be deceiving — especially when it comes to foodstuffs — because this dish is anything but rotten.

Cooked in a large earthenware pot, the loin of pork is slow-cooked for a couple of hours in a mix of water, roughly chopped onions, cut bulbs of garlic, and a touch of salt and pepper. Later, the pork is removed and the remaining water and ingredients discarded. In the same pot, mustard seeds, paprika, and cumin are heated in olive oil with onion. The pork loin is shredded and returned to the pot, along with a simple vegetable or wine stock, followed by red kidney beans, cannellini beans, and calasparra rice. Once the stock has evaporated, the pot is removed from the heat, re-seasoned and served on warm corn tortillas to become Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

A bottle of the 2006 Val do Sosego Albariño (12.5%), from Rias Baixas in Spain, available at Oddbins for £8.49, makes a wondrous pairing to this white-meat stew, its mix of apples and pears complimenting the pork as well as the corn tortilla. Pork and apples, like apples and maize are excellent pairing partners; and although there is a tad more of a floral sense on the nose and woodiness in the mouth than I would have liked, it remains light and well-balanced with a crispness that helps further perpetuate the sense of apple. That gives it a score of 8.3, based on the complicated but 100%-accurate ratings system outlined on InterWined.com’s Ratings page. Thing is, it was so close to 8.6.

(As most readers will know, InterWined’s rating system is somewhat arbitrary and largely tongue-in-cheek.)

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you two of InterWined’s favourite pizzas.

Pizza with Parma Ham, Basil, and Red Onion

Feta & Butternut Squash Pizza with Ricotta and Pine Nuts

The 2006 ‘Taste the Difference’ Primitivo del Salento, from Italy and available exclusively to Sainsbury’s for approximately £5, is made by Cantina Due Palme, an Italian co-operative from Apulia known for their award- winning Primitivo. So, it doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it slightly astounds. For £5, this is one of the best wines that I’ve had in months; it’s also great for pairing with all manner of foods.

This wine is rich and flavourful, with a complexion that’s something of a cross between black cherries and dried blood. Thankfully, you can only taste the cherries. But even if wine could taste like blood, this wine would pull it off brilliantly. There’s such a good balance to it.

It’s also the perfect mix of spicy and sweet to match both pizzas. The sweetness really marries well with the squash and adds a little bit of a zip to the mellower flavour of the baked feta. Likewise, the sweetness helps counter any saltiness from the Parma ham, while the fresh basil, red onions, and ample cranks of cracked pepper help compliment the spice. A perfect threesome: 9.1.

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Pizza with Parma Ham, Basil, and Red Onion & Feta & Butternut Squash Pizza with Ricotta and Pine Nuts

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ continues InterWined’s All American, a month-long celebration of some of American cuisine’s greatest dishes from classic comfort foods to the unsung greats of American soulfood, with InterWined’s Own Homemade Buffalo Wings with Lemon Parsley Dip.

You could write a book about Buffalo Wings…and, indeed, someone has. Two someones, if fact — Aaron Reynolds and Paulette Bogan. They are a children’s author and an illustrator, respectively, and the book is called — surprise, surprise — Buffalo Wings. It’s the story of a rooster and quest and a recipe by woman named Bellissimo and made famous by a guy named Frank at a place called the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York.

And, if a story about what must surely be a cannibal rooster hungry for some chicken wings doused in a sauce created by a woman named beautiful in a bar in Buffalo doesn’t mark out a recipe as an American classic, nothing will. Let’s be honest, shall we?

Now, controversial tales of cannibalising roosters aside, the story of Buffalo Wings still finds itself in the midst of a minor controversy. To bread or not to bread…

Breaded wings are able to absorb more of the sauce into the breading and maintain the fiery kick of the peppers; they are a little more civilised and only slightly messy to eat, the breading coming free on the tips of one’s fingers and easily picked away. Un-breaded wings somewhat prevent the sauce from fully absorbing into the meat of the wing; sauce drips from wings and stains the fingers and lips a bright orange. Given our rooster friend’s rather shocking predilections, this is surely his preferred method of feasting, feathers ruffled and orange stains everywhere.

Now, whatever your choice in all things chicken wings, InterWined is here to help. (I was going to write “swings both ways”, but was worried what kind of spam comments those words might generate. But, since I just wrote that I wasn’t going to write it, I’ll guess I’ll find out soon enough.)

Regardless of how you take your wings and which way InterWined swings, the Brown Brothers Non-Vintage Pinot Noir Chardonnay & Pinot Meunier (13%), £9-10 from Waitrose, is a treat. It’s not a sophisticated as a sparkling white wine could be; it’s not a dazzler to save for a special occasion — even if it did recently win the 2007 Yarden Trophy at International Wine and Spirits Competition in London. It’s a non-vintage, after all. It’s a sparkler to enjoy any day at any time for any occasion that I discovered in 2004, while looking for a bottle of wine to take to BYOB Vietnamese in Newtown, Sydney Australia. There’s a light, green-apple tinge perfectly in keeping with its pale yellow-green colour. It’s light and unfussy without being forgettable, fruity for a dry wine, and marked with a creamy sweetness to it. The creamy fruit flavour makes for an excellent balance to the spicy, hot zing of the Buffalo Wing sauce and the citrus and herb flavour of the lemon parsley dip. A winning wine for a winning recipe: 9.5.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Homemade Buffalo Wings with Lemon Parsley Dip

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Each Friday and sometimes Saturday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ continues InterWined’s All American, a month-long celebration of some of American cuisine’s greatest dishes from classic comfort foods to the unsung greats of American soulfood, with InterWined’s Own New Orleans King Prawn Po Boy.

The Po Boy is something of a culinary institution in the city of New Orleans. And whether you believe its name comes from the Franglish quip “pour le boy” or a bunch of striking streetcar drivers, two things are clear. You will find it on the chalkboards and menus of corner stores and cafes, bistros and banqueting halls, across the city of New Orleans and the southern United States, and it is definitely not a submarine sandwich, hoagie, grinder, or Hero/gyro.

Leaving New Orleans for London in 1997, there are few things that leave me with greater nostalgia than the simple pleasure of a naked Shrimp Po Boy with hot sauce. My favourite Po Boys, from which InterWined’s Own recipe derives, came from a small corner grocery on Magazine Street, where the Vietnamese shop owner served them naked, or dressed on French bread stuffed with a choice of shrimp, oyster, or roast beef and covered in sauce or debris. For those unfamiliar with the lingo of New Orleans, dressed means with salad, naked without, and debris is a kind of hot gravy for roast beef akin to that found on a drip beef sandwich. (For those unfamiliar with drip beef, we’ll leave that description for another day.)

The 2003 Ronco del Gnemiz Sauvignon from Friuli-Venezia Giulia in Eastern Italy, available through Cadman Fine Wines and reviewed here and here is the perfect companion, ably managing to match the heat of the chilli pepper, paprika, and hot sauce with its “kick-ass hint of jalapeño pepper” as well as subtly of the king prawns.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

New Orleans King Prawn Po Boy

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Each Friday and sometimes Saturday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ introduces InterWined’s All American, a month-long celebration of some of American cuisine’s greatest dishes from classic comfort foods to the unsung greats of American soulfood.

First up is All American Meatloaf with Crème Fraîche Mashed Potatoes.

Whether its origins rest, as some varyingly contend, with the mogul invaders of China, Italian meatball-makers, German Hamburgers, British shepherd’s pie-bakers, or the recipe books of eager home-meat-grinder salesmen, there can be little doubt that the humble meatloaf is 100% American and 100% classic.

Just as its histories are numerous, its variations and varieties are both countless and unpredictable. So, while some recipes call for the inclusion of pineapples or scotch eggs — ingredients that would be anathema in others, still others quibble over the significance of using barbeque sauce or ketchup or Bolognese in the name of authenticity and correctness. In the end, like so much confort food, it all comes down to what you like and what you think is right.

Indeed, there is little doubt that many chefs (and many of their mothers) will find InterWined’s All American Meatloaf far from correct. For one, it includes a couple of rather unorthodox ingredients, such as cubed pancetta and stale sourdough bread. For another, it’s topped with streaks of bacon.

And, because one classic deserves another, paired with InterWined’s All American Meatloaf is the 2005 Château Amarande (13.5%) Grand Vin de Bordeaux. A mix of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2005 Amarande has the familiar nose of a classic claret — a bit of eart, spice, and forest. On the tongue, it’s surprisingly soft, rich in fruit, and mildly tannic with a touch of pepper that marries brilliantly with the both the crusty edges of the meatloaf and its slightly fatty, chewy middle (thanks in no small part to the cubes of pancetta). At 13.5%, the wine is a tad too high in alcohol and, therefore, attention-seeking to be a perfect wine to serve with food; but it high-alcohol wines are all the rage these days and this one proves a superb match for the meaty ground beef, fatty pancetta, and crispy bacon all the same: 9.4.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

All American Meatloaf with Crème Fraîche Mashed Potatoes

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week is a busy one for the world religions, from Baha’i to Zoroastrianism and nearly every other alphabetically in between.

So, today, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings the world a little closer together with InterWined’s Own Rosemary Rack of Lamb with Dolcelatta Polenta.

Not only does Easter, Purim, and Mawlid an-nabi fall within the third week of March this year, but so too does the Vernal Equinox and a host of New Years and religious Spring festivals. And while there is no single food that could satisfy the observers of all of these holidays, there’s certainly one that comes pretty close — at least close enough to bring together Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — which on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is surely no bad thing.

What is this miracle foodstuff, you ask? Well, thank Abraham; it’s the humble little lamb, of course, that delectable little animal so prevalent in Judeo-Christian symbolism and essential to Islam’s Eid Al-Adha celebration.

And interfaith reconciliation aside, it’s also arguably the perfect companion to the totally haraam and non-kosher Pinor Noir. The 2005 Hautes-Côtes de Beaune Clos Bortier (12.5%) from Caroline Lestime and Domaine Jean-Noël Gagnard, currently available in store only from Oddbins, makes for simply a great match to InterWined’s Own Rosemary Rack of Lamb with Dolcelatta Polenta — if only for the goyim.

There’s a great deal of subtly the 2005 Clos Bortier, with a touch of cherry on the nose and tannin in the aftertaste. The tannin in the wine marries very well with lamb, while its limited potency prevents it from clashing with the creaminess of the dolcelatta.

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Two weeks ago, I told the story of the aspiring journalist keen on the details of InterWined’s copyright and how much credit she would have to give to use the wine reviews and recommendations that appear on the site in her publication. Now, InterWined.com could dismiss her comments as ones made under the influence of several glasses wine (which they were), but they raise a very interesting question.

In the age of hyperlinks and trackbacks, embeds and torrents, when is it stealing?

So far so Carrie Bradshaw…right?

The question is an especially poignant one for food writers.

As regular readers of this feature will know, it was the attempt to answer this very question that ultimately prevented ‘Blow the Bank’ from sharing the recipe for Slow-Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb from Greg and Lucy Malouf’s Saha cookbook without the authors’ permission, but allowed it to publish so many recipes from some the Web’s best food blogs.

The question isn’t just one of credit and permission; it’s also one of degree. Numerous food blogs and cookbooks include recipes adapted from ones found elsewhere. But whose to say how much of an adaptation must take place until it becomes your own. Does simply changing raisins to sultanas count? How about 100g to 150g or turning a loaf made with sweet potato and spinach into a muffin made with sweet potato and apple?

And what about, following one recipe, such as the basic omelette recipe in James Peterson’s Cooking to make another, like InterWined’s Own Creamy Lancashire Omelette with Spinach & Prosciutto?

Omelettes can prove tricky to prepare, but Peterson’s multiple recipes are incredibly informative, helpful, and visually easy-to-follow. The key to success is a well-buttered pan. The key to a great pairing (perhaps one of InterWined’s best) is good quality dessert wine.

That’s right — dessert wine. Regardless of its name, it needn’t be confined to desserts and puddings. In fact, paired with InterWined’s Own Creamy Lancashire Omelette with Spinach & Prosciutto, the 2005 Maculan Dindarello (12%) from Oddbins for £8.49 is close to perfection, its sweetness finding an excellent balance in the flavour of the egg and butter and saltiness of the prosciutto.

As described by the wineseller at Oddbins, the Dindarello, made of 100% Muscato by one of the Veneto regions most respected winemakers, also has a strong smell of nutmeg on the nose. There’s some honey on the palate, but not as much as some other dessert wines and only a little hint of fruit. Mostly, it’s the smell of nutmeg that wins your attention: 9.0 with InterWined’s omelette (8.8 with bakery-bought black current cheesecake).

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Creamy Lancashire Omelette with Spinach & Prosciutto

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, it’s InterWined’s Own Roast Chicken Givry.

Among some wine drinkers, it would appear that the red wines of Givry have the rather dubious reputation of being once-great, also-rans in a crowded field that includes such famous names as Beaujolais, Côte de Beaune, Côte de Nuits, Mercurey, and Montagny. Sure, as a quick survey of the Web will knowingly confirm that Givry was the favourite tipple of the late King of England and France and Lord of Ireland Henry IV — but that was nearly 600 years ago.

Doesn’t anyone have something good to say about Givry now?

It would seem not. In fact, for the Bourgogne aficionado, the reputation of the reds of Givry was permanently damaged by phylloxera in the 1860s and ‘70s and the ravages of two world wars. Which, one suspects, might explain the difficultly in locating these medium-bodied Pinot Noirs outside of France.

Thankfully, InterWined managed it with a wine that the local Oddbins on Clapham High Street was only too happy to note is personal favourite of South London acting great, Mike Leigh favourite, and voice of Barry Mickelthwaite in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories Timothy Spall. He’s an OBE, don’t you know. That’s Order of the British Empire to you and me. So, you know it’s good… It’s not CBE, KBE, GBE good. But, it’s still good — just like the always engaging and entertaining Mr. Spall and the red Givry. It might not be Hollywood A-list or Mercurey, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth your attention and respect.

Such is certainly the case with the InterWined-tested, Spall-approved 2004 Givry Domaine Tatraux. £10.99 from Oddbins, the Givry Domaine Tatraux gives a subtle, really breathe it in, hint of berry on the nose (raspberry, forest fruits, you know the rest) that proves indicative of its light finish and medium-body. No score; if it’s good enough for Spall, it’s good enough for you. Just, go buy a Givry and drink it (especially if you live in the United States, where the Domaine Tatraux is unfortunately, unavailable at present). In the mind of Blow the Bank scribe Sean, it was entirely reminiscent of many lighter New World Pinot Noirs and the perfect accompaniment to white meat, like InterWined’s Own Roast Chicken Givry.

See; the clue is in the name: Roast Chicken Givry.

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Roast Chicken Givry

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe.

Today, ‘Blow the Bank’ serves you the second of its two turkey-free dishes, aimed to guide you through the tumultuous week that marks the starting bell for the mad dash toward Chrismukah and New Year’s and help you to recover from the horrors of packed shopping aisles and empty wallets.

Lamb neck or scrag, as it’s sometimes known, is a fairly inexpensive and fatty cut of meat that cooks up a treat in casserole dishes and traditional stews. It’s also great for making simple, easy to prepare meals, such as InterWined’s own Black Friday Lambwiches.

Simply put, the Windy Peak 2006 Pinot Noir from De Bortoli, available from Sainsbury’s for £8.99, makes the perfect match for Black Friday Lambwiches, with its abundant concentration lamb-friendly aromas and fruity flavours (cherries, plums, pomegranates). Like the lamb neck, it’s young and easy-going, and makes a spot-on remedy to trials of Black Friday.

As some past reviews, this wine’s price might not technically ‘Blow the Bank’ but it might well prove difficult to find for readers. In which case, InterWined would recommend looking to one of De Bortoli’s other wine labels, of which there are several, such as the popular Gulf Station available in the US from Little Bros Beverages and K & L Wine Merchants.

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Black Friday Lambwiches

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe.

Or so that’s the plan.

So, what happened last week?

After all, didn’t ‘Blow the Bank’ just return from a two-week hiatus?

The answer is a special two-for-one: For one week only, ‘Blow the Bank’ is taking over InterWined.com to give you two turkey-free dinners in an effort to guide you through the week that marks the first of America’s turkey-filled, turkey-fueled holidays and the starting bell for the mad dash toward Chrismukah and New Year’s.

The first, published today, is InterWined’s own recipe for Chicken Mole with Tomatillos and Almond Flakes, a dish designed to take you away from pressures of cooking a 16-pound bird for an ever-growing list of 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and once-removed cousins and kin.

The second, published Friday, aims to help you forget the inevitable drink-induced fallings-out and crazed, free-for-all, shop-fest fatigue that follows America’s great day of thanks.

In cooking terms, mole ranks as one of the handful of truly great and inspired Mexican contributions to world cuisine, with its unorthodox blend of chocolate, peppers, and spices. So, while some might find the thought of serving chicken, duck, or — yes; even turkey — with chocolate sickly, don’t believe the hype. Its subtle contrast of flavours proves sugar & spice and everything nice goes into more than just little girls.

As mentioned elsewhere, chardonnay is often the de-facto, no-imagination, partner to chicken that’s as ubiquitous, boring, and tiring to see as skinny jeans on every girl and boy that fancy themselves the next waif model or lead singer in a band whose name begins with ‘The’…

But every once in a while, one must swallow his pride and admit that no matter how many people look like David Banner moments before he warns you that ‘you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry’, some people really do look incredibly good in skinny jeans. The problem is that every time you see someone suited to skinny jeans, you realise just how awful everyone else that wears them really looks.

And, believe it or not, the same is true of chicken and chardonnay. Sometimes, the two are made for each other. Sometimes, the flavours of the chardonnay compliment the chicken dish in such a beautiful and unexpected way that you suddenly realise how so many people got the impression that the two went together so well in the first place. If it only it were always thus.

Fortunately, such is the case with the 2005 Glen Carlou Chardonnay Reserve, £13.99 from Oddbins, its wild mix of fruit and cinnamon proving perfectly suited to the Mexican mole. A big wine, the Glen Carlou nevertheless sits alongside the abundance of flavours in the mole without ever attempting to overtake it and comes off all the better for it. This is a chardonnay to make you forget that you don’t like chardonnay: 8.9.

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Chicken Mole with Tomatillos and Almond Flakes

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After a two-week hiatus, ‘Blow the Bank’ is back.

And, just as it has for the last five months, each Friday InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe.

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes courtesy of its own recipe for Lamb Shank with Breakfast Mushrooms and Mashed Potatoes.

Shanks are tough, lean, temperamental cuts of meat from the tibia that require a great deal of attention, time, and cooking in order to become the big softies everyone loves. Cook them right and they reward you with a soft, tearaway flesh that falls of the bone onto your fork and almost dissolves in your mouth. Cook ‘em wrong and you forget what all the fuss is about.

To better illustrate the point, if you’ll forgive what is likely one of the most bizarre of food metaphors, shanks are pre-Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (You remember him, don’t you? He was that great actor from such tour de forces as Jingle All The Way and that film about male pregnancy that must have seemed like a good idea to some since-replaced studio bigwig, Junior.)

Uncooked, the shank’s just like Arnie à la the first Terminator — all relentless and badass, but, if you can hold out long enough, it’ll come back out of the oven re-wired and on your side just like Arnie the Protector in T2. It’s all about patience. If you’re impatient, if you rush it by cooking it on a higher heat for less time for instance, it’s game over. The Connors are dead, and the future’s fit only for machines. Good Job, ‘girlie man’. Now, instead of forking through some tender Schwarzenegger, you’re left with piping hot rock-hard heap of Vin Diesel! And let’s face it; no one wants that to happen. Not you; not me.

Sure we could argue for days on end about merits of both men, whose less wooden or whose better at looking tough under the lights, their muscles glistening from a last-minute olive oil rubdown. Yet, whatever the outcome, it’s just cosmetics. We’re talking meat, not musclemen. And, the real fact of the fact of the matter is we’d all rather watch a limp Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop over a cloying Vin Diesel in The Pacifier. Don’t deny it (Especially you, Gaffney — I’ve seen your video collection: It’s all Raw Deal, Red Heat, Last Action Hero, and Batman & Robin with you. Not a single copy of A Man Apart or Find Me Guilty in the bunch.)

And so it is with lamb shanks, it’s about the meat not the muscle — better an overcooked softie than an undercooked tough guy, which is exactly what happened with this week’s dish.

InterWined had high hopes that it’s breakfast mushrooms with onion, pancetta, and red wine would serve as the perfect jus for a soft, fall of the bone, lamb shank. And it would have paired beautifully too, had Sean proved more patient. Instead, the shank hung to bone far more than it should have done, coming in somewhere between Vin Diesel in XXX and Arnie in True Lies. If only it could have been Twins — where’s Danny Devito when you need him…right?

At 14.5% alcohol, the 2005 Chilean Matetic ‘Corralillo’ Merlot Malbec packs a punch. This is a muscle wine for a muscle shank, or so that was the thought when it was selected to accompany the lamb shank. It’s deep red in colour wine bouquet that’s falls somewhere between a campfire and a petrol station forecourt. For obvious reasons, one suspects most reviews would highlight the campfire over the forecourt. After all, the only people likely to get excited by the words “petrol station forecourt” probably drink a very select number of beverages that begin with White Lightning and wholly approve of Mark Vincent’s decision to change his name to Diesel.

For Vin Diesel fans and gasoline fetishists: 10 points.

For the rest of us: given the £11.99 price tag at Oddbinns, a-nothing-to-write-home-about 7.7 — too much alcohol, too little finesse.

InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full

Lamb Shank with Breakfast Mushrooms & Mashed Potatoes

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Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe!

It used to be that InterWined prepared its dish following the instructions of one of the Internet’s best food blogs. But, for the last several weeks, it’s blazed its own trail and almost forgotten that the idea was to pair a wine that exceeded the normal £10 ($20) threshold Jacob set for InterWined when he started the site about 200 years ago…

So this week, ‘Blow the Bank’ comes in the form of a good old-fashioned recipe — not from a blog, but from a book (an actual cookbook) — in the form of Slow Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb from Greg and Lucy Malouf’s excellently exotic ode to Lebanese and Syrian cooking Saha.

As readers will know, the vast majority of ‘Blow the Bank’ dishes come courtesy of chefs and bloggers from other Web sites who give ‘Blow the Bank’ scribe Sean permission to publish their recipes. So what should he do with a recipe from a cookbook that retails for £19.50?

Well, here’s the answer…write the author a letter and wait for a reply.

A copy of the letter follows, along with pictures of the cooked dish and a review of the wine. (Note: Sean replaced the pearl onions listed in the recipe with 8 shallots and the lamb chops with lamb rump steaks.)

Dear Mr. Malouf,

My name is Sean Sellers and about a year ago, my wife Steph gave me a copy of your excellent cookbook as a gift. I thoroughly enjoyed and particularly like your lamb recipes. (Lamb is Steph’s favourite meat and the first thing I ever cooked for her.)

I’m not a chef, but I do like to cook. And each week, I pair a wine and a meal for a Web site called InterWined.com, written by a well-known international wine journalist and sometime actor. In the past several months, I’ve cooked recipes from Internet chefs around the world alongside a few of my own.

Before posting the pairing on the site, I seek the chef’s permission to publish the recipe with photos of the finished dished and a review of the wine with which it was paired. This week, I prepared your fantastic Slow-Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb (it’s a firm favourite) with a few minor alterations. Namely, I replaced your pearl onions with shallots. But, since the recipe came from your cookbook and I didn’t have your permission, I thought it unwise and inappropriate to publish your recipe without seeking your permission first.

So, instead, I’ve published the post with pictures of the dish and this letter.

The 2006 Georges Duboeuf Brouilly from Beaujolais is as rich, grapey, and full of vibrant red fruit flavour as it was last year and probably the year before that, if not the year before that…after all, M. Duboeuf was fined €30000 in 2005 for blending grapes to make up for a poor 2004. Yet the wine’s consistency in flavour is probably down to a combination of cultivation practices and M. Duboeuf’s 55 years making Beaujolais more than anything else. And there’s something nice about knowing exactly what one is going to get from a bottle of Georges Duboeuf. (Remember; this is the man that invented the annual Beaujolais Nouveau craze. He knows what he’s doing.

The 2006 Bruilly is a superb match for the thick tomato sauce of Greg Malouf’s sweet & sour lamb, the fruitiness of the wine balancing nicely the tinge of sweet and sour flavour of the vinegar and, in the case of InterWined’s version, the sweetness of the shallots. 8.5: predicable, yet perfectly on the money — all €30000 of it.

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Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine that exceeds its normal £10 ($20) threshold with one great meal, prepared following the instructions of some the Internet’s best food blogs.

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ takes another slight departure from the norm and comes courtesy of its own recipe for Cumberland Pie.

As mentioned previously, traditional British foods have a universally poor reputation — especially when compared to the traditional foods of their European neighbours to the South, such as France and Italy. The only fly in the ointment, however, tends to be that so few of the people doing the comparisons have ever had many of the traditional British foods that they deride.

Perhaps it’s their names: To people born outside of the Commonwealth, names like Fish Pie, Cumberland Pie, Cottage Pie, Shepherd’s Pie, Toad in the Hole, Bangers & Mash, Bubble & Squeak conjure up images of Monty Python sketches far more than they do desirable cuisine. And to be fair, who wouldn’t rather eat something exotic sounding like Coq au Vin over Steak & Kidney Pie, which to the American ear — at least — must sound like the worst dessert ever.

Yet, pies in particular are an essential and complicated part of British cooking and cuisine. There are pies that have crusts and pies that don’t. To complicate things further, there are vast differences of opinion on the most appropriate method of preparation. Does one steam a steak pie or cook it? If a Shepherd’s Pie is prepared with beef, doesn’t it become a Cottage pie? Should a Cottage or Cumberland Pie always have minced meat?

And while InterWined has its own opinions on each of the above, any debate would, in part, miss the point: Traditional British pies, like French cassoulet and Italian osso buco are comfort foods, hearty dishes made for eating on rainy days and after arduous work, that people love to eat because they taste good rather than simply sound tasty.

The Spanish 2004 Sangre de Torro from Miguel Torres might not ‘Blow the Bank’ with its £5.49 price tag (available at supermarkets everywhere) and slight air of ubiquity (again, available at supermarkets everywhere), but don’t hold those things against it.

Made of Garnacha and Cariñena, the Sangre de Torro or Bull’s Blood is commonly hailed as a great Catlan table wine; and, as with the Vinho Verde served in the previous ‘Blow the Bank’, that’s not intended as an insult. This is a wine for serving with roasts and casseroles and all matter of traditional comfort foods.

Its rich mix of blackberry, current, and pepper gives added flavour to the sweated onions and meaty vegetables such as the mushrooms featured in this week’s pie, during their preparation. And, once in the oven, it serves as an excellent blanket in which to wrap the meat under a heavy lid of mashed potatoes and grated cheese, ensuring that meat is tender, juicy, and slightly sweet. A comfort wine for comfort foods: 8.7.

So rather than argue the details of whether InterWined prepared a fully authentic Cumberland Pie, let’s simply agree it’s a comforting and hearty meal and one of the Worst Desserts Ever!

InterWined’s Own Dish in Full

Cumberland Pie

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