Jeez. I know there is supposed to be health news around this time of the week, and I have some: eating leafy vegetables decreases the amount of scar tissue after suffering a heart attack. Was going to put up 400 words or so on that study.
But…
After Monday’s opening of the Champagne Bar located in the […]

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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’ comes courtesy of Haalo at Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once and a rich and flavourful Eggplant (Aubergine) Involtini with Ricotta, Mozzarella and Tomato.

Vegetarian food is regularly overlooked by head chefs and, in turn, often ignored by most diners. As a result, it is usually underserved by sommeliers who limit their pairings to a few simple dictums: mushrooms are like meat and deserve a full-bodied red wine such as Chateauneuf du Pape; Chardonnay goes well with quiche (it is chicken, after all – see Pear & Sage-stuffed Chicken with Hazelnut Crust for more); and, when in doubt, serve Sauvignon Blanc.

All three are reasonable, as, indeed, Sauvignon Blanc pairs excellently well with many vegetable dishes including asparagus, but each belies the complexity and nuance one finds in vegetarian cuisine.

As with the mushroom, one could class the aubergine or eggplant as a meaty vegetable. Equally one could place the aubergine alongside the courgette or zucchini in terms of its cucumber-like texture. (Perhaps strange, the aubergine is actually from the same genus as the tomato and potato.) While Chateauneuf du Pape can easily compliment the meatiness of mushroom, it would likely overpower the softer courgette (zucchini).

So what wine grapes pairs well with aubergine? Something red, to be sure; but, where others would possibly recommend a Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon, InterWined would suggest finding a red with softer tannins such as those found in the Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc.

Served chilled as an aperitif or opened only when plating, the 2006 Te Mata Woodthorpe Gamay Noir from New Zealand, £11 from Planet of the Grapes is an excellent partner to Haalo’s Eggplant Involtini with Ricotta, Mozzarella and Tomato. It easily compliments the softness of the grilled aubergine while proving a perfect partner to enhance the kick found in Haalo’s secret ingredient, wine vinegar-soaked currants.

The Te Mata Gamay Noir is black currant juice drink or even black cherry in colour. Fragrant, refreshing, and smooth on the palette; it bears all the signature features of an outstanding Beaujolais. In fact, since the Te Mata Woodthrope Gamay Noir seems unavailable outside of the UK and New Zealand, InterWined recommends another Beaujolais wine, the Fleurie; or, better still, try one of North America’s Gamay Noirs, such as the ones made by Andrew Lane in Napa, California.

Haalo’s Recipe in Full

Eggplant Involtini with Ricotta, Mozzarella and Tomato

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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