Here’s the recipe for the shiraz sauce for tomorrow night’s wine tasting. Bill Huddleston suggests we grill beef or sausages. 

Shiraz Sauce
 1/4 cup beef or veal demi glaze
 3/4 cup shiraz
1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 to 2 shallots minced
Pinch of allspice and clove
1/2 tsp. sugar
1/3 stick butter
2 oz. blue cheese
Salt and pepper, to taste

Sauté shallots in about half the butter until translucent; add the liquids, spices and sugar and cook down over high heat till reduced to almost 1 cup.  Stir in remaining butter, stir in blue cheese, and add salt and pepper to taste. Makes about 1 cup.
–Source: Bill Huddleston

I wrote about sweet and hot pickles that I make at home in this morning’s Whining & Dining column and I’ve had calls and e-mail all day from people wanting the recipe. They’re so simple to make that I thought I covered it, but here goes. And you will LOVE these, I promise.

Drain the juice from a jar of dill pickles (I prefer the Mt. Olive petite dills, but you can use slices, spears, whatever you like). For a 16-ounce jar, pour about one cup of sugar and 2-3 tablespoons of Tabasco sauce over the pickles. Give ‘em a good shake, put the jar in the fridge and shake every few days. The sugar will dissolve and make a sweet, spicy and tangy sauce. Delish. Wait about two weeks, taste and adjust flavor with extra sugar or Tabasco as desired.

These are approximate measurements. I usually make about a gallon and I don’t measure. And right now I’m not eating them because I’ve sworn off sugar, but I’m going to try them with Splenda and if I have good results, I’ll let you know.

1. Trim excess fat from the lamb shanks and season with salt and pepper. 
2. Heat the oil in the PC. Add the shanks and brown on all sides. (You can do this in a separate pan if you like).
3. When the shanks are almost completely browned, add the garlic cloves and cook until they are lightly browned but not burned.
4. Add the stock, port, tomato paste, and rosemary, stirring so the tomato paste dissolves.
5. Close the PC and bring up to full pressure.
6. Reduce heat to stabilize pressure and cook for 30 minutes.
7. Remove PC from heat and let pressure release naturally.
8. Remove the lamb shanks.
9. Return pan to heat and boil the liquid, uncovered, for 5 minutes to reduce and thicken the sauce.
10. Whisk in the butter, then add the vinegar.
11. Serve the sauce over the lamb.

Serves 2. Source: recipezaar.com

Note from JB: I bought my first pressure cooker around Christmas and I LOVE it! You could also cook the shanks in the crock pot all day, or cook them for two hours on 375 in the oven.

I’ve written about my aversion to sweet potatoes, at least as they’re traditionally prepared in the south. But I like them OK with savory spices and am going to try cooking them in other ways besides soup and hummus. It’s part of my commitment to banish the same old boring veggies from my dinner plate.

Don’t get me wrong: I love ALMOST all vegetables. I won’t eat English peas and I don’t see how anything can change my mind on that, although I’m willing to try a non-cooked preparation of fresh peas. But I find that I cook the same veggies over and over (face it, potatoes and green beans really are versatile) so I’ve begun buying different ones at the market a few times a week.

Right now, I’m loving beets. I’ve fixed them two ways in the past week and I’m settling on this for my standard preparation:

Clean the beets and roast them, unpeeled, until the largest one is tender when you stick a knife through it (put a little oil on them). When cooled, cut in quarters or slice, toss with a diced serrano pepper, white onion, salt, pepper, a light oil and plain white vinegar. The first time I used olive oil and the flavor competed with the beets; the second time I changed the oil but added lime zest and cilantro, neither of which enhanced the dish. Don’t peel the beets, by the way–the skins take on the texture and the toasty flavor of roasted potatoes.

Fantastic!

I’ll share a new cauliflower dish with you next time. Meanwhile, who cooks celery root?

I just finished my column for the week and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about pralines! Actually, as I mention in the column, I think I must be longing for a visit to New Orleans. We always have beignets on Christmas morning and I make pralines every year, but this year I’m making shrimp and grits, too.

But it’s the pralines that are holding me in their spell right now. I like the sugary, flat ones like they make at Aunt Sally’s in New Orleans. Bob remembers his grandmother’s (she was from south Georgia) being chewier, not exactly like caramel but not so far from it, either. In New Orleans I always buy mine at Aunt Sally’s, of course, and he walks down a few stores and buys the chewy ones from the other candy store. At Christmases past I’ve made half a dozen or more recipes, trying to duplicate his grandmother’s, but I haven’t quite gotten it. The recipe his mother has doesn’t make the pralines he remembers.

Anyway, I decided a few years ago not to make them early because we’d eat them (and one year Baxter ate a whole plateful when we were out of the room). But I think I’ve waited as long as I can. I’m jonesin’ bad…

What’s your Christmas treat? And if you’ve got a recipe that you think will make a creamy, south Georgia praline, share it with me.

It’s funny. Lately I’ve been thinking about my grandmother’s chicken and dumplings, which were fantastic and were made from, I would’ve sworn, canned biscuits. My cousin and aunt say no way, that Nanny always made her dumplings from scratch (still, I’m pretty sure I saw a can of biscuits once…).

Anyway, Gary sent the following e-mail to me and I told him we’d put our heads together. Who knows how to make good dumplings? (Nanny’s, by the way, were fairly dense. They were prehaps a half-inch thick and while they were completely soft, they had some body to them. )

“My grandmother (died in 1986 at age 85) used to make the best dumplings - I have never had their equal.  They were round and between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball.  When you dug into one, the first half an inch or so would be saturated with the chicken broth, and the rest would be hot and fluffy like a biscuit fresh out of the oven.  She always put a dab of butter in the middle, which saturated the middle of the dumpling - it also seems that some of the butter would be pooled in the middle of the dumpling when you cut into it.
Grandma was from Southwest Virginia, in the coal fields of the Appalachian Mountains.  Perhaps this is a scotch-Irish recipe, as many of the people in the Appalachians are.  But, her family was a combination of Irish, English, German, and French - so who knows the origin of the recipe.  It is possible that it was her creation, but I suspect not.”

Saturday was my husband’s birthday and we had about 30 friends and family members over for an old-fashioned shrimp boil. This is one of my favorite easy summer meals and there is nothing to it. (Well, normally there’s not, but this time I did have to boil in three stockpots because my HUGE one was at my mother’s house and she forgot to bring it.)

Anyway, first I added the tiniest new potatoes I could find (which are at Winchester Farmers Market) to a pot of boiling water liberally seasoned with Zatarain’s shrimp and crab boil powder. I added smoked sausages after about 10 minutes, then ears of corn (halved) after about 5 more. Finally the shrimp went in, cooked just until pink, then I drained it all and poured it out on the kitchen island, which was covered with newspapers. Clean-up was a breeze–just roll the newspaper up and throw it out.

We had plenty of cold beer and I made pitchers of Hurricanes–real ones, not cough-syrupy ones. I’m not sure of the authenticity of the recipe, but preliminary research says the original Hurricane was made from passion fruit juice and light and dark rum, with a few other things. I’ll tell you this: 1) They were mighty tasty, and 2) I think the reason they eventually added grenadine was because they were a ugly, muddy color. Now why someone eventually decided to start adding every liquor in the world to them, well, that I can’t say.

Anyway–happy birthday to Bob!

I love lady peas, the most pale and delicate of the Southern peas, including the earthy purple hull, the black-eyed pea and and other forms of what are known as “field peas” (Pisum arvense), designed to be used dried, but if you have them fresh, I say just cook ‘em.

I bought a pound of lady peas at the Memphis Farmer’s Market, and they are, I’ll admit, more expensive than the other peas, six dollars a pound. The package I bought had to be rinsed and picked through carefully; the peas were filled with bits of stems and bits of leaves and specks of dirt and a few brown ones. How natural can you get?

I always treat the various peas as potential soup, so I simmered the lady peas with chopped carrots, celery, green onions and mint, trying to make them all as thin and tiny as possible. I was going to throw in some pancetta or guanciale (Italian cured hog-jowl) to give the broth body and flavor, but what I thought we still had in the refrigerator had apparently been used for something else — a pasta or pizza — and you know what? As a purely vegetarian effort, the soup didn’t need the influence of meat and fat. It was delicious the way it was.

LL had flown in from Minneapolis late Sunday and was a little hungry, so I gently heated the pot of lady peas, spooned them into little bowls, topped them with quarters of tiny pale yellow tomatoes — brought from his garden by Benito, the local food and wine blogger (wine-by-benito.blogspot.com) — and poured us each a glass of rose wine. That made a nice extemporaneous supper.

When Og the caveman first tossed a mastodon haunch on the fire, charred it for a few minutes, sliced it and passed the pieces around, his friend Nog probably cried, “Hey, I asked for medium-rare!”

That’s how I felt recently when I ordered steak in two local restaurants and got them overcooked, in one case woefully so.

That was at Cafe 1912, and while I realize that there’s a new chef in the kitchen, I mean, we’re talking about cooking a steak here, something chefs learn in Grilling 101 at cooking school. I asked for my strip steak to be cooked medium-rare; when it arrived at the table and I sliced into the center, it was gray. Not red, not pink, not pinkish, not faintly pinkish. Gray. I pointed this out to the waiter, she was sympathetic, back it went. A few minutes later, here comes another steak. I cut into it; this time it achieved a state of faint pinkishness in the center, surrounded by gray-brown, still cooked way beyond medium-rare. I gave up, ate what I could and we left.

More recently, we dined with a guest from out of town at Encore, Jose Gutierrez’s contemporary bistro-style restaurant in Peabody Place. Now if there’s one thing a Frenchman should know about, it’s cooking a steak; after all, steak frites is a staple of bistros in France and around the world. Not that the executive chef himself would handle a steak order; there’s usually a grillman for that job. Whoever cooked this steak, however, must have sneaked out for a smoke or something, because it arrived on my plate more at the medium state than medium-rare, not as drastic as the first example I got at Cafe 1912, but still …

So I decided that if I wanted a steak cooked the way I like it, I would have to do it myself.

First, let’s look at the degrees of steak doneness.

According to bbqreport.com, the color of a very rare steak is blood red in the center; rare is red in the center; medium-rare is pinkish red in the center; medium is pink in the center with a grayish-brown surround; medium-well has a grayish-brown center; well-done is unspeakable, I mean, gray in the center. bbqreport.com says that a very rare steak, measured with an instant-read thermometer, should be at 120 degress; rare — 125 degrees; medium-rare — 130/135; medium — 140/145; medium-well — 150/155; well-done — 160. You can check on other Web-sites or in cookbooks and most authorities will be in agreement about these criteria, though the USDA recommends that steaks be cooked to at least 145 degrees, which it defines as “medium-rare,” which would actually take a steak to the far side of medium.

Remember that as you cook your steak, whether searing, broiling or grilling, the juices migrate to the outside, so it’s important to allow the steak to rest for five or 10 minutes before serving. But in those five or 10 minutes, the steak will continue to cook, all on its own, and the interior temperature can rise five or 10 degrees. In other words, what you intended to be a medium-rare steak can turn out to be medium, just by doing nothing. The rule here: ALWAYS UNDERCOOK YOUR STEAK!!!!!!!

Pictured above is an aged Hereford t-bone steak that I bought at Fresh Market. It has nothing on it but kosher salt and fresh-cracked pepper. I put butter and olive oil in a cast-iron skillet, turned the burner on high and let the skillet get REALLY hot before sliding the steak in there (meanwhile turning on both fans in the hood to suck out the tremendous amount of smoke produced). I cooked the steak five minutes on the first side and three minutes on the second, removed it from the pan and let it sit on a plate for six or seven minutes, while roasting potatoes and sauteeing green beans with shallots. Poured some red wine in the skillet, stirred up the bits and let it cook down and make a sauce. Sliced some cherry tomatoes. This was great with the Chateau St. Jean Cabernet Sauvignon 2003.

As you can see in the second image, I finally got a steak my way.

By pure coincidence — I mean in relation to Jennifer’s post yesterday about her salade nicoise — we had purchased the ingredients this weekend to make the salade nicoise described on Wolfgang Puck’s website. We made it last night with ahi tuna filets from Costco, which I coated with olive oil, salt and freshly-ground pepper and cracked coriander and grilled (two minutes on each side!) outside over charcoal.

This is an easy way to trash a kitchen, because you need a pan to hard-boil the eggs, another pan to blanche the green beans and a third pan to cook the potatoes, and then you use several cutting boards and a squadron of knives to slice or chop all the ingredients, including shallots and garlic for the vinaigrette.

But the result is a beautifully composed salad with the rare tuna resting atop a bed of lettuce surrounded, as you can see in the image, by little red and yellow tomatoes, olives, green beans, slices of potatoes and the quartered eggs. Surmounting the tuna are pieces of toasted baguette spread with goat cheese and tapenade.

The recipe for the salade nicoise can be found here. The vinaigrette dressing is here.