Cabin Fever

When the hurricane comes to town and you get shut in for the day, it can be hard to fight the old cabin fever. True, its only one day, but one day locked up can drive us modern city types crazy. You can either feed the disease by staring out the back door wondering if the rotten old tree in the neighbors yard is going to fall on your house (which it didn't, thankfully),

...or you can take the opportunity to cook something for six hours or more, just for the Hell of it. For me, this means channeling the ghost of my Nonna and cooking up some serious old school tomato sauce. Since I certainly wasn't dressing for anything yesterday, and since its a been a while since we geeked out about food here, I thought it was time.

The whole thing begins at 11 am with some very thick cut, country style pork ribs. For other recipes, meat like this is way too fatty, but trust me, after an entire day in the pot that fat is going to melt away into the sort of robust, earthy flavor so satisfying during such bad weather. It's a flavor that cannot be imitated in any health conscious or low fat way, but since we rarely slow down enough to eat this way, who cares?

After a liberal seasoning of salt and pepper is applied, the ribs are browned in a heavy pot over high heat in olive oil. This shouldn't take more than a few minutes per side.

After the meat has browned, throw in a chopped white onion and five or six cloves of mashed garlic, along with a liberal dose of red wine. Let the meat cook in the wine for a bit, turning once.

I firmly believe that it is a wasteful sin to put good wine in the sauce pot, but I don't abide the use of junk in any situation. Salvalai Valpolicella is a dry if simple Northern Italian red that can be had for $8.99 where I live. Cheap enough for the sauce but drinkable enough for a pizza. The bottle I grabbed was missing its front label. Call it taking one for the team.

Next in is the tomatoes. In truth, any brand of canned tomatoes will do, but if you can get them I prefer Pomi chopped tomatoes in the paper carton. They are a bit more expensive than some brands, but still only $1.99 a carton. Imported from Italy, they are brighter with a fresher taste and no other ingredients than tomatoes and they're juice. I find the chopped kind to have just the right consistency, cooking down beautifully into a chunky sauce.

For this sauce I used two cartons. After pouring in the tomatoes, loosen the meat from the bottom of the pan. This insures that it won't stick to the pan, and allows the sauce to flow under and around it. Up to this point, the whole process takes about twenty minutes. Like all great Italian cooking, the beauty lies in its sheer direct simplicity. All that's left to do is put the lid on slightly ajar, turn the flame to the lowest setting, and wait until dinner time. Occasionally move the meat around a bit, and enjoy the smell that will soon fill the entire house as you look contentedly from your favorite chair at the howling storm outside.

Cooking wine is one thing, but drinking wine is another. A meal like this is a celebration really of the fact that for once we can all slow down, even if our relaxed pace was forced on us by Mother Nature. As such, despite my consummate cheapskate-ism, I decided that something special was in order. Fabiano Amorone della Valpolicella Classico 2007 is a big, gutsy wine. Tight as a fist when its first open, I decanted this bottle at Noon and left it aside until dinner. At $50 a bottle, it sure isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for. Besides, you know I didn't actually pay that much for it.  Working in the wine trade has its advantages.

Come 6:00 pm, I boiled a pot of water to cook up some pasta to serve with it. The meat was so tender it fell from the bone, and a fork was all that was needed. This kind of food takes me back to my childhood, when the house was constantly filled with the comforting smells of slow food such as this. Back then my Nonna did the cooking, but she did it in the same kitchen, and for me that's something special. 

Since this is ostensibly a clothing blog, I suppose I should mention that I spent the day in an old pair of olive green cords and a worn plaid shirt, both by Brooks Brothers, with a pair of Toms on my feet, because dammit, they are comfortable. I showered, but I didn't shave.

I have to admit, I enjoyed the hurricane. In fact, I could use a day like that more often, so long as a tree doesn't fall on the house.













Book Review : The Gentry Man

A few weeks ago, Harper/Collins was kind enough to enough to send me an advance copy of their new book, The Gentry Man, released to the general public today. A compendium of Gentry magazine from 1951-1957, it provides an interesting look back at a period in menswear history that can frequently be romanticized beyond recognition.

For those of you not familiar with Gentry magazine, I can only say that it reminds of what GQ was like a long time ago, when it was good. It offers a broad slice of all the things that make up what they call "the civilized man". In it you'll find not only cocktail recipes, but also great articles about the act of drinking itself with titles like "In Praise of Booze". You'll find tips on winning chess in seven moves, food articles about James Beard and Brillat Savarin alongside classic and time tested recipes. You'll find a few pages about cars and resort hotels, furniture, modern art, and of course, plenty about clothing. Interestingly, you won't find much talk of professional sports.

As you might expect, it contains a lot of nostalgia about "the good old days" when men regularly wore suits in the day and formal wear at night. What's better than that, though, is all the unusual stuff that's included. Crazy sailor suits for poolside at the resort come to mind at the wild extreme, a tweed weekend jacket with raglan sleeves comes to mind in the "why doesn't someone make that anymore" end. The good stuff is really good, but it's the inclusion and sheer amount or weird stuff that's even better. For one thing, it makes the good stuff look better, and for another, its good to be reminded that even in what we like to think of as the glory days, it wasn't all a bed of roses. People were just as prone to go for something crazy in the interest of newness back the as they are now, the only difference being that then the labels were attached to the inside of the clothes. Its a useful thing to remember both good and bad when we see the past and use it as a tool to assess good and bad today. Gentry provides both.

Each chapter is introduced with some brief text by editor Hal Rubinstein, and his writing is well informed and to the point, making this book as good to read as the pictures are fun to look at. Best of all, the whole thing is relatively short, and very well chosen. No filler, only the good stuff. The book is laid out in a very easy to thumb trough way, which is always a bonus with these kind of things.

For the older reader, this book can offer both a warm look back and a chance to chuckle at some minor foibles. For the younger reader, it provides an extra degree of true perspective on the past in a more multi-dimensional way that is often offered. In either case, it would be a fun addition to any mans collection of sartorial books.

Worth Every Penny

Always nice to follow a rare "cheap commodities" with a rare "worth every penny" post, even rarer in that this one is about food and wine, I subject woefully neglected here for too long.

Last Friday, I stumbled across some Chateau Beaumont Haut-Medoc 2000 at the shop, a pleasant surprise that had slipped my attention....probably because it retails for $37.99, and I tend to shop the sub-$15 selections on my budget. Wine geeks will remember that 2000 was a vintage of historical proportions in Bordeaux, with wines being good from the plonk to the first growths and everywhere between. I've written (i.e. geeked out about) this before, more than once. They all sold fast, and I haven't seen one in a long time. So when this turned up, I decided some minor splurging was in order.

A wine like this with some age on it wants some time to breathe, so I decanted it at lunch time for consumption with dinner. The "decanter" is actually a cheap commodity, a $5 glass carafe from the hardware store of all places, which I've had for years. The corkscrew is a waiter-style one, double hinged, had for $10 or less at any good bottle shop. A paper towel held on loosely with an elastic allows the wine to breathe while keeping stuff from getting in it, a trick of particular importance in the Summer, as fruit flies tend to be drunks.

The wine was everything I hoped it would be. Rusty in color with that good old French stink, the best bad smell in the world. I once heard it described as "blueberry cow sh*t" by a man far more expert than I, and I still use that term myself. Full bodied and dry, with all it's astringency rubbed off by age, leaving a texture that is nothing short of velvet. A heady, rare wine, the kind you drink slowly, because you'll be a little sad when it's all gone.

Good wine deserves good food, and vice verse. But I'm not one to detract from one or the other by overcomplicating things. A simple but high quality cut of steak, seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked in a cast iron skillet until rare and juicy, with baby spinach dressed in a Dijon mustard vinaigrette and roasted yam with onions.

2000 Bordeaux, or good wine in general, is worth every penny.