Two at the Table_Menu_Week of July 13 2014

Welcome back to another week of great dinners at Two at the Table!

On Sunday, we’re going out to City Winery with our good friends Tom and Sharon to see Aaron Neville. Tom is a big fan and was kind enough to let us know about the show. We’re excited not only to see our friends again and Aaron Neville for the first time, but also to try a new restaurant!

Monday night we’re making something we’ve made only once before, but really loved:  Greek Salad with Oregano-Roasted Salmon. If you made the Grilled Shrimp with Black-Eyed Peas and Chimichurri last week, you probably have some oregano left over; this recipe will help you use it up. We really wanted to pair this with a Greek wine, but our on-line grocer, Fresh Direct, didn’t have any in stock, so we chose an Italian white instead: San Quirico Vernaccia di San Gimignano.

On Tuesday night we’re going to make Deb Perelman’s Tomato Scallion Shortcakes with Whipped Goat Cheese. This might be a bit of a tough recipe for us to tackle on a weeknight, since it involves baking. The shortcakes are not all that hard to make, but when you combine baking the shortcakes, making the tomato salad that goes on the shortcakes, and making the whipped goat cheese that goes on the tomatoes, it may be a little ambitious for a Tuesday. To address this, we plan to do some prep work in advance on Sunday and do the rest of the prep and all the cooking on Tuesday. This is different for us, because we rarely prep or make things in advance, but this recipe sounds so good, we had to give it a try. We’ll let you know how it goes and whether or not we’d try to do this from start to finish on a weeknight. We’ll match this up with a rosé: Pourcieux Rosé de Provence. (Please note that the link above will take you to the web site Culinary Covers and a review of this recipe by Joanne Bruno. You may remember that we made Joanne’s awesome Caramelized Onion, Spinach, Roasted Red Pepper and Ricotta Salata Crostini two weeks ago. The original recipe can be found in Deb’s great cookbook “The Smitten Kitchen”, on page 65.)

For dinner on Wednesday, we’re making an egg recipe we like a lot: Eggs Baked Over Sautéed Mushrooms and Spinach. This is tremendously savory dish, as it contains not just mushrooms and spinach but leeks too. We may throw in a little thyme, just because we think mushrooms and thyme go so well together. We thought this dish would go well with a white bordeaux, so we chose Château Haut Rian Bordeaux Blanc from Fresh Direct.

We took a trip to Spain a couple of years ago and tried a lot of different kinds of tapas. When the urge strikes us, we’ll have a “tapas night” and make a few small dishes that we share. (Tapas is usually a prelude to dinner, not a substitute for it, but we just like to do it this way.) On the menu will be Chorizo with Honey, Grilled Asparagus with Manchego, and Mushrooms with Thyme. If you have some chorizo left over from the Sheet-Pan Clambake With Mussels, Shrimp, and Chorizo, you’re in luck, because while we never would have thought to pair chorizo and honey, when we had this in Barcelona, we totally flipped for it! We’ll probably also have some caper berries, which are a fun snack, and maybe even some potato chips, which was a pretty standard offering at all the tapas bars we went to in Madrid and Barcelona. We thought we would liven things up a bit with a little sparkling wine, so we’re going to have some Spanish cava: Juvé y Camps Brut Cava Milesimé.

On Friday night, we plan to make Rachel Khoo’s Lemon and Lavender Chicken. We usually make this in the winter, but we are really in the mood for some fancy comfort food, and this dish is both fancy (but still so simple to make!) and comforting! The only changes we make to this recipe are to use chicken drumsticks and thighs rather than a whole chicken cut into pieces and to swap out the dried lavender for herbs de Provence, which contain lavender and other tasty herbs like rosemary and oregano. Kim was promoted recently, so this gives us a chance to open the split (or half bottle) of Veuve Clicquot champagne a co-workers was nice enough to give her. (Please note that the link above will take you to a slight adaptation of Rachel’s recipe. The ingredients in this adaptation are more or less the same as the original, except that the adaptation uses chicken breasts instead of a whole chicken and changes the quantities of some other ingredients. The original recipe can be found in Rachel’s fantastic cookbook, “Little Paris Kitchen”, on page 184. This cookbook is a must have for apartment dwellers, because, if you’ve seen her show on the Cooking Channel – watch it if you haven’t – Rachel is able to make all of her recipes in a kitchen so small it makes ours look palatial.)

After a pretty busy week of cooking, we’re going to treat ourselves with a dinner out on Saturday. We’ll probably go to a Belgian place nearby to sample their impressive selection of Belgian beers and their equally impressive range of recipes for mussels!