This Week’s Menu: Two-at-the-Table-Menu-Week-of-January-1,-2017

Happy 2017!  A new year begins another week’s menu with lots of new recipes, plus our annual New Year’s celebration.

Our plan for Sunday night was to make Saveur’s Hunter’s Wife Chicken (Pollo alla Cacciatora). We decided, however, that with all the prep work we wanted to do for our 5th Annual New Year’s Indoor Barbecue, we were better off ordering in. This gave us time to make two cheese balls (a classic Southern appetizer that recently got a shout out–a two page article actually–in the Food section of the New York Times: “Peer Into the Cheese Ball“), one with nuts and one without; make a dry rub and apply it to a whole mess of pork ribs (a mess of ribs = 1 rack; a whole mess of ribs = 3 racks); and bake a Texas sheet cake for dessert. Check the blog later this week for the full menu from our Indoor Barbecue.

Tony will be off from work on Tuesday, so he’ll plan to make the chicken cacciatore then, so that we can have it for leftovers during the week. The recipe calls for 2/3 of a cup of white wine, so we’ll open a bottle of 2015 Chateau Laulerie suggested by our friend Michael at Columbus Wine and Spirits. When it comes time to have the chicken, we’ll open another bottle, a red, specifically a Henry Fessy Julienas 2013 Beujolais.

Dinner Tuesday night will be seared tuna with mole sauce. We’ll be using the Xilli mole poblano sauce that we purchased at the Start Small, Think Big Second charity event that we attended in the fall. We’ll have the tuna with a side of Food 52’s Roasted Corn with Lime, Parmesan and Chili. We’ll probably have an IPA with the tuna, to help offset the spiciness of the mole and corn.

One of our blog-related resolutions was to make more dishes from our ever-expanding collection of cookbooks. With that in mind, we decided to make Skinny Taste’s So Addicted Chicken Enchiladas on Wednesday night. Per the recipe’s instructions, we bought some pre-cooked chicken breasts to use as filling for the enchiladas. In order to save some time Wednesday night Tony will make the enchilada sauce on Tuesday. Just like with the tuna, we’ll have an IPA with this spicier dinner.

We’ll be making another dish from one of our cookbooks on Friday night: Lentil and Butternut Lettuce Cups from The Forest Feast. If you haven’t seen this cookbook, you owe it to yourself to flip through it, if not buy it, at your local bookstore. It features tons of photos, not just of the finished dishes, but of the ingredients that go into those dishes, and provides some very helpful tips on how exactly to prepare the ingredients. We thought we would be able to stump Michael with this dish, but he found a pairing very quickly in a Sevre et Maine Muscadet.

We’ll go in a very different direction Saturday night, when we make Rachel Khoo’s Boeuf Bourguignon with Baguette Dumplings. We’ve made this dish once or twice before, but have always left out the dumpling step, Making dumplings seemed like quite a bit of work and likely to go sideways, but we’re going to give them a try this week. A dish like this needs a great, big, French red, both for cooking and eating, so well open a couple of bottles of 2013 Chateau Haut Selve. And that will wrap up our first menu of 2017!