Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Farfalle with Creamy Smoked Salmon, Fresh Peas, and Dill

It's the perfect time of year for these fresh spring pasta recipes, doctored with ingredients fresh from the garden. This only-very-lightly-creamy pasta dish pairs so deliciously with our Maeve Vineyard Chardonnay from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and it was a perfect base recipe to add some fresh peas and wild dill from our garden. The inspiration came from an old recipe in Food & Wine Magazine (pictured) to which we added a couple ingredients and updated the proportions a little bit.

 

Ingredients:

• 1 pound farfalle
• 3 tablespoons butter, cut into 1 tablespoon chunks
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 small shallot, halved and sliced thinly
• 3 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1/4 cup ABSOLUT vodka
• 2 cups heavy cream (plus a dash for the eggs)*
• 4 ounces smoked salmon, cut into 1" strips
• 2 cups freshly shelled sweet peas
• 1 tablespoon fresh dill, chopped
• 3 large egg yolks (plus a dash of cream)
• 2 tablespoons fresh chives, chopped into tiny pieces
• Maldon sea salt and frehsly ground red/black/green peppers to taste

* We don't keep fresh cream in the house on an everyday basis, and we don't cook with it often enough to have any use for left over heavy cream, so this is admittedly a terribly annoying amount of cream to have to purchase for this dish and then not to use. So we just purchase a pint of heavy cream and then set aside a dash to add to the eggs in order to finish the sauce. And if you forget to add that dash to the eggs and instead add it all to the cream sauce, well like so what? Just add the eggs to the pasta sauce at the very end as if you're making a carbonara.

Preparation:

• Melt the butter in the olive oil, don't let it brown.
• Add the shallots, give it a minute, then add the garlic. Season with a little Kosher salt. Let them sweat. Time for a glass of Chardonnay!
• Remove the sauce pan from the heat, carefully add the ABSOLUT**, then return it to a simmer. A sniff of boiling vodka won't hurt anyone :) It's delish!
• When the vodka has reduced by half, add the cream, and stir to consolidate. A little spring of fresh dill in the cream isn't a bad idea, just don't get carried away. How's that chardonnay tasting?
• Give that cream a chance to come up to a gentle simmer, and start to skim the solids into the sauce. It's a good time to add the peas, to let them soften as the cream condenses. Then add the rest of the fresh dill. In about five minutes of a gentle simmer, add the smoked salmon strips, and give them a couple minutes in the sauce to tighten up. Keep stirring everything together, then remove from the heat and set it aside.
• Immediately drain the pasta, and return it to its pot. Cover it with your cream sauce. Stir in your egg yolks, and let it all rest together for about five minutes. Then plate in shallow bowls, and enjoy

Serve with our Maeve Vineyard Chardonnay Santa Cruz Mountains 2021.

** ABSOLUT is our "absolute" favorite cooking vodka. We use it for every dish that calls for vodka. It's punchy enough to add a bit of flavor, but not so expensive we feel we're pouring money down the drain. ABSOLUT is a Kitchen Staple in our house.

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Sushi with fresh wasabi from our garden

(Pictured: blue fin tuna nigiri with daikon radish, scallions, and fresh wasabi)

Yes, okay, so it took two plus years to grow, but I finally managed to harvest my own wasabi plants from roots purchased in Oregon in 2021. When they arrived in the mail, the wasabi roots were about an inch long and had a handful of small wasabi leaves growing on them. I planted them in an 18" trench planter filled with compost and potting mix in a shady spot along our fence line and put a water line on them for three times per week. At first, everything started to grow brilliantly, but that was mid-Spring. As the angle of the sun changed over the beginning of the summer the wasabi came into direct sunlight during the middle of the day, and that's when we lost the first two plants to dehydration.

Another two plants died a couple weeks later during a heatwave due actually to over-watering. At that point, I took the water line of the remaining wasabi root, which was still doing pretty well, and transfered the planter to the north side of the house, where it wouldn't receive any direct sunlight at all. Without the water line on it, I had to warer it manually once per week over the rest of the summer and into the wall. So that's the story of how you turn five good wasabi plants into one. By the time winter rolled around, our one wasabi remained and was doing pretty well.

Fast forward to May 2023, and our little wasabi box has survived two brutal summers and some benevolent neglect in the watering schedule. Our main root has spawned a number of smaller root systems in the box, and at harvest, the first job was to dig these all out by hand and separate them. The smaller roots balls will be replanted with fresh potting mix in the same box.

Step 2: Dinner! We trimmed the wasabi root down to one long root about nine inches, then peeled off the coarse outer skin. To prepare fresh wasabi, we use this sharkskin hand grater that we purchased in Tokyo.

We ground some daikon radish ("oshinko") from the Japanese market in San Francisco (Nijiya, click here) ...

and we thinly slice fresh scallions ...

and halve eight fresh scallops, without cutting all the way through, leaving one edge attached ...

To prepare our sushi rice, we use a rice steamer purchased from Nijiya (this was one of the best buys we ever made -- it turns out consistently delicious rice without any hassle and is easy to clean). Once the rice has finised cooking, we pour about 1/3 cup of Rice Vinegar (we prefer the fancy stuff from Nijiya, but any rice vinegar will do) and 1 tablespoon of Aji Mirin into the rice pot, we stir it up gently, and let it sit for 15 minutes. We leave the rice cooker on "warm" -- which is how we like to prep our sushi.

We rub a small dash of the freshly ground wasabi on each scallop and each piece of thinly sliced tuna, then we prep a small ball of rice -- about 1 tablespoon of seasoned rice -- rolling it in our left hand into a thumb-sized lump. We top this lump of rice with fish, and press it firmly into place using two fingers pressing the fish down into the rice ball in our left hand. From then, all we have to do is adjust and garnish the pieces of sushi.

(Pictured: lightly seared fresh hotate "scallop" nigiri with fresh wasabi, nori wrap, with Maldon sea salt and oshinko garnish.)

 

 

 

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Pâté de Campagne – aka Country Pate

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Pâté de Campagne – aka Country Pate

Ingredients

• ¾ cup Brandy (we use house made Crosby Roamann brandy – call us for info)
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 1 pound ground veal
• 1 pound ground pork
• 2 packages bacon (about 1.5 pounds) chopped into 1” pieces
• 5 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2 ½ teaspoons Kosher salt
• 2 ½ teaspoons dry thyme
• 2 teaspoons dry rosemary
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• ½ cup heavy cream
• 1 small ham steak, cut into ¼-inch thin strips

 

Preparation

• Preheat the over to 350 degrees.
• Boil Brandy until reduced to 1/2 cup, about 2 minutes. Let it cool.
• Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat, then add onion, and later, the garlic, and saute until the onion is soft and translucent but not brown, about 10 minutes.
• While the onion and garlic are cooking, combine ground pork and bacon in large bowl using your fingers. When the onion has cooled a touch, add the onion salt, thyme, rosemary, and pepper to bowl with pork mixture and mix until incorporated. Add eggs, cream, and reduced Cognac. Mix well. You now have a big bowl of pate filling!
• Line a 9x5x3-inch metal loaf pan with bacon slices, arranging bacon slices across width of pan and a couple slices on each short side of pan and overlapping pan on all sides. Using hands, fill the terrine halfway with the meat filling, then arrange ham slices throughout the middle of the pan in a middle layer, then top with remaining meat mixture. I like to heap the meat filling into a mound on top of the pan, then cover it with the bacon slices that are hanging over the sides of the pan.
• Cover the pan tightly with foil and place it in a larger (13x9x2-inch) metal baking pan and transfer them to the oven. Pour boiling water into baking pan to come halfway up sides of loaf pan. Bake pâté about 2 hours 15 minutes.
• At the conclusion of baking, remove the pate pan from the baking pan and then dispose of the water from the baking pan. Return the pate pan to the baking pan, and place a heavy skillet filled with 2 to 3 heavy cans atop pâté to weigh down. Let this rest for an hour or so, until it has cooled. Then chill overnight.
• Place loaf pan with pâté in larger pan of hot water for about 3 minutes. Invert pâté onto platter; discard fat from platter and wipe clean. Cut pâté crosswise into 1/2-inch slices.
• Serve with good bread, cornichons and country Dijon mustard. Enjoy!

(Adapted from Bon Appetit Magazine)

 

Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Osso Buco