holiday highlights life of reiley style
I am not a New Years resolution type but this year I think one’s in order. Next year I will try to get into the spirit of blogging and bring you, my few but faithful followers, more regular tales from the life of an aphrodisiac queen.
Before the year ends, I just want to share with you some of the culinary highlights of my holidays.
One of the brightest spots came as a complete surprise. I was assigned to write a feature on Henriot’s 1995 Cuvée Des Enchanteleurs for novus vinum’s wine of the week. The wine was not only the best bottle of bubbly – and I love my bubbly – that I’d tasted all year, it was one of the best WINES I’d drunk in recent memory. Sometimes a wine hits a sweet spot in its lifetime. I believe the Henriot had hit its stride just in time for my Holiday tasting because it showed depth and richness but still had freshness of youth. In fact, as I said in my review, it reminded me of Krug, the king of Champagne.
Christmas eve was a foodie’s holiday. Traditionally, we have my bff Lisa’s family over to my mother’s house for a Christmas Eve dinner of hard smoked salmon followed by a pot of chili flavored with chocolate. (I don’t remember how this tradition started, but we’ve been serving chili on Christmas Eve since I was a kid.) This year, we had to change things up a little and we headed to Lisa’s mother’s for Christmas Eve, a roasted turkey and one of the cakes from Kiss My Bundt packed in the trunk for the twisty, turning drive from my mother’s house in Sonoma County to Lisa’s in the Napa Valley.
Lisa’s mother, HB, always puts on a feast of vegetables for the Holiday. She’s not a meat and potatoes type, which is perfect because neither are we! We’re probably the only Americans who ate their turkey with preserved lemons, crumb-topped cauliflower and sauteed chayote squash and sweet potatoes! The real highlight of the meal was, (and always is when Lisa’s family plans the meal), the cheese plate and the wines. As I’ve mentioned before in my blog, Lisa’s family own Peju Winery in Rutherford, (Napa Valley). For the Holidays, they always like to celebrate with some of their best bottles, like an aged Reserve Cab, their Provence, (the perfect turkey wine) and a “mystery” dessert wine bottled several years before but, oddly, never labeled. (Based on the wine’s faint green olive aroma, I’m guessing it was a late harvest Chardonnay.) As for the cheese plate, it offered an amazing local fontina, firm to the touch but as creamy as butter on the tongue – a cheese that is always something to look forward to enjoying at the Peju house. Other cheeses included a few of the Peju’s favorites from among the Northern California cheese companies with whom Lisa’s so-to-be brother-in-law works. (I particularly liked a gouda I believe is named purple haze, but after all that wine, my memory is really too hazy to remember!)
Most people think Christmas morning starts with presents. For me, Christmas morning means slipping out of my bed early, racing to the kitchen for a bottle of vintage bubbly, 2 flutes, 2 shell spoons and a tin of caviar before racing into my mother’s bed to get warm. We lay in bed and drink and eat until the tin is empty. I know, this sounds like the ultimate aphrodisiac breakfast save for the fact that I share it with my mother. Perhaps one day I’ll have someone to share my caviar spoon with whom the tradition will transform into foreplay, but for now I’m happy to sit in bed with my mom, my toes being warmed by a pair of chihuahuas.
Christmas dinner this year was that Christmas Eve pot of chili but this year’s dinner may have been the biggest home run ever. First of all, there was that salmon mentioned earlier, which is actually a family obsession.
Long before I was born, my parents lived in Alaska and after they moved back to the lower 48, their Alaskan friends continued to send them jars of hard smoked salmon, caught and smoked on their homestead outside of Anchorage. That salmon was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted. Unlike the cold smoked salmon we’re accustomed to at deli’s and on breakfast buffets, hard smoked salmon is hot smoked. The process dries the fish out a bit and strengthened intensity of flavor. The result is a hard, meaty piece of fish that tastes neither particularly smokey nor salty but is a perfect balance of both.
I have a small smoker in my back yard and I’ve been trying for years to reproduce this fish, “Dinkle Salmon” (named for its makers, the Dinkle family) as we call it. This year, with two slabs of silver salmon, smoked for approximately 3 hours then stored in a vacuum sealed bag for 3 days, was an almost exact replica of Dinkle Salmon. So good was the fish, in fact, that I failed to save room for the main course, which is a pity because this year’s chili was also our best.
I’ve been working on a Chocolate-Kissed White Bean Chili for my new book The Love Diet, http://www.lovedietblog.com So I asked my brother and his girlfriend Jill to follow my recipe and make the chili for Christmas dinner. The result was better than anyone expected. The secret ingredient was acai fruit puree. If you aren’t familiar with acai, it is an aphrodisiac super fruit from the rain forest. Its flavor and richness reminds me a little bit of tomato, which is why I thought of putting it in chili.
As I mentioned before, I was actually too full to enjoy the chili. But it turns out, taking a break during the main course served me well because dessert was amazing.
As you know, I’ve been working closely with Chrysta Wilson of Kiss My Bundt Bakery on her first cookbook. Chrysta once told me that she’s really sick of bundt cake but the one thing she still loves is hot red velvet cake served with a dollop of cold cream cheese. So this, the brilliant red bundt, was what I made for Christmas, a dab of cream cheese, like a little pile of shoveled snow, on the side. Chrysta is so right about this cake. I had seconds and could have had thirds had I not been afraid I would burst.
Now I know I mentioned dozens of aphrodisiacs in the meal, so was it a successful prelude to romance? Sadly, my sweet was struck by acid reflux by an evening cocktail so not only was there no romance in store for me Christmas. We didn’t even sleep in the same room. After spoon feeding all of our guests aphrodisiacs, I spent Christmas night on the couch!