SUNFIRE Winery | Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon and Port Wines from California » tapas

Simply delicious desserts that are simple to make

admin — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 06:54:43 +0000

During the last couple of weeks there has not been much happening in the cellar. Whenever I could extract myself from a rather overwhelming backlog of paperwork and accounting I would retreat to my kitchen to play. So one day, maybe about a week ago, we had a couple friends come by and stupidly I forgot to pick up dessert at Whole Foods. The oversight wound up turning into an evening of happy desserts. Here are the recipies for the winners of the night:

Fried Goat Cheese with Honey

1/4 pound of a creamy goat cheese

1 small red onion, finely sliced

1 egg, beaten

flour

1 tsp sugar

Spanish olive oil

Honey

Fry the onion over medium heat until it is really soft then drain off the oil, add the sugar and carmelize. As soon as thats done, chill it. Next, form the goat cheese into 4 equal size balls. Dip cheese balls in egg and then lightly cover in flour. Fry in a shallow pan of olive oil until golden brown. Put the carmelized onion in the center of a plate and arrange the cheese balls evenly around it. Drizzle the cheese with honey. Serve with Sherry if you have it!

Crostini with Chorizo and Bittersweet Chocolate Drizzle

Spicy dry cured Spanish Chorizo, cut to 1/4 inch slices.

3 oz bittersweet dark chocolate (Guitard wafers are great for this)

A baguette

Olive oil

Preheat the oven to 375. While waiting for the oven to heat up, add a couple tablespoons of olive oil to a frying pan and briefly sear both sides of the chorizo. Set aside the chorizo and brush the chorizo infused olive oil onto the crostini slices– one side only. Place the crostini onto a baking sheet and cook for about 10 minutes. Melt the chocoalte wafers or chips over a low heat. When the crostini is done put a slice of chorizo on top and drizzle it with the melted chocolate. Serve with a full bodied Tempranillo.

Simple but tasty tapas you can do at home

admin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:08:44 +0000

One of the thing I here whenever I start talking about serving a Spanish table is that cooking Spanish style (or iberian in general) is very complex. I can tell you that it’s just not true. Or rather that it doesn’t have to be. If I was I could not do it. I have an adversarial relationship with my oven. So if it ain’t range top or grill, I’m screwed… and so are my guests. The good news is there is so much you can do with Tapas.

As an example, a couple months ago I was perusing the menu at Sala 19 and decided to start adapting a couple of the tapas dishes to ingredients I can get here in Fresno. I can’t get real Iberico ham here (I’d like to…) so Proscuitto can be exchanged. You can get it at virtually any supermarket deli counter. Does that make the recipe Italian? Maybe. Does it matter? Not really!

So the recipe goes something like this:

DATILES CON JAMON (dates with ham)

16 dates (preferably pitted)

1/4 pound thick cut procuitto (about 1mm thick)

unsalted almonds

First pit the dates if its not done already. The stuff in 1 almond into each date and wrap the date with a 1 inch by 4 strip of prosciutto. Place in a 400 degree oven just until the proscuitto just crisps up. If you don’t get on well with your oven either, the grill works fine too.

Serves 4

The salty meat plays off the sweetness of the dates perfectly and it almost melts in your mouth!

Even better, the prep takes maybe 15 minutes. Pure simplicity.

Tasting the 2003 Pujanza Rioja

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:09:32 +0000

Last Thursday we had the first Tempranillo and tapas night at my house. Several pals dropped by (mostly for the novelty of watching me cook) and tasted a bottle of rioja I’d recently picked up in our local wine emporium. Our rating system is pretty straight forward: the scale is 1-5 stars with one being horridly vile plonk (I’ve judged a few in competitions, though thankfully its rare) and 5 stars which is a wine you should run, not walk, to buy.

The 2003 Pujanza Rioja is a blend of 90% Tempranillo and 10% Graciano. Our consensus is that it has medium bodied aromas of cherry, raspberry and white peppercorn. The predominant flavor is of raw cocoa powder and light red cherry. The wine was served with two Spanish dishes: Plate 1: A mild chorizo baked in a moderately spiced variation of patatas gravas. The wine went very well with this dish. Plate 2: A chicken and spicy chorizo pealla.

The wine as a stand alone and with Plate 1 got a consensus rating of 3.5 stars but with Plate 2 it did not fare as well; the wine simply lacks the body to stand up to the richer flavors in the paella. So for this pairing the wine gets 3 stars.

Overall the 2003 Pujanza Rioja is a decent but unexciting 3.5 star value at $25 so long as its paired with mild dishes.

Another day, another restaurant

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:40:29 +0000

This time I found a killer tapas joint in Manhattan. Sala One Nine. Creative dishes such as dates stuffed with almonds and wrapped with bacon are simple and delicious. The wine list is rather limited, though they do have a Mensia which is the grandfather of cab franc, but the food is simply scrumptious. If in NYC this place is definitely worth a visit.

Tempranillo Tuesdays (or maybe Thursdays)

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:12:49 +0000

Thanksgiving is over and it’s back to the grind for most folks, yours truly included, to the daily ritual which for this particular blogger is to amble out to the winery, toy with Cabernet and Tempranillo blends (which I should do more of) and this week at least get my act in gear re: Tempranillo Tuesdays or Thursdays. I need to choose two Spanish tapas dishes to pair with the first night’s wine, come up with some sort of scoring system that’s not utterly confusing (I mean really, what is the difference between a 91 and a 92 point wine… tell me please!) so I’m thinking about a star system (i.e. 1 star sucks and 5 stars means get the hell out of my way while I run to the store to wipe out my hard earned cash). I want this little experiment to include folks from within and without the industry so in any given week there will be winemakers, restaurateurs, sommeliers, serious and not so serious wine tasters and whoever else happens to show up. When I met my fiancé, I stupidly assumed that she knew what I was talking about when we were drinking wine. Now ya gotta understand, she’s a foodie, but she was completely perplexed when I started going on and on about white pepper and boysenberry fusion in wine and it finally clicked that most folks, probably some of my readers too, are equally intimidated or perplexed by wine-speak and inaccessible scoring systems and would just like someone whose not a pompous snob to tell them what they think of a wine in somewhat clearer terms. That’s why I feel its so important to include in these weekly tastings inexperienced wine tasters– inexperienced incidentally does not mean disinterested, a common misconception in my trade. Most wine professionals were just as confused by wine-speak at one time. Twenty years ago, I knew there were two types of wine (well, three types since my parents drank Châteauneuf-du-Pape) red and white. When I read wine notes like ” it has aromas of warm wet gravel” my reaction was something akin to: “as opposed to what? cold pond gravel….” So here we are twenty or so years later and I still don’t know what warm wet gravel tastes like, do you? I think not … I can just see it now, telling my friends:

Me:      ”Hey guys, this wine has aromas of lychee nut and warm wet
               gravel”
Them: “Sure Stew, whatyever you say.”
Me:       “I swear I’m serious and Ill prove it to you– just give me a
               moment to heat up some water and get some gravel out of
                the goldfish bowl…”

All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to getting this weekly tasting program under way. I hope you are too.