Cooking with wine is one of the most basic kitchen skills and one that I personally enjoy a lot.  There is something just so right about pouring a shot of wine into a hot pan or smelling a red wine stew bubble for hours.  Wine can do some pretty amazing things to a dish, and is responsible for many of your favorite meals.  It can turn a tough piece of meat into a tender roast or brown, dried up bits into a delicious pan sauce.  Cooking with wine the right way is basically food magic.

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I wanted to share this recipe today.  I love the play between the pork juices, balsamic sauce and fruit.  It’s quite impressive and it tastes great.  It’s also a great use of your real homemade stock.

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We’ve finally gotten to the fun part.  I’ll have to add a picture of the garden “overview” soon, but I’ve been pulling a lot of delicious cayennes, jalapenos and tomatoes from the garden.

The tomato plants are bursting with green and ripe tomatoes.  First, they had a problem with the bottom of each tomato rotting (fixed that by adding eggshells to the soil), and now they are splitting and cracking a bit due to unusually heavy rains we recently had (growing too fast).

The tomatoes might not look perfect, but they taste so good.  I remember my mother bringing home really good tomatoes from the New Jersey farms she passed on the way home from work when I was a child.  These are like that, maybe even better!  They are sweet and full of flavor.  The variety I planted is called “Better Boy.”  Definitely will plant these again.

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Went to lunch at the Counter recently in Reston.  We were offered clipboards with checkboxes and golf pencils.  The concept is that each burger is made to your order from fresh, hormone-free and natural beef (or chicken, turkey, etc)

My selections: Onion bun with 1/3 lb of beef, herb goat cheese spread, grilled onions, mixed greens, roasted green chiles, and a balsamic-dijon sauce to pour all over it.

I made my burger (above) into a mess before photographing it, but it was the best burger I have ever had.  I was pleased to see it was actually pink inside.  Most American restaurants don’t have the balls to cook beef properly for fear of customer complaint.  The Counter seems confident in the quality of their beef and did not overcook any of our burgers.  The toppings were fresh, and the combination of goat cheese and the balsamic sauce was pure heaven.  Maybe I just like that combination, but man… it was good.

Also of note: the sweet potato fries – served with a slightly spicy dressing for dipping – are crispy, sweet-salty goodness.

Piccata is a well-known dish that features some of cooking’s most essential skills – sauteing and making a pan sauce.  It also tastes great.  Bursting with fresh lemon flavor,  it’s simple, easy, and so satisfying to eat.  The key lies in the fresh ingredients, real wine (throw the “cooking wine” away and pick up some dry vermouth – keep it in the fridge with the cap closed) and a skillful saute of the meat so that it remains juicy and delicious.

For Veal Picatta, just use veal cutlets instead of chicken breasts and perhaps a dash of veal stock along with the chicken stock.  Veal cutlets cook faster, so use less time when sauteing them.

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It’s been almost a month since the last Square Foot Garden post, and a lot has happened.  We’ve had some unusual weather over the month of June.  Golf ball sized hail and unusually hot weather.

Tomatoes started to form, then grew larger

But there were some (quite a few in fact) problem tomatoes which developed large, flat brown spots on the bottom of the fruit.  I found out this is called Blossom End Rot and is due to a calcium deficiency in the soil.  Notes for next year’s garden…

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There is nothing that smells as good as food sizzling on a red-hot grill (with the possible exception of onion and garlic sauteing in hot butter.)  With summer fast approaching, you may be in the market for a new gas or charcoal grill.  I’ve been using a Weber Genesis for about one year.  Before that, I had a Weber Baby Q (due to a small living space and a small budget).  Both grills have been absolutely outstanding, but what I have also discovered is that Weber is also quite possibly the most helpful and responsible company I have ever dealt with.

In general, I noticed right away that the products were of wonderful quality; easy to assemble and very solid.  I haven’t had any issues with the grills.  My first experience with Weber’s customer support came when a Weber-branded cookbook I purchased began to have issues with the binding (pages were coming loose).  I sent an e-mail to Weber’s general customer support address, expecting absolutely nothing in return.  Most companies don’t respond to e-mail with anything more than a canned “thank you for your e-mail, we will look into it,” and I assumed I had basically wasted my time.  I was surprised to receive this promptly in return:

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