The Alcoholian

Posted by johngl

As much as I would like to make food from scratch all the time, sometimes it just isn’t in the cards. Thankfully, I have a most glorious spousal unit who is wicked smart using prepared foods.

So, on this chilly and rainy weekend, where temperatures were down in the range of our Stephen Taber trip in June, she decided that some comfort food was in order.

There’s these folks here in Austin that call themselves Cookwell & Company who make a great green chile stew in a jar.

We discovered them during the recent Hatch Chile Festival at Central Market.  They were running a sale on their stuff and had some free samples available.  We tried a couple of different things and determined that the green chile stew was the best of the lot. We grabbed a bottle, brought it home, and I promptly forgot about it.

Luckily, the most glorious one did not. We used that as the base.

We added the black beans and chunk of leftover pork loin.

Heating it up for about five minutes, it wound up looking like this:

Doing a taste test, I determined it needed a little salt, chile pequin powder, a couple of tablespoonsful of tequila, a tablespoonful of white wine vinegar, and about an ounce of heavy cream.  Yep, that certainly brightened things up!

In the meantime, most glorious gathered up the cornbread fixins:

Yep.  That is indeed a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix.  Most glorious doesn’t make anything from scratch if she doesn’t have to, and frankly, the stuff isn’t too bad.  They actually put lard in it.  I couldn’t believe it and had to read the label again.

Anyway, she mixed it up:

I think this only takes about 20 minutes to bake.

Lay out your condiments:

And dig in!

All that we needed to top this off was a decent bottle of wine.

Most glorious chose a Portuguese red from the Douro: a 2004 Domini from wine makers Domingos Soares Franco and Christiano Van Zeller.

The 20 year old vines within this 28 acre vineyard in northern Portugal — made up of Touriga Franca, Touriga Nacional, and Tinta Roriz grapes — make for a dark, full-bodied wine with flavors of blackberry, plum, and perhaps a hint of vanilla.  Some solid tannins give this $11 bottle some short-term aging potential.

Wine Enthusiast says:

This joint venture between the inspired winemaker Domingos Soares Franco and Cristiano van Zeller produces fascinatingly idiosyncratic wines. Big and bold, but then lean and tannic, with sunshine-filled fruit over dark tannins. Consumers wanting an action-packed wine, needing time to come together (when it will be superb), should go for this.

While not a scratch meal, it certainly had the rich flavors of one and hit the spot on a chilly, wet day.

The best things in life should be shared!

Tags: Chile Peppers, pork

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 5:15 am and is filed under Recipes: Eats, Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.