I was going through our wine selection trying to find a wine that I could find a great pairing to go with. So I went through our Tablas Creek Wines. The great thing about Tablas is that they set you up for a great wine pairing. They have a vintage chart on their site, so you can see which wines are ready to drink. Tablas Creek does mostly Rhone varieties in the French style, so most of their wines are meant to age. I found a 2012 Patelin de Tablas in the rack in the dining room that was ready to drink and found a recipe and pairing ideas on the Tablas site (yep, they usually have one or 2 recipes to pair with each of their wines, as well as some additional suggestions…it’s really foodie heaven).
There was a fish with fennel recipe and suggestions for citrus avocado salad, fish with tropical salsa and Mussels or clams cooked in butter and wine. We determined we would do the citrus avocado salad, fish with tropical salsa and the clams. We thought we would go to whole foods for a good citrus selection, but since I wanted clams and I wanted them to be easy, we stopped first at Trader Joes.
Foodies might be appalled, but while I wanted clams, I didn’t want the worry of cleaning them, so we picked up a box of TJ’s steamer clams, which are frozen and have an herb butter sauce already. We picked up some frozen Alaskan Cod, a mango, limes, a red bell pepper, a red onion, Meyer lemons, blood oranges, a Minneola, arugula and mint. I had an avocado at home from the farmers market. This was probably a Zutano or a Pinkerton avocado and it was a little different from the well-known Haas. It was smooth skinned and green with a pear like shape with a smooth light flesh.
Cooking
So now it was time to cook. We started by making the salsa, dicing ½ of the red pepper, the mango and ½ of the onion then squeezing the juice of 1 lime over it and seasoning with salt and pepper. Mix this up early if you want and toss it in the fridge to let all those flavors meld.
Next we sliced up our citrus into rings. In retrospect I could have sliced them thinner. They get tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper and go in the oven at 425 for 10-15 minutes to roast and caramelize. While they were in there, I tossed my arugula and some fresh mint together and mixed a dressing of small diced red onion and the juice of 1 Meyer lemon.
We started the clams at this point and Michael seasoned the cod. The box of clams went into our preheated pan and then instead of the water called for on the box, I went to add the white wine… only it was red. Silly me…I saw the label and didn’t look to see if it was the white or red Patelin de Tablas. So, Plan B…I grabbed a bottle of 2012 Esprit de Tablas Blanc and tossed in a bit of that.
Michael got some butter (by that I mean almost a stick) going in a skillet and added the cod pieces, these cooked while I sliced the avocado for the salad and pulled the citrus from the oven to top it. Last the dressing of Meyer lemon juice and onion went on.
The Wine Pairing
The fish was plated and topped with our salsa and we were ready to eat! Our wine pairing wasn’t what we originally expected, but we enjoyed the Esprit de Tablas Blanc with dinner and then enjoyed a glass of the Patelin de Tablas after. While the Patelin de Tablas Blanc would have potentially made for a better wine pairing with the mango salsa and with the citrus salad, the Esprit went very well. The difference? The Esprit is a blend of 75% Roussanne, 20% Grenache Blanc & 5% Picpoul Blanc, where the Patelin Blanc would have been 52% Grenache Blanc, 27% Viognier, 16% Roussanne & 5% Marsanne. That Viognier would have lended itself nicely to the tropical salsa, but regardless the Esprit was wonderful with it!
The fish and clams were delicious. The salad…the peel and pith were a little bitter. Perhaps if I had sliced these more thinly, it would have soaked up more of the olive oil and been a little sweeter, less chewy and caramelized a little more. It was beautiful though and the mint and arugula were nice with it.
All in all, this was a pretty simple dinner. It took us about 35 to 40 minutes total, but that was with shooting while we cooked. You could multitask and complete the whole thing in about 20 minutes.
So dive in! A fantastic looking dinner doesn’t have to take hours in the kitchen; in fact the best stuff usually is simple and cooks up pretty quick. And even an accidental wine pairing can turn out to be delicious!
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