LL no longer eats lamb or veal, so when she is traveling, on one night I’ll often buy lamb or veal chops and sit down with a phalanx of red wines to try with some of my favorite meats. She was out of town recently, so I got three small but thick loin lamb chops, sauteed them simply with rosemary, salt and pepper in a dab of olive oil (in the good old iron skillet), roasted a couple of potatoes and dutifully steamed a handful of green beans, which I actually ate, I promise.

Looking through the wine shelves and boxes at home, I grabbed six bottles, not really thinking about place or origin; I just wanted predominantly cabernet sauvignon wines. Turns out that two were from the Columbia Valley in Washington State, one from Australia’s Padthaway region and three were from the Napa Valley. Or without thinking about prices, which turned out to range from fairly expensive to outright expensive. On the other hand, the wines were excellent. While with one exception the alcohol levels were all above 14 percent (and what’s not nowadays), the wines were balanced and integrated, with none of the flamboyant toasty oak or excessive ripeness that render so many contemporary red wines questionable.

What is it about lamb and cabernet/merlot-based wines that makes them so amenable, so fated, as it were, to a marriage made in culinary heaven? Lamb is fatty, ripe itself in the way that good fresh meat can be ripe, a little earthy and gamy (it’s “wilder” than beef or pork) and, in the way that great beef has, it possesses a mineral quality that the heat of the flame brings out. Wines composed solely or mainly of cabernet sauvignon or merlot offer, in their own vinous ways, very similar qualities: the richness and ripeness, the “fat,” the mineral elements. Sometimes I like pinot noir with lamb, but most of the time, give me cabernet or merlot.

These wines are mentioned in the order of tasting.

*The blend of the Matthews Cellars Claret 2004, Columbia Valley, is 55% cabernet sauvignon, 22% merlot, 18% cabernet franc, 4% malbec and 1% syrah. The color is dusky ruby-purple; the bouquet wafts a seductive strain of lavender and licorice, ripe, fleshy, meaty and dusty black currant and black raspberry. The wine is dense and chewy, smooth and mellow, packed with smoke and spice and minerals; after a few minutes in the glass, it opens earthy layers of underbrush and forest floor, polished oak and fairly gritty tannins. It’s a lovely red wine, accessible and delicious yet capable of aging through 2014 or ‘15. Excellent. About $32.

*Notice how the combination of grapes on the Matthews Red Wine 2003, Columbia Valley, is similar to the blend of the previous wine but without the malbec and syrah; this is 53% cabernet sauvignon, 26% cabernet franc and 21% merlot. The first impression is of an incredible and heady smoldering heap of bitter chocolate, mint and eucalyptus, cedar and smoke, potpourri, lavender and sandalwood. Then the fruit comes up in a welter of macerated and roasted black currants, black cherries and plums. It’s a high-strung wine, taut with acid, energized by minerals, but still dense and cushiony, lavish with firm oak and grainy tannins that gain power and substance as moments pass. Try from 2009 through 2012 to ‘15. 823 cases. Excellent. About $60.

*Made from 100% cabernet grapes, Henry’s Drive Cabernet Sauvignon 2005, Padthaway, delivers the towering heft and darkness of a softly cloaked monument. This is a wine of piercing purity and intensity, huge and vibrant, deeply imbued with dusty oak and grainy tannins and seething with earthy, mossy, forest floor qualities and a resonant mineral element that lends the wine tremendous dynamism. Fruit falls into the realm of rich, ripe and fleshy black currants and black raspberries with touches of mint and eucalyptus and toasted Asian spices channeling licorice and lavender. For all its size and complexity, the wine is beautifully balanced and integrated. Try now, served with barbecue brisket or chili-rubbed pork chops and such fare, from 2010 to 2015 or ‘16. Case production was 1,150. Excellent. About $37. Great stuff.
The wines of Henry’s Drive Vignerons, which include Henry’s Drive, Parson’s Flat, Pillar Box and Dead Letter Office, are imported by Quintessential, Napa, California.

*Merryvale Vineyards no longer offers a “reserve” designation, under which this wine would previously have fallen. The level is now the “Signature Tier,” though that term does not occur on the label. In any case, the Signature Tier wines find a niche between the less expensive “Starmont” line and the top-of-the-line Profile and Silhouette.
The Merryvale Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 is composed largely of grapes that would have gone into the Profile, had Profile been made in 2005. Produced from 100 percent cabernet sauvignon grapes and aged 18 months in French oak, 32% new barrels, this feels like classic Napa Valley cabernet. It’s deep, rich and lush, dark as the night that covers us from pole to pole, a serious, intense and concentrated wine. The bouquet is woven from walnut shell and wheatmeal, mocha, cedar and tobacco and — give it a few minutes — aromas of tightly wound black currant and black cherry. The wine is huge in the mouth, notably tannic , earthy and minerally, bursting with spice, and yet for its size, it delivers a remarkable degree of finesee; it’s almost light on its feet. Of this group of wines, it’s the one that cried “Rib-eye steak, please, hot and crusty from the grill!” Drink 2010 through 2015 or ‘16. Excellent. About $50.

*My first note on the Bourassa Vineyards Symphony3 Proprietors Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2004, Napa Valley, is “Wow, what a mouthful of wine.” This producer believes in strenuous oak treatment, as in three years in French barrels (no indication as to the proportion of new to used), yet the wine is immaculately bright, vivid and vibrant, deliciously smooth and mellow. Notes of ripe, meaty and fleshy black currants, black raspberries and cherries teem in the glass, well-laced with smoke, spice and potpourri. Earthy, minerally tannins feel finely milled, as if they had been ground between giant rollers of iron-flecked velvet, while oak is powerful and polished and a tad debonair. This is, in other words, a wine of lively contrasts and happy resolutions. Best from about 2010 to 2015 to ‘18. Cases produced: 500. Excellent. About $60.

*Three years in French oak is also the regimen for the Bourassa Harmony3 Red Wine 2003, Napa Valley. The blend is 56% cabernet sauvignon, 23% malbec and 21% cabernet franc; the alcohol level is a mild-mannered 13.5 percent. What an absolutely lovely, vigorous, palate-pleasing red wine, pure pleasure! It offers wonderful balance and integration, great breeding and character, classic equilibrium of power and elegance, each element essential and inevitable. Yes, it does get pretty smacky, minerally and foresty on the finish, just as it should. I won’t say that I would choose this wine over the others on this page, because they’re all tremendously enticing, filled with depth and detail, yet this one seems special. Cases production: 450. Excellent. About $48.

We were putting together dinner Thursday night. I was making a pasta with some leftover pot-roast I had prepared last weekend, but not just any pot-roast. This hunk of beef was slow-cooked with a puree of dried ancho chilies, chipotle peppers with adobo sauce, coffee, lime, garlic and onions. Have mercy! I chopped some of the remaining beef, scrapped what was left of the puree into the pan with it and gradually added a 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes. It all made an intensely flavorful sauce for penne pasta. The recipe is in The Best of Gourmet: Sixty-Five Years, Sixty-Five Favorite Recipes (Random House, $40); it was intended for short ribs but certainly worked with the roast.

Anyway, LL brought a carton of kumquats from the grocery store. These curious little orangey-yellow fruits, with their tasty but bracing, bitter citrus tang, originated in China, but their small, shrubby trees are now cultivated there and in Japan, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus and the United States. The kumquat is not a true citrus fruit but belongs in the same Rutaceae family. (This information comes from the invaluable New Oxford Book of Food Plants, Oxford University Press, 1997; no home serious about food and ingredients should be without it.)

We had worked with kumquats years ago, when we prepared Charlie Trotter’s Wok-Smoked Catfish with Sweet-and-Sour Fennel and Kumquat Sauce for a dinner party; this is a great dish! It’s in The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter (Ten Speed Press, 1999), a book with recipes designed for cooking at home. Anyway, this recipe recommends simmering the kumquats in water three separate times to remove some of the bitterness. LL did that, chopped the kumquats, which by now were pretty soft, and whisked them into a lemon and olive oil dressing. I guess I shouldn’t call the dressing a vinaigrette since we rarely use vinegar in salad dressings; using freshly squeezed lemon juice makes salads easier to eat with wine.

The salad consisted of a variety of fresh greens, sliced cucumbers and the kumquat dressing, which had chunks of kumquat in it. It was a terrific salad, made even better by the wine we sipped with it, the August Kesseler Riesling Lorcher Schlossberg Kabinett 2004, from Rheingau. At three-and-a-half years old, this riesling was soft, round and blossomy, offering a weaving of pear, peach, lime and lime peel with hints of jasmine and rose petal. In the mouth, the wine is crisp and just off-dry, more ripe and bright and vivacious than sweet; the finish brings in clean but slightly earthy limestone. The primary impression is of lovely subtlety, of a breezy wreathing of delicacies. It was lovely, also, with the salad, the wine matching and even taming the citric vividness of the kumquat-and-lemon dressing, the slight bitterness of the kumquat adding a hint of dimension to the wine. I rate the wine Very Good+. The price is about $25 to $30. The wines of this estate are brought to the U.S. by August Kesseler Import Co. in Chicago.

With the “pot-roast” pasta, we drank the Parson’s Flat Shiraz Cabernet 2004, produced by Henry’s Drive Vignerons in Australia’s Padthaway region. The blend is 70 percent shiraz, 30 percent cabernet sauvignon. The wine ages 16 to 18 months in large and small barrels, 75 percent American, 24 percent French. This is a very big but well-mannered red wine, very ripe, quite dense and chewy, very spicy, quite vibrant with acid. It delivers mint and eucalyptus, black raspberries covered with bittersweet chocolate and layered with blackberries, plums and a touch of super-ripe boysenberry. This all sounds flamboyant (like an over-the-top zinfandel), but the package, while expressive almost to the point of exuberance, is nicely controlled by dry, slightly gritty tannins that load the finish with austerity. Delicious now with hearty fare, the wine could age a couple of years and drink well through 2012 or ‘14. I rate it Excellent. The price is about $40. Henry’s Drive wines are imported by Quintessential in Napa, Ca.

The kumquat picture is from jupiterimages.com.

LL had to work late last night, so I took over dinner duties and braised some baby bok choy (salt, pepper, olive oil, lemon juice and sprigs of thyme), roasted some potatoes and cooked salmon (fresh farm-raised steelhead) in the way we usually do it, nothing but salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon, sear it in a hot pan one minute on each side and then put the pan with the salmon in a 400-degree oven for three or four minutes. The salmon emerges slightly crusty on the outside and almost creamy inside, cooked just past rare.

Anyway, there had been a bottle of Italian white wine in the refrigerator, brought to the house by a friend — thanks, Mike! — who came to a tasting here a few months ago. Knowing nothing about the wine, not having actually looked at it carefully, I thought, why not? The full name of the wine is: Vidussi Podere di Spessa Ronchi di Ravez Collio Bianco 2002. (Collio lies in Italy’s northeastern region of Friuli, abutting Slovenia.) So, here’s a five-year-old white wine from Italy. Whoa, what’s this going to be like?

The name of the wine might as well add up to “fantastico!” Lord have mercy, it came from the bottle in a stream of bright medium, slightly brassy gold, and as we sat there at dinner both LL and I uttered variations on the theme: “It’s like what a wine would taste like if it were gold.” Or maybe: “It’s what gold would taste like if it were wine.”

Here’s the report: The Ronchi di Ravez Collio Biano 2002 acted like a dessert wine in the nose and a bone-dry wine in the mouth. By which I mean that the bouquet was a seductive weaving of candied orange rind, honeyed and roasted peaches, apricots and smoked almonds. In the mouth, however, it was all apple and pear, lanolin and dried herbs, dynamic acid and notes of anise and lavender. “Meadowy” was a word that came up, but not a high summer meadow brimming with flowers, no, this would be a late summer to fall meadow, one that encompasses the changing of the seasons and dry, weedy, fading floral aspects.

The blend of grapes is 45 percent ribolla gialla, 30 percent malvasia Istriana, 20 percent friulano (no longer called tocai friulano) and 5 percent picolit. The wine spends a short six months in oak, accounting for some of its firm structure and suppleness. About 1,500 cases are made. The wines of Vidussi are brought into the United States by Opici Imports, Glen Rock, N.J.

The price is about $23, a great bargain as far as I’m concerned for such a gorgeous, intriguing, complicated wine. which was, by the way, fabulous with the salmon.

On another subject, I just posted to KoeppelOnWine a page of “Refrigerator Door Wines,” eight bottles priced from $8 to $15, four white and four red. The whites are simple and direct and somewhat charming, being mainly decent quaffers for sitting around the porch or patio. The reds show more character, especially the Greg Norman Zinfandel 2005, Lake County, and the exotic Hecula 2004, from Yecla in Spain. After all, it won’t be too long before we start firing up those backyard grills and requiring some robust red wines to go with grilled meat.

It snowed like mad yesterday in Memphis, an occurrence that’s no novelty for those of you living in northern latitudes, but a rare event in the Mid-South. Already the drifts are melting, so I went out this morning and took some pictures to share. Here’s an image of the front of our house. You can see that the snow has weighed down the branches of the maple tree that stands at the beginning of the driveway.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to be slightly snow-bound for a night and have dinner at home — and by the way, I’m no longer reviewing restaurants for my newspaper; see “Goodbye to All That Dining” at the “Whining & Dining” blog — and turn on the lights on the back of the house so we could watch the snow flurry down as we ate.

I whisked up a vinaigrette and made a salad of spinach, radicchio and endive, and LL made risotto, which I will describe. She very slowly cooked two pieces of pancetta to get a little fat, took the pancetta out of the pan and then browned a diced shallot. She added a little olive oil to the pan and cooked arborio rice to that translucent stage and then put in half a cup of white wine and when that was absorbed began adding the chicken broth and stirring the rice. In a few minutes she dropped in some diced green onions, more chicken broth — you know the routine with risotto — and at the end added a handful of grated Parmesan cheese and about a tablespoon of butter.

The whole process took about 25 minutes, and the risotto was fabulous.

To drink with the risotto, I took a bottle that had been in the refrigerator for six months or so. St. Pauls Exclusiv Weissburgunder Plotzner 2005, from Sudtirol Alto Adige, was sent to me with two other bottles of wine from Italy’s northeast region by a marketing firm in New York, but for the life of me I can’t remember what that company is, nor can I find any printed matter I may have received with the wines. No importer is listed on the label, whose text is in Italian and German. A Google search on the wine brought up only five hits, all in foreign languages. One of those, however, provided a link to St Pauls informative website. St. Pauls Kellerie/Cantina was founded in the town of Eppan, southwest of Bolzano, in 1907. It’s a cooperative that makes a full range of red, white and sparkling wines from grapes typical of the region.

The wine we tried was terrific and a great match with the risotto. Weissburgunder, while it might look like a synonym for chardonnay (”white Burgundian”), is a name used for pinot blanc (or pinot bianco) in Germany and Austria. Think that a pinot blanc from 2005 would be losing its freshness and luster? Not this one. Sporting a radiant straw-gold color, this wine was incredibly clean and fresh, spicy and minerally, snappy with crisp acid and slightly earthy. Notes of white pepper, peach and pear enlivened lemon and roasted lemon fruit, the whole package vibrant with the delightful tension between bone-dryness and juicy flavors. I rate it Excellent, and I wish I could tell you a price, but I haven’t a notion. The pinot blanc grapes for this wine come from vineyards at 600 meters above sea level, or 1,968 feet. If you visit St Pauls website, you’ll see how steep and picturesque and beautiful the area is.

Of course we ate the pancetta for dessert.

The New Day referred to in the title of this post calls attention to the fact that BTYH is now affiliated with Triggit!, a new program that will allow me to make a little moolah from this blog beyond the pittance that Google ads bring. This will still be a pittance, but if you add a pittance to a pittance, you get a slightly larger pittance, enough, perhaps, to pay for a bottle of wine every once in a while.

You will notice, from now on, that every wine I mention on BTYH is highlighted in red. Click on the name of the wine and you will be taken to wine-searcher.com, which will show you where the wine can be bought or ordered and the price it fetches around the country. Every click brings me, as they say in the South, “a thin dime.” Actually, I think it’s 11 cents, making that thin dime a tad thicker. So, visitors to BTYH, you know what your job is. By the way, as an alternative, I can direct the links to winezap.com instead of wine-searcher; I would be interested to know what readers think is more useful.

So, while I already went back and created a few links in previous posts, we’ll launch the Triggit! function officially with two Spanish wines that LL and I drank with meatloaf.

You know how it is with meatloaf. In the same way that migratory birds wake up one morning and think, “O.K., time to go,” human beings rise from slumber thinking, “Yes, it’s a day for meatloaf.” For years I’ve made the meatloaf from Julia Childs’ The Way to Cook (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), and it’s so perfect a rendition of the concept — meat made into a loaf with a few ingredients to hold it together and make it taste even better — that I see no reason to change. For starch, we made the potatoes gratin from Alice Waters’ book from last year, The Art of Simple Food (Clarkson N. Potter, $35). This dish involved layering three strata of very thinly sliced potatoes, immersing them in milk, butter and (a suggestion) Parmesan cheese and sage, and baking the concoction for an hour. Holy moly!

The first night of the meatloaf, we drank the Casa de la Ermita Crianza 2004, from the Spanish wine region of Jumilla. The wine is a blend of 40% monastrell (mourvedre), 25% tempranillo, 20% cabernet sauvignon and 15% petit verdot. The bouquet is frankly gorgeous, a heady amalgam of smoke, lavender, crushed violets and minerals and ripe fleshy black fruit. The wine aged nine months in a combination of French and American oak barrels, a factor contributing to its spiciness and its firm structure. Casa de la Ermite Crianza ‘04 delivers great balance and integration, as well as a dense, chewy texture, currant, plum and black cherry flavors touched with cedar, tobacco and potpourri and, unexpectedly, a wild, high note of camellia. It was great with the meatloaf. Drink now through 2010 or ‘11. Excellent. About $19.

That was last Sunday. Midweek we sat down to dinner with the leftovers and a bottle of Mas Igneus Barranc dels Closos 2004 from the Spanish region of Priorat. This blend of grenache (70%), carignane (25%) and merlot (5%), which matures only three months in French oak, uses soft, grainy tannins to support luscious currant, plum and blueberry flavors threaded with lead pencil and minerals, wild berry, black tea, potpourri and a hint of tar. A few minutes in the glass bring up touches of mulberries and roses, briers and brambles. It’s a clean, vibrant, spicy wine, super-attractive and drinkable, but with an element of seriousness about the structure. It too was terrific with the meatloaf. Drink now through 2010 or ‘11. Very good+. About $20.

Both wines are brought into the United States by Opici Import Co., Glen Rock, N.J.

With what do you follow a tasting of 20 dessert wines, when your whole body feels as if it has been steeped in crystallized ginger, baked peaches ‘n’ cream and faintly rotten apricots? When sugar overload threatens to sent you into Sweet Tooth Shock Syndrome?

Something very clean and crisp and rigorous, a little nun-like in its purity and power. Wild sockeye salmon and the Silverado Vineyards Miller Ranch Sauvignon Blanc 2006, from Napa Valley’s Yountville appellation.

I organized this dessert wine event for eight people, including me and LL, and we all sat down at the table at home yesterday, on a blustery, rainy afternoon, when “the thermometer,” as Yeats says, “sank in the mouth of the dying day.” The dessert wines were all white, all non-fortified, representing many countries, regions, grapes, styles and strategies and ranging in year from 2006 back to 1986, lending the affair a tidy sense of symmetry. We tasted the wines blind, but since they were so different, I didn’t arrange them in competitive flights but offered each one individually. Quality varied, of course, but as LL said, “There wasn’t a clunker in sight.” And as Benito (wine-by-benito) averred, it was a great way to spend a chilly, rainy Sunday afternoon. I’ll post the results of the tasting in a couple of days.

Meanwhile, after clean-up, it’s eight o’clock or so and we needed that simple dinner, the salmon prepared with nothing more than salt, pepper, thyme and lemon juice and briefed seared, then briefly roasted (I mean, all this takes about four minutes); a handful of roasted potatoes; and some unadorned broccoli.

Made in stainless steel, the Silverado was perfect, fresh, clean, crisp and appropriately steelly, vibrant with acid, resonant with taut grapefruit, lime peel, lemon flavors and a touch of green apple; there’s a subtle weaving of dried thyme and tarragon, a hint of smoke, a bell-tone of leafy currant at the core. Classic and elegant and a bit austere from a flash of limestone in the finish. I rate it Excellent. About $18. Bottled with a screw-cap for easy opening.

Actually, we were supposed to eat that salmon Thursday night, but after what one always calls “a long day” — days aren’t really longer than each other; they just feel that way sometimes — before getting out the salmon for dinner we opened a couple of plastic-foam boxes (for a pre-dinner snack) we had brought from a restaurant the night before. Somehow this snack turned into dinner itself, which we ate standing in the kitchen, right out of the boxes, with a bottle of the Gainey Vineyard Merlot 2005, Santa Ynez Valley.

The restaurant was Umai, a small place in Memphis where an open kitchen the size of a modest walk-in closet turns out brilliant efforts at Franco-Japanese cuisine. We brought home 48-hour marinated duck in a “drunken duck” sauce and sirloin steak, crusted with chilies and chicory coffee and served with the best “fried” rice I have ever eaten.

The Gainey Merlot 2005 is aged 21 months in oak, 33 percent new barrels, and it wears that wood like a silk scarf around its shoulders. This is such a beautifully layered and structured merlot that it’s irresistible, but it doesn’t neglect the more stalwart elements of dusty, earthy tannins and touches of briers and brambles on the finish. Mainly, the wine is rich and intense, bursting with bright and vivid black currant and black cherry flavors framed by spicy oak and a supple chewy texture, bringing up, after a few minutes, waftings of dried flowers and bittersweet chocolate. Serious and delightful simultaneously. I rate this one Excellent, too. About $24. Drink now through 2010 or ‘11.

… come into a bar, No, ha-ha, what I meant to write was, Seven inexpensive Spanish wines show up on the “Refrigerator Door Wines” page for wines priced under $15 over on my website, KoeppelOnWine. I posted 10 wines on that page a few minutes ago and encourage you — what else? — to take a look. Included are three rosé wines made in different styles, from Spain, South Australia and Washington state, and a delightful Spanish unoaked chardonnay, as well as a clutch of simple and appealing red wines that would be great with grilled meat like lamb, veal and steak.

And speaking of steak — I’m on a self-promotional roll here — the “Eating and Drinking” page I posted yesterday on KoeppelOnWine mentions three meals and the wines we drank with them. It’s called “A Little Turf, a Lot of Surf.” The steak comes into it because I seared a t-bone steak one night, and we tried five red wines with it: Cabernet sauvignon, merlot, zinfandel, petite sirah and sangiovese. The “surf” part refers to sauteed swordfish we had one night and a pick-up pasta of smoked salmon, tiny heirloom tomatoes and vodka another night.

I hope you enjoy reading about these matters as much as we did eating and drinking. Well, no, you won’t, actually, sorry, but please try to live vicariously.

There it was, emblazoned on the cover of the Food & Wine magazine for March: “Perfecting Homemade Pizza.”

Well, that’s something I’m interested in. As readers of http://www.koeppelonwine.com know, I make pizza regularly, as many as, oh, 35 to 40 a year, because our ritual is two movies and a pizza on Saturday night or, if duty calls us elsewhere that night — “What, the president wants to see us again?” — on Sunday. We’ve been engaging in this ritual for 12 years or more, so, Buddy, that’s a lot of pizza, and I have worked incessantly to perfect the method myself.
The one-page article by Grace Parisi includes a box of specific products that the magazine recommends for making pizza: The wooden peel from Williams-Sonoma ($27); Bufalus Buffalo Mozzarella from Whole Foods ($NA); a Fibrament cement baking stone ($53); La Valle San Marzano canned tomatoes ($NA); Tutto Calabria oregano on a branch ($4); and a Typhoon “mezzaluna-style” pizza cutter ($18). None of which has anything to do with perfecting your pizza, but Food & Wine always wants to appear to be on top of things when it comes to food prep. I’m still using my ceramic stone and rotary wheel-type pizza cutter from years ago, and you know what? They work just fine. And I always use fresh tomatoes.
Anyway, the secret to great pizza, as anyone knows who wasn’t raised on a diet of Pizza Hut or Domino’s, is a slightly chewy, crisp but not cracker-like crust, and the real secret of the crust is water. Now Parisi, whose grandfather had a pizzeria in Brooklyn, achieves the crust she wants — “a chewy crust with a slight tang” — by leaving the pizza dough in the refrigerator overnight or for up to three days. That’s a pretty radical step, but I’ll try it sometime (maybe not this weekend).

The trick for me is not using a standard amount of water to make the dough, as in “pour four cups of water in the bowl,” but adjusting the amount carefully so that the dough remains moist, even a bit sticky. It can’t be too sticky; that makes kneading impossible and messy to boot, but if the dough is too dry the pizza crust will end up stiff and chewy at the expense of crispness. Keep the dough as moist as you can, flour the board and the dough sparingly and knead it until you have a ball of dough that’s smooth and silky.

While we’re on the subject of pizza, my new favorite meat to us as a topping is guanciale (”gwant-chi-AH-lay”), a dry cured pork jowl that’s a specialty of Latium, the province around Rome, and an essential ingredient in the pasta sauce called amatriciana. Now we know something about pork jowl in the South, a region in which all parts of the pig are consumed. Smoked hog jowl is an essential ingredient in the New Year’s Day blackeyed pea-hog jowl-turnip green soup; simmer a pot of that stuff on the stove for three or four hours and the jowl turns to luscious velvet.

As you can see from the photograph of guanciale here, the jowl is mainly fat, so basically, after frying it at low heat for 10 minutes or so, you have a plateful of pork cracklings. Yeah, they’re not “good” for you, but you can’t always be “good,” can you? I mean, lordy, what fat this is! Anyway, we use pizza night to make up for all the fish we eat.

We ordered this guanciale from Niman Ranch online. The jowl is cured in salt, maple syrup, pepper, rosemary, coriander and bay. Niman Ranch, located in Marin County, California, employs humane and sustainable practices. The pigs run free, eat natural feed and are given no antibiotics. That certainly makes me feel better about eating pure fat.
Now we couldn’t eat pizza without wine to go with it, preferably a bold, flavorful but not too complicated red wine. Here are two we’ve had with pizza recently:

*Vertex Just Red Blend No. 609, California. This nonvintage blend of cabernet sauvignon from Lake County, syrah and petite sirah from Lodi, cabernet franc from Napa Valley and merlot and malbec from Sonoma County is a product of The Gabrielle Collection of Wines. Robert Pepi and Jeff Booth are the winemakers for Vertex, a robust and full-bodied red wine bursting with hearty, spicy black currant, blackberry and black cherry flavors nestled in a cushion of dusty, chewy tannins. Great with pizza, red meat pastas and burgers. Very good. About $11.

*Artezin Zinfandel 2005, Mendocino County 39%, Amador County 36%, Sonoma County 25%. Artezin is a label of The Hess Collection. This is a super-attractive, almost sophisticated zinfandel, solid and firm, very spicy and flavorful, with no ashy edges or over-ripe exaggerations. Notes of clean earth and leather bolster currant, cherry and plum fruit permeated by licorice and lavender, grainy tannins and polished oak; the finish is a bit austere and could use a year or two to flesh out, but this is primarily a terrific zinfandel that went perfectly with pizza. Excellent. About $18.

Friends, I’m a carnivore.

It’s true that I don’t eat foie gras now, for ethical reasons, and I avoid sweetbreads as too rich and injurious to my digestion, but other than those exceptions, bring on the braised meat, the roasted meat, the seared meat, the rack of lamb, the veal shank, the short ribs, the rib roast, the strip steak. Much of that fare we — or I — partake of in restaurants, while at home we try to eat fish as much as possible. During the Yuletide season, however, we did over-indulgence with lots of meat and lots of red wine, so LL suggested recently that it would be good to try a few vegetarian dishes. Gack! I said within, but agreed to the regimen, even as I thought about tofu, brown rice and seaweed.

LL had something else in mind, though, and an example was the Brussels Sprout and Mushroom Ragout with Herb Dumplings from Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen (Broadway Books, $27.50). Madison was the founding chef of Greens, the revolutionary vegetarian restaurant that opened in San Francisco in 1979, and is author of a roster of award-winning vegetarian cookbooks. Nothing wimpy here, this is an incredibly flavorful dish, filled with wintery, rooty effects of deeply caramelized onions and mushrooms, a rich mushroom broth and the hearty influence of the most tender and flavorful Brussels sprouts I have ever tasted. The dumplings, dotted with parsley and tarragon, compliment the dish wonderfully — and also make it non-vegan, since they contain milk and an egg, though Madison says that substituting wild rice for the dumplings would be fine. A little pancetta would have — no, no, I won’t say it.
Madison suggests a rich Santa Barbara chardonnay with “a little oak” for the dish, but the heady, autumnal redolence that filled the kitchen put me in mind of pinot noir, so I opened a bottle of the Flowers Pinot Noir 2004, Sonoma Coast (about $45 to $50). Lord have mercy, what a match! The wine is beautiful in every sense, from its intense dusky, ruby hue, like the color of a glass of wine in a Dutch still-life painting, to its bouquet of smoky black cherry, cola and spice, to its lovely harmony and balance, its black fruit flavors permeated by earth and moss and a satiny texture that has some iron and grit to it.

It was a great meal during which we listened to Christmas music for the last time as a reminder of the end of Yuletide and the New Year holiday.

A cheaper wine with much the same effect as the Flowers, but not quite the elegance or resonance, is the Lockwood Block 7 Pinot Noir 2005, Monterey County (about $20).

I was reading a piece in the Gourmet magazine for January about the restaurant Gambero Rosso, run by self-taught chef Fulvio Pierangelini, in the Tuscan coastal town of San Vicenzo, the thrust being whether it’s the best restaurant in Italy. Well, that’s not really the point writer Colman Andrews sensibly implies. It’s just all about the food, which Andrews describes as “straightforward” and “guileless” and “surprisingly simple and pure.”
Those remarks impelled me to consider the two types of chefs that seem to dominate the culinary world: Those who are straightforward and guileless and produce simple pure food, embodied by Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and her many disciples; and the impresarios of ingredients, the grand-standing magicians, manifest in Ferran Adria, of El Bulli outside Barcelona, frequently described as the world’s most important chef, and his proliferating emulators who have unleashed a tide of asparagus foam and spherification upon the land.

I have known people, even chefs, who dined at Chez Panisse and came back to report their disappointment, saying , “There’s nothing to it. Anybody could do that.” There is, actually and deceptively, a great deal to the cuisine at Chez Panisse and just anybody can’t do it, which is what makes eating at the restaurant such a pleasure. Waters’ doctrine of fresh, local ingredients treated with respect and minimal manipulation — but always impeccable technique in the kitchen — produces cuisine of jewel-like flavors and quiet integrity.

I have not eaten at El Bulli — there are 300,000 requests a year for the 8,000 seats available during the season — but in the summer of 2004 I dined at the restaurant La Alqueria, part of a fabulously beautiful and romantic 10th Century Moorish estate in Sanlucar La Mayor, outside Seville. The chef, Rafael Morales, trained at El Bulli and subscribes to Adria’s doctrine that a restaurant kitchen is an extension of the chemistry and physics laboratories and that a chef’s business is to astonish diners by yoking wildly disparate ingredients in startling forms.
The succession of 20 small courses, improbable and extravagant, brought on spoons or little plates, cunningly presented, led to responses that distilled to “Well, that worked” or “Well, that didn’t work,” notions that don’t have much to do with the satisfaction of one’s appetites. Not that the experience wasn’t interesting, intriguing and sometimes fun, but eating at a carnival can also be interesting, intriguing and sometimes fun. Whatever the case, I think that astonishment is not as important as gratification when it comes to fine dining.

Anyway, apropos of simplicity, a few days ago, LL said, “You haven’t made macaroni and cheese in a long time. I think not since we moved to the house,” which was about a year ago. Might as well say it: we love macaroni and cheese. My family ate the dish frequently when my brother and I were growing up, but it came out of a box named Kraft. My model is the macaroni and cheese at the Zabar family’s E.A.T.S. restaurant on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. An order brings a monumental slab of dense baked macaroni permeated by sharp, tangy, creamy cheeses and surmounted by a thick breadcrumb crust also thick with cheese.
So, my procedure is to make a bechamel sauce (good ol’ Fanny Farmer!) and stir into it in the last moments about a cup and a half of shredded cheeses, on this occasion sharp cheddar, Colby and Monterey Jack. I combine that with the cooked macaroni in a buttered casserole, sprinkle on some quartered cherry tomatoes and diced country ham and then shovel on a mixture of breadcrumbs and more cheese: Parmesan, Gruyere and cheddar. Japanese panko breadcrumbs are available at many groceries nowadays; I use those because they create a crisp crust and they last forever if you store them tightly sealed. Then bake the casserole for 35 to 45 minutes at 375 degrees. Lord have mercy, it was good.

I dithered about trying to decide what wine to serve with the mac and cheese, and finally LL said, “How about something basic and simple.” So I popped the cork on this Da Vinci Chianti 2005 (about $16) and it was indeed, basic and simple and fruity, just the thing, though for the life of me I don’t understand why the Italians, of all people, wouldn’t call the label “Leonardo.” I mean, fer gawd’s sake, the wine in made in the hometown of the great artist, engineer and the worlds’ smartest person ever; how about a little respect?

And then yesterday, which was chilly and rainy, I said, “How about some oatmeal?” because some hot oatmeal would really hit the spot. Now you will accuse me of being excessively purist when I tell you that we use only McCann’s Irish Oatmeal, but truly I have tried every oatmeal I can find and this is actually the best. Yes, you have to stand at the stove and stir the stuff for 35 or 40 minutes, as if you were making risotto, but the result is so rich and nutty, so oaty, so hearty in flavor and texture that it beats all other contenders. LL takes hers with butter and salt; I use brown sugar. Just a bit of milk to stir in. Pure goodness. Wonderful. Satisfying.