Dino

When I filled out the Washingtonian questionnaire the other day, I listed Dino as my top favorite restaurant, followed by Brasserie Beck and Komi. Went there last night with a friend from out of town and had a really great meal.

Dean Gold, the owner and executive chef at Dino, sends out a weekly email that really makes your mouth water. A former wine and food buyer at Whole Foods, he pays a lot of attention to sourcing and he lovingly describes where he gets his food and what he does with it.

His recent emails have mentioned the fried baby Anzio artichokes he has flown in from the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, and cardoons from Next Step Produce, a farm in Charles County, Md. So these were the two antipasti we ordered last night. My friend, btw, is vegetarian and one of the nice things about Dino is you have a wide variety of dishes you can order without feeling that you're ordering the vegetarian special.

The carciofi fritti were tender and crispy with a fresh artichoke flavor, fried and served with a slice of lemon. I dipped them into the olive oil on my bread plate and they were delicious. The cardoons had a nice rooty, vegetable flavor. They were cut into strips and sauteed with garlic, lemon and tomato, quite tasty.

We followed with swordfish and winter squash risotto. A recent email explained the Pacific swordfish are caught in sustainable manner and supplied by a local vendor who used to work for the National Marine Fisheries Service on fish sustainability issues. Dean said the saffron that was supposed to be in the sauce didn't make it in time. Nonetheless it was quite tasty and set off nicely with sauteed mizuna, also from Next Step.

At Dean's suggestion (and you need his help navigating the fabulous list of Italian wines), we ordered a Ribolla varietal wine that actually comes from Slovenia, a Movia {Ribolla} 2007. It somehow combined the creaminess of a Chardonnay with the crispness of a Sauvignon Blanc.

Dessert of pistachio torte and bread pudding put on the finishing touches to what is for me a rare three-course extravaganza. Often we mix and match small plates and entrees, get wine by the glass and skip dessert for a less expensive outing.

Dino has always been good, but since Dean made himself the chef -- though he has no formal training as a cook -- it has gone from strength to strength. Slow Food is having a dinner there Nov. 18 which I'm already looking forward to.

660 Curries

I finally cooked a recipe from 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer and it was delicious. I've decided to cook my way through the book over the next year -- 365 days, 660 curries. Just kidding, but I've been wanting to write that since seeing Julie and Julia.

Started with a very simple chicken curry with tomato and coconut milk. It was quick and easy and perfect for a week night. You just sautee some red onion, garlic and ginger, then sear the 1-inch cubes of chicken breast with curry mix, add the coconut milk and simmer till cubes are done (only a few minutes), remove the chicken and thicken the sauce, add tomato and cilantro, pour sauce over the chicken and serve.

I was going to grind the Madras curry powder myself from the component spices (coriander seeds, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, cloves, fenugreek seeds, black peppercorns, thai chiles, and turmeric) but Wholefoods didn't have either whole fenugreek seeds or thai chiles so I just used some of the packaged curry powders on my shelf. Obviously, though, the real secret to this cuisine is to grind the spices fresh and I will just have to improve my sourcing for ingredients.

I bought this book some time ago after reading about Iyer being International Association of Culinary Professionals Teacher of the Year. I have other Indian cookbooks, including a couple of the classics by Madhur Jaffrey, and I like Indian cuisine, but I've found the undertaking daunting. This book seems to me to make Indian cooking accessible in the way Julia Child did for French cooking.

Curry of course refers not primarily to the powder or the sauce in a dish -- though that is the way most Americans would define it -- but to the dish itself. The frontispiece of the book defines it this way: "Any dish that consists of either meat, fish, poultry, legumes, vegetables, or fruits, simmered in or covered with a sauce, gravy or other liquid that is redolent with any number of freshly ground and very fragrant spices and/or herbs."

It was a revelation to me the first time I went to Indique how the spices could burst with flavor when freshly ground. In the meantime, my favorite area Indian restaurant is Passages to India in Bethesda, where again that freshness is paramount.

Big Green Egg

So I've inaugurated my Big Green Egg! We had the Caveman Chops from the Jamison cookbook -- super-thick bone-in pork loin chops with a smoked salt and pepper rub, mopped with Worcestershire sauce -- on Sunday and last night had an exquisite grilled halibut on chile and coriander slaw that I found serendipitously on MyRecipes, courtesy of Sunset magazine.

I've had my eye on the BGE for some time, and received one as a kind and generous gift for my birthday. The immediate occasion for getting one now was when a friend served us filet mignons grilled on a BGE that were super-moist and tender. (Let me hasten to add, per new FTC suggestions, I have received no consideration from the makers of BGE for anything I say about them.)

The biggest difference to the Weber is the absolute temperature control via the upper and lower vents and the closed ceramic oven structure. I grilled the chops at close to 500 degrees for nearly half an hour, though the internal temperature of 150 degrees recommended by Jamison resulted in chops that were a little dry to our taste. We accompanied with mashed sweet potatoes that included sauteed chopped onion with thyme.

The halibut recipe featured a dressing/marinade of 2/3 c. cider vinegar, 1/3 c. EVOO, 1/3 c. chopped cilantro, 1 clove garlic pressed, 1 tsp. cumin seed, 3/4 tsp. salt, and 5 to 6 tsp. minced fresh jalapeno chiles. You use 1/3 c. of the mix to marinade the 6-8 oz. filet pieces for 15 min. and 1/2 c. as dressing for the slaw -- 1 lb. of red cabbage cored and thinly sliced and 1/2 c. thinly slivered red onion. I grilled the fish at about 350 degrees for a little more than 10 minutes. They were done through and still very moist, with pretty grill marks. You place the fish on a mound of the slaw and drizzle some of the remaining dressing over it, and serve with corn tortillas. Delicious, with the cumin setting off the cilantro-chile combination.

Now both of these dishes would be fine on the Weber and what I really want the BGE for is slow roasting and smoking. We'll get there.

German cuisine

Boiled pig's knuckle with sauerkraut is probably not everyone's idea of a great meal. I happen to like it, though I would never call it a great meal. It's a traditional German dish and I had a plate of it in Berlin during my recent trip.

I thought I would be posting often about wonderful culinary experiences. Alas, there were none. At one point, the group of American journalists I was with got a tour of Kreuzberg by a German-Turkish candidate for parliament that ended in a very nice Turkish restaurant, Hacir, where we got huge plates of mezzes followed by huge plates of kebabs. I joked with our host that we would go back to the U.S. after 10 days in Germany and tell everyone our best meal was at a Turkish restaurant.

More or less true. We had a nice meal in the executive dining room of Deutsche Bank (pumpkin soup with a kind of balsamic vinegar emulsion, saddle of venison with nice root vegetable sides, and a mocha and chocolate dessert). We had another nice meal in the "press club" that Axel Springer created for his employees (no menu, but it seemed to be a carrot-ginger soup, a variation of geschnetzeltes -- a kind of veal stroganoff -- and a dessert I've forgotten).

Otherwise, we had a succession of mediocre to bad meals -- a bland venison dish at a traditional Gastaette in the Ore Mountains, a so-so pork neck at the dreadful Kartoffelhaus in Freiberg, and so on. A very classy wine tasting at Eltville am Rhein was followed by dinner at the mayor's house -- and it was very kind of him and his wife to host us -- that featured a version of chicken nuggets that may have come from the German equivalent of Costco.

I should not have been surprised. Germans have never placed great value on the quality of food, and the price-quantity relation is the most important in choosing a restaurant. I know there are good restaurants in Germany but the revolution we have had in the U.S. thanks to Alice Waters and crew seems to be not nearly as widespread in Germany as it is here. I enjoyed my plate of matjes herring and boiled potatoes at a little terrace table in Berlin's Nikolai Quarter, but it's a dish that has been unchanged for literally centuries.

Germany is a conservative society that doesn't much care for revolutions and the cuisine is no exception to that rule.