A Couple of Recent Dinners:

First, recently, Mina and I have been growing a kit of portobello mushrooms that my mom and dad gave her for Christmas. We finally were able to harvest the first batch, so I've been concentrating on mushroom-centric recipes the last few days.

The pizza pictured here is a portobello mushroom pizza with mozzerella and parmesan cheeses. It came out with a nicely crisped crust and just the right amount of tomato sauce. I finished it with some nice, fruity olive oil just before serving.

Below, is one of the dinners that came out of our trip to the Mitsuwa supermarket. There's saikyo miso marinated steelhead trout, red and white mixed miso soup, steamed white rice, Japanese pickles, a salad. Actually, there's also a sauteed, soft boiled egg, which was one of Mina's most interesting creations to date.

Flavor, flavor, flavor. This couple of meals certainly had it in spades.

Bobby Corno at the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra - Beethoven's 3d Symphony:

Last night was the 3rd of our 6 concert series at the SSO. This was the one I had been waiting for as, knowing Beethoven better than any other composer, I thought this would be the real test of what our orchestra can do. Overall, I felt that they handled a challenging program well, with my notes below.

The first piece on the program was the overture from Coriolan, Op. 62 which, interestingly, I neither own nor can recall having heard performed before, but which I am going to have to add to my collection. The second piece was the 2nd Piano Concertom Op. 19 and the soloist was William Wolfram. The 2nd is probably the most "Mozartian" of Beethoven's piano concertos and I thought this was an interesting choice for this program because it is so much an earlier work than either the symphony or the overture that we heard.

So, the 3rd Symphony, Op. 55...I actually thought the orchestra worked this piece very well. The Musical Director, Daniel Hege, started off with a kind of clinic in which, working from early musical sketches of the symphony from Beethoven's notebooks, showed how the ideas in the finished version came together over time. It was interesting to hear how the complexity of the chord and rhythmic structure developed from an early idea into the piece we know today. Following this, the orchestra went straight into the symphony itself. This is where Bobby Corno came into play.

Who is Bobby Corno, you ask? Well, he is the fictional first chair horn player in P.D.Q. Bach's New York Mills Philharmonic who, on the track "New Horizons in Musical Appreciation", flubs the horn part in the first movement of Beethoven's 5th.

Anyway, there was a Bobby Corno moment in the horn section during the first movement of the 3rd last evening. The horns came together and handled the 2nd and 3rd movements without flaw, though they seemed to drag a touch in the 4th movement and that detracted a bit from the sense of urgency that you usually feel at the end of a Beethoven symphony. The first chair oboist was spectacular, however, and really held things together along with the first flute player.

So, next time it's Ravel, Saint-Saens, and Debussy.

An Interesting Set of Lists:

Returning to my interest in ranking things; I was looking around the web a while back for some recommendations of classical music to acquaint myself with. I am always looking for new things to listen to, especially now that I study 10-12 hours each day and like to have something to listen to other than the bustle of the other PhD students in my suite. So, I stumbled across this page at the Australian Broadcast Company's radio station: a ranking of their listeners' Top 100 Concertos of all time. There is also a link there for other Clasic 100 surveys, where they have the top 100 pieces by Mozart, for piano, among Operas, and of classical music overall.

I found the list very interesting. Especially intriguing to me was Max Bruch's 1st Violin Concerto being in the Top 5. This is a piece that I first heard on a recording by Akiko Suwanai (my favorite living violinst, and someone I've written about here before) in 2002. I had grown up on the Beethoven Violin Concerto and always assumed it would remain my favorite. So it does, but the Bruch had really grown on me over the years as has Bruch's Scottish Fantasy for Violin, which also comes in on the list.

Anyway, for those looking for a primer on classical music, or who want something to guide them to some pieces they haven't heard or considered listening to before, I think these Classic 100 lists are a very nice tool.

Anyway, happy listening.

Mitsuwa Marketplace:

Yesterday, Mina and I took a drive down to Edgewater, NJ to do check out and do some shopping at the Mitsuwa Marketplace (http://www.mitsuwanj.com/en/index.htm), a Japanese supermarket complex. You may ask, "4.5 hours each way to go to a supermarket?", but my answer would be that the bowl of Ramen at the outpost of Asahikawa, Hokkaido's Santoka Ramen (http://www.santouka.co.jp/) was worth the drive all by itself. Santoka turns out to be more of a ramen chain than I would go out of my way to try if I was in Japan - it turns out that in addition to the original shop in Asahikawa, there are 42 branches in Japan, 1 in Singapore, and 5 here in the States), where I usually try to limit myself to one-off shops or at least to the original shops of those that have expanded, but here in the U.S., having not had a professionally made bowl for 18 months, and even not having had a passable bowl of instant noodles for that long? Again, easily worth the 9 hours I spent in the car yesterday to get there and back. The soup was rich, the noodles done perfectly, and the char-sui pork tender and flavorful.

For the lovely Mina, I think the trip was all about sea urchin. If you ask her, uni-meishi (sea urchin roe on rice) is the thing she has most been wanting to eat in recent months, so it was nice to go to a place where the yellow stuff was available. We also picked up some grilled eel and some fish marinated in saikyo miso that we will eat this week. We also picked up a bottle of kabosu (a Japanese citrus fruit) juice that will be nice for making marinades and dressings, top end ingredients for dashi soup, and other items. I also bought a very cool serving dish to add to my growing collection of plates and bowls.

The weather on the way back to Syracuse last night was much less than ideal, but with my belly full of pork bone soup, I really didn't mind.

New Year's Eve Dinner:

Ok, so there is a bit of a story behind this one. Over the summer I spent a good deal of time driving around the U.S. Mina and I went to Maine for our Anniversary, to Athens, OH for my brother's master's program graduation, and to Indianapolis for the formula one U.S. Grand Prix. While on these trips, I listened to some books on CD that I had borrowed from our local public library. One of these was the unabridged version of "Undaunted Courage", by Stephen Ambrose, which is the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition of the American west. In any event, the descriptions of the delights of buffalo meat that Ambrose, Lewis, and Clark give got me to wondering about what it tastes like. I had seen buffalo steaks at the Wegman's supermarket, and thought New Year's was a special enough occasion to splurge (actually, two 6-ounce steaks were $9.99, which is about $13.33/pound - not outrageous, really).

So, the menu: Buffalo Sirloin Steaks, Caramelized Onion Confit, Roasted Garlic and Rosemary Mashed Sweet Potato, Red Wine Braised Mushrooms, a salad, and homemade rolls (courtesy of the Lovely Mina). The steaks I did on our grill pan, 3 minutes on one side and 1:30 on the other, and they came out just perfectly medium-rare. I slathered them with olive oil along with sea salt and black pepper before grilling. Buffalo steaks are incredibly lean, with no noticable fat either marbled or on the outside of the meat, but ours came out juicy and tender. The verdict: In short, I am sold on buffalo. The meat had a very nice mouth feel, and the only way I can describe it is to say that is was somewhat sweet.

The onion confit I had prepared before, and was quite easy. The onions were browned and then simmered, covered, in 1/3 cup of stock, a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, and a star anise. After 20-30 minutes, the pan lid was removed and the sauce thickened. The mushrooms I sauteed in olive oil for about 1-2 minutes with garlic, and then simmered in red wine until the wine had reduced by 2/3, finally adding a small pat of butter to bring a little shine to the sauce. The sweet potato was simply boiled in satled water and then mashed with a little butter, some rosemary leaves, sea salt, pepper, and a head of roasted garlic. For the salad, we used some mixed greens, cherry tomatos, kalamata olives, feta cheese, a little sliced bosc pear, and a few slivers of toasted almond.

We toasted with Domaine Ste. Michelle Blancs de Blanc, my favorite bubbly, and had some Ravenswood 2005 Lodi Zinfandel to match the buffalo steaks. All around, a very nice dinner to see out 2007.