Hello, everybody, and Happy New Year! Welcome back to Cèpage et Cuisine, Mary’s and Brian’s wine and food blog. It was an eventful New Year’s weekend here in central Mississippi, including a severe storm with a tornado that caused damage in our area but, thankfully, no severe injuries or loss of life. Mary and I enjoyed an evening at home for New Year’s Eve, then dined out Jan 1 for our 10th wedding anniversary!
Today, we’re talking about another of Mary’s culinary creations, baked sea bass with a lemon-herb breadcrumb topping.
This is Mary--Brian says things like "Mary's culinary creations," but what I really do is work with recipes we find. This recipe came from the Food Network. Below are the ingredients: bread, butter, lemon, thyme, garlic and parsley.
I make my own bread crumbs from toasted whole wheat bread and then I cube the slices as small as I possibly can. I've tried using the food processor, but with only 2 slices of bread, it just tosses them around and doesn't chop them into small enough pieces.
Here’s the seasoned fish in an oval baking dish. Try to use a baking dish about the same size as the fish so the topping stays on top while baking. Add lemon juice, lemon zest and thyme.
Melt butter in a saute pan and add garlic. Cook for a minute or two, take off the heat, and let the garlic flavor the butter. Add the bread crumbs and toss. Let the bread absorb the garlic butter. Add the parsley and stir all together.
Spoon the topping onto the fish. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes.
Here's how it looks right out of the oven, and then on the plate.
I made a honeycrisp apple risotto (maybe a future blog post) and garlic spinach as sides for the sea bass. It makes a pretty plate of contrasting colors and textures and pairs well with our wine for the evening. Here’s Brian again, discussing the wine.
In honor of the occasions of New Year’s Eve and our Jan 1 anniversary, we selected a Champagne to pair with this dinner. Although often associated with celebrations, which is fine, sparkling wine performs well as a food wine with the right foods. I enjoy sparkling wine, but Mary loves, loves, loves it and in the world of sparkling wine, Champagne is certainly the gold standard. It is more expensive than other sparklers, no doubt, but the creaminess and complexity on a special occasion is worth it.
We chose a non-vintage Taittinger, a blend of 50% Pinot Noir, 35% Chardonnay, and 15% Pinot Meunier. It is a white wine, of course, even though the blend is 65% red grapes. That’s because the juice is pressed off the skins immediately after crushing the grapes and before fermentation. A rosé Champagne may allow brief contact with the skins before pressing. Perhaps sparkling wine is a good topic for a future blog post. Here are my notes on the wine.
Taittinger Brut Champagne La Française NV. Just what we expected, the nose showed nice lemon, apple and baked bread aromas. The palate had a lovely creamy texture, refreshing acidity, and lemon citrus, green apple, yeast bread, and mineral notes. Very nicely balanced, moderately complex, wonderful length. 50% Pinot Noir, 35% Chardonnay, 15% Pinot Meunier, 12.0% alcohol. We paid $47 for this wine at Briarwood in Jackson.
Mary loved the Champagne so much she played with the bottle, cork, and cage for more photos, so here they are!
Et voilá! Sea bass, baked with lemon-herb breadcrumb topping, apple risotto, and spinach, paired with a lovely Champagne on New Year's Eve. And here we are the next evening at our happy anniversary dinner.
That's our post for today, our first of 2011. Thanks for reading our blog. We hope you enjoy it and find it interesting. Keep checking back at Cèpage et Cuisine.
Cheers!
Brian♥Mary
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