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Want Quake Protection? Try This Wine

The way the earth has been shaking, it might be wise to pour a glass of Quinta da Lapa's reserva red blend from 2013.

This is not to make light of the recent quakes in Japan and Ecuador, but to look at what happened in Portugal. In 1755, Lisbon and the area around it were decimated by a quake that left thousands dead.

In 1756, the then owner of Quinta da Lapa mounted a stone over the door of the winery residence carved with a poem by Saint Teresa of Avila. The first four lines are, in translation, "Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things are passing away. God never changes." Fitting words for a region that had been terrorized.

Quinta da Lapa's 2013 reserva honors the 500th anniversary of Saint Teresa's birth. The front label shows the stone inscribed with her poem (at the top). The complete poem is on the back.

Each year, only the best grapes are selected for this wine, said Sílvia Maria Canas da Costa of Quinta da Lapa, holding a bottle poured at a Portuguese wine tasting organized for the LA Wine Writers. The tasting took place at Cafe del Rey.

In Portugal, "reserva" has a special meaning. The top level of wine is DOC (Denominação de Origem Controlada). However, this is restricted to wines made from native grape varietals. If made from European varietals, a superior wine would go into the reserva category.

The Quinta da Lapa reserva blends the Portuguese grape Touriga Nacional with Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. An example of a DOC wine poured at the tasting was a 20-year Setúbal Moscatel Roxo from Jose Maria da Fonseca (above).

Incidentally, the Quinta da Lapa residence has been turned into a guest house, the stone still intact over the doorway.  Canas da Costa is the architect who handled the redo.

Also at the tasting were Miguel Braga of Quinta do Mourão, a Port wine producer (above); Eugénio Jardim, the Wines of Portugal US Ambassador, and André Magalhães, who has the restaurant Taberna in Lisbon.

Cafe del Rey provided food to accompany the wines, including a flat bread pizza, an octopus salad, beef cheek stew with red wine risotto, morel mushrooms and pea shoots, and a vanilla ice cream tart with roasted cherries, pistachio biscotti and lemon curd.

Now becoming more widely available, Portuguese wines offer remarkable bargains. A Merlot from Quinta da Lapa is only $13.  A 2014 white reserva from Casal da Coelheira (above) is just $15. It's composed of 70% Chardonnay and 30% Arinto, a Portuguese grape. The Ponte das Canas Mouchao 2011 is about $21. This red wine blends Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca and Syrah.

Getting pricier, the Quinta da Fonte Do Ouro 2012 estate-bottled wine (above) runs around $55. It is 100% Touriga Nacional and comes from Dão, the region considered the birthplace of that grape.

A sparkling wine poured at the start of the tasting, Caves Transmontanas Vértice 2007, was dry with good bubbles. "People are going to think you are pouring a nice expensive French champagne," said Jardim, the wine ambassdor. It sells for about $24. The grapes are Gouveio and Rabigato.

The priciest wine of the lot, a stratospheric $1500, was a 100-year S. Leonardo Tawny Port from Quinta do Mourão, poured by Miguel Braga. Composed of wines from as far back as 1897, this Port spent 100 years in barrel. 

Earlier, to accompany  dessert, Braga provided 10, 20 and 40 year S. Leonardo Tawny Ports from Quinta do Mourão, each number indicating the years the wine spent in barrels. The 10 is the most versatile and could serve as an aperitif with savory dishes, he said. The 20 is a dessert wine, and the 40 is to drink by itself.

What to do with the 100 year Port? Bow down and worship it, if you are lucky enough to get a taste.

Mahan's Creative Indian Food

When dinner starts with a drink in a jar, you know you're not in your everyday Indian restaurant.

You'd be in Mahan in Alhambra, where this tamarind martini is the top cocktail.  It's composed of French vodka, lemon juice, freshly squeezed tamarind liquid, a dash of cayenne, Himalayan salt and sugar.

"It's a sipper. You drink it throughout a meal," says Sage Sharma, son of owners Anil and Poonam Sharma. At 22, Sage is adding fresh new touches to the restaurant, which opened 15 years ago.

The only Indian spot in the midst of Chinese and Japanese restaurants, Mahan could have played it safe with a standard menu. Instead, it has developed specialties that you won't find anywhere else.     

Talk about unconventional--the idea for mango chicken tikka (above) came to Anil Sharma in a dream. To make the dream real, he worked out a spicy, tart, sweet sauce using fresh mango, canned pulp and sweet mango pickle. The result is as dreamy as the origin.

Mozzarella is in the stuffing of these crispy mushrooms. Coated with chickpea flour batter, they're topped with crisp strands of sev--chickpea flour in another form. The swirls are house-made tomato sauce.

Samosa chaat (above) transforms the potato-stuffed pastries. They're split, set on chickpea curry and dressed with raita, mint and tamarind chutneys and a dusting of chaat masala.

Mahan's gobi (cauliflower) manchurian (above) shows how exciting Indo-Chinese flavors can be. The sweet-sour, spicy sauce includes vinegar, soy sauce, sugar and a dash of Chinese chili paste with ginger and garlic.

Sweet-hot seasonings and caramelized onions make pumpkin curry (above) one of Mahan's best dishes. The pumpkin is cubed kabocha squash.

Not everything is showy. Malai kofta (above) looks like lumps in a plain orange sauce. But the sauce is good enough to eat by itself, like soup. It's creamy and rich with ground almonds and walnuts. The kofta are vegetable dumplings.

The word mahan means royal. That's appropriate because the level of cooking is high. Even tandoori fish (above) is perfectly done, not dry.

Good food isn't the only attraction. The restaurant is vegan friendly, has a daily lunch buffet, and parking is free.

Mahan Indian Restaurant, 110 W. Main St., Alhambra, CA 91801. Tel: (626) 458-6299.

A Festival of Authentic Turkish Food

Good food, great pastries and wonderful hospitality--I'm so glad I managed to get in on the Turkish Food Festival held at the Bosphorus Center in Garden Grove just before it ended.

From the street, this Garden Grove mosque looks like a ranch style house. Only balloons fluttering outside revealed that something was happening--a festival outside in back.

Crowds had been there earlier, but by evening they were gone. Then it was quiet and relaxed, and there was still plenty to eat. At the top, Selda Tok holds a plate of yogurt-covered ground beef dumplings called manti (pronounced mantuh).

Here's a closer look at the dish. Turkish groceries stock frozen manti, but this was the real thing, each tiny dumpling filled, folded and pinched by hand. I could appreciate the work involved because I did it myself--once.

The pastry table was sheer heaven. There I found this flour halwa, dark brown and nutty tasting from flour browned in butter.

This is kalbura basti, a syrup-soaked sweet sprinkled with pistachios.

Baklava was liberally stuffed with chopped walnuts.

These flaky filo pastries were filled with thickened sweet bechamel and walnuts.

This is the menu of savory dishes.

And here is where they were served.

To finish the evening, a cup of strong Turkish coffee, properly foamy on top.

This set of coffee cups from Turkey was on sale in a booth that displayed modest Islamic clothing, jewelry, scarves, shawls and many other items.

What made the festival especially appealing was the hospitality. Turkish people are known for their warm reception of guests, and my friends and I sat chatting with two of the women in charge, Selda Tok and Ebru Awad, as if we were guests in their homes.

The kitchen was run by Atike King, who gathered a team of "sisters"--I like the way they call each other that--who worked for days preparing the food. All were volunteers.

The three-day festival was their first, and I hope they'll schedule another next year. Being small, it was more intimate and fun than large fairs jammed with booths, games and crowds. And it provided a rare opportunity to taste genuine Turkish dishes, prepared with care and expertise developed over generations.

Not Your Everyday Picnic Menu

Forget hamburgers, hotdogs and potato salad. The picnic I went to last weekend had dreamy food from farflung places--Turkey, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Israel, and I took a Jewish honey cake.

The group that put this together included three cookbook authors, a Turkish cooking teacher, an internationally-focused blogger and women expert in the cuisines of their homelands in the Middle East.

You don't find such food in restaurants, so fresh and prepared with such care and pride. Look at this beautiful boreg, filled with feta cheese.

Yellow Yemenite rice brightened the table and was full of good things--eggplant, sweet red pepper, onion, parsley, chick peas and edamame.

Succulent rice-stuffed grape leaves disappeared quickly.

This is spinach borek, a Turkish pastry from Azerbaijan.

Smoked eggplant from Azerbaijan was heavenly, a rich blend of grilled eggplant, yogurt, olive oil and garlic, drizzled with more olive oil and sprinkled with dried mint and paprika.

This dish intrigued me because I thought it was made with short-grained pasta. The pasta turned out to be exceptionally long-grained aahu barah basmati rice.  Mixed in were cubes of lamb and a sweetened mixture of fried carrot strands, raisins, slivered almonds and pistachios.

Called qabeli, or kabuli, pulao, this is the national dish of Afghanistan, mandatory for special occasions. Several of us whipped out notebooks and wrote down the recipe, because we'd never tasted anything like it.

Turkish cacik--yogurt with garlic, dill, mint and cucumber--went with everything and was good just to eat by itself, like a salad.

There was also a Mediterranean salad, basically an Israeli salad with jicama and walnuts added.

This Turkish bread, made with poppyseed paste, is called hashhasli corek.

And here is buttery rich baklava, made with a technique that eliminates the hassle of buttering filo sheets one by one. 

Beautiful, light apple sharlotka is a Russian cake from Azerbaijan.

Here is my honey cake, jammed into a box. It was much better than this presentation. Two people have asked for the recipe, which came from Faye Levy's book, "1,000 Jewish Recipes."

The picnic took place at El Dorado Park in Long Beach. The weather was cool and breezy following days of rain. We warmed up with Turkish tea served in Turkish glasses and mugs. The water had been heated on a small portable stove.

Following that came coffee in dainty cups, the way it would be served in Turkey.

If this had been a food festival, we would have been sorry when it was over. But we are cooking friends, in touch regularly, and we're planning to do it again.

LASA'S Weekend Filipino Pop-Up

Fresh, light, refined--these aren't  adjectives usually linked to Filipino cuisine. They do, however, describe the food at LASA, a Filipino pop-up in downtown Los Angeles.

Brothers Chad and Chase Valencia aren't doing offal-laden, blood enhanced dishes such the stew dinuguan or liver-seasoned caldereta or pinacbet, which requires bagoong (shrimp paste) and bitter melon.

You might not even recognize their food as Filipino, because they are freeing up traditional concepts in favor of new ideas that please rather than scare off the uninitiated.

Take the sour soup sinigang (above). LASA’s version isn’t soured with the usual tamarind but with rhubarb from the Santa Monica Farmers Market. Rather than filling the bowl, the soup is more like a sauce for grilled octopus, accented with braised daikon, sliced pickled Fresno chiles, mustard greens and a few grains of crisp, puffy white rice. Additional rhubarb goes into a sparkling soda to sip with dinner.

LASA operates Fridays through Sundays at Unit 120 in the Far East Plaza in Chinatown. This spare, bare space gives chefs a chance to showcase their concepts.

It may be one more step toward a permanent restaurant for Chad, the executive chef, and Chase, the general manager. That's Chad in the photo above.

They already have earned a following from dinners they’ve been staging locally. When Chef Alvin Cailan opened Unit 120 in January as a restaurant “incubator,” they were ready to step in. Cailan, founder of Eggslut in the Grand Central Market, is also Filipino-American.

LASA’s four-course menu changes every four to five weeks and offers vegetarian options. The sinigang dinner started with crisp pork chicharron on a mung bean and yogurt dip with a dusting of powdered red chile and annatto.

Knobby kohlrabi underwent a Cinderella like transformation into a cake seared in brown butter and set on its own greens, cooked in coconut milk (above). This is an adaptation of Filipino laing—taro leaves cooked in coconut milk. Pairing the warm seared cake with the coolly flavored greens was inspired.

The dessert, avocado semifreddo (above), might have been outside the average comfort zone. In Southeast Asia, avocado as a sweet is not a novelty. A home economics text from the 50s that I picked up in Manila includes recipes for avocado ice cream and a frozen avocado creme to serve in sherbet glasses with meat or as a dessert.

Before you say yuck, thinking of sweetened guacamole, you would have to taste LASA’s delicate semifreddo, which merely hints at avocado rather than shouting “yes, you are eating avocado for dessert.” It helps that the pale green semifreddo is almost buried under snowy milk granita and crumbs of pistachio polvoron--three different textures and temperatures.

During their stint, the Valencia brothers are setting out Filipino cookbooks from their collection on a table in the waiting area. Chase (at the right) will discuss them with you.

Otherwise, Unit 120 is totally bare, no art on the wall, no cozy cushions. Its only decoration, at least for now, is a view of the kitchen through a large window (top photo). To read more about the Valencias and for updates on their LASA menus, check their website.

LASA, 6 to 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday at Unit 120 in Far East Plaza, 727 N. Broadway in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Tel: (213) 443-6163.

Tempranillo--It's All Over the Place

It's almost 20 years since the first domestic Tempranillo was bottled. That was the 1997 vintage from Abacela in the Umpqua Valley in Oregon. This pioneering winery planted the first Tempranillo vines in the Pacific Northwest in 1995.

From that beginning, this Spanish grape varietal has spread all over the place, to Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and California, from north to south.

These were the areas represented at a tasting presented by WineLA at République. LIke the Rhone Rangers, Tempranillo has its own fan club, the Tempranillo Advocates Producers and Amigos Society (TAPAS), which gathered 15 wineries for the tasting.

Here, from participating wineries, are Tempranillos that stood out, at least for my taste.

Abacela. Following the Spanish model, Abacela today has four tiers of Tempranillo--crianza (one year in oak and one in the bottle), two reservas (one year in oak and two in the bottle) and one gran reserva (two years in oak and three in the bottle). Above is a 2013 Tempranillo that will be released in a few months.

Longoria Wines: Clover Creek Vineyard, about five miles east of Solvang, provided the grapes for the two Tempranillos poured by Diana and Rick Longoria (above). The 2013 wine blends 15% Grenache and Syrah with 85% Tempranillo. The 2012 contains a little Merlot and Syrah. Both were wonderful. In business since 1982, Longoria has a winery and tasting room in Lompoc.

Croma Vera Wines of San Luis Obispo is new to the game. Its first Tempranillo vintage was last year, and so its 2015 Tempranillo is labeled joven, meaning young. It also has released a Tempranillo rosé (above). Pale, almost watery in appearance, the rosé has plenty of authority when you taste it. The grapes were whole cluster fermented in stainless steel, then aged five months in neutral oak, said consulting winemaker Jeremy Leffert.

St. Amant Winery is in Lodi, but the grapes for its 2013 Tempranillo came from Amador County, a vineyard owned before the winery was established. The wine is lovely and light, with a touch of sweetness. You could serve it chilled during hot weather.

Texas Fine Wine went all out with four Tempranillos from four Texas wineries, Brennan Vineyards, Pedernales Cellars, Bending Branch Winery and Spicewood Vineyards.  Its table is at the right above, next to Abacela. The woman who poured said that the Tempranillo grape grows very well in the Texas climate--obviously.

Caduceus Cellars exhibited two rich and fruity Tempranillos from 2013. One was from Sancha, Arizona. The other was a Tempranillo-Primitivo blend from Merkin Vineyards in Tarzan, New Mexico.

Irwin Family Vineyards of Napa Valley poured The Bull, a 2013 blend of Tempranillo, Petite Sirah and Malbec from the Sierra Foothills (above). The name comes from the bulls that graze in the foothills. As for authenticity, winemaker Derek Irwin was born in Spain.

Cholame Vineyard in Monterey County offered another bullish wine, the Bull Pen Tempranillo 2012, a nice, dry, all purpose wine.

Pierce Ranch Vineyards in Monterey County exhibited a pleasing Tempranillo from 2013. The grapes came from a hot area in the southern part of the county. The wine was aged in French oak for 18 months.

Verdad Winery. There's something special about the 2012 and 2013 Tempranillos from this Central Coast winery (above). They're both sourced from a biodynamic vineyard, the Sawyer Lindquist Vineyard in Edna Valley. Only 30 to 40 cases of the 2012 are left so hurry if you want to taste it. However, the 2014 Tempranillo from the Santa Ynez Valley is also very good.

Verdad also brought its 2015 Albariño, from the Sawyer Lindquist Vineyard. Bottled only two weeks before the tasting, it was just starting to settle down, said winemaker Louise Sawyer Lindquist. Verdad wines are made at the Clendenen Lindquist Winery in Santa Maria.

Six Sigma Ranch, Lake County, poured an inky dark Christian's Reserve Tempranillo and a Diamond Mine Cuvee, which blends in Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah, both from 2013. The grapes were grown on the ranch, where soils, elevation and climate are similar to those of Ribera del Duero, the region in Spain renowned for Tempranillo, said winemaker Matt Hughes (above).

At a TAPAS event, it's appropriate to serve Spanish style style small tastes (tapas), and République obliged with a table of cheeses, olives, cured meats and bread to refresh palates between tastes of wine.