The time: Friday night
The setting: Crate and Barrel
The players: a perky salesguy; me
Me: I'm looking for a large round plate.
Perky salesguy: What do you need it for?
Me: I'm making flan.
Perky salesguy (perking up, more): Flan! You know what flan is?
Me: Uh...
Perky salesguy: It's fun, with an L!
Me: [thinking: no, that's "flun"]
Perky salesguy: Flan! [less certainly] Fla-un?!
Me: OK then.
Saturday night I had an open that bottle night, which technically is supposed to happen worldwide in February, not July, but then I've never been one for rules. That, and/or a procrastinator. Anyway, the point of an OTBN is to open, finally, that bottle of wine you've been saving for a "special occasion." Trouble is, you could wait forever, and no occasional could ever be special enough.
The bottle I'd been saving was a 1994 Williams Selyem Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, which I got when my dad, a big wine enthusiast, retired and had a vertical wine tasting (same winery and type of wine, different years). At the end, we drew numbers and got to take home our favorite in the order we drew. I got number one, and I chose the '94.
This, to be sure, was worth way more than a night on the couch in front of the TV. But then the years rolled by and by, and my parents told me they'd opened some other Williams Selyems, and they'd gone bad. So it was time, at last, to drink the darn thing, with friends who maybe had bottles of their own, and their own stories to tell.
On the menu: tortilla de patatas (also known as tortilla espanola, which is basically like a big egg-and-potato pancake), arroz con mariscos (sort of a Peruvian paella, with seafood and chorizo), green salad, and the aforementioned flan.
Without getting into too many details, let's just say that I have never had so many cooking crises in my life. In making the flan, I ended up melting three different batches of sugar (I even had to go back to the store at one point), throwing out the first two attempts in disgusted failure. Here's the trick to making caramel sauce for flan. OK, three tricks: 1) sugar goes through a bunch of phases before it gets to the right amber color -- liquid, then crystalline, and then that amber caramel -- so don't panic; 2) be sure to make enough caramel so that it covers the entire bottom of your mold, and it's better to have too much than not enough; 3) if you don't have enough, and you pour it in and it stops swirling and looks like it hardens right away, it's a trick! It hasn't hardened! Do NOT reach out like a dope with your right middle finger and try to touch it! Because you'll end up with an alarmingly huge and occasionally painful blister on your finger, and perhaps you wouldn't believe you'd need your right middle finger to do much of anything except flip people off, but you would be so very wrong. Typing the letter "i," for example. That comes up a lot.
Then again, I am a big idiot, and most of you are not.
Also the tortilla de patatas ended up sticking to the pan, because I don't have a nonstick pan, and it was the biggest cooking disaster I've ever had and I was ready to throw the entire thing out, but I saved it (apparently) by giving everyone a little bit on a plate with some red pepper spread on top. And now I'm tired of typing with only nine fingers so I'll just post some pictures, except I will tell you that we had a fantastic time, and the pinot noir had gone flat and lost nearly all of its complexity, but at least it got drunk, and in fine company, too.
The lesson here? Drink your wine. That's what it's there for, to be drunk and enjoyed. What are you waiting for? In that spirit, tonight -- on my couch, in front of my TV -- I opened a 2001 bottle of syrah I'd had for ages. Frankly, it wasn't much good. But I've got many more to go.
The arroz con mariscos:
The flan (third time was the charm):
My bottle:
Patrick's bottle (which was delicious):
Annah's bottle (Hungarian!):
Patrick's second bottle:
Salud, everyone.
