Marchand de Vin Butter (Page 894)

RECIPE #845

• Date: Wednesday, October 8, 2008 -- 9pm
• Location: Bloomington, IN
• Kitchen: My Apartment
• Recipe Rating: A
  

I picked this recipe to make last week because it was super-quick. The Book has a lot of recipes for compound butters (i.e. butter with stuff smushed into it) and this was the last one I had left to make. In general, I am pretty neutral about compound butter. Often it tastes good, but butter all by itself tastes good too, without all the smushing. This compound butter, however, was AWESOME. It was very simple. I cooked minced shallots in red wine until the red wine was reduced and the shallots were soft. Then the red wine shallot mixture was smushed into a stick of softened butter, along with some parsley, salt, and pepper. The result: deliciousness. Those red wine saturated shallots were incredibly good. I ate this butter spread on some bread, and it was so much better than regular butter. The red wine flavor was spread throughout the butter nicely, and then the delicious, delicious shallots provided both bursts of flavor and good textural contrast. Awesome. Seriously. So while usually I would never tell you to go smush things into your butter, this is the exception. Yum. One comment: I couldn't get all of the red wine mixture to incorporate -- some of the liquid kept separating out. It didn't matter though. Even with not all of the mixture incorporated the butter was still delicious.

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I drove up to Chicago yesterday. I am giving a seminar at Northwestern tomorrow, but yesterday and today I have been hanging out with my special gentleman's brother Brad and sister-in-law Deniz. Yesterday afternoon we went apple-picking and wandered through a corn maze. I had never been in a corn maze before. When we entered they handed us maps, which seemed like cheating until we realized how huge and hard to navigate this corn maze was! We ended up relying on the map -- Deniz's sister Tulin and I were the official map readers (even following the map wasn't too easy, so it was safer to have two people figuring out which way we should go!). We had a good time.

This morning the Chicago marathon took place. So at 8am we went to the marathon course to cheer along the runners. Where Brad and Deniz live is near mile 11. It was really fun to be out there cheering. We got to see the elite runners (Man, are they fast!) and then we stuck around a couple hours to watch the regular runners go buy. Many people wrote their names on the front of their shirts so that as they run by you can yell, "Go [insert name here]!" We cheered a lot! I had never watched a marathon before, and it really motivated me for my upcoming half-marathon. Later in the day Brad and I went running ourselves. We ran 11 miles, which is my new record! Brad is training for the Las Vegas marathon, so he can run much farther (and faster!) than me, but he ran with me today, which was great. I recovered from my long run better than I usually do, and now I am feeling pretty good!