BudgetGourmetKitchen.com

We love wine. We love drinking it, we love cooking with it, and we love running our finger through the layer of dust that settles on bottles which have somehow managed to survive in our basement for more than a few days. We just don’t like paying a premium for it. Our Wine series will feature notes on our favorite great-value wines, plus tips and tricks for finding excellent wine at low prices.

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La Vieille Ferme: Côtes du Ventoux 2005 (Red)

This robust wine is made in the foothills of the Provence behemoth, Mt. Ventoux (”The Windy Mountain” in Provençal, a local dialect). It’s a robust, ripe Côtes du Rhône, and for $8 this is a great wine for every day drinking and cooking.

La Vielle Ferme balances its chewy Grenache backbone with spicy, smokey Syrah, Carignan, and Cinsault. Have a glass with a hearty lunch to keep the blood flowing during the cold days in the garden, or try it in your next Coq au Vin.

http://www.bevmo.com/

La Crema: Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir 2005 / 2006

At $19 a bottle (2006), this Pinot Noir is an excellent value for evenings that call for something classy. This is a well balanced wine from California’s Sonoma Coast, with dynamics not often achieved in this price range.

Take a sip and you’ll notice the distinct lack of a punch-in-the-mouth sensation of explosive fruit, all too common in New World Pinots. Slowly, after swallowing, the flavors come trickling in. A soft duet between cranberries and vanilla nearly becomes a symphony before the decrescendo. By avoiding that overpowering first sip, La Crema has made a wine we could drink all day.

http://www.klwines.com/

Tip: Vin de Pays / Vin de Table

One trick to cut down on the cost of imported French wine is to look for “Table Wine” and “Country Wine” on the label. In French, Vin de Table and Vin de Pays (similar phrases exist in other European languages).

It’s tempting to assume that these wines would be thin and underdeveloped, but the distinction between Vin de Table, Vin de Pays, and AOC (the third and most popular category for French wine exported to America) lies in tradition.

Wine designated AOC must grow only traditional grapes and use traditional harvesting and winemaking methods. These traditions are different for each AOC region and are strict, usually resulting in a more expensive wine. Vin de Table and Vin de Pays, however, are much less strict, and are quite often less expensive.

So what do you get with a less restricted wine making process? Sometimes it means super-dense vine planting or fast fermentation, which can lead to bad wine. But sometimes it simply means that the vintner added a grape variety that was not deemed “traditional” in his city. Or perhaps his winemaking methods were distinctly modern, preventing an AOC designation.

Ask for a good Vin de Pays or Vin de Table the next time you’re looking for French wine at your local bottle shop. You might find a gem of a wine for much less than its AOC counterparts.

One of the best ways to make great food affordably is to cook seasonally and locally. By choosing produce during the peak of its local harvest (which will change from region to region), we can make food that’s good for us, good for farmers, easy on the wallet, and tastes wonderful. The Budget Gourmet Kitchen series Cooking Seasonally will discuss recipes, kitchen lore, and frugal practices about a highlighted seasonal ingredient.

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Winter may seem like the least fruitful season, with its gloomy skies and bare trees. During the cold weather, many plants save energy by dropping their leaves and sending sugar underground where the energy will be stored until sunnier weather. Not surprisingly, some of the best produce this time of year is root vegetables, which are full of life while many fruit trees are sleeping.

One of the few non-root vegetable families that can hold up to the heavy rains and frost of harsh winters is the cabbage family. This familly includes broccoli, cabbage, kale, and today’s special guest, kohlrabi.

While kohlrabi is not quite a root vegetable, its bulbous stem makes it look like a close relative. The stem has a hard green or purple skin, with a sweet, earthy, pale center similar to celery root or parsnips. The leaves can grow two feet tall, and are close in consistency and flavor to swiss chard.

Thanks to enzymes common in the cabbage family, you can play with the spiciness of kohlrabi by blanching. If desired, dunk slices of the peeled stem into boiling water for a few seconds immediately after cutting to subdue the spiciness. This will kill the enzymes responsible for developing spiciness and the kohlrabi will taste less like a radish and more like a celery root.

Our favorite kohlrabi dish, Kohlrabi Gratin, is made with the peeled and sliced stem, but make sure to keep the leaves handy for a side dish of sautéed greens. Gratin purists will be horrified by our use of a white sauce flavored with spices and - gasp! - cheese.

But here at the Budget Gourmet Kitchen we’ve found that Kohlrabi releases so much water during cooking that, without the thickness of a white sauce, the gratin can fall apart between the oven and the dinner table. The herbs and spices in the sauce help complement the earthy and spicy flavors of kohlrabi. And the cheese? Gratin purist or not, you’ve got to appreciate the salty crunch and gooey creaminess of melted, slightly browned cheese.

Kohlrabi Gratin

Peel and slice 3 - 4 kohlrabi bulbs and set aside. Make a roux with 2 Tbs. each of flour and butter, and add a cup of warm milk to make a white sauce. Flavor with salt, herbs and spices — our favorites for this dish are usually some combination of nutmeg, white pepper, ginger, rosemary, and Dijon mustard. Add a sprinkle of emmenthaler or gryuère to thicken the sauce if needed.

Preheat the oven to 400°. Cover the bottom of a deep baking dish with slices of kohlrabi, and spoon enough sauce to nearly cover. Continue alternating kohlrabi and sauce, and finish with a shredded handful of emmenthaler or gruyère. Bake until the cheese on top is brown and the kohlrabi pieces are tender, around 40 minutes depending on the thickness of the slices.

You can also experiment by adding other sliced vegetables to the mix, like potatoes and celery root.

We love playing with the kitchen gadget displays at Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table as much as any foodie, but it seems like there should be a cheaper way to buy the same tools and toys. Many of our favorite utensils are specialty items in America, but are more pedestrian in Latin America, Asia, and India. Our advice is to buy from supermarkets that cater to these ethnicities, where you can find many of the same kitchen utensils for much cheaper.

Mortar & Pestle

A good mortar and pestle is a great way to crush spices and herbs. With a big enough set you can even make entire dishes of guacamole and pesto. This pair of tools is priced rather high when sold in boutique American kitchen supply stores, and rarely seen in the American foodie kitchen, although various forms of these utensils are commonplace in the kitchens of southeast Asia, India, and Latin America.

We found this granite mortar and pestle for $10 at a local southeast Asian supermarket. The interior bowl and pestle have a slight coarseness, similar to ceramic versions, perfect for grinding dry ingredients into a sneeze-inducingly fine powder. Unlike the ceramic kind, our granite isn’t brittle at all, and hasn’t chipped during even the most ravenous of spice-grindings. The bowl is four inches wide, and it stands four inches tall. Together, the mortar and pestle weigh a hefty three pounds, and feel solid enough to last longer than the hardwood floors. We’ve seen the identical set going for $25 at Sur La Table.

Cleaver

Usually reserved in American kitchens for butchering meat (and what DIY foodie can resist cleaving a whole squab from time to time?), cleavers are far more typical in China where they are the standard chef’s knife. Here at the Budget Gourmet Kitchen, we have found cleavers to be quite helpful in cutting through hard-skinned, heavy produce such as watermelons, pumpkins and acorn squash. By steadying the cleaver with one hand and firmly tapping the back of the knife with the other, you can be precise and powerful with these unwieldy fruits.

We bought our cleaver for $8 at a local Chinese market. Its seven inch long, one pound steel blade is mounted to a round wooden handle. If left wet, the blade will show a little surface rust. But kept clean and oiled between uses, this cleaver will have you making broth from squab bones for years.

What utensils have you found deeply discounted at international supermarkets? Mandolins and bamboo steaming trays? Skimmers and earthenware? Send your advice for the Budget Gourmet Kitchen community to BudgetGourmetKitchen@gmail.com

Here’s an article by Nick Czap that gives us ten cheap and useful kitchen tools, including links for buying online. Thanks Nick!

If you buy your spices in bulk, you probably take your spices home in little plastic baggies. Over time, the constant opening and closing, inserting of spoons, and throwing in the back of the cupboard makes these cheap bags wear out. Eventually they’ll tear and the spices will spill all over or, even worse, air circulation will cause the spices to lose their flavor. And we all know how flavorless spices turn our tried-and-true recipes into comedic performances as we dump gallons of bland turmeric into the lentils, frantically searching for enough flavor.

Here at the Budget Gourmet Kitchen, we love bulk spices: the quality tends to be much higher, and the price cheaper, than the pre-packaged kind. But we needed to solve the storage issue. A good spice container should form a perfect seal to keep the flavor in, and should be open-and-closeable nearly ad infinitum. They should be available in a variety of sizes (do you need as much white pepper on hand as you do paprika? We sure don’t). We prefer see-through material, because spices are pretty (but keep those spices shaded! Sunlight can cause dreaded flavor loss as well). For bonus points, the containers will be washable and recyclable. And of course, cheap.

The solution came to us at the grocery store: baby food containers. Perfect seal? Check. Open-and-closeable? For the most part (keep reading for the caveat). See through? Yup. Washable, recyclable, cheap? Slam, bam, thank you ma’am.

These airtight jars come in a range of sizes, from one ounce to three. Not to mention, you can find them for as cheap as 25¢ each. So what are you waiting for? Go to the store, pick out a dozen baby food jars, clean, fill with spices, and label. Voilà.

The only down side? After repeated use, some jars seem to seal a little too well. We’ve been using these spice jars for a couple months, and we’re finding that if we close them as tight as we can, they take some serious effort to reopen. The solution? Don’t crank them shut! Finger tight is fine.

PROS: Great seal, reusable, cheap, transparent containers available in a variety of sizes.

CONS: Can seal a little too well sometimes, so make sure you only finger-tighten the lids.

COMPARE: Baby food jars are 25¢ ~ 75¢ each. IKEA and Target sell five-ounce spice jars with mediocre seals for $3 ~ $4 each.

THE NEXT LEVEL: For the truly thrifty, stalk parents buying food for their babies and offer to collect the empty jars.