I was fortunate enough to spend a few days in Vail last week at a friend's elegantly appointed duplex, equipped not only with a mountain-view jacuzzi and passenger elevator but also with a giant, modern kitchen with a huge gas range, acres of counter space and a futuristic microwave hidden in a drawer in the kitchen island. As they say in Argentina, aprovechamos a full.
Friday night dinner, "Notisserie" chicken, seasoned and oven roasted, stuffed with garlic, thyme, rosemary and halved lemons and served with a mushroom risotto including porcinis lovingly reconstituted, by chef David Menon, with the hydrating aid of chicken broth and white wine.
For Saturday morning breakfast, I drenched and toasted up some grilled cheese in homemade schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) and served it with a medley of guacamole and spinach-blue cheese-pine nut dip. (Leftover "Notisserie" chicken also went to work in a crunchy chicken salad that we munched on at 10,000 feet.)
Chef David Steinvurzel, swineing around all weekend, skipped the après-ski hot tub on Saturday night to hunt (fruitlessly) for broccoli rabe and prepare (fruitfully) orecchiette (Italian for "little ears," a tiny disk-shaped pasta) with sweet broccolini (eats, shoots and leaves), spicy Italian sausage, shallots, Parmesan and thickly chopped garlic. (Admission: I dig broccolini, and I was kinda hoping he'd come up short on his broccoli rabe odyssey.) Speaking of Steinvurzel, he also shot all the photographs above.
