A night of Cod, Potatoes, and Port

As if there weren't any food blogs around, here's yet another one!

This is our Saturday night dinner. We decided to use some of the salt cod we keep in the fridge for a special ocasion, thought about a dish to cook, and bought the wine accordingly. The wine was a Chilean Chardonnay, a 2004 Montes Alpha, which was particularly well-suited for the dish we had in mind - cod cooked in the oven with a creamy Bechamel sauce. At the last minute, we decided to change the dish, but did not change the wine, so the pairing wasn't exactly perfect.

The other aspect of our Saturday night was Port. The night before, we opened a bottle of a 10 year old tawny, Warre's Otima, and started talking about the differences between the various types of Port. Saturday afternoon, while drinking a pint at the local pub, the idea came back to us, and we decided to buy an LBV and put the two wines in confrontation. Our choice was 1999 Noval Unfiltered LBV. Can you tell which one is which?



Here is the recipe and a picture of the final dish:

Cod and New Potatoes in the Oven

This is a poor man's version of a classic: Bacalhau 'a Lagareiro. Not exactly the same, it is good enough!

Ingredients:
200 gr of salt cod
500 gr of new potatoes
coarse salt, garlic, parlsey and olive oil.

Soak the cod at least overnight, changing the water frequently.

Set the oven at 200 centrigrades. Put the cod in a large pot, and cover it with boiling water. Put the lid on and leave it like this for half an hour. Note that the pot should not be on the stove. Wash the potatoes, pat them dry, put them on a tray, sprinkle them with salt and olive oil, and put the tray in the hot oven. In the meanwhile, mince a few cloves of garlic and put it in a small ramekin with olive oil. When the potatoes are almost done, take the tray out of the oven, punch each of the potatoes so that its skin breaks, pour the garlic-olive oil mixture over the potatoes and move everything around to coat evenly. Find room in the tray for the chunks of cod, which you have patted dry, and return the tray to the oven to brown. It's a good idea to pour a bit more olive oil over the cod. Chop the parsley finely and sprinkle the finished dish with it. It's ready to eat with more olive oil on the side!