Author: KC

I'm a graduate student in Montreal. I spend most of my time studying drug addiction using brain imaging techniques. I'm also a foodie, exploring the culinary world both in and out of my kitchen.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

105. Stilton Sauce p.884


No recipe this time

A blue cheese sauce is a classic pairing for a roast tenderloin. This was my favorite of the three sauces I served on this particular evening, but I had trouble remembering anything about it. I incorrectly identified it as a béarnaise sauce in yesterday’s post. I think that says a lot about the sauce.

The recipe calls for Stilton or Roquefort, I prefer Roquefort’s more mellowed character so I went with it. The cheese is softened and mixed with an ungodly amount of butter, and then stirred into a reduced mixture of white wine and heavy cream. Once it’s melted some flat leaf parsley is stirred in, and it’s drizzled over beef or vegetables.

It’s a foregone conclusion that a sauce made of Roquefort, butter, wine, and cream is going to be insanely delicious, and this was. This classic sauce has been replicated so many times in so many ways that it’s lost all novelty though. The only real difference between the blue cheese sauce at a mega chain steakhouse, and a fine dining version is the quality of the cheese going in. But with all the butter and cream the individuality of the cheese is obscured. I don’t find much variation in the world of blue cheese sauces, they’re rich, and delightfully stinky, but they never blow me away. This was no exception, it tasted very good, but there’s nothing to really latch on to about it.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

104. Beef Tenderloin with Cornichon Tarragon Sauce p.416


The recipe

Some good friends were coming to dinner, and I wanted to make something a bit special. When I’m looking for dishes suitable for an occasion, beef tenderloin is frequently at the top of that list. I had frozen part of the tenderloin I used for the Twenty-First-Century Beef Wellington so it was an easy choice to make. I decided to serve the roast tenderloin with three sauces, the cornichon tarragon sauce from this recipe, a Stilton sauce, and whipped horseradish cream. This sort of a menu seems much more appropriate to the fall weather I’m writing this in, than the summer weather I cooked it in. However, it was a pleasantly warm day, and I made one important change to the recipe. I grilled my tenderloin outside instead of sticking it in a 350 degree oven. The sauces were a bit rich for summer, but that just encouraged restraint.

The sauce is made by reducing white wine, shallots and tarragon, then adding cream, thinly sliced cornichons, and a mixture of mustard whipped with butter. This was a seriously powerful sauce. The mustard, tarragon, and shallot flavours were fairly strong on their own, but the cornichons were overpowering. I picked up good quality, imported sour gherkins from France. They were mouth puckeringly sour, without too much other flavour. They were nicely crunchy, but not really my favourite pickle style. The recipe calls for a lot of these little guys, and their concentrated vinegar permeated the whole sauce. My first impression of the sauce wasn’t great, just too sour, and overpowering the somewhat subtle flavours of the tenderloin. As I ate more it grew on me though. Once I stopped making a sourpuss face the underlying flavours came out, and they were good. The sauce also mellowed over the next day, and ended up being in a better balance.

I’m not sure if this is how the recipe was intended to turn out, or I just got a batch of very sour pickles. I think it’s possible I did everything right, because my dining companion preferred this sauce to the other two choices. She agreed that it was sour, but she enjoyed the interplay of the rich creaminess, with the clear vinegar cutting across it. I won’t rush to repeat this one, and if I did I’d try a different brand of pickle, or cut back on them. This sauce had to struggle to get over a bad first impression, but it did redeem itself after a few bites.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

103. Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Mojo Sauce p.476


The recipe

I chose this recipe because it was over 30 degrees, humid, and didn’t look like it was going to cool down overnight. We had dinner late because we couldn’t stand the thought of eating until the relative cool of the evening. This tenderloin fit the bill for a light dish that wouldn’t heat up the house. I was too hot to think, and this recipe is simple enough that I didn’t have to. I happened to have a tenderloin in the freezer, and an orange in the fruit basket, so I didn’t have risk sweating my way over the grocery store.

The recipe is simplicity itself. I just rubbed a tenderloin with salt, pepper, and a bit of oregano, then threw it on the grill. Meanwhile I whipped up the mojo sauce, which is nothing by orange juice, garlic, oil, and more oregano. Once the meat was cooked and rested, I sliced it and drizzled with the sauce.

For about five minutes work it was quite good. Oregano smells wonderful when it burns, and it left the crust of the meat with that great charred perfume. I’m a bit iffy on meats with sweet sauces, but the citrus was welcome on that stiflingly humid evening. The orange and garlic combination was new to me, and it probably wouldn’t occur to me to pair them, but it was quite delicious. The simply grilled tenderloin was nicely complimented by the straightforward flavours of the sauce. I wasn’t really in a mood for nuance, and this was certainly unfussy.

This isn’t a dish to try to impress the neighbours with, but it has its uses. It uses simple ingredients, doesn’t heat up the house, and it’s pretty much impossible to mess up. When you’re suffering from heat stroke these are all good qualities. Pork tenderloin is very lean and easy on the stomach, but it still feels substantial and like a real meal. When I’m looking forward to a night of uncomfortable twisting and turning in the sauna that is my bedroom, indigestion is not a risk I’m willing to take. This dish didn’t wow me, but I was very happy to find it on that particular night.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

102. Spaghetti with Handfuls of Herbs p.204

I couldn’t find a recipe for this online, but this is more a concept than a specific set of instructions anyway. The idea is to toss spaghetti with extra virgin olive oil, butter, minced shallots, and any and all herbs growing in the garden. The pasta is then sprinkled with bread crumbs which you’ve toasted in olive oil. The heat of the pasta releases the flavours of the herbs, without wilting them too much, and the uncooked shallots are warmed but retain their sharpness.

There are no specific instructions for which herbs to use, or in what proportions. It’s totally dependent on what you have on hand. I had a grand old time out on the balcony with a pair of scissors. I ended up with basil, thyme, rosemary, oregano, parsley, chives, sage, lavender, and lemon balm. Those last two were unexpected flavours, but they absolutely made the dish for me. I got really lucky and randomly combined my herbs into a near perfect flavour medley. I couldn’t repeat the process, I just snipped a bit of this and a bit of that, and I ended up with a completely delicious and intensely fragrant plate of pasta. My dining companion thought it was good, but not transcendent, but for me it was exactly the right dish at exactly the right time. It was perfectly suited to a warm night out on the balcony.

The bread crumb topping adds a textural counterpoint to the pasta, but not one I thought was really necessary. The Book says that the bread crumbs don’t weigh the dish down the way cheese would, but I just found them oily. Admittedly my bread crumbs weren’t coarse, and they might have worked better if they’d been more like tiny croûtons. Mine were more of a sandy coating on my pasta. It didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the dish, but I think they ruined it for my dining companion.

You may also notice that I didn’t use spaghetti in this spaghetti dish. I can’t bring myself to care about the different shapes of pasta, and I resent having to remember all of their names. They’re all exactly the same, shells, spirals, round strands, flat strands, big tubes, and small tubes all interchangeable in my mind. Sure, some shapes hold on to some sauces better, and finding things hidden in little shells can be cute. But, the idea that we all need to keep fifteen different shapes of pasta on hand to do justice to the traditions of some particular Italian hamlet is just annoying. They all taste exactly the same, and I’m going to use them as such. The only downside is that the different shapes really do differ in surface area. The amount of sauce needed to coat is proportional to area, which has little to do with mass or volume, so it does take some guesswork to avoid over or under saucing.

The concept of this dish is great, it’s simple and summery. It uses herbs at their peak, and allows for creativity around a central theme. It also has the advantage of not heating the kitchen up too too much. I was thrilled with the flavours at work in my version, and I can only hope you get as lucky as I did if you try this for yourself.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

101. Cassoulet de Canard p.273


The recipe

This is The Book’s definitive and official cassoulet recipe. I wrote about the Easy Cassoulet recipe a couple of months ago, which skipped steps and cut corners, but still resulted in a very delicious dinner. This adaptation of Julia’s from Mastering the Art of French Cooking takes two days, and goes out of it’s way to find traditional steps for you to follow.

On the first day you soak the beans. But you don’ just soak them. You bring them to a boil and let them sit for 50 minutes. Then you bring them back to a boil, with a bouquet garni, onions, salt, and pork rind you spent the preceding 50 minutes ritualistically rinsing, boiling, and slicing. Then it’s simmer and skim for the next 1 1/4 hours. The beans are then left to cool overnight.

Day one’s activities continue with the skinning, defatting, and shredding of the duck legs, the browning of mutton (I used veal) bones in a whole cup of goose fat, and the caramelizing of onions in that goose fat. The duck, the bones, the onions, and let us not forget the fat are brought to a simmer with bay leaves, stock, tomatoes, garlic, and white wine. After an hour and half on the stove it’s left to cool overnight.

Day two is fairly straightforward. You brown and slice some sausage, and remove the inedible bits from the now cold beans, and the duck mixture. Then the cassoulet is assembled in alternating layers of beans and meat, then topped with bread crumbs and parsley. The recipe calls for a 10 quart enameled cast iron pot, but the biggest one I could get my hands on was 7 3/4 quarts. I managed to get almost everything into the smaller pot, but the full sized pot would have been better. The cassoulet is brought to a simmer on the stovetop, the baked for about an hour until the juices are bubbling up through the crust.

There were a lot of steps, a lot of tricky to source ingredients, and some strange cooking instructions here. It resulted in a rather delicious cassoulet though. I cheated in more than a few places, and messed up in a few others, so I’m not sure the dish came out exactly as it did in The Book’s test kitchens. For the record I had a mix up with the bouquet garni and ended up putting in 15 cloves instead of 5, which really changed the flavour of the beans. I didn’t peel the tomatoes, because I hate peeling tomatoes and I don’t find it’s really worth the effort. I didn’t make beef stock, and I did used the specifically forbidden canned variety. I used a cured garlic kielbasa instead of the fresh garlic sausage called for. I also couldn’t stand the idea of serving the dish with all that goose fat in there, so I removed most of the fat that floated to the top of the meat pot. It was still decidedly rich and fatty, but not nearly as oily as the recipe intended.

That is a long list of cheats, normally I do my best to stick to the recipe as closely as possible, but this time I just wasn’t in the cards. I made the recipe for The Boys on one of our weekend getaways, and I was cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, with only the equipment I’d thought to bring with me (they don’t cook much, so the facilities are minimal). I couldn’t find some ingredients, some of the steps I just didn’t have time for, and there were a couple of honest mistakes thrown in for good measure. I think the final dish was pretty close to what the original intended though.

In the end the cassoulet tasted great. It was similar to the easy cassoulet, with the duck and sausage flavours predominating. However, the beans in this version were really worth all the effort. They were tender with a bit of bite left to them, and packed with flavour. Unfortunately a lot of that flavour was cloves, but the smoky bacon, and pork belly were there, with the thyme and onions adding a nice backdrop.

The breadcrumb crust was a bit of a letdown. The easy cassoulet had an amazing crust, made by turning the duck skin into cracklings, and toasting the bread crumbs in some of the duck fat and garlic. That topping was just out of this world, whereas the topping on this dish is just there to absorb some liquid. The recipe has you throw away the confit duck skin and its fat, but then add in a whole whack of goose fat. I really didn’t understand the rationale, it seems like an obvious missed opportunity.

This dish was labour intensive, and I don’t think it would have been nearly as much fun without the help of my co-chef Al. Whenever it’s time to make an excessively fatty fat fat dish, I can count on him. I should also thank the other boys for washing the seeminly endless sink-fulls of goose fat coated dishes this produced. Cassoulet is an absolute indulgence, and indulging is much more fun with friends, especially if you’ve had to work for your reward.

I feel that this recipe is one I’ll make again and again, until I get it just right. My first attempt tasted about as good as the Easy Cassoulet, but I’m sure that with practice this recipe has the potential to blow the easy version out of the water. It’s the kind of dish that people perfect and refine over lifetimes, to get just the right texture in the beans, the perfect amount of bacon flavour, the ideal thickened but still runny texture in the juices. Next time I’ll be much better prepared for some of the more obtuse steps, and counterintuitive instructions. I can see some improvements I’d like to make, but overall it was a delicious, and faithful rendition of a very classic dish.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

100. Creamy Parmesan Polenta p.265

No recipe for this one, but the proportions are the same as the Basic Polenta recipe, with butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano stirred in at the end.

I’m not really clear on why this recipe needed to be a recipe at all, it could easily have been some optional additions at the bottom of the Basic Polenta recipe. The recipes are identical, except that this one only makes 4 cups, whereas the basic recipe makes 10.

I love that basic polenta recipe, it works flawlessly and doesn’t take much effort. The addition of a bit of butter in this version is a definite improvement. It helps to smooth the polenta out, and amp up the creamy texture. This recipe calls for a lot of cheese, the proportions are 3 cups water, 3/4 cup polenta, and 1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s a rare day that I say something had too much cheese in it, but honestly you could have cut it in half. I don’t think the second half cup did much to make the dish taste cheesier, it just added a lot of salt. I really like a bit of cheese stirred into my polenta, but this was excessive.

I served this polenta along with the Chinese-Hawaiian ribs from yesterday. They’re both variations on southern classics, what’s better than barbecued ribs and grits? unfortunately both dishes were different enough from the original I was hoping to emulate that they didn’t go particularly well together. The polenta was intensely salty, and the ribs were overwhelmingly salty and sweet. Together they were too much. I think serving this polenta alongside a more mildly flavoured side, perhaps some stewed vegetables, or a pot-roast, would have showed it off to better advantage.

After a night in the fridge the polenta firmed up and set beautifully. I was able to cut the leftovers into a few slices, and crisp them up in a skillet. The outsides of the slices turned a deep brown and formed a crunchy lattice of melted Parmesan. The centre regained all the creamy runniness of the night before. We had them with poached eggs, fresh fruit, and a macchiato. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer weekend breakfast. This second application showed off how good this dish could really be. It just goes to show that making a delicious dish isn’t enough, pairing your foods correctly is just as important.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

99. Chinese-Hawaiian “Barbecued” Ribs p.491

The recipe

I wasn’t sure I was going to like these ribs, but I was pleasantly surprised. These are racks of ribs marinated in soy, sugar, ketchup, sherry, salt, garlic and ginger. They’re then baked at 325 for 1 3/4 hours, basting with the marinade every 20 minutes. Everything about the title is confusing, I get the Chinese part of the name, soy + ginger + garlic = Chinese, fine. But Hawaiian? Is it the ketchup that makes it Hawaiian? The blurb says the recipe came from a Hawaiian restaurant, but if they’d come from a Sweedish restaurant would they be Chinese-Sweedish ribs? Chinese-Hawaiian doesn’t really tell me a lot about what they’re going to taste like. “Barbecued” is another misnomer, quotation marks don’t turn barbecue into baking. Yes they’re low and slow, but where there’s no smoke there’s no barbecue.

I’m usually pretty relaxed about health and safety standards when I’m cooking. I’m happy to eat raw eggs, tartars and carpaccios, and if some leftovers have sat out longer than they should have I’m probably still going to eat them for lunch the next day. One aspect of this recipe gave me pause though. The ribs are marinated, then the marinade is used to baste the ribs while they’re in the oven. Using a marinade as a basting liquid or a glaze is often a delicious way of making the most of your marinade. Usually the marinade is brought to a boil before it does double duty as a glaze though. Not here, the only safety precaution the recipe mentions is to apply the last coating of glaze 10 minutes before you take it out of the oven. Maybe 10 minutes at 325 is enough to kill any nasties that have been growing in the raw meat juice marinade sitting out for nearly two hours… maybe. I followed the directions, and nothing bad happened. But it seems like bringing the marinade to a boil for a few minutes would make the whole operation a lot safer and not take a lot more effort.

The ribs themselves were surprisingly good. I was only able to marinade them for about 1 1/2 hours, instead of 3, but that didn’t seem to hurt anything. All the sugar in the marinade made for a thick caramelized coating, and the long cooking time almost gave them the falling off the bone tender texture of real barbecue. The glaze was thick enough to seal all the juices inside the ribs, so they stayed nice and moist. The glaze was a bit intense for my taste, it was really really salty and sweet. It could have used something to cut that. Normally some acid would be added to give the glaze some tang, or some chilies would spice things up. I find those flavours can balance the salty-sweet, whereas the ginger and garlic here weren’t really able to get the job done. I thought they were tasty, but too intense and unbalanced. My first few bites were delicious but after a couple of ribs it was getting to be too much.

I liked the baked and glazed ribs concept a lot. In future I would play around with the glaze, and try to keep the flavours in equilibrium. Low sodium soy might be an improvement, and cutting the sugar wouldn’t be a bad idea. The baking “barbecue” worked out well, it’s a pretty good substitute for those of use who don’t have a pit in the back yard. I’m still unclear how they were Hawaiian, but they were good.

Categories
Poultry The Book

98. Chicken Fricassee p.372


No recipe this time.

This was a fairly successful and simple recipe. It’s real comfort food, chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce served with noodles. Like most comfort food it’s fatty and a bit bland. The preparation was as simple as you could wish for. Break a chicken down into serving size pieces, and brown them in a skillet. Remove the chicken and make a sauce of onion, celery, garlic, thyme, mushrooms, and chicken stock. The chicken is added back in and simmered ’till it’s cooked through. Then the remaining sauce is bolstered with heavy cream and an egg yolk.

I often complain about chicken skin and wet cooking methods. The skin tends to turn into a gross mush. In my opinion there’s no point in eating the added fat of chicken skin unless it’s crispy. This is a wet cooking method, but the skin managed to retain at least a bit of texture, and loads of flavour. The chicken parts are simmered in the sauce, but only the bottom halves are covered. The skin gets steamed, but not bathed in liquid, so the caramelization you built stays in one place.

The sauce worked really well on the pasta. The sauce actually had more chicken flavour than the chicken did, and the cream and egg yolk gave it a really silken texture which coated the noodles perfectly. I ate some of the chicken, but the dish was really all about the pasta and sauce for me. The thyme and mushroom flavours were prominent, fortunately that’s a great flavour combination. I found the first few bites bland, but the addition of a good dose of fresh ground black pepper picked things up quite a bit. I sprinkled Parmesan on some leftover noodles the next day and they were even better.

This dish had very straightforward flavours, it hit all the marks of a crowd pleaser. It has the added advantage of not containing anything people really object to (except celery, but that’s just me). It tasted good, but it wasn’t really inspired, or particularly interesting. I guess you can’t have it both ways. I would have preferred something a little more novel. Combining loads of carbs, a healthy dose of fat, the unobjectionable flavour of chicken, and some pantry staple spices is a no brainer. This dish would fit in well on a family restaurant’s menu. This kind of comfort food isn’t actually the stuff I crave after a bad day, but TV tells me this is what people want when they’re upset. It tasted good, but it wasn’t really memorable.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

97. Sole Meunière p.284

No recipe for this one.

This is one of the simple and elegant classics that make French food so revered. It’s the first dish Julia Child had in France, and she credits that lunch of sole meunière as the catalyst for her cooking and eating career. This is about the simplest possible fish preparation there is, a fillet of dover sole is dredged in flour, then pan fried in browned butter and parsley. A quick sauce is made of the pan juices with a bit more butter, salt, and lemon juice.

When the ingredient list is short it’s a good cue to make especially sure that everything you’re using is of the best possible quality and freshness. If you use butter that has picked up a bit of flavour from the fridge, there’s no way you’re going to be able to hide it here. Unfortunately fresh local sole isn’t really a possibility in North America. Dover sole is sometimes available, but it’s fished in Europe. Gray sole is much more readily available, but it’s not actually in the same fish family, and the taste is different. Nevertheless gray sole is what I used, and I was thoroughly pleased with the results.

The simplicity and balance of the flavours here are the reason it’s a classic. It wouldn’t be half as good if you didn’t brown the butter properly, the nutty aromas make the dish. The lemon simultaneously adds sweetness and acid, and the faint flavour of parsley actually serves a purpose in a dish this subtle. The dredge in flour means you get a crispy coating, and the aromas of just baked bread are a bonus. The fish was moist and succulently flaky. My only complaint is that cooking the parsley along with the fish makes it kind of black and ugly by the end. I added a little fresh just for looks. The flavour of the fish is very mild, and it takes a delicate preparation to allow it to play the lead. Everything in the dish is there to support the fish, and they do a great job of highlighting it without stealing the spotlight.

I’ve been eagerly following this season of “Top Chef”, and I’m waiting with baited breath for the finale. One of the contestants, Casey, has had her food called “soulful” by half a dozen of the best chef’s going. The bravo forums have been abuzz wondering what soulful actually means. The best definition I’ve heard is that the food is well seasoned, balanced, thoughtful, and instantly familiar. It should tap into our collective sense of childhood favorites and family classics. This dish is a quintessential example of soulful. It’s not fussy, it’s just good.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

96. Salmon Burgers with Spinach and Ginger p.291


The recipe

I rarely make recipes from The Book for lunch, but this was an exception. I happened to be home, and to have a salmon fillet lingering in my fridge, so I decided to go for it. It wasn’t the greatest thing I’d ever tasted, but it certainly wasn’t bad. It’s a simple burger made of diced salmon, spinach, scallions, ginger, salt, and pepper. It’s held together with an egg white, and a dash of soy, then shaped into patties, fried crisp, and topped with pickled ginger. As you can see I happened to have some neon pink pickled ginger in the fridge, and I used it. It didn’t look great, and it wasn’t the best pickled ginger I’ve ever had, but this was lunch and I was alone, so who would ever know? I still had a bunch of the dill and crème fraîche mixture I used in the Rye Crispbread Crackers with Pepper-Dill Crème Fraîche and Smoked Salmon, so I added that and the burger to a slice of Russian bread and called it a meal.

The burger cooked up nicely, and developed a crispy crust. I often worry about fish burgers falling apart in the pan, but that was not an issue. The flavours were a bit aggressive. Salmon can stand up to intense sauces, but this was pretty much a ginger burger with salmon and spinach. It tasted quite nice, but not much like salmon. Unfortunately my kitchen still smelled like pan fried fish. I’ve also got to deduct points for the boring “let’s make it Japanesque” flavours they’ve gone with. Ginger and soy are a great combination, but leaving that as the only flavouring in an Asianoid dish smacks of foreign food of the ’50’s. And not in that quaint kitschy way I love.

Overall the burgers were fine. Not particularly inspired, but totally edible and even enjoyable. I definitely don’t think this should be the definitive salmon burger, or the only fish burger in The Book, but it’s not bad at all. The nice thing about lunch is that it’s held to a lower standard. This burger might have been a disappointment at supper time, but having a burger for lunch is a treat no matter how it tastes.