Tag: lettuce

Categories
Soups The Book

178. French Pea Soup – Potage-Saint-Germain p.96


The recipe

I was really excited to try this soup. I went looking for a pea soup recipe in The Book, expecting to find a hearty split pea version with ham hocks, instead I got this spring vegetable centric Potage-Saint-Germain. It wasn’t really what I was looking for that night, and the idea of mint in my soup seemed a bit weird, but one ingredient captured my imagination and I knew I had to do this recipe ASAP. That ingredient was lettuce. I’ve been toying with the idea of cooked lettuce since I saw an early Julia Child episode where she braises whole Romaine heads and serves the flaccid results. It looked terrible but she assured me that it was an excellent treatment for lettuce. As we all know, Julia’s word is law, or at least worthy of a test. I’ve never cooked lettuce in any way before, I guess it’s not that different from cooking bitter greens, bok choy or cabbage, but it seems delightfully sacrilegious and just plain wrong.

To prepare this soup you start by making croûtons with an old baguette, butter and salt in the oven. The soup starts with softening leaks in butter, then adding chicken stock and water. Once it’s boiling you add chopped Bibb lettuce, and frozen peas. As soon as the peas are tender you stir in fresh mint, and purée the soup in the blender (seriously be careful, hot pea soup was used as a viable substitute for napalm in the Nam). The soup is then seasoned with salt and pepper, and served hot topped with croûtons and lightly beaten cream.

The idea with the beaten cream was to make elegant drops, and to run a knife through them to make a stunning pattern. You can see how well that worked out for me. I think my central problem with this soup was that it was served hot. The hot soup melted the slightly whipped cream and sent it running all over the place, and it just tasted weird. Minted things are rarely served piping hot, it’s an odd juxtaposition, mint is the universal symbol of cool and refreshing, but this was a thick, hearty, hot, soup. I tried some the next day at room temperature and I was much happier. The lettuce experiment was a success though, the lettuce along with peas, leaks, and mint were the prominent flavours in the soup, and the lettuce really worked. The Book describes the flavour of the lettuce in this soup as “grassy” and I’m glad they got in a food writing buzz word there, but really it tastes exactly like uncooked lettuce, and in this case that’s a good thing. Again, hot lettuce isn’t really for me, I much preferred that flavour when the soup was cool. I like croûtons in any context, and this was no exception. The soup was thick enough that they floated easily, and didn’t get soggy.

I won’t be rushing to make this soup again, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t serve it warm. The flavours and ideas were pretty good, but the temperature was a big miss, and I wasn’t fond of the drizzled cream on top. I think the ideas behind this soup are solid, and I’m looking forward to playing with different combinations of these ingredients. Pottage-Saint-Germain is a beloved French classic, but I’m not sure it’s for me.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

129. Posole: Pork and Hominy Stew p.486


Epicurious doesn’t have a recipe for this one, but one of the posole recipes I found on there looks great, and might address some of my concerns with this dish.

I was really excited to make this. My dining companion came home raving about the posole at Le Jolifou, a great Montreal restaurant which specializes in Mexican inspired Québécois dishes. A couple of weeks later we looked through The Book, and tried its take on posole. I can safely say that this recipe didn’t live up to Le Jolifou’s exacting standards.

Posole is a Mexican stew, which usually features pork and chiles and always features hominy (confusingly also called posole). This was my first experience with hominy, which are corn kernels that have had the outer hull removed by soaking in an alkaline solution. This is a really cool example of ancient food chemistry. At some point someone decided to boil their corn with a handful of ashes from the fireplace, and found that the corn tasted better and the family was healthier. The treatment makes the corn kernels more digestible, more nutrients become available, and it’s nutritionally complete enough to be a staple food. Without this process people surviving on corn will become malnourished and develop pellagra. Europeans brought maize back from the new world, but didn’t treat it, and pellagra became widespread. I’ve idly wondered what the difference between polenta and grits was for a while, and now I know. Polenta is made from untreated corn meal, while grits are made with treated corn meal, simple, but it wasn’t obvious. If you’re looking to geek out on more food science check out the Wikipedia page on this process, called nixtamalization.

Despite my affection for hominy, this posole wasn’t great. It’s simple to make, just soak pasilla and guajillo chiles in water, then run them through the blender with oregano, salt, cumin seeds, pepper, garlic, tomato, and onion. You then simmer cubed pork shoulder in this sauce for an hour, add canned hominy, and continue to simmer for half an hour more. The stew is served with any combination of radishes, onion, cilantro, lettuce, chiles, lime wedges, and tortillas or tortilla chips.

The sauce has some very nice flavours to it, and I love pork braised with chiles, but the texture wasn’t great. I’m not really sure what happened, but my pork cubes ended up tough and dry, swimming in a thin sauce, with a huge amount of hominy. I would have preferred a thicker chunkier sauce, perhaps leaving the tomato and onion out of the blender, or mashing some of the hominy would have helped to thicken it up. I also would have preferred to shred the pork into the sauce. I found the chunks too big, and not amazingly flavorful. The recipe calls for three 15 oz cans of hominy, which should really be reduced to two. The other recipe I linked calls for 26 cloves of garlic, the version in The Book calls for only one. I’m not sure if I’d up the garlic quite so drastically, but I’d seek out a happy middle. The hominy itself was really interesting, it has a very unique chewy texture, which I liked. I’m not sure I’d really want to eat a whole lot of it at one sitting, it reminded me a bit of the tapioca balls in bubble tea.

As with most stews the posole improved with age. By day three the pork had soaked in more flavour, and softened, and the whole dish was more cohesive. It was perfectly edible, and even enjoyable, but my dining companion’s stellar dinner out had really built up my expectations for this posole, it just couldn’t live up to them.

Categories
Sandwiches & Pizzas The Book

119. Turkey Wraps with Chipotle Mayonnaise p.189

I can’t find an online version of this recipe, but it was good enough to earn a 5 mushroom ratings so I’ll give it to you here.

FOR PICKLED ONION
1 red onion (6 ounces), sliced crosswise 1/4 inch thick
1/2 cup cider vinegar
3/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon salt
FOR CHIPOTLE MAYONNAISE
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped canned chipotle chiles in adobo, including some adobo sauce
1/4 cup mayonnaise
FOR ASSEMBLING WRAPS
4 (8-inch) flour tortillas, preferably whole wheat
1/4 pound sliced or shredded roast turkey or chicken
3/4 cup tender pea shoots or shredded lettuce leaves
salt and freshly ground pepper

MAKE THE PICKLED ONION:
blanch onion in a 1 1/2 quart saucepan of boiling water for 1 minute: drain. Return onion to pan, add vinegar, water, and salt, and bring back to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 1 minute. Transfer mixture to a heatproof bowl. Cool, uncovered, then refrigerate until cold, covered, about 2 hours.
MAKE THE CHIPOTLE MAYONNAISE:
blend chipotle and mayonnaise in a blender of food processor until smooth.
MAKE THE WRAPS:
Toast tortillas directly on (gas or electric) burners over moderate heat, turning over and rotating until slightly puffed and browned in spots, 40 to 60 seconds.
Spread 1 tablespoon chipotle mayonnaise on each tortilla. Arrange one quarter of turkey and pea shoots across middle of each tortilla and top with some drained pickled onion. Season with salt and pepper and roll up wraps.

I cooked this a while ago, and by happenstance I’m getting to writing it up just before the Americans have their turkey day. If any of you are planning a big turkey feast for thanksgiving this is a wonderful way to use up some of the leftovers. My post Thanksgiving sandwich is a fairly ritualized affair, it must have a mix of white and dark meat, mayo, cranberry sauce, rice and sausage stuffing, and a bit of lettuce, preferably on fresh sliced multi-grain bread, or baguette. But for a post-post thanksgiving sandwich, I think this wrap is the way to go.

Its components are just a little different, and very versatile. The pickled onions were shockingly good. It didn’t seem like they’d be anything special, just some blanched onions with vinegar and salt, but the onions are transformed. The harsh raw onion flavor is mellowed and replaced with the sweet-tart cider vinegar. They lose that mouth-stinging halitosis-causing raw onion edge, but retain their raw flavour, and even have it enhanced by the salt. These picked onions are beautiful too, the red pigment dissolves in the vinegar and dyes them pink. We loved them on these sandwiches, and then we put them on everything else we could think of ’till we ran out. Just writing this makes me want to go whip up another batch.

The chipotle mayonnaise was also a winner. There’s nothing to it, just chipotles in adobo and mayo, but it’s a super versatile topping for pretty much any sandwich. This mayo is so simple, and so good, that I’ve elevated it to the status of fridge staple.

While these wraps are an ideal way to use up a whole roast turkey, you don’t have to limit them to the day after major feasts. I can find turkey breasts at the grocery store pretty frequently these days, and I love them. They’re lean, inexpensive, and more flavorful than chicken breasts. I seasoned the breast with salt and pepper and then grilled it using the same indirect heat technique I used for the Cornish hens. When cooking a whole turkey the breast tends to dry out by the time the thigh is done, but if you’re just grilling a breast you can take it off as soon as it hits 170 F. I did a much better job on this breast than on the Cornish hens. The skin was golden, crisp, and packed with flavour, and the meat was wonderfully moist.

The elements of this sandwich are really strong, and they compliment each other well when combined. Sandwiches are about as humble as food gets, but when some real though it put into their composition they can be a treat. My only real criticism of this sandwich is the recommendation to grill the tortilla over a gas or electric burner. I was pretty skeptical about this working on my electric stove, and guess what? it didn’t. 119_turkey_wraps_with_chipotle_mayonnaise_p189_burned_tortilla.jpgI wonder if they tested this on a gas stove and figured it would work out for electric too? or perhaps I’m missing something. My dining companion just shook her head and sighed while she watched me fill our kitchen with smoke.

This was a very simple wrap, but everything about it was delicious. I saw this recipe coming up in my backlog, and decided I had to have it again. So, last night made a variation with grilled chicken, and I added bacon. I didn’t recreate the wonderful pickled onions and I regret that. This wrap is nothing fancy, but it earned its five mushroom rating.

Categories
Salads The Book

118. Frisée Salad with Lardons and Poached Eggs p.139


The recipe on Epicurious helpfully notes that frisée is curly French endive, The Book does not. I really don’t know much about salad greens and this one stumped me. I thought it was the curly lettuce I picked up, but I was wrong. My dining companion is a salad impresario, she has an eye for composition, and a knack for combining the elements, and pairing them with the perfect dressing. I usually stick to the lettuce or other greens with balsamic and olive oil formula. It’s not exciting, but it gets the job done.

In this salad slab bacon is cut into lardons, which are cooked up in a pan then put to the side. Shallots are then softened in the bacon drippings, and red wine vinegar is added to the pan (I’ll remember to use a splatter screen the next time I follow that step), this hot dressing is then poured over the frisée to slightly wilt it. The salad is then topped with the lardons and a poached egg.

The recipe must have an error in it because it never actually mentions that you’re supposed to top the final salad with lardons, but given that the lardons are in the title it would be pretty silly not to include them. Besides, lardons are one of the greatest culinary achievements of mankind. If I could only have one form of cured pork for the rest of my life, I’d choose bacon strips, but lardons are magnificent. They have the advantage of being French and fancy sounding, which makes it easier not to think about the cardiovascular consequences of eating them. The thicker cut also preserves their meaty porcine nature, which bacon can sometimes lose in favour of crispness.

I’ve been working on my egg poaching technique, and things are coming along to the point that I’m almost satisfied. I didn’t add enough water to the pan for these eggs, so they stayed yellow on top, but I find that kind of attractive. I’d love to be able to produce the perfectly spherical poached eggs you get in restaurants, but for now I’m happy with the fact that the whites set, the yolks run, and the come out of the pan in one piece.

This salad was exceedingly good. I broke my egg and let the yolk run all over the greens. where it combined with the already rich bacon dripping based dressing. This is the kind of decadence I can’t help but smile and make incoherent consonant sounds in response to. The vinegar and shallots were nice contrasting flavours. Eggs and bacon for breakfast have to to pair well with coffee and orange juice, so red wine vinegar doesn’t play a big role on brunch menus, but it worked quite well here.

My uninformed choice of salad greens took away from the recipe a bit. Actual frisée is much crunchier than the soft lettuce I chose. The hot dressing wilted my salad in a less than appealing way, but with a sturdier green it would have worked very nicely indeed. Frisée is also more bitter and flavourful than curly lettuce, and might have stood up to the robust dressing a bit better. Oh well, it was delicious. I’ll get it right next time.

Some of my favourite childhood memories are of my Mom coming home late, and deciding that we should have breakfast for dinner. She’d fry up some eggs and bacon and have three kids fed in under twenty minutes. It was always such a treat, and this recipe captured that special out-of-the-blue feeling.