Tag: rosemary

Categories
Poultry The Book

159. Duck Legs and Carrots p.398


The recipe is from Fergus “Nose To Tail” Henderson’s London restaurant, St. John.

My dining companion and I adore duck, and eat it often, so a new preparation is always exciting for us. I really like the thinking behind this recipe. It takes an underused part of the duck, and brings out its absolute best. Incidentally duck legs are a wonderful bargain, they’re exceedingly flavorful and they’re nicely inexpensive. Duck breasts and fattened livers are worth their weight in gold, but that means that there are a lot of legs hanging around, and there’s only so much demand for duck confit. There’s loads of duck produced in Quebec, so it’s always easy to find.

In this recipe duck legs are trimmed of excess fat, and that fat is rendered in a skillet. The legs are seasoned with salt and pepper, and browned in batches. Most of the fat is then discarded from the skillet and a mixture of chopped leeks, onions, and garlic are softened. A truckload of sliced carrots are then added to the pan and cooked for a few minutes. The veg is then seasoned with salt and pepper, and spread in the bottom of a roasting pan. A bouquet garni of parsley, rosemary, and bay leaves is added to the veg, along with a jalapeño. The duck breasts are then nestled on top of the carrots, and chicken stock is added until it covers most of the legs, but the skin is left exposed to the direct heat of the oven. The dish is then baked at 400 for an hour and half-ish. The duck and carrots are served with the defatted juices on the side.

I was really pleased with what this preparation did for the duck. The meat was falling off the bone tender, and perfectly braised, while the all important skin was cracklingly crisp. The meat gave up some of its goodness to the surrounding liquid, but it has flavour to spare, and it benefited from the arromatic infusion. I would happily eat this duck again and again, but I’d leave the carrots off the plate. Carrots braised for an hour and a half are well in to mushy territory, and there were a lot of them. Everyone at dinner was going back for seconds on the potatoes and Brussels sprouts, but the bowl of carrots was mostly ignored. It actually tasted pretty good, but the texture was just not appealing. I’d leave the carrots in the kitchen when you make this, and turn them into the basis for a lovely carrot soup the next day. The duck legs, and accompanying pan juices were an excellent centerpiece to the meal, and the carrots were a worthy sacrifice, in this case the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.

I liked this dish on a lot of levels, first off, the flavour was fantastic, the duck meat was heightened by the arromatic infusion, and the skin had the almost but not quite too rich quality of bacon. The meat was fork tender, and the skin perfectly crisp. I also loved the concept here, it’s a really simple and smart way to bring out the best of duck, with tender meat and crispy skin, all in one go. If the vegetables had been less done, it would have been a conceptual trifecta, and a perfect little symbiotic ecosystem. As it was I wasn’t quite sure what to do with fourteen carrots and two leeks worth of mush, and I didn’t think of making soup at the time. I turned some of it into a middling pasta sauce. As a standalone the duck and pan juices would earn about 4.5 mushrooms, but the carrots are dragging the rating for the whole dish down.

Categories
Soups The Book

136. Mushroom Barley Soup p.113


The recipe

This soup suffers from a serious branding issue. If it had been billed as barely soupy barley stew, with extra barley, some carrots, and hardly any mushrooms at all, I would have known what I was getting into. The blurb for the recipe talks about all the contrasting mushroom flavours and blah blah blah, but I really had to do some food styling to get any mushrooms in the photo at all. I picked this recipe because I wanted a mushroom soup, and I was looking forward to a little added body from the barley, and a nice background of aromatics. I ended up with a perfectly OK barley stew that I wasn’t at all in the mood for.

The recipe starts by browning garlic and onion in a large pot, then adding sliced white mushrooms, soaked and sliced shiitake’s, soy sauce, cooking out the liquid, then adding sherry and evaporating that too. The liquid is then added in the form of chicken stock, water, and the mushroom soaking liquid. The barley, carrots, and dried thyme and rosemary are added and the soup simmers for an hour. When it’s ready it’s seasoned with salt and pepper, and some parsley is stirred in just before serving.

The texture was very thick and hearty, with most of the flavour coming from the chicken stock and aromatics. It actually tasted a whole lot like my mom’s beef and barley soup, but without the deep beef stock and hearty chunks of meat that made that a satisfying winter lunch. The chicken stock left it tasting thin and whimpy, and seriously overpowered by the mushy barley texture. I should reiterate that for a mushroom barley soup, mushrooms were not a flavour consideration.

Unfortunately this soup was in a rotten in between spot. With less barley and four times more mushrooms it could have been the nice mushroom soup it advertised itself as, or using a more concentrated stock, and adding rich chunks of meat, could have resulted in a thick barely stew worth eating. As it was, it was perfectly edible, but nothing to look forward to.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

113. Rosemary Focaccia p.606


The recipe is the same as this one, but linked recipe forgets to list the water and salt for the dough in the ingredient list (they are in the recipe description).

I should start off by saying that this was absolutely delicious. It didn’t rely on rare ingredients or novel taste experiences to get there. It went with the straightforward combination of fresh baked bread, so much olive oil that drizzling is not an option, and enough salt to make it crunchy. This is the same tried and true combination that keeps the deep-dish pizza places of the world in business. You know that this is a Gourmet recipe and not a special from Pizza Hut because the focaccia doesn’t have a ring of cheese baked into the crust.

The recipe starts with a simple yeast dough, with some olive oil added in. It’s mostly kneaded in a stand mixer, then finished kneading by hand. Once the dough is coated in more oil and it’s been left to rise for 1 1/2 hours, it’s pressed into a baking sheet, covered with plastic wrap, and allowed a second rise. Obviously this second rise requires the addition of more oil, but this time it’s used to lubricate the baking sheet and plastic wrap. After the second rise it’s time for, you guessed it, more oil. This time the oil is mixed with chopped rosemary, and poured over the bread. There is so much oil at this point that the recipe directs you to make indentations in the bread for the oil to pool. Then the bread is sprinkled with sea salt, and baked at 425 ’till it’s golden. When it’s ready the bread needs to be inverted to get it out of the baking sheet. I’d do this over some paper towel because even the absorbent power of bread is overwhelmed by the amount of oil in this dish.

The focaccia was excellent, the bread was moist, with some chewiness, but a nice crumb and texture. The crust, both top and bottom, were wonderfully golden. The rosemary was fantastic, and really allowed to shine as the sole aromatic. If you serve this to friends they’ll beg you for the recipe, don’t give it to them. It would be like telling a kid about Santa. The bread doesn’t hold up well overnight. It’s not great cold, microwaving killed everything good about it, and rewarming in the oven didn’t to it justice. It’s best to get a crowd together and polish the whole thing off in one go.

The recipe uses a truly unconscionable amount of olive oil. The ingredient list calls for just under 1/2 a cup (7 tablespoons) of oil, to 5 cups of flour. But that doesn’t count the “generous” lubrication of the dough ball during the fist rise, or the baking sheet and plastic wrap during the second. I suspect the total is closer to 3/4 of a cup. That’s 1400 calories at 120 cal/tablespoon. We had the focaccia along with yesterday’s kale and chroizo soup for dinner, and certainly didn’t feel like we’d eaten lightly.

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
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

93. Grilled Butterflied Leg of Lamb with Lemon, Herbs, and Garlic p.502

The recipe

Spring lamb simply prepared is one of the best rewards I can think of for having suffered through a long winter. Spring lamb comes from a younger animal than lamb without an adjective. Generally spring lamb is 3-5 months old, but it can be called lamb right up until a year old. As the animal gets older it’s flavours become more pronounced, so a piece of spring lamb is going to me more delicate and tender than an older lamb. My dining companion is a bit tentative about lamb, but she likes it in small portions. She’s quite sensitive to the goaty flavours it can take on. For her sake I choose spring lamb whenever possible. I appreciate those more intense flavours, especially in a stew. Occasionally I can get my hands on some goat for a nice curry, and if anyone can point me in the direction of some mutton I’ll be forever indebted to you. Even spring lamb packs a serious flavour punch though. In this dish a leg of lamb (spring or otherwise) is taken off the bone, rubbed with lemon, thyme, rosemary, parsley and garlic, then allowed to sit for an hour for the spices to penetrate before being grilled to medium rare.

This preparation shows off everything that makes lamb great. It’s flavourful enough to stand up to a bold spice rub, it’s fatty so it does well with high heat, it cooks quickly, and tastes best just this side of medium-rare. A leg of lamb like this is what grills were invented for. It developed a pungent, crispy exterior, with a melting, delicate interior. The spice rub charred, and smoked the dish, but enough of it got worked into little crevasses that it retained some of its fresh taste. My only regret is that I have a gas grill. If ever there was a time to break out the hardwood charcoal this is it. Some real wood smoke would have done wonders for an already wonderful dish.

I’d like to take a moment to thank my instant read digital probe thermometer. This was the first dish I used it with, and I can’t tell you how happy it made me. Being able to close the grill with the probe in the meat (it’s attached by a long wire to the display), and set an alarm for the desired internal temperature was a revelation. Our grill is on the flimsy side, so every time we open it it loses a huge amount of heat, and it doesn’t have the mass to bounce back quickly. Being able to keep the lid closed means that the top side of the meat is still being roasted and browning without direct exposure to the heat. Since I started using the digital thermometer everything has been coming out better, and I don’t worry about over or under doing anything. It also means I only need to stab one hole, and the probe is much smaller than my old analogue one. If you don’t have one of these things you really owe it to yourself.

This dish was just fantastic. Lamb prepared like this is an absolute classic, and dozens of cultures have their variations on it. This one leans towards the Greek end of the spectrum, and it works exceptionally well. Many many other flavourful spice rubs could work with this preparation though. The beauty is in taking the lamb leg off the bone and butterflying it so that it grills quickly. Increasing the surface area also gets more flavour into the meat, and gives you more deliciously grilled crusty outside bits. I love that this preparation is easy enough for a casual supper, but would work well as the centerpiece for an Easter feast too. Grilled Butterflied Leg of Lamb with Lemon, Herbs, and Garlic has earned its five mushroom rating.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

56. Rosemary Walnuts p.5

No recipe this time, sorry.

This is the second recipe in the book, with only Candied Walnuts coming before it. It’s a very strong start. It combines my favorite things, simple, delicious, and affordable. It’s a shame that the recipe isn’t available online, but the proportions aren’t that important anyway. All you need to do is melt butter with crushed dried rosemary, salt, and cayenne. Then toss the nuts in the butter and bake the whole thing at 350 for ten minutes.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention will have noticed that the above photo has been contaminated with non-walnut nuts. My excuse? The grocery store was out of walnuts an hour before my guests arrived, so I went with what they had. In combination with the walnuts I had in the freezer I figured it would count. As a matter of fact the walnuts weren’t event the best part. I found that the cashews and pecans really sparkled with this treatment.

The star of the show in this dish is the cayenne, it’s unexpected, and it plays a beautiful counterpoint to the richness of the nuts. But wait! clearly the rosemary is the star. It gives the dish body, and takes the flavours to a more sophisticated place. Without the rosemary the dish would risk being brushed off as “spicy nuts”. Maybe neither star is enough to carry the show, but together they light up the stage like Sonny and Cher.

My only tiny change would be to reduce the butter by about half. Ideally there would be just enough to coat the spices onto the nuts without pooling and carrying flavours away.

These were are really excellent appetizer, and no one could help themselves from having just one more. If you find yourself in the kitchen singing “I’ve got you babe” to a dish of these, I won’t blame you.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

38. Roasted Carrots and Parsnips with Herbs p.529

the recipe

I nip, you nip, we all nip for parsnips!

I love them mashed, boiled, grilled, broiled, sauteed, and particularly roasted. They behave almost exactly like carrots, they look like carrots, they taste quite a bit like carrots, and yet… the carrot is a superstar of the vegetable world, and the poor parsnip is drinking alone at the bar slurring “whachs ur problum, not ornge enough fur ya??” at unsuspecting passersby. They’re not as sweet as carrots, but I think they bring a lot more flavour to the table. They’re also a whole lot starchier, meaning that they pretty much have to be cooked.

It’s hard for me to be objective about this recipe, because I’ve been making my own version of it for years. I normally toss carrots and parsnips with oil, salt, pepper, and assorted dried herbs, then roast them. The advantage this recipe has is the addition of water to the pan which helps the vegetables get tender, then as the water evaporates they’re able to brown up. When I make this I generally just use dried herbs, I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of difference in a dish that’s roasted for an hour. That said the sage and rosemary were delicious.

This is one of those pretty basic recipes that’s hard to rate. It would be delicious if you followed the recipe exactly, or if you improvised wildly around it. But it was solid, and it won’t lead you wrong.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

29. Pork Chops With Onion Marmalade p.480


the recipe

I made these for a bunch of hungry hungry boys during a trip to Toronto. It was a nice change from pizza and bar food. Our dinner was a quiet moment in the midst of a rowdy weekend. We sipped wine, listened to light jazz, and enjoyed some classic comfort food. Pork chops, green beans, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce; sounds like a stereotypical home cooked meal. It was delicious.

As a side note, cooking in someone else’s kitchen is a deeply weird experience. It’s almost like looking through their medicine cabinet. They keep their pots there? Why do they need HP sauce in an industrial size bottle? Is it a faux pas to joke about the bottle of Emeril’s spice mix? It also highlights how many little things you know about your own kitchen (Of course the top left burner only gives 2/3 the heat of the bottom right). Also, I’m almost guaranteed to cut myself when I’m not working with my own knives. I’ve started bringing a few of my own things with me when I know I’ll be cooking somewhere else, but it feels a bit rude.

These chops came together easily. They’re seared first, then cooked through in a broth made from the pan juices, onions, balsamic, and red currant jelly. I admit, I cheated and just used a jelly from the fridge, it was red though. The recipe called for boneless centre-cut chops; as I was feeding a crowd I bought the super-pack from the mega-mart. Some of them were boneless, some bone-in, all delicious. I think I tripled the recipe (sextupled the linked recipe), and the liquid proportions were off, but I adjusted and everything came out fine.

The key to these was the dried rosemary. Fresh herbs are superior to dried for almost all applications. This isn’t one of them. The rosemary is with the chops right from the initial sear, so they’re contributing to the flavour from the beginning and because the rosemary ends up in the broth it’s rehydrated by the time the dish is done. The rosemary flavour permeated the whole dish. I don’t think you could have gotten this penetration using fresh, I suspect a lot of the flavour developed during the initial sear. Fresh would just have burned, but the dried stuff held up well.

These were satisfying, came together easily, and didn’t cost a fortune. They’re a winner.