Vivi briefly mentions Lesson #13

Really quick -- a week ago, I made the Duck with Garlic, Tomatoes and Olives. It is very easy, and very tasty. Note that the recipe serves 4, not 6, as every other recipe in the book does. (We invited RJ over, and the meat was a little stretched. We had no leftovers.)

I was disappointed before cooking the dish, because I prefer sweet sauces with duck, and this is not. But even so, this was really good, and I want to make it again. We had lots of sauce left over, which I couldn't figure out how to use, so I recommend serving it with rice or noodles. We ate it with a loaf of half-whole wheat No-Knead Bread, which was quite good for soaking up sauce.

I skipped the Marinated Sea Bream with Fresh Dill, and served cheese (some gruyere, some stilton with apricots, and some other that was on hand) and another packet of the gravlax I made and froze last September.

Instead of the Crêpes with Red Currant Jelly (which I will make in future), I finally made the Riz à l'Imperatrice (or Empress Rice Pudding), according to the directions in Lesson #12. Cook rice in water briefly; cook it the rest of the way in milk. Macerate dried fruit in kirsch. Make a crème anglaise, add gelatin and whipped cream to make a bavarian cream. Fold the cooked, cooled rice, the macerated fruit, and the bavarian cream together, slop into a charlotte pan and chill.

But you're not done yet. Melt red currant jelly, add gelatin, and then pour it over the unmolded pudding, and let chill some more before serving.

My bavarian cream wasn't setting, so I folded everything together and put in the charlotte pan anyway. This meant (I reverse-engineered later) that the rice sank to the bottom, leaving a 2-inch layer of simple bavarian cream at the top of the pan.

That meant that when I unmolded it, the heavier rice part squashed down the lighter cream, making the pudding into kind of a turban shape (the Texan said it was a crown, thank you).

It is very rich, and the red currant jelly adds something to the flavor, offsetting the rich blandness with a slight sharp crispness. Still, I think I like my rice pudding the old-fashioned, just-cook-rice-in-milk way. Others (Girl-Child, resident Brother) loved it.

Note about the fruit. The recipe calls for "candied fruit", and I just don't think that means the candied orange peels, crystalized citron, and alien-green-colored cherries and pineapple that we find here. I spent some effort trying to find the sorts of candied fruit that we saw in southern France, (photo taken at the Nice Old City Market in 2004) but to no avail. In the end, I used a mixture of raisins, currants and chopped apricots. I love raisins in rice pudding usually, but this blend didn't work. The apricots and raisins essentially melted, the currants didn't soften despite hours in kirsch and then pudding.

Next time someone I know goes to France, I'm requesting they buy me a small packet of candied fruit, and I'll try making (my own version of) rice pudding with them. nudge nudge wink wink