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

Vivi logs in on #12

Not much to say, after the Bride's accurate summation. We quite enjoyed our own version of fricassee (also made with chicken breast -- bone-in halves in our case). We had it with fresh fettucine (purchased, not homemade) which was really tasty. And the usual green salad and an apple salad on the side (and strawberries for the children). Very easy, very flavorful.

Why is this dish not a chicken stew? Or is fricassee another word for stew? Oh...Google can help. Look up "define: fricassee" and the many results include:

[French] stew made of chicken or veal cut into pieces and cooked in a gravy. Though chicken is the most common form of this type of stew, fish, vegetables, and other meats are prepared in this manner.
From recipegoldmine.com

and A white stew. From foody.com .

Which sort of applies, too. It's a little too colorful to entirely call "white" but the meat was white.

I haven't made the rice pudding yet, which I am looking forward to doing with the full trimmings, holding back on none of the gazillion steps nor the fat (and curious to see if it tastes any better than our plain ordinary rice pudding). I may put that off until this weekend, however, and make a chocolate heart-shaped Valentine's cake for the week night dessert.

The Bride finds Menu 12 Ho-Hum

No pictures because, frankly, it wasn't that special. I didn't do the Oeufs, used chicken instead of veal and canned broth instead of home-made (tasted great) and made a different, simpler rice pudding (less decorative, but divinely flavored). I served it with whole wheat couscous, not home-made fettucini, which I couldn't have eaten. But the result was, as The Son of COG pointed out, no different than our usual meals.

Therein lies the rub: if I cook the recipes as written, I can't eat them. If I make changes to be more consistent with our diet, they are not special.

I have no idea what to do about this. Does anyone else have any brilliant insights?

The Jacques Pepin rice pudding, was fabulous. Extremely simple to make, amenable to those watching their calorie intake, and delicious. It was, if possible, even easier to prepare than regular rice pudding. Here's the recipe:

Old-Fashioned Rice Pudding with Dried Fruit

4 cups whole or nonfat milk, plus additional milk if needed
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup long-grain white rice
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
3/4 cup diced (1/2 inch) dried fruits (raisins, apricots, figs, apples, cranberries, cherries etc.)
3/4 cup yogurt or sour cream (optional)

1) Bring the milk, sugar, vanilla to a boil in a saucepan. Add the rice, mix well, and bring back to the boil. Cover, reduce teh heat to very low, and simmer for about 40 minutes, or until the rice is very soft. The mixture should still be soup at this point; if it is not, stir in enough milk to make it so.

2) Add the lemon rind and dried fruits to the pudding, mix and set aside until it has cooled to room temperature. At this point much of the extra soupiness is absorbed and it's wonderfully creamy.

3) Spoon into four dessert dishes. If desired, top each dessert with 1 or 2 TBSPs of yogurt or sour cream.

Menu 12: The Bride Tinkers with the Menu

Here's my plan: the oeufs are not happening. The veal fricassee is going to be a chicken breast fricassee, with no fat added. And the Empress will not be so happy about the Riz, but she will be thinner. I'm making a Jacque Pepin rice pudding with dried fruit recipe which is more consistent with my diet, but which also sounds very nice and is made in a similar, but much simpler way. I'll post the recipe I'm using later.

Vivi does The Timewarp, and cooks from #22

We had a pork roast in the freezer, which I am trying to clear out. The Longe de Porc des Pruneaux of lesson 22 calls for a loin, and this was a boneless leg, but I figured once a porc always a porc.


It was delicious -- as good as the best fish we've had via Cordon Bleu. You stuff the (supposed-to-be butterflied) pork with fresh prunes. Brown the meat and roast over veggies, as you would roast a chicken. Use the drippings and a curious caramel made with vinegar instead of water to make a sauce, and then serve surrounded by more prunes that you have plumped up with, of all things, Ceylon tea.

I also made the Oeufs Mollets Florentine, sans oeufs, as a side dish. No picture because it wasn't all that beautiful, but it tasted very good. In typical Le Cordon Bleu fashion, the recipe called for boiled spinach which you squeeze dry, then sauté in heaps of butter, and then broil (with the hard-boiled eggs) with Mornay sauce in a buttered pan. Instead, I boiled the spinach, squeezed it, then threw it in a non-stick pan with just enough Mornay sauce to taste great. I think it would be better still if you just steamed the spinach, then served it with the Mornay sauce on the side. You could of course, leave out the Mornay sauce, but then it's just plain cooked spinach and I wouldn't be writing about it. The spinach was a great side dish with the pork.

We also had, for the record, Pommes à l'Anglaise, and an apple salad. And also for the record, my Mornay is too thick, more a dough than a sauce. Something I'll have to work on.

I'm going to make the fricasee tomorrow, using beef instead of veal. And the rice pudding on Wednesday, our next Dessert Night.

For comparison purposes, by the way, here is Boy-child's chosen menu.

Returning to Creme Anglaise

In Lesson 12, we make a Crème Anglaise as part of making a Bavarian Cream as part of making a rice pudding. (Typical recipe, I'm learning -- rather than just the tasty rice pudding we know and love, we're going to make it vastly more difficult. I am really looking forward to this dessert, however, and I hope it will taste scrumptious.)

Anyway, Reader Blithe tried an experiment of her own, using the Jamie Oliver recipe. She commented about it after the entry Vivi Gets Back on Her Feet. I'll quote the recipe here, with formatting. I'm going to try this version (with 2% milk) this weekend. (Picture from another blog. That's Jamie O, not Blithe.)

Jamie Oliver's Crème Anglaise (via Blithe)
500ml (2.1 cups) milk (he uses whole but I only had 2%)
565ml (2.39 cups) thick cream (or 2 cups + 6 Tablespoons, or 1.2 pints)
6 Tablespoons of sugar
8 egg yolks.

He infuses the milk, cream and 4T of the sugar with a vanilla pod, then the remaining 2T sugar are whisked with the egg yolks. Then the hot milk is gradually added. The whole mix goes back into the pan and is cooked only briefly (5-10 minutes on low heat). His instructions are to remove it from the heat as soon as it coats the back of a spoon.

Blithe says:
This made a runnier custard than I like but the texture was superb - like thick silk. I poured the leftovers into a jug and that has thickened to what I would call a "normal" custard, still pourable but thick. I also didn't have a vanilla bean so I used 2 teaspoons of natural extract, added just before taking it off the heat.