What menu? What supplies?

Okay, you slow-pokes, what are you cooking this weekend? Moule o pintade?

I went to get my guinea hens today and discovered that the shop where I had confidently seen them a few weeks ago, doesn't carry them after all. They have game hen, a reasonable phonological mistake of mine when the menu was a few weeks out and I was just getting a general lay of the land. In fact, they had not heard of guinea hen.

They do regularly carry duck, game hen (which is Rock Cornish game hen), quail, poussin (which is to chicken as lamb is to sheep), an assortment of older chicken and capons, and quail eggs. So I'm set for other poultry, if and when we come to it.

I chose to get two game hens, because I was there and they were there. I will call the other gourmet market in town to see if they carry guinea hens, but I'm doubtful. Even if they do carry them, I'm not sure I'll buy them. Then I'll have to cook both sets (although I have cooked game hen before, on a Thanksgiving I celebrated alone. It was roasted with cranberry glaze. I could make that again some other night). But it would be fun to taste guinea hen, whatever that is.

I did find my very own Charlotte Mold today, at the fourth cookery shop in town. Saved me the $10 postage from amazon.com, but it is a plain aluminum mold, not the lovely red-gold-coppery look of the amazon photos. I am sure the Bavarian Cream with Strawberries will taste even better from this pan than from the soufflé dish I've been using.

Menu #3..."wow, wow, rich & heavy," moaned sister 2

I suppose, given the number of eggs and the amount of butter, it should have been obvious that this was going to be a heavy meal. In France, a number of non-French mentioned that they found French cooking heavy, and I wasn't sure what they meant because I wasn't experiencing French food as particularly heavy. Until tonight. Maybe I'll just have a gallbladder attack to spite myself. Or a coronary.

In terms of technique, the dishes were very straightforward, though I continue to struggle with the sequencing with so many steps and multiple courses.

In terms of the food, the diners liked the egg dish starter which they described it as tasty and "interesting" though I thought it was dull. White eggs, white onions, white sauce...bland. However, it was good practice with Bechamel sauce, one of the "Mother" sauces of France. On the other hand, the diners didn't care for the veal shanks bourgeois (I substituted beef ribs.) They thought it was dull, a cover-up for a poor cut of meat. They didn't even think it was very "french." I liked it, though. I thought it could be adapted very easily as a technique for a lot of meat stews, We served it with wild rice so the Vegetarian would have something to eat, but I wondered if potatoes might have been better; The other diners pooh-poohed that idea vigorously. I believe the term, "meat and potatoes," was used in a pejorative way. I missed fresh and green at this meal.

But the chocolate mousse...we all agreed that was divine! Today was the Husband's 60th birthday. We had lunch at the St. Paul Grill with his family and returned to our house for cake and presents. Instead of cake (which we cooks won't reach until lesson #5) I made the chocolate mousse (it is pictured here, half devoured.) It was easy to make and fantastic. The chocoholics considered it first rate, high praise indeed. I wasn't able to find a pastry bag in the desultory shopping that I did, so I used a cookie press. Not perfect, but worked well enough.

We had extraordinary wines tonight. In honor of his 60th birthday, The Resident Oeniphile brought up a couple of bottles of wine that he bought when he was a young whippersnapper: a 1970 Château Giscours, from the Margaux region and a 1973 Château Margaux. We had a third bottle of a California pinot noir for comparision. I'll have to let him write his own observations in the comments section because I drank almost no wine (too much rich food for my blood today.)

So, overall, in the Midwest, the opinion was that lesson #3 was a good menu for techniques, had a fantastic, killer-chocolate dessert, but too much butter and too many eggs for people concerned about their weight or arteries. Or people concerned about weight AND arteries.

Update on Midwestern broth adventure

When last I posted re Sunday's meal, the broth, left incomplete on Sunday, had become a frozen mass of leek, celery, and so on...now it is strained, a thick brew about six cups in volume. I put the pot on to simmer for 1.5+ hours after supper on Monday and, oops, forgot, left it overnight. I didn't shriek when I woke from a sound sleep at 6:00AM, suddenly mindful that I had not turned it off, but I definitely scurried out of bed and downstairs. Expletives may have been spoken.

The soup was fine, fortunately, but there is even less of it than before. The urgency of the question, "Was it worth it all the fuss?" has been increased. Another round of cabbage, onion and vermicelli will have to provide the deciding evidence.

#2 x #2 or Peaceable's Adventures in the Kitchen

I didn't start the stock in time. I broke a beloved dish. I totally missed that we were supposed to cool the custard before serving. I nearly set my hair on fire when I lighted the calvados, and I stood so long in front of the 425º oven, custard-tending, that my gold necklace began to heat up; I nearly dropped the pan of near-boiling water and wobbly custard goo as the necklace scorched my tender skin. The Niece, to tell the truth, enjoyed the spectacle of the whirling, dish-dropping, frazzled, hair-on-fire, neck-grabbing, yelping Chef. She wished she had a camera on her to take some candid photos.

I have new insight into why the French prefer to be alone in the kitchen with a door that can be shut.

And then, to top it all off, my long initial post on the subject was somehow over-written by my subsequent post on Charlotte pans. "Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbons?" chortled the Prince Regent long ago to the author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." "Grumble, grumble, grumble, eh, Peaceable?" would be my modern take. So here I am, rewriting something that I was satisfied with before, that peculiar exercise in memory.

In any case, despite all that, we all agreed that we loved the custard even though it was served hot because the important text, "remove from pan and let cool" had not managed to pierce into my consciousness. In terms of preparation, it took me two tries to get the caramelized sugar to "coat the bottom and sides" of the cake pan I used as a substitute for a 4-cup charlotte mold. That would be two goes with a 20-minute clean-up in between (Man, that caramelized sugar is tough stuff!) Our mother, of course, makes fantastic custard sans caramel sauce; It isn't just "French children and their parents" who grew up on and "love this eggy custard." I used whole milk for this, with a pang of guilt. I'm going to try it again with 2% or skim. The Niece and I agreed that the desserts last week and this were too sweet; I'm going to make caramel custard again, but I will cut back on the sugar in the egg goo rather than forgo the caramel. I'm also going to cut back on the sugar in subsequent desserts. Fat, sugar, long pre-prep times...what else can I change to make these recipes function for me?

I also loved the soup, but I made it (Quelle horreur!) with Savory Choice Liquid Chicken Broth concentrate ("Fresh homemade flavor made from natural ingredients") rather than the fond de volaille, and, done this way, it was relatively easy. Under sibling pressure, I decided to make the chicken stock after all, but I started way too late. So, preferring to eat supper sometime before 9:30 PM, I aborted at the point where I removed the chicken, with the 1.5+ hour final simmer remaining. The stock spent the night on our front porch and is frozen rock solid. Now it requires a several hour defrosting AND a 1.5+ hour simmer before being useable, sigh. I liked making the bouquet garni from scratch, but the whole process seemed pretty fussy for eight cups of chicken stock! Was the flavor worth it? I'm going to make this soup again later this week to use up the stock and see. I may use a standard MN cabbage with no butter wilt rather than a Sa-VOY cabbage (I asked for a SA-voy cabbage and was primly corrected by the produce man at Lunds) with scald and butter wilt. Because, God forbid, I should be systematic about this.

Another BIG hit in our crowd was the baked golden delicious apples. I used less than 2T of butter on eight apples so it wasn't too bad, as these things go. Personally, I could have skipped the meat and just feasted on baked apple, mushroom sauce and whole milk custard. We used a cut of thin-sliced beef instead of veal, and I was disappointed. It wasn't tough, but neither was it particularly flavorful. I think chicken would have worked as well. But everyone else enjoyed the meat. They were full, but would have enjoyed more. I substituted a blend of 2/3's cup of low-fat sour cream and 1/3 cup of low-fat yoghurt for crème fraiche--so only around 100 calories per serving rather than crème fraiche's 10,000,000.

The Resident Breadman made lovely rolls as a side starch. These were a bit soft for our tastes, but we happily used it to sop up all the mushroom sauce. Among us, we downed nearly four bottles of bon vin rouge: two French--a Minervois and a burgundy--plus an Italian red and a Malbec from Argentina.

Our neighbors, Larry and Julie, joined us. They are betting that we don't get past recipe #5. The Son also joined us, a pleasure, of course. The Daughter had to work Christmas hours.

Prepping for #2 by #3

Mais oui, you must make the stock! Else what's the point? All of us have cooked stocks before, so the difficulty is doing it their way, not the "usual". I thought I read the recipe before I started, but then kept tripping up -- I cut the leeks in half, crosswise, before reading about cutting them into quarters. So I essentially cut them in strips (quartering lengthwise). Then I found out I was putting them into a bundle -- too late to wrap the bundle in a single leek. Still, I managed.

I assumed you truss the chicken to keep it from flopping around in the pot -- it's easier to pull it out after an hour, without getting bits of onion and carrot stuck inside it or under a drumstick. You tie up the bundle for the same reason -- those are the floppiest stuff to pull out, and it's easier to pull out as much as possible before straining.

Here are my questions: Why cut the tips off the wings and then throw them into the soup pot with the chicken? What, exactly, is a "branch" of thyme, as compared to a sprig? I assumed it was a thicker stemmed bit, with several sprigs on it.

Diverting from the Fatness
We have already concluded that we don't need 8 Tbs of butter for the veal recipe. We're planning to use half what is called for (in all recipes) and cooking spray. That should keep the flavor without making it hard to cook. I'll report back if it works. Maybe we can use even less -- but I've never cooked with veal before (I've only ever eaten it once that I know of) so I do want to get a sense of what things are supposed to taste like before altering too much.

A warning about the caramel, which I coincidentally made for Thanksgiving: it goes from clear sugar water to blackened burned in fewer than 10 seconds, after 8-10 minutes of boiling. Watch it carefully. I had to make two batches to get it right (you can use a candy thermometer, if you are lucky enough to have one -- I think the sweet spot is 375°).

If you look at the picture for "chiffonade" (how-to) on page 520 of my edition (1991), they show what appears to be Savoy Cabbage, not ordinary green cabbage as I know it. I've never cooked with it before, so I don't know if it's any different from other cabbages. I haven't located any in town yet; if I can't find any by noon I'll use ordinary.

Given Blithe's comments about help from Larousse Gastronomique (what is French "lettuce"?) I'm considering getting a copy. It's an $85 book (in the new 2001 edition), and even the older editions at Powell's, dog-eared and yellowed hard-to-read pages, at in the $40 range.