Spring Doldrums?

Very little activity on HotDish recently. I haven't had time to update the menu to the next lesson (which is Cheese Souffle, Poached Salmon Trout and a Clafouti made with Cherries). The menu is rather high in eggs, as usual, and because it was Easter Weekend, we were already rather overrun with egg dishes of other sorts, so we've put it off a week.

Instead we had a good old traditional meal -- for Thanksgiving, that is: turkey and stuffing, roasted vegetables, salad, with coconut cream pie for dessert. I used the Cordon Bleu method for cooking the turkey, turning it every 30 minutes, and it was a splendid bird. I also sort of roasted the veggies a la Cordon Bleu, except I refused to pre-cook everything (which I should have done, because in the end we had to hold dinner 15 minutes for them to finish).

Ne pas Cordon Bleu -- Cordon Au'Vert!

A day late and a dollar short, but here's my entry for the St. Patrick's day feast we ate last night. Green beer, corned beef and boiled veggies, with homemade Irish Currant Loaf with lots o' butter on the side. (I don't know why the recipe for the bread isn't called Irish Soda Bread, because it's identical, aside from being half whole-wheat, and not calling for the optional caraway seeds.)



And a moment of silence in memory of Father Bleu, who would have turned 85 today.

Not-Quite Real-time Cordon Bleu blogging by Vivi

Saturday night
I started Lesson #14 Saturday night after finishing dinner and dishes. I couldn't find any candied orange peel (for the orange ice cream) at the store, so I decided to make my own. I hadn't looked very hard -- I remember Blithe making candied citrus peel (was it grapefruit or orange?) in married student housing in St. Anthony Park, back in The Day. I also started the old-fashioned No-Knead Bread, (since my copy of the infamous Artisan Breads in 5 Dollars a Day hasn't come in from the library yet) so I had to get that stirred together 18 hours before second rise.

Sunday morning
This morning I completed the candied orange peel, which then required to air-dry for an hour (end of Joy of Cooking recipe) and then to macerate in Cointreau for another hour (beginning of the Cordon Bleu recipe -- I used my homemade 44 instead of Cointreau). Then I took a break from Cordon Bleu and made Breakfast Burritos for the gang who go out to play soccer at 8:30 a.m. every Sunday (from a recipe in The Week magazine).


Sunday afternoon
Half the afternoon was spent badgering, urr, encouraging Boy-Child to write up his Science Fair project. The other half seemed to go to making the Orange Ice Cream. First the base, which was egg yolks, sugar, and hand-squeezed orange juice (no diary in this ice "cream"). Then the chilling of the base. Then the freezing in the ice cream making machine (which has a place of honor on a drop-down shelf built by the resident Bleus Brother, outside the back door). Then the continued chilling of the thickened ice cream in the freezer.

And then the pureeing of the strawberries for the sauce. I used frozen (the fresh are hit -- bullseye hit -- or miss, these days). The recipe calls for something like 1 cup of confectioner's sugar with the puree, but remembering that Cordon Bleu is often too sweet for my taste, I used perhaps 1/4 of that (after ascertaining that the puree did need some sweetening). And It Was Good.

As early afternoon slid into late afternoon, I baked the No-Knead Bread and started on the main dishes for dinner.


Late afternoon, early evening
I'm still not having much luck with mussels. The Coquilles Saint Jacques Dieppoise was supposed to be mussels, shrimp and scallops -- but I discovered that the stink in the fridge was that every single one of my mussels were dead by the time I went to cook them. I bought them only yesterday, but I guess Fred Meyer is not the place to buy mussels. (Also, they were picked up early in my shopping run, and they may simply have gotten too warm while I finished my purchases. I feel badly for all those wasted little lives.) In the end, the dish was good, but I think it would have been better with the mussels -- the sauce (in Lesson #6) of mussels, shallots, butter, wine and parsley was amazing.

However, the Foie de Veau (or in my case, Pork Loin Chops) was delicious, and quite easy to make (relatively speaking). It is sautéed meat, with a sauce of the drippings in the pan seared with apple cider vinegar and beef broth (supposed to be veal stock, but you take what you can get). On the side, roasted potatoes and apples. Really really good potatoes and apples, and the meat was delicious, too. I fried up one slice of calf's liver, to try. We all dutifully tasted it (including, surprisingly Girl-Child, who hated it, but at least she tried), and gratefully returned to the pork. The sauce was perfect with the dark flavor of the liver, but you have to really like liver (which I don't).

The Porc au Vinaigre et aux Deux Pommes gets very high marks from the whole household, on a par with our very favorites, the Truite Amandine and the Fish Cassoulet.

Sunday night
We finished off with the ice cream, in its pool of strawberry sauce. It didn't entirely freeze hard, but even in softserve format it worked particularly well. I do not as a rule care for fruit ice creams, yet I went back for seconds, and even for thirds, and now am doubting I will ever fit into a nice dress for Daughter-of-The-Bride's wedding in only 2.5 months.

We think this dessert would be especially good in deep summer, when it's very hot outside -- on one of those days when we take hours to drift through dinner, and drink a whole pitcher of Sangria between us.

Back on track?

Yo, mes soeurs! Are we back on track for this weekend?

Frankly, I'm not so sure about the Foie de Veau -- intrigued, but I expect in this household, a main dish of calf's liver for 6 will have, after everyone has eaten their fill, about 5.5 servings left over. I am thinking of cooking one calf's liver (beef liver, actually) this way in a small side pan, and substituting another meat for the rest of it. Perhaps pork chops (I know, it seems a travesty, but the flavors would probably go together nicely) or maybe pork tenderloin?

But the starter and dessert sounds good! The meal needs a veg and a starch, from my point of view, too. Easy enough.

Any thoughts?

Irritably Crediting Cordon Bleu with Taste

Perhaps the primary lesson I appear to have learned so far from cooking the Cordon Bleu, is how bad food can taste when it's poorly cooked, or cheap. I am now halfway through my trip away, in a small town. I would expect that a small town would have one good restaurant, but I haven't found it yet. The recommended seafood restaurant used frozen vegetables in its seafood wine sauté, and the wine was cheap and the seafood may have been frozen too. I don't think I could have told before that the food needed something. Another's fish fry had bland batter and too much of it. I bought some locally cooked sandwich bread and have been eating in my room but the bread has as much taste as cardboard. The canned soup I'm eating lacks that extra dimension in the broth.

I have just this evening learned of an apparently superior Mexican restaurant in town. I will try that tomorrow.

How will I stay down on the farm, now that I've tasted Paris?

Hiatus on Cordon Bleu?

I will be away for the next two Sundays (and chose to pack and watch the Oscars this Sunday rather than cook). Will you sisters be proceeding forward or catching up and re-visiting favorites in the meantime?

I'll be back and ready to cook on March 16 -- although I may substitute an entirely different main dish for the Calves Liver (due for Menu 14). I believe I will face a mutiny if I serve Calves Liver to this household.

We haven't written Cordon Bleu poetry for a long time. Perhaps we could blog some for the next couple of weeks.

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

The Bride Makes Jelly Smiles

Not Cordon Bleu, but fun. Start by halving 4 or 5 blood oranges and squeezing out 3/4 cups of juice or thereabouts. Then with the edge of a spoon, scrape out the insides of the halves down to the white and set the on a tray. Do try not to damage the shells too much, as you will need them.

In a bowl, put one package of unflavored gelatin in 1/4 cup of cold water for a minute. Heat the orange juice until nearly boiling and add sugar or honey to taste, if needed. Mix the juice into the gelatin, then fill as many of the orange halves as you can. I filled 5. It's OK if they don't fill to the top exactly, they can be trimmed later.

Chill for 3 hours, then slice into smiles.

Recipe from Apartment Therapy the kitchen, online

Roast Chicken Redux (The Bride)

In Menu 1 we roasted a chicken. The recipe is almost the same as the way I always cooked chicken, except that the chicken was trussed and cooked in a small baking pan, and turned every 20 minutes. OH, and I always used a lemon, but the CB recipe had thyme.

Ever since then, I've trussed every chicken I've roasted - just for practice. Last night I followed the menu #1 recipe exactly. It was so easy this time - I hardly had to look at the book. I'm getting to be an old hand at trussing.

Next time I'm going to use thyme AND lemon. That should be nice. And I like the lemon-y goodness in the reduced juice at the end.

I bought a pineapple today and I'm going to make the pineapple sorbet from an early menu over the weekend. I may not hollow out the pineapple this time, though.

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.

Sisters, a suggestion

Vivi and Peaceable - how about if we don't do menu 13 this coming week. Instead, let's use the time to revisit things which we have already done. I'm feeling that I'd like to review some things that either didn't work out, or that we especially liked. And it gives Peaceable some extra time to catch up.

I can't remember exactly when we started, but it was before Thanksgiving, so we've been galloping forward for 3-ish months. It seems like a good time to stop and reassess what we've learned.

Then, we can move forward the next week.

Any thoughts? Any other ideas?

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.

The Bride looks for a Dunnett link to Cordon Bleu

According to the Cordon Bleu entry in Wikipedia:

"The origin of the school comes from L'Ordre des Chevaliers du Saint Esprit, an elite group of French knights that was created in 1578. Each member was awarded the Cross of the Holy Spirit, which hung from a blue ribbon. According to one story, the group became known for their extravagant and luxurious banquets, known as "cordon bleu." While these dinners ended with the French Revolution, the name remained synonymous with excellent cooking.

At least that's one theory proposed. In 1578 - Lymond would have been.... what? in his 50's? Surely a Marshal of France, even one living in Scotland, would have been dined with them sometime.

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.

Peaceable plugs away and completes #8

I made the onion soup from menu 8 on Friday night, a fairly straight-up recipe. It was pretty, though... well, not so much dull as very delicate. I think the onion needed to be sauteed a bit longer, and we needed better cheese. But the soup had great potential and didn't break the points budget. It was definitely an example of what The Bride observed in an earlier thread--many of these recipes are ways of serving plain foods in fancy ways. Onion, bread, wine, cheese. What could be simpler?

Tonight, I made the Truite aux amandes, although, alas, in the end it turned into Truite sans amandes because I remembered the almonds only after we sat down to eat. The little bag of almonds sitting in the ingredients pile next to the butter, parsley and lemons might as well have been left in the shopping cart at Lunds. Oddly, I remembered the slice of lemon. I remembered the parsley garnish. Evidently my subconscious was stunned enough at the prospect of sauting almonds in 10 TBL of butter that it just drew a blank. In addition to forgetting the butter-sauted almonds, I reduced the fat content of the recipe by using butter-flavored canola spray instead of 3 Tbl of butter plus 1 Tbl of oil. I'm sure that the flavor would have been much richer with butter and nuts, but it was good without it too.

Arthritic, hobbled Hobbes was like a cat-possessed. The trout seemed to put a spirit of youth in him. He performed acrobatic feats to reach the counter where I was preparing the trout. When I stood up to get the salt, he moved like a flash and almost got some off my plate.

We served the trout with the pommes à l'Anglaise, roast asparagus and delicious baguette made from "artisan bread in five minutes a day." I had a French white, and Tom had a red.

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.

Vivi swans around Menu 11

Sunday was the Super Bowl. Curiously, the three adult women watched the game. The Brother stuck his head in the room occasionally; Boy-child got excited and bored and ran outside to play his own game of football; and Girl-child, somewhat predictably, preferred her Princess video game to the Match of Champions.

We all participated in the Nacho pig-out, however. No Cordon Bleu that night.

I made the vegetables on Saturday, actually. They weren't that difficult (although did use every pan in the house). I only made the leeks, and carrots, and green beans instead than cauliflower. I used canned rather than fresh winter tomatoes, and halved the marinade recipe. The leeks were surprisingly good, and of them all, those are the ones I'd happily make again.

The sole was excellent, as I expected it to be. I have made something like it before, without the extra butter-lemon sauce. I have not completely mastered sauteing at high heat without burning the butter, however. Had to go through two butter melts, and filled the main floor with burnt greasy smoke.

My swans. I don't know why, but they did not puff in cooking -- the pastries in the photo are all about 1.5 inches long (you can see how long and graceful the swan's neck is -- the recipe called for an S shape 2 inches long). Not only were they almost too small to manipulate, they were heavy in texture. I'm sad about this, because the gruyère puffs cooked perfectly, and I had really been looking forward to the playful form of the dish.

My chantilly cream was stiff peaks when I beat it, but it softened before I got to the assembly, and the whole thing was a sweet but soupy mess. But the swans, delicate and tiny, were pretty.

So I made two swans only, and turned the rest into éclairs. Because the pastry didn't puff, there was no air holes to squeeze cream into, so I just spread it between pastries and hoped the chocolate would camouflage the mess.

Here are the possible reasons the pastry didn't puff: I could not get the dough to the point described: "shiny and the dough slowly drips off the spoon in a point". I added almost the full 4 eggs called for, and finally gave up when it was shiny and the dough slowly dripped off the spoon in a sort of roughly pointy thick glop.

So: too much egg? Not beaten hard enough? Too dry (needed more egg?) Cooked too fast on the stove? (Perhaps the element was too hot.) Or was it that I used insulated cookie sheets, so the heat distributed evenly, when it shouldn't have? Is pàte a choux trickier than I realized, and hard to make on a rainy day with high humidity? Or am I just a bad pastry chef -- I certainly have had some disasters this last month or so.

Lesson 11: Preparing sole, marinated vegetables

Petits Légumes à la Grecque
(Marinated vegetables with lemon and coriander)

Sole Belle Meunière
(Pan-fried sole with nut-brown butter and mushrooms)

Cygnes Chantilly
(Choux pastry swans)

Cooked about Sunday, February 3, 2008

Peaceable cheats on #7

Have you have noticed how very fat-filled these recipes are? Jeez. I calculated the points total for the Pintadeaux and, alone, it used up my entire weeks worth of points. And the profiteroles, so highly recommended, yummy looking, are even worse. I might as well just eat a stick of butter and skip the effort. The dessert? The Strawberry Bavarian cream...mmmmm but pure heavy cream. So tonight I put down my foot and said nuts to Cordon Bleu directions. I just winged it.

Skipped the profiteroles. Later. Skipped the Strawberry bavarian cream for now. Ditto. I'll definitely try both of these for the techniques eventually. But tonight I concentrated on the Pintadeaux au chou. And I cheated on that. I skipped all butter. Skipped the Polish sausage. And I skipped the lardons. Used local cabbage and skipped all the prep.

We would see lardons for sale at the Carmes market. Neat to know that one can make them, those yummy, salty bits of fat, but no, I will never use them. And frankly, the pintade that we bought in France--a wonderful dark meat flavor--is not replicable here. The closest thing to it, I believe, is dark chicken meat. So instead of a whole bird, I used boneless, skinless chicken thighs.

I sauted the onions and carrots in their own juices, added the cabbage, bouquet garni, salt and pepper, etc., and let it simmer for an hour.

While that was simmering, I fried four slices of low-fat bacon and mixed the chicken thighs (8 of them) in the bacon grease, and slathered them with garlic, thyme (overlooked the bay leaf), salt and pepper and roasted them, along with some yam chunks for 1/2 hour.

Then I served up the vegies with the roasted chicken breasts alongside. The vegetarian got a sweet cabbage dish which she ate with a slice of the Breadman's latest loaf. The meat eaters got a flavorful dish that was only 6 points. Okay, so it wasn't Cordon Bleu, but it was tasty.