From My Paris Kitchen
Join me here for cooking adventures. My Paris kitchen is not in France but in northern Michigan, out in the country, between Leland and Northport, Michigan. Its size, however, is very Parisian! Pas de problème!
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Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Finally getting around to that chutney....
Monday, May 6, 2024
Spring Fever -- Go Wild!
Dandelions,leeks,toothwort, violets |
Fiddleheads in the woods |
Salad with carrot shavings added |
Sautéed fiddleheads with yellow violets |
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Hot or Cold -- You Choose
Start with leeks, sautéed in olive oil. |
Next, add thinly sliced (peeled) potato. |
It is "getting good," as my grandma used to say. |
Puree in blender or, for a rustic soup, simply mash. |
Add cream and heat. |
Instead of chives, I chose freshly grated nutmeg for garnish., |
Hot today, cold tomorrow -- good either way. |
Sunday, February 4, 2024
Vegan for a Day
When a gracious hostess who is also a vegan invites me to a potluck, I want to take something she will eat, even if she is making chicken for her guests, and fortunately, one of my cookbooks at home offered what I saw as a likely recipe for the event. It began with couscous, which I prepared with my old standby, Better Than Bouillon vegetable base. No saffron in my spice drawer. What to substitute? Turmeric – didn’t have that, either. (Why not? Must remedy the situation.) Curry? No, I love curry, but it wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. Luckily, I had a Moroccan spice mix on hand, Ras El Hanout, and decided that would be perfect.
My dried fruits were sliced apricots and then -- a variation from the recipe -- figs, which seemed perfectly appropriate to a North African dish. Sliced almonds and dried fruit were toasted and plumped in olive oil before being added.
I wanted a festive look for the topping and took a flyer on something I’d picked up on impulse at the store: “Salad Toppers.” The edamame and cashews gave a little crunch, while cranberries added color. A recipe that manages to be different while also being easy to prepare gets my vote, and people said they liked it, so I’ll probably do it again sometime.
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
My New Favorite Recipe for Tzimmes
(Sorry I don’t have more pictures. And sorry this is my first post since Thanksgiving, too. I have cooked, I have baked, I simply haven't posted. No excuse.)
Above was the assembled dish before it went in the oven, and it’s the only photo I took. Big mistake. Because when dinnertime rolled around, I decided this was my most successful tzimmes ever.
Most recipes for this dish call for large quantities of ingredients and feed a big crowd, but we would be only four at table – three guests and me – so I was happy to find a recipe online that began with half a pound of sweet potato rather than three pounds! Here is the ingredients list for the Traditional Rosh Hashanah Tzimmes recipe posted online at Chabad by Miriam Szokovski.
1 large Spanish onion, cut in half or quarter rounds
¼ cup oil
1 lb. carrots, sliced
½ lb. sweet potato, cubed
10 prunes, diced
1-1/2 cups orange juice
½ cup honey
½ tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. salt
Onion in tzimmes was a new ingredient to me, but the rest was familiar, so I decided to go for broke and sauté that onion to add to the mix.
My Changes
However, I pared the quantities down further and only used:
½ onion
½ sweet potato
2 carrots
I also added ¾ raw apple, sliced and diced, because I wanted that tender sweetness – and because I’ve always made tzimmes with apple. And maybe Miriam did this, too (I don’t know), but I squeezed the orange juice fresh from the orange.
Finally, the online recipe called for the dish to be simmered on the stovetop for an hour. Again, because I’ve always done it this way, I baked it in a casserole dish in a 350-degree oven. Since it is served warm, it’s something you can do ahead of your guests’ arrival, and I was glad I’d started early, because one hour wasn’t enough. An hour and a half was perfect. For the final half-hour I sprinkled just a bit of brown sugar over the top, a touch easily omitted if you don’t want the extra sweetness, but I highly recommend topping with sauteed sliced almonds right before serving. The crunch was a nice contrast to the rest of the soft, sweet vegetables and fruits. And I loved the onion! Thank you, Miriam!
Kitchen tip: Microwave oven makes a good overnight breadbox. |
Saturday, November 26, 2022
When you had the turkey dinner five days earlier....
Stock in the making |
Get up at 5 a.m. Peel and clean shrimp. Add shells and tails to chicken stock with garlic cloves, bay leaf, and a few slices of onion to boil for stock.
Roux |
Beautiful stock! |
Now go walk the dog while your stock cools and then come back and clean your house.
Holy Trinigy |
The Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking is onion, bell pepper, and celery. Sauté in butter. Add sausage and cook some more.
Before |
Now it's all together except for the shrimp. and those don't need long to cook, so wait until everyone has had a glass of wine. Finally, when the time is right, add shrimp and cook until opaque. Serve. Then forget to reach for your camera and neglect to photograph the bowls of rice and shrimp-and-sausage gumbo, because it's time to eat, after you take a moment to give thanks for food and friends.
After |
When everyone has left, realize that your photo-essay is incomplete. Let it go. No one cares.
Leftovers |
It's okay to depart from menu traditions. The important traditions are being together and being thankful.
Monday, August 1, 2022
NOT "Crackers over the Sink"
Inspired by red gooseberries |
One of my friends had her 85th birthday recently, and I decided to make a special birthday dinner for the two of us. We enjoy meals on my front porch together, often remembering when there were four of us, not just two. (We share a lot of memories.) So why not an extra-special evening? And there were those gooseberries, after all, calling for something out of the ordinary.
So I put together a dinner plan starting with dessert, the most ambitious item on my menu: gooseberry tart. Gooseberries have to be “topped and tailed” (stem and blossom ends removed), which is time-consuming but also a basically meditative task perfect for a summer afternoon. Instead of adding sugar to the berries, I mixed in about a third of a little jar of plum jam.
For the shell, I looked at half a dozen recipes and cobbled mine together from bits and pieces of all of them. I didn’t have almonds to grind for the pastry (that would be nice another time) but did have powdered sugar. And we might as well say here that this pastry is known as pâte sucrée. Chunks of butter worked with fingers into flour, sugar, and a pinch of salt, and I added a whole egg (though some people use only the yolk or no egg at all). While the sweet dough rested in the refrigerator, I worked outside in the yard for an hour, planting what will be a lovely daylily border, I’m sure, when the plants fill in.
Later, while prebaking the tart shell I cooked a batch of rigatoni, and you could call what I made with it mac ‘n’ cheese, I suppose, at least a variation thereon: basic bechamel sauce but made with cream rather than milk and fresh nutmeg grated in; then, for the cheese, raclette. We are very fortunate to have fine raclette made right here on the peninsula at Leelanau Cheese, and I’d bought that at the farmers market on Friday, too. My cheesy pasta I baked in cute little ramekins, with extra raclette on top, but the cuteness was nothing compared to the taste. I warned my friend, “One bite, and you’ll feel a need to go to confession!” She laughed but agreed after she tasted.
We had the salad I invented a couple weeks ago and love for its cool, freshing summer tastes and textures: tomato (this one an heirloom variety from the farmers market), cucumber, blueberries, and pinenuts, with balsamic vinaigrette. We had poached (steamed, really) salmon and green beans with curried mayonnaise, with the rigatoni-raclette on the side. And for dessert we had gooseberry tart generously heaped with freshly whipped real cream.
(Cold, the next day) |
Half-eaten serving! |
Another friend told me the other day that someone had asked her, after her husband died, if she was fixing regular meals for herself or “eating crackers over the sink.” I certainly don’t fix meals like this when I’m alone (or even for company more than once a year, if that!), but once in a blue moon, for an old friend, it felt like the right time to pull out all the stops -- which meant I also did better than crackers over the sink the following day, when my next evening's dinner recapitulated everything but the whipped cream and so, finally, I got a few half-decent photos to illustrate this post. Because while I often photograph while I'm in the process of cooking and baking, I also often forget to photograph the finished dishes in all their glory. "Did you take a picture of that?" the Artist used to ask me. But now no one asks.