For a family dinner, I was recently looking around for a good way to serve carrots, and I spotted a Pierre Franey recipe on the NY Times recipe website. It was both simple and very tasty. 1-1/2 lbs. of carrots, peeled and thinly sliced ½ tsp. sugar ¼ cup water 1 Tbs. lemon juice 2 Read More …
Coquilles St. Jacques is a French classic which I used to make with some regularity, but had not recently. I spotted a recipe in Saveur magazine which included mushrooms as well as scallops, and since Carol is quite fond of sautéed mushrooms, I thought it would be a nice welcome back dinner after her visit Read More …
Back in February, the Wall St. Journal published a “Slow Food Fast” recipe about making a variation of salad nicoise suitable for the winter, since it used only pantry ingredients and broccoli, which is readily available in the winter. I thought this was a good idea since it was a salad based on a vegetable Read More …
This is the version of baguettes that I have been making the most often lately. The starter was from breadtopia.com and I followed their Almost No Knead Baguette recipe except that I substituted 250 g.of the sourdough starter for the poolish in the original recipe. (The sourdough starter has 100% hydration, i.e. equal weights of Read More …
This was adapted from Mimi Thorisson’s new book, French Country Cooking: Meals and Moments from a Village in the Vineyards. The main change I made was cooking the pork sous-vide at 140 degrees rather than panfrying it. I also forgot to soak the prunes before making the sauce, so I cooked them longer Read More …
I was in a Middle Eastern grocery last week and saw that they had rabbit in the freezer case. That inspired me to make this French classic. This version is adapted from Marie-Pierre Moine’s excellent book Cuisine Grand-Mere: Traditional French Home Cooking. As indicated by the title of the book, this is not Read More …
Aioli is essentially a garlic mayonnaise made with olive oil. I needed some for dressing for a grilled corn salad, and turned to Serious Eats for a recipe. The two key steps are to use an immersion blender (or food processor) to make an initial emulsion with a neutral oil, and then to whisk in Read More …
This simplified version of a classic cake from Brittany originated in Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s book Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World, as further refined by Food and Wine magazine, and then as I further adapted it. I made it the first time per the recipe with Read More …
In the book Julie and Julia, author Julie Powell sets out to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In the movie based on the book, I think that one of the first dishes she tries is chicken breasts in cream, which is indeed a very tasty dish. I made this Read More …
On my latest trip to Houston I decided to watch a Craftsy class, The Art of Caramel, and when I returned home, I wanted to make something from it, so I chose a classic, crème caramel (or flan). This version turned out well, although I did use a few pans and bowls making it. Read More …