WE MASTERED THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING!

Another gourmet dinner prepared by accomplished cooks who know how to make the dish shine in spite of issues with the recipe. It was a very impressive meal that began with my appetizer, Paté de Canard en Croute (Boned Stuffed Duck Baked in Pastry Crust). Since I took you step-by-step through the process in my previous post, I won’t repeat it. I did not have enought time to totally chill the dish and the crust was very tough when I cut through it to remove the top. Almost inedible. Willie’s photo shows you what it looked like on the plate sans crust. You might notice that the skin over the paté is almost non-existent. Remember how the trussing strings created a puffy loaf before it went into the pastry crust and oven? All gone! Bill chose a bottle of Regnie 2009 Beaujolais Domaine Des Braves that turned out to be the perfect pairing for the savory paté. This Beaujolais was very hardy and spicy and stood up to the paté and accompanying grainy Dijon mustard and cornichons. Bravo Bill!

The good news is that it turned out pretty well and everyone liked it. We discussed ways of making it without the “en croute” part or without the duck skin since it is such a time consuming recipe. Maybe if we baked it without the pastry crust at a lower temperature, it might work? The pastry makes a very dramatic presentation but is it an unnecessary step? The duck skin is a much better covering than pork fat or the cowl fat, in MHO, anyway but, again, deboning and removing the meat from a duck is very time consuming. I suspect it is all done with a purpose and the crust was much more palatable once it had chilled completely by the next morning.

Our next course was a traditional French dish that we’ve all grown to love. Soupe A L’Oignon Gratinee (Onion Soup) that Annie prepared. The soup was rich with onions that were caramelized for an hour and topped with a crispy thickly sliced crouton and cheese. We got a second slice of baguette with which to sop up any soup left in the bowl…slurp! Bill chose a rich chardonnay to go with the soup and he succeeded with a Bernardus, 2008, Chardonnay from Monterey County. Another perfect choice!

Our next course was a combination of several dishes that I thought would complement each other:
Daube de Boeuf A La Provencale (Braised Beef with Wine & Vegetables, with a Garlic & Anchovy Sauce)
Pommes Anna (Potatoes Anna)
Navets A La Champenoise (Turnip Casserole)
Choux de Bruxelles Braisés (Brussel Sprouts Braised in Cream)

Our timing was a little off so we served Marianne’s beef dish with the potato. The Braised Beef was very rich and the sauce was thick with delicious vegetables and spices. It was marinated in wine overnight and then braised for hours so you can imagine how all the flavors were melded. Annie was surprised that the carrots hadn’t disappeared after all that braising and were still there in small pieces. Willie’s Pommes Anna was such an artful presentation and pretty easy to prepare so, speaking for myself, will be a way I'll make them more often. What can go wrong with potatoes, butter and salt & pepper? Yum-m-m. You can see from the photo that it also made a beautiful presentation on the table! It went well with the beef. Julia recommends a rice pilaf that would be a nice accompaniment too. Bill poured a very unique wine for these two dishes and again, a good choice. Bill was batting .300 tonight, and selected the best wines to compliment each dish! For this course, it was a Chapelle De Maillac 2007 Grenache Rhone. I typically don’t like Rhones but this bottle may change my mind. Young Rhones are usually too harsh for me and I avoid them, preferring Rhones that are at least 20 years old. This one was spicy, rich, full and well-balanced with fruit and smooth tannins.

We had the two vegetables dishes together. Sandy made the Turnip Casserole with Rutabagas instead of yellow turnips. I love rutabagas so I wasn’t unhappy with her choice. I was very curious about how this dish would taste. It is made with cubes of pancetta and even has a little flour in it to make the sauce thicker and allow it to cling to the rutabagas. I liked it a lot and I think everyone was surprised with this dish.

The Brussel Sprouts that Jeffrey prepared was what its title implies…creamy, rich and soft brussel sprouts. It’s not easy to pair any wine with brussel sprouts and especially since the wines were chosen for the 4 dishes to be served together. Bill selected a 22-year old Forman Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa to go with the main course and sides. It did not go well with just the vegetables but as a wine, it was wonderful! Bill had selected it to go with the combined dishes of beef and sides and it was the perfect choice for those combined flavors. Ric Forman makes his wines in a Bordeaux style that I love. It still has the signature California fruit but in his wine, the fruit is not forward but tastes more like a blended wine. He is a very careful vineyard master and winemaker. He doesn’t produce a lot and as a result, he is able to exert maximum control over how each lot is made. It definitely pays off.

Bill gave each of a genetic chart of wines and we learned that all wine grapes originated from a grape variety called Traminer. It was an fascinating chart showing how each variety morphed into new varieties.

After this short break, we were served our desserts. Sharon made a Gâteau Á L'orange Á La Créme D'orange (Orange Sponge Cake with Orange Buttercream Filling) . She made this cake three times and was unhappy with the results but brought it anyway. She didn't like how grainy the frosting looked. I thought the sponge cake was light and the Orange Buttercream recipe a delicious and easy way to make a buttercream. She made the orange curd for the filling and then added a softened cube of butter to a cup of it to make the frosting. I liked it enough to try making it myself for the next time I bring a dessert somewhere. Post-note: I did try it on Wed. and doubled the icing recipe and heated an off-set spatula to smooth out the frosting once it covered the cake. I think that worked.

Sandi made a Tarte au Citron (Citrus Tart with Glazed Lemon Slices and Lemon Peel) from Julia’s dessert cookbook. (sorry, couldn't find an online recipe to link to for you) She tried the Lemon Tart from Julia’s “Mastering the Art of…” but didn’t like how that one tasted. This one had a lemon marmalade glaze that actually used apricot jam as the sweetener. I liked the tart slices of the Meyer lemons layered on top. She said it was a difficult tart to slice because the curd clumped rather than sliced like a custard. It was probably hard to slice through the lemon slices as well. It was delicious and everyone enjoyed it and really didn't notice the presentation problems the two women had with their desserts. The wine star of the evening turned out to be the Italian wine that Bill found to complement the desserts, Nivole 2004 Moscato d’Asti Michael Chiarlo. Everyone loved the wine and found that the spritz and the citrus-y flavors cleansed the sweetness of the desserts on our palates. Even Sandy like this wine!

Once again, a memorable meal and we all took home our favorite leftovers as a faint memory of another feast. Willie took a photo of all the wines we tried this evening. It helps to know what the label looks like if you decide to try any of them.

AND, the best news is because her recipes have been around since the early 60’s most of them are online albeit sometimes in an abbreviated format but the ingredients are always the same. To view the recipe, click on the the title of the dish. Also to see a larger image of any dish in each of the posts, just click on the image.

Our next challenge is a Mexican dinner a la any Rick Bayless cookbook.

¡Buen provecho!

Pièce de Résistance

This dish is the epitome of the phrase “pièce de résistance,” not as in the definition of being the highlight of a meal but as a literal translation of the dish that resists!

I am not an accomplished gourmet cook…I would define myself as an intermediate level cook. I’m willing to try complicated recipes but don’t always understand what I’m supposed to do if the instructions aren’t detailed. It’s probably why I love Thomas Kellar cookbooks because his instructions are detailed on a micro level. For everyday cooking, I don’t need details but for complex recipes, I need all the help I can get!

Paté de Canard en Croute (Boned Stuffed Duck Baked in Pastry Crust) á la Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol II, was the dish I chose to make for our cookbook dinner. To be honest, I made it just to see if I could do it. I know how to debone a chicken so I figured I could debone a duck. I had the butcher grind the veal and pork for me but if I ever make this recipe again, I’d do it myself on my mother’s ancient hand meat grinder. Do you remember the device that clamps on to your kitchen table, made out of pot metal, that cranks by hand and magically pushes out ground meat?

I separated this recipe, that takes up 8 pages of her cookbook, into two days.

Day 1:
Mixed the ground veal and pork with the port, cognac, herbs and seasonings and refrigerated it while I worked on the duck. This was probably the easiest part of the whole dish. It will take more time if grind the meat myself but still, pretty easy peasy.
I then tackled deboning the duck. You can see the bones on the left and skin and meat on the right side. Julia left the last wing joint and the leg joint connected to the skin but I decided to remove those bones so what you see is a totally boneless duck. It’s time consuming but if you have a very sharp boning knife, it’s pretty easy. Kind of gross image but that's how it is.

I spent about 40 minutes removing all the pin feathers that are left on the skins of supposedly dressed ducks. I used a tweezer to do this.

I then removed the meat as she instructs and you can see from the photo how much duck meat is removed at the top of the photo and the now bare skin of the duck.

Once done, I rolled up the skin and wrapped it tightly with plastic wrap and placed it in the refrigerator.

I cubed the duck meat into pretty small pieces and added them to the veal/pork mixture and returned the bowl into the refrigerator.

The part took me about 3 hours to complete from start to finish.

Day 2:
I made the pastry dough. Her method of mixing the flour with the butter and Crisco and eggs and water is not how I would do it in the future but decided to follow her instructions. She used the traditional French method of using your fingers to initially mix the dry ingredients with the butter/Crisco together. Then after adding the egg/water mixture she has you take 2 tablespoons of the mixture and blend them, two tablespoons at a time and then knead the dough until you have a smooth ball. And then refrigerate for two hours.
There is a flaw in her recipe because she calls for 2 eggs in the list of ingredients but nowhere in her instructions does she tell me what to do with the eggs. I looked online to see how other people dealt with this flaw and most people didn’t even mention this error. One woman said she combined the eggs and water and said that it worked. She also said that the dough doesn’t turn out well without the eggs. You’d think Knopf ‘s editors would have discovered this mistake in later editions and corrected it….

While the dough was refrigerated I brought out the duck skin and while Julie didn’t say to do this, I sewed up the hole left by the butchers. It’s the entrance to the cavity where the neck, giblets, liver are placed inside the duck. I couldn’t figure how to stuff the duck with that gaping tear in the skin. I also decided the sew up the skin by the wings and legs since there were holes at the ends of the limbs. I used thicker button thread to do the sewing and a curved needle to make it easier on me.

I then shaped the veal/pork/duck meat into a loaf on top of the duck skin and wrapped the skin around the loaf. Then, more sewing to totally encase the loaf in duck skin. And then the whole loaf is trussed with white string. Note how puffy the duck looks in between the trussing strings? It will magically disappear as the duck cooks.

I then browned the duck in my largest skillet and you can see that the skin is still puffed out around the trussing strings.

Now the hardest part for me. Roll out the pastry dough into two ovals with which to encase the duck. I got it done after a fashion and so far my duck looks pretty much like Julia’s step-by-step drawings, as you can see. I brushed on the egg/water glaze and popped it into the oven for 2 hours, cool it and chill it.
The interesting part about this process, is other than making sure the loaf reaches the temperature of 180º, I have no idea what has gone on inside the crust. I did use a basting bulb and removed as much of the fat that seeped out of the crust onto the pan.

This day I spent 4 hours before I put the duck in the refrigerator to cool.

I cut open the crust as Julia instructs and lifted off the cover and the duck skin had shrunk to fit tightly over the pate…like magic! I removed all the trussing strings and the stitching. I tasted the crust because after all, it had butter, eggs in it but it was very hard and tough…in a word, inedible*. But the duck wrapped paté was very savory and other than the fact that I would grind the meat myself in order to get it to finer ground, I was very happy with the results. I served the slices with cornichons, a dab of mustard and slices of baguette.

Is all this effort worth it in order to serve the Pièce de Résistance? Yes! Will I do it again? Maybe…and then again, maybe not.

To see the dish in all of it's glory and a photograph taken by a professional photographer, you'll have to see it in it's role in our Mastering the Art of French Cooking Cookbook Dinner. I'll write that post as soon as I get the photos from Willie, who is enrolled in a photo class and is improving his skills as a food photographer! We are so fortunate to have Willie in our club because I for sure would not take the effort he takes to make our dinners look as delicious as they taste.

* NOTE: I tried the crust the next day and it was softer and actually tasted pretty good so I think we tried to eat it before it had thoroughly chilled last night. I ran out of time to chill it as long as it should have so it's something to remember if you ever try this dish.

Yummm!

I am always trying to find new ways to enjoy vegetables. I think my resistance to vegetables is that to make them interesting, they require a lot of work and for all that work, the results are not great.

This month, Fine Cooking came out with an intriguing recipe, well, actually several recipes. I tried one of them that uses cane vinegar, more out of curiosity but did not like the results so I won’t go into that recipe.

However, there was a wonderful recipe that uses TEFF FLOUR. I’ve never used it before…in fact, I had never even heard of it! Teff is the smallest grain and therefore you get the most fibre from this tasty flour. The recipe is: Swiss Chard, Sweet Potato, and Feta Tart in a Teff Crust. (just click on the dish’s title to get to the website with the recipe) This is the photo from the magazine’s website. Their photo isn't a good representation of the wonderful colors in this tart. The combination of the orange sweet potatoes, the dark green of the swiss chard (I used red chard), the bright white of the goat cheese and the dark caramelized onions sprinkled on top is a beautiful presentation.

I used regular creamy goat cheese since I had it on hand instead of feta and I liked the resulting texture. This recipe takes a bit of time (like 2 hours) but is a delicious vegetarian(not vegan though, since it uses 2 eggs)dish I plan to use for a main course for my vegetarian friends. Yea!! Finally, I have a couple of dishes I can use for vegetarian main courses! (The other one I like is the Zucchini & Basil Filo w/ Pine Nuts I made from the Greens Restaurant’s cookbook dinner in 2009.)

I like the nutty flavor that the teff flour adds to the crust so I’m thinking of using this crust recipe for other savory tarts that I make. Even Bill liked it so it’s a sure winner! The other reason it’s a winner is that it is filled with vegetables that are so-o-o good for you AND it’s 490 calories for a pretty hefty slice since it's an 11" tart and serves 8. This photo is of the one I made...of course I almost forgot to take it so it's only a part of the tart!

Give it a try and let me know if you liked it too.

Unlikely Culinary Adventure

After our DAT experience at Garibaldi’s on Presidio, we had dinner with our friends, John and Peter, at Bar Agricole, in SF. I encourage you to try this place. A limited menu because they only serve what is fresh or in their own garden but every dish was fabulous! I had the best game hen I’ve ever eaten and Bill even liked the beet dish! We ordered several desserts and shared tastes. It’s the first time that I’ve liked all of them. In fact, I’m going to try preparing the blood orange sherbert with blood orange granita this weekend. If you are ever in the City, give this place a try!

Sometimes our culinary adventures occur in the most unlikely places! Last Friday, Bill and I ate lunch at the California Café in the Stanford Shopping Center (behind Nordstroms). We meet with our First Friday Wine Group each month . It’s been a regular meeting place for this group for over 10 years and the fare there has been predictable and decent. Not fabulous but not bad and they have been more than kind and generous with our group so we’re pretty loyal diners.

HOWEVER, this past Friday, the Executive Chef, Mark Pettyjohn, offered to prepare a 4-course lunch for us rather than our usual ordering off the standard menu. What a totally unexpected surprise!! The meal was of gourmet quality and prepared with innovation and to perfection. I’ll share the menu with you and wines the group brought to drink with each course, because you too can have this great adventure for an unbelievably low price (keep reading)!

Our first course was a Seared Day Boat Scallop, served over Parsnip Puree, with a circle of Vanilla Beurre Blanc. The scallop was melt-in-your mouth seared. I love parsnips and found that the puree was the right foil for the scallop. He added a little leaf of frisée that would seem rather insignificant but it added just a nice touch of crispness to the otherwise smooth mouth feel of the scallop and puree. We had two rich buttery style chardonnays with this dish. One was a wine you can only buy at the winery, a 2008 The Mountain Winery Chardonnay. If you have ever been to the Mountain Winery outdoor concerts in the Saratoga hills, you may have purchased a bottle. Jeffrey makes this wine for them so while not a Mount Eden wine, it has that wonderful "Jeffrey" signature to it. The other Chardonnay was a 2008 Rhys Winery that is also from the Santa Cruz Mountains and also went well with the scallops.

Our next course was a Roasted Pork Tenderloin, served with Caramelized Apple, Cider-Coriander Reduction. The pork tenderloin was still pale pink in the center, moist, tender--how I think pork should be prepared. The caramelized apple was a nice complement to the pork as was the cider-coriander reduction. I liked the very fine 2008 Blanc fume de Pouilly Sauvignon Blanc, Domaine Didier Dagueneau from France because it cut the sweetness of the dish but I was in the minority. Others in the group thought that a pinot noir would have been better but I don’t think the pinots would have stood up to the sweetness of the caramelized apple and reduction.

Next we had Grilled Portobello Mushrooms over Goat Cheese Polenta, and Truffled Mushroom Jus dribbled around the edge of the plate. He sprinkled some white truffle oil over the dish that added a nice aroma to the dish since the truffles in the dish were Oregon truffles that don’t have the earthy aroma that Italian truffles do. Several people commented that this was the best presentation of Portobello mushrooms that they’ve ever had (I agree!). We had an Italian 2007 Icardi Nej Pinot Noir, Langhe Rosso and a 1985 Saint-Joseph Red Rhone, Le Grand Pompee with this dish and even tried a New Zealand 2001 Martinborough Vineyard Pinot Noir that was generously added to our repertoire but none of them were quite the perfect pairing. Of what we had, the Rhone came the closest.

Our main entré, even though each of the dishes were more like big bites than full courses, was a Cocoa Nib Crusted Lamb Chop over a slice of Potato Confit , accented with a Blackberry Demi-Glace. Cocoa nibs, BTW, are perfectly roasted cocoa beans separated from their husks and broken into small bits. They add a subtle chocolate flavor to any dish and do not melt but add a crunchy texture. Again the lamb chop was medium rare and quite generous. We were commenting on how unlike New Zealand lambs the chops were. I loved the yukon potato confit dish, slow cooked in duck fat at a very low temp oven for 2 hours. It was like having mashed potato texture without the mashing. AND, as you can tell, I forgot to take a photo of this dish! Sorry...
I brought a bottle of 1997 Joseph Phelps Insignia for this dish but when we opened it, it was corked! We were all bummed by this discovery since this was supposed to be a great vintage and a wonderful bottle of cabernet. Our ex-cookbook club member, Bob, brought a wonderfully full and earthy barolo, a 1995 Nebbiolo Poderi Luigi Einaudi Nei Cannubi. It was a great pairing for this dish!

Our dessert was Caramelized Pear slices, sprinkled with Blue Cheese and candied walnuts, accompanied by a small slice of Puff Pastry. This dish was again a fabulous entré that we all loved! It was served with a 2002 German Mosel Eiswein, Weingut Johann Peter Reinert Riesling that we also all loved! It was the perfect choice for this dish with enough acid for the sweetness but enough sweetness to stand up to the caramelized pears. Some thought it was the best wine of the afternoon and since eisweins are my favorite dessert wine, I agree!

AND, here is the best part! YOU can have this kind of experience every Friday at the California Café “FIVE BITES DINNER” for only $20, including tastes (not full pours) of wine. If you like any of the wines that you taste, you can buy a bottle for your table from the winemaker at retail price. There are about 60 people who make this their Friday night dinner destination, so you do need to call (650/325-8068 ) and make reservations. Mark is raising the quality of California Café dining to new levels and I hope you will all give this place a try either for a regular dinner or on their "Five Bites" Friday. Hope to see you there soon!

We were all impressed with this lunch menu, to say the least, and hope that Mark stays at the California Café for a long time. He's offered to do something for our Cookbook Club so we can discuss this at our next Mastering the Art of French Cooking dinner on Feb. 19. BTW, have you selected your recipe yet?

Several of the cookbook club members miss Bob so I am enclosing a photo of him since he was in attendance at this lunch! He just celebrated 50 years of marriage and is enjoying his grandchildren, teaching and his life with Diane. I'll keep trying to get him to come to one of our cookbook dinners. Here are some of the other members of our First Friday Wine Group...some of whom you will recognize!