Day 56 – a French word: pamplemousse, a French recipe: salade de pamplemousse au concombre

Pamplemousse, masculine noun (un pamplemousse, le pamplemousse, des pamplemousses) = grapefruit (pronounced paan-pler-moosse)

BUT mousse by itself is a feminine noun (une mousse, la mousse, les mousses) = froth, or a mousse (as in chocolate mousse for example), or moss, or slang for a beer.

My recipe for today is for salade de pamplemousse au concombre.

Salade pamplemousse concombre

For 4 people, you will need:

• 2 grapefruits
• 1/3 cucumber
• 4 cherry tomatoes
• a fresh red chili if you like it
• a few lettuce leaves
• 2 tsp honey
• 2 tsp nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce)
• 2 tsp oriental sesame oil
• the juice of a lime
• salt and pepper

Preparation:

Halve the grapefruits and, with a grapefruit knife, remove the segments into bowl. Keep any grapefruit juice for another use.

Wash the cucumber and cut into 1cm slices, and each slice into six triangular pieces with the peel. Add to the grapefruit segments.

Cut each cherry tomato into four pieces. Add to the grapefruit.

Make the dressing: in another bowl combine the honey, nuoc mam, sesame oil, lime juice, salt and pepper. Pour the dressing over the grapefruit, cucumber and tomato and mix well. Chill for at least 30 minutes before serving, stirring occasionally to blend the flavours.

Place washed and dried lettuce leaves on individual serving plates. Spoon the mixture on top of the lettuce carefully, heaping it up, and only adding about a teaspoon of liquid. You don’t want the plate swimming in dressing. Finely slice the chili on top if you are using it.

This is in fact a Vietnamese inspired dish. But since Vietnam was at one time a French colony, I am allowing myself to include Vietnamese dishes among my French recipes. Their food is so delicate, inventive and full of flavour that I can’t resist it!

Cucumber and grapefruit salad

Bon appétit.

Day 55 – a French word : volaille, a French recipe: crème de volaillle

Volaille, feminine noun (une volaille, la volaille, des volailles) = poultry (pronounced vau-lie (like telling a lie). In the singular, it’s a farmyard bird, in the plural, poultry.

It comes from the verb voler (to fly). No clever definitions and examples today, I can’t find any.

But my recipe is for crème de volaille = cream of chicken soup, which is the ultimate comfort food.

Crème de volaille

For a large pot of soup, for about 6-8 people, you will need:

• three medium sized leeks, washed and chopped
• 2 small potatoes
• a large bunch of parsley
• a couple of handfuls of meat from a cold chicken
• 2 litres of water and 2 stock cubes (or 2 litres of home-made chicken stock)
• pepper
• butter and flour to make a beurre manié (1tbs soft butter, 1 tbs flour, mixed well with a fork to form a paste)
• a little whipping cream
• a few celery or fennel seeds

Preparation:

1. Sweat the leeks in a little oil or butter until softened.
2. Add the cubed potatoes, the chicken pieces chopped into smallish pieces, and the parsley and cook for a further minute or two.
3. Pour on the stock or the water with the cubes.
4. Simmer gently for a good half hour.
5. Mix well with a soup mixer, until very creamy with no bits and lumps.
6. Add the beurre manié and stir well. (The beurre manié thickens the soup.)
7. Test for seasoning and add a little pepper.
8. Whip some cream with a little celery salt,  and pipe a large rosette into the middle of each serving, topped with a few celery or fennel seeds, to garnish.

Bon appétit.

Day 54 – a new word: coriandre, a new recipe, saumon au four, pesto de coriandre

Coriandre, masculine noun (le coriandre, du coriandre - one never says un coriandre or des coriandres) = coriander (UK Eng.), cilantro (US Eng.), (pronounced korrie-aan-dr, both rs in the back of your throat, slight stress on the first syllable).

A lot of French people (including me at one time, I have to say) put coriandre in the feminine, which it is not. I once lost a bet on this.

Coriandrum sativum (picture from Wikipedia)

Coriandrum sativum is widely cultivated for its culinary and medicinal properties but it also grows wild all around the Mediterranean. The leaves, the root and the dried seeds are all used. It is good for the digestion.

My recipe for today is for saumon au four, pesto de coriandre = baked salmon with coriander (cilantro) sauce.

Saumon au four, pesto de coriandre

For 2 people you will need:

• 1 tbs slices spring onion greens
• 1 very small clove of garlic (don’t put too much or it completely masks the other flavours)
• 4 tbs roughly chopped coriander (cilantro) (stems and leaves)
• salt, pepper
• 4 tbs olive oil
• a large handful of pine nuts

Some of the ingredients

Le saumon

La papillotte

Preparation:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C
2. Peel and boil the potatoes. This will take 20 minutes from boiling point.
3. Place a portion of salmon on each sheet of paper, salt very slightly, grind a little black pepper, and close the parcel. Add no butter or oil.
4. Cook  for 12 minutes in the hot oven.
5. In the meantime, put the coriander, garlic, pine nuts, spring onion and olive oil, with a ¼tsp salt and 4 turns of the pepper mill, into a mini mixer and grind, pushing down the ingredients which stick to the sides, but leaving some texture. Not too pulpy in other words.
6. Drain the potatoes, open the salmon packets, and run a knife between the fish and the skin (often the skin sticks to the paper a little and it is easy enough to leave the skin behind). With a fish slice or a spatula, transfer the salmon without its skin to individual serving plates.
7. Cut the potatoes into chunks, spoon a little pesto over them and the fish, and garnish with sprouted seeds.

I cook a lot in little packets (papillottes), it is quick, clean and easy.

Pesto de coriandre

This pesto is also good on cold beef, pasta or rice, and as a basis for vinaigrette for salads (just thin it with a little vinegar). It will keep in a jar in the fridge for a couple of days.

Saumon et pesto

Bon appétit.

I have to go away for a week or so, and I shall not be connected to internet. So try as I might to pre-publish posts, I have not been able to accomplish a week’s worth. My challenge is broken, too bad, I’m not too worried about that really. I’ll get going again in March when I’m back.

Day 53 – a French word : crevette, a (French) recipe: salade de mangue verte

Crevette, feminine noun (une crevette, la crevette, des crevettes) = shrimp (pronounced really as it looks, cre-vet, with the r in the back of your throat, no particular stress on either syllable).

Crevette rose = prawn, crevette grise = tiny grey shrimp, crevette cuite = cooked shrimp, crevette crue = raw shrimp, crevettes décortiquées = shelled shrimp, pêche à la crevette = shrimp fishing,

Crevette is a nice nickname for a child that is tiny. C’est une crevette.  And the sea-horse emblem of Air France is called la crevette.

My recipe for today is une salade de mangue verte aux crevettes = green mango and prawn salad. It is Vietnamese, not French at all, but I did warn you I’d use recipes from former French colonies. And on top of that, it’s not my recipe, I adapted it from a lovely book called Green Mango and Lemon Grass  which I can highly recommend. It is not only a cookery book but talks about South East Asian culture and is fascinating.

Salade de mangue verte aux crevettes

The recipe is really easy, you just need a few basic Asian ingredients, and of course green mangoes. Mine were on the ripening side of green, but still quite hard and the dish was stupendously good. Get them as green as you can.

For 4 people you will need:

• 4 green mangoes (about 800gr), peeled
• 2tsp caster sugar
• 4 kaffir lime leaves chopped into very fine strips (or the finely grated peel of two limes)
• 4 finely sliced shallotts
• 1 finely sliced spring onion
• 4 tbs chopped coriander leaves
• 2  tiny red chilis, sliced
• 2 tbs nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce)
• 600gr fresh peeled cooked prawns (about 25gr each)

Close up of green mango and prawn salad

Preparation:

1. Cut the flesh off the mangoes and grate as you would for grated carrots. Same sort of shreds, not too fine, not too thick.
2. Put the grated mango into a large bowl with the caster sugar and mix for 30 seconds with your fingers.
3. Add all the other ingredients apart from the shrimp. Mix well.
4. Add the shrimp and serve immediately.

Two bowls of salade de mangue verte aux crevettes

Looks good, doesn’t it? Just had it for lunch. Fantastic.

Bon appétit.

Day 52 – a French word: Tatin, a French recipe: tarte Tatin

Another proper noun which has become an adjective : Tatin (invariable, with or without a capital T), pronounced Ta-tang (that is, the sound of tang, without any emphasis on the final g).

La tarte des demoiselles Tatin: two famous sisters, Caroline and Stéphanie, at the end of the 19th century inherited a hotel-restaurant from their father in Romorantin in the Sologne region of central France (an area covered in forests and lakes, where the French kings loved to hunt, and where some of the Loire châteaux are to be found). Caroline dealt with what would now be known as the “front office”, Stéphanie was in the kitchen. Her speciality was apple tart, a particularly melt-in-mouth, caramelized version. And myth would have it that one day, she got it all wrong and prepared it upside down. The tarte Tatin was born, and it must now be one of the most famous recipes in the whole of France.

Originally made of apple, it is now made of anything you care to turn upside down, with more or less happy results. But I have a few savoury recipes to share with you later qui valent le voyage (which are worth the journey).

Tarte tatin

Here is my recipe for an apple tarte Tatin :

For 6 people you will need:

• A ready-rolled  26cm circle of good quality puff pastry
• A round pie dish about 22cm across, 4cm deep, which you can put onto a burner (i.e. non stick metal probably), in French this is called a “moule à manqué”
• 125 gr caster sugar
• 50gr butter
• 1kg Golden Delicious apples (the apples you use must not “melt” during cooking)

Preparation:

1. Pre heat the oven 180°C.
2. Peel and core the apples, cutting them into quarters.
3. Make a caramel: if you don’t have a pan that goes on the flame, use a saucepan.  Put the sugar in the pan, add a dash (no more than a tbs, less probably) of cold water and put the pan on the burner at moderate to high heat.
4. Protecting yourself with an oven glove, shake the pan occasionally to distribute the melting sugar. DO NOT STIR. Watch closely, the sugar will turn pale gold, dark gold and then brown (see photos below). You want it brown, but not black and burned. Bear in mind that the heat of the dish will continue to cook the sugar after you remove it from the heat, so don’t leave it too late. You can remove the dish several times while you ponder the state of readiness of your caramel, and put it back again if it is not quite done enough. Shake, tip, BUT DON’T STIR. Making caramel is really easy, you just need a bit of practice. There is about as much myth surrounding it as making home-made mayonnaise. If you don’t get it right the first time, start again! You’ll soon get the hang of it.
5. As soon as your caramel is the right colour, off the heat put the butter in on top of it in smallish cubes. If you are doing it in a saucepan, pour it straight into your tart dish.
6. Place the apples in the dish, rounded side downwards (cored side upwards). Put them in a circle all around the outside of the dish, then continue with a circle inside that circle, and so on until the dish is filled. Pack as tightly as possible but keep a nice regular pattern. Fill the gaps with little chunks of apple, and slice the equivalent of two apples all over the top (photos below).
7. Place the puff pastry on top of the apples in the dish, and tuck in the overlapping edges.
8. Put into a hot oven and cook for about 30 minutes,  until the puff pastry is golden. Remove from the oven, leave to cool for a few minutes.
9. If you are making this dessert in advance, leave it as it is for the moment, do not remove from the dish and leave it sitting on its puff pastry base, this will get soggy. The tart should be served warm, and it is easier to warm the whole thing up if it is still safely in the dish. Just pop it back in the oven for a short while.
10. When you come to serve the tart, take a serving platter which is bigger than the pie dish. Place the serving dish face downwards on top of the puff pastry. Being careful that any hot juice that might spill will not hit your wrists, turn the whole thing over briskly. You now have the serving platter underneath, and the upside down cooking pan on top. Shake a couple of times to loosen the apple, and remove the cooking pan. You should have a perfectly beautiful caramelized apple star on a puff pastry base. If any pieces of apple stick to the pan, just replace them in the pattern before anyone notices.

Starting off the caramel

Caramel starting to colour

Caramel ready to put the butter

Buttered caramel in the bottom of the tart dish (the streaks are the pattern on the dish)

How to place the apples

The second layer of apples

The pastry on top

This tart is best served as it is, maybe with a bit of cream, but certainly not ice cream. Should there be any left over (this is quite a rare occurrence), reheat to warm in an oven, not the microwave which destroys puff pastry.

Tatin just out of the oven

Tatin upturned and ready to eat

I also make individual versions of this in small oven dishes. But I make the caramel in a saucepan and pour a little into each dish before arranging the apples. The pattern is not as satisfying, because the apples don’t fit regularly round a small dish, but it does produce oohs and aahs when the individual upside-down helpings are brought to table.

Tarte tatin

Lots of photos, but they do show you how it all works.

Bon appétit.

Day 51: Guest appearance – How Sweet it Is

Every Monday, I shall be telling you about someone else’s food blog, inviting a guest to do my work for me. Last Monday it was Dar El Bey with a tomato and goat’s cheese salad.

This Monday, note this address : www.HowSweetEats.com. You won’t regret it.

This lady has a quality food blog and a huge following. Her photographs are mouthwatering and very professional. Her recipes work. You want to cook almost every one of them. And she is so funny, she makes you laugh from one end of a post to the other.

Today, look at her post on Grilled Lime Tilapia Tacos with Kiwi Salsa Dressing. I can’t copy it, so go and get your mouth watering with her photos. And then come back here and say thank you nicely!

Day 50 – a French word: moule, a French recipe: gâteau à l’ananas

Moule in the sense of a mold (un moule) not mussels (une moule, des moules, feminine), we’ll come to them later.

Moule, masculine noun (un moule, le moule, des moules) = a cake mold (pronounced mool).

Moule à manqué = a round fairly deep cake tin; moule en silicone = silicone mold; moule à gaufres = waffle iron.

Just one expression: coulé dans le moule = true to type (made in the same mold)

Not mould, that is moisi.

I mentioned in a post a few days ago on juices that my juicer instructions tell me I can re-use the pulp from juicing to make cakes and other things. So I experimented. My recipe for today is a gâteau à l’ananas, made with the pulp from juicing a whole pineapple (minus a slice to make little chunks with for my cake). If you don’t have a juicer, just peel and core a pineapple, keep a slice to dice (for more texture in your cake) and cut the rest into large chunks and blend it to make a pulp. If your pulp is very juicy, I think I would strain it, and drink the juice, or your cake may be a little over moist.

Gâteau à l'ananas

If you are using pulp from juicing, be very careful with the state of your fruit, that is, don’t put anything into the juicer that you do not wish to find in your cake afterwards, like the scratchy “eyes”. Remove these if you don’t want them appearing in your slice of cake.

For one cake for about 6 -8 people you will need:

• 1 pineapple (mine weighed 1175gr) from which you will take:
•  75gr of little cubes
• 220gr of pulp

This is what I got from my pineapple

Hang on a minute. I started with a 1175gr pineapple. I ended up with 75gr of cubes, 220gr of pulp, and 200gr of juice. Missing: 670gr = skin and core. Conclusion: pineapple is not a very economical fruit.

• 3 eggs
• 150gr sugar
• 150gr plain flour (or, if you use self raising, leave out the baking powder)
• 5gr baking powder (not baking soda)
• 50gr melted butter

Preparation:

1. Pre heat the oven to 180°C
2. In a large bowl whip the eggs with the sugar, add the flour, baking powder, pineapple pulp and cubes. Mix well with a wooden spoon.
3. Pour in the melted butter, stir.
4. Spoon into a greased cake mold (or an ungreased silicone mold, or muffin or cupcake cases) and bake for 35 minutes or so (if you are doing mini versions, adapt the cooking time: my mini ones took 10 mins. But they are very mini (about 2.5cm across).

Mini cakes, blurry but I wanted to show you the molds

Unmolded mini cakes

I found the cake very tasty but a bit stringy. The pulp left after juicing is partly made up of tough fibres. The pulp from carrot juicing would not have the same consistency (use the same recipe with no carrot chunks). The ingredients above include a bit more flour than I actually used, the cake was too moist. And made little pockets around the pulp.

Gâteau à l'ananas just out of the oven

To my mind, using juicer pulp is taking economy too far, but the cake was very good, and half of it has disappeared already.

Bon appétit.

Day 49 – a French word: veau, a French recipe: blanquette de veau

Veau, masculine noun (un veau, du veau, des veaux) = calf or veal (pronounced vo, you never hear the x in the plural).

This is one of the rare “meat” words in French that is the same for the animal and what one finds in the kitchen. In English, calf is the animal, veal is what we eat; pig is the animal, pork is what what we eat, and so on.

Expressions: pleurer comme un veau = to weep copiously; tuer le veau gras = to kill the fatted calf; c’est un veau = someone who is soft, a dummy, useless, or a bad racehorse, or a bad car… not very complimentary to calves all that.

When I buy veal, that is to say rarely, I always buy organic veal which has been raised sous la mère (under its mother). I personally think this is important for the animal, quite apart from the fact that the meat tastes better.

Blanquette de veau

My recipe for today is blanquette de veau, a creamy, winter, country dish with veal and vegetables, usually served either with boiled potatoes or rice, so that you have plenty to pump up the juice with. But the original, old-fashioned recipe is complicated and needs small quantities of lots of ingredients. I have come up with a version which, although not entirely orthodox, is very good and much easier to do (don’t be put off by all the steps in the instructions).

Cuts of veal. Taken from wikipedia (the calf looks distinctly unhappy...)

For 4 people you will need:

• 1kg of veal from the belly and chest (see diagram above, flanchet, tendron, poitrine on its underside). It is a good thing to mix pieces with and without cartilage and bone, for more flavour.
• a large onion, peeled and stuck with 4 cloves
• 4 cloves of garlic, peeled
• 2 large carrots, sliced
• 2 stock cubes
• a bouquet garni (see picture below)
• 300gr small firm mushrooms
• 3 egg yolks
• 100ml liquid cream
• the juice of a lemon
• 1tbs plain flour
• butter
• salt, pepper

Bouquet garni: celery, bay leaf, thyme

Some of the ingredients

Preparation:

1. Cut the meat into very large cubes (3-4cm).
2. Place in a heavy pan, just covered with plain water, no salt, and bring to the boil. Simmer for one minute, and drain.
3. Put the meat back into the same heavy pan, with the onion and cloves, bouquet garni, sliced carrots and stock cubes. Cover well with water (1½-2 litres) and bring to the boil. Simmer for 50 minutes.
4. In a large bowl, put the three egg yolks, saving the whites for another preparation. Add the cream and whisk. Set aside.
5. 10 minutes before the end of the cooking time, in a frying pan, put a couple of tbs butter, slice the mushrooms thickly on top (or quarter them), sprinkle with a little salt and fry gently for three or four minutes. Squeeze the juice of one lemon on to the mushrooms, stir, and take them out onto a plate with a slotted spoon.
6. Add a tbs flour to the mushroom pan and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon, scraping all the pan juices. Change to a whisk, remove any flour lumps, add one at a time about five ladles of stock from the veal pan, whisk, and simmer for a minute to cook the flour.
7. When the veal is cooked, take a ladleful of stock and pour into the cream mixture, whisking briskly so that the hot liquid does not cook the egg.
8. Pour the contents of the frying pan into the veal pan, stirring, and bring to the boil to thicken the sauce.
9. Add the mushrooms to the veal pan.
10. Off the heat, pour the contents of the cream bowl slowly into the veal pan, stirring.
11. Taste for seasoning. Add salt and pepper if necessary.
12. Serve in deep plates, with boiled potatoes or rice, and lots of the creamy juice.

Blanquette cooking

Blanquette de veau ready to eat

Bon appétit.

Day 48 – a French word: araignée, a French recipe: crabe mayonnaise

Araignée, feminine noun (une araignée, l’araignée, des araignées) = spider (pronounced array-ñay, no particular stress).

Une toile d’araignée = a spider’s web

A French saying: Araignée du soir, espoir; araignée du matin, chagrin. = Spider seen in the evening brings hope, spider seen in the morning brings unhappiness.

But most important for my purposes here, araignée de mer (literally sea spider) = a spider crab.

Live spider crabs

It is the season for spider crabs here in Brittany at the moment. I bought one yesterday evening from a fisherman’s wife for 3€15 (about 4US$ or £2.75). Not even the price of a steak. And so much more pleasure. It weighed 790gr, most of which is shell of course. It was one-person portion size, and I have to say that for the very first time I really appreciated  why people say that spider crabs are so much better than ordinary crabs. The meat was really sweet. (The two pictured above were given to me by my neighbour last Spring.)

Now I know I’m going to lose a few friends here. I bought it alive, and cooked it in a very large pan of boiling sea-salted water (15 minutes from the time the water came back to the boil). I can hear a lot of you saying “How could she?”  Well, very easily is the answer.

And now it’s my turn to sound off – I think it hypocritical (unless you are a very strict vegetarian or vegan) to squirm and go pale when someone talks of actually killing something to eat it. It’s too easy to go and buy two plastic wrapped chicken breasts at your local supermarket; they were alive once you know, someone else killed them. If everyone had to kill, pluck and prepare their own dinner, we’d eat a sight less meat.

So, back to the spider crab, I have no qualms about cooking seafood. I prefer to do it myself and be sure exactly when it was cooked and how fresh it was. Crab should be cooked at least two hours before it is due to be eaten so that it can cool if you are eating it with mayonnaise.  In France it is difficult to find picked crab meat, we always sit down with a whole beast in front of us and eat in a very basic and almost prehistoric fashion, get very messy and make lots of noise.

Cooked spider crabs

As far as home made mayonnaise (pronounced maa-yon-nez) is concerned, it’s really very easy, especially since the invention of the hand held mixer! Before it was much more strenuous. Home-made mayonnaise does not keep since it contains raw egg (one day in the fridge is the limit), so only make the quantity you think you will use immediately. All the ingredients and the bowl should be at room temperature.

You will need :

• one very fresh egg yolk
• ¾ tsp French mustard
• a couple of pinches of table salt
• ½ tsp wine vinegar
• about 175ml of olive oil, or corn or peanut oil, or a mixture of the two

The oil is really a question of personal taste. Olive oil makes a strong, dark coloured mayonnaise, suitable for eating with an aïoli (cold vegetables and fish) for example. Corn oil makes a more neutral tasting mayonnaise.

Preparation:

1. Choose an appropriate bowl, fairly deep so that the oil does not spatter all over the place when you mix. Place a wet dishcloth on the kitchen counter under the bowl, it will prevent it from migrating from the vibration of the mixer.
2. Break the egg and put the yolk into the bowl, saving the white for another preparation.
3. Add the mustard, salt and vinegar and stir. Leave for a minute or so for the mustard to “cook” the yolk.
4. With the mixer in one hand and the oil in a pouring jug in the other, start mixing at high speed, but only let a tiny trickle of oil run into the bowl. Stop pouring often to make sure the oil is being well incorporated into the egg.
5. Continue in this fashion until all the oil has been used up and the mayonnaise is very thick.
6. Should it not be thick enough, put it in the fridge for half an hour, remove it and mix again (but add no more oil). It should thicken.
7. Should it turn or separate, stop what you are doing, put another egg yolk into another bowl, and incorporate slowly the “turned” mayonnaise into the new egg yolk, as if you were starting over again. Well you are starting over again. When this is done, continue with any oil that is left.
8. Taste and if necessary rectify the seasoning.

Here is a video in French which shows you how to make mayonnaise. Have a look even if your French isn’t good: a) it’s easy enough to understand and b) your French might improve. But two things I would say about the video: I think she puts too much mustard, and you can see from her bowl sliding all over the place how useful it is to put a wet dishcloth underneath it.

Home made mayonnaise is so much nicer than shop bought; and you can mix chopped herbs with it once it is completed, to make green mayonnaise, or crushed garlic, or paprika, or chopped gherkins and capers to make tartare sauce, your imagination is the limit.

Last night's crabe mayonnaise

Spider crab and mayonnaise, heaven. But hard boiled eggs are good too, or left over white fish or shrimp.

Bon appétit.

Day 47 – Indexes and lists

Today I’m giving you a day off.

Have you seen that I’ve made indexes? Every time I add a post, I also add an entry to the recipe index with a link to the page in question, and one to the word index with a link. This will make it easier for you to find recipes. Later on, I shall do an ingredients index, so that you can easily find ideas for the raw materials you have to hand.

You’ll find these pages above this text, under the header. I hope they help.

Beach at Tréguennec, Finistère