One French word: navet, one French recipe: pétales de légumes

navet, masculine noun (un navet, le navet, des navets) = turnip (pronounced nah-vey)  .

Not most people’s favourite vegetable, but when they are young and fresh in spring their flavour is delicate and not overpowering as it often is in autumn and winter, and they can easily be eaten raw. Or used to accompany a meat dish, boiled briefly then glazed in a sugar and butter mixture.

Un navet is also currently used to denote a flop, when talking of a bad film, theatre performance or book.

My recipe today is a little different to the taste buds: pétales de légumes = vegetable petals. 

Main ingredients – looks a bit like a still life, doesn’t it…

For each person you will need:

• One small raw spring turnip
• One small raw beetroot
• One ripe tomato (I used a beef tomato)
• One small courgette (zuccchini)
• and any other vegetables you may feel like that can be cut into fine slices (radishes?), or fruits (oranges, strawberries?)
• salt
• chili flakes
• olive oil
• raspberry vinegar

Preparation:

Wash and trim all the vegetables. Peel the beetroot but do not peel either the turnip or the courgette.

Slice the courgette into as many thin lengthways strips as possible, discarding the first slice, which is just skin (simply for aethetic reasons), and place around the edge of each person’s plate in wavy, curly shapes.

Peel and slice the beetroot into very fine slices and being careful not to taint the courgette with beetroot juice (again for the aesthetics), place an overlapping circle of beetroot slices inside the ring of courgettes.

Wash your hands, the knife and the chopping board. Finely slice the turnip and place another ring inside the beetroot ring. Do not season.

Core and skin the tomato (plunge it into boiling water for a minute or so, the skin will come off easily). Cut into small cubes, place in a bowl with the equivalent of one smallish dried chili (outside and seeds), flaked. Quite a lot of salt (tomatoes need salt), but you can rectify later. One tbs raspberry vinegar. 2 tbs olive oil (if you are several at table increase the oil and vinegar). Mix to a smooth paste with a soup mixer. It makes a sort of rather thick gazpacho-like mixture. Taste and rectify seasoning. It should be fairly chili hot, vinegary, with a good strong flavour of olive oil.  Place a spoonful of this mixture in a tiny bowl in the centre of your vegetable plate. Leave the rest of the tomato dressing in a larger bowl on the table, because it is more-ish and people can help themselves and drown their plates in it if they like. But it looks better to present only a small quantity.

This is an excellent starter, fresh and appetizing-looking, but you can also make a main course of it if you are feeling fragile and only want raw vegetables, maybe accompanied with crusty bread and butter, or viande des grisons (thin cured beef slices). Or parma ham.

Bon appétit!

One French word: moules, a French recipe: moules marinières

The French language bit:

moule, feminine noun (une moule, la moule, des moules) = mussel (pronounced mool, never say the s in the plural) 

I remember in 1965, arriving at my grandparents’ house in Bordeaux in south-western France with my younger brother on one of the hottest days in living memory. My diminutive grandmother, still then a fantastic cook, although she forgot how at the end of her life, trotted out to the fishmonger next door to get fresh mussels, and made us a big panful of moules marinières. Here’s how she did it:

Main ingredients for moules marinières

For 4 people as a main course you will need:

• 2-3 litres (or kilos, depending on how they are sold) of fresh mussels
• a bunch of fresh parsley
• 4 plump shallots
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 60gr butter
• a glass or two of dry white wine
• pepper (you shouldn’t need much salt)

Mussels cleaned and ready to cook

A word about buying mussels: there is a season for mussels, which varies depending where you are in the world. Mussels are best and plumpest when they are in season and should be firmly closed when you buy them. There are always a few that are not; these should be discarded. They should be cooked immediately and eaten the day they are bought, from a reputable fishmonger where the fish is fresh, well prepared and on lots of ice. Best not to buy them when it is too hot, best also to have a cold bag to bring them home in.

To prepare mussels, tip them all into the sink, and under running water and with a small sharp knife, check through each and every one. Any that are broken or that do not close promptly when you press them shut, throw in the bin. Debeard them by pulling on the bit of weed that comes out of one side of the shell with the knife. As you prepare them, put the clean ones into a colander. It doesn’t matter much if, after sorting them, any of the ones in the colander open up. They were closed a short while ago, and are about to be cooked. If any mussels have barnacles on the outside of their shells, scrape them off.

Peel and chop the shallot and garlic. Wash and chop the bunch of parsley.

In a very large pan, over moderate to high heat, put the butter, the shallot and garlic and a little pepper. Add the glass of wine and boil briskly to reduce a little and soften the shallot and garlic. (You can also use good quality wine vinegar instead of wine if you wish, they are very good that way too and in fact that is how I usually cook them.) Add the mussels all in one go, put the lid on the pan, and shake quite vigorously. Cook for a minute or two, raising the lid to see if the mussels are opening, stir to bring the bottom mussels up to the top and distribute the shallot evenly.  Add the parsley and a couple of grinds of the pepper mill. You should not need to add salt. Put the lid back on, stir again, and as soon as all the mussels are open, serve without delay. There is NOTHING worse than an overcooked, shrivelled mussel. They should be steamed in their own liquid, just open, and very moist. Ladle into large individual bowls with some of the liquid, and keep the unserved ones warm.

Don’t use forks to eat mussels, choose a largish shell, remove and eat the mussel, and then use that shell as an eating iron, pinching and grabbing successive mussels with it. And to save space, don’t just chuck your shells into a bowl, pile them up neatly as in the photo below.

Don’t forget to spoon up the juice or to pump it up with pieces of fresh bread. Serve the mussels with chips (French fries) as the Belgians do (the French copy them more and more). Moules frites   you will see that on menus all over France.

Bon appétit!

One French word: petit pois, a French recipe: cake à la feta et aux petits pois

The French language bit:

Petit pois  (un petit pois, des petits pois) = garden pea (pronounced peuh-tee pwah) 

We’ve had pois cassés = split peas, but these are the nice tender variety that we shall have on our plates in a month or so.

Just as a noix (= walnut)  is used to indicate a tablespoon sized portion, often of butter, so petit pois denotes a pea-sized portion, of a cream from a tube for instance.

Petits pois à la française are peas cooked with silverskin onions, a little fried bacon (lardons) and the braised heart of a lettuce. It always seems strange to me, but then I was at one time Anglo-saxon, that the French really prefer their peas from tins (cans) and not fresh or frozen. We like them bright green, they prefer khaki. Same with “French” beans (haricots verts). One gets used to them, but I could never prefer them.

When you see on a menu “à la Clamart“, it means the meat is served with peas.

Avoir un petit pois dans la tête (= literally to have a pea in your head) means to be stupid, to have a pea-sized brain 

My recipe is for a cake à la feta et aux petits pois = a loaf-shaped cake with feta cheese and peas. This is really useful as an apéritif nibble recipe, you can put it in mini molds to make bite-sized portions (but do reduce the cooking time accordingly). It is also good for picnics or taking to the office. It makes neat slices that aren’t too crumbly. It contains protein and vitamins.  It is good cold, with mayonnaise, or hot with a homemade tomato sauce. Very versatile, and ridiculously easy to do.

Main ingredients

For four people you will need:

• 150gr flour
• a heaped tsp baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 10cl vegetable oil
• 10cl milk
• 130gr frozen peas
• 130gr feta
• 1/2 tsp salt, 4 grinds of the pepper mill
• a handful of chopped fresh mint
• a handful of grated cheese

Preparation:

1. Heat the oven to 180°C.
2. Grease a loaf tin.
3. In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, the salt (but taste your feta first to make sure it is not too salty, in which case reduce the amount), the oil and the milk. I used virgin organic rapeseed oil, which is bright yellow and has a delicate flavour. You can use olive oil just as well.
4. Add the flour and the baking powder and beat thoroughly so that there are no remaining lumps.
5. Bring a very small amount of water to the boil (do not salt it) and put the peas to boil for 3 minutes.
6. Cut the feta into small squares.
7. Chop the mint.
8. Add the drained peas, the feta and the mint to the egg and flour mixture and pour into the mold. Make sure you are using real Greek feta and not some imitation. Not at all the same thing.
9. Put a handful of grated cheese (pale yellow cheese NOT orange cheese, this will spoil the aesthetics of the dish) in a stripe down the centre of the cake.
10. Bake for 40 minutes – it may need 50 but watch it after 40.
11. Unmold and allow to cool slightly if you are serving it hot, cut into slices (slicing is a little tricky when hot as the feta is far from firm). Allow to cool completely if you are serving cold and chill in the fridge.

Any left over cake should be wrapped in tin foil or cling wrap and kept in the fridge. Try not to slice more than you are going to use, it keeps better in one piece.

The colours of this cake are delicate and springlike (printanier, we just had that word). Very appetizing.

Bon appétit!

One French word: anis, a French recipe: saumon en papillote à l’anis

A nostalgic parenthesis: do the British among you remember aniseed balls? Do they still exist? The size of a small marble, deep rusty red, but when you sucked them they became white and your tongue went rusty red instead? And when you got right to the middle after hours of work, there was the prize: a single aniseed to crunch between two incisors! My favourites when I was little.

 The French language bit:

Anis, masculine noun (l’anis) = aniseed (pronounced a-neesse, or sometimes a-neee), but you never say un anis or des anis. If you want to say one aniseed, or lots of aniseed, you say une graine d’anis, or des graines d’anis (one aniseed seed, or lots of aniseed seeds). 

Anisé = aniseed flavoured, such as all the Mediterranean apéritifs, pastis in the south of France, ouzo, raki, arak… each Mediterranean country has its version.

I bought some organic aniseed the other day, not for any particular purpose, but I have since been using it for making tisane (herbal tea), lovely, a teaspoonful with boiling water poured over it and a bit (or not) of honey. And you can eat the seeds when you’ve drunk the tea!

Aniseed is very different from fennel, or dill, or cumin, or caraway. I use it in this recipe for salmon: saumon en papillote à l’anis and it complements the fish perfectly.

You will need a piece of salmon per person. I prefer slices across a fillet (called le filet in French), not through the whole fish with the bones (called a une darne). A teaspoonful of aniseed per portion, and a little butter or cream.

Preparation:

• Heat the oven to 180°
• Prepare large squares of aluminium foil or greaseproof paper, and place a piece of salmon on each
• Salt and pepper each portion and add the aniseed
• Place a teaspoonful of butter or cream on top of the lot and close the papillote
• Cook in the oven for about 12 minutes for a small portion, 15 minutes for a larger. Don’t overcook salmon, it must be moist

Serve with new potatoes and some fresh crunchy celery. Salmon always looks so lovely next to something pale green like celery or cucumber.

Bon appétit!

One French word: printanier, a French recipe: printanière de légumes au blanc de poulet

All sorts of tender, colourful, flavoursome Spring vegetables are appearing in shops and on market stalls. You must seize the opportunity now, they will soon lose their tenderness, and their attraction. When we come out of Winter, we are hungry for something different and fresh.

 The French language bit:

Printanier, adjective (printanier (m.), printanière (f.), printaniers (m.pl.), printanières (f.pl.) = springlike, Spring seasonal (pronounced prah-n-tan-yeah, prah-n-tan-yair). 

Le printemps = Spring (literally a sort of prime time (prin-temps)). Summer = l’été (estival = summerlike). Autumn= l’automne (automnal = autumnlike). Winter=l’hiver (hivernal=wintery). 

Une printanière is a dish made with Spring vegetables.

 

Printanière de légumes au blanc de poulet

My recipe is for a printanière de légumes au blanc de poulet, which uses a small quantity of several different vegetables together to accompany a chicken breast cut into strips.

Chicken breast in strips

For two people you will need:

• 1 good sized chicken breast, cut into strips
• 1tbs cornflour
• salt
• 6 small mushrooms cut into quarters
• 6 small broad beans cut into one inch pieces with their pod (better to use organic)
• a tender inside stick of celery
• a couple of spring carrots
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 4 new onions (the bulb of a largish spring onion
• and anything else you find that you fancy
• 1tsp fond de veau (veal stock, failing that, concentrated chicken stock)
• 100ml water or white wine
• oil for frying
• fleur de sel

Cornflour added. The bits of yellow you can see are strips of ginger I added, just for me!

Preparation:

Main ingredients

1. Slice the chicken breast into thin strips, put into a bowl with a good tbs cornflour to coat and 1/2 tsp salt.
2. Wash, prepare and chop the vegetables: chop the broad beans into one inch pieces, with their pods; peel the carrots and slice into four lengthwise; take the outer skin off the onion leaving a couple of inches of stem and slice into four lengthwise; chop the celery into long pieces; crush the garlic with a cleaver and chop roughly; cut the mushrooms into four.
3. Put a little oil into a non stick pan and fry the chicken pieces quickly, turning, for about 2 minutes.
4. Add all the vegetables (and a little more oil if necessary) and fry for about 5 minutes, stirring.
5. Dilute a tsp of fond de veau in 100ml water or white wine and pour over the vegetables and chicken. Simmer gently for about 10 minutes.
6. Serve in soup plates, seasoned with a little fleur de sel.

Chopped broad beans

A word about fond de veau: this is a rich stock which you can make from scratch with pieces of veal, veal bones and vegetables. You can also buy it in powder form, made by Maggi, which is very good. It’s a bit like a powdered stock cube. If you can’t find any, use a crumbled chicken or vegetable stock cube. Together with the cornflour from the chicken, this makes a rich sauce, slightly thick and shiny. If you are using a stock cube, be careful about resalting.

Frying the chicken and vegetables

And a word about fleur de sel: the very cream of salt, not to be used for cooking but sparingly, as it’s expensive, to season dishes on your plate. I shall be doing a whole post about it one of these days.

Savour every mouthful, eat each vegetable separately, taste the flavours: Springtime in your plate.

Bon appétit!

One French word: grenouille, a French recipe: cuisses de grenouille à l’ail et au gingembre

Well we couldn’t miss this word out, could we!

Grenouille, feminine noun (une grenouille, la grenouille, des grenouilles) = frog (pronounced grrr-nou-y)

Une grenouillère is a baby’s sleep pyjama, which fits like the skin of a frog.

Une grenouille de bénitier (literally a church font frog) is said of someone who spends their time in church.

The sound frogs make in French is croasser = to croak.

La Grenouille qui voulait se faire aussi grosse que le boeuf (literally The Frog who wanted to be as big as the steer (cow)) is a famous Fable de la Fontaine, the frog in question, trying to be so much greater than he was meant to be, finished up by bursting…

Un tétard = a tadpole

This is what the French are famous for, isn’t it? Eating frogs. And yet in actual fact a lot of French people have never eaten frogs’ legs, and those that do, don’t do so that often.  They can be found on restaurant menus, fried with garlic and parsley, but less and less it seems to me. It used to be a pastime for those living in the country with a pond, lake or river nearby, to catch frogs to eat. I’m sure some people still do, though they are in fact protected, or the large ones that supply the best legs are. I used to be able to buy skewers of large French frogs legs on the market thirty years ago. No longer. The only ones I can find are frozen farmed ones, quite small, from Thailand or Vietnam. They are still very good and worth doing from time to time. I think these are the ones you are likely to find wherever you live.

So my recipe today is not the usual frogs’ legs with parsley and garlic butter, but cuisses de grenouille à l’ail et au gingembre = frogs’ legs with garlic and ginger. This version gives you crispier and tastier frogs’ legs, and if really you don’t feel like doing the real thing, or can’t find them, strips of chicken fillet (the strip which is on the inside of a chicken breast) would do instead.

Une cuisse, by the way, is not a leg (= une jambe), but a thigh (une cuisse de poulet = a chicken thigh), and gives rise to some interesting expressions:

Le droit de cuissage was the right of a lord to the virginity of a serf or servant before she got married, and un lit trois cuisses is a bed measuring 120cm wide, larger than a single bed (90cm), but not as big as a small double (140cm).

What a lot of culture you are getting for your money today.

A bit blurry as usual

For 4 people you will need:

• About 40 frogs’ legs, unfrozen and patted dry
• a three-inch piece of ginger, grated
• 4 cloves of garlic, grated
• 2tbs oriental sesame oil
• 1tsp salt
• 4tbs sesame seeds, toasted or not
• cornflour to coat
• corn oil to fry
• a bunch of fresh coriander leaves
• rice to accompany

No, don't say eeuw, chicken thighs look just the same...

Preparation:

Marinating

1. Place the frogs’ legs in a dish and add the sesame oil, garlic, ginger, salt and half the bunch of coriander, chopped. Stir and leave to marinate, turning occasionally, for from 10 minutes, to half a day (in the fridge).
2. Add the sesame seeds and stir. They should stick to the meat.
3. Add the cornflour, enough to coat.
4. Heat the corn oil in a large heavy frying pan, and tip the whole dish of legs into the pan (there should be no liquid left, the sesame seeds and cornflour should have absorbed everything). If you are cooking for more than two people, you will need two large pans.
5. With tongs, separate the legs so that a maximum of their surface area is in contact with the pan. This is important is you want them crispy. Fry on fairly high heat for about 4 minutes, checking to see they are not burning.
6. Turn each pair of legs and fry for 2 or 3 more minutes. They should be very brown and crisp.
7. Serve with plain rice and a green salad with the remaining coriander chopped and sprinkled over them.

This is a very delicate and tasty dish, so do get rid of any prejudices you might have and try it.

To be eaten with the fingers, of course. Bon appétit!

One French word: demi-sel, a French recipe: coquilles farcies au fromage demi-sel

Demi-sel, invariable adjective = literally “half-salted”.

Butter and soft fresh cheese can be said to be demi-sel. Salt is added to a product which is not naturally salted.

Du beurre demi-sel = salted butter

Du fromage demi-sel = salted fresh soft cheese

My recipe for today uses large pasta shells stuffed with a herb and cream cheese mixture : coquilles farcies au fromage demi-sel.

The type of shells to buy - check that they are not broken

Per person:

• 6-7 coquilles
• olive oil
• 100gr fromage frais demi-sel (fresh salted cream cheese)
• a handful of chopped chives
• a handful of chopped basil
• a handful of pine nuts
• a handful of chopped stoned olives, green or black or a mixture
• pepper
• tomato sauce
• grated cheese (optional)

Main ingredients

Boil a large saucepan of salted water and cook the coquilles for two minutes less than the time recommended on the packet (mine said 18 minutes, I cooked them 16 minutes). Put a little olive oil in the water to prevent them sticking to each other or to the sides of the saucepan. But keep an eye on them and detach them if you see them trying to get too close. The problem if they stick is that they break and split and are difficult to stuff afterwards.

While they are cooking,  mix the cream cheese with the herbs, pepper, and pine nuts. Don’t salt, the cheese is already salted.

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.

Drain the shells gently and put them the right way up in an oiled baking dish to cool.

With two teaspoons, place a tsp of mixture into each shell. Cover well with fairly liquid tomato sauce (home made or your favourite bottled version). I used Panzani Fresh Tomato and Olive, which I’m very keen on at the moment. No pasta should be showing or it will dry out in the oven. Add grated cheese if you wish.

Place in a hot oven for 10 minutes, this will warm up all the ingredients and finish cooking the pasta. It is quite a good idea to do them in individual dishes so as not to have to disturb the  shells when  serving them. Add more chopped basil before serving.

This was so good…

Bon appétit!

One French word: soufflé, a French recipe: soufflé au fromage

soufflé, adjective (soufflé (m.), soufflée (f.), soufflés (m.pl.), soufflées (f.pl.) = blown up, expanded, risen …

or a masculine noun: un soufflé

Well everyone knows what a soufflé is, don’t they?

The word comes from the verb souffler = to blow (le vent souffle = the wind blows, je souffle mes bougies = I blow out my candles) and from the noun souffle (without an accent on the e) = breath (un souffle de vent = a breath of wind).

The expression souffler quelque chose can mean to whip away, to steal something, and laisse-moi souffler means give me breathing space, time to breathe.

Soufflés rise because they are made of thousands of tiny bubbles of air. No bubbles, no soufflé. They are not complicated to make; there are just one or two golden rules: firm egg whites, and a hot oven that you do NOT open during the cooking time. Hot soufflés must be served very rapidly, because they sink down again. So people must be disciplined and be at table when the soufflé is removed from the oven. It is very impolite to the cook not to be.

Soufflé au fromage

My recipe is for a basic soufflé au fromage = cheese soufflé, in my opinion the best one. It is a very spectacular meal to prepare when one has virtually nothing in the fridge. All you need is a few eggs, some grated cheese and some milk.

For four people you will need :

• 3 eggs
• 125ml milk (1/4 pint)
• 30gr flour
• 30gr butter
• 90gr grated cheese
• salt, pepper

The basis of a soufflé is a béchamel (in my recipe index, but I will go through it again here), to which you add egg yolks and cheese. Followed by the stiffly beaten whites.

Preparation:

1. Heat the oven to 180°.
2. Grease a soufflé dish.
3. Put the milk to warm (it doesn’t have to boil, just warm it).
4. In a saucepan, put a heaped tbs of flour (which is about 30gr) and 30gr butter. As the butter melts, incorporate the flour gradually and let it cook for a minute, stirring.
5. Whisk in the warmed milk, little by little ( a whisk will avoid lumps). When the mixture is smooth, leave to cook for a minute or two, gently.
6. Add the grated cheese (good quality gruyère or emmenthal), stir to melt and mix well. Add four grinds of the pepper mill and half a teaspoon of salt.
7. Off the heat, add the egg yolks, one at a time, stirring briskly.
8. Leave this mixture off the heat while you beat the egg whites, with a pinch of salt, to stiff peak. Make sure the bowl you are using is scrupulously clean, no trace of grease, and that there is no yolk in the whites, or they will not whip up well. You should be able to turn the bowl upside down and the whites will stay in the bowl if they are beaten enough.
9. Fold half of the whites into the béchamel mixture, stirring delicately with a metal spoon, so as not to break them. But at the same time, the mixture must be homogenous. Lift from the bottom to make sure all the mixture is being incorporated.
10. Transfer the remaining whites to the soufflé dish, and fold the mixture in the saucepan into them gently. The mixture should only reach three quarters of the way up the soufflé dish. Place into the middle of a hot oven with no bars above to stop the soufflé rising.
11. Cook for about 30 minutes, without opening the oven. When the soufflé is golden, remove it and serve it from the dish immediately, but only after everyone at table has admired the way it has risen. It doesn’t matter much if it is still a bit goopy right in the middle.

The béchamel mixture

Cheese added

Cheese stirred in

Adding the egg

Eggs added

Folding in the whites

Ready for the oven

My mother used to do a mean cheese soufflé, one of our favourites. But just after the war, when cheese was rationed, she also did a version where she mashed up a tin of sardines and added it to the béchamel in place of the cheese. I preferred the cheese, but this one was ‘interesting’. You can also, instead of the cheese, add some finely chopped ham, some flaked haddock or just lots of chopped fresh herbs.

Bon appétit.

One French word: pois cassé, a French recipe: saucisse de Morteau aux pois cassés

Pois cassé, masculine noun (le pois cassé, des pois cassés) = a split pea (pronounced pwah cassay)

un pois (les pois, des pois) = pea; cassé = broken (from the verb casser, to break)

Un petit pois = a green pea, un pois chiche = a chick pea, un pois gourmand, or un pois mange-tout = a sugar snap pea, un pois de senteur = a sweetpea.

The ultimate comfort food (at least I think so), split peas as a vegetable or in soup, are useful pulses and a source of easily  digestible dietary fibre. They are also rich in protein, minerals and slow release sugars. They are cheap, and do not need soaking, so you don’t have to start to think about them a day ahead of time. They will cook in half an hour or so. As with other pulses, they should only be salted at the end of the cooking time or they will become tough.

Used in soup, they can be cooked alone or with onion,maybe using ham stock, and served either just like that, or with a topping made of fried crispy bacon bits and garlic.

My recipe, saucisse de Morteau aux pois cassés, uses them as a purée, a sort of a purée, in fact they are left just as they are when they are sufficiently cooked. Not to be confused with English “mushy peas”, not the same thing at all.

A word about saucisse de Morteau: this is a chunky, smoked, regional French pork sausage from the town of Morteau in the Doubs region, eastern France. It is usually boiled whole and served with sauerkraut, or mashed potato. I doubt that outside France you will find one. For French readers, Leclerc’s range “Nos Régions ont du Talent” do an excellent one, photographed here. A good Polish smoked sausage will do the trick as a substitute elsewhere.

Instead of boiling the sausage, I have cut thick slices and fried them, using no extra grease whatsoever in the pan. The sausage is rather fatty, and this method of frying creates crispy slices and you will be surprised at the amount of grease it releases in the pan (rather than going into your stomach).

For two to three people you will need:

• one Saucisse de Morteau, or smoked Polish sausage (about 4 cm across, 20cm long)
• 300gr of split peas
• salt, pepper

Preparation:

1. Wash and pick over the split peas to ensure there are no little stones left in them.
2. Place them in a large saucepan with four times their volume of water.
3. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat (they boil over easily and make a terrible mess) and simmer for about half an hour, testing regularly to see whether they are soft.
4. When soft, add a little salt, stir and cook for a further two minutes.
5. Do not drain, serve directly from the saucepan with a holey spoon. Any remaining peas and water can be used for soup the next day.
6. In the meantime (ten minutes before the peas are ready), cut the sausage into slices 1 to 1½cm thick and fry briskly in a non stick pan until browned and crispy.
7. Serve the slices of fried sausage with a generous helping of split peas.
8. Adjust the seasoning and add a little freshly ground pepper.

Bon appétit!

One French word: croustillant, a (French) recipe: porc croustillant

croustillant, adjective (croustillant (m.), croustillante (f.), croustillants (m.pl.), croustillantes (f.pl.) = crispy, crunchy (pronounced krous-ti-yaan (m.sing. & m.pl), krous-ti-yaant (f.sing., f.pl.), no particular stress).

From the noun une croûte = a crust.

Une histoire croustillante = a tasty story, a bit of a naughty story

Porc croustillant served the salad way

My recipe today – porc croustillant (otherwise known as boulettes de porc which it is in fact not) – is one of my oldest recipes. I used to do it for my children often, my son loves it, I’m not sure about my daughter… It’s cheap, quick and easy. One small pork chop will do one person, a large one will do two. I use côtes de porc échine, but there seems to be no translation for this. I asked an Australian butcher who works around here, and he didn’t know what it was in English. So I’ll try to explain. It is a pork chop, but not the nice shaped one with a little border of fat that one usually buys, but a rather mis-shapen, fatty, scraggy one with a little bit of bone at one end. So if you can’t find this, just buy a cheap bit of pork, you are only going to cut it into little pieces anyway.  You can use filet mignon of pork, but it’s really too lean. There’s much more flavour in a fatty bit of pork.

For two people you will need:

• one large or two small chops (or 200gr pork)
• 1/2 tsp salt (I put more but I over-salt everything)
• 10 grains of szechuan pepper (optional), use whole
• 3/4 tsp coriander seeds (or powdered coriander)
• 1/2 tsp Chinese 5 spice powder
• 1tsp grated fresh ginger
• 1 clove grated fresh garlic
• 1tbs oriental sesame oil
• 1 scant tbs Kikkoman soy sauce
• 2 tsb cornflour
• corn oil for frying

Preparation:

Pork slices marinating

1. Cut the pork off the bone and into small slices (doesn’t matter how irregular they are).
2. Place in a bowl with all the other ingredients except the cornflour and marinate for at least half an hour.
3. Heat some oil in a frying pan or wok, not enough for deep frying, but more than just a tbs. A few tbs let’s say.
4. Add the cornflour to the pork, stir to coat, add more if necessary, it should be fairly dry; the whole thing tends to form a ball at this stage, don’t worry, you can separate the pieces when they are in the pan.
5. Fry briskly until the pork is cooked through and is crispy all over, turning it several times and separating the bits with tongs or cooking chopsticks.
6. Serve with plain boiled rice, or with lettuce leaves, mint and the green parts of spring onions.

I used to add an egg to the mixture before the cornflour. That makes a different type of batter around the meat, but requires more oil to fry.

After adding the cornflour

Not French at all, as you have guessed. Not really anything, I just invented it. It’s a taste I like. Actually, come to think of it, the inspiration probably came from a book I bought about 45 years ago, my first book of Chinese cuisine by Kenneth Lo: The Complete Chinese Cookbook. I still have it on a shelf next to me as I write.

The salad ingredients

Not exactly Weight Watchers stuff… but lighter if you use salad as an accompaniment and not rice. Just roll up pieces of pork and some mint and spring onion tops in large green lettuce leaves. You can add a dipping sauce if you like.

Ready to roll…

Served here with polenta

Bon appétit!