We’re entering the green days, when all the work of the rain and sun come to fruition. Which you know, sounds great, but in reality means being perpetually behind on weeding the garden. This week’s recipe is the essence of green without the work, soft slices of avocado drizzled with a little lemon and a lot of (homemade) pistachio oil. I decided to make my own pistachio oil, using this recipe, in part because I was feeling crafty and in part because I didn’t want to buy a whole bottle of the stuff. The combination of pistachio, lemon, and avocado made a nice appetizer tonight. The rest of the 1/4 recipe I made of the pistachio oil is destined for tomorrow night’s vinaigrette. I have no regrets having made my own oil, but I might invest in a bottle of the proper stuff, after all. It is the season of fresh (food) greens and there will be a lot of vinaigrettes (and perhaps a pistachio avocado or two) this summer.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the weekend ridding my garden of the improper green stuff to make room for sunflowers, dahlias, and cosmos. There will even be a little bean-planting in the vegetable garden, if the rain holds off.
There was a little bit of synchronicity across the Dorista-sphere this month. While the French Fridays crew was tasked with making asparagus soup this week, the Tuesdays with Dorie crowd was busy stuffing brioche pockets with asparagus tips. Making both on the same day meant not having to worry about how to use the leftover asparagus stalks – they went straight into the soup pot.
Making both recipes on the same day also meant I was a little tired, so when my photos stubbornly refused to admit that my soup was green (not the brown you see above), I didn’t have enough gumption left to keep playing with the lighting. What you see isn’t always what you get.
This soup was a little fussy (I’d really recommend getting thick-stalked asparagus, rather than the thin ones I found), as there was a lot of allium-chopping and asparagus-peeling to do. Once the prep was done, though, it was smooth sailing. I especially loved that the scraps and ends of the asparagus are used to intensify the flavour of the soup and that the base of the soup is the blanching water, which intensifies the asparagus flavour even more. The soup was good on its own, but really shone with a spoonful of Greek yogurt mixed in. Very much worth all that prep work.
I also caught up on another recipe that’s worth a little fuss, the financiers from a few weeks ago. These are very worth the time it takes to brown the butter and to heat the egg whites with sugar and almond flour. I gave the batter a good, long rest in the fridge and the cakes came out beautifully. My grandmother’s little cake pans were the perfect size for these. It was nice to have an excuse to use them. My only difficulty was deciding what to do with the six egg yolks that were left over. I found this egg yolk cookie recipe and adapted it by exchanging a cup of the all purpose flour for whole wheat and using a little lemon juice and orange zest in place of the extracts. (You can see them in the background of my financiers photo.)
There are no more strenuous kitchen projects in my immediate future. I’ve just got some homemade pistachio oil in the refrigerator, awaiting next week’s recipe. Until then, I’m going to enjoy the weekend, hanging out with friends and sampling goodies at Eat Vancouver this weekend. I hope you’ve all got some lovely weekend plans lined up, too.
You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Asparagus Soup. Everyone’s posts on Financiers can be found here.
We’re doing something a little different for this week’s French Friday. The group is participating in Food Revolution Day, which was started by Jamie Oliver to get people into the kitchen and around the table together.
I decided to do something a little different this week, too. Since this year’s Food Revolution Day theme is Cook It, Share It, I thought I’d ask my partner to take the lead on this week’s recipe and share his thoughts with all of you. I chose one of the recipes I’d missed when the rest of the group posted about it, Warm Weather Vegetable Pot au Feu, because it seemed like a perfect match for the ethos of Food Revolution Day. I also thought it was a good fit for my partner. I helped a little with the chopping and pot-watching, but Kevin made the dish. Here’s what he had to say:
I thought that the Warm Weather Vegetable Pot Au Feu was excellent, though I would have preferred it without so much of the vegetable broth. While the veggies tasted good with the broth flavouring, I didn’t finish all of the leftover broth in the bowl. In fact, it was almost better the second night when my partner made quinoa, which soaked up the broth nicely. I think my partner Teresa chose this meal for me to make because, although I was once a vegetarian for about eight years, I’m no longer one and would like to get back to eating this way the majority of the time. Not only was the dish tasty, but it was also cheap and easy to make, which I appreciated. This will inspire me to cook vegetarian more often. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about agriculture and food lately and I hope to do more in the kitchen and garden soon.
It’s been wonderful watching Teresa take part in the French Fridays with Dorie group. We have tried so many dishes that were new to us. If my memory serves me correctly, I’ve loved all the dishes but one. For the last few years, I always know we are likely trying something new on Friday and that element of surprise has been neat. It was great to finally make a dish. My partner Teresa does most of the cooking in the house, but I do cook occasionally – I have my usual dishes. For the most part, we cook separately. It was nice for Teresa to guide me though this recipe, as we keep talking about sharing more of the cooking, along with cooking more vegetarian meals. This dish accomplished both of those things for us. I hope we will do more of it together.
Food Revolution Day sounds amazing. I think we need a food revolution on a number of levels, but Cook it, Share It is a fantastic start.
For my part, I thought this dish was delicious, on the first night when we ate it as a pot au feu; on the second when we used the leftover broth to cook more vegetables, which we served over quinoa; and on the third when we used the remainder of the broth to gently heat up some lamb burgers I’d made. The broth made a very good gravy in the end.
You can participate in Food Revolution Day too, by contributing posts or pictures, or by commenting on those of others. Here’s how, as outlined by our own Mardi Michels, one of Food Revolution Day’s Toronto ambassadors and instigator of our French Food Revolution Friday with Dorie:
“Follow the Food Revolution
Make sure you’re following #FRD2013 online for up to the minute news, updates and messages to share, re-post and re-pin to your followers.
Egg bread made into an egg-y French toast, turned into an even egg-ier bread pudding. What’s not to like? Nothing, that’s what.
When I noticed that both last week’s dish and this week’s recipe called for brioche, I decided to make some. It’s a job for a stay-at-home evening, but not too difficult when there’s a stand mixer involved. The only downside to making brioche is thinking it’s too pretty to slice.
Brioche was perfect for this dish (though I think that any good bread would do). I let the points of the French toast rise above the custard bath when I baked it and I really enjoyed the different textures this created. I also refrained from adding any flavours to the dish beyond the vanilla called for in the recipe. The vanilla worked well against the creamy egg-iness of the bread pudding. It can be lovely to have a single dominant flavour in a dish, sometimes. Relying on vanilla also brought out the flavours of the dried blueberries and apricots I tucked amongst the slices of French toast.
I’d be happy to have this dish at (or let’s face it, FOR) any meal, but I think I’m going to file this one under potluck brunch recipes.
You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Coupétade
Yesterday was an ‘egg’stravaganza – making brioche, then using it to make this week’s recipe and next week’s French toast bread pudding. That’s more than a dozen eggs, not even counting those I used for the upcoming Baking with Julia rhubarb cake. It was a busy day, that called for a simple supper.
Dorie’s Creamy Mushrooms and Eggs is meant as an appetizer, but I served this as a light supper for three. Two pieces of toasted brioche, a third of the mushrooms, and a poached egg was more than enough, especially since there was rhubarb upside down cake for dessert. I subbed dried mint for the fresh and 2% milk for the cream, but I don’t think the dish suffered. It was comforting, creamy, and rich.
I gave most of the baking to family and friends, but there’s one of the rhubarb cakes and a little coupétade in the fridge for the weekend. The mushrooms and eggs will show up on the menu again, with gluten-free bread standing in for the brioche. It’s too good not to share with Kevin.
You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Creamy Mushrooms and Eggs
Misunderstandings are like thunderstorms that move across our lives, leaving little trace of the chaos they caused once they’ve disappeared. Unless they linger, but luckily most don’t. My reaction to chaos is to do something grounding, to find a simple task that results in something solid and good to counter the havoc.
Making pancakes certainly fits the bill. It’s one of the things I remember learning to make when I was very young, just after toast and pan-fried eggs. I also remember making pancakes for my parents for special occasion breakfasts in bed, along with the aforementioned toast and eggs and cups of instant coffee.
Pancake-making didn’t follow me into adulthood, except for occasionally on camping trips or weekends away with friends. I’m not sure why, because they’re almost impossible to get wrong and there are so many different combinations of batter and toppings that it’s hard to get bored with them. (They also convert beautifully to gluten-free.) I think I’ve mademorepancakes since I started French Fridays than I have in the previous decade. All Dorie’s pancake recipes have been keepers, including this week’s Swiss chard version.
These are really Dorie’s take on farçous, a specialty of southwestern France, and her recipe can be found here. The herbs in my garden aren’t ready for harvesting yet, so I substituted dried marjoram and cilantro for the fresh chives and parsley. Those flavours went well with the Middle Eastern-ish lamb burgers I served with the farçous. (I’m still using up the quick preserved lemons I made for the cod and spinach roulades.) I also used a gluten-free all purpose flour mix. I think my pancakes were a little bigger than they should have been, as I only got 25 from a recipe that makes 40, but I liked them at that size.
Making the pancakes yesterday was a welcome distraction in the midst of a small crisis and then, when the crisis disappeared with the misunderstanding that had caused it, I was left with the better part of dinner already made.
You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Swiss Chard Pancakes
This dish was not a success for me, which has been rather rare for this cookbook. Perhaps it was because my roulades were sole and kale rather than cod and spinach. My presentation was terrible and my photograph even worse, but it was the taste that underwhelmed me most. On a positive note, it was fun to put the roulades together and much easier than I thought it would be. I overstuffed them a little, but they still held together well enough, if not prettily.
The roasted asparagus was fantastic, though. There’s nothing better than simply prepared spring vegetables. I also served this with some of last year’s pesto, which I’m trying to use up before basil season begins again. It helped the dish.
I know that others had more success with this week’s recipe than I did, so I’ll point you in their direction: Cod and Spinach Roulades.
My parents’ freezer is full of various French Fridays and Baking with Julia projects. I make a lot of French Fridays dishes at home, of course, but if I’m visiting my parents, I like to cook for them, so they’ve gotten their fair share of Dorista bounty. It’s great for my mom, who is as busy as she was before she retired. She still enjoys cooking and baking, but it’s less of a priority for her now – there’s so much she wants to do with the grandkids, her friends, and her volunteering. I only baked a dozen of these sablés today and packed up the remaining 2 1/2 logs of dough and put it in the freezer for her. Next time she gets together with her friends for wine and nibbles, they’ll be ready for baking.
I think her friends will enjoy these as much as we did. A little savoury and a little sweet, olive sablés are surprisingly delicious. The recipe is a little unusual, too, incorporating grated egg yolk, potato starch, and cured olives into the usual sablé mix. The dough is much softer than traditional sablé dough, but when it’s baked, the cookie somehow achieves the familiar sandy texture.
Some members of the French Fridays crew were unable to locate potato starch (though scheduling these right around Passover made it much easier than it might have been at other times of year), and corn starch was the substitution of choice. Check the link at the bottom of this post to see how that worked out for folks.
I hope that last week’s long weekend was relaxing for everyone and for those who celebrated Passover or Easter, that it was filled with family, friends, and food.
Steamed spinach with olive oil and lemon zest – hardly a recipe, but it’s good to have a reminder of how lovely simply prepared vegetables can be. We had the spinach with the Chicken Breasts Diable from the beginning of the month. It was a good choice, along with celery root purée.
I did mine in a stand-alone steamer, which is one of my favourite kitchen gadgets. I love being able to set the timer and leave it to do its work. I’ve had it long enough that I know how long each vegetable takes and it’s nice to spend my time in the kitchen on more interesting cooking tasks. (I’m totally trying to justify keeping a probably unnecessary electric appliance – hey, at least it was a gift. Tune in next week for my essay on the joys of electric can openers…)
Spinach has always been a favourite of mine (I was one of those weird kids who liked liver and onions, brassicas, and cottage cheese.) and I’m glad that my partner loves it, too. Speaking of spinach-lovers, I thought I’d share an old Popeye cartoon with you. I have to say, though, it was hard to find one that I felt comfortable posting. Those old cartoons are a lot more problematic than I remember. I’m guessing they don’t show that many of them any more. Here’s one that’s not entirely problem-free, but enjoyable for its presaging of our current food wars.
By the way, I’m flu-free now – thanks for the well-wishes from the Facebook Dorista crowd. Now, I just have to find time to catch up on the Ispahan cake.
You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Lemon-Steamed Spinach
East End Food Co-op is where we do a lot of our grocery shopping and it’s long been a neighbourhood hub in our area. It’s hard to go in there without running into someone we know and some of the staff know us so well that they’ve memorized our member number. The co-op does a good job of stocking organic produce, along with products that cater to the various tastes and needs of their customers (for instance, they sell a very good gluten-free all purpose flour). When this soup came up in the rotation, I headed over to the co-op to pick up some more of their beautiful organic French green lentils. Though I have to go further afield for some ingredients (like next week’s rose syrup), I’ve always felt grateful that I have such good options a five-minute walk away.
This soup was well worth using those lentils. One expects earthy, savoury flavours in lentil soup, so the brightness brought by the fresh ginger and orange peel in this recipe surprised me. There have been a couple of recipes from the book that I thought had a little too much orange in them, but this one was perfectly balanced, I thought. I made this with olive oil and vegetable stock, so it made for a nice meatless meal.
Yogurt and lardons are suggested as toppings, or in Cher’s case, homemade labneh. I was so pleased with this soup’s flavour that I ate it just as it was. No toppings needed.
One Wet Foot 