Fancy French Dinner that Knocks Out 3 FFWD Recipes!

I'm on a mission, and that mission is to catch up on all the FFWD recipes that I've missed. I made great strides today with a fancy French dinner I made pour moi et mon amour. The menu:
Bacon, Egg and Asparagus Salad
Bistrot Paul Bert Pepper Steak
Broth-Braised Potatoes
Vanilla Eclairs

My first soft-boiled egg and it was pretty perfect if I do say so myself. I peeled the bottoms of the asparagus and there was no toughness.

I chose beef tenderloin for the steaks, and forgot to salt them (oops!) But I thought it was actually delicious and didn't need any. I wanted to add a healthy side dish so I chose Dorie's Broth-Braised Potatoes. They haven't been chosen for a FFWD recipe yet, but if they ever are, I'll be one step ahead! Btw, these potatoes are absolutely delicious and I would make them again in a heartbeat. I flavored them with sage.

The Vanilla Eclairs are delicious. It's all I can do to not go into my fridge and eat the rest of them. I halved the recipe since I didn't need to make 20 eclairs. The dough didn't puff up that much, and my mom (profiterole expert) said they could have probably used one more egg, or they could have stayed at 425 (instead of lowering the temp), or both. But the flavor was great. I used Dorie's bonne idee and added Grand Marnier to the pastry cream and the glaze. Honestly, I couldn't taste it at all. I dusted the plates with unsweetened cocoa to create a pretty decoration, but it turns out the cocoa is a tasty little dip for the eclairs too.

Back to cooking after a long semester!

I gave my penultimate doctoral recital May 5th - a lecture recital on the piano works of Jennifer Margaret Barker - and I'm finally getting back into the swing of cooking. That is, until the middle of June, when I start preparing my final recital, scheduled for Sept 15th. So between now and then, I'm trying to catch up on FFWD - a neat online club where people are cooking their way through Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table - and also working to cook healthy and eat healthy and moderate portions. So far so good.


Today I made a Dorie recipe, "Marie-Helene's Apple Cake" and it was pretty delicious. It called for 3T of rum, and I think that was a bit much, so I'd probably drop it down to 2T if I made it again. But other than that, it was great, easy, and it gave me an excuse to use my new (and first) springform pan. As mentioned in the book, the cake pulled away from the sides right out of the oven (see above). With the help of a flat spatula, the cake separated easily from the bottom of the pan, and was a big hit at the dessert potluck I attended.


I figured I'd post a couple other pictures of dishes I'd made recently, including a gorgeous salad with fennel and fresh strawberries, and a vegetarian entree of marinated portobello mushroom, asian slaw and snap pea and orange salad. (That's the health kick showing itself)

Garlic Crumb-Coated Broccoli. Um. Yum.

I honestly wasn't looking forward to this recipe, because it didn't sound that exciting. How different is it from just sauteing broccoli in a bit of olive oil or butter and garlic?

Well, I should have known better, because breadcrumbs sauteed with garlic are always something special and delicious.

To try to make this recipe a little healthier, I used extra virgin olive oil instead of butter. I also used panko breadcrumbs instead of regular ones, simply because that's what I had in the house.

I really loved the result, well, who cares about the broccoli, I loved the garlic breadcrumbs! I think that had I used regular breadcrumbs, more would have probably stuck to the broccoli. But I was ok with having a bunch of leftover crispy tasty crumbs, because I then sprinkled them on my salad, on a lemon/evoo-dressed quinoa, and ate the rest with a spoon. Um. Yum.

Quinoa salad

One day late but still really good! I made the salad with golden raisins, dried cranberries, apricots, peaches and prunes, sunflower seeds, almonds and walnuts, and parsley and basil. I dressed the green salad with a little evoo and dark cherry balsamic (to complement the fruit) and used a nonfat greek yogurt. I was really surprised how much I enjoyed this. The hardest part was waiting for it to come to room temperature.

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Caramel Orange Scallops, Spicy Glazed Carrots and Gougeres

Last week I made the Caramel Orange Scallops on time, but forgot to post here and on FFWD! Doh! It's been a very busy week.

On the left here, you see my caramel orange sauce bubbling away. I didn't want to open a bottle of white wine for a 1/2 c. of wine, since I wouldn't be able to drink the rest before it got old, so I used dry vermouth.

Also, I only bought enough scallops for myself, so although I made the full sauce recipe, it was only for 3 scallops :) Luckily Harris Teeter was having a special on fresh sea scallops last Friday!

I don't think I let my sauce reduce enough, because it was a little watery.

As per Dorie's suggestion, I made the Spicy Glazed Carrots (one of the earlier recipes I hadn't tried yet) and enjoyed both making and eating them.

You can see I served my scallops with the carrots and plain basmati rice. I dropped the empty cardamom pods (I had used the seeds for the carrots) into the rice to add a tiny bit of flavor. It really almost added no extra flavor at all but I felt it pulled the whole thing together.

I patted the scallops dry before I put them in the saute pan, but they still spattered all over the place, so I covered them with a screen. Still got a couple flyaways - ouch!

And then on Sunday I got up earlier than my alarm, and decided to whip up a few gougeres for a small reception that morning at church. I wasn't expected to bring anything, but since I was up, and since gougeres were another past recipe I hadn't tried yet, I decided to give them a go. I'm not sure I let the dough dry enough in the pot, and I used a stand mixer to add the eggs, which according to my mom (who makes amazing profiteroles) wasn't the same as mixing it by hand. So I guess I'll try by hand next time. I added mozzarella and parmesan which I had in the fridge, and although they weren't the puffiest, they were very tasty.

Butter Break-Ups

I managed to get back on schedule this week with the Salted Butter Break-Ups from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. The dough was very easy to make, thanks to my new food processor :) I chilled it for about two hours in a square shape, and then bashed it a little with the rolling pin as suggested by the book, then rolled it out into a "rectangle."



I brushed on the egg wash with my brand new pastry brush from Sur La Table (yay!). Notice the gentle brush strokes and the expert artist's hold of the brush (haha.)











I then created the criss-cross pattern with the back of a fork. That was the most "difficult" (and by difficult, I mean time consuming) part of this recipe. The pictures tell all.





The final product was DELICIOUS.

This week's cooking adventures

I can't believe that tomorrow is Friday and I still don't think I have all the ingredients to make the Beggar's Linguine. To be honest, that recipe sounds totally awful to me. I mean, I love pistachios, almonds, figs, golden raisins, and the rest of the ingredients. But together? I mean... ew. I will make this recipe, however, because I'm not going to judge these recipes before I try them. Tomorrow. In the meantime, here's what I did this week. I was on spring break and kind of frantically working on a paper so there wasn't much time to try stuff.



Catch-up recipe! I made Dorie's Spicy Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup! It was delicious! I was so excited to be cooking something that actually smelled like a restaurant dish. I used chicken and also bought a half pound of rock shrimp, just because, and for noodles I found some Chinese egg noodles at Whole Foods. Um, they were expensive. But anyway. I was really excited and proud of this dish. I also learned that I don't have deep bowls out of which to eat Asian soups.

I still have a bunch of almond meal leftover from when I made the Orange-Almond tart, so I decided to buy a piece of fish while I was at Whole Foods and crust it in the almond flour. I found a recipe at epicurious.com for Almond-Crusted Salmon with Leek and Lemon Cream and adjusted it for my needs. I used hake, a white fish I've never tried before that was fresh, instead of salmon. First I sauteed some sliced leek in a bit of butter and oil. When it was time to add the cream, I chose to add almond milk instead, to stick with the almond theme. (I had also purchased almond milk at WF that day and was
excited to try it.) The cream was then blended in my tiny chopper thingy and put aside while I cooked the fish. I didn't want to use an egg batter, so I just laid out the almond meal, grated some lemon zest into it, salt and pepper, and smushed it into the fish on both sides before sauteing it in the pan. It was done in a couple minutes. In the meantime, I made mashed potatoes. I decided again to use the almond milk, instead of regular milk, to keep in the almond theme. They were good, but I spilled a little too much in them so they were a bit liquidy. Simple salad on the side with balsamic vinaigrette finished it off.

Okay - can I just say how excited I am to try celery root? I saw it at WF and just had to have it! I will probably make a puree, but my Turkish friend has suggested various ways of eating it, including cooked but then cooled in a salad, with a tzatziki-style topping, lemon and evoo, etc. Yay!




And last but not least, I had some strawberries to eat, macerated with a little lemon and sugar, so I decided to make a faux Strawberry Shortcake. I used the Kitchen Aid recipe book to find a baking powder biscuit recipe, and then split the biscuit and covered it with strawberries, their juice, and a heaping dab of creme fraiche. I LOVE SS!!!