Sweet potatoes, parsnips and potatoes covered and smothered in … yep … duck fat. These babies are being roasted to accompany some fine looking pork roast.
Concoctions
The what, when, how much stuff used for each dish
Tuna Casserole for Lunch
And in the foreground, the beginnings of cream cheese brownies.
Now we are most definitely a pasta-free zone. Due to an amazingly flavorful beef cheek dish, I needed a quick out to enjoy the flavor while simultaneously toning down the cheekage. Standby macaroni ( or in French “coquillettes” ). If I must use noodles, I make them with Einkorn and loads of eggs. Long-story-short, there are coquillettes in this dish. I feel a bit like a slacker, but sometimes you need to react with the raw ingredients you’ve been handed. While you wait for your meat to defrost, you look around and see butter, cream, milk, dash of einkorn, canned tuna and macaroni which all add up to tuna casserole.
– make a cream sauce and make it taste yummy
– add tuna, double taste the flavor
– add pasta
– stick in the oven for twenty minutes until it settles in and makes friends
Should you use fresh, farm eggs for your cream cheese brownies, you must quickly crack into its own cup to check things out. Because Kevin the Cockerel keeps his girls topped up, should they sit a bit too long on their daily gem, things could move along more quickly than you ‘d want in your brownies.
I love brownies because they use lots of eggs, minimal flour and deep dark chocolate. I’m hoping the cream cheese version will entice my husband who holds brownies in contempt along with flour-less chocolate cake.
Quick! They’re Hungry!
I have tried a few times to get a plated version of “chicken curry,” by the time we get organized and I get my camera and things are less noisy, it looks like this. “More of everything, please,” they say. Then it is gone.
This is actually not chicken curry, but rather Butter Chicken of some description. Madame Jaffrey calls it “Chicken with tomato sauce and butter.”. I’m guessing there is some shorter, hip cool Bollywood slang for this, but mo matter, it tastes very good.
The heart and soul if this dish is quickly made in the blender using the Indian Food Trifecta: onion, garlic and ginger with a splash of familiar friends cinnamon, cardamom and clove.
The whole thing can be easily done while you work on your cassoulet, play with your kids and have a sip or two of wine. There is nothing hard about this dish. I added a few splashes of cream to give it that Indian Take-Out look we used to enjoy when we lived in a city that had take-out places.
I’m sure there is a Patak equivalent of this dish, but there is no comparison. Donchoo even think of opening a jar when you can spend the same effort on a Madhur Jaffrey recipe and come out miles and miles ahead.
Cassoulet Day Two, One Hour In
With three more hours of cooking to go, we couldn’t wait. Lunch was approaching fast and I had no alternate plans other than rye bread with “brique” ( I suppose it could have been worse. The Brique de Vache is quite tasty and incredibly filling ).
When I first experienced cassoulet, it was rolled on its very own rolling cart and served to my husband. He ate as much as he could ( cassoulet is a bit moreish ), but still there was plenty leftover. There’s not a bean dish I know that makes an entrance with such pizazz.
It’s not like I’ve been slaving over this dish in the kitchen. It takes care of itself. All cassoulet needs is time. The “hour in” tasting was good, but 1) a little fatty 2) needs more time to become friends ( I’d say the participants are still in the drinks phase )
That fat was scooped out a bit and the temperature lowered for the remaining two or three hours.
It’s not a lot of work, but might seem a bit overkill for French Beans-N-Weenies. But the absolute warm you feel when you eat it is no match, it ain’t the same league, it ain’t even the same f-in sport as anything produced by Heinz.
Cassoulet Cassoulate
I literally said this to my sister Laura ( the one who taught me the cream sauce ):
” Hey, yeah, I’ll be over soon, I’m just going to wax my car real quick.”
She hung up the phone and probably arranged and set off on a trip to the Oregon Coast, bought some saltwater taffy, ate a bowl of chowder and then returned with enough time to watch the evening news because she knew that I’d be a while.
This is Cassoulet. You think that with all the prebrowning, the pre-confit-ing and skipping the dried beans step by using canned that you could start at four and serve at six-thirty, but sadly for you, you are wrong. Even with your shortcuts, the dish needs an overnight stay in the cool fridge of love that makes flavor happen. You need time ( and a dash of thyme as it so happens ).
When you live in Southwest France, duck is plentiful and pork is cheap. This sets the stage for Cassoulet.
Don’t worry, in the meantime we fed the troops a Butter Chicken I’ve done in the past and quickly pulled together. And it is a small coincidence that Butter Chicken and Cassoulet are but a nub of ginger away from being equally belly warming. Both require this onion-garlic paste dealio.
Oh gooby, googie sausage, how I love thee especially when you are layered with your beany ducky friends.
After your layers of yum, cover with beans and let it gurgle and bubble for an hour.
Then another hour or so at a lower heat. Then, overnight in the fridge. Then cook the next day for an hour. And THEN … Taste and see if it’s ready. Cassoulet is so worth the time and effort. Don’t be fooled by the tin. Live a little, Make it from scratch.
Fukui-San, It Appears She’s Melting Butter with Celery
My sister Laura set me up with this cream sauce. I was so young and not even ready to yield its power, but I listened.
2-tbls butter,
2-tbls flour,
a nub of celery,
a cup of milk
Salt and pepper to yum-ness
And after my first batch, I cream sauced damn near everything. Tuna casserole, Mac-n-Cheese, Gorgonzola hoo-ha there was nothing I wouldn’t pop in a cream sauce. She did this little celery number. She said it gave it a little something ( or whatever babyboomers use for “pop” or “snap” or “x” ). I learned later that she taught me a Béchamel sauce to which forever after made me hum “Béchamel, Béchamel mucho” to the tune of a classic Mexican Mariachi request.
For this cream sauce, I added parsley and the much forgotten herb, Tarragon. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, Thyme, all equally loved. But poor Tarragon, the Carreras of the herb world, sits in the wings waiting for that blessed “broken leg.” So Fukui-San, what am I making?
And with this I leave you a tune to hum when you stir your cream sauce: Béchamel Mucho-
Here’s a Quick Kid Dinner
When the kids are screaming in your ear about how they are dying from lack of food and you need to pull some magic out quick while sticking to your core values, we answer that with fish sticks. Normally, I fry in lard. As I’m all outta lard ( I’m so lost without you ), I went with my new pet fat, tallow. Because hey, if it worked Mc-D, then dern it, it can work for me.
We served with peas.
Husband was curious where his plate was. “Pot-au-Feu for us tonight,” I said. “Oh yum. Pot-au-Feu. Wow. Can’t wait. Sweetums, honey o’mine. Mmm. Mm, yeah I noticed you worked a couple days on that … What with skimming the fat and straining the bits to uncover a lovely, beefy broth,” were his words. His eyes, however, said “fishsticks, darlin’ and a dash o’ mayo.”.
Kid dinner … Adult dinner, really it’s a matter to be hankered with.
Confit Revealed
The confit has surfaced from its little retreat at flavor camp. And it came out … Delicious! Okay, so you stick duck bits in a vat of hot fat and fah-git about it. Not hard, but you need to be patient. You need to have the time ( and a hefty glass of wine ). You need to love duck. This is my third time with duck confit and this is what it takes:
Ducky bits, legs and/or machons
Thyme
Bay leaves
Salt
Pepper
Salt and pepper over night
The next day you can rinse or not rinse
Stick in a big pot and cover with duck fat for an hour or two or so I don’t even remember how long these beauties bubbled
You can stick it in a jar if you wish. I stuck my big vat in the fridge then, a week or so later, I heated it up enough to pull some out for dinner and shoved the rest in a bag. They sell confit in bags around here. I like to do like they do. I’m not certain how long it lasts in a bag, therefore I recommend you eat it in the best way you know how.
One Tasty a-Meatball
Sausage meaty balls tonight. A Nigel Slater recipe that keeps on giving. ( from his book Appetite ).
I usually do the lemongrass version, but tonight we do European porky balls. What you see above is:
Pork en vrac ( crap, what’s that in ‘merican. Loose? Just like my men )
Thyme
Garlic
Comte
Naturally and usually I fry these balls in lard. As I lost all my lard, I would usually turn to duck fat, but I’m mad at duck fat. So I used some tallow. We run a beef farm and tallow is something I need to acquaint myself with.
Porky yum balls were served with broth ‘n’ parsley and some mash ( because there’s no way my kids are sticking meatballs in broth, but let me tell you this: meatballs of the pork variety are absolutely lovely in broth
with fresh parsley. That is all. ).
A Whole Lotta Short Ree-Yibs
There was a time in my life when I used to flip through cookbooks searching for yummy stuff to make. I would go with a feeling or an urge. Then I’d construct the shopping list and off I’d go. But this is not the way it works when you’re living, breathing and running a farm. Ingredients fall upon you ( big zucchini, odd beef cuts, foie gras trades … ) and you are left with a task. “What do I do with a few kilos if very ripe tomatoes?” Or “Wow fifteen kilos of beef to grind and process. Where do I go from here?”
When it comes to short ribs and you are in France, you make Pot-au-Feu. Or as we affectionately call it “Faux Pho.” These short ribs are called “Plat de Cotes” ( there’s a little hat on the ‘o’ … still working out iPhone symbols ).
Now I could totally Faux Pho the lot, but I thought I’d Gangnam Syle some of them ribs because that’s how we roll. I found this Korean Short Rib recipe that looked too good to refuse. Progress is smelling divine, we’ll see how it tastes.
As a side note, part of Gangnam Style Ribs is a browning phase. If you are not living in France you will not appreciate the next photo, but trust me, I browned meat – our meat – and I think I shed a little, happy tear of success. Our beef, you can brown it! So let me present to you, browned beef:
Girl On Grill Action 