Profiteroles

This week’s classic French recipe – profiteroles filled with whipped cream and topped with chocolate sauce. I made the choux pastry no problem – I’ve made it before and it is very easy to do. The hurdle where I fell down was something I hadn’t even considered as a potential problem – the piping.

And there you go. Turns out there is a knack to piping and shaping the choux pastry. It came out alright, but obviously there was a problem with trying to fill little undersized corkscrews of pastry. And since I had no more eggs in the house because my supplier fell through (my friend’s kids who keep chickens), I couldn’t make replacement choux pastry. The trial was over and, literally, in the garbage. Sad!

Well, this is life. I am sure Jill is laughing at me for this. There is probably some very basic professional pastry chef thing I should have done but didn’t. But I’m recording the attempt regardless.

Salade Niçoise

I hate to boast, but right now on Vancouver Island (the southern part, that is) the weather is wonderful. I love this time of year when it is early spring in the Pacific Northwest along the coast the sky, the landscape, and the sea are all shades of grey and green, with the occasional burst of blue when the sun comes out. You can see all the lichens and mosses hanging heavy on the tree branches, and the air is soft and damp, and the light dim. I love it so much – I feel like my whole body rejoices in it.

So it was too warm for a heavy meal this weekend, and I made salade niçoise for dinner, to have with soup:

I took the recipe from Laura Calder’s “Elegant Everyday Eating”. Apparently this may not be a true salade niçoise, due to the cooked vegetables (and I would imagine, the lack of tuna?), but it was good and I have no clue what the genuine dish should be. As far as I’m concerned, the anchovy lying across the top of the salad makes it authentic. (Maybe the tuna steps in to replace the anchovy for the feeble of palate?).  Anyway, very good and yes I would have it again. I’m starting to wonder if the dishes of Nice (niçoise) are identifiable by the anchovies? – Note to self, need to pick up on my reading and research.

Part of this project is to make classic French dishes I haven’t tried before, just to see what they are like. I am probably the only person who is surprised that I have so much liked everything I have made thus far.

Just to show you that spring truly has arrived here, I offer you proof from the back garden: snowdrops coming up. It’s too soggy for me to walk out to them, but they are there.

Omelette

This weekend I made an omelette, something I already knew how to make so I don’t know if I am cheating on my own rules or what. Anyway, this post could also be titled “my lunch today”.

I made the omelette with three mushrooms, a tablespoon of finely chopped shallot, and a pinch of dried tarragon, along with salt and pepper (of course). I had hoped to do an omelette aux fines herbes, but after being in Vancouver all week the herbes were not so fines (terrible not-even-a-joke, I know, but it’s all I’ve got). So mushrooms and shallots struck me as adequately French, although I am sure a true French cook would have used morels or something exotic and extra-flavourful and not the plain old button mushrooms I had dying at the back of the fridge.

I put the tarragon into the eggs to jazz the whole thing up. Tarragon is the most French of all herbs to me, and I love the taste.

Just so you know, my omelette did fold and slide perfectly on to the plate. But that didn’t show you the filling inside, so I had to break it with a fork. The more I try to photograph food, the more impressed I am with the skill of the professional food photographers…although we all know they are frequently cheats, with their food dyes etc., touching up the food pre-photo.  Or that’s what I tell myself when I can’t get something to look any good.

Tarte Tatin

This weekend I made a dessert I have heard of so many times, but never felt that motivated to make myself. Every time I read a recipe for tarte tatin, I felt some skepticism as to whether it could possibly be that good. Well, yes, it can be that good. And I am kicking myself for never having tried it before!

You cook the apples over medium heat until the juices they release caramelize with the butter and sugar, creating the wonderful taste of toffee apples. Then you drop it into a pan, cover it with a circle of puff pastry, bake, flip, and voilà! The simplest and most heavenly dessert, particularly warm with a small scoop of vanilla icecream.

I used Rick Stein’s recipe from his cookbook “French Odyssey”, but (again) this is a pretty basic recipe you can get anywhere, such as the recipe database at Foodtv.ca. Please do try this – you won’t believe how good, and how easy it is. I certainly can hardly believe it.

The cookbook I mentioned, “French Odyssey,” is a companion volume to a television series Rick Stein did a few years ago. In it he takes one of my deam trips – travelling by canal boat through the French countryside. So I’m plugging the TV series as well….is this where I again make a disclaimer saying I have no financial interest in the Rick Stein empire?

New Year; New Project. Pissaladière

I have been neglecting my cooking and this blog shamefully. I’ve turned a deaf ear to the cries for more posts from friends, and to the cries for help with a recipe from the occasional reader. BUT! a new year, a new project. Last year’s decision to cook British was no good, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into here, but last week I was thinking about my goals for the year and organizing my weeks so that I can inch daily and weekly toward achieving my big goals, and I realized that cooking had gone to the back burner (I’ve spent a lot — and I mean a lot — of time working in Vancouver the last six months, staying in hotels. The inevitable weight gain and digestive upset was leaving me in a bad space creatively and emotionally).

What could I do? I could start a new project! And, as my eye fell on the “Lonely Planet” guide to Provence that was my current bedside reading, I knew what my new focus should be – to learn about French cooking. So fabled, and yet so unappealing on the written page. (At least half of those of you who have sat down to read through a French cookbook and then tried to pick something to make for dinner should know what I mean).

So, this year, each weekend, I will try to cook something new and distinctly French for dinner. This past Saturday was the famous Niçoise onion tart, pissaladière.

I was uncertain about how I would like this, and how my audience would receive it. I mean, straight anchovies? And how would olives work with anchovies and onions? I shouldn’t have worried. The onions after an hour of cooking with the four herbs and olive oil melts down into a sweet savory paste, and that sweet herby onion flavour tastes — so! good! — with the olives. As in, dream combo. As in, we broke out the container of olives and started adding a fresh olive to each bite.

The other bonus of this was that I used a Rick Stein recipe, and his recipe for the pizza crust was so childishly simple that I have overcome my fear of homemade pizza dough for the rest of my life. Whenever anyone suggests pizza, I will volunteer to make the dough, because it is that easy to do. Amazing – I never knew!

Since I personally have four separate recipes for pissaladière, I won’t bother reprinting one here, because if you have a French cookbook, or even just a comprehensive baking book, it will most likely have a recipe. This post is just to say a) I’m back with a new project, and b) you really should try making this dish. Or, at least, try homemade pizza dough. So easy.