French Kitchen: Tartiflette!

I don't know about you, but I love me some cheese.  And some bacon.  And some potatoes.  So Rachel Khoo's Nids de Tartiflette recipe is right up my alley.

According to the recipe introduction, tartiflette was the brainchild of the makers of Reblochon cheese as a way to promote their cheese with an easy, hearty recipe that would increase their sales.  Personally, I'm not sure why this was necessary, because Reblochon cheese was my absolute favorite during my time studying in Paris.  It's a bit more pungent than other creamy soft cheese, and unfortunately it's not available in America.  Apparently it doesn't pass the USA's pasteurization requirements.  Part of me feels like I should be freaked out by that, but instead I just lament the fact that I can't buy Reblochon at my local supermarket.

I can, however, find Camembert, so that will do nicely.

This recipe didn't have a ton of ingredients, and really didn't rely heavily on adding spices.  But then when you're working with cheese, wine, and bacon, you're pretty well guaranteed some excellent flavor.  Here are the components of my tartiflette: potatoes, onion, butter, bay leaf, white wine, Camembert, garlic, and thick-cut bacon.

Another reason I was excited for this recipe was that it gave me an opportunity to use my brand new mandolin slicer.  A mandolin is essentially a very sharp blade which cuts food into thin slices by drawing the food back and forth across the blade using a hand guard.  It's an awesome little contraption.  I cut a ton of potato slices in very little time.  For this recipe, I used one and a half potatoes.  The recipe said to peel them, but I am bad at peeling things and impatient with my lack of skill, so I just left the skin on.  Ultimately, I ended up cutting the thin rounds into horizontal slices for more of a julienne-style cut.

After that was done, I diced an onion and sliced the bacon, and threw it all in a frying pan with the garlic and bay leaf.  The recipe called for something called lardons, which are cubes of streaky bacon with a prosciutto-like taste.  A quick Google search in the store told me that it's hard to find lardons in America, so I substituted some thickly cut bacon strips.  

Meanwhile, it's time to tackle the Camembert!  Yet another reason I was excited to make this recipe is because it incorporated Camembert into the potato bake.  Although I love French cheese, I always eat it simply - a small, cold slice on a cracker or piece of bread.  The thought of chopping up a whole Camembert round into little cubes and tossing it into a recipe to become all melty and delicious is completely irresistible.

Once the bacon has turned golden around the edges, add some white wine and continue to cook until the wine has reduced down to just a couple tablespoons.  Take off the heat, and stir in the potatoes and cheese.  Pro-tip: remove the bay leaf before you add all the potatoes...it took me several minutes to find it!

Rachel Khoo styles her tartiflette in little nests using a muffin tin (this is the nids part of the name nids de tartiflette).  Butter the muffin cups first, or the potatoes will stick, and overload the cups, because the tartiflette cooks down a bit.  The recipe seemed to indicate that it would only make six nests - but that must be assuming a larger muffin tin than I own because, as you can see, I definitely filled all twelve of my pan's little cups.

Pop it in the oven, wait 20 minutes, and voila!  Tartiflette hot from the oven.

Unfortunately, my little nests didn't hold their shape very well once they were taken out of the pan - but it didn't even matter.  This is absolutely one of the most delicious things I've ever made.  It's some serious comfort food, and perfect for a chilly winter evening.  The wine adds a sophistication of flavor that is lacking in American-style hash browns, and the Camembert cubes melt down into delicious gooey morsels of cheesy goodness.  Seriously - it's incredible.

So there it is!  Tartiflette.  An awesome meal with an awesomely fun name.  I served mine up with another recipe from Rachel Khoo - carrot salad, which basically involved mixing carrots and apples with a vinaigrette made from white wine vinegar, olive oil, grainy mustard, sugar, salt, and pepper (which is a super easy and delicious way to serve carrots, by the way).  I was wonderfully satisfied with this dinner.  Another victoire de cuisine francais! 

French Kitchen: Bouillon de Poulet avec des Quenelles de Volailles

Welcome back!

In the vein of yesterday's dreamy love letter to French cuisine, I would like today to write the post which I originally intended to write yesterday - a culinary tale of French food made in my American kitchen.  On the menu for today's post: Bouillon de Poulet avec des Quenelles de Volailles.  Or, Chicken Dumpling Soup.

I feel like there are few things which are more down-home American than Chicken and Dumplings.  And yet somehow, when I began flipping through Rachel Khoo's The Little Paris Kitchen cookbook, this was one of the first recipes that drew my eye and caught my interest.  I think the reason it intrigued me was because of the dumplings, or quenelles - unlike the American versions of flat noodley concoctions or mounds of floating Bisquick, these dumplings were finely shaped little creatures, derived from flipping the dumpling back and forth between two spoons before gently gliding the dumpling into the boiling stock.  What's more, the chicken was all mashed up inside the breading of the dumplings...meaning that the dumplings were, in fact, chicken dumplings.

So I gathered all my ingredients together and proceeded to begin with the journey.  As I said yesterday, despite the wonders attributed to French food, the ingredients they use aren't all that different from those found in your average American grocery store.  Today we have: White bread, eggs, chicken breast, carrots, nutmeg, parsley, salt, mushrooms, chicken stock, salt, and half and half.  Please ignore the Royal Wedding Commemorative Tea Tin in the background of the photo (or celebrate it's kitschy glory, if you prefer - in fact, that's the option you should choose.)

First thing to do is to chop up some carrots.  The recipe called for two carrots, diced.  Pro-tip: if you don't want to buy big carrots, buy baby carrots and line them up to look like normal carrots to figure out how many you need to use.

That'll do.

Next, get some chicken stock a'boiling, and dunk those carrots right on in there.

Meanwhile, it's time for the fun part - blending almost all the other ingredients together into a gooey mess of chickeny-eggy-bready wonder.  Toss about 1 chicken breast, one egg plus one egg yolk (separating eggs for the win), a piece of bread without crusts, some half and half, a pinch of nutmeg, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of pepper into the blender.  And then blend it up.  Blend that baby up real good.

Now if you, like me, have a sub-par blender, this might actually be kind of tricky.  The ingredients are supposed to combine to form a sticky paste-like dough, which kind of gets stuck in the blades and causes it not to blend too easily.  I found that mixing things around with a wooden spoon handle and shaking the pitcher back and forth like a lunatic in between blending helped overcome this difficulty.

After everything is blended and pasty, it's time to make the quenelles!  Basically, you take a spoon in each hand, pick up some of the dumpling dough, and scoop the dough back and forth from spoon to spoon until it makes a nice little oval.  Unfortunately I don't have a photo of this part because I, like most humans, do not have three hands.  But here's a video showing the general idea...



By this point, the boiling chicken stock should have made the carrots tender enough for a soup.  As you shape each quenelle, drop it gently into the (still boiling) soup.  It will sink to the surface at first, and then rise up all nice and fluffy once it's cooked, about five minutes later.  After all the quenelles seem to be floating merrily along, toss in some sliced mushrooms to finish things off.  Let it cook just a bit more to tenderize the mushrooms a bit.

RISE, my dumplings, RISE!

And voila! Plate things up, sprinkle on some parsley, and you have for yourself a lovely chicken soup with some happy little quenelles French-ing things up.  I served mine with a simple cranberry and blue cheese salad with a bit of olive oil.  It made for quite the pretty little meal.

The quenelles were fascinating little things.  The texture wasn't at all like American dumplings - it was quite sponge-like and springy.  You could obviously taste the chicken, but you couldn't see it at all.  Essentially, you have on your hands some little chicken breads.  It was a bit unusual at first, but, after the surprise of the first bite, they're quite good.  The nutmeg really adds a depth of flavor to the dumpling.  In fact, I've cooked several French recipes now, and there always seems to be some nutmeg involved.  Perhaps we have discovered the French secret to culinary greatness.

So there you have it!  Quenelles de poulet, brought to you by my Tennessee apartment kitchen.  See you next time for more cultural escapades!

Baguettes and Brie - The Allure of French Food

One of my favorite things to do is read cookbooks.  I find it intellectually fascinating.  I like cooking too, obviously, but in the chaos of daily life I often find myself falling into a restaurant and take-out rut.  Besides being expensive, this unfortunate habit also causes me to lose out on one of my favorite hobbies in the name of laziness, unhealthy cravings, and a desire to eat a delicious variety of foods.

But delicious foods of varying cuisines aren't limited to the restaurant world - people cook all over the world, and with relatively the same basic tools and ingredients.  Everyone has eggs.  Everyone has meat.  Everyone has produce.  What makes international cuisines different from one another isn't the tools, it's the technique.  And usually, it's the spices.

When I was a junior in college, I studied in Paris for four months.  During this time I lived with a host mother who cooked dinner for me and my other American housemates several times a week.  French food is notoriously wonderful, the height of culinary excellence, and tres fancy.  I was excited to see what my French host mother would cook up for dinner each night.  She rarely disappointed - the meals were delicious and varied widely from one another.  But what was fascinating to me was that I couldn't figure out why the food was so good.  Most of the ingredients that crossed my plate were familiar - and yet they tasted wonderfully different and delicious.  At the time, my own cooking skills were limited.  For example, that same semester I made dinner with my housemate, and somehow produced startlingly high flames while cooking ham in a frying pan.  For obvious reasons, my housemate oversaw the remainder of the meal.

Being therefore a culinary novice, I chalked up the taste difference between French and American cuisine to the food being fresher.  The French people buy fresh bread every day at the local bakery, buy cheese at the cheese store, buy meat from the butcher, and so forth.  These are a people who take their food seriously.  Certainly, bits of processed food have begun to infiltrate French society.  My host mother stocked Chocolate Special K cereal in her cupboard for breakfast, and the TV regularly played ads for sugary snacks (though these came equipped with an official Surgeon General's Warning that advised, "For your health, avoid snacking in between meals".)  But the French take pride in their culinary heritage, and this is reflected in the local restaurants as well as the day to day life of the French people.

It's been 5 years since I studied abroad in Paris, and my cooking skills and intellectual interest in culinary styles and techniques have both increased immensely since then.  So you can imagine my delight when, this Christmas, I unwrapped "The Little Paris Kitchen: 120 Simple but Classic French Recipes" by Rachel Khoo.  This beautiful cookbook provides simple to follow, non-intimidating recipes with full page photos of each dish.   I discovered Rachel Khoo, and this cookbook's existence, through her Cooking Channel TV Show of the same name.  The recipes found in the cookbook are based on those she prepared in a tiny restaurant she operated out of her studio apartment - meaning that the recipes were created and cooked entirely with two gas burners and a miniature oven.  Watching the show, I was fascinated to see the food that a woman of similar age to myself was able to produce from such a small kitchen...and I thought to myself, "Surely I can cook food like the French, too..."  And it turns out that I could!  I'm beginning to discover that a lot of French cooking has to do with the way the food is cooked, not the ingredients being used.  Perhaps culinary excellence in day to day life is not so far off as we Americans often imagine...

I have successfully prepared three recipes from Rachel Khoo's book so far, and I am absolutely loving it.  Each has turned out deliciously, and tasting very much like the food my Parisian host mother prepared for me five years ago.  In future posts, I plan to recount my experiences cooking the various recipes, complete with photos and tales of tribulation encountered en route to culinary victory.  In fact, that was the original intent for this post, but I seem to have gotten caught up in dreams of a land where food is meant to be savored, where the smell of fresh bread wafts through the streets even before the city wakes up, and where a particular sauce and a pinch of nutmeg make all the difference.

So I will leave you here to dream your own culinary dreams.  Check back soon for more French cooking adventures!

Welcome!

Well hello to you, and welcome to "The World Made Small!"

I have found in my life a persistent love of exploration and discovery, ever since I was a child and my family packed up the minivan for vacations year after year.  I've been to twenty five states and nine countries.  I speak French and English fluently, and have picked up smatterings of Italian, Greek, German, and Portugese over the last several years.  The world has always seemed wonderfully interesting to me, and I have a great desire to experience as much of it as I can - and, I have been blessed to be able to see quite a bit of it.

But as all would-be explorers know, traveling is complicated.  It's expensive.  Vacation time is limited.  There are responsibilities to see to, and bills to be paid, and weekends to be slothed away in front of the television.  And yet I don't believe the desire for exploration ever quite dies out.  No, I think that, once it's there, it's quite difficult to get rid of.  The need to look once more just around the river bend persists, despite busy calendars and fledgling bank accounts.

Happily, here in 21st century America, we live an increasingly globalized existence.  Bits and pieces of other countries and cultures slip past us every day, whether we notice it or not.  The latest British boy band sensation sings over the store intercom.  We go out to lunch at the local Thai restaurant, or Italian restaurant, or Sushi restaurant.  We watch BBC, secretly love Studio Ghibli movies, and tune into "The Amazing Race" every Sunday.  In many ways, we don't really need to travel to experience the world - the world is coming to us.

And so the idea for this blog sprung into my head.  The world is undoubtedly large, but I want to make it small.  I want to reach out into the big, wide world, and fit it into my one-bedroom apartment life - whether through music, television, books, movies, or anything else that might cross my path.  And I want to write about it.

I'm setting off on a journey to discover our great big world, and make it mine.  Our world - my world.  Made small. 

Care to join?