coupetade (french toast bread pudding)

Posted on 10/05/2013 by

My home network is FINALLY back online. All in all, it wasn’t down for much longer than a week. But considering how things are all tied together now, one week is a VERY long time to be without a land line, television, and internet. The withdrawal shakes started after only two days. By day seven I would have sold my soul for one episode of Jon Stewart.

But in my information starved state, at least I didn’t starve. As a matter of fact, I somehow had much more time than I normally do, and put it to good use whipping up this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Coupetade, a.k.a. French Toast Bread Pudding.

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So it’s like this: first you make some french toast, and then you make it into bread pudding. Sounds like a tasty brunch idea actually. Instead of maple syrup, I topped mine with cream and strawberries, because the berries are so gorgeous right now and I can’t seem to go more than a day without gorging on them.

My husband loved it. I was not as big a fan. Not sure why as I usually love bread pudding. But now that I have my internet back, I just can’t be bothered to spend too much time wondering why. After all, Jon Stewart is waiting.

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swiss chard pancakes

Posted on 26/04/2013 by

Starting out this week with a few shots of my recent trip to Paris. I have been working there quite a bit lately and decided that it was time to stay over a weekend and have some fun. My husband (the eclair fiend) stopped by and the weather played along nicely.

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After much sampling, the eclair fiend decided that the offerings from L’eclaire de Genie in the Marais were the best. I can only agree.

So, what was I supposed to be talking about? I can’t seem to drag my mind away from the eclairs. French Fridays with Dorie? Oh, right, this week’s recipe, Swiss Chard Pancakes.

With the spring veggies finally starting to make an appearance (and it’s about darn time!) it was actually not so easy to find chard. My regular product market didn’t have, but I did finally find some lonely bunches hidden at the far back of my local grocery store. They Paris 056looked ok when I bought them, but by the next day they had seriously wilted and were not so pretty looking. From the two bunches I bought, I was only able to salvage enough leaves for half a batch of Dorie’s pancakes.

Making the pancakes was easy as could be. Just throw all of the ingredients into the blender and blitz. The color of the batter was St. Patrick’s Day green and had me thinking that these might have fit better in the March schedule.

Paris 057I fried up my pancakes and served them with a fresh salad and a dollop of creme fraiche. All of which may sound very healthy, but my pancakes seemed to be awfully greasy, despite all the paper towels I went through trying to soak up the oil. Possibly I didn’t turn up the heat high enough. Whatever it was, these were sadly not a hit.

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cod and spinach roulades

Posted on 19/04/2013 by

I ignorantly voted for this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Cod & Spinach Roulades, thinking it would be a filet of fish stuffed with spinach and how hard could that be. Upon actually reading the recipe my eyes went wide with terror. Fish mousse? Stuffed with spinach & preserved lemons? Wrapped in plastic? And then steamed? How the heck is THAT supposed to work? That’ll teach me to cast my ballot before educating myself on the merits of the candidates.

Yes indeedy, from my perspective, this was one of the most intimidating French Fridays with Dorie recipes yet. I even tried to enlist the help of my trusty sous chef, but he took one look at the recipe and decided that he would prefer to be the photographer. I thought he did a pretty good job.

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We took it one step at a time and it actually worked. The individual recipes of fish mousse, spinach filling, and tomato sauce were actually pretty easy. It was more the assembly and cooking method which had me spooked. But in the end, the fish mousse was far easier to work with than I had feared and my plastic wrap held up in the steamer without melting.

I would now love to tell you that the whole thing was a success story and that we loved the finished dish. Sadly, not so much. But this recipe was WAY outside my comfort zone and I enjoyed the trip anyway.

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financiers

Posted on 11/04/2013 by

No WordPress! No you did NOT just post only half of the post that I stayed up late typing. No, I refuse to believe that you would be so mean. But here I am the next morning, reading my published post and noticing that it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense with the first paragraph missing. If I can’t even rely on you to fulfil the one function for which you were built, then really, why should we continue to be friends?

Yes, here I am, trying to remember what the heck I wrote last night right before hitting the “publish” button and going to bed. It had something to do with being a bad Dorista because I have been on the road and not had time to check in with my fellow cooks to see what they have been up to. It may have also mentioned that I haven’t been in my kitchen in weeks and how grateful I am that our super team of admins got the April recipes up so early so that I could (kind of) participate. I don’t really remember anything else, but I’m certain that it was some of the most brilliant writing that I’ve ever managed and is now forever lost in the WordPress circuits. Sigh, on to the bit that did actually get published, hopefully next week will be better….

Even so, it’s been a hectic few weeks and my participation has been pretty low. I think I’ve only read one or two of your olive sable posts… hope I wasn’t the only one who love those. And now, this week I’m posting without pictures because those happen to be at home on my personal computer and I forgot to upload them before I left. Oh well, such is life sometimes.

So, what do I remember about this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Financiers? I remember that the dough was very different from any I had made before, calling for browned butter and cooking the egg white mixture over low heat. I remember being impatient because the dough then had to sit overnight in the fridge. And I remember that the little cakes were awfully tasty. Even better with a cup of tea. My favorite financiers are pistachio so some day I would like to try my hand at making those.

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pierre herme’s olive sables

Posted on 05/04/2013 by

Now I’m a big fan of traditional sables. They are rich buttery cookies which seem fit for just about any occasion. But after being underwhelmed by our previous forays into the non-traditional sable realm with first cocoa and then seaweed sables, I was more than a little hesitant to tackle this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Pierre Herme’s Olive Sables. Yep, the only reason I voted for this recipe was because Mardi asked us to.

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In addition to my initial qualms, I had continued doubts all the way through the process. Which olives should I buy? Dorie recommends cured olives, but surely those are too salty. Should I make a full recipe or cut my loses and try for a half batch? Should I lie to my husband in order not to scare him off from this recipe? Are they dessert or are they appetizers? What the heck is this thing going to taste like!

In the end I decided to just go for it and follow the darn recipe to the letter by using cured olives to make a full batch and hope for the best. Thankfully, once I had finally decided to stop fighting it, the whole thing came together quite easily. In fact, I found the dough to be much easier to work with than normal sable dough, which I often find to be crumbly and difficult to mold into a log.

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And do you know what? These were delicious! After all that hemming and hawing, my goodness. Dorie accurately describes these as perceptibly sweet and salty at the same time. I’m still none the wiser as to whether to call these an appetizer or dessert. But I also don’t care any more because they are highly addictive no matter when they are served. My husband, however, was not convinced. His exact review was, “good, but they would be better without the olives.” Oh well, can’t please em all I guess.

Dorie says that these pair well with champagne, which is awfully handy because my husband and I just visited the Champagne region over the Easter holiday weekend and may have come back with a trunk full of bottles. Thanks goodness for the EU open border policy.

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lemon-steamed spinach

Posted on 28/03/2013 by

This week I am going to have to post and run because we are heading out of town for the holiday weekend. We get Good Friday and Easter Monday off here in Germany and my husband and I usually try to squeeze a little mini-break into the 4-day weekend. This year we are off to the Champagne region of France to drink a little bubbly. I will report back.

But in the meantime, we’re making spinach this week. Spinach is one of my favorite vegetables and we eat it rather often around here. To be honest though, I can’t remember the last time I tried a new spinach recipe. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I tried a recipe for spinach period. Usually I just throw it in a pan with some garlic and olive oil and call it a day. But this week, French Fridays with Dorie has us cooking up Lemon-Steamed Spinach, and I was looking forward to giving it a try.

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Dorie’s spinach recipe is hardly more involved than my usual preparation. She tosses her uncooked spinach with olive oil and lemon zest before throwing it into a steamer. The whole recipe took about 5 minutes from start to finish.

Instead of plain spinach I used a bag of salad greens which was composed of baby spinach, rucola, and beet greens. We paired it with lamb and potato gratin. All in all it was an absolutely delicious meal and this week’s recipe was an incredibly quick and easy side which we will use again.

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ispahan loaf cake

Posted on 22/03/2013 by

Through no fault of Dorie’s, this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Ispahan Loaf Cake, was a complete failure. I don’t know why. There are times when it seems that my subconscious is deliberately trying to sabotage a recipe by doing everything possible to mess it up, and yet it still comes out. Then there are other times when I follow the recipe exactly, and it just doesn’t work. This week fell into the later category. Ironic really considering that “ispahan” is a kind of Rose, and thus this week we were making my namesake cake.

For anyone who is interested in Ispahan Loaf Cake, I encourage you to check out what my fellow Doristas got up to this week.

As for mine, well, the darn thing just wouldn’t cook through. Dorie suggests 50 to 60 minutes in the oven. I left mine in for 90 minutes (checking the oven thermometer several times along the way) until the toothpick finally came out clean. But after letting it cool, turns out that the darn thing still wasn’t cooked all the way though. I doused it with whipped cream and hoped for the best. But apparently there are some problems which even cream can’t save.

If anyone has any brilliant ideas as to what I can do to use up a massive bottle of leftover rose syrup and extract, I’m all ears!

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