Recipe: Arroz Chaufa

Well, I’ve been promising a number of people a certain recipe, and it’s time to finally put it up here. I still intend on photoblogging this the same way I did my aji de gallina a couple of years ago, but that’s not happening right now, that’s for sure. Anyway, before starting the recipe a quick aside: in contrast to yesterday and the day before, I actually had good luck with fish, resulting in delicious roasted pink trout.

Arroz Chaufa (Peruvian-Cantonese Fried Rice)

Note: I’ve translated a few terms into French for my Francophone friends.

Also, you should start marinating the pork the night before if you can, as the pork takes on more flavor and becomes more tender if it has many hours to soak.

And also, chaufa (like other kinds of fried rice) reheats very well and is often believed to be even better the day afterwards, so this is a convenient recipe for potluck dinners and other events when you want to prepare the dish in advance.

Ingredients

• 1kg or so of pork shoulder roast (or some other lean boneless roast); you can also replace this with chicken, tofu, or seitan (gluten).
• Brown sugar (cassonade) to taste (at least a 250g/ 1 cup)
• Soy sauce to taste (I use 2 parts light soy to 1 part dark soy)
• 1 tablespoon of ginger, freshly grated
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 3 cups of rice, white and long-grain
• 2 bunches of green onions (also called spring onions)
• 6 eggs

Preparation

1. Trim off any excess fat or skin (which you can later fry in a pan to extract the lard and use in frijoles refritos) and cut the meat into strips about the length and width of two fingers. Try to cut across the grain of the meat for more tender pieces.
2. Place the in a large freezer bag (sac congélation) and add the ginger, garlic and sugar. Add the soy sauce(s) until the sugar has just barely dissolved. The marinade should be very sweet. If you’re wary of tasting a marinade with raw pork in it, you can prepare the marinade in another bowl and then add it to the pork afterwards.
3. Push out as much air as possible and seal the bag and place in the fridge. This must sit for at least two hours, but ideally you should start the marinade the night before preparing the dish.
4. On the day that you’re going to make the chaufa, begin by preparing the rice. Put 3 cups of dry rice into a large saucepan with 4.5 cups of water and a bit of salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer partially-covered until all the water has disappeared.
5. When the rice is ready, transfer it to a wide casserole or tray, separate the kernels with a fork, and leave it to cool and dry out a bit (this makes for better texture; if you like, you can make the rice the day before as well).
6. In a hot frying pan with a thin layer of oil, lay down the pieces of marinated pork in one layer until the pan is full, leaving some space between the pieces. After 3 or 4 minutes, turn over and continue cooking. After 4 minutes, pick the largest piece out of the pan and cut in the middle. The center should be white or light pink and firm.
7. Remove pieces from the pan and place any remaining uncooked pieces into the pan and fry in a similar manner.
8. Once all of the pieces have been cooked, pour the marinade into the pan and boil over high heat until it thickens into a light syrup (when the bubbles begin to pile up into a mousse). Remove from heat.
9. With a fork and a sharp knife, cut the pieces into small cubes and place into a large bowl. Pour the thickened marinade over the pork cubes and mix to coat.
10. Clean and trim the green onions, remove any wilted layers, and then slice thinly.
11. Finally, it is time to assemble the fried rice. Have a clean non-stick pan (a well-seasoned wok also works) and a heat-resistant spatula or wooden spoon. Around the stove, arrange the rice, meat, and green onions near you, with the necessary serving utensils. Place the eggs nearby, with a clean bowl and a fork for whipping the eggs as you work. Also, have the bottle of light soy sauce and frying oil open and within easy reach. And finally, have a large clean bowl ready for the finished rice.
12. The rice is prepared in batches, so you will repeat the next steps 6 times.
13. Heat the pan until it is very hot. Spray or pour just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan lightly, and then add 1/6 of the meat to the pan.
14. Reheat the meat, stirring constantly, for about 30 seconds and then add 1/6 of rice into the pan. Break up any clumps of rice and mix well.
15. As the rice cooks, crack one egg into the bowl and beat lightly with a fork.
16. Add 1/6 of green onions to the pan, 2 dashes of soy sauce, and mix quickly.
17. Create an empty space in the center of the pan, add a bit more oil, and pour the egg into the middle. Tilt the pan until the egg covers the center of the pan and runs into the rice at the edges.
18. When the egg begins to turn opaque and coagulate on top, push the rice back on top of the eggs and wait for 30 seconds. Then, break up the egg with the edge of your utensil and mix it into the rice.
19. Transfer to your serving bowl and repeat the previous 6 steps.
20. Serve and enjoy!

Back in the Saddle, musically

Etude 007: Reggaetón Edition

Yay! Back in the saddle, so to speak. After work, I finally got around to making some music again. It’s just a short 2-minute loop with some reggaetón samples that a friend sent me, but I was just happy to have produced something after more than a month of radio silence.

Anyway, I had crashed at a friend’s place the night before, so I got up at 10h00, fell back asleep, woke up again at 10h30, and finally got myself out the door. I was in no shape to go directly to work, so I had to climb on my bike and pedal my way around parc Buttes-Chaumont and make my way over to my place for a hasty shower and breakfast.

I got to work a bit late, but my boss seemed to forgive me, and my day was otherwise pretty unexciting. I headed home and set about making a fish salad out of those two roasted sea bass that I had left over from the night before. It actually worked out pretty well. I made some mayo from scratch with some good olive oil, an egg, lime juice, mustard and a clove of garlic (and with the help of a good hand blender, mind you). From there, I finely diced some onions, fennel, turnip, and carrots along with some of the fennel greens. I took the fish and carefully disassembled them, pulling the flesh off the skeleton without taking too many pin-bones with it; I flaked the flesh with a fork and removed any bones I could find, and then I mixed the fish in the veggies and added the mayo. Not bad, really.

I also made a roasted cauliflower soup, which was “improved” by adding a small container’s worth of crème fraîche. See? It’s healthy, because there’s vegetables in it…despite the pound of cream.

My evening was spent mostly dealing with the banalities of preparing application dossiers for fellowships and dealing with pedagogical issues, but before going to bed I decided to stay up and make a bit of music. It’s been almost a month since I had resolved to make something—anything—musical at least once every couple of days, so tonight was my night to get back to it.

The Four-Night Weekend, Part 2: Chopped Rainbow in Crystal Fold and Le Pin Up

Although I had only been lightly drunk at the height of last night, I realized this morning that I had been mixing my drinks too much. The combination of champagne, white wine, red wine and then mixed drinks gave me a splitting headache this morning.

Nonetheless, I managed to pull myself together, mix some breakfast, and then go about my day. I was a bit of a shut-in during the day, focusing on FINALLY catching up on my blogging from the previous weekend in Berlin. During a break in the intense blogging activity, I made an attempt to duplicate this dish that I’ve had a few times at Toronto-area Chinese restaurants, called “Chopped Rainbow in Crystal Fold.” Fantastic name, eh? The idea behind the dish is that you stir-fry some diced vegetables of bright and contrasting colors, toss in some spices and a bit of soy sauce, and then serve them warm on little wraps made out of lettuce leaves. The contrast of temperatures and texture had always delighted me, but I’ve never been able to find a similar dish in Chinese restaurants elsewhere.

So I improvised tonight with what I had. I chopped up a red onion, some carrots, some turnips, some potatoes, a bright red hot pepper and then sautéed them with a ton of garlic and ginger and a dash of dark soy sauce. Then, I dug out the red cabbage I had in the fridge and did my best to carefully pull out the exterior leaves intact. Although most of the leaves broke as I peeled them back, they were large enough that the fragments were the right size to fit in your hand and be wrapped around the filling. The results were pretty tasty, although the peppery taste of the raw red cabbage got to me after a while. It might be better with Napa cabbage or bok choy, although lettuce is certainly still an option.

Anyway, I headed out that night to Le Pin Up to see Fantômette spin at her monthly “Piscine” night. I had plans of leaving there a bit early and heading over to Djoon to check out Theo Parrish, since I still haven’t been to that club and I haven’t seen Parrish spin in years. Also, Bob (of Bob&Donna at PanoramaBar fame, see last weekend) was in town and planning to go out as well, so we said that we might find each other at Djoon later in the evening.

However, there was a big turnout at Le Pin Up that night, including lots of friends that I hadn’t seen in ages, so I stuck around and chatted with everyone. By the time I gave some thought to moving to Djoon, the métro had stopped running and I wasn’t too keen on biking all the way over to the Bibliothèque Mitterand area. Also, I had had several of the trademark “Bubble Pin Up” drinks, which involves champagne, vodka, and violet syrup, and which had hit me harder than I had expected…probably because my dinner had been nothing more than veggies.

Anyway, I stayed there and hung out with friends until the night ended at 4h00, and then I wandered down the street with a couple of friends and grabbed a Vélib bike and headed home.

Beef Bourguignon, Baby!

Sometime last week, at the height of my flu/cold/plague, I bought a couple of bottles from the little corner shop on my street. The more expensive one, a 1998 bordeaux at 6€, turned out to be corked. Even without the use of my olfactory senses, I could tell that this wine was totally undrinkable. So I put it aside and lurched back downstairs the next day and asked to replace the bottle. The shop owner insisted that I had just picked a “bad quality” wine, and told me to pick another bottle of similar value. So I did, and that bottle was corked, too. I was too sick and tired to go back down and fight him over it, so I left the bottle in the fridge overnight with a ball of plastic wrap (this is a trick for removing the “corked” taste that sometimes works) and waited for it to mellow out. It was still undrinkable the day after, but it was probably usable for boeuf bourguignon, so I left it in the fridge and waited for a good day to make that most famous French stew.

Tonight, on the way home, I decided to finally make the boeuf bourguignon. It was a relatively simple affair. I stopped at a grocery store and bought a pot au feu (“stew”) packet, which comes with a lot of leeks, a lot of carrots, and a bit of celery, one onion, and one turnip. Personally, I would’ve used more onion, but I couldn’t complain with the convenient packaging. I also picked up a pack of stewing beef, which here is helpfully labeled “bourguignon,” because what other thing would you make with cheap beef? At least, that’s what I assumed the French packagers were thinking when they decided to label it so. I also bought some candy, but that’s neither here nor there. Moving along…

So I stopped to get some bread at my bakery, and then it was time to make the bourguignon. I’ve written about the recipe here before, but I realize now that I never gave an actual recipe, so here it is. There are many, many possible versions of this, and this is the simplest version I’ve done so far, and it turned out EXCELLENT.

Ingredients

• 500 g. of stewing beef (approximately), but in large chunks (note, the more chewy connective tissue the better; it’ll all dissolve into the sauce)
• 1 onion (or maybe more)
• 6 medium-sized carrots
• 4 leeks (whites and a bit of the green)
• 1 large turnip
• 1 stick of celery
• 1-2 bay leaves
• several sprigs of fresh thyme
• rosemary (optional; I just had it kicking around)
• 4-5 cloves of garlic
• a bottle of wine
• some water and/or stock
• olive oil
• a few tablespoons of flour

Instructions

1. Prepare all your vegetables first. The leeks always have grit between the layers, so start by cutting them length-wise, and then crosswise into half-moons about 1cm long. Put them in a large bowl with a lot of water and separate the layers of leeks with your fingers, leaving them to float to the top and release their grit.
2. Dice the onion and celery, and place to one side. Peel and dice the turnip and place with the onion.
3. Peel and dice about 2 carrots and place with the onion and turnip, but also peel the rest of them and cut them into relatively large rounds.
4. Peel and mince the garlic as finely as possible. Put to one side.
5. Finally, get a large stock-pot or dutch oven and place it over medium heat. Add enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pot to a depth of a few millimeters.
6. One the oil is good and hot, CAREFULLY place the pieces of meat into the pot with a pair of tongs, taking care to leave a bit of space between them for proper cooking.
7. WAIT. The meat will probably stick to the bottom of the pan and that’s what you want. You need to wait for the meat to caramelize to the bottom of the pan and develop a crust, so give it at least 2 minutes. Then, test by giving the meat a gentle pull with your tongs. When they pop off the bottom of the pan with a bit of gentle pulling, turn them over and fry the other sides of the meat. It’s Ok if a few bits of the browned meat stay stuck on the pan for now.
8. Once all of the meat has been browned, remove the pieces from the pot and place them in a large bowl (a bowl is better than a flat dish, because the meat is going to leak a lot of molten fat and blood while you’re working on the next few steps).
9. Toss in the onions, celery, turnip, and the diced carrots (but not the sliced carrots) into the pot and dust lightly with salt. Mix to coat and then cover a leave over low heat for a few minutes.
10. When the leeks and onions are translucent and beginning to get soft, add the garlic and the rest of the carrots, mix, and leave to sweat a couple of minutes longer.
11. Dust the contents of the pot with a layer of flour and quickly mix. Keep mixing as the flour cooks into the oil and begins to thicken everything. When you see the flour-oil mixture beginning to really stick to the bottom of the pan, it’s time to deglaze.
12. Pour just a splash of wine and quickly mix. Once that’s absorbed, pour in a bit more and mix again (this method helps to avoid lumps in the sauce). After that, pour the rest of the bottle in, along with about 1 liter of water or stock.
13. Add about a teaspoon of salt (you can always add more later) and 4 crushed black peppercorns (or half a teaspoon of ground pepper).
14. Place the meat back into the mixture. If you have some potatoes kicking around the kitchen, you can wash them and throw them in here, as well.
15. Place over high heat until the liquid starts to boil. At that point, reduce to a simmer and cover.
16. Leave to simmer for at least 3 hours, preferably 4.
17. When the meat comes apart easily and the connective tissue has become soft, remove meat from mixture, along with the potatoes and any other bits of vegetables that are large enough to pick up with the tongs (don’t sweat the smaller veggies).
18. Place the remaining sauce over high heat and stir frequently, until the sauce has reduced by about half its volume and it’s thick enough to cover the back of a wooden spoon.
19. Return the meat to the pan, stir until coated, and then turn off the heat and leave covered for a few minutes. When the stew is cool enough to eat, serve and dig in.

Canette de Barbarie, rôtie

I got home around 6h00 last night, soaking wet, so I slept in pretty hard, not getting up until nearly 15h00. I lazed about for a bit, and then worked on blogging yesterday’s events, took care of some email correspondence, and then made dinner.

I had a canette de barbarie (a young duck of the Muscovy Duck variety) and some potatoes, so it was time to make like a volailler and whip out the rotisserie grill! My oven has a rotisserie attachment, which works relatively well. So I washed a bunch of potatoes and cut them into large chunks, and then put them in a baking pan and drizzled a light coating of olive oil (just a bit, since they’ll continue to be basted with the fat of the duck). After mixing the potatoes to give them a good coating, I turned them all on their skins, so that the cut sides of the potatoes were facing up. I stuck them in the oven and turned it to high, so that they would start to bake while I was prepping the canette.

For the canette, I gave it a wash and then gave it a good coating of rosemary and oregano all over the skin, and then added a generous dash of salt. I didn’t put any pepper on it, since black pepper can burn under high heat.

I put the canette on the rotisserie skewer and then stuck it into the socket in the oven, with the bird positioned over the potatoes. I let it grill quietly for almost two hours, during which the fat from the young duck dripped onto the potatoes and the skin turned a caramel brown. The last time I had made poultry this way, I had pulled it out too early, thinking that the first sign of brownish skin was a sign that the bird was done. This time, I waited until the skin was beginning to look crispy and the tips of the wings were beginning to go black. At that point, the bird was perfectly and thoroughly done. The breasts of the duck came out a bit tough and iron-heavy, but that’s the taste that comes with the duck, and it was corrected with a bit of gravy.

The potatoes weren’t completely done (the rotisserie attachment requires the oven to be left partially open, so they didn’t get much heat), and so I pulled out the bird and put it on a serving plate to rest while I closed the oven and put the potatoes to roast on high.

Once the potatoes were ready, I pulled them out, placed them on the serving tray, carved the duck into pieces, and then poured the pan drippings (duck fat!) over the whole thing. Then, I put the pan over the stove and heated it and splashed in a bit of water to bring up all of the tasty browned solids from the bottom of the pan. I transferred the liquid to a saucepan and reduced it by nearly half, and then threw in some tapioca flour that had been mixed into a slurry with a bit of water. Eventually, the sauce took on a thick consistency, and I drizzled it over the cut duck breasts.

Delicious! And that was my day.

Rascasse en papillote

Again, a busy but non-noteworthy day at work. BUT, then I went home and made some excellent, excellent fish. So here’s the recipe. This time, I used a rascasse (a type of scorpionfish), which has a more buttery flavor than the maigre from yesterday. Nonetheless, the results were delicious. The whole spices I used here are optional, but certainly add some flavor.

Whole Fish in Papillote

Ingredients

• 1 white-fleshed fish, about as wide as a dinner plate and no thicker than 2 inches thick at its widest point
• 1 red onion, sliced in thin rounds
• ½ bulb of fennel, sliced thinly from the base to the stalks to create thin horseshoes
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, sliced thinly
• 1 key lime or ½ lemon, juiced
• salt
• pepper
• whole coriander seeds
• whole fennel seeds
• whole cumin seeds
• olive oil
• (equipment: parchment paper, roasting pan)

Instructions

1. Start preheating your oven to 200ºC (around 400ºF)
2. Slice the onions, fennel and garlic and place on a dish near where you’ll be preparing the fish.
3. Cut a length of parchment paper that is as long as the fish and twice as wide (i.e., enough to wrap the fish). Fold the parchment paper lengthwise and then open again. The fish will be placed on one side of this crease, and then folded over.
4. Before bringing preparing the fish, you can prepare your first layer of aromatics. Lay down a row of onion rounds, then a thin layer of fennel, and then another layer of garlic. Leave enough aromatics for the other side of the fish as well as the cavity.
5. Wash the fish under very cold water in your kitchen sink, running your hands over the body of the fish and feeling for any remaining scales (note: there are always scales left around the head). Rub the belly cavity under running water to remove any bits of blood and check that the internal organs have all been removed.
6. [Also, if your fish’s fins haven’t been trimmed by your fishmonger, get a pair of scissors and cut them close to the body.]
7. Pat the fish dry with paper towels and transfer to the parchment paper but don’t place it on the vegetables yet. Salt liberally on both sides of the fish and in the cavity, then lay it down on top of the vegetables.
8. Stuff the cavity with aromatics, and then lay the remaining vegetables on the top side of the fish.
9. Fold the parchment paper over and start to fold the two layers of parchment paper together by making overlapping diagonal folds. Be careful not to rip the paper on the pointy bits of the fish (fins, mouth, tail); you can use aluminum foil instead of parchment paper to avoid tearing, but the acidity of the lemon juice will react with the aluminum and create odd flavors.
10. Carefully transfer the papillote package to the roasting pan, and then place in the oven.
11. Cook for 30 minutes (25 if the fish is a bit thin)
12. Pull the papillote and carefully transfer the fish to your dinner plate. The parchment paper is probably quite wet on the bottom, so it will tear easily. A pair of flat spatulas will probably help.
13. With a sharp knife or a pair of scissors, cut the top of the papillote along its length and pull back to expose the fish. Stick a fork into the thickest part of the fish along the spine and twist gently. The flesh should flake away easily.

OMG I MADE ALIOLI FROM SCRATCH

For realz, yo. There were other amusing things that happened today, but this is by far the most awesome.

Now, I don’t just mean that I made alioli with a hand-blender or something. I made it WITH A MORTAR AND PESTLE. That is how hard-core I am.

So just to review: alioli (or aïoli) is a sort of mayonnaise that is made with a clove of garlic as the basic emulsifier rather than an egg. Originally from the Provençal / Catalonian regions, this recipe was traditionally made by crushing some garlic into a smooth paste and then adding mustard and oil until it takes on a mayonnaise-like texture. Egg yolks are sometimes added to speed up the emulsion, but the “real thing” involves just salt, garlic, oil, with a bit of mustard and a bit of lemon juice.

Here is a more general recipe for the sauce (although I disagree with the author’s use of egg), but here is what I did tonight:

1. Take 2 large cloves of garlic, peel then slice finely and throw into a pestle (in retrospect, one was more than enough)
2. Add salt, a little splash of olive oil, and a half-teaspoon of Dijon mustard.
3. Pound and pound and pound. The garlic should turn into a paste.
4. At a certain point, the olive oil you had added will disappear into the paste. At that point, add just enough oil to cover the paste and start pounding again.
5. As the paste absorbs the oil, repeat the previous step again.
6. When the paste starts getting a bit stiff, add the juice of half a lemon.
7. Pound until the juice is absorbed, and then start again with the oil.
8. Keep going until the paste starts getting stiff. NOTE: It’s very hard to get the sort of “hard” mayonnaise emulsion you get from store-bought mayonnaise, so don’t push the emulsion too far.

Now, I threw the entirety of the mixture over a super-large bowl of mâche greens and called it an appetizer. I should’ve left the alioli to mellow out a bit before eating, as the two cloves of raw garlic were strong enough to make my mouth hurt. I’m a big fan of spicy food, but even I had trouble finishing. Also, I stank of garlic for the rest of the night.

Quince and The Trumpet of Death!

I'm starting my own Harry Potter franchise! It'll involve gastronomy instead of magic. But I'll maybe include sodomy instead of witchcraft, so at least the books will get banned in all the right places.

On the way home from work today, I noticed that somebody had taken advantage of the dark-grey asphalt that has been laid down as sidewalk in the area around the “Rive Gauche” neighborhood (Université Paris VII, to be exact) to write various slogans in contrasting, light-toned paint. Most of it is of the “rent is too high!” “squatters rights!” variety, but there’s also this:

Aug 08 – Sep 08, en mémoire des feuilles mortes, tombées pour l’automne.

In translation: Aug 08 – Sep 08, in memory of dead leaves, fallen for autumn. Anyone who’s spent some time in a Western European city will recognize this as the standard formula for a war memorial (especially WWI and WWII), so I thought this was amusing and oddly poignant. All the more so because there is a lot of new construction here, which means that there are only baby trees planted here and there.

Anyway, I had noticed that Monoprix was selling black trumpet mushrooms (In French, trompettes de la mort, or “trumpets of death”), so I grabbed a handful and took them home. The other night, I had bought two pear-like fruits called coing, which I had presumed to be a variety of pears, since in the autumn you can often find a selection of 4-8 varieties in many stores. When I peeled one and tried to eat it, I found it beautifully perfumed, but hard, fibrous, and sour. So I looked up “coing” online and discovered that it actually meant “quince.” Ah. So I boiled the already-peeled one to soften and de-sour it, and it was lovely and fragrant.

So tonight, I had a handful of black trumpet mushrooms, one large quince, and a hankering for a bit of chicken. I hit the butcher near my place and picked up a cuisse de poulet, which means “chicken thigh,” but tends to resemble a dark-meat quarter-chicken by American standards: drumstick, thigh and the part of the back where it meets the thigh. My plan was to make a slow-cooked dish, so I thought a bone-in, skin-on, dark-meat quarter would do the trick rather nicely.

So I browned the thigh for a while in a relatively deep pan, removed the chicken and added a pat of butter to the chicken fat and the peeled and diced quince, added the mushrooms after the quince had gotten a bit soft, and then stirred the whole thing and stuck the chicken thigh back in. I covered the saucepan and let it simmer for a while until the mushrooms and the quince and the chicken had all rendered their juices, and then I added maybe a ½-cup of water and covered again and cooked for about half an hour. The result? Deliciousness. Quince has a lot of pectin in it, so by the time the fruit had come apart and turned into a sort of sweet jam, I had this thick mushroomy-sweet sauce that I could slather over the chicken and eat.

I had bought this demi-bouteille of 1989 Saint-Émilion Bordeaux wine for 7€ the other day (“expensive” by French standards), so I cracked it open to have with the chicken. Nearly 20 years old, that wine was the smoothes, most buttery red wine I think I’ve ever had. Just amazing. It was maybe a bit too mild for fans of the Cahors or Côtes du Rhône, super-tannic wines, but it’s the kind of thing you could serve to almost anyone.

So, without further ado, another recipe:

Chicken à la LMGM (Quinces and Trumpets of Death!!1!)

Ingredients

• 1 cuisse de poulet, which is like a quarter-chicken with the drumstick and thigh together.
• A bit of olive oil
• A pat of butter (2 tablespoons)
• 1 large quince, peeled and cubed
• 1-3 cloves of garlic
• 3-4 big handfuls of black trumpet mushrooms (morels might be another substitute)
• ¼-½-cup of water or chicken stock

Instructions

1. Rub the chicken with a bit of oil, then place in the already-hot pan or dutch oven. Fry for 3-5 minutes on both sides over medium heat, until brown.
2. Remove chicken and leave on plate (note, it will leak juice, so don’t just put it on the counter!)
3. Melt butter into the remaining chicken fat in the pan, add quince, salt lightly and stir.
4. Once the quince has become glossy and a bit soft, add chopped garlic and mushrooms. Stir to coat.
5. Reduce heat, return chicken to pan (and any drippings that leaked out onto the plate), cover and simmer on low heat.
6. After 7-10 minutes, the mushrooms and quince should’ve released their liquid into the pan. Add water or chicken stock until there is about 1.5 cm of liquid in the pan (1/2”), stir, and then cover and continue simmering.
7. After 30 minutes, grab the drumstick and give it a pull. If the meat falls from the bone or the joint comes apart, it’s ready. If it’s not ready, dilute the liquid as necessary, cover and cok for another 15 minutes.
8. When ready, remove the chicken and reduce the sauce if necessary to desired thickness. If the sauce is too greasy for your liking (depends on how fatty the chicken was), add some bread crumbs or crushed saltines to absorb some of that and simmer for a few minutes while stirring.
9. Pour sauce over chicken and serve.

Things I might do differently next time:

• Add shallots with the garlic
• Use an entire découpe de poulet (i.e., an entire chicken cut into pieces), so that the sauce could be eaten with the breast.
• Maybe experiment with “sweet” spices like nutmeg or cloves or allspice.
• Finish the sauce with a healthy dose of crème fraiche.
• Try using cèpe/porcini mushrooms, for a more noticeable mushroom texture.
• Try substituting the braising liquid with white wine or maybe a sauterne (sweet white wine).
• Try using duck fat instead of butter, and replacing the chicken thigh with duck breast.

Mushroom season!

Although you can get many mushrooms all year round, fall is really the time in France where everything seems to be in season and you can get huge amounts of mushrooms for very little money. To celebrate this fact, of course, I went out and bought the most expensive mushrooms I could find. On the way home, I stopped in Monoprix to get a few things and found a huge special display full of mushrooms. They had morels, black trumpets, shiitake, cêpes (porcini) and blewits (pied bleu, or “blue foot”). I grabbed a generous portion of the cêpes and the pied bleus and made my way home.

I’d never had pied bleu mushrooms before, and looking them up on the web revealed that they can actually be poisonous when undercooked. So I decided that I would save them for tomorrow and make a mushroom sauce to go over pasta; I don’t want to poison myself in the interest of making a quick dish.

So for tonight, I decided to make a fricasée of mushrooms and sausages. I had two leftover saucisses de Montbéliard but I think any smoky sausage would do. Anyway, the results were fantastic, so here it is my recipe, in the place of a blog entry.

[Picture taken from noodlepie's Flickr set]

Fricasée aux cêpes et saucisses de Montbéliard

Ingredients

• 250-500 g (about a pound) of cêpes / porcini mushrooms
• 2 medium-sized sausages (bratwurst, kielbasa, chorizo, whatever; as long as it’s a bit smoky and has some fat to contribute to the mix)
• 1 pat of butter (about ¼ cup) at room temperature
• dry white wine or lemon juice (optional)

Preparation

1. Slice sausages into rounds that are about ¼-inch think (½-cm) and place in a dry pan over medium heat.
2. Start cleaning and slicing the mushrooms. If the mushrooms look clean, give them a quick wipe with a damp cloth and get to work. If they’re covered in dirt (like most mushrooms here), wipe the caps with a damp cloth—taking care not to get any water in the gills on the underside of the cap—and take a peeler to the stems. Don’t peel away too much of the stems! They’re the best part.
3. Pull off the cap and slice at about the same thickness as the sausages. Take the peeled stems, slice in half lengthwise, and then slice to a similar thickness.
4. As you’re working on the mushrooms, keep an eye on the sausages. Eventually, they’ll render their fat and then start to brown onto the pan. When they’re beginning to stick, flip them over and let them start browning on the other side.
5. When there’s a fair bit of fat in the bottom of the pan and the sausages are almost entirely cooked, toss in the mushrooms.
6. Mix to coat, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cover.
7. After a few minutes (5-8 mins) the mushrooms should’ve given up a lot of their liquid. Remove the cover, turn up the heat and reduce the liquid in the pan by about half. If you like, this would also be the moment to add a splash of sherry, dry white wine, or lemon juice.
8. When the sauce can cover the back of a spoon, remove from heat and mix in the butter.
9. Serve as a side dish in small portions or as a main dish as one large portion.

Comfort Curry for a Gray Day

Well, today started out depressingly gray and stayed that way all day, and something about the weather really got to me. I slept in until noon, slugged around for a bit without accomplishing anything substantial, and then took a nap again until 17h00, thinking that it would give me some more energy. Realizing that I hadn’t had a coffee all day—and that we were out of coffee grounds—I finally schlepped my butt into the shower and headed out to the nearby grocery store. I decided to check out the nearby Penny Markt, which is maybe a step up from Aldi and very similar to the Franprix chain in France. What was available wasn’t high quality, but at least it was cheap. I got a fair bit of pasta, a bottle of Coke, potatoes, sausages, toilet paper and tissues, espresso grounds and some chocolate for just under 18€.

Anyway, my day was spectacularly unproductive, except for the domain of food. Perhaps sensing that I wasn’t going to get any writing done, I went into the kitchen and made an ersatz curry that I’m rather proud of. And so, without further ado…

Luis’s “Deutscher” Curry

I’m calling this a German curry because I make use of sausage filling, potatoes and carrots as the main elements of the curry, which would often appear on a traditional “home-style” German plate.

Zutaten (ingredients)

• 2 generous pinches, each of the following whole spices:
  • cumin
  • fennel
  • anise
  • dark and/or light mustard seeds
  • ajwan a.k.a. lovage
• approx 500 g of sausage filling
  • (in germany, you can find this out of the casing, but if you can’t find that, just buy 500 g of uncooked sausage and then pull off the casings)
• 1 large white onion, diced finely
• 3 medium tomatoes, chopped
• 3-5 cloves of garlic, crushed or minced
• 3 teaspoons of minced fresh ginger
  • (more if you’re using prepared ginger)
• 1-2 hot peppers and/or pepper flakes (to taste)
• 3-4 cardamom pods, bruised with the flat of your knife
• 2 tablespoons of ground tumeric (or just use a generous dose of prepared currypowder)
• 3-4 small waxy potatoes (e.g., “princess” or “new” potatoes), cut diagonally into ½-cm slices
• 4-5 medium carrots, peeled and sliced diagonally into ½-cm slices
• 1-2 cups of water or stock (as needed)
• ¼-cup of butter

Zubereitung (preparation)

1. I was a moron and didn’t brown my meat and toast my spices first, but you don’t have to follow my mistakes. So you should take a large and deep saucepan / stockpot / dutch oven and put in about a ½-cup of oil. Add all of the whole spices (but not the cardamom) and toast at high heat until they begin to release their aroma.
2. Normally, I would wait until the seeds start to pop before moving on, but we’re going to brown the meat as well, so toss in both the sausage filling and the onions, and break it up with a wooden spoon over medium-high heat. You want a bit of browning, so once it’s broken up, leave the meat to sizzle and stick to the bottom of the pan, moving it around every once in a while.
3. Once the onions are at least translucent and the meat is mostly brown (if you’re working with ground pork, it won’t go deep brown like beef), toss in the tomatoes. They will release a fair bit of liquid, so take advantage of this opportunity to deglaze the pan (i.e., scrape up the brown bits at the bottom of the pan).
4. Add the garlic and ginger, mix, and then wait for the garlic to mellow out a bit (but don’t let it burn!).
5. Add the hot pepper / pepper flakes, cardamom pods, tumeric, potatoes and carrots and mix quickly to coat everything.
6. By now, the consistency of the mixture should be pretty thick, so add enough water (or stock) to just barely cover everything and mix well. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat and keep at a simmer.
7. Go read a book or something. A good curry takes time, especially if you want that thick gravy-like texture, so set it simmer uncovered until the mixture starts to stick to the bottom of the pan, then add another cup of water, simmer, and so on until the vegetables are well-cooked and the sauce has thickened.
8. When everything has come together, remove the pot from the heat and add the butter. Adding the butter after cooking allows for that buttery finish without adding as much butter.
9. Allow to cool and thicken, and then serve with rice or, to be totally German, slices of dark rye bread.

Tartiflette!

Ah, tartiflette, cheesy potatoey meaty dish of the French Alps. Carla and her friends had left me a half-round of reblochon cheese (which comes from the mountainous Haute-Savoie region), so I decided to try to duplicate the dish we had tasted in Le Mans last week. I didn't have the recipe myself, so I used this recipe from the French Wikipédia, along merged with ideas from this recipe and whatever I could recall from the tartiflette I ate in Le Mans the week before. I must say, the results were freakin' delicious.

Luis's Freakin' Deliciuos Tartiflette

Ingredients

• 1/4-cup of butter or duck fat (or vegetable oil, if you wanna be like that)
• One large onion, diced finely
• 4 thick slabs of bacon (low salt) or poitrine fumé if you're in France, cut into think strips / lardons
• 3 or 4 shallots, diced finely (optional)
• garlic finely chopped (to taste, but I put in about 5 cloves)
• 500-750g of potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1cm cubes (or enough to fill your casserole / pan
• 250-500ml of white wine
• 250ml / 1 cup of crème fraîche
• 1 round or half-round of reblochon (depending on the surface area you need to cover)
• a handful of fresh rosemary chopped finely (optional)

Preparation

1. Put the onions, butter and ham together in a large, deep pan and put over a medium-high heat, until they begin to brown. If the ham is fatty, you can reduce the amount of butter.
2. Reduce heat and add the garlic and the shallots to sweat them out, taking care not to burn them.
3. Put the potatoes in the pan and sauté the whole mixture, until the potatoes have started to absorb the fat in the pan.
4. Add white wine, leave on medium-low heat, and cover until the potatoes are almost cooked through.
5. Mix in crème fraîche, and rosemary if you have it.
6. Take your roblochon and gently scrape off some of the while bacterial bloom with the back of a butter knife or a spoon. If you have a whole round of reblochon, cut into quarters, if you have a half round, cut in half again. Cut all the pieces crosswize (horizontally) to expose the soft centre.
7. STOVETOP VERSION: Lay the pieces of cheese, rind-side up, over the potato-cream mixture. Cover the pan and leave on low heat until the cheese has melted into the potatoes (approx 20 min).
8. OVEN VERSION: Place mixture in a heat-safe ceramic or cast-iron casserole, and place the cheese, rind-side up, overtop. Put into a rather hot oven (450F), and cook until the cheese has fully melted and begun to brown.
9. Serve!

Onions and Cilantro

Well, despite the fact that today was Mayday and I should've been out taking part in some labour-related protest (which is the tradition here), I was mostly hungover this morning, and thus missed out on the marches. I headed off to my local marché for some last-minute vegetables and fruits, and also picked up one of those delicious roasted chickens that are so easily edible here. I made fantastic warm chicken salad when I got home, upon which I grazed for pretty much the entire afternoon.

Since nothing else really happened that day (except for work and a phone meeting with folks back in Chicago), I'm including a recipe here. And since most people reading this blog probably know how to make a killer chicken salad, here's another recipe that I've been meaning to post. This is the "green" onion salsa that I made for my friend's brunch last Sunday. You see, growing up with a Peruvian mother, "salsa" to me always meant onions and something acidic; after that, tomatoes, (hot) peppers, corn, celery, beets, herbs, olives--all of those were optional. So, although this won't give you the chunky-tomato-style salsa that you might get in a grocery store in the states, it's certainly one of my favourite forms of salsa. Even if you're not a big fan of raw onions, this is worth a try once (and I've included some tips on how to mute the sharpness of the onions).

Onion-Cilantro Salsa, "Chimichurri"-style

[The ingredients for this salsa sort of approximate what you might put into a chimichurri sauce]

Ingredients

• At least 2 large onions of any kind (sweet onions are nice, but even cheap cooking onions are good
• A splash of some mild vinegar (cider, sherry, wine)
• A lot of ground cumin (at least two tablespoons, more to taste)
• The juice of a lime or lemon (or bitter orange)
• TONS of cilantro (about two bunches), stemmed and chopped finely
• A bit of olive oil

Preparation

1. Take the onions, peel them, and slice them into very thin half-rounds (or whatever cut you prefer; it just has to be thin).
2. If the onions you have are too strong, salt heavily and put them in a collander or sieve while you prepare the coriander. Rinse with cold water to remove the salt.
3. Add just enough of the vinegar to get the onions wet. Mix.
4. Add cumin and lime/lemon juice and a drizzle of olive oil. Mix.
5. Add cilantro, chopped finely, and mix again. Add more olive oil if you want it to be glossier and thicker. Add more vinegar if it needs more bite, and more citrus if the cumin/cilantro is too heavy.
6. Eat immediately or refrigerate till served

"Making the Bridge"

Tomorrow is a national holiday, so many French people were asking each other if they were going to "make the bridge" (faire le pont). As it turns out, what this expression means is something like "long weekend." More specifically, it's what you do when you have a holiday on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and you take off intervening days to connect the holiday to the weekend before or after. In other words, Thanksgiving in the US, and May 2-4 in Canada (a.k.a. Victoria Day, a.k.a. Get drunk in the bushes in honour of "our" Queen day). Since tomorrow is a Tuesday, most people here take off today as well and have themselves a 4-day weekend somewhere nice. I wish I had thought of that. I could've gotten some cheap-ass last minute train tickets to someplace near the ocean. Ah well, live and learn.

Anyway, after an unremarkable day at work, I got home and started preparing to finally blog about my outing last Saturday. I managed to upload, select and edit all of my photos and upload all of my film clips to YouTube, before DJ suggested that we go get some poutine. Now, poutine is one of those dishes for which, once you mention it to me, I am totally hungry. And once poutine is in my head, nothing else will satisfy me. So, I wrapped up what I was doing and got ready to head out.

In what was probably poor judgement, I decided that DJ and I should try one of the bottles of rosé wines that I picked up while shopping earlier that day. I've always been a bit of a snob about rosés, but the weather is warm and I'm willing to believe that rosés in France might be less crappy than elsewhere. For what it's worth, the rosé was actually quite nice: more like a dry Italian white with a little bit of a red bouquet. Regardless, we finished the whole bottle.

From there, things sort of spun out of control. Especially since neither of us had eaten yet and we had half a bottle of wine in us. We headed off to The Moose, ready for some poutine. Of course, we forgot that tomorrow was going to be a holiday--which meant that the place was packed. At least, it was packed for a Monday night.

After travelling up and down the bar and into the back room a few times to look for a table or even a decent seat at the bar, we gave up and took position next to the main dining area, with beers in our hands. DJ and I did our best to send out "hook up and go home" vibes to all the couples that were taking up precious real-estate with their non-poutine-related courtship. For a moment, we considered circulating around the room, advising people on how to be efficient about it: "Dude, there's no way she's going to do you, so you need to hit on her friend." "Honey, don't try to bag the boy your girlfriend is already working on. Take that guy with the indyrock beard as your consolation prize."

We also spotted this guy that looked like a bizarre, neon-coloured extra from Trainspotting. He was tall and exceptionally large, with a shaved head an no neck, wearing an over-tight zip-up shell-top that had a garish geometric pattern on it, a soccer jersey underneath in clashing colours, and some floppy adidas pants that were actually still too tight on him. DJ suggested that I approach him and ask him, "Excuse me sir, were you aware that you're ironic?" It seemed like an excellent idea, but thankfully my survival instincts overrode that one.

There was a group in front of us that were also waiting for a table. Suddenly, two large tables opened up, so we let them head to one table, and then we started heading toward the next table. As we were about to take the table, a girl from the other group came over and said, "No, we're taking both tables and pushing them together." "Oh yeah? Why do you need both?" "There's 15 of us." "Fifteen?!" "Sorry, you can totally have the next table." "Whatever."

We returned to our position to sulk, bitch and glare and the group that had denied us our poutine. At some point, another group tried to push past us and find a table in the dining area. I did everything but snarl at them and they quickly took the hint and went back to drinking at the bar. By this time, both of us were ready to fight for our right to poutine, dammit.

When another table finally opened up, we pretty much threw ourselves at it. It was a table of 4, and the same girl from that other group (which kept growing as more of their friends from their MBA-students-of-France posse showed up in their incongruous 3-piece suits) darted over and tried to claim that table for her group as well. Despite being pretty tipsy at this point, I managed to marshal enough French to assert myself: "HEY!! We were totally here before the rest of your group showed up!" "Ok, ok, we'll leave you two chairs." Damn fucking straight you will, missy.

So, after a fair bit of angst, DJ and I finally managed to get seated and order up a bowl of their best poutine with Montreal smoked meat. We wolfed back our food, ordered some more beer, and took a moment to allow our arteries to harden. For the rest of our time at the bar, we drank beers (it was 2 for 5€ Mooseheads that night) and amused ourselves watching the complex ballet of "Who's getting laid tonight?" play out at the table before us. The best part of the whole drama was when the girl who was the centre of attention went away and came back with a male "friend" who clearly served as a cock-block to the rest of the guys. I only wish I could've videotaped that.

After the bar stopped serving beer, we headed out onto the street with the realization that we were still hungry. DJ knew of a kebab place in the Latin Quarter that was pretty good, so we headed off in that direction. A little while later, we discovered the place was inexplicably closed, so we headed off to another Kebab place near that cluster of never-closed restaurants around Les Halles.

As we were enjoying our deliciously-bad kebabs and greasy fries, we got chatted up by a couple of American guys who were in Paris for a while. They asked us what we were doing in Paris, which inevitably turned into DJ and I explaining our discipline and subject areas. Thankfully, both guys were far more interested in DJ's jazz stuff than my EDM stuff, so DJ got to field the "Recommend jazz clubs for me!" questions.

We left the kebab stand a bit greasier (but happier) and headed off to Châtelet to catch the night bus home. The return home was surprisingly uneventful...

Hispano-Moroccan Salsa Goodness

So, work today was one of those days that should've been short and light, and turned out long and heavy. Once all of that was taken care of, I headed home to get some work done on my blog. I still had the latter part of last week and the big night out on Friday to write up, so I was pretty behind.

Nonetheless, I did take some time out to make a bit of food. I'm on a raw and veggie kick this week, mostly to compensate for what I've been eating this past month as people have come to visit me. With Carla planning to return in May--hopefully free of her diet restrictions--I may just have to subsist on water and celery sticks till then.

So today I had some tomatoes that were delicious but on the verge of going bad, a delicious new cucumber, a big bag of onions, a handful of hot peppers and some lemons. It's salsa time! This particular salsa preparation was inspired partly by the delicious salsa-like preparations that I've found at Moroccan restaurants here. After dicing all of the veggies and sprinking with a bit of salt and a fair bit of lemon juice, I added a ton of ground cumin and a drizzle of olive oil. It was perfect.

Desi Arroz Tapado and catching up

Yay! I spent all of today, from dawn till midnight, locked in my room, doing laundry, blogging like a maniac, and otherwise getting caught up. I still have to cut my hair, do the dishes and maybe have a moment of rest, but getting rid of the blog backlog was quite the relief. If you haven't been checking this blog recently, you might not realize that the last two weeks were pretty much written in the last two days. I've been a busy, busy boy.

Rather than bore you with stories of assclowns in the laundry room and endless typing, here's a recipe for what I ate today, which is essentially an arroz tapado made with Indian-style ingredients. Arroz tapado, by the way, is a Peruvian dish that involves preparing rice and ground beef separately (in this case, I used beans), then layering them in a bowl and turning the bowl upside down on a plate. I don't know why, but this little aesthetic turn meant the world to me when I was a kid. It still does, really.

Desi Arroz Tapado

Ingredients

The "Meat"

• 1/2-cup of butter (1/4 for frying, 1/4 for finishing)
• 1-2 medium onions, chopped finely
• 4 medium vine tomatoes, chopped finely (peeled if you have time)
• 1 tbsp garlic, crushed or chopped
• 1 tbsp ginger, grated or chopped
• 2 tbsp of chana dal mix or some other indian masala that you like
• 1-2 cups of mung beans or lentils (no need to presoak, really)
• 3-4 cups of water or stock
• Salt and Pepper to taste

The Rice

• 1/4-cup of butter
• 1 tbsp each of whole spices--at least cumin, but also black mustard seeds and lovage, maybe cardamom too. NOT peppercorns, though...they burn!
• 1 cup of rice (more if you like, but adjust water accordingly)
• 2 cups of water or stock

Preparation

The "Meat"

1. Melt 1/4-cup of butter and sautée tomatoes and onions until they begin to form a paste.
2. Add garlic, ginger and spices and wait for garlic to mellow out.
3. Add beans (washed) and mix to coat.
4. Add liquid until beans are well covered and leave to simmer.
5. When the mixture is nearly dry, add more water and simmer again.
6. Keep on doing this until the beans are soft and break open under the pressure of your spatula
7. With the mixture still rather dry, remove from heat and mix roughly with a firm spatula or wooden spoon until some of the beans have opened up and created a bit of a paste.
8. Add water, return to heat and allow to boil down one more time, being sure to stir more often.
9. Remove from heat, stir in remaining butter and put aside.

The Rice

1. Melt butter in saucepan and add whole spices over medium heat.
2. Wait until the butter has stopped frothing and the spices have begun to render their aroma. Add rice and stir to coat.
3. Add liquid and simmer uncovered until liquid has disappeared. Fluff with a fork and put aside.

The Plating

1. In a bowl (preferably something smooth, like glass or plastic), lay down alternating layers of rice and beans/meat. the layers can be as thick or thin as you like, but there should at least be 3.
2. Turn the bowl over onto a dish and give it a couple of sharp taps. The mixture should hold its shape on the plate.
3. If you want to be really Peruvian about it, add a sliced hard-boiled egg.

Luis & DJ eat again

OK, this was less planned than the last dinner with DJ, and I am proud to have invented a new dish in the process. I call it The Luis, out of pure hubris. When I die, I will live on in recipe form.

I bothered DJ for a dustpan and ended up inviting him up for dinner (which sounds like a hilarious premise for a porno, now that I think about it; "Is that a dustpan in your hand?" [cue porn guitar]). He went out and bought some wine (great wine, by the way DJ!) and bread and milk, and I set about throwing together The Luis (see below). With our apéritifs, we had baby pink radishes with this awesome smoked-salt butter. As DJ can attest, you could smear this butter on cardboard and it would be delicious. It's that good.

After a mountain of salade frisée, we had The Luis, and then seared tuna fillet (finally!). At this point, we were so full we were ready to burst. We skipped the cheese course and the dessert, which is just as well, since I was already later for a date with friends for drinks over at Bastille.

I headed out to meet the same friends that I had seen last Saturday, who had also brought another pair of friends. We had a few rounds of drinks at a bar on rue de Lappe (near Bastille) called Sister May. After a great night of chatting and comparing favourite music bio-flicks, we made plans to meet again on Friday and headed our separate ways home.

The Luis: mashed purple potatoes and green leek soup

Ingredients

The Potatoes

• About 500gr of purple / vitelotte / "all blue" potatoes, whole
• 2 large white or yellow onions, sliced in paper-thin half-rounds.
• 1/2-cup of butter for potatoes, 2 tbsp. for onions
• 2-3 cloves of garlic (optional)
• splash of sweet vermouth or sherry
• 1/2-1 cup of milk
• 1/2-cup of creme fraiche (or sour cream)

The Leek Soup

• 2 large leeks with the greens still on
• 1/2-cup of butter
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed or chopped
• One onion, chopped finely
• 1-2 cup(s) of stock or water
• 1/2-cup of milk
• 1/2-cup of crème fraîche (or sour cream)

Preparation

The Potatoes

1. Rinse potatoes but DO NOT peel them. Without their peels, purple potatoes go grey in water.
2. Put is saucepan or stock pot, cover with water and boil until tender (easily pierced with a fork)
3. In the meanwhile, slice onions and put them in saucepan with butter over medium heat. Cover (you can also add sage and/or oregano for flavour here).
4. When the onions are beginning to brown to the bottom of the pan, deglaze with vermouth and reduce heat.
5. When potatoes are ready, drain, cut into cubes, and return to pot along with butter. (You can remove the peels if you don't like them, but the results are tastier and more vibrantly purple if you leave them on.)
6. Mash potatoes roughly with spoon or whisk (or use a ricer if you prefer a smooth mash).
7. Add 1/2-cup of milk and 1/2-cup of creme fraiche, stir briskly into potatoes. Keep on adding milk until the mixture is creamy but not too thin.
8. Add onions with pan drippings and mix through

The Leek Soup

1. Cut up leeks into small chunks and place in pot with butter over medium heat to sweat. Make sure you wash the leeks well! They pick up grit very easily. Also, trim off the ends, but make use of the more mild green ends as well for a better-looking soup.
2. Chop onions and add. Sautee the entire mixture until reduced and soft.
3. Add garlic.
4. When garlic has mellowed, add 1 cup of stock and simmer for 10 minutes on low heat.
5. Add milk and creme fraiche. Blend with wand mixer or stand mixer until smooth.
6. Add more stock if too thick.

Plating

1. In a deep bowl, take purple potato mash and spread in a thick layer around the bottom and sides of the bowl.
2. Pour leek soup in the middle
3. Serve.

Mushroom soup for the soulless

Don't worry mom, I'm just kidding. I just like the sound of that title.

Anyway, following the purchase of the AMAZING 2 kilos of oyster and hedgehog mushrooms yesterday, today was definitely a mushroom soup sort of day. The soup was kind of improvised, but I included a recipe at the bottom anyway, since I liked the results. Anyway, after preparing the soup and eating a huge batch of it along with a veritable mountain of salade frisée, I was too full to eat the delicious filet of tuna I had waiting for me in my fridge. So, with heavy heart, I put the tuna off till tomorrow.

Mushroom Soup as Improvised by Luis

Ingredients

• an ASSLOAD of mushrooms (in this case, assload = 4 generous handfuls)
• lots of butter (about 1/2-cup to start and another 1/4 to finish)
• a couple cups of water and/or stock
• one onion, sliced (optional but tasty).
• salt, pepper and/or other spices (go lightly; mushrooms are already delicious

Preparation

Essentially, you sweat the crap out of the mushrooms, add butter to sautee them in their juices, and then add water/stock and blend.

1. Chop mushrooms into chunky slices and place into pan over low heat. Cover and leave for about 10 minutes
2. When the mushrooms have given up most of their liquor, turn up the heat, add the onions and butter, and sautee.
3. Once the mushrooms have been cooked all the way through and the onions have reduced, add about 1 cup of the stock/water and mix. Then, transfer to a saucepan or stockpot and add the remaining stock/water. Simmer over medium heat for a few minutes, adding any spices you'd like
4. Blend with a wand blender or in a stand mixer.
5. serve.

DJ and Luis eat stuff, but also drink a lot

You see, I went to the market at place des fêtes this morning and tripped across a vendor that was selling beautiful oyster mushrooms at 2€/kilo (insanely cheap) and hedgehog mushrooms for 3€/kilo. For 5€, I had enough mushrooms for days' worth of soups and stir-frys and such. So, of course, I emailed DJ and announced to him that we were having mushrooms that night.

I had already invited him over to eat the Mung Bean Dal (Indian soupy bean preparation) that I was planning to make tonight, so this just added another course to the evening's festivities. I had also picked up a huge pile of beautiful mâche (lamb's lettuce), which we grazed upon like cattle. When the salad greens are as good as they can be here, all you need is a quick wash and a bit of oil or vinaigrette. I can totally see how "salade" here can be a meal substitute.

I pre-soaked and boiled up the mung beans and then left them to simmer while I prepared the curry base. This time around, I tried doing the spice-tempering thing (I had bought a bunch of whole spices at the Indian grocery store that day). In a rather hot pan with a bit of oil, I threw in some whole cumin, lovage and black mustard and toasted them until the seeds began to pop. I think I had the heat on a bit too high, but thankfully none of the seeds came out burnt.

Shortly after that, I added chopped onions and tomatoes, letting them cook down for a bit. Once the tomatoes were beginning to fall apart, I added a tablespoon of garlic and ginger each (crushed and/or chopped). Afterwards, I added a bit of raz el hanout ("head of the table", a spice mix usually used in Moroccan cooking) and then mixed it with the beans. I added some water and let the whole thing boil together for a while.

A bit later, I added nearly 1/2-cup of butter and almost 1-baguette's worth of stale bread (in cubes). The butter helped to make the soup more velvety and the bread thickened the soup quickly and gave it a more rib-sticking consistency. After a few more minutes for everything to come together, I hauled out my handy wand blender and made a purée. It was delish (although I realized afterwards that I hadn't added any salt yet).

But the big event that night was the mushrooms. I enlisted DJ's help to clean and slice about 1/3 of the mushrooms from both batches (i.e. about 300grams of each). I put them all in a dry pan over low heat and covered them until they rendered all of their liquor. Then, I turned up the heat and sautéed them in their own juices, with a bit of margarine to help things along (sorry, I ran out of butter). Near the end, I added a sprinking of flour to thicken things and a handful of finely chopped cilantro. Again, delicious. In retrospect, the juice of 1 lemon would've been a nice way to cut through the creaminess of the dish.

So we ate like kings and stuffed ourselves silly, but we also drank quite a bit. We had cognac as an apéritif (even though it's more a digestif), then a bottle of Blanc-Typé wine from the Jura region (tasted like non-sweet sherry), then a bottle of bordeaux (forget the domaine), and then several additional servings of cognac as a digestif. If it says anything, we started eating around 8pm and DJ didn't leave my apartment until 4am.

DJ and Luis eat yet more stuff

In the ongoing development of our food-based relationship (i.e., I cook a load of food, he brings the alcohol), DJ came over tonight to help me eat the mountainous load of arroz chaufa (note: the recipe in this link isn't the same as my recipe). I haven't had or made arroz chaufa since I left Chicago last August, and I forgot how much I missed it until I made it. Since it is essentially a Peruvian-Chinese version of fried rice, I prepared all the materials ahead of time (chopped green onions, rice, chicken or beef or pork in a soy-ginger-cassonade glaze) and whipped them together with DJ when he got there. The results were FANTASTIC, but I have to admit that arroz chaufa is total comfort food for me. I've grown up with this food and I have many happy memories of all of us kids rushing to the table to wolf down as much of this stuff as possible. So I realize that any arroz chaufa that follows my mother's recipe will always be amazing to me. On the other hand, DJ made my inner latina mom proud by valiantly attempting a second heaping plateful, so I think it went well. And this was after we ate sliced dry sausage with our apéritif (very french), purple potato salad, and a simple green salad (I was really channeling the stereotypical latina mother and preparing too much food).

Ironically, I totally forgot to take pictures of the food prep for the arroz chaufa, so the recipe + photoblogging will have to wait. On the other hand, I did get a few pictures of the purple potato salad. By the way, if you haven't tried purple potatoes (a.k.a. vitelotte in France), you totally should. They're harder to find in the USA or Canada, but they're pretty available near the Andes or in Europe (when in season).

Purple Potato & Rosemary Salad

Ingredients

• Approx 1/2-kg of purple potatoes (10 or so small ones)
• One onion, chopped
• Two sweet peppers of any colour, chopped (I used white and purple)
• The juice of one lemon
• Mayo as needed (no more than 1 cup)
• 1 leek, chopped and sautéed lightly in butter (optional)
• Dijon mustard (optional)
• Salt and/or pepper to taste
• 2 sprigs of rosemary

Preparation

1. Put the potatoes to steam (20 minutes in a pressure cooker with a basket, dunno about regular steamers). Place the rosemary in the basket to steam with potatoes, but reserve about half of it for later. I like to leave the skins on, because it's better for you, tastes better, and helps keep the purple colour from leaking into the water. Also, you can boil the potatoes rather than steam them, but they tend to lose their colour this way as well.

2. The important part is to mix almost all of the ingredients while the potatoes are still warm, so I suggest chopping up all of the other ingredients while the potatoes are cooking and having them ready to go, much like in the image below

3. When the potatoes are ready, remove from steamer and cut into cubes. Admire their adorably purple flesh. Snicker at the phrase "adorably purple flesh."

4. Chop the remaining rosemary and mix it in with the hot potatoes.
5. Add the remaining ingredients (except the mayo) and mix. Make sure the mixture is no longer very hot (high heat will curdle the mayo) and mix in the mayo. Serve!

Franco-Mexican Cuisine

I don't know if I was the first one to think of this, but I'm pretty damn proud of it. You see, a colleague of mine passed on to me a bottle of concentrated mole sauce, smuggled from the USA. I had three chicken thighs sitting in the freezer that needed to be eaten soon. I thought about the very French mushroom-cream chicken that I often make, and realized that I could mix the concetrated mole with crème fraîche to make something very delicious. Add to this the fact that I still had that cocoa-based pasta I bought a few months ago, and it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

So I invited DJ over again after work and I made a big pile of mole-cream chicken over cocoa pasta. DJ brought along some fine whiskey and wine (and bread), and we ate like kings. The recipe itself was surprisingly simple. It hardly merits a recipe, but here it is nonetheless. [By the way, I had meant to get a picture of the resulting dish, but I was too hungry and forgot.]

Ingredients

• 1 jar of Mole (I used a concentrated paste of 125g marked "4 portions")
• 1 tub of crème fraîche, 500ml
• 3-4 chicken thighs or breasts
• Rotini or penne rigate, enough for 4 people

Preparation

1. Ideally, you should brown the chicken in its own fat, remove the chicken, and then begin making the rest of this recipe in the same saucepan. However, you can skip this step if you're pressed for time or your using frozen chicken.
2. Prepare the mole as indicated on the container, but half the liquids. In this case, I used a 1 : 1 ratio of water to concentrate, rather than the 2 : 1 ratio indicated on the bottle.
3. Heat the water and paste gently and mix vigorously until a smooth sauce forms.
4. Add crème fraîche and mix together. Increase heat to medium and wait for mixture to begin bubbling.
5. Add chicken, partially cover, and leave on a low simmer for at least an hour. Stir occasionally to pull up any milk solids sticking to the bottom.
6. The fat will likely separate from the cream during this process, and this will be even more pronounced if you're using a fatty part of the chicken (e.g., thighs). You can either skim some of the fat (but lose tasty fat!) or whisk it back into the emulsion later.
7. About 15 mins before the chicken is ready, begin to boil pasta in salted water. Drain and toss with a ladleful of the mole-cream sauce to prevent sticking.
8. Remove from heat. Remove chicken and place to one side. Whisk cream and oil until it returns to a smooth emulsion.
9. Serve chicken on a bed of pasta. Ladle sauce overtop.