Soupe au Pistou and Thon à la Provençale

The busy school year is about to start again, and so this cooking project must come to an end. In fact, I had to skip last week because of an important deadline. For my last meal, I wanted to include a friend who is vegan, which posed the challenge of finding a vegetarian recipe in MAFC that could also be prepared without dairy. I landed upon soup au pistou, a vegetable soup with a garlic, basil, and herbs mash. Julia and co. describe this recipe as an early summer dish originating from the Mediterranean region of France and made distinctive by the pistou sauce. The soup begins with boiling carrots, potatoes, onion, and white beans until tender and then adding green beans, broken spaghetti, and crumbled stale white bread a for the last 15 minutes. The recipe also calls for a pinch of saffron in the soup, but that was outside of my means.

Plain soup

Pistou

The pistou is prepared alongside the soup by mashing four cloves of garlic with tomato purée, fresh basil, Parmesan cheese, and “fruity olive oil.” Tangent – if I haven’t mentioned it before, the wonders of genuine, Mediterranean olive oil are endlessly delicious. I would direct anyone interested to the book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller for a full discussion. Anyway, these ingredients are combined and the oil slowly beaten into the paste. When the soup is finished, one cup is beaten gradually into the pistou, and then the rest of the soup is poured into the tureen. For my vegan friend, I simply omitted the pistou from her portion. As suggested, I served the soup with hot French bread – mmm.

 

Soup with pistou added - see how the color changed!

To accompany this soup, I prepared another dish from the south of France, thon à la Provençale. I was able to find decent frozen tuna steaks at my local grocery store and merely thawed them in the refrigerator for a day. The recipe instructed the blending of salt and lemon juice in a backing dish then beating in olive oil and pepper. The fish was then placed in the dish, basted with the marinated, covered, and refrigerated for 1.5 to 2 hours while turning and basting several times. I then drained and dried the fish and sautéed it in hot olive oil to brown each side. The steaks were then placed back in the baking dish.

Next, I peeled and seeded three pounds of tomatoes using the techniques described in MAFC. They instruct blanching the tomatoes for 10 seconds then the skin is easily peeled. They then suggest slicing the tomatoes in half crosswise to extract the seeds by gently squeezing. For the tuna, I then chopped the tomato pulp and added it to minced yellow onions that had been sautéed. Adding mashed garlic, oregano, thyme, salt, and pepper and simmering covered for 5 minutes added the distinct Mediterranean flavor. The mixture was then spooned over the fish and brought to a simmer on the stovetop. I baked the fish for 15 minutes then added a cup of dry white wine and continued baking for another 30 minutes. After the fish was removed from the oven, the authors instructed boiling down the sauce until it was reduced and stirring in tomato paste. I skipped beating in a paste of butter and flour, but topped it with chopped parsley. This may seem like a lot of fuss for a piece of fish, but these tuna steaks were absolutely worth the effort and will certainly be cooked again.

Tuna with sauce

My friends Ami, Rachel, and Doug joined me for this meal and brought berries and vegan cream puffs. The cream puffs disappeared so quickly I barely had time to snap this picture of the few left at the end! We all enjoyed this hearty dinner from la Provençe.

 

Full meal

Last of the vegan cream puffs!

With this post my exploration into French cooking through weekly meals with friends and family has come to an end. While I will no longer be writing regularly about my cooking experiences, be assured that I will continue exploring new recipes and refining the techniques to which I have been introduced. This experience has deepened my appreciation for French food and widened my ability to replicate some of the most highly regarded dishes in the world. If I find time in the future, this blog may be rejuvenated, but for now, à la prochaine.  

Caneton à l’Orange and Navets Glacés à Brun

As previously mentioned in the goose post, I love duck.  I finally found duck at our local Asian food store, which proved to be an adventure in and of itself. As you may imagine, poultry from an Asian market comes whole. Head, eyes, feet, claws. Whole. I’ve always said you should be willing to handle raw meat if you want to eat meat. The whole beast is a different story though. I’ll spare you all the graphic details, but without a proper meat cleaver, detaching the extremities was tedious.

Orange and duck is a popular combination in many cultures and MAFC embraces it fully. The duck is roasted similarly to all the other birds: seasoned cavity, trussed, rotated in the dish occasionally, and remove excess fat with baster. The true tour de force of this recipe, as with many French recipes, was the sauce. First, I peeled four oranges and cut the skins into julienne strips. These were simmered in water for 15 minutes then patted dry. Some of the orange strips were placed in the duck cavity, the rest were set aside for the sauce.

Orange peel; peeled oranges

The sauce truly began with a “sweet-and-sour caramel coloring” of boiled sugar in red wine vinegar. This concoction gave off quite a sharp vapor and thickened to a sticky consistency after a few minutes. Then, stock was added and a cornstarch and port thickener. The recipe actually called for arrowroot mixed with wine to add thickness and color, but arrowroot was not available at my local store. The rest of the orange peel was added and it continued to simmer for a while longer. When the duck was done roasting, port was boiled down in the roasting juices and then strained into the rest of the sauce. The sauce was finished off with a couple of tablespoons of orange liqueur and butter enrichment. The complex flavors of this sauce added both acidic citrus and sweet richness. The duck was served with arranged orange slices and a drizzle of sauce.

 

Prepared duck and turnips

Orange sauce

To accompany the duck, I made the frozen pea and shallot recipe previously described. The authors insist that nothing should interfere with the flavor of the duck and thus more subtle vegetables should be served. Instead of the recommended potatoes, I decided to try glazed turnips. I don’t know that I have ever made turnips before, but I always enjoyed them with my grandmother’s roasts. MAFC calls for two pounds of turnips, peeled and quartered then blanched in boiling water. The vegetable was then sautéed in butter to lightly brown the outside. I then boiled them in bouillon and sugar until a syrupy reduction covered them. They took almost two times longer than the recipe indicated to become soft, but required little maintenance – just a stir here and then. To serve, I sprinkled the white vegetables in parsley for color. The turnips were fairly easy to prepare and were sweet and delicious.

Prepared meal

My dear friends Blake, Meghann, and her husband, Ryan, joined me for this special meal. We discussed the joys and struggles of marriage as Meghann and Ryan had recently celebrated one year of matrimony. We all enjoyed this rich meal and hearty wine that accompanied it. My meat carving skills still have not improved much, but I’ll blame it on not having the correct utensils. I greatly enjoyed the duck and, if I can find a well butchered bird in the future, will certainly make it more frequently. 

Soufflé aux Crevettes, Asperges au Naturel, and Tomates à la Provençale

I was home visiting my parents and sister this weekend in Indiana and of course wanted to share my French cooking journey with them. My mom mentioned that she had recently seen a rerun on TV of Juila Child making soufflé and suggested that as a possibility for our dinner. Of course, my parents’ well-equipped kitchen has several soufflé molds, a missing tool that has prevented me from making any molded dish so far this summer. So soufflé it would be!

The authors of MAFC give extensive directions and illustrations for the delicate processes of whipping, folding, and baking a variety of soufflés. I chose a shrimp variation because it was on hand. The diced shrimp was first cooked in butter and simmered for a moment in vermouth. The shellfish was set aside while the main mixture was made. I cooked flour in butter for a few minutes and then beat in boiling milk and seasoning. Then four egg yolks were beaten in one by one. Then, the authors direct stiffly beaten egg yolks to be folded slowly into the yolk mixture along with grated Swiss cheese. The mold had been prepared with butter and cheese sprinkled inside. The egg mixture was layered with the shrimp, sprinkled with cheese, and baked for 30 minutes. The soufflé breathed spectacularly high above the mold, but unfortunately collapsed before I was able to take the picture as soufflés are apt to do.

The main dish was accompanied by a sauce mousseline sabayon, which is very similar to hollandaise. The recipe called for fish liquor but I could not find any at the local store so substituted vegetable stock. It was simply a whipped combination of egg yolks, whipping cream, stock, butter, and seasoning. You can see the sauce below over the soufflé in the final plated images. The soufflé was a little on the dry side and denser than I expected so the sauce, while a little more bland than I had hoped, helped make it more palatable.

Souffle drizzled with sauce

To accompany the soufflé, I chose two vegetables, one more tedious than the other. The authors suggest that peeled and boiled asparagus in the French method is the best. So, even though the asparagus I bought was rather thin, I peeled every stalk – a process that took an hour. The stalks were the bundled together and boiled in a pot of salted water for about 15 minutes. They were indeed very delicate and tender, but we all agreed they were not quite worth the effort.

 

Look at that beautifully peeled asparagus!

Finally, my parents’ luscious home-grown tomatoes were too tempting not to include in some way. In fact, they had one very large tomato that, when quartered, served the four of us. I chose the Provençale recipe as a bold contrast to the delicate soufflé. The recipe is a simple process of removing the seeds and juice from halves (or in our case quarters) and stuffing with herbs and breadcrumbs. I was able to use fresh basil, parsley, and thyme from my mom’s garden along with garlic, green onion, and salt and pepper. These herbs where mixed with olive oil and some baguette crumbs, stuffed in the tomatoes and roasted in oil for about 15 minutes. This vegetable was a wonderful summer accompaniment to the rest of the meal. As an avid tomato eater, I will certainly make this dish again.

 

Close-up of the tomato

Baguette

This meal was quite enjoyable with my family on our back porch on a pleasant summer evening. We had pinot grigio paired with the fish and ate the rest of the baguette. Unfortunately, all photographs were taken in the kitchen under artificial light and many of them were blurry as I was in a bit of a hurry. Better luck next week!