Veau Viennoise, Leeks Vinaigrette

Mmhm. Two huge back to back work projects plus a complete hard drive crash spells B-U-R-N-O-U-T. I decided to take a break from cooking and blogging for a bit just to maintain sanity. Now I'm back and it's time to play catch-up!

One of the last things I cooked before taking hiatus was Veau Viennoise--that is, fried Veal scallopine. This is the first real veal dish that I've made from this cookbook, since I'm honestly not too keen on veal. It's not a very nice process to make veal (and this is from the girl who happily laps up foie gras at every opportunity), and even if I weren't bothered by that, I just don't find the taste that great. But I decided to give this dish a try when I found some free-range veal at the farmer's market, for a limited time this spring.

Ok I know you are scratching your head at the oxymoronic term "free-range veal," but here's the thing, the veal is made by never locking the calves up, but keeping them with their mother before they are slaughtered. Which is not PETA approved, naturally, but a little better than the pro-chainy variety of veal. So, I decided to give this dish a shot.

Here's a shot of the veal. It actually looks pretty good, doesn't it?



I started out by making the garnishes for the veal. Some nice fat lemon slices, chopped up hard boiled egg, and anchovies rolled around single caper berries. This was a pretty promising start.

Next, I made some bread crumbs by toasting some bread slices, and whizzing them through the food processor. (Pretty easy and way better than those horrible blue cans!)

Then I set up the veal assembly line: beaten eggs, seasoned flour, and bread crumbs.



It is pretty easy to see what to do here. First dredge the meat in the flour, then the egg, then the bread crumbs until they are nicely coated. The meat gets refrigerated for a few hours.







While the meat chilled I made a side dish--leeks vinaigrette with sauce gribiche.

First I sliced the leeks in half so that they could soak, removing the grit from their layers.



Then I made sauce gribiche, which consists of chopped hard boiled egg, cornichons, capers, and parsley mixed with peanut oil and vinegar.



The leeks get boiled for about ten minutes until they are tender, then dressed with the sauce gribiche.

Finally, it is time to fry up some veal! I heated peanut oil in my sauté pan, then fried the scaloppine until the crumbs were golden brown.



Once the veal was all fried, I served them topped with lemon slices, caper and anchovies, and alongside chopped onion and hard boiled egg, with leek vinaigrette.



Also, champagne.



Looks good, but how did it taste? Well, it was okay. The veal itself was not bad, and I enjoyed it with far less guilt than non free range veal. But to be honest, the whole breaded and deep fried meat thing is not my favorite thing to eat, even though this was a good specimen of the species. I did like the mixed pickle/egg flavor of the sauce gribiche on the leeks, and would definitely make that again. All in all, not a bad dinner, but not my favorite.

However, one of the benefits of this dish was that I realized that deep frying is not so scary after all. Check out what I was able to make:



Yup, I am a fearless deep fryer, and made Thomas Keller's fab fried chicken for a Fourth of July picnic! Next up... frites!

Lessons Learned: Free range veal does exist! Deep frying is not so scary, and can be fun and rewarding.

Next Week: Well... Husband J is on a trip next weekend, so I'm cooking for one. I think I'll make a favorite thing that I DON'T want to share. That would be escargots, the world's greatest excuse to eat pretty much melted butter for dinner. Whoo!

Poulet au Pot

Phew, what a refreshing break! Thanks everyone for being patient, and coming back to read some more.

After the rather exotic coeur du porc last time, I decided to go with something a good deal more familiar and homey, and what better than poulet au pot--that is, chicken-in-a-pot?

Poulet au pot, as I discovered from the magic that is google, is a recipe that dates back over 500 years, and is a Sunday Staple in the French countryside. It's basically a stuffed chicken stewed in a pot with veggies, and served with crunchy cornichons, salt and mustard in its own broth. The internets even report that Henry IV declared that every French family ought to be able to have poulet au pot once a week, the start I suppose of that great political promise "a chicken in every pot."

I made sure to wake up extremely early on Sunday, so to take the best advantage of the farmer's market's bounty (particularly the whole chickens from Smith Meadows Farms, which are snapped up very quickly in the mornings). I got there so early, actually, that I had half an hour before the "starting bell" and had to grab a coffee at (uch) Starbucks to bide my time. It turned out to work well, because I was able to scope out which stands had the veggies I needed for the stew, and could map out the best route through the market in order to maximize my take. Farmer's market strategies... I don't know whether that's uperyuppie or megahousefrau.

I stopped first at Smith Meadows and asked for the biggest chicken they had (Tony's recipe calls for a 6 pounder; the biggest I could get was 5 lbs) and a pound of chicken livers. Only--disappointment--they had no livers that day. I'm beginning to think there's some kind of Smith Meadows conspiracy against me, where they don't have precisely the thing I need each week (because of course all farms must cater to my needs at all times). Oh well, at least I got the chicken. Next I stopped by the Cedarbrook Farm stall to pick up some sausage for the stuffing. They were out of "country rope," but did have loose sausage stuffing outside of the casing--perfect! I thanked them for the heart, and reported that it tasted like roast beef. They looked at me like I had sprouted two heads, but tried to be polite about it. I guess the thought of cooking pig heart is just a little too much crazy at 9:00 in the morning, even if you are a farmer. It's going to be fun when I ask them for pig livers for the upcoming pate....

Then I loaded up on veggies and hauled my take home. Next to Whole Foods for cornichons, livers, cream and bread while the chicken and sausage defrosted in the refrigerator.

In addition to the chicken-in-a-pot, I decided to go with the "pot" theme and make salted caramel pots-de-creme from a recipe I found on Tastespotting at the blog "A Bowl of Mush" and have been dying to try. I need to get on some of the desserts that are actually in the book, but they're so few, while the main courses are so many, I'm trying to space them out. So as a bonus, I'll tell you about my experience with this recipe, even if it doesn't exactly go with the theme.

After getting back from Whole Foods, I started the dessert by melting sugar, sea salt, and a little water in a pot til it got caramelized and liquidy. The recipe calls for stirring constantly, but I found that by leaving the sugar alone, then stirring it up a bit and leaving it alone again, the caramelization process went faster, but still didn't burn. Then I took the caramel off the heat to add the cream. This proved troublesome, as the caramel immediately turned rock-hard and stuck to the bottom of the pan, refusing to mix with the cream at all. I had to allow the cream to heat slowly and melt the caramel in order to incorporate.

While the caramel melted into the cream, I started preparing the stuffing for the bird. First I mixed a cup of bread cubes with some more heavy cream, then added parsley and shallot. Next I chopped up a half pound of chicken livers into a liver-y mush, and added them plus the pound of sausage meat to the mix. The stuff looked a bit slimy thanks to the livers, but I bucked up and stuffed the mess into the bird. There was a good bowlful of stuffing left over, even after I crammed the chicken to the breaking point, so I baked it in the oven as dressing.

Raw stuffing. Yup that red gobbety stuff is chicken liver and possibly blood. Mmm.

Tony calls for sewing the chicken's butt up with a trussing needle and thread, but by the time I'd overstuffed the thing to the point of livery stuffing oozing out of its cavity (nice mental picture there, right?), there was going to be no sewing, that was for sure. Also, I couldn't find a needle and thread at the Whole Foods. I figured once I got the stuffing in and propped the chicken up inside the pot, the stuffing would stay reasonably intact.

Finally, I chopped up the veggies (carrots, parsnips instead of turnips, celery, garlic, onions), and added them and a bouquet garni to the pot, and set them to simmer for two hours.

Chicken and veg simmering together

Back to the custards. By now, the cream had melted the caramel sufficiently so that I had caramel infused cream instead of rock hard caramel sitting in a pool of cream. I cooled the caramel cream and added it to a mix of egg yolks, sugar, and vanilla. The mix filled four ramekins reasonably well (enough for Husband J, Neighbor C, Friend I and me), so into the oven it went for about 50 minutes to bake.

By this time the chicken stew was smelling amazing, bubbling away on the stove, and the extra dressing had come out of the oven sizzling, and filling the kitchen with a rich meaty aroma. Husband J, Neighbor C and I all had bites, and the stuff was really out of this world.

Cooked dressing, glistening with delicious fat.

After the chicken simmered for two hours, I threw in a chopped up head of cabbage and a couple of red potatoes, and let the stew simmer for another 30 minutes. Then the pot came off the heat, the chicken came out of the pot, and I carved it up, giving everyone a chunk of white meat, a chunk of dark meat, a spoonful of stuffing, and some veggies, and some broth on top. Cornichons, salt and mustard went into the extra ramekins on the table for everyone to spoon out as much as we liked.

The result was better than I could have imagined. I'm always skeptical about boiling food, coming from the Irish tradition of "chuck it into the pot and boil it till it's grey" school of cooking by ancestry, but poulet au pot makes for one spectacular chicken. The meat was super tender, falling off the bone, but the breast meat was not at all dry. The stuffing inside the bird spilled out in a nice, well-cooked pile, adding some meaty richness to the dish. The veggies were all cooked to perfection, especially the very delicious cabbage and potatoes. All of it went wonderfully with the briny mustard and cornichons. Husband J feels that it is the chicken stew equivalent of a pastrami sandwich, with the meaty goodness nicely balances with the tart mustard and sour pickle. In fact, he liked it better than the poulet roti, because the meat was so tender and soft in this dish, and the combination of veggies and condiments were perfect. Everyone ate a big plateful, barely saving room for dessert (the dish is surprisingly filling).

The caramel pots de creme were again the big hit of the night (notice how everyone loves desserts best?) with everyone cooing over their salty caramely goodness. I topped them with whipped cream and a sprinkle of sea salt, and it was the perfect end to a great meal. The caramel cream was an even bigger hit than the fruit tarts if you can believe it.

Uh, and sorry about the lack of photos on this post. The dishes got snapped up before I could really take a camera to them. I'll definitely be making this dish again, so I might try to supplement this post with future poulet au pot photos.

Lessons learned: Sometimes chucking it into a pot and boiling it is the best way to cook. No matter what, everyone loves dessert best. Anything tastes good with mustard, salt and pickle. Chicken livers are pretty freaking tasty.

Next week: Frisee aux lardons (BACON SALAD, an oxymoron if I've ever heard one) and Coquilles Saint Jacques avec Champagne (sea scallops in champagne sauce). But what for dessert?

Chicken Stock and Vichyssoise

Ok, well. Despite my previous bitching about making stock in the middle of August, there actually appear to be a ton of recipes in the Les Halles cookbook that actually require the making of stock before they can be attempted. And this blog is about following each recipe to the letter with no shortcuts so... stock it is.

But, not crazy-ass veal stock. That has to wait a few more weeks. No, this week is white chicken stock, using the bones from last week's roasted chicken.

There is no real recipe for chicken stock in the Les Halles Cookbook. Instead, Tony gives the basic guidelines for stock, which basically consist of "dump a bunch of chicken bones, some veg and some herbs in a pot and simmer for 6-8 hours." Easy, right?

So, I grabbed an onion, and a pound of carrots, and a big stalk of celery (which Alton Brown teaches me is called a mirepoix), as well as a bunch of sage, thyme and rosemary (notice how I listed them out of order so as not to annoy you with any earworm type songs?), and dumped them into my new stockpot with last week's chicken bones.


It took about half an hour to get the thing up to a near boil, at which time I turned the heat down to medium so all that liquid could simmer. I split the difference and simmered for seven hours while my husband watched Tool Academy and I played Persona 4. (I love a lazy weekend, don't you?)

Well, the house started to smell amazing (I credit the herbs in particular) and the stock reduced to about half the liquid that started out. The stock wasn't exactly colorless, but a nice golden brown, which I decided would have to do. I strained the stock through the last of our coffee filters (not realizing before I did so that we didn't have any left for tomorrow's coffee... ugh...), cooled it in an ice bath, and socked the better part in the freezer. The rest went into the fridge for tomorrow's Les Halles recipe, vichyssoise, cold potato/leek soup.

One of the catalysts to starting this blog was my (finally) reading Tony's Kitchen Confidential (well, listening to him read it on audiobook, which I'd argue is even better), in which he describes a Proustian moment of tasting vichyssoise on the Queen Mary, marveling at the wonder of eating cold soup, and quantifying this taste, as well as the taste of raw oyster, as one of the two major moments of learning to love food as something more than fuel. While the name vichyssoise brings to mind (for me anyway) Claude Raines dumping a bottle of Vichy water into the trash at the end of Casablanca, symbolizing a break from Vichy France and Nazism, cold leek and potato soup is definitely a taste I can get behind. So now that we have the required chicken stock, let's get on with the soup!

I invited friends M and B (a married couple) to lunch on Sunday, so the plan was to serve vichyssoise along with two other vegetarian faves of mine, miso glazed tomatoes and corn/scallion salad. The latter recipes were some I got from the Washington Post, and are probably the best summer produce recipes I've come across, and the most satisfying in terms of deliciousness/produce show-off/blending superb ingredients into something sublime.

So, Sunday morning I roll out of bed, pull on some jeans and run to the farmer's market to get my pick of fresh tomatoes, leeks, potatoes and corn. First stop is the stall with those big ugly purple mottled tomatoes that look like mutants and taste like heaven. I pick out four big juicy ones, when suddenly I am stopped by a man with a "press" card around his neck.

"Excuse me," he says, as I fumble to turn off my audio book (The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson).

"Uhh, yeah?"

"I'm from The Washington Post, we're doing a story about tomatoes, and I just took a picture of you picking out tomatoes. Can I have your name?"

"Oookay..." so I give him my name and head off to pay for the tomatoes, some cilantro, and a few chives. So, I guess, look out for me in The Washington Post, probably Wednesday, in a story about tomatoes. I'm the one with the big cream colored Ray Bans with my hair in pigtails, and oh yeah, NO MAKEUP. Goddammit.

*UPDATE: The Wapo in all its wisdom decided not to use me as the poster girl for the tomato story. Which actually is kind of good, because the story was all about how awful it is for snotty ass yuppies like me to be buying crazy expensive tomatoes during a recession. Not that I'm not a snotty ass yuppie. I just don't want to be enshrined as one in the local paper.*

Anyway, after picking up my produce, and with only a slight detour to the gelato stand, I head home and start cooking. Oh, and brought my husband more coffee filters from the grocery store, which is a good thing, as I walked in on him trying to brew coffee with a NAPKIN. I mean seriously. Husbands.

First sweat the leeks in 4 tb of butter (mmmmm), then add the cubed up potatoes, then the chicken stock. Bring to a boil, and let simmer for 35 minutes.


"The next part," says Tony, "is tricky." We must now slowly, and in small batches, transfer the mix to the blender to puree the soup bit by bit, never filling up too high, unless we want a face full of boiling starchy, sticky hot potato-leek puree. This, according to Tony "hurts like a motherfucker," and is one of the more frequent professional kitchen accidents.

Well OK Tony, I GUESS that is tricky, unless you have a HAND HELD BLENDER like I DO which will puree the soup WHILE IN THE POT IN ONE GO. Haha, sucker!

Looks pretty artistic with the cream being swirled in!

Once pureed, the soup gets a hefty dose of cream, simmers for another 5 minutes, then goes into an ice bath to cool. Once cold, serve with a chive garnish.


I'm happy to report that everyone loved the soup, which was definitely the least healthy thing on the menu what with all that butter and heavy cream. Both B and husband J declared it to be the best thing on the menu for today's lunch, while M and I preferred the corn salad (less rich, more cilantro), but scraped our soup bowls clean anyway. There's about two more bowls left over, lucky for us, as it's a soup that gets better over time. As J, resident food critic said, it's a hearty enough soup that it fills you up, but it's refreshing enough that it doesn't feel too heavy while eating in hot weather like this. Another success for the Les Halles Cookbook!

We also had two nice bottles of white wine, and some brownies courtesy of M and B, as well as some berries and whipped cream (the latter left over from the soup, so easily whipped for dessert) and some fun conversation with friends who we haven't seen in way too long. Seriously, already this project is making me all kinds of happy to have a good excuse to force people to come over and eat some damn food. It's a ton of fun!

And yeah, I promised B that we'd invite them over sometime when the menu was not so vegetarian, particularly since he shares my passion for boudin noir (blood sausage--we have almost convinced M to try some of its delicious, fatty bounty).

Lessons learned: I need some cheesecloth to strain stock, since it tends to rip coffee filters. Vichyssoise takes more than half an hour to chill to proper temperature. That hand held blender is one of the best purchases ever, useful for both the soup and blending the vinaigrette.

Next week: Grilled lamb steaks; blueberries with lime sugar.