Tomato and Fennel Soup

Phew. Another hard work week gone by (by the time this posts, a couple of weeks), filled with labor, late nights, and eating at the same restaurant every day of the week with co-workers... the glory of business travel. Funny how those things work. At the start of the week I was thrilled for oxtails and scallops with wine-butter sauce, but by the end of the week I was practically crying for salads and lightly cooked veggies, with maybe a ravioli or two. And because the weekly schedule was work, dinner, work, get to hotel at ass-o-clock AM, try to sleep and fail because of strange hotel room, up, work... by the time I wrapped my lips around a glass of wine, I was about ready to compose florid verse in praises of the grape. Yeah, that atmosphere did not conduct itself to a desire to cook once I dragged myself home. I made a halfhearted attempt at celery remoulade, but was thwarted by the lack of celeriac (I swear I saw it at the market last week... or was it two weeks ago? Guess that will have to wait for autumn, now). I collapsed in exhaustion, and woke up wanting something simple, nutritious, and above all, EASY. So I chose this tomato and fennel soup.

Now, don't get me wrong kids, it is still May, and there aren't any worthwhile tomatoes out yet. But here's the awesome thing, tomato and fennel soup from the Les Halles Cookbook uses tomatoes in a CAN! I used to be mighty skeptical about any food that comes in a can, because in my experience canning tends to turn veggies into a slimy, preserved mess. Just think of all that canned spinach and canned beet you were subjected to as a child! Fresh roasted beet is like an orgasm compared to canned beet, amirite? But recently I have come to love canned tomatoes. This is partly because of a determination to never, ever buy out-of-season fresh tomatoes that I made a few years ago, but mostly because they are just really good for making soups and sauces. They retain their flavor nicely, and the slimy texture disappears once they are cooked down, pureed, or otherwise assembled.

Also, in non-conformance with the rest of my project, I ended up making this soup on a weeknight. Yes, you heard me. It is that easy.

First, I cored two fennel bulbs by cutting them into quarters and removing the core. I sliced them on my mandoline until I had a stack of slices.


A lovely fennel root.

Next, I chopped an onion and a potato.



The potato, onion, and chopped fennel.

I heated some olive oil in my big pot, then added the veggies and cooked them for about ten minutes.



Next, the tomatoes went into the pot to cook.



Finally I added 6 cups of chicken stock and cooked the whole mess for an hour.



Once the soup was cooked, I blended it all with a hand blender, and added salt and pepper.



To serve, I added salt and pepper, and squirted some balsalmic glaze that I had left over from a French Laundry Cookbookexperiment in a Jackson-Pollocky design I served the soup alongside some grilled cheese.





The color is kind of odd, isn't it? Instead of the murky, red color of canned tomato soup, this is more of a milky orange. But let me tell you, this soup is incredibly delicious. It's creamy with no dairy (yay, potato), and thick to stand up to dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into the bowl. The balsamic glaze is no mean feat either!

Lessons Learned: Making tomato soup from scratch is easy, delicious and satisfying. And it can be done on a weeknight!

Next Week: Something fancy: Chartreuse of Quail.

Salade Niçoise

Okay yup, I copped out on the whole snapper, and am doing Salade Niçoise for this week's dish. But there is a reason for this... after a hard week at work, I limp-ragged it through Friday afternoon, necessitating Nepalese takeout for dinner, then headed up to Baltimore to go to a street festival, where I ate deliciously creamy penne alla vodka and various deep fried delicacies. After that I could barely eat for most of Sunday, and decided that the best cure for this weekend of culinary excess would be a fresh, salty, acidic Salade Niçoise for dinner. And anyway, it's not really a copout. I mean, Julia did an entire show about Salad Niçoise. It also involves two basic kitchen techniques that it's always good to feature: blanching veggies and hard-boiling eggs.

Salad Niçoise always seemed like a rather appealing dish, fresh and filling at the same time, but I've actually never eaten it. The reason is that I've always seen it served in places that sell their salads in plastic clamshell packets, and the contents--limp lettuce, grey grainy tuna, over-boiled eggs with that awful green ring around the yolk--never inspired me to want to eat, let alone make, any such concoction. It seemed like the salad would be overly oily, salty and gross, and looking at the recipe in the Les Halles Cookbook did not inspire much confidence. Oh well. Today is apparently my time for Salade Niçoise, so let's get to it.

First, take about 6 ounces of haricots verts--that's green beans to you filthy Americans--and blanch them in a pot of boiling water. Tony gives a few tips on this. "Anytime you blanch a green vegetable, the more water and the more room, the better...[t]hey need plenty of room to swim around." Sounds good. Into the boiling pot they go for 6 minutes, then into an ice bath. Blanching vegetables is a great technique to use when you need greens or veggies (such as spinach, green beans, kale, etc.) that need to be cooked a little so they're not crunchy and tough, but can't be cooked too much or they turn to mush.

Plenty of room... they were perfect!

Next, the potatoes cook for 20 minutes, until they are tender and can be pierced easily with a fork.


While the potatoes cooked, I hard boiled two eggs. I'm not much of a hard boiler, really. Husband J and I both hate hard boiled eggs. I'm not a fan of rubbery white and chalky, crumbly yolk. I prefer soft boiled or poached eggs, I love dipping bread into a runny yolk, preferably mixed with a generous amount of butter and salt (I am salivating just thinking about this) and often eat soft boiled eggs for breakfast in little egg cups shaped like fish. (I know, precious, but it really is the most delicious breakfast with buttered toast.) So I had to turn to Tony's instructions: "How to Hard Boil a Freaking Egg" featured under the recipe for Oeufs Perigourdins (hard boiled eggs stuffed with yolks, ham and truffles, dipped in egg white meringue and deep fried in duck fat. Can't wait to see me try that one, can you?). Anyway, take cold water in a small pot, add the two eggs, then bring them to a boil.

Boiling eggs

Shut off the heat, clap on a lid and wait ten minutes, then put the eggs in an ice bath to cool. Then peel, halve, and check to see if they are done well.

No yucky ring = hard boiled perfection. Kind of like Raymond Chandler.

Time for the salad dressing. Rub a garlic clove on the salad bowl, then add olive oil and red wine vinegar, and whisk with the fork, which should still have the garlic clove on it (mmm, garlic).


Then I took the bibb lettuce, peppers, potatoes (quartered), tomatoes, haricots verts, nicoise olives, and cut up pieces of anchovy, and tossed them in the dressing. Over this salad went the expensive yellowfin tuna packed in oil in a jar (not a can!!) and hard boiled egg halves.

Husband J and I took this dinner up to the roof for an al fresco dinner with a baguette and some cheese as a side.


The verdict: AMAZING. Anyone like me who thinks that this would be a weird, overly salty and kind of gross combination needs to shut the eff up and make this salad right now. It was an amazing meld of flavors that went so well together, it was like the veggies were expressly grown to meld with the dressing, fish, and eggs. The salad was a perfect main dish (as I suspected) nicely filling yet fresh at the same time. Husband J even ate his hard boiled egg half, and asked for (and dished himself) another half, which is an amazing feat for me. Yup, the eggs, cooked correctly, were not chalky or rubbery at all, but tender and creamy. While neither of us would eat the egg by itself, it tasted wonderful with the veggies and dressing to go with it.

Husband J opined that the salad was even better than our beloved tomato salad, because of the complexity of the flavors and the fact that it was more "main dish" than "side dish." We have both officially changed our tune about Salade Niçoise, and I can see myself fixing this dish again in the near future.

Lessons learned: Don't discount a dish just because it doesn't look good when it's takeout... buy the expensive tuna and anchovies, and give it a try. Properly boiled eggs make all the difference. Always make your own salad dressing by stirring it with a garlic clove.

Next week: I may try the whole roasted fish basquaise, or the skate grenobloise. But I may go crazy and cook the coeur de porc a l'armagnac. Keep an eye out for a middle of the week post... there's another chicken to be roasted, and I may try one of the potato recipes to accompany it.

Soupe au Pistou and Basic Tart Dough

Last Monday after our extravagant turkey dinner in August, a day where we could hardly sit outside because it was so hot, the temperature suddenly dropped. I walked outside to go to work in a light summer dress only to find that outside, it was in the low 60s. I could not believe it... but it is a sign. Summer is almost over.

Husband J is thrilled. Fall is his favorite season, and he can't wait to break out sweaters, coats and scarves, and eat fall type foods like apples and sausage, roasted root vegetables, and rich braised meats.

I'm not so thrilled. Despite the oppressive humidity that characterizes D.C. summers, I really love the warm weather and the start of cold weather always makes me feel a little sad. It's time to have a last summer meal, veggie heavy, and full of the last of the best late summer produce. Soupe au pistou is definitely the best way to do that, as it is full of zucchini, summer squash, tomatoes, and basil.

This weekend, Labor Day holiday weekend, was an odd one. I ended up heading home sick from work early on Friday, and stayed sick through Saturday, leading to a very low key video game playing day. Sunday I woke up feeling better and headed to the market for veggies. When I got to the stand that sells my favorite yogurt and butter, they had a big sign out front: "WE HAVE MASCARPONE!" so I couldn't resist getting a tub. That gave me an idea for a mascarpone fruit tart, so I grabbed a load of peaches and blackberries (I think those fruits go very well together). The soup and tart will be very delicious refreshments for tonight's activity--visiting neighbor C's apartment for a double feature of the second season of Tool Academy (Husband J terms it "TA2: The Reckoning").

First, the tart crust. I was hoping for a better result than the pie frankencrust from two weeks ago, which turned out dry and patchy, and not very photogenic. Tart crust is not made in the food processor, which is good, as I've decided I prefer making crusts with my own two hands. Tart crust is also softer, sweeter, and more delicate than pie crust.

I started out by sifting flour into a bowl, creaming butter and stirring it into the flour, then adding egg, sugar, and vanilla.

Crust ingredients in the sun.

I mixed all of these with a fork old-school style, and the crust came together easily. I took a taste of the raw dough, and it's just astoundingly delicious, like the sugar cookie dough my grandmother makes for her Christmas cookies, and which I can (and have) eat(en) by the handful (salmonella be damned). I wrapped it up and set it in the fridge to cool for an hour.

After the hour passed, it was time to roll the crust out. This crust was just beautiful... soft, rich, delicious tasting, and rolled out nicely in a circle. The only problem was, despite the generous flouring I gave my silicone mat and the rolling pin, the crust just did not want to transfer to the pan. First it stuck to the mat, forcing me to tear it up and re-roll it, then an attempt to transfer it into the tart pan caused it to tear in half. I ended up pressing the crust together in the pan again, creating a Frankentartcrust which ended up being a bit more photogenic than Frankenpiecrust, anyway.

Frankentartcrust!!!

While the crust baked in the oven, I made the custard, using the recipe called for in the Tart Alcasienne (apple tart), replacing the called for heavy cream with mascarpone. Only I screwed the filling up by adding the eggs before putting it on the stove, and realized my mistake before putting the whole mess on the stove to heat. I decided to try it, hoping the egg wouldn't curdle if I kept whisking. One sore forearm and a mess-o-curdle later, I dumped the pot and made another batch of custard, this time keeping the eggs separate until I boiled the cream. That seemed to work well. Once the custard was finished and cooling, I sliced the peaches, arranged the berries in the crust, and poured custard over the whole thing. Into the oven it went to set.

Time to make the soup! The canellini beans had soaked overnight, so they went into the pot for 10 minutes, 5 minutes less than their package said to cook them. While they cooked, I chopped the zucchini, onion, garlic, tomato and fennel. Onion and garlic sweat in the pot first, then I added the rest of the veggies to soften in the oil.

Gorgeous veggies!

Once the veg were soft, I added the chicken broth, a bouquet garni, the macaroni and the beans, and set the thing to simmer for half an hour.


Meanwhile I made the pistou (basically pesto, without the nuts). This involves mashing six cloves of garlic and a bunch of basil leaves into a paste with a mortar and pestle, then adding olive oil a bit at a time, mashing until smooth. "If you are criminally lazy," says Tony, "you can use a food processor." Okay, done!

Mmmm... criminal laziness....

A bit of Parmesan, salt and pepper, and the pistou was finished.


This is where the problems in the soup pot began. The macaroni started cooking nicely, and was soft and delicious in a few minutes. The beans, however, remained rock-hard and kind of disgusting. Full disclosure... I'm not the biggest fan of beans in general, since my early days when beans came in a can and were covered in slime, and I've never worked with dried beans in a dish before. Not a good day to try....the clock was ticking for Tool Academy to start, and the beans were just not cooking! Finally I decided enough was enough--the veggies and mac were turning to mush, and the broth was cooking out of the soup. I took the soup off the heat, stirred in the pistou, packed it into a tureen, and trucked it over to Neighbor C's for a night of tools and prosecco.

Despite the great cannelini bean disaster, the soup went over very well, with everyone having seconds and lapping up even the nasty beans (I warned everyone about the al dente nature of the beans, but it ended up being too much trouble to pick them up or eat around them). Everyone involved loved garlic, which is a good thing, since with the pistou the entire thing had eight big cloves. It really would have been great if the beans had cooked properly, but as it was, the taste was good, even if the texture was a bit off.


The tart was of course the hit of the night. In my opinion the fruit was the best, followed by the nice sugar cookie crust. The tarte alcasienne custard was a bit too eggy and rich for a summer fruit tart, but it didn't taste bad. Husband J opined that it was better than the usual too-sweet custards in fruit tarts, so all in all, it worked out.

I tried to arrange the peaches artistically, but it didn't quite work out...

It's almost time to start stewing and braising, which means I need to make some veal stock. Alas, no veal bones were to be had at the market today. It's kind of depressing that there are no real butchers to be found in DC, though I have a promise from one of the farmers market stands that I can e-mail them on Thursdays to see if I can find some bones at the next market. I'm not feeling too sanguine though, since veal is a spring thing, right? I'm running out of recipes that can be made without veal stock and demi glace, though, so if anyone knows where I can find some bones, please let me know...

ETA: Forgot my lessons and future plans! Here we go...

Lessons learned: Cannelini beans take for freakin' ever to cook and don't taste that good al dente. Everything tastes better with 8 cloves of garlic. Never put the eggs in the custard before you put it on the stove, they curdle no matter how fast you whisk. Mascarpone tart is ok, but there are better ways to showcase mascarpone flavor, next time just use cream. Tart crust is delicious but delicate to handle. Veal bones apparently do not exist in DC.

Next week: Possibly salad nicoise, or if I am feeling very ambitious, whole roasted fish basquaise which has the added bonus of leftover bones so I can make fumet (fish stock). The soupe au pistou used up the rest of my chicken stock, so we'll probably have to roast another chicken in the near future so I can have more bones. Who is up for a stock making party?

(Non)Grilled Lamb (Non)Steaks and Blueberries with Lime Sugar

Today's dinner takes place on a Saturday, as some friends (K & A) from the suburbs are coming into the city to partake of our bistro bounty. This is great, though it does mean that we must do our shopping at the Whole Foods rather than the farmer's market. So husband J and I headed down in the morning to purchase some lamb steak.

Now I have nothing against Whole Foods. It is definitely expensive, but I love how you can find practically anything there, especially our favorite beer, which we drank with BLTs for lunch. One issue I have with Whole Foods is that it tempts me into buying pre-made foods when I'd really rather cook. But I countered that desire by eschewing the premade sandwiches in favor of buying some nitrite free bacon, bread and lettuce and making BLTs with the leftover tomatoes we bought for tonight's dinner.

We even found the exact cuts of lamb we needed... with some mishap. We headed to the meat counter first, and, not finding lamb leg steaks, decided on a 2 lb butterflied lamb leg which we figured we'd cut up after grilling. Of course, 15 minutes later while looking for creme fraiche we found in the packaged meat section precisely the cuts of lamb we needed. We'd already had the other packaged for us though, and the leg was local rather than from New Zealand, as the steaks were, so we decided to go with the butterflied leg anyway. We also grabbed some more local heirloom tomatoes for a tomato salad (We can't not eat tomato salad with the tomatoes being so delicious right now) and some blueberries.

Once home, I cut the excess fat and silvering from the lamb and put it in the marinade--garlic, olive oil, rosemary, thyme--and in the fridge. Technically it is supposed to marinate overnight but I figured six hours would not be so bad.


Then I started into the lime confit for the blueberries. This was extremely easy, basically peeling the zest from the lime, slicing it into thin, vertical slices, and boiling it in a mix of water and sugar until half the water has cooked off.


A few hours later, it was time to take a look at our cooking implement, the rooftop grill. Unfortunately and to our disappointment, the grill had decided that today was a good day to actually not ignite... leaving us with only one option (since we have no grill pan), to broil the leg of lamb. So we have non-grilled lamb non-steaks to look forward to... hopefully the fact that we are using Tony's marinade will make up for the unorthodox cooking methods and cuts.

So while I prepped the tomato and onion for the salad, I put the lamb in the roasting pan and under the broiler for about 10 minutes per side. I used a meat thermometer to gauge the temperature of the interior of the lamb, which almost led to disaster when I didn't realize that the cord to the thermometer was actually touching the flames emanating from our broiler unit. Whoops. After a little toxic smoke, but not too much damage, I readjusted the thermometer. The interior of the meat was still a bit cool after broiling, so I left the lamb in a 200 degree oven for about 10 more minutes until the middle of the lamb reached 60 degrees C (I couldn't figure out how to adjust the thermometer to Fahrenheit), the temperature that corresponds with "rare."

While the lamb cooked I finished the tomato salad, and made an onion sauce consisting of chopped onion, parsley, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Finally I finished the dessert by mixing the juice of the zested limes, a little sugar, and the blueberries. I topped the berries with a chiffonaide of mint leaves, and left them in the fridge.


Once the lamb came out of the oven and rested for 10 minutes, everything was ready, and dinner was served (too quickly to allow for pics of the finished lamb, unfortunately). The lamb with onion sauce and the salad were big hits with everyone. I sliced the leg thin, which allowed for small slices to hold generous amounts of onion sauce, and allowing all to have seconds and thirds of the meat. I felt a bit bad actually, since both the main course and salad relies heavily on onion flavor, which made for a rather acidic dinner, but everyone seemed to enjoy it anyway. The resident food critic liked the lamb quite a lot, saying "It was more familiar than some of the other things you've cooked," because it allowed for the flavor of the meat to shine through and reminded him of having lamb in Greektown near Detroit as a kid. He also liked the very prominent onion flavor to the dinner, which made me feel a bit better.

The dessert ended up being the big hit of the night--despite it being again very acidic due to the lime juice and berries. We served the soaked berries with creme fraiche, which was a perfect accompaniment. K and I ended up scooping creme fraiche into the juice left on our plates when we finished, and ate the cream soaked in the leftover berry/lime juice. All in all another successful dinner.

Lessons learned: Whole Foods has a packaged meat counter as well as a butcher deli, so look there before deciding on a different cut than the recipe calls for. Onions are great, but maybe not in every single course. Creme fraiche basically wins everything. Tomato salad is always successful when it is the time of year for delicious tomatoes. Lime zest might be awesome in a cocktail of some kind (maybe a gimlet?)

Next week: Not really sure actually. I'll be on a business trip for most of the week, so it may end up being "whatever I feel like." Dad's coming in from the middle east, though, so I may try to make rillettes for him.

Tomato Salad and Poulet Roti

In an interview with The Washington Post, Anthony Bourdain had two suggestions for people cooking from this book. "Either start with the easiest dishes to pump up your confidence...or, for the more ambitious readers, start out with [veal] stock and go on to demiglace."

Um, ok. Except that until just this morning I had no idea where to get a ready supply of veal stock bones, and besides, making veal stock in August where you have to stand above a simmering pot of stock for like eight to ten hours (no COMMENT, Carol Blymore, who is apparently about to do a post on Alinea-style veal stock in, let me reiterate August), and even Tony's eight hour veal stock is the kind of half-assed veal stock that will apparently get me fired from the French Laundry (apparently they need sixteen hours?). Ok. So, no veal stock today.

Instead, since it is August, it's time for tomatoes, which means fresh tomato salad, which looks to be the easiest recipe in the book--the only hard part is waiting til you can find the perfect tomatoes (the answer is right now). And since the day dawned a little chilly and rainy, a dish that I have a feeling will be cheerful and delicious, poulet roti.

So what is poulet roti? I'm glad you asked, because Tony has the answer for you. "That's roast chicken, numbnuts!" is the first sentence under the header. Oh good, Tony, glad you cleared that up for us. He goes on to explain that roasting chickens is extremely simple and straightforward, by letting us know that "if you can't properly roast a damn chicken then you are one helpless, hopeless, sorry-ass bivalve in an apron." Just the thing to pump up my confidence!

Until this year, I'd never before roasted a meat. My first experience was a rack of lamb I made for my husband and my in-laws when they visited for Easter. I haven't roasted another meat since that day--not that the lamb didn't turn out well, it was delicious--but it's just not something I often do. But I've been wanting to try my hand at roasting a chicken for ages so that I may indulge in all of the things I was never permitted as a child and now love--dark meat, and crispy fatty skin that's been drenched in white wine and butter (you children of boomer parents, like me, were subjected to skinless boneless dry as a bone breast meat, I know you were!). So even though the slightly chilly, wet morning has turned into a hot-ass sunny afternoon, I'm going to roast the damn bird, Les Halles style.

One of the benefits of being a snotty-ass yuppie is living in walking distance of a huge farmer's market. Upon waking this morning, I hauled my ass through the pouring rain to the market, where I dodged umbrellas and bought a chicken. I went for a 3.5 lb grass-fed, free-range organic bird from Smith Meadows Farm which was hellishly expensive, but worth it, because I don't want the PETA people on my ass til I get to foie gras. (Just kidding! I totally care about animal welfare! But only because happy chickens are more delicious.) I also found some beautiful heirloom tomatoes and organic onions, which will go into the salad.

The first step of making a roast chicken is making the herb butter, which seems like a good idea in general. I mean, herb. Butter. How could anything with herb butter fail to be delicious???

Mise en place (Tony calls it meez which is a little precious. So it will be mise from here on out on this blog):
The herbs are parsley, lemon thyme, rosemary and basil. I chopped them up and dumped them into some softened butter with honey, white pepper and salt, and the result:

Somewhere out there my little sister is gagging.

I rolled this into a log, wrapped it in plastic, and threw it into the fridge to harden up.

When the chicken had defrosted in the sick, it was time to start! First things first, remove the giblets!

Uh...

Where are the giblets?

What are giblets, anyway? Wikipedia says they are the liver, heart gizzard, anus (AHHH!), etc. of a chicken, and are often included with a chicken in a bag inside the cavity. But the innards of this chicken are devoid of bagged offal. Crud. This is going to mess up my gravy. But I soldier on.

Mise:

Note my cross-contamination prevention mat! Salmonella beware!

After rubbing with salt and pepper, inside and out, time to tuck the legs into the skin. But wait--the chicken has already been "trussed" in exactly the style Tony recommends by the farmers! That makes up for the lack of giblets, for sure!

Into the cavity go the onion, lemon and herbs. Under the breast skin, two tablespoons of herb butter, and a plain butter rub all over the chicken. Then it goes in the roasting pan, on top of the onions, and into the oven.


While the chicken is in the oven, it's time to start the tomato salad. You need two strainers for this, in order to rub both tomatoes and red onion in salt, and let them drip over the sink for a half an hour. Once that's done, rub a garlic clove into your salad bowl, whisk together the dressing, and toss the tomatoes and onions and a few basil leaves into it.

The result:

In the meantime, the chicken has cooked to a fantastic looking golden brown.

Mmm. Chicken lickin' good.

The chicken rests for 15 minutes while the (giblet-less) gravy is made. Basically, deglaze the roasting pan with white wine, and stir in a ton of butter, boil and thicken, then add parsley.

And then we serve it all up!

The verdict?

For me, this was the best roasted chicken I've ever eaten. Which I guess isn't hard, because it's the only homemade roasted chicken I've ever eaten (all others have been the supermarket rotisserie kind). But the amazing thing is, although I expressed a preference for dark meat above, I really preferred (and went back for seconds, and thirds of) the breast meat on this chicken. It was incredibly tender and juicy. What made it for me was the lemon that got stuffed into the chicken cavity before cooking. The chicken really took on a lemony delicious flavor, as if I'd squeezed a lemon on top of it before eating, only better. The salad was equally incredible. The red onion was absolutely perfect, and I don't think I'll ever make another salad with red onion without first "marinating" the onion in salt first. The onion slices were so tender and meaty. The two dishes were also perfect together, since the acid-brinyness of the salad went wonderfully with the roasted fat-butteryness of the chicken. Served on one plate, the sauces for both dishes melded together went into one delicious sauce for chicken and tomato alike.

The Resident Food Critic (aka, the husband) first declared that the salad looked like it would be better than the chicken. He later changed his tune, and agreed that the chicken was the best ever, especially the drumstick and wing, which he (opposite of me) never liked much. But he agreed that the breast was perfectly tender and juicy, and also like me, abandoned his knife and fork pretty quickly into the meal to tear the chicken carcass apart with his hands.

Lessons learned: Ask for giblets before you buy the chicken. Always go for the best tomatoes. Always brine your onions in salt before using them in a salad. Don't discard the roasted onions from the bottom of the pan--your husband likes to eat them.

Next week on What Les Halles: chicken stock!