french

Chicken Marengo

In June of 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte led the French army to a decisive victory against the Austrian army in Marengo (present-day Italy), an important battle during the French Revolutionary Wars. Legend has it that the French supply carts failed to catch up to their soldiers, and so Napoleon’s chef had to forage for ingredients in the local village. Returning with a chicken, olives, and some crawfish, the chef threw them together into the dish now known as Chicken Marengo, and served it with grilled bread topped with a fried egg. Napoleon, who was known to have bad digestion due to wolfing down his meals, enjoyed the dish so much that he requested it after every subsequent battle.

History has its fair share of eccentric leaders. Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) had three of his eight(!) wives banished to spend their remaining days in an abbey, and legend has it he had an elephant executed when it refused to bow before him. Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916) supposedly had awful table manners and an insatiable sweet tooth. US Presidents have been fairly interesting too, from Chester A. Arthur, who wore several changes of pants each day, to James A. Garfield, who could write with both hands at the same time, in different languages (Latin and Greek). Ulysses S. Grant smoked over 20 cigars a day (but later succumbed to throat cancer). FDR supposedly enjoyed driving around in Al Capone’s armored car, which had been seized by the US Treasury Dept when Capone was imprisoned for tax evasion. Also, two US Presidents (Carter and Reagan) have claimed to witness UFOs.

Today, Chicken Marengo is only rarely made with crawfish – shrimp are a fair substitute – but given that crawfish season just started here in the Florida panhandle, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try the real deal. Instructions for both shrimp and crawfish are provided below!

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Ratatouille

September is here, Labor Day has come and passed; it’s time to get autumnal.

Ratatouille is a Provençal vegetable stew, first originating in the city of Nice (near the Southeast tip of France). Its base ingredients, namely tomatoes and eggplant, are indicative of its Mediterranean influence; there are similar dishes in other countries that border the Mediterranean, like Pisto (Spain), Camponata (Sicily), and Briám (Greece).

But who am I fooling – you are probably already aware of this dish. If you’re like me, you were pretty inspired by the 2007 film; to me, it captured the beauty of cooking in a way that few films have. Truth be told, few animated films have stuck with me as long as Ratatouille (but I think Pinocchio will always be my all-time favorite).

For today’s preparation, I kept things simple. Just the right ingredients, done in an hour, and mostly hands off – it’s the perfect accompaniment to a more labor-intensive main dish. In fact, it’d be the perfect time to try out that Chicken in Champagne Sauce recipe you’ve been eyeing for the past few months!

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Chicken in Champagne Sauce

When creating recipes, I find inspiration in several places. I’ll typically stumble upon traditional recipes while researching random food facts (quite a black hole of information, trust me). Other times, I solicit ideas from friends, or readers via my facebook page, and add potential dishes to a growing list of contenders. But how I created this dish is unique for me, so I’d like to share that story.

I recently stumbled upon a photo on Instagram from Food & Wine’s Chefs Club, a restaurant concept featuring a line-up of visiting chefs. For this particular event, they offered menu items from La Caravelle, a classic French restaurant that closed its NYC doors in 2004. One of their signature dishes, Chicken in Champagne Sauce, was a favorite of the Kennedys; the restaurant re-named the dish Poularde Maison Blanche (“White House Chicken”) when JFK was elected president.

Inspired by that photo, I set out to make my own Chicken in Champagne Sauce. Let me be clear: I did not attempt to recreate this famous dish, but rather, I wanted to make a dish that tasted as good as this picture looks. Considering I’m late to the party and wasn’t able to attend the event (or visit the restaurant before it closed), this may be the closest thing I experience to the dish, and I’m fine with that.

Champagne is the name of a sparkling wine made from grapes grown in the Champagne wine region in Northeast France, fermented under strict guidelines; sparkling wines that don’t feature Champagne grapes, or weren’t produced under the required guidelines, cannot legally be called Champagne. For this recipe, any sparkling white wine will do. Fun fact: the bubbles in sparkling wine are a result of second fermentation, similar to how kombucha achieves its effervescence.

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Blue Crab and Chipotle Bisque

NFL team loyalty is a crazy thing. Growing up in Washington state, we were diehard Seahawks fans; after all, who else can you root for all the way up in the Pacific Northwest? Moving away and living in Hawaii for seven years really messed me up, since football games come on so early – over the years, the whole sport dropped off my radar. That all changed six years ago when our family moved to Baltimore, the proud home of the Ravens, and I was immediately drawn to this tough, talented, and admittedly dirty team. Today, I’m torn between who to support – Seattle or Baltimore – but luckily they rarely play each other so it isn’t that big of a deal.

It’s been hard for me to follow games closely after canceling our TV service a couple years ago, but since our family is moving once again this fall (to Pensacola, Florida this time), I can’t help but feel a little sentimental knowing this is our last season in the heart of Ravens madness. The folks behind Tabasco recently asked me to come up with a dish that used ingredients that were indicative of my local NFL team, and something with blue crab immediately came to mind. Since crab cakes are already in my cookbook, I went with my next favorite crab dish – bisque.

A bisque is a cream-based soup of French origin, typically made with shellfish. Seafood bisques are very popular in Maryland, and can be found in just about every diner menu (and we have a lot of diners). I like the type of bisque you find in Maryland – simple, honest flavors – so I whipped up a basic recipe for the home chef, adding a little Chipotle Tabasco in for some kick.

My next challenge: picking a Florida NFL team to follow.

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Beef à la Mode (French Pot Roast)

Beef à la Mode (Boeuf à la Mode) is the French variation of traditional pot roast. What sets it apart from an American-style pot roast is that it uses red or white wine (and sometimes tomato), while the original American pot roasts were made with just water. Traditional Beef à la Mode employs a technique called larding, where a special needle is used to thread long strips of pork fat through a tough cut of beef to add fat and flavor. While that sounds pretty awesome, I didn’t think it was fair to buy a needle just for one dish; so instead I did what many modern chefs do today, and cooked some bacon with the roast. I’ve seen some old Beef à la Mode recipes call for a cow foot to be added to the pot to help thicken and gelatinize the braising liquid; personally, I just used some gelatinous homemade beef stock instead.

I made a couple other slight modifications to this dish. Instead of celery, I used celery root, which imparts a similar flavor but is much heartier and more satisfying to eat (I bet it’s more nutritious, too). Secondly, I garnished the dish with some fresh chopped parsley and thinly sliced lemon zest to add a bit of brightness to the dish. The modifications definitely worked; my wife said this was the best pot roast I’ve ever made.

And yes, “à la Mode” means more than just “topped with ice cream”; it roughly translates to “in the style/modern”, meaning that when the French first started braising beef in wine it was in style. In that same sense, when Americans first started putting ice cream on pies (around the 1890s) it was considered stylish, so we adopted the French phrase. If you went to France and asked someone to bring you some “Tarte (Pie) à la Mode”, you’d probably just get funny looks. Read Full Article

Roasted Asparagus with Béarnaise Sauce

Roasted asparagus is no big deal, right? To roast asparagus, you basically just roast asparagus – not really worthy of a dedicated blog post. But pair this under-appreciated vegetable with a traditional Béarnaise sauce and you’ve got something spectacular. It’s funny what a few egg yolks and some butter can do.

Asparagus is an ancient vegetable, found in records dating back 5,000 years. In fact, an asparagus recipe appears in the oldest surviving cookbook (Apicuius, 4th century AD). While widely used by the Greeks and Romans, it nearly disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire, only to be reintroduced in the late Middle Ages by the French.

Béarnaise sauce is relatively modern, first developed in the 19th century. It is often associated with Hollandaise sauce, as it employs a similar technique of emulsifying fat (butter) in egg yolks and acid. While Hollandaise is made with lemon juice, a Béarnaise is made with an herb-infused vinegar reduction. The sauce has nothing to do with bears, or the capital of Switzerland (Bern), but rather is named after Béarn, a former province in southwest France. Fun fact: d’Artagnan (one of the main characters in The Three Musketeers) was from Béarn.

My friends at Pacific Merchants donated this Enamour dish for my recipe, which was pretty cool of them. Enamel-coated stoneware is very sturdy and versatile, and this dish is a thing of beauty. It can be used for baking and broiling, but in this case I used it as a serving dish. They are also offering 25% off purchases on their site for my readers, valid March 4-12, 2014! Use code DomesticMan at checkout.

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Beef Bourguignon, Revisited

Some long-term readers may remember that I posted a Beef Bourguignon recipe about this time last year. While it tasted great, I wasn’t happy with some of the steps in the recipe, and I was really unhappy with the pictures. So this past weekend I put my thinking cap on and tackled the dish from scratch, without consulting my old recipe at all. I’m happy to report that I made some pretty big improvements to my old recipe and cut out a couple unnecessary steps along the way. To avoid confusion, I’ve now happily removed my old, obsolete recipe.

Beef Bourguignon is a dish that originates from the Burgundy region of Eastern France. It’s widely accepted that this dish started as a peasant’s recipe, possibly as far back as the Middle Ages, as a way to slow-cook tough cuts of meat. However, it’s not mentioned in cookbooks until the early 20th century, when it was refined into the staple haute cuisine dish it’s generally regarded as today. Most people associate this dish with Julia Child, as her recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a timeless classic.

This dish is fairly true to the authentic recipes available today, and not terribly unlike Julia’s original recipe. Generally, this dish is cooked with bacon since lean/tough meats were typically used and adding bacon gave this dish some rich fattiness. I’ve also found that fattier cuts turn out really good as well. My personal touches include dusting the beef pieces in rice flour before browning (Julia browned the beef alone, then added flour and roasted the beef for a little while in the oven, turning the beef once halfway through – quite an involved step!). I also decided to keep the pot on the stovetop instead of transferring it to the oven; to me, this better mimics the open-fire method of cooking that birthed this dish, and it doesn’t alienate home chefs that don’t have a dutch oven yet. If you’re rice-free, never fear – while the addition of rice flour helps thicken the sauce and adds a little body to the broth, it’s not a show stopper.

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Braised Beef Cheek (Joue de Boeuf) with Anchovy Butter

Because of their heavy use, beef cheeks are super lean and tough. While this doesn’t sound like a fun cut of meat to cook, when braised the results are remarkable: with a little liquid, heat, and time, one cheek magically transforms into a dense, succulent, and immensely satisfying meal for two.

A traditional French-style braise in broth, red wine, mirepoix veggies, and a few sprigs of fresh herbs help to bring a full flavor to the meat. But after several hours in the oven I felt like I needed to add something to liven the dish up; so I worked out a new favorite invention of mine, anchovy butter.

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Rolled Lamb Loin Roast

Lamb is a delicate but rewarding meat; while a lot can go wrong when cooking it, when you get it right it’s an unforgettable experience. US Wellness Meats recently sent me one of their rack of lamb split loin roasts, and honestly, it was a little intimidating. Not only is this one of the most tender parts of the lamb, it needed some initial carving/butchering as well. Since one of my goals of this site is to make cooking less intimidating, I was happy to have the opportunity to demystify this formidable cut of beast.

I went with a French-inspired preparation of the dish. I carved the rack into a rolled loin roast, and used the leftover bone pieces to make an on-the-spot broth while the roast marinated. This broth then served as a base for my mint/parsley/mustard sauce.

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Moules à la Marinière (Mussels in Wine Sauce)

Here in the United States, mussels have a bad reputation as being a “lesser” shellfish. I happen to disagree. True, they may have a less intense flavor than clams or oysters, and they sure like to turn into a rubbery / chewy mess with a quickness, but with the right amount of care you can make something remarkable. And to top it all off, mussels can be found for relatively cheap compared to their more popular cousins.

This preparation is a Provençal (SE coast of France) dish. The “à la marinière” part of this dish translates to “mariner’s style”, which is when shellfish is prepared with white wine and herbs. Although the white wine really enhances the mussels’ taste, I like to think that it’s the butter and cream that really do the trick. Either way, you’re in for a treat.

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