Whisk Wednesday Assignment #14, Part 2 -- Brochet a Beurre Blanc (Whole Poached Pike with White Butter Sauce)

I missed last week's Whisk Wednesday assignment for a lot of reasons I gave Shari -- all of which were true, Fearless Leader! So don't think I was trying to pull a fast one -- but the major truth of Steak Mirabeau (Beef Tenderloin Steaks with Anchovy Butter) was that the very idea of smooshing up some slimy little anchovies into perfectly good butter was, in my mind, a combination of blasphemy of dairy products and a sick-making endeavor better left untried.

Besides, I have made compound butters (which was what the lesson was about) many times, garlic butter and honey butter being the two main compounds that have come out of my kitchen. I felt no need to mess around with nasty anchovies, the very description of which -- "small, silvery fish cured with salt" -- makes my skin crawl.

So today, I was pleased to undertake Beurre Blance, although I'm just going to come right out and say that there was no way I was going to be poaching an entire pike, whole. I used some lovely salmon filets and the beurre blanc was absolutely delicious on them and produced several eager requests for me to "make that again!"

This recipe, which is designated "Beurre Blanc Sauce I" in Le Cordon Bleu at Home, was very easy to make, especially if you've already met with success at emulsified sauces like mayonnaise and béarnaise.

The ingredients were also simple, things I already had on hand in one form or another (my herbs are almost always the dried variety instead of fresh, but to be honest, either my dried herbs are of outstanding quality, or my palate is so deadened after years of eating barbecue-flavor Bugles that I'm incapable of much discernment in flavors), although I did substitute heavy cream for the crème fraîche called for in the recipe.* I used shallots, dry white wine (the Robert Mondavi Woodbridge chard which makes my evenings take on a warm and happy glow), white-wine vinegar, thyme, bay leaf, the cream, the butter and some lemon juice.

Really, this just couldn't have been much easier. The first few ingredients were combined over the heat and I allowed the liquid to evaporate, as per instructions (reminiscent of the béarnaise), then added the cream , gave it all a stir, and then allowed it to reduce by half, which it obligingly did. I was surprised by this, because I was halfway expecting it to balk in the manner of that really annoying Velouté Agnès Sorel -- the cream of chicken soup -- which never thickened, ever in this world.

The butter was whisked in without trouble (although it got a little softer than it needed to be in my warm kitchen) and once the lemon juice was added, it was ready to serve. Get this: Le Cordon Bleu at Home, in describing the plating for this dish, advises chefs-in-training to peel the skin off the pike while it is still warm and spoon a little sauce over the body, "leaving the head unsauced." Zut alors, my lunch trembles anxiously in my stomach just reading that. Eeeuuwww!!!

The Beurre Blanc was truly delicious on the salmon filets, which I served with steamed (fresh) carrots and (frozen) green beans that I cooked with a teeny, tiny bit of bacon, in spite of the fact that our healthful salmon had already been given a generous application of CREAM and BUTTER. Oh, my poor arteries!

Next Week: Salade de Sardines Crues aux Epinards (Spinach Salad with Fresh Sardines) page 197-198 {discussion of Vinaigrettes page 55}. Umm, I won't br using any sardines in this recipe either. They makes us feel creepsy, my precious.


*I found out later that a better replacement for crème fraîche is actually sour cream, rather than heavy cream. So this recipe perhaps missed a bit of flavor that it could have had, and my Beurre Blanc was probably more "saucy" since the heavy cream is thinner than the crème fraîche, if you follow me. But still, it was very delicious, and I consider it a successful undertaking.

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13, Part 7 -- Potage Ambassadeur (Split Pea Soup with Bacon, Sorrel, and Lettuce)

I stood alone in the rain on a corner, holding out my hands beseechingly and saying, "Sorrel. Sorrel. Won't someone give me some sorrel? Or show me where to buy it? Or, I don't know...maybe tell me what it is?"

_________________________________________
sor·rel
(sôr-uhl)
n.
1. Any of several plants of the genus Rumex, having acid-flavored leaves sometimes used as salad greens, especially R. acetosella, a widely naturalized Eurasian species. Also called dock4.
2. Any of various plants of the genus Oxalis, having usually compound leaves with three leaflets.
_________________________________________


Oh. Well, that certainly clears things up.

I searched through the produce departments of several different markets and sooper-sized groceries and could not find sorrel. I hope it doesn't have some kind of magical taste that turns a simple pot of split pea soup into a classy dish worthy of Marie Antoinette, because if it did, we missed it.

However, this was also a very easy soup to make and let me tell you -- it is delicious. Delicious! Nothing went wrong this week, well, unless you include not being able to identify sorrel in a lineup of suspicious-looking fruits and vegetables.

Potage Ambassadeur was made up of homely, comforting split peas, carrots, onions, leeks, garlic, rice, bacon and heavy cream, all cooked together in a nice, hearty porridge -- a potage, which means "thick, creamy soup" -- that whispers "Cold, rainy evening in late October" into your ear. I can hardly wait to make this again in the autumn, when the aroma of it cooking on the stove will make everyone in our big, chilly barn of a house feel all warm and cozy.

Meelyn, Aisling and I did take a few liberties with the recipe, though.

1) I made the executive decision to not use bacon, since we were already dealing with butter and heavy cream. I used Canadian bacon, which was very delicious. In the past, I've always eaten split pea soup with ham in it.

2) The three of us loved the rustic peasant look of this soup and we couldn't bring ourselves to purée it in the food processor. It's so adorable with its little peas and bits of carrot and leek and onion and Canadian bacon. It is a happy-looking soup. Don't ask me to explain that. Just make it yourself and then stand at your stove and giggle at its preciousness. If soup were a baby, this one would be both Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in the early years of Full House, back when they were just learning how to talk.

3) I have GIVEN UP on trying to make a bouquet garni hold together, so I am now putting all my aromatics (parsley, thyme, leek, bay leaf and celery) in a little cheesecloth bag and tying it up in a cute little bundle.

That's all I have for you this week, because it has been a hella day (sorry, Mom) and I have a headache that is about to split my head, just like a pea.

We're done with soupes and moving on to entrées!

Next week! Steak Mirabeau (Beef Tenderloin Steaks with Anchovy Butter) page 426-427

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13, Part 6 -- Soupe à l'oignon gratinée (Onion soup)

The first time I had French onion soup, it was made by my grandmother, who was known as Ma. She was crazy about Julia Child, so it may well have been one of Julia's recipes; all I know is that it was pretty darned tasty. Ma had some of those little French onion soup bowls with the wee little handles on one side (I have me eye on a set of four Pfaltzgraff ones on e-Bay that match my dishes and I'm thinking about asking my husband if he wants to get me an early Christmas present), and let me tell you: Nothing shouts "PRESENTATION!" like a French onion soup bowl coming out from under the broiler with browned cheese going over the edges, a toasty blanket of melty goodness.

And then I took my first bite and found the crouton. Ahhhhh....

Since I don't have French onion soup bowls, my soupe à l'oignon gratinée made its appearance in my little ramekins, which also match my dishes. (Here are some onion soup bowls from Le Creuset.) It worries me that I am very excited about having EVERY MATCHING PIECE OF POTTERY in the Yorktowne pattern that ever was turned out of a Pfaltzgraff kiln. We received sixteen place settings plus little odds and ends like salt and pepper shakers and butter dishes as wedding gifts and my urge to add to what I already have remained latent for many years, but now it's come back in the same manner that full moons come back around for werewolves.

What is this madness that has seized me? Since the Yorktowne pattern made its debut in 1968 as a tribute to early American salt-glazed pottery, you'd better believe that the good folks at Pfaltzgraff have had a bunch of busy years to think up different items like corn on the cob holders, tulip mugs, teapots, cheese servers and casserole dishes to drive undisciplined people like me into a collecting frenzy. Where will it all end? Possibly with me owning so many dishes purchased for $3.99 plus shipping on e-Bay that we'll have to move into a whole new house, leaving this one as Shelley's Museum of Bourgeois Stoneware. I don't mind being the curator, but I don't want to do the dusting.

(I do promise to stop short of the Fan Blade Appliqués. Because when I saw them, I realized that there can be too much Yorktowne...)

Anyway, back to the soup...

This soup was very easy to prepare. All you had to do was slice the onions nice and thin, throw them in a pan with some butter and cook until they caramelized nicely, throw in a little flour, some white wine and water and a bouquet garni, and there you have your soup. I was surprised that I didn't have to make beef stock, and actually very glad that I didn't have to go to the trouble.

The only trouble I did have is that I just can't get this food from Le Cordon Bleu at Home salty enough. I know it's not just me, because I read the blogs of my fellow Whisk Wednesdays members and they seem to be salting things a lot, too. Hmmm.

I toasted little rounds of baguette and grated up the Gruyère to put on top, planning on serving dinner to my family while the ramekins of soupe were getting all melty in the oven. I don't trust my broiler, so I never use it; instead, I heated the oven to 425⁰ F and let it go from there.

But all was not rosy -- or maybe "oniony"? -- on the way to this week's Whisk Wednesdays recipe, my friends. I had two problems (one minor, one major) that affected the way the soup turned out.

1) The bottle in my fridge that I thought was dry chardonnay (Robert Mondavi Woodbridge chard) was actually a bottle of Oliver Winery's soft white, which is definitely on the sweet side. The soup didn't taste bad at all with the sweeter wine, but I wonder what it would have tasted like if I'd been able to use the chardonnay I thought I had, which I subsequently remembered finishing off last week during a time when the girls were driving me crazy.

2) The soup was so unsalty when I first finished it -- and that was after a generous application of coarse sea salt straight from the box -- that I added enough to make it taste good. (And it did taste good! I do have that success to clutch to my heart during the darkest hours of the night.) Before I served the finished product to the fam, I sat down with a tiny serving of soup, crouton and cheese and was horrified to find that the Gruyère was very salty; combined with the soup, it was just awful.

Fortunately, I remembered Ma's way of dealing with salty soup, which was to peel a potato, cut it in half, and then simmer the potato halves for twenty minutes in the soup: the starch in the potato is supposed to suck some of the brininess out of your soup. So I tried that, but I'm not sure it worked.

When the soup came to the table tonight, it looked adorable. A very cute soup! The cheese had melted and browned a bit and bubbled over the ramekins and the soup itself was a nice deep golden brown color and as I picked up my spoon, I was so happy that I'd remembered that little housewife's trick with the potato.

And then I took the first spoonful. Zut alors, but was that a salty soup! We all took about four bites and had to give it up. I blame the cheese. I can't remember what brand it was, but it was waaaay too salty and I'll never buy it again if I can recognize the package, which I probably won't be able to, as Aisling would say. The soup was very good without the cheese and the cheese was good without the soup, but together, they were cringe-making.

It was par for the course tonight, though. I made buttermilk biscuits that didn't rise and I didn't make gravy because we ran out of milk and the green beans were barely warm and the potatoes were downright chilly and if you don't mind, I think I'll just go and get the rest of that bottle of Oliver's soft white and go sit on the back steps and think moodily about e-Bay auction I lost for a two-tier tidbit tray to some sneaky sniper who came in at the last moment and stole it from me.

It was Yorktowne. It was mine. And I was robbed.

Better luck next week on the soup (I've been on a real run of flops lately, which is destroying my confidence, just in case you wondered).

Potage Ambassadeur (Split Pea Soup with Bacon, Sorrel, and Lettuce) page 462

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13, Part 5 -- Consommé Madrilène

I want to be totally frank with you and just say right up front that if you intend to prepare and eat the Clear Soup of Madrid, be prepared to do so with a salt shaker or a salt cellar or one of those big blocks that deer lick in the winter somewhere close by.

Otherwise, you might have the same experience the girls and I had this afternoon, when we gathered with pleased expectation around little mugs of consommé and each took a sip from our spoons and swallowed what tasted like dishwater that had had a tomato and a chicken dipped in it.

(Or an ocean. Oceans are good source of salt.)

Consommé Madrilène was not difficult to prepare, especially since I already had the chicken stock frozen flat and stacked neatly in freezer bags. I pulled one out (I freeze things like stock in four cup portions, which was fine for this recipe, since I intended to cut all amounts in half) and let it thaw in the fridge yesterday.

Today, all I had to do was get it out and pour it into a saucepan and allow it to come to a boil. While that was happening, the directions instructed me to make a meatloaf. Yes, you read that correctly: I made a meatloaf. I made it out of ground chuck, an egg white and herbs, as well as some leek, celery, carrot and chopped tomato. All this was supposed to be stirred together in a mixing bowl and Aisling, who was chopping vegetables with our newly sharpened chef's knife said conversationally, "I thought you said we were having quesadillas for dinner."

"We are," I said, stirring in the celery she dumped into my bowl.

"Then why are you making a meatloaf?" she asked in a reasonable tone.

"This is not a meatloaf. This is.....a filter."

"A filter?" Meelyn queried dubiously. "Like, for water? Or....for the central air?"

"No, it's a filter for the soup. This, er-....meatloaf will kind of float on top, if I'm reading the directions right, and it will draw all the little bits of herbs and all that kind of thing out of the chicken stock so that when it is finished cooking and it's been chilled, it will be as clear as glass and we'll be able to see the pattern on the bottom of our soup plates."

"Is that important, seeing the soup plate's pattern?" Meelyn asked politely.

"I'm thinking yes."

"But when you make a real meatloaf, you just put it in that baking pan," Aisling said, doggedly pursuing her own train of thought, and a very special train it is. So special, in fact, that passenger space is limited to one. "So what are you filtering then?"

"My thoughts, Aisling," I sighed. "My wicked thoughts."

She regarded me over her glasses. "You might want to be careful, saying things like that. Because I could believe you, you know, and tha-..."

"ANYWAY," I interrupted, giving her a quelling sort of look, "the consommé has to simmer with this meatloa-...I mean, filter on top of it for forty-five minutes, and when it's done, we'll pour the soup off the bottom and that will be our finished product."

Aisling looked at me suspiciously. "What happens to the meatloaf?"

"I'll just run it down the garbage disposal," I shrugged. (Actually, I was feeling guilty about that, but I have no idea what I would do with a wet, boiled meatloaf after it had filtered my consommé. I can't feed it to the dogs, because it would be much too rich for their delicate digestions, and I can't see my family being enthusiastic if they asked what's for dinner and I replied "wet boiled meatloaf sandwiches.")

(Or maybe you could eat a bowl of Consommé Madrilène while floating on the Dead Sea, which is so salty, fish and plants can't live in it. It will also support your body weight because the specific gravity of the Dead Sea's water is so high. The guy in this picture is reading a magazine, but I don't see why he couldn't be eating a bowl of cold soup, do you?)

The girls looked disapproving, so I distracted them by mixing the meatloaf with my bare (clean) hand.

The filter apparently worked just as it was supposed to, because the consommé came out of the saucepan as clear as a June sky, only golden instead of blue. There was some kind of bizarre instruction to drag strips of paper towel across the surface of the soup to soak up any fat left over from the stock or the ground chuck, but what is that all about? We did it just to say we'd done it, but I think it makes a lot more sense to just chill the soup and take the solidified fat off later. It didn't really work all that well, anyway. There was a tiny bit of fat on top of the cooled soup and I just lifted it off and discarded it.

So that brings us back to the moment of tasting and a feverish wielding of the salt shaker over our mugs. Salted, it had the flavor of rich chicken broth and tomato, and it was indeed very clear, but other than that, I was underwhelmed. I'm not certain what good the leek, celery, carrot and aromatic herbs were supposed to do, because they were all used in the original stock, which was already tasty. And I found out that I'm not a chilled soup kind of girl. The soup seemed more like a beverage than a soup, like Clamato. The sort of thing that might welcome a shot of vodka. Or, you know. Two shots. You know what, just make mine a Bloody Mary and you can have my soup, okay?

(Or the Bonneville Salt Flats. If you're reading in Utah, you could drive really fast across the plain while holding a bowl of Consommé Madrilène out the window. That would probably help.)

Oh, and I forgot to get the red pepper and extra tomato to dice and float on top, which would have been very cute.

Next week! Soupe à l'oignon gratinée (Onion soup) pages 48-49

RECIPE: Salmon filets with Chive Cream Sauce from Le Cordon Bleu at Home

[I added this post to the Whisk Wednesdays section because of the Chive Cream Sauce. -SM]

I bought some salmon filets a couple weeks ago, and the first chance I've had to use them came last night when I was desperate for something fast and easy to make for dinner. It was Monday, you know? And I was worn out from a busy weekend and wishing I could just pull a few handfuls of grass up from the yard and say, "Here. Salad. Eat it."

I thawed out the salmon beforehand, and in a desperate bid to make it look AS IF I CARED (because let's be real: sometimes I just don't and I know you don't either, but adulthood is largely a matter of faking enthusiam for certain people, events and household tasks, don't you think?), I went paging through Le Cordon Bleu at Home to see if I could find an easy sauce for fish. Et voilà! I found one on page 204 and happened to have every single ingredient on hand.

This recipe was extremely simple and my entire family highly recommends it.

CHIVE CREAM SAUCE

INGREDIENTS:

1 1/4 cups heavy cream
salt and freshly ground pepper
Juice of 1/2 lemon, strained
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon (I used 1 teaspoon dried tarragon)

DIRECTIONS:

Allow the cream to come to a simmer in a small saucepan. Season with salt and pepper; stir in the lemon juice. Bring to a boil and cook for 3-4 minutes -- KEEP AN EYE ON IT or you will have a sad mess on your cooktop. Remove from the heat and stir in the herbs.

That's it. Really. I promise. The sauce thickened upon standing and the herbs infused their flavor into the cream and the lemon flavor was very delicate, just perfect for fish.

I sautéed the thawed salmon in my cast iron skillet in a small amount of oil and two chopped scallions and two cloves of garlic, allowing it to cook for four minutes per side over a medium-low heat and sprinkling it with pepper and a little sea salt.

The salmon with the sauce was served -- unimaginatively, I admit -- with baked potatoes and green beans. But the green beans were the frozen variety, not from a can, so I think I deserve credit for that.

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13, Part 4 -- Bisque du Langoustine (Lobster Bisque)

Okay, I cheated. But I cheated with a purpose, and the purpose was to keep my husband from shouting at me with a crazy look in his eyes and then cutting up my debit card for spending our $90 per week grocery budget on lobster and cognac. Because I could have, you know? I priced cognac in a couple of different places, several different brands -- Hennessy, Courvoisier and Remy Martin -- and they were all in the $38-$44 range for smallish bottles. Boone's Farm apparently doesn't run to cognac.

And then there was the lobster. When I passed their tank at the grocery, I just turned my head aside and walked a little more quickly. I am SCARED OF FOOD that doesn't give you an actual cost, but instead offers the bone-chilling message on a little blackboard: "Market Price."

I bet you anything that the market price on lobsters flown from Maine to Indiana is not $2.09 a pound.

So I emailed Shari and begged off the Bisque du Langoustine for this week, but I did offer to make instead the Lobster Bisque recipe that I found printed on the label of my little jar of Superior Foods' Better Than Bouillon Lobster Base. This is the same lobster base I bought to use in the Seafood Enchiladas à la Chi-Chi's recipe I posted on July 8. It was good stuff in those enchiladas, so when I read that little tiny recipe, printed in a font so small I thought I was going to have to hire a fairy to come read it for me, I thought, "Hmm, that sounds pretty good. And easy! I'll have to try it someday."

This was the day.

First of all, this recipe scored huge points for me because it took all of ten minutes to prepare, HUGE. Secondly, it tasted delicious. Other than the absence of the quenelles, which are little egg-shaped bundles of puréed lobster, egg whites and a few other ingredients, basted and cooked with the bisque, I wonder if anyone would have known that this recipe came from a jarred base. A purist would have made the quenelles anyway, using lobster or crab meat or even shrimp, but I am very impure when it comes to that sort of thing. Look not upon me. I am not worthy.

So my bisque was just a mug full of creamy deliciousness of a gorgeous pumpkiny sienna hue. I really do think that this could be served as a first course to guests: it tasted that good. For lunch, a bowl would be very nice with a French baguette and some really cold butter.

LOBSTER BISQUE

2 cups heavy cream OR half-and-half (or milk, if you have to be that way)
1 cup water
1 cup white wine (a sweeter variety) or sherry
1 tablespoon Superior Foods' Lobster Base
3 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/4 teaspoon paprika

All you had to do was throw all this stuff in a medium saucepan, give it a go with your whisk, allow it to come to the boil, and then turn the flame down to allow it to simmer gently for five minutes. Done!

I poured myself out that mug-full I mentioned and sat down for a quick taste. The texture was lovely and creamy, the color delightful and the taste completely delicious. I don't know who these Superior Foods people are, but their Lobster Base is darned good. At it cost me a whole $4.95 at the grocery, where I found it on the soup aisle.

Since I'm confessing things anyway, I'll add that I got some crispy golden butter crackers and naughtily crushed a few up into my bisque. I know this makes me sound about eight years old, but it sounded to yummy to pass up.

Next week! Consommé Madrilène (Chilled Consommé with Red Peppers and Tomatoes) pages 267-268

Plating

I've always been the type of cook who liked a plate to look nice. My mother was always a wonderful cook when I was growing up and she taught me the finer points of both nutrition and culinary aesthetics of not serving a pale, naked boneless, skinless chicken breast shivering on a plate next to some mashed turnips and a serving of wax beans. Her meals were always hearty and filled with color, if lamentably short on desserts.

But actual plating is something I've never really done until the double-whammy of Whisk Wednesdays and Top Chef hit me. All of a sudden, I'm enjoying little finicky details like a flat-leaf parsley and grape tomato garnish, or a sprinkling of paprika and dill weed across the top of a potato salad. (I know the paprika thing is hopelessly stuck in the 1950s days of casseroles baked with chicken, noodles, cheese, cashews, pimiento-stuffed green olives and two cans of cream of mushroom soup, but I can't help it. Just be thankful that I don't make that casserole.)

Tonight we ate a simple dinner of Mexican chili, which the girls and I dished up into our faithful old Pfaltzgraff rimmed soup plates. We laid a slice of Colby-Jack cheese on the top of each bowl, threw a few corn chips on it like a group of little seafarers perched on a life raft in the middle of a bumpy red sea, and topped it off with a sprig of the aforementioned parsley. It looked very pretty, and my husband was appreciative of our efforts. Which made me sigh in relief, because he's a pickier eater than he thinks he is, and I was trying to disguise the fact that we'd run out of our usual cheddar cheese.

I'm also teaching the girls some little niceties of the table, things I left behind me from my mother's training when I had two little ones "helping" and just getting supper on the table took the organizational skills of General Patton. For some time, I've been just throwing bottles of ketchup and mustard out there, along with chips in a bag instead of a bowl, sometimes with a big plastic jug of milk acting the part of a centerpiece. It used to drive me batty when my mother put mayonnaise in a tiny dish and pickles in a tiny dish and croutons in a tiny dish. It made so much extra stuff to wash. If it had been possible to put my frayed nerve endings in a dish, it would have taken a big one.

But tonight, Meelyn, Aisling and I did what we've been trying to do and put jalapeño peppers in a tiny dish and slices of Colby-Jack on a little plate and corn chips in a medium-sized bowl. And decorated everything with parsley, because if you're going to serve your family a cheap dinner like chili made from canned ingredients, the least you can do is make everything pretty.

My husband nodded approvingly and said that everything looked very nice and congratulated me that the girls aren't growing up like wild animals with no manners. He seems to believe that all problems with child rearing can be solved by everyone's sitting down at the dinner table in the evening. Although I could tell him some stories about throwing a buttered biscuit at my father that might change his mind about that.

My personal theory includes flat-leaf parsley.

And plating.

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13, Part 3 - Velouté Agnès Sorel (Cream of Chicken Soup)

Back in my undergrad days at Ball State, one of my favorite things the food service came up with was known as Chicken Velvet Soup. Everybody loved that soup, so creamy, so rich, so....velvety! On the days when it was served for lunch or dinner, people would sit at the tables, their heads bent dreamily over their bowls, inhaling the inviting fragrance the way a lover breathes in the scent of his beloved.

Well, okay. Maybe not quite that dreamily. But still, it was really good soup. And throughout my adult life, I have judged all chicken soups on this criteria: Does it measure up to BSU's Chicken Velvet?

I'd have to say that Velouté Agnès Sorel is very, very close. Velouté does mean "velvety," so I was hoping to achieve a very close approximation.

I prepared the stock on Monday afternoon, having scored a gorgeous three-pound chicken at a butcher's markdown price that morning. I made the stock in the slow-cooker, using the recipe I posted here a couple of weeks ago. Only this time, I filled the cooker a bit too full, and when everything inside came to a simmer, it sort of sploshed out and my copy of Le Cordon Bleu at Home received a chickeny baptism that marks it as a true cookbook: In my mind, a cookbook can't properly carry that title if all its pages are pristine and untouched as they were the day it was boxed up by the printer. No, a real cookbook -- a Velveteen Cookbook, if you will -- is one that has pages with notes scribbled in the margins, and greasy butter stains and pages stuck together and all that. My copy of LCBatH already has notes scribbled in the margins ("Totally screwed this up - use fresh mussels next time" the chagrined note at the edge of the Billy Bi recipe reads) and now it has about forty pages that have been well and truly chicken-stocked.

But I digress. As usual.

I was intrigued by the idea of using beef tongue or ham in this soup (guess which one I chose?) because it seemed it would add another dimension of lusciousness to something that sounded pretty darned good, even without the meat. It also called for the breast of the chicken cooked in the slow-cooker plus the addition of butter-sautéed mushrooms, so I was looking forward to a really hearty soup, which is what we got. I found that surprising, considering that this soup is named after the favorite mistress of King Charles VII of France, Agnès Sorel, natch. In fact, several delectable dishes and a couple of operas feature her, a person of reported grace, beauty and intelligence, so I'm thinking she must have been one hot little number who would have appreciated a thick soup made with...er, tongue. And breast.

*coff*


ANYWAY, the soup came together fairly easily, except for four problems that dogged me.

1) The first trouble spot occurred when I tried to julienne the mushrooms, which refused to comply with my dull and unintimidating knife, so I just sliced them and reflected that last week's Julienne Darblay's results had been better, but not by much;

2) Then I tried to slice the chicken breast before it was cooled because my family was standing outside the kitchen door, murmuring among themselves and sampling the leg of one of the dining room chairs as an appetizer. It wouldn't slice, and was so tender from the slow-cooker that it ended up shredding itself in the creamy broth later on. It still tasted okay, but it wasn't the look of julienned chicken, ham and mushrooms that I was supposed to achieve;

3) I ran out of twine and the becursed bouquet garni went all to pieces in the broth. You know those pictures you see sometimes of a bouquet garni tied with a bit of a scallion's green end? Well, that's all just a cruel lie, so don't bother, and;

4) The soup wouldn't thicken when I added the cream. I don't know where I went wrong on that one, because I followed the recipe to the letter. Is one of my daughters a secret Cordon Bleu spy who made an international call to tattle to the director that I made the stock in a slow-cooker instead of on the stove? And then, according to instructions from abroad, did that girl replace my real copy of the cookbook with a fake one that had little changes made to the recipe so that it would flop? And have I been watching too many TiVo'd episodes from The X Files, or what?

So I served the soup and I thought it was pretty good and Meelyn thought it was just okay and Aisling turned up her naughty nose and my husband ate one bowl in stoic silence, pushing his mushrooms onto the rim of his soup plate with a pained grimace. I sat in a grim silence of my own and resolved to serve the ingrates some pre-fabricated macaroni and cheese for the next three nights.

I just ate the rest of it for lunch and thought it was rather good, although still not up to the Chicken Velvet standard. The combination of chicken, ham and mushrooms in that really delicious creamed stock is quite good. But I would definitely try this out again and work to make it thicken the way it was supposed to.

I felt that this soup, because it was so full of chunky ingredients, was definitely the type of soup you eat for a meal, whereas last week's Julienne Darblay, smooth and creamy could be either a first-course dinner soup, or a main course luncheon soup, or even a simple supper soup, if you wanted it to. To complement the Velouté Agnès Sorel, I made up some buttery garlic croutons to float on top (along with a garnish of flat-leaf parsley) and placed them on the table in a serving dish for people to help themselves.

I would have made a lovely little green salad to go with this soup, but I was pressed for time and everyone was mad at me, so pretend that's what I did, if you don't mind. I'd like you to imagine it with some cucumber and tomato chunks, plus a little chopped red onion and a handful of dried cranberries. We like a nice garlic vinaigrette with that. If you'd like to pretend that my husband and I had a chilled glass of white wine and didn't have some cross words after dinner, it wouldn't hurt my feelings.


Next week! Bisque de Langoustins (Langoustine Bisque) pages 185-186

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13, Part 2 -- Julienne Darblay (Creamed Leek and Potato Soup)

The Julienne Darblay was a wonderfully easy soup to make. It made the whole house smell deliciously of promises of dinner to come, which was confusing for my family, considering that I was cooking it at 5:30am on Thursday morning. But really, is there a bad time for your house to smell of simmering leeks and potatoes and bouquet garni, in a rich homemade chicken stock?

I don't think so either.

I had to make a number of executive decisions on this recipe, based on the fact that I am leaving for CousinFest for the next few days and I haven't yet packed a single cotton ball. Even though it's less than twelve hours until my husband and I meet Carol and transfer my cotton ball (and hopefully some other things as well, like a clean top to replace the one I will undoubtedly spill a cosmopolitan on) from our car to hers. I was working under pressure.

Julienne Darblay's most difficult task was doing the julienne, and I was pleased and surprised to discover how easy that was. Everything else consisted of cutting and washing the leeks (the recipe didn't call for the bits of dirt and sand that you can find in a leek's layers), dicing the potatoes and assembling the bouquet garni. The bouquet garni consisted of parsley, a bay leaf, thyme, celery and the green part of the leek: I used dried herbs and fresh celery and leek for mine.

The only part that stumped me about the soup was the potatoes. The recipe didn't specify if they were to be peeled or not. I hung over the sink for a moment with Le Cordon Bleu at Home at my left and a veg peeler at my right. To peel or not to peel? I remembered with sorrow the Billy Bi soup from last week that desperately needed the flavor from the mussels' juices; is there some essence of potato that I'd be missing in this soup if I peeled? On the other hand, the cookbook features a picture of the soup on page 132 and it was very light in color. The leeks and potatoes are puréed in a food processor after cooking to render a smooth, creamy texture and I had to wonder if that light color could be achieved if the skins of my lovely russets were part of the purée?

In the end, I chose to peel.

The leeks, potatoes, bouquet garni and chicken broth had to simmer together for about half an hour, so I left them to their business and practiced my julienne skills with a carrot and a leek green, observing that it's hard to cut anything when you buy your knives from the grocery's baking aisle for $7.99. I still do have all my fingertips -- but only because the knife isn't sharp enough to cut one of them off -- and moved on to the final stage of the soup.

The food processor.

I have an admission to make here: I don't own a food processor. When I told Kayte this a few months ago, she practically needed smelling salts. I fanned her energetically as she sat slumped in a chair and said in a weak voice, "You don't have a food processor? How do you cook?"

"Mostly from cans and boxes," I confessed. Which practically brought on a panic attack and I had to dial 9-1-1 on my mobile and stand there, still fanning, and waiting to see if I needed to press the Send button.

I do have a teeny little food mill that is fifteen years old. I know how old it is because I bought it to make baby food for Meelyn with. Many's the pea and peach I've whirled around in that handy little gadget, but the problem is that it holds about a cup of whatever you want to mill in it, and I had a good deal more than one cup of soup to handle.

However, no one's going to say that I'm not intrepid and ready to take on a challenge, especially from Le Cordon Bleu. Mine is not to question why and all that. So I got my soup pot, my food mill, a strainer and a clean bowl assembled and went to it.

My first surprise was that my bouquet garni had come undone and that little flecks of dried herbs were merrily bathing themselves in the broth. Oh, well....the soup was going to be speckly instead of one color and mirror-smooth, but what can you do? Other than strain the soup before milling it, which I wasn't inclined to do at 6:00am.

It took less time than I thought, and before long, I was rewarded with a lump of greenish potatoey-leeky stuff that looked very strange but smelled divine. My only problem here is that the silly stuff was too thick to strain and I was a little confused about the whole "pressing out the liquid and discarding the solids" thing that the book told me to do: It seemed to me that I'd be reducing the amount of soup from six or maybe eight servings down to about four. So I decided against the pressing.

"Le Cordon Bleu," I said. "You are not the boss of me. But only because I am not paying you a giant tuition, but instead purchased this book at a very reasonable price from Amazon.com."

The only thing left to do after that was return the soup to the pot and the heat, allow it to warm again, and then take out a small portion in a little bowl so that the cream could be stirred into that to avoid curdling the cream. At least that's what I'm assuming might happen. With a pint of store-brand heavy cream at $3.99, I wasn't about to just throw it into the pot and hope for the best.

The cream stirred into the soup pot easily, and although I didn't have the delightfully smooth look the picture in the book called for, it still looked pretty darned good. And again I have to return to the smell, which was better than you can imagine. No, better than that.

I got a small serving out of the pot and sat right down to sample. I have to say that this is one really delicious soup. I know that a lot of it is due to the stock, because the rich, chickeny-ness provided a good base for the flavor, layered by the mild potato and leek and still again by the combination of herbs. It evoked a taste and feeling of autumn, with soup in warmed bowls and homemade croutons floating on top... it was just sooo good.

Next week! Velouté Agnès Sorel (Cream of Chicken Soup) pages 444-445

___________________________________________________

Due to circumstances as far beyond my control as the rising and setting of the sun, I did not get a chance to make the Julienne Darblay soup today (or yesterday or the day before that), although I did make a lovely, golden pot of stock on Friday, which I froze, and bought all the groceries I needed except cheesecloth for the bouquet garni, that little bag of herbs which is so dearly beloved in French cooking, also which I cannot remember no matter how many times I walk through the doors of the market. Some brain cramp occurs and wipes "cheesecloth" right off my slate and puts "chocolate" there instead and now I have forty-seven bits of candy and no cheesecloth.

And no soup. Although I hopefully will have some here tomorrow, since the leeks are sitting hopefully in the fridge and the stock is defrosted and the potatoes are beginning to ask "Are we there yet?" every time I walk through the kitchen.

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13 - Billy Bi aux Paillettes (Mussel Soup with Cheese Straws)

This week's lesson was by far the hardest and our results were mixed, but not because the recipes were bad. The recipes were just fine and I have been so pleased to read in a flurry of emails that several of my fellow Whisk Wednesdays members had great results from their efforts and thought the soup was delicious. I think everyone probably felt that the paillettes were were delicious - where can you go wrong with puff pastry and grated fresh Parmesan?

I know exactly where we went wrong with the soup. Billy Bi (pronounced "Billy Bee" and named by chef Louis Barthe at Maxim's in Paris after restaurant patron William "Billy" Brand) calls for mussels, which are not exactly thick on the ground in my little blue collar city. I was thrilled to find 2 pounds of frozen mussels from Prince Edward Island for $5.99, which I didn't feel was a bad price for a dinner component, in the seafood case at Meijer; they were pre-cleaned and pre-cooked and I felt that I'd rather handily killed two (pounds of) mussels with one fishing net or however you'd prefer to state that.

Did you catch the word "cooked" in that last paragraph?

It turns out that one of the most essential parts of this recipe was the cooking of the mussels so that their juices could be used to add a layer of flavor dimension to the soup. Without those juices, the girls and I wound up with bowls full of pleasantly flavored creamy broth. It smelled fantastic, but the mere aroma didn't translate to the taste. It was too bad.

If we have an "exotic" seafood in some other recipe, I think I'll definitely make the drive over to Kayte's city (where the girls and I do so many other things, so it will be easy to combine several errands and save gas) and go to see her new friend, the fishmonger, and get the real, fresh deal. One of the things that really stings about this recipe is that Kayte's two pounds of fresh mussels cost less than my two pounds frozen!

One thing I enjoyed about this recipe was removing the mussels from their shells, which were the most intriguing indigo-black with pearly pale blue interiors - beautiful. The mussels themselves were ugly little buggers and Meelyn sat flinching on the chair across the table from me, uttering little horrified screams.

"Why are they that awful color?" she asked, shuddering.

"Because God is the artist of all artists and that's how he made them." I flicked another mussel out of its shell with a spoon and Meelyn recoiled when it landed in my bowl with a slight splash.

"I don't like this art."

"Maybe this is art that has to be tasted to be appreciated," I mused, throwing a lovely shell into the wastebasket.

Sad, sad. It didn't happen. Everything went off just the way it should have -- the herbs and wine, the roux with the cooking liquid added and then the cream poured in -- I was very pleased, until I took that first taste.

Swallowing, I said hesitantly, "I think it needs salt."

Meelyn tasted, then Aisling. "More salt, definitely," they agreed.

I added more and gave the soup kettle a stir, then tasted a second time. "I think it still needs more."

The girls agreed, so we went another round. Finally, Meelyn said, "You know, I think it doesn't really taste like much of anything. Except maybe cream."

I knew my husband would be very disappointed if I offered him a bowl of warm herbed cream after twelve hours at work, so I hustled some leftovers out of the fridge and served barbecue sandwiches, potato salad and green beans instead. *sob!*

But then there are the paillettes, the cheese straws. Shari said we didn't have to make the cheese straws for this assignment if we didn't want to. She'd already made them in a previous lesson (I jumped into Whisk Wednesdays at Lesson 12) and didn't intend to make them again. I, who have never even made a pie crust in my entire life, thought I'd go ahead and give them a whirl. Or maybe a "roll" would be more accurate. Anyhoo, the puff pastry doesn't call for any exotic ingredients, just flour, butter, and some egg, basically. I had everything I needed already on hand, so I set forth.

I had to scrub down my kitchen counter to roll the pastry on. Before I started, I wet two tea towels and put them in the freezer for fifteen minutes to make the counter nice and cool, which I believe has something to do with the pastry not getting all hot and sticky. In this weather, I could understand perfectly. Many's the time I've wished I could lay my hot and sticky body on a nice cool counter, although come to think of it, don't they do that at the morgue?

Ewww!

Forget I said that.

I measured out the flours and made a little well in the center as Le Cordon Bleu at Home instructed me to do; the only thing bad that happened in the making of the puff pastry was when my liquidy ingredients naughtily overflowed and attempted to frolic all over my counter and run off into the utensil drawer. I firmly put a stop to that and mixed them up with the flour and started rolling.

After that initial rollout, the dough had to be wrapped and put in the fridge for 30 minutes to allow it to rest. Cooling the dough helps it lose its elasticity: the elasticity is what makes the dough tough. (Isn't it very strange to see the words "dough" and "tough" right next to each other and contemplate their pronunciations? It isn't? Okay, then. Never mind.) The butter had to be softened by placing it between two pieces of parchment or waxed paper and pounding it with the rolling pin until it was the consistency of the dough. Aisling and I had a great deal of fun doing that.

After abusing the butter, we shaped it like the dough we'd just rolled out -- into a rectangle. Then began the process I really enjoyed, which was rolling the dough, folding and turning it, refrigerating it after each two rolls-and-turns. I can't really explain why I found that to be so entertaining, but I told Kayte in an email that I was so proud of that pastry, I was practically cooing babyluv at it each time I passed the fridge.

When we made the cheese sticks, the only mistake I made (other than not having an egg for the glaze, drat it all) was in not separating the sticks in the middle of my baking sheet a little better. The ones in the middle, because they were crammed in so tightly, didn't have enough room to puff up like the ones on the outer edges. But I'm happy to report that being squashed in closely didn't affect their taste.

"Thede theez thicks are good evn do they're nod puvvy!" I said indistinctly as I carried a little tray of cheesy paillettes into the dining room, spraying my family with a delicate rain of flaky crumbs.

Julia Child states that the most important part of cooking is tasting what you've made and I believe her.

Coming next week for Whisk Wednesday -- Julienne Darblay (Creamed Leek and Potato Soup with Julienned Vegetables) page 133-134. Sounds absolutely delicious and is perhaps the very soup that caused Julia to snort laughter through her nose when she inadvertantly said, "First, you take a leek..."

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #12, Part 3 -- Mayonnaise and Salade Messidor

This week's assignment turned out to be very tricksy and somewhat inscrutable. Like, there is supposed to be something inside an artichoke when you cut off all the green outer leaves, right? It's not just nature's little joke, getting us to pay for these odd-looking vegetables (most of which are tipped right into the trash) only to find....nothing?

I think I'm confused about artichokes.

This week was the one I've been waiting for - the week in which we were to make homemade mayonnaise, a task I set myself to do this summer. And I can now say that I've done it! So have Meelyn and Aisling, because if there was ever a three-person task, it's mayonnaise making: One person to stir, one to pour the oil, and the third to lie back in a kitchen chair, panting and nursing a rubbery, tired arm, waiting to spell Person #1 with the stirring. We made mayonnaise from two different recipes this week. Eh bien soit, one we liked and one we didn't.

I'm sorry to say that the one we didn't like was from Le Cordon Bleu at Home. The recipe, along with the recipe for Salade Messidor, can be found on pages 30-31 of the book.

Le Cordon Bleu at Home calls for the following ingredients in their mayonnaise:

2 egg yolks

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

salt and fresh ground pepper

1 3/4 cups vegetable oil

1 tablespoon wine vinegar

The girls and I undertook this recipe on Sunday, since I wanted a little practice before putting the salade together. The technique for making mayonnaise is completely straightforward and doesn't vary from recipe to recipe: beat the egg yolks quickly, add the oil slowly. But that's really the second part of the technique. The first part of the mayonnaise-making technique is to make sure you have all your ingredients at room temperature. That's not so difficult for the oil, which I'm assuming most of us store in a kitchen cupboard, no matter what sort you're using. But the eggs, now, that's a different story. To bring your eggs to room temperature quickly if you've forgotten to get them out of the fridge ahead of time like, say, me, you can put them in a small, deep bowl with warm water to cover them. Fifteen minutes or so should do it. I learned this handy trick from The Tante Marie's Cooking School Cookbook by Mary Risley, which is another book I feel I simply must own. (Kayte already talked me into buying Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, the book she and the group from Tuesdays with Dorie blog are baking their way through, and why I did this I simply cannot fathom, as I dislike baking to a degree almost phobic in its intensity.)

The reason it's important to have all ingredients at room temperature is because mayonnaise is an emulsion of egg yolks and oil -- you need to get all the little molecules that make up these two substances to bond -- emulsify -- and they can't do it if they're at disparate temperatures. Alors, any attempt to combine cold egg yolks with room temp oil is only going to end with you sitting hunched over on a bar stool, throwing back glasses of marc with a cigarette hanging unattractively out of the side of your mouth, muttering cuss words in French.

Meelyn, Aisling and I had great success with this mayonnaise. It obediently did just what it was supposed to do. The only problem was that it was bland. We added more salt. We added more pepper. We gave it another kick of vinegar. The one thing I didn't want to do was add more Dijon mustard, because it already had a faint mustard flavor and I wanted our mayonnaise to taste like mayonnaise. It didn't seem too much to ask. Frrustrated, I went to the shelf and got out Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, Julia Child's chef d'oeuvre, to see what her take on the recipe was. I can remember my grandmother's homemade mayonnaise, and it tasted creamy and rich and wonderful, whether it went into a Hoosier potato salad or on a turkey sandwich. It didn't taste like mustard.

Julia's instructions for basic mayonnaise (she lists seven variations) can be found on page 87. Here's the list of ingredients:

3 egg yolks

1 tablespoon wine vinegar OR lemon juice (we used lemon juice)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon prepared mustard

1 1/2 to 2 1/4 cups oil, whatever kind you prefer


I found the two recipes intruguing, because they're so fundamentally similar, yet different in ways that matter a lot. To our taste, anyway. Probably the biggest difference was the use of plain salad mustard in a small amount in place of the much larger amount of Dijon mustard. As it turned out, that was what made all the difference. Julia Child's mayonnaise beat Le Cordon Bleu's hands down, baby.

The Salade Messidor was easy to put together, except for the artichokes. We used two chokes instead of the extravagant six called for in the recipe. Le Cordon Bleu at Home has a very nice section at the back of the book that gives photographic depictions of how to do things like, well, peel an artichoke. So the girls and I peeled.



And peeled.




{And p e e l e d}



When we got beneath the outer leaves, we discovered to our dismay that our artichokes were nothing but outer leaves. Inside was a flimsy little bit of leaves-plus-prickly-fluff. What the- ??!! I thought there was supposed to be something inside the silly thing. This is what I get for waiting forty-plus years to denude an artichoke of its leaves, I thought, looking at the bit of nothing in my hand. It's a judgment on me. A punishment. Now I shall never know the joy of peeling and cooking my own fresh artichoke.

Sadly, I laid my knife down on the cutting board and wept for a while. The girls sympathetically passed me a tea towel on which to dry my eyes.

There is the bottom part of the artichoke, however -- is that all there is to it? -- and our artichokes must have been sub-standard because the bottoms were about as big around as quarters. Seriously. So I am completely kerflummoxed re: artichokes. How big are artichokes supposed to be in order to get an artichoke bottom that is big enough to balance the remainder of the salad on? Does it have to be as big as my head? A basketball? The moon, for heaven's sake?

The Salade Messidor was simple to prepare, artichokes notwithstanding. It also called for celery, caulifower soaked in a bit of white vinegar, some crisp-tender green beans and some peeled, seeded tomatoes. We had a smashing success with everything else, especially with skinning the tomatoes by dunking them in boiling water and then popping them into cold water.

Once the veggies were prepared, they simply had to be stirred together with some homemade mayonnaise and served, alas for the artichoke bottoms that never were!

We found that the salad needed salt a-plenty. Once seasoned, it was flavorful in an okay kind of way, but if Le Cordon Bleu thinks it has anything over my own friend-Julie's-mother-in-law-Connie's Summer Potato Salad, they've got another pensée coming, is all I've got to say.

The girls and I served the Salade Messidor with tilapia filets baked in herb butter and the Pommes Pont Neuf from the first week's lesson on page 253 of Le Cordon Bleu at Home. Pommes Pont Neuf are nothing more than homemade french fries, but with a snazzy name that translates as "New Bridge Potatoes," you feel like you're getting a little something extra, which may cause you to use an extra amount of enthusiam when coating each hand-cut piece with Heinz tomato ketchup from the huge plastic bottle someone plunked down on the dinner table. Bon appétit, mes chéries!

Next week: Les Soupes! We'll be making Billy Bi (Mussel Soup) on page page 311

Whisk Wednesdays Assignment #12, Part 2 - Béarnaise sauce

I posted on Sunday about this assignment and the dinner that was going to go along with it, but events have transpired so that there were no artichokes present at our meal. Instead, there were garlic mashed potatoes and green beans. Or haricots verts, if you are so inclined, which tend to be after reading Le Cordon Bleu at Home.

Béarnaise sauce is a variation -- or perhaps derivation would be a better term -- of the Hollandaise we made last week. It is Hollandaise with shallot, tarragon, wine, wine vinegar, peppercorns and chervil added, creating a more complex taste that compliments the taste of just about any kind of meat or fish, according to the cookbook. In looking through some of the other books in my small collection of cookbooks, I found recipes for beef, poultry and fish that called for a buttery-rich drizzling of warm béarnaise and it's just fortunate for my digestive system that I didn't try to eat the pages that depicted colored photographs.

Meelyn, Aisling and I started out by finely dicing the shallots (we used three small instead of one large) with our new 7" chef's knife. Our knife skills are....poor. Beyond poor. When we were dicing those shallots, we looked like zealous members of of some sort of amateur digit amputation association, only our knife is not all that sharp. But you have to start somewhere, and considering the fact that we trimmed the woody ends off of last week's asparagus with a utility knife that is about as useful as a piece of sharp stone from the driveway, we felt that we were moving forward in the world, even though our new knife cost under $10, which made us all kind of giggle in embarrassment, considering the awe-inspiring price of this professional set. We've been interested in knives ever since watching the contestants on Top Chef reverently placing theirs into their little canvas bundles or attachés.

Shallots diced, we measured out the tarragon, substituting one teaspoon of the dried herb for the one tablespoon of fresh called for in the recipe. It turns out that our blue-collar city isn't the best place to shop if you plan to do a little French cooking and fresh tarragon was not to be found at the two grocery stores nearest my home. (Neither was chervil, fresh or dried, so I substituted dried parsley flakes, but that comes later.)

The béarnaise recipe called for the shallots, tarragon and three ground peppercorns to be placed in a small saucepan with 1/4 cup of white wine and 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar and then cooked over a gentle flame until the liquid was gone, which I think is called a reduction, but don't quote me on that. Unless I'm right.

I didn't have any white wine vinegar (and was unmotivated to drive back to the market, since I'd just come back from that very place with the meat), so I used the red wine vinegar from last week's recipe. The wine was just a white table wine I had in the fridge.

The herbs and spices cooking on the stove smelled sooo good. The girls and my husband kept commenting on the sweetly savory aroma pouring forth from that little pan. I estimate it took about fifteen minutes for all the liquid to evaporate, with me giving it a stir every now and then. It would be very easy for this to scorch, so take care if you decide to make this yourself. I have to warn you -- this doesn't look all that yummy when the liquid is gone. It sort of looks like, well, chewing tobacco. Already chewed chewing tobacco.

I decided to follow Kayte's way of doing things over at Grandma's Kitchen Table last Wednesday and I did not clarify the butter. I melted it in the microwave in short bursts so that it wouldn't foam up and get too hot -- it needed to be room temperature before we could stir it into the egg yolk/water mixture that was coming up in a few minutes.

One thing I know from making soap for so many years is that if you're making an emulsion, all the ingredients you're combining have to be very close in temperature if you want them to stick together. This has something to do with chemistry and molecules binding together and if hash were on the menu for this week, I could try to explain all that and you'd have a serving of it. Let me just say: if you add hot butter to a just-warm mixture of egg yolks, water, herbs and spices, you're going to have problems: the mixture is going to separate into an oily mess of butter and nasty chunks of curdled egg yolk, plus all the stuff that looks like ABC* chewing tobacco....yuck.

But if you remove that little saucepan from the flame and then add the room-temp butter to it in a slooo-oow stream, you will have no problems. Add the rest of the tarragon, the chervil (or parsley, in our case) and just keep stirring. Before we knew it, we were looking at a saucepan of béarnaise! Meelyn even paid me the high compliment of saying, "Mom, that looks just like the picture in the cookbook." I was terribly thrilled. I pushed my toe against the kitchen floor, blushed, and murmured, "Ohhh, I bet you say that to all the FRENCH CHEFS IN THIS HOUSE."

(If you'd like to see what béarnaise sauce looks like, here's a fairly decent photograph -- oops, wait, I was just informed that that one looks like snot, so try this image instead -- although it doesn't look nearly as delicious as the sauce in the photograph in the Le Cordon Bleu at Home cookbook, nor even our humble efforts chez nous.)

Again, just like last Wednesday, I made a bain-marie out of my small saucepan carefully arranged inside a slightly larger saucepan that was half-filled with simmering water to keep it warm but not hot until the meat was done. I read that if the béarnaise gets too hot, it will cook the egg yolks too much and you'll have a lumpy sauce. I also took out just a brief moment to write "Buy a cheap double-boiler" on my shopping list.

My husband grilled the beef -- we ended up buying two strip steaks that were on a severe markdown, indicating that they'd been on display for a few days -- and cut them in half, along with a couple of chicken breasts that I'd marinated in a nice vinaigrette earlier. Meelyn whipped the garlic potatoes with butter, salt, ground pepper and a bit of milk; the green beans were ready for Aisling to dish up with the slotted spoon.

I asked everyone if they'd mind making the grilled meat with sauce their first bite and was extremely gratified when everyone said, "Mmmmmmm!" in unison.

"I could grow to like this Frenchy stuff," my husband said, mopping a bite of steak in a little puddle of sauce with enthusiasm.

Me, too!


NOTE: I happened to read a severe little paragraph in a different French cookbook which stated that sauces are meant to be applied with artistry, a mere tablespoon or so drizzled over the meat with a careful hand, creating a beautiful presentation as well as a beautiful taste. Me, I used a small ladle and covered our steaks and chicken with a thick blanket of béarnaise that completely obscured the meat, making a presentation that looked like oddly shaped, unidentifiable lumps under a very pretty sauce. It could have been a chunk of possum under there, for all we knew. That's how we eats our sauces here in the Hoosier state, monsewer.

* Remember that from childhood? ABC = Already Been Chewed

Gearing up for this week's Whisk Wednesday

This week, Shari, Kayte and I are working on another emulsified sauce, the famous Béarnaise. Le Cordon Bleu at Home says (on page 250) that if anything could be called a "steak sauce" in France, this would be it. Which makes me feel kind of weird about THE GREAT BIG BOTTLE OF HEINZ 57 sitting in my refrigerator. What can I say? I am a complex woman with many different layers, kind of like a great big bulb of garlic. Yeah.

I've never made Béarnaise before, but I have eaten it. This week, it's going to go on a couple of filets mignons -- our grocery budget will not allow for the six center-cut tenderloins of beef the recipe calls for, nor even four so that we'll have one each. However, I can spring for two and my husband, who is absolutely brilliant on the grill, will get a great deal of pleasure out of cooking them. He has mastered the ability to produce a delicious medium-rare steak. And considering that he usually has some el-cheapo cuts of meat to work with, I figure this will be a pleasant thing for him. We're going to eke out the rest of the meal with grilled chicken in our favorite marinade.

This is also going to give us the chance to eat artichokes in a different way than we've ever eaten them before. Previously, all artichoke eating has been confined to eating spinach-artichoke dip with celery sticks and baguette slices, which is made with marinated artichoke hearts. We all love that a lot -- the spinach and artichokes are perfect together in their spicy blend of cream cheese and grated Parmesan, with plenty of red pepper flakes and ground black pepper. I make it in a little quiche plate and it is really tasty. But now, we're stretching ourselves a little with these cooked fresh chokes and Aisling says she hopes they don't make her. Choke, of course.

Whisk Wednesdays Assignment #12, Part 1 -- Hollandaise and Sauce Moutarde

I am more of a foodie-wannabe than an actual foodie, so when I relate that the Hollandaise and Sauce Moutard the girls and I made turned out spectacularly well, picture a balloon drop and flying confettiand the sounds of a brass band playing a strapping Sousa march on the street outside our house.

This recipe, from the excellent cookbook, Le Cordon Bleu at Home (you can have a look at it and read reviews by typing the title in the Amazon.com search feature to over to the right and down a bit), was very easy to follow even for a piker like me and delicious? Oh my heavens, you cannot believe the rich, warm, buttery goodness. My two teenage daughters, Meelyn and Aisling, and I were standing around our saucepan gauging the need for more lemon juice, salt and cayenne and all of a sudden I noticed that we had achieved the required level of yumminess, yet still, there we were. Tasting.

"Stop," I said, lifting a spoon to my lips. "Stop tasting the Hollandaise, girls! How do you expect to have enough left over for our asaparagus, and some to add the Dijon to for the Sauce Moutarde?" I took another enthusiastic taste. The girls, licking their spoons, looked at me with narrowed eyes. I placed the spoon in the dishwasher and cleared my throat.

"Thank you," I said with dignity.

I felt we'd cheated a bit in the making of this sauce because we watched a DVD of Julia Child making Hollandaise just a week ago. She explained everything so clearly, telling us what to do -- and perhaps more to the point, what not to do -- that it would have been hard to mess things up.


First off, we placed the three eggs in a shallow dish of warm water so that they could come to room temperature while we were clarifying the butter. I was a little nervous about that butter, seeing as how I had never clarified it before. Eaten it, yes. Clarified, not so much. Since I wasn't sure, I did what any seasoned internet aficianado does -- I used Google.

I found that information this site and the instructions worked a treat. Before too long, I was skimming off the foam into a little bowl, pouring the clarified butter into another bowl, and then scooping the remaining milk solids into the bowl with the foam. Easy peasy, and so far, so good.

Once the butter was clarified, I showed Meelyn and Aisling how to separate the eggs so that we'd have the yolks for our Hollandaise. We popped those into a medium-sized saucepan, added the water and got to whisking.

It was nice having help for this task, because Julia made it pretty clear in that episode we watched that one does not leave the egg yolks and water there on the gas burner and go off, say, to paint one's fingernails or read the newspaper or broker peace in the middle east. Over a medium heat, we whisked away and were rewarded in less time than I imagined with a nice, thick yolky emulsion and it was time for the clarified butter.

Aisling professed herself to be tired of cooking and me giving cooking instructions in a bad French accent, so she sat down at the kitchen table with a book and put her feet on the dog, who had come out to the kitchen seeking a handout, perhaps hoping for an entire ham to fall to the floor. Meelyn stayed at the stove to whisk while I added the clarified butter. Once we had a nice, smooth thing going there in the saucepan, I added back the rest of the milk fat from the little bowl and Meelyn whisked it all smooth. As it turns out, I think this was a mistake. Fortunately, this was a happy mistake that affected neither the taste nor the texture of the sauce.

For our Hollandaise, we used about a teaspoon of lemon juice, approximately two teaspoons of sea salt, and probably an eighth of a teaspoon of cayenne. I could have used less lemon juice and been happy, but the result was, as I said, delicious.

Half the Hollandaise was reserved for the asparagus we were going to roast and the rest was going to have the Dijon mustard added to it for the Sauce Moutarde, but first we had to roast the asparagus and cook the saucisse fumée.

I know that asparagus is traditionally served steamed with Hollandaise, but I'm not fond of steamed asparagus; I don't like the texture. I am really fond of roasted asparagus, tossed with a little olive oil and salted and peppered and placed in a 450⁰ oven for fifteen mintutes. I heated the saucisses fumées on the stovetop for that same amount of time, in the pan in which we clarified the butter.

To keep the Hollandaise warm, I used yet another pan -- can you imagine the crowded interior of my dishwasher, with plates, cooking pans and utensils all jostling for space and complaining, "Move! I can't get any water on me! You're hogging all the detergent!" -- and made a little makeshift bain-marie since I don't have a double-boiler.

Asparagus done, the girls and I forked it onto our warmed plates and gave it a couple of loving dollaps of the plain Hollandaise. We then made the variation by adding a tablespoon of Dijon mustard to the remaining mother Hollandaise, which created the petite sauce moutarde. That accomplished, the sausages went to the plates and were given a friendly soupçon of Sauce Moutard. We all retired to the table with glasses of freshly brewed iced tea, et voilà! We partook of an extremely tasty lunch.

By the way, I'm just being a dork with all that saucisse fumée stuff. It's just plain old all-beef smoked sausage I bought at the deli counter, made by Eckridge, the same kind that is often cut into chunks and served with steamed and buttered cabbage or even bean soup. Confession is good for the soul.

And Hollandaise is good for the stomach!

Here are Shari's results over at Whisk: a food blog

Here are Kayte's results from Grandma's Kitchen Table

Whisk Wednesdays

Tomorrow will be my first Whisk Wednesday here at InsomniMom. The girls and I will be stirring up Sauce Hollandaise and Sauce Moutard. You might say a little prayer for us: I have recently felt very proud of myself for stirring up a homemade barbecue sauce that uses a great big ol' tacky bottle of chili sauce as a base, so I am quite possibly out of my league here.

And as I told Shari, the writer of Whisk: a food blog, I do occasionally make casseroles featuring cream of mushroom soup.

I am not a foodie. I just like to eat. And my normal level of cooking is way, way below Kayte's skill. Kayte is a gourmet cook -- I can tell because of the casual remarks she tosses off, as if making a soufflé is something most people do on a daily basis. Now, I'm not a total idiot. I don't, for instance, pronounce the word soufflé as "soofley" or anything, but I have never made one. I am good at making frozen chicken pot pies, forty minutes from oven to table. (Just kidding, Kayte.)

But anyway, it's important to keep learning and adding all kinds of knowledge to the insides of our heads and we all have to eat, right? So Meelyn, Aisling and I are going to use this opportunity Shari has offered through Whisk to learn about good food and how to make good food. She doesn't need to do a single thing toward helping us enjoy good food. We've got that covered.

I can't post pictures of our weekly ventures yet, but I will write about our results every week.