Bonne Année !

All the best for a great 2007 ! Here's a shot of the inside of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. I thought the clock would serve as a good icon for the passage of time. Besides, I don't have any festive new year's photos since I'm usually asleep when midnight comes.

This is a pretty old photograph. It's a color slide that I took way back in 1992, the first and only time that I visited the museum (it's probably time for another visit, no?). I just scanned it for posting on the web.

I'm going to try this winter to spend cold damp days inside scanning more of my old slides of France for the blog. Since my slide projector is en panne (broken), I haven't seen many of these photos in years, and sorting through them and scanning some will be a great way to get reacquainted with them.

Happy Happy !

Just a couple photos of the Christmas Day fun on this New Year's Eve.

Our friend Sue in California sent this cool little dish to us this year. I'm not sure yet, but I think she probably picked it up here in France last spring when she was visiting. She's like that... It works great as a little serving dish !

Down below is the gang around the table. Janet and David brought traditional English crackers that bang when you pull them apart. Inside were these paper hats, little gifts, and little sayings resembling fortunes inside Chinese fortune cookies. This was taken just as we sat down to our dinner of turkey, stuffing, brussels sprouts, and squash purée.

Left to right: Harriet, Alfred, Ken, Janet, David.

Sorry the photo is a bit blurry, but I didn't use a flash and I had been sipping wine in advance of dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This evening we're off to see French friends Brassia and Gilles and some others that they've invited for the new year réveillon. They live about 40 minutes from us. Temperatures are predicted to be above 50ºF, so we don't have to worry about icy roads or snow on the way home, and that's a good thing. Oysters and duck are among the items on the menu.

Bonne Année ! See you next year !

Bûche De Noël

Once again this year I attempted a traditional French holiday dessert : une bûche. It's a yule log cake that gets its name from the log that people put on the fire just before going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve.

This is the third year that I've made one, but this year my chocolate frosting didn't work as well as the last two years. It might have been that I put too much kirsch in, resulting in a frosting that wouldn't thicken properly. Oh well, it still tasted good !

The jelly roll cake, fresh out of the oven. It will flatten out a bit as it cools. I think I need to reduce the number of eggs from eight to six.

The first step is to make the jelly roll cake. This is a light cake made with eight eggs. I know that sounds a bit contradictory, but the eggs are separated and the whites are beaten until they're fluffy and the yolks and flour get folded in, so there's a lot of air in the cake.

Chocolate pastry cream is spread on top of the cake just before it gets rolled up.

For the filling, I made a chocolate pastry cream (more egg yolks). Then the cooled cream is spread over the cooled cake and the whole thing is rolled into a log shape.

The rolled-up log.

Next, I cut the ends off diagonally and stuck them onto the log to simulate branch stubs. This year I made them too big. Then the whole thing gets frosted.

Above, the ends of the cake are stuck onto the log to simulate stumps. Below, chocolate and cream are ready to be made into a ganache for frosting the cake.

You can make meringue mushrooms or candied leaves to decorate with, but with everything else we were doing that day, I just sprinkled the log with powdered sugar to simulate snow. Like I said before, it all tasted great even if it didn't look to professional...

The frosted and dusted cake.

So, I'm thinking that if I do this again next year, I may use lemon curd for the filling and try a different frosting. And I also think I need to make a smaller, flatter cake, so I'll experiment with six eggs rather than eight and reduce the flour and sugar accordingly.

Amuse-Bouches

For little appetizers on Christmas Day, I made these little roll-ups that I saw someone make on Cuisine TV. I thought they looked good and that they would taste just as nice.

The first ones are made with cream cheese, smoked salmon, and cucumber. The second with pâté de foie de canard (duck liver pâté) and cornichons (gherkins).

Smoked salmon and cucumber roll-ups sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

First, you take a slice of whole wheat sandwich bread and cut off the crusts. Then you flatten the bread with a rolling pin. Spread cream cheese on the bread, add a layer of smoked salmon, and a stick of cucumber (the cuke is peeled, seeded, then cut into sticks the length of the bread slice).

The whole thing is then rolled up like a sushi roll - in fact, I used a sushi mat to do the rolling. A little cream cheese seals the seam, which is then covered with toasted sesame seeds to hide it. Each roll is cut into four pieces and stood on end. I also sprinkled some toasted sesame seeds on top for decoration.

A close-up of the pâté and pickle roll-ups.

The pâté roll-ups are done the same way, only I used butter to seal the seam and pressed them into paprika to hide it.

A tray of pâté and pickle roll-ups with paprika.

They tasted great, even though they didn't look as pretty as I wanted them to. I just need practice. In fact, I'm making them again for apéritifs this evening at the home of our British friends, Janet and David.

Don't Even Think About It !

Above, a warning sign at Fort Macon on Atlantic Beach, NC. Below, a shopkeeper's warning in Beaufort, NC.

Word Of The Week

riper

While watching Fiches Cuisine on Cuisine TV the other day, the host, Carinne, slid her creation from the oven tray to a platter by grabbing hold of the parchment paper on which the dish had baked and pulling it quickly to the platter. I believe she was making something with foie gras, in which she had built up layers of foie gras and other ingredients inside a mold, then baked it for a while. Once moved to the serving platter, she slid the paper out from underneath, then slipped the mold off the completed dish.

As she slid the foie gras tower from baking tray to platter, she said, "Je ripe le tout de la plaque vers l'assiette." She used today's word, the verb riper, which means to slide or slip something from one place to another, as in slipping cookies off a cookie sheet onto a platter.

Kitchen Collection [3]

I first saw a salad spinner in France, back in 1981. I think I laughed. What a contraption ! Why would anyone buy some thing that does that ? I mean, what's wrong with rinsing lettuce in a colander and letting it drip dry ? Well, it never does dry that way, and that's what's wrong.

Unwashed lettuce can be full of sand and the occasional bug, so it must be washed. Excess, or even any, water in a salad dilutes the dressing and makes the salad, well, soggy and unappealing. Crisp, dry lettuce is what you want. The spinner works almost like the spin cycle on your washing machine. The inner basket of the spinner rotates at high speed forcing the water outside against the wall of the bowl where it then falls to the bottom, below the basket. Et voilà, dry lettuce !

By the way, in France, lettuce is commonly called salade. The word laitue exists, and according to the Petit Robert it does mean the leafy stuff we call lettuce, but most people (and markets) use laitue to refer to what Americans call Boston lettuce. Salade includes chicories, lettuces, and other leafy plants. Common varieties of salade in France are batavia (rouge ou verte), feuille de chêne, scarole, endive, roquette, cresson, mâche, romaine, and frisée. Iceberg lettuce is rare here, but you do see it around.

A salade is typically served by itself, with vinaigrette. Once you add anything to salade it becomes a salade composée (salade niçoise and salade grecque are good examples). There are special salads that you will almost always find in cafés and restaurants like frisée aux lardons or scarole aux betteraves or endives aux noix.

It gets even more complex, because une salade is not just lettuce, but can also be the name for a great variety of other dishes that are served cooked or not, than can include meats and seafood, and that are dressed in a sauce. These dishes are said to be mangés en salade, or eaten as a salad. But that will be a discussion for another time. Let's just stick to the leafy stuff for now.

You can crisp up a tired salad by letting the leaves soak in a basin of water for 20 minutes or so before spinning them dry, provided they are freshly separated from the head. And that's a good tip : never take all the leaves off a head of salad unless you plan to use them all. Work from the outside in, breaking off each leaf, and leaving the rest attached. Put the unused portion of the head in a plastic bag back in the fridge, and your salad stays fresher longer (this doesn't really work for iceberg lettuce, however).

When a salad spinner is unavailable, Ken will always put washed salad in a clean kitchen towel, gather up the corners, then go outside or into the shower and swing it around to dry it. This works great provided you hang onto that towel. I have seen salad leaves flying through the air; not a pretty sight.

We've had many spinners over the years. Our current one, an OXO, is great and I think it's lasted longer than any of the others. There is no cord to get tangled or to unwind. The mechanics of the OXO spinner are pretty simple and it works. And it even has a handy brake to slow and stop the spinning basket. Pretty cool.

You can also use the spinner to dry freshly washed herbs. The bowl of the spinner doubles as a wash basin.

No kitchen should be without one.