After the salad nicoise and the strawberry bavarian cream, I thought you might like to have a food dictionary. Be prepared. Look up those obscure terms your foodie friends are tossing about. Be informed. Find recipes.
http://www.epicurious.com/tools/fooddictionary/
So far, however, I have not been able to find an orange Bavarian cream recipe which pleases me. Will dig through old cookbooks. Nothing like having a mission.
Grapeshot
Showing posts with label salad Nicoise. Show all posts
Showing posts with label salad Nicoise. Show all posts
Monday, June 16, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Salade Niçoise
We had company this weekend and due to working around a theater curtain time, etc., I decided to make a Salade niçoise, I chose the salad in Julia Child's The Way to Cook as my recipe.
Now we all know that Julia is not the short-cut queen, no recipes in 30 minutes from the French Chef, so I was prepared for a bit of work. My only "shortcut" if indeed it was, was to cook the small Yukon Gold potatoes whole and peel them. I also omitted anchovies since I don't like anchovies and when you are the cook you can do what you damn well please.
O.K. second substitution was to buy three small beautiful tuna steaks and grill them. I made Julia's potato salad, cooked the beans, S.O. grilled the tuna, and I boiled some eggs, and pounced upon a beautiful red tomato, capers, black olives, lettuce, the works all laid out beautifully on a big ceramic platter.
The dressing was a lemon-garlic affair, with both lemon peel and lemon juice and raw garlic pounded to a paste. A bit of work but well worth it. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts and we had a feast.
At the other end of the spectrum was dessert. I know our friend likes strawberries, so a strawberry dessert seemed optimal. I recalled back in the first years of marriage I had been on a Bavarian cream kick, making various flavors of a French dessert called Bavarian cream.
I looked in the old New York Times cookbook and lo, there is was, but it was the shortcut version--Julia would have disapproved big time. I measured out all the ingredients including a heaping cup of chipped ice and dumped them into the blender in the prescribed order, and blended the prescibed number of second, and lo, strawberry Bavarian cream in less than a minute, no cooking. Raw eggs, too. My bad. I licked the spoon to test whether the eggs were safe and I guess they were.
We ate it with sliced strawberries from Wards Berry Farm, altogether lucious with no hard white centers, but red berry all the way through.
So this was yin and yang of meals, but lovely.
As for lovely, the garden looks and smells lovely. The white carnations bloomed and have sent a fragrance over the yard and now into the house as I picked a few and added the sage blossoms, favored by the bumble bees.
The tomatoes, heirloom beets, pepper and herbs are growing apace, and the flowers are blooming, even the new white lupine, and the clematis has huge purple blossoms. The hummingbirds come to the feeder regularly and one looked at us in the window this morning. We had a fantastically large butterfly, all yellow and black, and of course the dragon flies swoop and land on the flowers. So life is good on the edge of the slough.
Big goldfinch battle yesterday. They are territorial little guys. Catbirds have discovered how to get into the suet feeder for small birds.
We had a good rain this morning and everything is lush. Looking at the garden puts me into a good mood, which is a good thing, because Festival Madness has two more rejections. We looked at the beginning again, and it read pretty good.
The New York Times Book Review today had many of the same books as the WSJ. Not my cuppa tea. The Globe's list is more literate, but Boston readers are obviously not typical.
Tonight I'll do a few more pages of the new book. I really need a working title.
Grapeshot
Now we all know that Julia is not the short-cut queen, no recipes in 30 minutes from the French Chef, so I was prepared for a bit of work. My only "shortcut" if indeed it was, was to cook the small Yukon Gold potatoes whole and peel them. I also omitted anchovies since I don't like anchovies and when you are the cook you can do what you damn well please.
O.K. second substitution was to buy three small beautiful tuna steaks and grill them. I made Julia's potato salad, cooked the beans, S.O. grilled the tuna, and I boiled some eggs, and pounced upon a beautiful red tomato, capers, black olives, lettuce, the works all laid out beautifully on a big ceramic platter.
The dressing was a lemon-garlic affair, with both lemon peel and lemon juice and raw garlic pounded to a paste. A bit of work but well worth it. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts and we had a feast.
At the other end of the spectrum was dessert. I know our friend likes strawberries, so a strawberry dessert seemed optimal. I recalled back in the first years of marriage I had been on a Bavarian cream kick, making various flavors of a French dessert called Bavarian cream.
I looked in the old New York Times cookbook and lo, there is was, but it was the shortcut version--Julia would have disapproved big time. I measured out all the ingredients including a heaping cup of chipped ice and dumped them into the blender in the prescribed order, and blended the prescibed number of second, and lo, strawberry Bavarian cream in less than a minute, no cooking. Raw eggs, too. My bad. I licked the spoon to test whether the eggs were safe and I guess they were.
We ate it with sliced strawberries from Wards Berry Farm, altogether lucious with no hard white centers, but red berry all the way through.
So this was yin and yang of meals, but lovely.
As for lovely, the garden looks and smells lovely. The white carnations bloomed and have sent a fragrance over the yard and now into the house as I picked a few and added the sage blossoms, favored by the bumble bees.
The tomatoes, heirloom beets, pepper and herbs are growing apace, and the flowers are blooming, even the new white lupine, and the clematis has huge purple blossoms. The hummingbirds come to the feeder regularly and one looked at us in the window this morning. We had a fantastically large butterfly, all yellow and black, and of course the dragon flies swoop and land on the flowers. So life is good on the edge of the slough.
Big goldfinch battle yesterday. They are territorial little guys. Catbirds have discovered how to get into the suet feeder for small birds.
We had a good rain this morning and everything is lush. Looking at the garden puts me into a good mood, which is a good thing, because Festival Madness has two more rejections. We looked at the beginning again, and it read pretty good.
The New York Times Book Review today had many of the same books as the WSJ. Not my cuppa tea. The Globe's list is more literate, but Boston readers are obviously not typical.
Tonight I'll do a few more pages of the new book. I really need a working title.
Grapeshot
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
New Novel
The photo is the Sharon Police Department where my character, Maxine, will report the crime, although the crime (fictional, of course) will be committed in another town.
Into Boston on the commuter train today for lunch. Left my current book, Chris Roerden's Don't Sabotage Your Submissions in the car. On the train, I wrote a paragraph of my new novel, some notes for what to ask the cops, etc., and made a haircut appt. instead of reading. Remembered two things I had forgotten to put on my "to do" list. I live and die by my lists. If something doesn't make the list, chances are it never gets done.
The way to make winter fly by it to make a big list of all the INDOOR tasks you want to accomplish. Before you know it, spring is here. And the list is still long.
So this novel just keeps talking to me. I don't know where it came from. It doesn't even have a "working title." I had given up on crime fiction. I've read ten books doing research for the California book which was supposed to be next. Can I write two an once?
Ha ha.
Tonight we ventured forth to take a few surrepticious photos of the murder house, which is a house I used to drive by on my way to work. The book is set here in the Boston area, in Boca Raton and in Northern Nevada, all places I'm familiar with, so the research shouldn't be too onerous. But it always is. And fun, too.
We are the last of the ribs with ancho-apricot glaze tonight. Ye gods, they were heaven. I'm making a salad nicoise this weekend. From scratch. Including the tuna. Assuming I can find fresh.
So now to totter upstairs and see how the Red Sox are doing. I have been watching a lot of games and am starting to bond with the team big time. How does this happen?
Grapeshot
The way to make winter fly by it to make a big list of all the INDOOR tasks you want to accomplish. Before you know it, spring is here. And the list is still long.
So this novel just keeps talking to me. I don't know where it came from. It doesn't even have a "working title." I had given up on crime fiction. I've read ten books doing research for the California book which was supposed to be next. Can I write two an once?
Ha ha.
Tonight we ventured forth to take a few surrepticious photos of the murder house, which is a house I used to drive by on my way to work. The book is set here in the Boston area, in Boca Raton and in Northern Nevada, all places I'm familiar with, so the research shouldn't be too onerous. But it always is. And fun, too.
We are the last of the ribs with ancho-apricot glaze tonight. Ye gods, they were heaven. I'm making a salad nicoise this weekend. From scratch. Including the tuna. Assuming I can find fresh.
So now to totter upstairs and see how the Red Sox are doing. I have been watching a lot of games and am starting to bond with the team big time. How does this happen?
Grapeshot
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