Poulet Saute aux Herbes de Provence (Julia Child's Chicken Sauteed with Herbs and Garlic, Egg Yolk and Butter Sauce)

Tonight's dinner party was a success! We had so much delicious food, and everyone left with happy bellies and faces despite the horrid heat wave.

Dinner Party Menu:

-Creamy Carrot and Sage Soup with Cinnamon Croutons

-Tossed Salad with Mushrooms, Cucumber, Tomato, Red Onion, and Parmesan Crisps

-Julia Child's Poulet Saute aux Herbes de Provence (Chicken Sauteed with Herbs and Garlic, Egg Yolk and Butter Sauce)

-Bananas Three Ways: Rosemary and Whiskey Bananas with Vanilla Ice Cream, Bananas and Sour Cream, Toasted Coconut Banana Muffins


Creamy Carrot and Sage Soup with Cinnamon Croutons

See "A Sneak Peak" post for the ingredients. I garnished this with some sour cream and bacon (not shown). This is such a delicious and satisfying soup, and the cinnamon croutons make it even more outstanding.



Parmesan Crisps with Herbes de Provence

Ron and Fran made these crisps, and they were sooooo good!



Tossed Salad with Mushrooms, Cucumber, Tomato, Red Onion

Ron and Fran brought this salad. It was the perfect refreshing accompaniment to the chicken.



Julia Child's Poulet Saute aux Herbes de Provence (Chicken Sauteed with Herbs and Garlic, Egg Yolk and Butter Sauce)

Wow. Sure, Julia Child's dishes take a long time to make, but the effort is so worth it. This chicken was so juicy and tender, and the hollandaise sauce that accompanied it was full of flavor. Brad insisted that we must make this dish again. And again. The sauce is a variation on the standard hollandaise sauce because it uses the pan butter drippings and white wine instead of just plain butter.



Rosemary and Whiskey Bananas with Vanilla Ice Cream

I got this recipe from Eric Ripert's blog, and it is so delicious (and unusual!). I omitted the pepper, but everything else was the same. You make the dish in the toaster--how easy is that? (Eric Ripert actually has a whole bunch of dishes on his blog that you make in the toaster oven. )

The man is a culinary genius, and this is just one of his interesting and delicious creations. I highly recommend trying it yourself.

http://aveceric.com/category/recipes



Desert was really 3 banana deserts in one (hence the name "Banana Three Ways"). I also served my sour cream and banana dish (see "$50 a week challenge" post) and toasted coconut banana muffins. I was surprised that the coconut banana muffins actually came out tasting great after a toasting and a dab of butter! We gave some to Ron and Fran to take home, but made them promise to toast them with butter before eating them.

Mayonnaise, Take 2

TARRAGON DEVILED EGGS AND BACON ON TOAST : TAKE TWO

I am not one to take defeat lightly, so after my mayonnaise failure yesterday, I was determined to master mayonnaise today. I made sure to add enough olive oil, and sure enough, it got thicker and thicker!



Once it was thick enough, I added chopped tarragon. This really makes the dish.



Next, add the chopped hard boiled eggs



Place on toast. Garnish with tarragon. I discovered that it is much better to chop the bacon into small pieces instead of leaving it as strips. It's just too clumsy to eat when the bacon isn't chopped up.

The finished dish!

The $50 a Week Challenge

You know how Rachel Ray has her show "$40 a Day" in which she tries to eat all her meals in various cities for "just $40 a day"? Well, I always thought to myself, "Big deal--$40 a day is a lot of money for just one day. She should try $20 a day. Or even $10 a day.." (Can you imagine that show? Hello McDonalds!)

Inspired by Rachel Ray, I originally wanted to challenge myself to cook every meal for just $40 a week. Then I realized that no matter how I stretch my dollars, that just isn't going to happen. I'd rather not sacrifice quality to save a few extra bucks, so I settled on the more reasonable goal of $50 a week.

Friday is my grocery shopping day, and since I've been cooking a lot (all 2 weeks worth :P), it's been sort of crazy. I go to at least 3 places to get all my groceries: Whole Foods for meats (organic when possible), Ralphs for veggies and fruits, and Trader Joes for the rest (butter, eggs, cream, etc--I prefer organic dairy, and TJ's has it cheaper than Whole Foods does). When I can, I also go to farmers markets and the Santa Monica Coop.

Today I bought $110 worth of groceries for both Brad and I. That's $55 each--not bad, but I didn't reach my goal of $50.. :( Maybe next week!

Today I came up with this simple but amazing desert:

BANANAS AND SOUR CREAM WITH CINNAMON



I remember seeing some recipes for sour cream banana cake and pancakes, and thought, "Why not just cut out the extra flour and sugar?" The resulting recipe is healthier, but still satisfies your sweet tooth.

Ingredients:
1 banana
A dollop of sour cream
a pinch of sea salt
cinnamon
stevia to taste

Slice the banana into coins, put a dollop of sour cream on top, a pinch of sea salt, cinnamon, and then finally sprinkle with a very light dusting of stevia. It is so good!

A close up of my second helping:



DEVILED EGGS AND BACON ON TOAST



I wanted so much to make mayonnaise by hand as Julia Child instructs in her cookbook, so I decided to make deviled eggs for lunch today. I'd made mayo before from scratch in the food processor; it was a piece of cake. However, Ms. Child said that one should really know how to do it by hand in order to gain a good understanding of the egg.

So to become "one with the egg", I whipped, and whipped, and drizzled oil, and more oil... I guess I stopped before adding enough oil, because the mixture never really gelled like it did in the processor. Oh well. I still made the deviled eggs with my runny mayo, and it was fine. File this mayo under "works in progress".

Ingredients:

2 hard boiled eggs
Handmade mayo made from 2 egg yolks, olive oil, mustard, pepper, salt, hot sauce
1 Niiman ranch bacon strip
1 slice toasted Ezekiel bread

The hard boiled eggs


The mayo "work in progress"...


LEAF'S SIDE SALAD

I did eat out once this week, at a raw restaurant called "Leaf". I got their side salad, which turned out to be quite large. It was surprisingly tasty--much better than their collard wraps. There are some crispy nuggets of raw nuttiness under all that yellow sauce.



LEFTOVERS FOR LUNCH

Yesterday's lunch: leftover boeuf bourguignon with added cauliflower and watercress. Oh, this dish just gets better and better the longer you wait!

A Flurry of Dishes

Days off tend to make me lethargic, but today was an exception. Chalk it up to the culinary wave I've been riding, perhaps. Instead of dilly dallying, I woke up, vacuumed the house (twice in one week??), furminated my bunny (i.e. brushed her to take out all the fur she's been shedding), went grocery shopping for stevia, and then made a whole flurry of dishes.

There were hits, there were misses, and there were what I like to call "works in progress".

Let's start with the hits...

CREAM OF CAULIFLOWER SOUP

I tweaked this recipe just a bit by using fresh ginger instead of powdered, a red onion instead of 2 leeks, no celery, both homemade beef and chicken stock (instead of just chicken stock), and a touch of sour cream and coconut milk to thin the soup out instead of half and half. I love this soup! It's creamy, but not heavy. It's also low on the glycemic index, unlike the carrot and sweet potato soups I've been making. Just one cauliflower yields a lot of soup. I also roasted some cauliflower florets in the oven to add to the soup as a garnish in the end.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Cream-of-Cauliflower-Soup-350616



Before putting it in the blender..


PLUM RASPBERRY AND RED WINE COMPOTE

I had some leftover red wine from last night's beef stew, so I found this recipe on epicurious. I prepared it the night ahead, and it was just delicious the next day for dessert. Brad put it over vanilla ice cream while I was happy just eating it plain. For this dessert, it is important to give it time for the flavors to meld; I had a taste yesterday, and it was definitely not as good as it was today.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Plum-Raspberry-and-Red-Wine-Compote-5629

after 24 hours of marinating in the red wine syrup reduction


Brad's half eaten ice cream with fruit


The red wine syrup..


RED WINE BARBECUE SAUCE

Brad requested burgers for dinner, so I made hamburger with a red wine BBQ sauce (yes, I was trying to find a way to get rid of the extra red wine from last night!). It turned out great, and was so easy to make.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Red-Wine-Barbecue-Sauce-109711



Now let's move on to the "works in progress"...

FRIED POLENTA

I had a bunch of leftover polenta from last night, so I wanted to make broiled polenta for lunch. I cut some of the leftovers into slices, coated them with some olive oil, and put it under the broiler and waited.... And waited.... There was no browning whatsover. I took it out, put it in the toaster oven and tried broiling it again. And again, nothing.

Finally, I decided to eat my failed broiling experiment and try frying instead. I heated the oil till it started smoking, dried off one piece of polenta with a paper towel, and then put it in the olive oil. After 4 minutes on each side, I was left with a golden piece of fried goodness. It was heaven. Too bad I only made one piece :P

I tried making this again for Brad for dinner, but it just didn't crisp up like it did earlier. This is definitely a work in progress.

My one perfect piece of fried polenta:


My lunch today: fried polenta with leftover boeuf bourguignon



HAMBURGER WITH AVOCADO, SOUR CREAM, FRIED POLENTA AND RED WINE BBQ SAUCE

This was a "leftovers" meal. The BBQ sauce was the best part!



Finally, we've come to the "disasters" section. There was only one disaster today...

DOUBLE FUDGE BROWNIE (with Stevia)

I have never cooked with Stevia, but I figured I should start because sugar is not good for me and I don't want to get diabetes. I searched online for stevia recipes and found this one. I made some substitutions (butter instead of margarine, half and half instead of skim milk, 1/2 gluten free baking mix and 1/2 regular flour, and pure stevia extract instead of the stevia blend. I guess all of these substitutions was my first mistake. My second mistake was that I didn't measure out the stevia, but added it in little scoops to taste. The problem was, I ended up making it way too sweet! I tried to remedy this by adding more chocolate/butter/half and half. The result was just a mess. It stuck to the cupcake mold, was too moist inside, and was not sweet enough in the end.

On the bright side, I whipped my first egg whites by hand into peaks! Brad helped---it sure takes a lot of beating to make those peaks :P

http://www.cookingwithstevia.com/web/desserts07.shtml

The brownie tops (the rest stuck to the pan)



Coming out of the oven



The mess...



(The disaster didn't stop us from polishing off the whole plate of brownie tops tonight, though.)

Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon

Today I attempted to cook a dish I can't pronounce. In fact, it's a dish with a name I can't even spell--I need to google it just to make sure I'm spelling it right each time!

I finally bought Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". It's $40, and I was lucky to find it at a Border's in the Valley--it's been sold out everywhere else! Of course, the famous recipe from the movie Julie and Julia is Boeuf Bourguignon, so I couldn't wait to make this recipe. I bought all the ingredients except the bacon rind (they didn't have it where I went). I served it with creamy polenta, made from white organic cornmeal that Brad's mom gave us. The polenta was amazing--I cooked it slowly for an hour on the stove with this recipe:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Buttered-Polenta-233990

The Boeuf Bourguignon was tasty, but I think I seared the meat a little too long because it was not as soft as I expected it to be. The sauce was also very thin, so I had to thicken it with some arrowroot (trying to boil it down didn't do much). I had a lot of leftovers, so I'm looking forward to having this tomorrow because the flavors will only get better.

Boeuf Bourguignon recipe: http://www.recipezaar.com/Boeuf-Bourguignon-a-La-Julia-Child-148007


The meat after browning, before going into the oven with stock and wine.



The slow cooked grits



The sauce, thickened with arrowroot



The finished dish..

Bonjour!

After reading Julia Child's autobiography "My Life in France," I got so inspired to cook French food--heck, any food. I went crazy and bought a casserole dish, stainless steel bowl, and a whole bunch of groceries. Last week, I was able to cook for both Brad and I for only $40 each. We did not eat out once (ok, maybe just once for lunch). I was amazed that we were able to find such good quality ingredients (a lot of it organic and/or from farmer's market) for a good price.

This week, it cost a little more, but this also counted essential pantry items that we were in desperate need of and that will last a long time (e.g. spices, butter, and grains). We also spent a little bit on kitchen utensils (that casserole dish, stainless steel bowl, etc). Opening my fridge and seeing all of the great ingredients I bought this week makes me so happy. Cooking for my guy and seeing how much he enjoys my cooking experiments (even if they flop: see "Raspberry Clafouti" below), also makes me really happy.

Today I made an amazing recipe from Hubert Keller's appearance on Top Chef Masters. It was one of the most delicious things I've ever made.

On the menu for later this week are Figgy Piggy Cornish Game Hen (from this month's Gourmet) and Julia Child's famous Boeuf Bourguignon. I cannot wait!

Below are some of the "Hits" of the past week

CORN CAKES WITH SALMON AND SALMON ROE

This is a Top Chef Masters recipe by Chef Hubert Keller. It is AMAZING. Probably the most gourmet thing I have made so far. It's so easy to make because there's a video on the Top Chef Masters website on how to prepare the dish from start to finish. I used fresh organic white corn, not canned corn like the video suggests. I think it makes all the difference.

Recipe:
http://www.bravotv.com/foodies/recipes/thinly-sliced-salmon-baked-in-tender-corn-pancakes-with-watercress-sauce

Video:
http://www.bravotv.com/top-chef-masters/videos/hubert-kellers-scottish-salmon

Corn Pancake Batter
3 to 4 ears fresh young corn, husked
3 eggs
2 tablespoons flour
Salt and pepper to taste
Salmon
8 ounce salmon fillet
4 tablespoons Caviar, such as whitefish, salmon, or sturgeon
Salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon virgin olive oil

Watercress Sauce (Optional--I didn't use this)
1 small bunch watercress, stemmed
1 teaspoon virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon minced shallot
2 tablespoons dry white wine
1 tablespoon cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Garnish
30 blanched asparagus tips, about 3 inches long, fanned
30 1/2- inch-wide slices tomato, fanned
1 teaspoonmixed black and white sesame seeds
1 tablespoon sour cream
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tablespoon minced fresh chives

My plate:

Brad's plate:



A NOT QUITE PERFECT RASPBERRY CLAFOUTI

This was my first attempt at clafouti, and I made two mistakes: too much batter in the ramekin and too much whisking of the flour mixture. The taste was great, but it was rubbery and took way too long to cook (I poured out a lot of the batter).

http://aveceric.com/category/recipes

1 tablespoon butter
¼ cup sugar + more for ramekin
1 large egg
6 tablespoons half and half
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 cup fresh raspberries
Vanilla ice cream (optional)





FRUIT SMOOTHIE

Brad has been making fruit smoothies every day for breakfast. It's just fruit (bananas, peaches and berries are his faves right now) and a couple of cubes of ice. I also add coconut milk. We calculated that each smoothie costs us just mere cents.


EGG ON EGG ON EGG

I made this dish up. It's asparagus with egg (a poached egg would be nice, but the ones in this picture are scrambled) topped with a mustard hollandaise sauce (I make this from scratch, hence the second "egg" in the title of this dish) and topped with salmon roe (hence the third "egg" in the title)

-asparagus on bottom
-sunny side up/poached/scrambled eggs on top
-mustard hollandaise on top of that
-salmon roe on top of everything



ROASTED CAULIFLOWER

This is so good by itself, or with hollandaise sauce.
-cauliflower (450 degrees for 25 minutes in lower 1/3 rack)
-olive oil
-pepper, salt



SAGE SWEET POTATO SOUP

This is something I just whipped together. The sage in this soup makes it special. I didn't really go by a recipe, but here's the ingredients:

-homemade chicken stock
-yam (450 degrees for 25 minutes in lower 1/3 rack with olive oil, pepper and chopped fresh sage)
-butter
-water



THAI CURRY WITH FRIED STICKY RICE

This is also something I just whipped together. I didn't go by a recipe, but here are the ingredients:

THAI CURRY
-thai chili paste
-coconut milk
-curry powder
-tamarind paste
-cumin powder
-honey/sugar
-ginger
-garlic
-veggies and meat of your choice

FRIED RICE

-day old rice
-onion
-carrots
-sesame oil
-soy sauce
-water chestnuts
-garlic
-ginger



CHICKEN WITH MUSTARD VINAIGRETTE
The chicken is from the farmer's market, which makes all the difference. We cannot get enough of this chicken.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Roast-Chicken-with-Mustard-Vinaigrette-1800

1 6- to 7-pound roasting chicken
1 large shallot
2 fresh rosemary sprigs
2 fresh sage sprigs
1 cup Mustard Vinaigrette
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage


PAN DRIPPINGS HOLLANDAISE SAUCE

Serve this sauce with the chicken!

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Poulet-Saute-aux-Herbes-de-Provence-354343

2 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon dry white wine or dry white vermouth
2 to 3 tablespoons butter, cut into 1-inch cubes (optional)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil, fresh fennel fronds, or fresh parsley (optional)