It was French night at Supper Club.

We started off with two different French aperitifs: Lillet Blanc and Pastis. There were salmon rillettes made by Linda, topped with pink peppercorns and served with cornichons and caperberries. Georgiann’s herbed goat cheese tart was a great success, made with Gothberg Farms chevre. If there hadn’t been so much good food to come I could have happily made a meal out of just these two dishes.

Our first sit-down course was made by Jenise: a delicate vegetable terrine and a small pastry that turned out to contain a mushroom stuffed with foie gras. Good lord.

While the foie gras pastry was rich, salty and knock-your-socks-off good, the terrine was beautifully subtle as well as gorgeous to look at. One layer had pureed watercress, and another had mushroom duxelles to connect it to the pastries. Carrots and snap peas adorned the center. It was served on a light salad with a shallot dressing, I think.

The next course, made by Roger while we ate our terrine, was crevettes a la provencale: prawns on a bed of tomatoes and olives. A nice change of flavor from the first course, bold and rustic, it went well with the French red country wines that had been opened and led us into the main course.

This was chicken ballotine, roasted beets, and petatou. Linda and Mike made the ballotine, boning out two whole chickens and stuffing them with bacon, spinach, croutons and gruyere, then tying and roasting them. A real showpiece of a dish, it was fun to look at as well as eat. Georgiann did the beets, which were tossed with champagne-raspberry vinegar and orange juice. And Jon made the petatou, which was a major production but well worth it.

We found the petatou recipe in Tony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook (a hilarious read as well as a great reference for classic bistro cooking) . Essentially a potato and olive salad topped with goat cheese and broiled, it made a fabulous side dish with the chicken. It was enriched with reduced cream and egg yolk, which helped bind the potatoes together for molding, but I can see that it would be wonderful simply made up to the point of adding the cream and served as a cold salad instead of the broiled timbales. This was one of the most delicious things we’ve ever done with potatoes – I’ve copied out the recipe below if you’d like to try it yourself.

Linda also made some carrots with olives, from a Jacques Pepin recipe. Like everything else on the table, it was beautiful.

Finally, everyone found room for a slice of my tarte tatin, which we washed down with pineau de charentes and coffee. Apparently I ate my slice without even considering taking a picture, but I did do a post on it a while back. This version was made with an extra-short buttery pie crust and Jonagold apples. There were no leftovers.

Petatou

From the Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain. The recipe claims it makes four servings, but we doubled it and (using a 2″ biscuit cutter) got close to 15 servings. Depends on what you’re using for a mold and how tall you make them, I suppose. Leftovers are delightful.

• 2 pounds red potatoes
• 1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves
• 1/2 pound nicoise olives, drained, pitted and chopped
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
• salt and pepper
• 1 cup cream
• 1 egg yolk
• 4 oz fresh goat cheese (chevre)

Cut the potatoes in half, place in a pot and cover with water. Add 2 Tbsp of salt and bring to a boil. Cook the potatoes until tender (about 20 min), drain and cool. Remove the skins and dice the potatoes, putting them into a large bowl. Add the olives, thyme, olive oil, and the vinegar. Add salt and pepper to taste and toss gently.

Put the cream in a small pan and bring to a boil – watch out, it boils over fast! Reduce it by half, stirring to prevent scorching. In another bowl, lightly beat the egg yolk. When the cream is ready, beat it into the egg, whisking constantly. Add all but 4 Tbsp of this mixture to the potatoes.

Preheat the broiler. Using a biscuit cutter or other ring mold, form the potato mixture into cylinders and arrange them on a baking sheet. Cut the goat cheese into circles and lay a piece on each potato tower. Drizzle the remaining cream mixture over the top, and broil until golden brown. Serve with parsley oil (below).

Parsley oil (for garnish)

• 2 Tbsp parsley leaves
• 2 Tbsp olive oil

Chop the parsley quite fine, and put it in a bowl or jar with the olive oil. Stir or shake well. Spoon around or over the finished petatous before serving.

What are the holidays for if not to take on elaborate cooking projects that involve plenty of butter? Exactly. This week I decided to try out a gnocchi recipe from Bouchon, Thomas Keller’s tome on bistro cooking. Instead of the more typical potato or ricotta gnocchi, this is a Parisian dumpling made from pâte à choux, the same dough that makes gougères and cream puffs. It was much easier than I expected, although we did have to walk down to the kitchen store for a pastry bag, as we didn’t appear to own one.

Once the gnocchi are cooked and chilled, you could use them lots of different ways, or freeze them for later. This particular recipe combines pan-fried herbed gnocchi with squash, fresh sage and shiitake mushrooms. Keller wants you to use butternut squash, which is certainly easy to work with, but you could use any sweet squash. We had delicatas and what I think are Carnival squash, or perhaps Little Dumpling, that we bought at the farmer’s market in October - I used a delicata. They’re very mild, but I like how they do in this sort of recipe.

We served our gnocchi with a simple pork chop and a very nice aged Italian wine. It was delicious and festive – I’d definitely recommend it for a holiday dinner. And since I’d made a full recipe, there were plenty of leftovers…

…which made a very, very fine breakfast with an egg on top. Mmmmm. Buttery.

Parisienne Gnocchi

adapted from Bouchon by Thomas Keller (I halved the recipe and omitted fresh chervil, which I have never seen for sale anywhere)

• 3/4 cup water
• 6 Tbsp butter
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 Tbsp chopped chives
• 1 Tbsp chopped parsley
• 1 Tbsp chopped tarragon
• 1/2 cup grated Comte cheese
• 3 eggs

Gnocchi with squash and mushrooms

• one medium delicata squash, peeled and cut into small dice
• 12 small sage leaves
• butter
• 12 oz shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• 3 Tbsp minced shallot
• plenty of butter, salt and pepper
• 2 Tbsp minced chives
• 1 tbsp chopped parsley
• 1/2 lemon
• more butter

To make the gnocchi: Heat the water, butter and half a teaspoon of salt to a simmer, then dump in the flour and stir briskly until it comes together into a ball. Continue stirring over medium heat for a few minutes, until you get an aroma of cooked flour. Remove from the heat and beat in the mustard and herbs and the rest of the salt, then add the eggs one at a time. It will seem at first that the egg will never be absorbed into the batter, but then suddenly it will. Have faith and a strong arm. Or you could use a mixer. Scrape the dough into a pastry bag fitted with a plain wide tip and let it rest half an hour.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Adjust it to a simmer, then take the pastry bag and a small knife. Working over the simmering water, squeeze out about an inch of dough and cut it off at the nozzle so the dumpling falls into the pot. Do this about twenty times, then set the bag aside and watch as the gnocchi begin to float to the top. Give them an extra minute or two once they’ve floated, then scoop them out onto a paper-towel lined baking sheet to drain. Taste one – it should be slightly undercooked, as they’ll be getting cooked again later.

Continue cooking gnocchi until the dough is gone. I got about 100 gnocchi from this recipe, which didn’t take nearly as long as you might think. Once they are all cooked and drained, arrange the gnocchi on a parchment-lined baking sheet and put them in the fridge until you’re ready to pan-fry them, at least half an hour and up to a day ahead.

Shortly before dinnertime, prep the squash, herbs and mushrooms. Set a nonstick skillet over high heat, drizzle a little oil in and add a pat of butter. When it sizzles, add the diced squash in a single layer (use an extra pan or do it in batches if it doesn’t fit) and sprinkle the sage leaves over the top. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the squash is done (taste to check) and golden brown on the outside. The sage leaves will crisp up in the butter – take them out and reserve for garnish. Set the squash aside.

Slice up the mushrooms (we can get gorgeous fresh shiitakes from a local mushroom farm, but I would say any good mushroom would work here), cook them until soft in a little oil, then add a pat of butter and the minced shallot and cook a few more minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Finally, set out two skillets (you can re-use the ones you cooked the veg in) and heat with yet more butter. Add the gnocchi in a single layer and fry until crispy and golden. When they’re done, add the cooked squash and mushrooms along with the chives and mix it all together to heat through.

Dump the whole thing out onto a serving platter, decorating it with the fried sage leaves, and make a brown butter sauce (if you really think it’s necessary – I would feel free to skip this part if you feel you’ve used enough butter in one evening). Melt two tablespoons of butter in the skillet and let it get brown. Add the parsley and squeeze the lemon juice into it. Pour it out over the gnocchi and vegetables. Eat.

On the third and final day of Duckfest, we made confit, rillettes and pâté.

When we got to the farm on Sunday morning, the table was well laden with leftover bagels, plus a few sheets of freshly made cinnamon rolls.

As we ate breakfast, Kate was beginning the process of rendering the duck fat we’d collected off the carcasses the previous day. She was careful not to get the fat too hot – just enough to melt most of it off of the solids, but not enough to crisp them up.

She removed the bits of skin and meat and set them aside, and brought the fat just to a light simmer, as if making stock.

When the fat was the right temperature, we dried the salted duck pieces off well and added them in gradually. The legs went in first, then the breasts and wings, and eventually the necks and gizzards. Kate continued to stir the pot while the fat simmered, monitoring the temperature so it wouldn’t get too hot.

When the meat was suitably tender, perhaps an hour later (the slower the better), she removed the duck from the fat. What remained in the pot was true liquid gold, to be jarred up and used later.

We divided the confited pieces among vacuum-seal bags, and ladled in duck fat over each before sealing them up.

The bags of confit went outside to cool down for a bit before going into the fridge. We got to take some home, with the assurance that the confit will just get better with time.

The bits of skin left over from the rendering were put into a skillet and crisped up into cracklings. Except for the occasional pinfeather (oops), it was like super-crisp duck fat popcorn. They make excellent croutons!

Earlier, while the confit simmered, we had all gathered around the kitchen table and begun picking meat off the duck carcasses, which Neal and Kate had finished in a pressure cooker. It didn’t seem at first as if we’d get much, they were stripped so clean already, but we ended up with quite a decent pile of duck meat.

Our hands were very well moisturized after this effort.

The picked-over carcasses were taken out to the dock for the fishies and birdies…

Then Kate enlisted a few other sets of hands to help her go over the picked meat, shredding it finely and pulling out any stray bones or gristle.

The shredded meat became almost like dough as Kate kneaded it. I’m afraid I didn’t see what else went in (Fat? Seasonings? Kate, can you help me out?) The end result was rillettes, a delicious rich spread. Normally rillettes get packed into jars and topped with fat for storage, but this batch just got set aside for lunch.

While all these other things were going on, Kate was also making liver pâté.

She took the hearts and livers that we had set aside the day before, tossed them in the cuisinart, and mixed them up with Armagnac (universal seasoning of Gascony) and lard (that’s homemade lard on the plate up above, not mashed potatoes). The mixture was packed raw into canning jars, which were put into a water bath in the oven to simultaneously cook and seal. We got to bring one of these home as well.

Eventually we took a short break, then retired to the dining room for a late lunch before leaving.

We had the finished rillettes for lunch, piled on toasts rubbed with garlic.

The oysters that we failed to finish off on Friday night were turned into chowder, with the help of plenty of homemade bacon and fresh Jersey cream from Bridget the Cow up the road. On top of the rillettes, it was ferociously filling, but too delicious not to have seconds.

For dessert there was a clafoutis, made from fresh creamy milk and farm-picked prunes soaked in Armagnac.

It was very different than my usual breakfast clafoutis, which is baked in a cast iron pan and comes out caramelized and crusty. This was soft, sweet and custardy, dissolving in the mouth, with the prunes providing a deep, earthy counter point.

Finally, the ferry ride home, sure that we wouldn’t need to eat again for days.

On the second day, we slaughtered ducks.

Or, to be more precise, some of us slaughtered ducks, and we all plucked, butchered and ate them.

As you might expect, there are some slightly graphic photos in this post (although I left out the worst ones) so proceed at your own risk.

The day began cool and misty.

We met at the farm for strong coffee and vast quantities of freshly made bagels with homemade butter and smoked salmon. The bagels were fantastic – Neal’s wife is an amazing baker.

Garbing ourselves in fetching outfits and accompanied by extremely excited farm dogs, we went out to the duck shed and listened to Neal expound on the finer points of humane slaughter.

You have two main goals when killing an animal for meat: to spare them pain and fear, and to avoid doing anything that will decrease the quality of the meat. Neal uses a cone to confine the bird, then cleanly slits its throat (without cutting the spine) and lets it bleed out. If done correctly, the duck dies instantly, with no trauma.

Neal demonstrated the first duck. It was all over very quickly.

Did I kill a duck? No, I didn’t. I may have just been rationalizing my own fear, but I felt that it wasn’t fair for me to try killing an animal and possibly botch the job, causing it unnecessary pain, just so I could say I had done it. It would be a different story if I was planning on raising ducks and needed the practice.

That was just my own feeling. Two students in the class did successfully slaughter ducks, though, and they did a good job. The rest of us were content to watch.

After the duck has bled out, plucking is the next step. You can dry pluck, which produces a very high quality bird that keeps well, but it’s very time consuming. Since we were doing ten ducks, wet plucking was the way to go.

For the ducks’ hot water bath we were using a turkey fryer on a gas burner, which worked pretty well. The water had a bit of Dawn dish soap added in to help with the oil in the duck feathers. Each bird was lowered into the water and dunked several times, then hung by the feet in the plucking shed. This part smelled really, really bad – the clouds of hot duck steam began to send people running into the fresh air each time a new duck came into the shed.

Plucking takes a really, really long time.

The last of the pinfeathers are really hard to get out by hand. Neal showed us how to removed them by singeing (stinky and dangerous-looking), and by waxing (time consuming). Kate had brought a bottle of powdered pine resin from France, which gets rubbed into the duck feathers before dunking, and that made the plucking process a heck of a lot easier. We took to calling it the Magic French Powder.

Mostly it was lots of careful finger work. Fingernails helped.

Eventually, we broke for lunch, which was rabbit stew with potato dumplings, plus all the leftover cheeses and terrines from the day before. It made a very welcome break from the morning’s activities.

Later that afternoon, after a bit of recuperation, we butchered the ducks.

We gathered around the big farmhouse table with cutting boards, aprons and sharp boning knives.

Kate handed out a duck apiece so we could each try to clean and joint a bird. I don’t have any pictures of the process, since my hands were covered in raw duck, but suffice it to say it was a bit tricky (Neal helped us out while Kate demonstrated). Eventually we had a bowl of duck pieces for confit, a bowl of fat, a bowl of hearts and livers, and a pile of cleaned and sectioned gizzards (I wish I’d gotten a picture of those, they’re very cool looking). A relatively small amount of waste went into a bucket – mostly feet – but we would be using almost the entire bird for various dishes. The pieces for the confit (wings, legs, breasts, gizzards and necks) were well salted and laid in a tub, to be finished the following day.

For dinner that night, we each contributed one breast (called a magret) from our duck, trimmed and skinned, and Kate marinated them in Armagnac and mustard. She seared them, leaving them nice and rare, and made a pan sauce with shallots and some duck blood (which Julian, thinking it was chocolate, dipped a finger into and was somewhat startled).

There followed an argument as to whether we should have polenta or potatoes alongside. We ended up having both – potatoes roasted in duck fat (ohmigod) and soft polenta topped with duck skin cracklings (whoo).

To balance out the duck, there was also a good pile of broccoli cooked with garlic.

And wine, of course. And goody bags of local products (including madrona bark tea!) decorated by Neal’s daughters. And a pear tarte tatin for dessert. And more coffee and Armagnac. It was a good thing we were walking back to our room.

We dreamed about duck feathers all night.

Despite growing up around livestock (my family raised dairy goats, chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep and rabbits at various times), I’ve never had much to do with the process of turning a live animal into food. I’m not particularly bothered by the idea of eating animals, as long as they are raised well and killed humanely. All of our food comes from other living things, whether plant or animal. However, it’s a little different when you’ve met the animal you are going to eat, and even more so when you are present at, or responsible for, its death.

Jon and I have been buying more and more of our meat locally, and currently have pork, beef and lamb in our freezer from Skagit and Snohomish County farmers. We haven’t yet found a good source for chickens or ducks, but we’re working on it. But the more we buy whole animals straight from the farm, the more we realize how little we know about actual slaughter and butchering practices, and how to get the most from an animal. I don’t picture us raising animals for meat (not on our current property, anyway), but I really feel that knowing our meat from the ground up makes us better cooks.

Hence Duckfest, a workshop designed for just this sort of situation. We spent the first weekend of 2010 on Shaw Island in Puget Sound, learning to slaughter, butcher and cook ducks. The class was put on by chef and farmer Neal Foley, aka Podchef, and by chef, teacher and author Kate Hill, who graciously came out from her farm and cooking school in Gascony to demonstrate cassoulet and confit making. I love her book (sadly out of print at the moment), and I’ve been wanting to visit her school for a long time, so this was a wonderful opportunity – a taste of France just a few miles from our house!

The workshop lasted three days. We ate a vast amount of amazing food and took far too many pictures, so to spare my patient readers I’ll be writing it up in three installments. Here is day one (Cassoulet):

On the first day, we got up far too early. It was New Year’s Day, and I had a potato chip hangover, but we made it to the ferry dock in Anacortes with plenty of time to spare. The wind was howling down Rosario Strait, and the ferry ride was unusually alarming, as the boat wallowed from side to side and sudden crashes emanated from the lower decks. We (and our car) made it to Shaw Island intact, however, and were met by Podchef himself (henceforth referred to as Neal, as that is his actual name). We deposited our bags at the monastery guesthouse and proceeded on to lunch at Neal’s farm with most of the other attendees.

This was the view from the house. Not bad, hm? The first day it was storming and there were whitecaps across the bay, but the rest of the weekend it was gorgeous and smooth. A wonderful place.

This was the lunch: rabbit terrine and pate, red onion jam, quince membrillo, homemade baguette and buttermilk crackers (only the BEST CRACKERS EVER), cheese (both homemade and storebought), extremely fine pickles, and a very nice dry rose wine. Between all this and the bottles of Lillet that started things off, we were all pretty relaxed. We went out to meet the ducks, then took a break to wander around the island before reconvening for our first cooking lesson.

That afternoon, Kate made cassoulet, one of her specialties. The beans (gorgeous, enormous cannellinis, graciously donated by Steve at Rancho Gordo) had been set to soak earlier. She put them on to cook, just covering them with water. Carrots and celery went into the pot, along with plenty of thyme and a few pieces of fresh pork rind, plus a sprinkle of the secret cassoulet seasoning, epices Rabelais.

Neal had killed some ducks a few days before, so we would have confit for the cassoulet. He had also made two kinds of sausages from his pigs: Toulouse sausage, which is a simple ground pork sausage, and pork rind sausage, which is made from chopped pig skin and fat and turns out to be one of the most delicious things on the planet.

When the beans were done, a few strips of pork rind went into the bottom of the two cassoles. Some beans went in, then a layer of confit pieces. More beans, then whole sausages. Then still more beans on top, and the bean broth added until it came up just to the edge of the bowl.

By the way, you may have heard that a cassoulet should have breadcrumbs on top. Don’t do it! Kate emphasized that you want a crispy crust on top from the beans themselves. As the cassoulet bakes, you will be breaking the crust and pushing it back into the liquid several times. If you put breadcrumbs on top but then push them in, you will end up with a cassoulet full of breadcrumbs. So just say no!

While the cassoulet quietly did its thing in the oven, we had a little snack to tide us over. Kate had brought tins of freshly packed foie gras from one of her local producers in Gascony, and we did a taste-testing of duck liver terrine, goose liver terrine, rillettes, and foie gras-stuffed duck hearts. The popular vote went to the rillettes, followed by the goose liver, which seemed to be a touch sweeter than the duck. There was Champagne to go with the foie gras, and then the pan of oysters came out.

Kate picked these up from Jon Rowley on her way up from Seattle. It was a nice selection from our usual oyster source, Taylor Shellfish, including Olympias, Kumamotos, Pacific extra-smalls, and Virginicas. We ate quite a few oysters (the dog got some, too), then Neal produced a bottle of Laphroaig and we had to eat a few more splashed with the Scotch.

By the time the cassoulet was done we weren’t as hungry as we might have wished, but we applied ourselves.

The two cassoles were brought to the table, crusty brown on top and blazingly hot. With a fresh green salad and plenty of wine, we stuffed ourselves silly.

Some people even had room for dessert. Unluckily (or luckily) for me, it was a gorgeous Paris-Brest covered with almonds, so I had to plead allergic and stick to coffee and Armagnac. It was lovely.

Stay tuned for Day Two of Duckfest, where we learn how to kill, pluck and butcher ducks. If you just can’t wait, you can check out all my pictures from the weekend on my Flickr account.

As of last year, I decided that cassoulet would be my New Year’s Day tradition, beans being good luck and all. Cassoulet 2008 was thrown together with leftover pork roast and andouille sausage – it was very tasty, but I wanted to experiment a bit. I found a good-looking formula for cassoulet on Kate Hill’s blog, and followed the instructions loosely.

I was going to use duck confit this year, I swear, but the co-op sold out of the stuff, then closed early on New Year’s Eve. We made do with sausage and a small slice of uncured ham. I didn’t have any ham hocks or bacon to flavor the broth, either, so I used some of our good roasted turkey stock from Thanksgiving. The final result wasn’t particularly meaty (or fatty), but the beans had a wonderful deep flavor – they soaked up every bit of broth I gave them. I didn’t use any breadcrumbs for the top, but the crust turned out fabulous.

We ate the cassoulet with a tossed Caesar salad and a bottle of Tikal Malbec. Lovely.

Note to self: I cooked up more beans than our casserole could hold, so I had to freeze some for later. Ease up on the beans next time. Also, investing in some really good quality white beans would be nice – the co-op’s Great Northerns tasted good, but they looked old and tired when I bought them.

Cassoulet 2009

1 1/2 pounds Great Northern beans, rinsed and sorted
3 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 onion
2 cloves
2 sprigs parsley
2 bay leaves
2 thyme branches
1 quart turkey broth
1 quart water (approximately)
salt and pepper
1 slice ham, diced
1/2 kielbasa sausage, diced
1/2 linguica sausage, diced
1 pint chicken broth, heated

Put the beans in a Dutch oven, cover them with water, bring it to a boil, then let it sit for an hour. Drain. Realize you have way too many beans and your pot is too small.

In a very large Dutch oven, combine the beans, garlic, onion, cloves, herbs, broth and water and bring to a boil. Adjust to a gentle simmer and cook until the beans are just tender, another hour or two. Remove the onion, cloves and herbs.

Preheat the oven to 450°. In a roasting pan or casserole, spread a little olive oil, then ladle in beans to cover the bottom. Sprinkle the diced ham and sausages over this in an even layer. Top with beans. Pour over any broth remaining in the pot, then top up with the chicken broth you had to get out at the last minute – you want the broth to just cover the beans, if possible. The pan will be very full.

Put the pan in the oven and let it bake for half an hour. Turn the oven heat down to 350° and bake another hour, occasionally patting the beans down into their cooking liquid with a wooden spoon. When the beans have formed a beautiful golden crust, take the cassoulet out and let it rest a few minutes while you fix the salad.

Unless you have several dinner guests, prepare to eat cassoulet for every meal for a few days afterwards. There are worse fates.

For some unknown reason, I had never tasted tarte Tatin until recently, and it was a revelation. I like apple pie, but often find it a bit bland. Tarte Tatin is not at all bland: the apples are soaked with caramel, chewy around the edges, and the crust has a wonderful shatteringly crisp quality that I’ve never encountered in a regular fruit pie. As soon as I tasted it, I vowed that I would try making one myself.

The basic concept really isn’t too complicated, and there seems to be some flexibility, based on the difference between the various recipes I looked up. The foundation is a caramel sauce made with sugar and butter, the apples are laid on the caramel, and pie crust is laid on the apples before baking, then the whole thing is turned upside down before serving. I found variations involving cooking the caramel in a separate pan, then mixing it with the apples, but I went with an approach of cooking the butter, sugar and apples together in a skillet, without stirring, until the sauce caramelized with the juice from the fruit.

Another simple variation is whether to use puff pastry or pie dough. I had some pastry in the fridge, but I felt more inclined to a simple crust, so I just mixed up a single-crust amount of my usual recipe, based on the Joy of Cooking’s Pie Dough Cockaigne.

This is a great example of the kind of food that you should really get other people to make for you, just so you don’t have to see how much butter really goes into it. Between the crust and the filling, this had nearly one and a half sticks of butter! But it’s so good that it’s worth turning a blind eye to the calories. And besides, it’s full of apples, so it’s good for you!

I’m obviously going to need more practice making these – my first attempt was delicious, but not very beautiful. Guess we’ll have to have another one…

Tarte Tatin

adapted from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan and On Rue Tatin by Susan Herrmann Loomis

pie dough:

• 1 cup unbleached white flour
• 4 Tbsp butter
• pinch of salt
• cold water (about 1/3 cup?)

tart filling:

• 1 stick unsalted butter
• about 5 apples (I used Braeburns, but any flavorful, firm apple would do)
• 3/4 cup white sugar

Preheat the oven to 400º.

Mix up the pie dough, roll into a disk and set aside (you can refrigerate it if you’re working ahead).

Melt the butter in a heavy skillet. Sprinkle the sugar over the butter, remove from the heat, then arrange the apples in the pan, as snugly and artistically as possible. Put the pan back over medium or medium-low heat. The sugar and butter will bubble up around the apples. Keep an eye on it as it cooks, it will eventually turn a dark caramel color. This took me about half an hour (Dorie says 15 minutes, Susan says an hour, so I just split the difference). Don’t stir.

Lay the crust over the apples and tuck in the edges. Into the oven with it.

Bake 30-40 minutes, until the crust is crisp and golden. Then, without hurting yourself or anyone else, place a large plate over the top of the skillet and invert it. I spilled quite a bit of caramel doing this – I think I need to use a different pan. Rearrange the apples if they became mussed – you may need to scrape some out of the pan.

Make sure to give the tart a few minutes to cool, otherwise the hot caramel may cause injuries. Serve with unsweetened whipped cream (or creme fraiche if you can get it).

We had a class at Gretchens with chef Peter Belknap the other night, the theme of the evening being “French Riviera.” Of course, there was cream sauce involved, and plenty of cheese and breadcrumbs as well. But one dish that I thought was particularly fun was a salad of white beans, pasta and squid with a mustardy dressing. I love squid, but I never cook it at home (my few attempts, many years ago, were rather rubbery). This was a nice presentation, and the flavors and textures worked well together. I may have to give cooking squid another try.

I got to prep the squid – apparently having small fingers is an asset in this business. This was frozen, cleaned squid without the tentacles, very easy to work with.

Salade de cocos aux scupions (Bean & Squid Salad)

• 3 cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• olive oil
• 2 onions, thinly sliced
• 2 Tbsp chopped garlic
• 6 roma tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
• 1 cup shell pasta, cooked, cooled, tossed with oil
• 1 pound squid, cleaned and sliced into thick rings
• 1/3 cup shallot, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup spinach leaves
• 1/4 cup shredded basil
• 2 Tbsp shredded fresh mint

Dressing:

• salt and pepper
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice

Fry the onions and garlic in olive oil until soft, add the tomatoes and cook them in, then add the beans and heat through.

Mix the dressing in a large salad bowl. Add the shallots, spinach and herbs. Pour the hot beans over and stir to wilt the greens. Mix in the pasta.

Fry the squid in olive oil until just opaque – you do NOT want to overcook it, unless you have a fondness for rubber bands. Salt the squid and add it to the salad bowl. Mix, and let the salad sit up to 4 hours before serving.

The summer season has begun at Gretchen’s Cooking School, so we’re back in the kitchen doing our usual chopping, serving and washing. In honor of Bastille Day, our friend Peter Belknap put together a menu of Parisian delights.

The first course was a composed salad of lettuce, endive, julienned vegetables, sweetened walnuts, apples and marinated sausage, topped with fresh gougères. It made the customers swoon, which isn’t bad for a salad. Someone even said it was the best salad she’d ever had!

For the second course Peter had me help him put together little mushroom galettes. Each one started as a round of pie dough with a spoonful of cream cheese mashed with comte and parmesan set in the middle, then topped with a savory mushroom mixture. Then we pleated up the sides so they made little open-topped globes on the baking sheet, and baked them at high heat. Oh my, these were good, especially with a sprinkle of chopped herbs and a squeeze of lemon (he had been going to serve these with herbed whipped cream, but the lemon was a wise choice).

It was hard to think about more food after the galette, but there was a third course: pork tenderloin steaks cooked with tons of black pepper (crushed by J with much difficulty and pounding with a meat tenderizer), and combined with port-soaked prunes, flambéed cognac and cream, served with appallingly buttery mashed potatoes with a hint of nutmeg. Whoo-ee!

I actually don’t think we ate anything this good in Paris. Can’t wait for his Riviera class!

I used to be a fanatical cake baker. If we went to a party, I made a cake – the bigger and fancier or more chocolatey, the better. My college friends and I stayed up late, baking things that would then disappear within seconds. It was my cooking signature.

Somehow, though, once I started cooking all my own meals, and discovering the huge world of savory flavors, I sort of lost interest in cake. These days when I bake it needs to be relatively simple, preferably producing something that isn’t too sweet. French yogurt cake (gâteau au yaourt) fits the bill. I first found this on Clotilde’s blog, and have made it many times since. It’s just sweet enough, with a nice tart edge from the yogurt, has a lovely golden crust and a soft crumb. It is the easiest cake in the entire world to make, and it is dreamy with fresh fruit.

This particular cake was made in honor of my grandfather’s 95th birthday, on a blazingly hot Seattle day, with lots of fresh Skagit strawberries. We had leftovers for breakfast!

Gâteau au Yaourt

from the blog Chocolate and Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier (there’s a slightly different version in her book of the same name)

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup whole-milk yogurt
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 Tbsp rum
• 2 cups white flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• pinch of salt

Oil a 10-inch springform pan and preheat the oven to 350°. Mix the eggs, yogurt, sugar, oil, vanilla and rum in one bowl, and the flour, baking powder and salt in another. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, stir until just blended, then scrape into the pan and bake 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool ten minutes before removing the springform. Eat plain or with lots of sliced strawberries or mangoes.