Cauliflower Bake

We served up a pretty white dinner the other  night - chicken, onions and cauliflower.  Not the prettiest dinner, but it was mighty tasty.  We used a poulet rouge chicken - they're locally grown and although I was a skeptic at first, it was one of the tastiest chickens we've ever had.  The onions were roasted with the chicken so they had picked up a great caramelized flavor.  The cauliflower, however, was the main star of this particular evening's dinner. 

For a long time, I was a failure at making a white sauce.  For whatever reason, it seemed like an unattainable pinnacle of cooking.  The first break-through was making soufflee.  Following the recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking made it easy.  So when I saw a cauliflower in white sauce recipe on a cooking show, I figured we were ready to tackle this dish.

Equal parts flour and butter are the key, along with having your milk ready to go.  I heat the milk (1 cup) in the microwave, simple and quick.  Then it's ready to be stirred into the butter and flour (2 TB each) after they've cooked for a couple of minutes.  It thickened right up, see?

It cooked for a couple of minutes, then we turned off the heat, stirred in some grated swiss cheese, pepper, salt, nutmet and red pepper flakes, and poured it over our cauliflower.

The cauliflower had been microwaved ahead of time until it was mostly cooked.  Sauce and store-bought breadcrumbs topped the florets and we put it in the over for about 20 minutes, along with the chicken, to bubble up and brown.

As you can see, there were no leftovers on this one!

Turnips

Remember those baby turnips from the farmer's market I mentioned last time?

I had eaten perfect baby turnips last year in a little restaurant off an alley near Place Vosges in Paris and they were just about this size.  Why not recreate that moment, never mind the lack of rough-hewn stone walls, old wood, creaky floors and the haughty insistence of the host that we really needed a reservation but, since we were so early he'd see what he could do..., I opened Mastering the Art... and we were off!  It couldn't have been simpler.  We chopped the greens off, trimmed the tops and bottoms and washed them up.

No peeling, no blanching (because they were so small), they went right into the pot with enough chicken broth to nearly cover them and some butter (don't tell Julia, but I used 1/4 her recommended amount!)

They simmered for about 20 minutes, I cut them into halves and put them in little dishes: voila!

We ate them with a salad topped with the cranberry-shitake chicken mix and olive-oil drizzled avocados.  I was hoping the kids would hold true to stereotypes and dislike the turnips but they gobbled them up.  Sweet, tangy, buttery and brothy - they were delicious!  A grind of pepper suited me, but they didn't need anything else.

Bon Appétit!

Keeping it Light

For a while there, it was all about French cooking. Between Julie and Julia, butter made a comeback, boeuf bourguignon was all the rage, and we even hosted a poulet-en-croute dinner for a few friends. My favorite thing from Mastering the Art of French Cooking though, is the omelet.

I love reading that book because it works as a cooking instruction book and as a delightful diversion. I have a tendency to wander from the page, try new ingredients and methods, not always with the desired results. My mother handed down her love of an orderly kitchen along with the notion that recipes are “suggestions”. This helps me a lot when it is 6 o’clock on a weeknight, everyone’s hungry, and I need a substitute ingredient for whatever we’re making. It also encourages creative use of the pantry (another hand-me-down talent). 

The downside is that it's easy for me to forget to learn the basics somewhere along the line.

Omelets are about as basic as you can get. Eggs, butter, salt and heat. Then there’s the flip, just to keep it interesting.  If you follow a Julia Child recipe, it turns out just like it should. 

I read My Life in France first, and there was so much attention devoted to the omelet, I was hooked. I ordered a set of Mastering from my favorite used book place and lugged them around on car trips, read them at my desk over lunch, too late at night and so forth. Then it was time.

My friends came over after work for omelets before going to see the movie. We had a delicious salad fresh from the winter garden, French wine (bien sur!) and…perfect omelets!

I was feeling pretty confident.

So, the next morning, I made omelets for my kids.

Let's just say that's not how it looked in the cookbook.....

After several minutes of the floor-rolling-belly-clutching kind of laughter, I scooped the eggs up and they were delicious.  My kids love to know that perfection isn’t the goal – how much easier things are that way! The wonderful thing about cooking? You always have another meal coming up.