so fraiche

30. Chicken cooked in beer

Creme fraiche is expensive in Australia. You think all that Masterchef stuff would've driven up demand somewhat, given the contestants use it in everything. Oh well.

Anyway, this recipe grabbed my attention right away for reasons Julie Andrews articulated so well in The Sound of Music

Chicken sauteed in butter
Australian pale ale
Juniper-flavoured alcohol
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites

When the bee stings

When I'm feeling sad

I simply remember my favorite things

And then I don't feel so bad

Or maybe not.

Anyway, to cook a chicken in beer you joint a small, whole bird--me, because I'm cooking for two, I just bought a couple of 'marylands'. You brown the chicken pieces in butter and then add a couple of shallots to the pan. Once they're softened, you deglaze the pan with gin and pour in 400 mL beer and 60 mL creme fraiche. The cooking liquid is flavoured with a bouquet garni, a pinch of chilli powder and a large handful of sliced mushrooms. The chicken is cooked for 45 minutes and then removed from the liquid. You then reduce the sauce and enrich it with an egg yolk and more creme fraiche.

The recipe didn't specify the kind of beer I should use. I'm not a fan of most mass produced lagers. And stout? Well, I thought about it, but I reckon the intense bitterness wouldn't work in this dish. I opted for a pale ale: Cooper's Pale Ale, to be precise. A drinkable but inexpensive beer. Given the idea is to reduce the cooking liquid into a sauce--a beer sauce--I wanted something that was actually interesting without being domineering. On the gin front, I used Tanqueray London Dry.

After a few recipes that weren't necessarily duds but just weren't that interesting--the moussaka, the tajine, the sausages--it's nice to stumble onto a winner. The sauce retained more of the flavour of Coopers Pale Ale than I expected it to. This is a simple dish that could easily be produced in great quantity for a crowd. One to hang on to.

31. Sauteed raw potatoes

A different take on the sauteed potatoes I cooked a couple of weeks ago. This time around, as the name of the recipe suggests, you don't boil the potatoes before you slice and saute them--you simply dump them, thinly cut, of course, into fat and cook them for 25 minutes. The recipe suggests using a combination of olive oil and butter but I just can't resist using duck fat. I also threw in a small sprig of rosemary.

The potatoes were okay. Soft and fluffy. They were nowhere near as crisp as the pre-cooked sauteed potatoes. I'd cook that recipe in preference any day.

32. Preparation (of asparagus), 33. Cooking (asparagus) in water & 34. Asparagus served hot


Who knew the simplest of vegetable preparations would see me knock over three recipes at once? I never ate asparagus as a kid--never knew what it was, even--but I've come to like it. Maybe even love it. Mostly, at home, I use Heston Blumenthal's method for preparing it. See his old show, Kitchen Chemistry, for details. Larousse suggests a very different method to what he suggests.

To prepare the asparagus you first cut all the stalks to the same length and then peel them. You tie the stalks into small bundles and then plunge them into boiling salty water and cook them for 20-30 minutes--which seems like a long time to me--depending on the thickness of the stalks. The asparagus is then drained and served with clarified butter, which you can jack with a squeeze of lemon juice.

the grapes that nobody wanted

28. Moussaka

There's a lot of variation in moussaka recipes, even before you get to interesting attempts at modernising the Greek classic like the one in George Calombaris' Press Club cookbook. A lot of the ones online are really just lasagne recipes that use slices of eggplant (aubergine to you, probably) instead of pasta sheets. I don't know how authentic Larousse Gastronomique's recipe is. It doesn't include bechamel sauce, which sets it apart from most of the recipes floating around.

The recipe is a piece of piss. The meat sauce includes onion, garlic, bay, minced lamb (the book says you can use mutton instead, which I'd prefer if I could get my hands on it locally), dried oregano, ground cinnamon, tomatoes and beef stock. The sauce is then layered with slices of eggplant, which must be fried in olive oil first. The whole lot is then covered with a mixture of yoghurt, eggs, flour and nutmeg. It is then baked.

The only problem I had with the recipe was the suggested simmering time for the meat sauce. 30 minutes simply wasn't enough: the sauce was too wet. I gave it a full hour, slowly reducing the sauce with the lid off and allowing the tomatoes to fully break down.

The moussaka is okay. I wouldn't rush to make it again for a weeknight dinner but I could see its potential if I ever had to cater for a lot of kids.

  
29. Rice a la grecque

I figured Greek-style rice would be a nice side dish for the moussaka. Greek classic. Greek rice. You know. Rice is, or so Larousse tells me, Greeked up by the addition of onion, raisins, a bouquet garni and garlic. It can be made even Greekier by adding diced capsicum and pees. Despite the list of ingredients sounding like a variation of the garnished pilaf, which is cooked in the oven, Greek-style rice is steamed on the stove top.

 

fine weather for ducks and chicken

It's wet and miserable outside. Such depressing weather. To cure the blues I prescribed myself some potatoes roasted in duck fat. The healing properties of duck fat roast potatoes are acknowledged even in The Bible:

I am the best fat in the world

He who roasts potatoes in me

will not walk in darkness,

but have the light of life

I chose a main based on how well it would get along with duck fat potatoes. Hence ...

25. Chicken casserole

Sitting here with the book on my knees, a few hours before I prepare dinner, I'm nervous about this dish. I like the idea. I'm just concerned--really--about cooking chicken at 230 degrees. Even if it's in a covered casserole dish. Even if it's been lubed up with flavoured butter. Even then. It's what the recipe calls for and I know I said I'd be faithful, but my experience and my readings of Blumenthal and McGee are demanding I lower the temperature. 230 degrees is just too hot.

The recipe otherwise looks good. You brown a chicken, season it and then add some sort of fat--the book says you could maybe use bacon, but I'm opting for a flavoured butter, as cheap supermarket-grade bacon wouldn't make a positive contribution to the dish. The chicken is cooked for a hour in a covered casserole dish and served with pearl onions.

I ended up lowering the temperature to 200 degrees. Into the casserole dish I also added the peeled pearl onions, which I figure will absorb all the grease and juices that leak out of the chicken, as well as some a broken-up bulb of garlic and a couple of torn-up sage leaves.

26. Preparation of flavoured butter

A basic technique that is endlessly useful. Normally, when I roast chicken and quail, I make a flavoured butter using whatever's around, whatever looks good. Some parsley, maybe. Garlic, too. Perhaps some thyme. Tonight I'll be using lemon juice, sage and garlic. As with all basic flavoured butters, the butter (unsalted, I might add) must be creamed first. My food processor died a nasty deaths a few months back and I haven't got around to replacing it yet so I'll be creaming the butter by hand.

I find it interesting that neither Larousse Gastronomique nor Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques tell their readers how to cream butter, either by hand or using a machine. It's one of those simple but essential techniques, so this is a really surprising oversight.

27. Roast potatoes

Larousse Gastronomique offers an interesting recipe for roast potatoes. I've always--always--cooked the potatoes in boiling water before putting them in the oven. I don't remember ever seeing anyone not boil the potatoes first. Larousse Gastronomique tells you to simply use small potatoes--or cut large ones small--and toss them in fat and roast them for '40 minutes or more'. To serve, they are garnished with fresh parsley.

I ended up roasting my potatoes for 60 minutes. I added some roughly chopped rosemary to the roasting dish as rosemary gets along with roast potatoes almost as well as duck fat. The potatoes were nice. I'm surprised at how successful they were given I didn't roast them. The skins were puffed up and crisp. The insides soft and fluffy.

holding court

21. Court-bouillon with wine

I admit that I don't eat or cook seafood as much as I should. Maybe it's because good quality seafood is hard to find and expensive, but mostly, I think, mostly it's because I didn't it at much as a kid. Old habits die a hard death and all. My childhood concept of seafood was limited to deep-fried fillets of shark and oven-baked, frozen Birds Eye. As an adult I have a very low tolerance for deep-fried foodstuffs, aside from good frites, and no stomach at all for cheap frozen crap, so those two 'delights' have largely been removed from my diet. Too, cooking fish is hard. Most meats are forgiving. Most seafoods are not. My failures as a cook become blindingly fucking obvious when you hand me a whole fish and tell me to cook it perfectly. Cooking through Larousse Gastronomique will see me cook a lot more seafood. Hopefully I'll learn how to do it well.

Court-bouillon is a classic way to prepare seafood. You prepare a flavoured cooking liquid in which to poach the fish. Until I read the 'court-bouillon' entry, I was under the impression court-bouillon always involved wine. Not so. You can make a simple court-bouillon with salt and water.

Tonight I'm making the wine variant. Larousse Gastronomique sets out the following formula: for every two and a half litres of water, add half a litre of dry wine wine, fifty grams each of grated onion and carrot, a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, salt and, if you like, a small amount of celery and/or parsley. Pepper is only to be added during the final few moments of cooking. I didn't add parsley today but I did add celery. The recipe discourages the use of parsley because it can easily dominate the other flavours.

Interestingly, court-bouillon is something you can hang onto and use again and again, so long as you strain and store it carefully. I wouldn't want to keep it for more than a couple of days, though.

I'm cooking a fillet of gemfish, large enough to feed two people, in the court-bouillon. Having never worked with court-bouillon before, I turned to Google for assistance. Supposedly a large fillet like the one I bought will take maybe 15 minutes to cook through. We'll see.

Now that I've actually eaten the fish, I really like--really--this way of cooking. I think I'll come back to it a lot in the near future, given we're heading into summer. This method, too, is fairly forgiving--or at least more forgiving than a frying pan.

22. Pilaf rice

I remember buying a rice cooker and using it maybe two or three times. I found the resulting rice was inferior to the rice I steamed in a saucepan on the stovetop. That's how I usually prepare rice if I'm serving it as a side dish.

The method for pilaf rice is foreign to me. You start by frying some diced onion and toasting the unwashed grains of rice in butter, which isn't so unusual--reminds me of making risotto--and work with a 1.5:1 liquid:rice ratio but then, rather than cooking on the stove top, you place the saucepan in the oven for 16-18 minutes. You then let it stand for 15 minutes. As I write this, a couple of hours before I cook, I'm a bit worried the rice will be fucking wallpaper paste after 30-35 minutes of cooking and resting. Normally, I cook and rest rice for 20-25 minutes.

I regret doubting Larousse Gastronomique for a second. This recipe produced beautiful aromatic, buttery rice. The texture is slightly different to steamed rice, probably due to the frying of the grains.

23. Carrot salad with orange

I chose this salad because it was both simple and interesting. The salad is nought but a mixture of diced orange, grated carrot and sliced onion (I went for red onions as their raw flavour is less offensive than the flavour of brown onions). Larousse Gastronomique suggests using a lemon vinaigrette but, not having any lemons on hand and not fancying a 40 minute round trip in the heat to go get some, I'll just be making a standard vinaigrette.

I liked the salad but there were two flaws, as I saw it. Firstly, the salad was dominated by orange. Not so much in terms of flavour--my choosing of navel orange was a considered decsion--but in terms of quantity. I should've bought another carrot. Maybe two. Secondly, I think the orange pieces were too big. I was nervous about cutting into the orange segments as I envisioned the juice squirting everywhere, leaving me with a salad of carrot and onion and orange pulp.

24. Basic vinaigrette

Curiously, the formula provided in this recipe differs significantly from the other one I worked with. Here Larousse calls for an acid:fat ratio of 1:3 and mentions, too, that you can add a little bit of mustard if you like. I followed the acid:fat ratio and found the taste much more pleasant than that of the vinaigrette I made the other week. I added some salt, pepper and the tiniest amount of hot English mustard--not so much you can taste the mustard, even, but enough to give it a little bit of bite.

leaping lapin

18. Rabbit stew with lemon and garlic

It's rabbit season. Or, rather, rabbits are on special at the local poultry shop.

This recipe is the first to bring into the picture my butchery skills. Rabbit, see, was one of the first animals I broke down into primary cuts. The first couple of times, I made a real mess of it. Same, too, with my first attempt at duck. It took practice to understand the standard advice for breaking down small animals. To turn the idea of carefully drawing your knife along the length of the bones and working with, rather than against, the creature's joints from theory into practice.

Larousse Gastronomique says that rabbits should be broken down into six pieces: two front legs, two back legs and two pieces of saddle. And that's exactly what I did. From experience I knew that some pieces of the rabbit--the front ribs, the belly 'flaps' that hang off either side of the saddle--don't have much meat on them and constrict during cooking so I trimmed these off. I think, overall, I did an okay job, although there's a noticeable inconsistency in the size of the rear leg portions. With the legs I carefully but forcefully dislocated the shoulder and hip joints. The only bone I actually cut through was the spine when breaking down the saddle.

The book also says that commercially-reared rabbits should be marinated for a few hours in a mixture of wine, herbs and vegetables. I bought a wild rabbit but did this anyway, even though the recipe didn't ask for it, as rabbit stew always seems to work better for me when I sit the meat in wine for at least a few hours. I'm unsure of how much marinades actually contribute to the tenderness and juiciness of meat--I'm under the impression they only help a little bit--but in my experience they do good things to rabbit.

My marinade was a mixture of maybe 3/4 of a bottle of white wine, the juice of one lemon, most of the peel of that lemon, a spring of thyme, a sprig of parsley, a spring of rosemary, a couple of dried bay leaves, salt and pepper.

 

To prepare the rabbit, remove it from the marinade. Brush off any bits of herb or lemon peel as these will burn when you put the meat in the pan. Heat some olive oil in a pan. Fry the rabbit pieces for 10 minutes or until browned nice and evenly. Set aside.

Add to the pan 20 cloves of garlic (peeled, whole). Cook them for a couple of minutes. Now, transfer the meat and garlic into a small ovenproof vessel: a little casserole dish, say. Add, too, the reserved marinade (drain it first), the juice of two lemons, a sprig of thyme and a fresh bay leaf. Bring the liquid to the boil and then put the lid on the pan and place it in the oven at 180 degrees. The recipe says to cook it for a hour but I get the impression they're dealing with farmed rabbit, even though they don't say one way or the other directly, as later recipes specifically mention wild rabbit. I'm using wild rabbit here and I have no idea if it was a young bunny or an old bunny before it met its maker. So I'm playing it safe and giving it 90 minutes in the oven.

The rabbit turned out okay, I think. The liquid component of the stew is nice with a mellow sourness and mild garlickness. If I'd used home-grown garlic I think it'd be overpoweringly garlicky, though. The rabbit is still a bit dry. Not inedible and perhaps not even bad. But not quite where I want it. Certainly using a commercially-reared rabbit would produce superior results in terms of moistness/dryness but then the meat wouldn't have as much flavour. 

19. Potatoes a la sarladaise

'a la Sarladaise' refers to a style of preparing potatoes that is practiced in the Perigord region of France. You saute thin slices of potato in goose fat and sweat them with parsley and garlic. At least, that's what the 'a la Sarladaise' entry says. The recipe in the potatoes entry, though, says to peel and wash some potatoes and then cut them into eighths. Goose fat is hard to find and expensive. Duck fat is fairly expensive too but easier to find: most poultry shops and some supermarkets stock it. Essentially you saute the potatoes for a while (bless Larousse's vagueness: it's unclear whether, as the 'a la Sarldaise' entry suggests, you cook the potatoes in goose fat and then let them sweat in the oven, or if you're just giving them a bit of colour) in the fat, season them and introduce them to everyone's favourite root vegetable, Mr Garlic.

The recipe calls for ceps, too. I don't have ceps. I think I maybe saw fresh ceps at Queen Victoria Market one time, maybe, but I've heard that oyster mushrooms make an acceptable substitute. Oyster mushrooms are reasonably priced and avaliable locally. On a hot day, that beats the hell out of heading into the city for what may not even be avaliable and what is probably, if it's in stock, insanely expensive. You add the sliced mushrooms to the pan with the potatoes, put the lid on the pan and slide the thing in the oven (200 degrees) for 40 minutes. 

So far I've liked all of Larousse Gastronomique's potato recipes. I enjoyed the sauteed (cooked) potatoes most of all but this one had the sort of soothing qualities only soft potatoes and rendered duck fat can offer. The mushrooms weren't so nice after 40 minutes cooking in duck fat. I wonder if a dusting of porcini powder would be better. 

20. Carrots a la forestiere

Ah. The twentieth Larousse Gastronomique recipe done and dusted. Only how many hundred to go? Yeah.

The entry for 'a la forestiere' ('forestiere' unsurprisingly means 'forest') speaks of a method for preparing small cuts of meat or chicken--or even vegetables and eggs, like they're an after thought--by garnishing them with mushrooms that've been sauted until sexy in butter. It says, too, you can even add bacon.

The first recipe under the 'forestiere' heading calls for carrots to be braised in butter and served with a garnish of mushrooms and parsley. That's it. I had an open packet of oyster mushrooms from the potatoes a la Sarladaise so I used them up here. 

How do you braise a carrot in butter? There's no description of this technique in the 'carrot' entry but it can be derived from this recipe ...

20.5. Braised baby carrots with caramelised gingerbread sauce

I know, I know. I'm cheating. I'm not making the caramelised gingerbread sauce. Ergo, I won't check this recipe off in my Excel document. I'll come back and make this in full at some point because hey, carrots and gingerbread sound like an interesting combination.

Anyway, to braise carrots you combine them with a little bit of salt and sugar. You brown them in some olive oil and then cover them in stock--I have no stock at the moment, so I used water--and then you add a knob of butter and cook them for 20 minutes.

saucisses et pommes de terre

15. Sausages a la catalane

I don't eat sausages all that often. Mostly because rarely do I make the effort to travel to a nice butcher--say, Peter G Bouchier in Toorak or Rob's British Butchery in Dandenong--that specialises in, or at least puts a lot of effort into, making nice sausages. A lot of sausages out there are miserable mystery bags of minced lips and arseholes and shit too horrific to have a name.

Happy with the Otway free range pork products I've tried so far, I decided, today, to give their sausages a go. For $16 per kilogram or thereabouts you can get their 'Irish' sausages--pure pork, in other words. $16 per kilogram for what are, at the end of the day, supermarket-grade sausages is comparable with Peter G Bouchier and Rob's offerings. And, too, more expensive than a lot Otway cuts, including the glorious belly, avaliable from butchers that sell them.

So. This a la catalane business. The name gives it away, I guess. Like many of Larousse Gastronomique's 'ethnic' recipes, it's not authentic. Not anything a Spaniard would recognise as Spanish. It is, like most of the ethnic recipes, a French take on the concept. An idea modified to suit French ingredients, tastes and techniques. A bastardisation, really.

Sausages a la catalane is a simple preparation. The recipe doesn't specify any particular variety of sausage but you couldn't go wrong with pure pork or beef sausages--or even veal or whatever. Something lightly seasoned, like your standard 'Italian' sausages or the French Toulouse., would work too. I don't think heavily seasoned sausages, such as chorizo or boerwors, would work at all. The sauce is fairly delicate--although this may be just in my kitchen, as the garlic I bought turned out to be a bit sad and I didn't trust the commercial broth (the unsalted variety was out of stock, see) to reduce the shit out of it.

To make sausages in the catalane style, you briefly fry some sausages (the book suggests using dripping as your frying medium) until golden all over and then set them aside. You add a couple of spoonfuls of flour, stir it until it takes on some colour and then introduce it to some white wine, stock and a small quantity of tomato paste. Simmer this for ten minutes and then strain it. Return the sausages to the pan along with some peeled, whole cloves of garlic. Pour the strained sauce into the pan and add a bouquet garni and a piece of dried orange peel. Simmer for thirty minutes.

Dried orange peel can be sourced from Chinese grocers as it's used, I'm told, in Sichuan cuisine. Sure, you can dry your own orange peel in a low oven or whatever--or maybe under the sun, even, I don't know--but when it's $1.30 for stuff that's perfectly fine (and fine in the way of most spices, not fine in the way of commerical stock) I wouldn't bother unless, you know, there are lots of oranges to be used up somehow.

The overpriced sausages were okay, I guess. Not bad. No. But no different to any other reasonable quality pork sausage. If I bothered making this dish again I'd probably muster up the energy to head out to Dandenong.

16. Potatoes au jus

This recipe reminds me, a bit, of Fergus Henderson's recipe for 'Orbs of Joy'.

Potatoes au jus is the sort of recipe that will make me, in the next week or two, actually get me to make my own brown stock. With a commercial broth, it's just sad. Insipid. The potatoes are soft and that's just swell, but they don't turn out as the recipe implies they should: soft and glazed with sticky, meaty goodness. Seriously. Don't waste your time or your potatoes unless you have some quality stock on hand.

You quarter some potatoes--peel them first, which I forgot too--and drop them into an oven-proof pan with some stock. You bring the stock the boil on the stove top and then place the pan, lid on, in the oven for 40 minutes at 200 degrees.

17. French beans a la lyonnaise

Cook the beans using Larousse's catch-all method and then saute them in a saucepan with some sliced onions (I admit that I kind of skimmed past the book's suggestion you use something like a 4:1 bean:onion ratio), which you've already softened. Let the beans take on a bit of colour and then season them with salt, pepper, parsley and vinegar.

first step towards civilisation

I started a herb garden today.

Until now, I'd been relying on supermarkets and green grocers for fresh herbs. And, let me tell you, that's not a good place to be. Not at all. For starters, fresh herbs are expensive. And too, the range is limited. You're lucky if you can get thyme. Sage? Forget about it. Most importantly, they're not actually fresh. Pick a leaf. Taste it. Mostly, what it tastes like is old grass clippings.

I always had a Bunnings up the road but never bothered to go. Without a car, I guess, working up the motivation to go there and come back with an armful of plants is difficult. Still, on a whim, today, given I was coming home past Bunnings, I ducked in and picked up five small pots. I have flat leaf parsley, coriander, sage, thyme and rosemary. I saw oregano and chives and bay a few herbs I've never used before but will, once I bite deeper into Larousse Gastronomique, including lemon verbena and lavender. I seriously considered the bay plant but it was a bit big to carry home with everything else I already had. In the near future I'll add all of the above, plus basil--couldn't find any today--to the collection.

In the ideal world (well, as of maybe March next year, when I have my own place) I'd like a serious fruit and vegetable garden. Lots of fresh herbs. A good range of chillies. And lots of fruits and vegetables that are either hard to find, expensive or poor quality in shops, such as leeks (overpriced and often old and soggy and sad), blueberries and blackberries. Bunnings has a nice range of berry plants. Indeed, they stock some berries I didn't know were avaliable--fresh, anyway--locally. A lemon tree would be nice, too. After living in houses with lemon trees out the back for 22 years, it really sucked having to start to buy lemons.

royale with(out) cheese

Hamburgers are one of life's simple pleasures, no? When they're good, I mean. Not McDonald's standard. Not supermarket grade, processed-meat pattie standard. No. I mean burgers made using meat of reasonable quality (I'm no snob--it need not be wagyu or organic, grass-fed whatever) and nice bread and toppings.

Sadly, good burgers are hard to find. I'm happy with Grill'd's offerings. And, too, I have a soft spot for The Napier's infamous Bogan Burger (beef, chicken, bacon, egg, beetroot and a hash brown on a pide bun with, too, generous helpings of chips and a green leaf salad). Still, I make them at home sometimes and was happy to see that Larousse had a recipe one offer. It also suggested--and this is further proof of how civilised the French are--that I could load up my burger with either mushrooms or olives. I opted for both.

13. Hamburgers

The patties are a mixture of minced beef (I used King Island beef, as it's readily avaliable, reasonably priced and, even from supermarkets, okay quality), diced onion, chopped parsley, salt, pepper and a single egg (the recipe called for two eggs per 400 grams of meat but from experience I knew this would be excessive). They are fried over a high flame in the same pan as some chopped onion, which later joins the pattie in the burger bun as a garnish.

As mentioned earlier, the recipe suggests all manner of garnishes. I liked the sound of olives and mushrooms.

14. Anna potatoes

You can't seriously consider burgers without potatoes but, really, I wasn't in the mood for fucking around with a saucepan full of oil. No. And too, I've had a few days without any dairy fat, so I think it's time. The recipe for Anna potatoes is a bit gratin. You take some thin slices of potato, brush them all over with melted butter, layer them in a sexy fashion and bake them--covered--for just shy of half a hour at 200 degrees. You then lift the lid and cook them for a further half hour. You could easily, I suppose, sex these up with garlic and rosemary and thyme. In fact, unless you're in bad shape and require the sort of comfort that only soft, buttery potatoes can provide--and these are soothing--I'd recommend doing something like that.

non-larousse cookery: christmas pudding

Been meaning to, for weeks now--well, months--get around to actually making my Christmas pudding. Had the fruit macerating in alcohol for a good while. Could have assembled this ages ago but didn't--largely because of the expense of the ingredients involved and, too, the time committment.

I've never made Christmas pudding before and was confused, I admit, by the myriad of recipes avaliable. Some looked Bad and were discounted straight away. Others looked good ... but very different from other good recipes. A friend picked up a recipe as an apprentice pastry chef and that's what I ended up using, although I scaled the quantities down considerably (well, by five).

Anyway, I used 2 kilograms of dried fruit. The recipe called for currants, sultanas, raisins, candied cherries and mixed peel. I used all of these but, too, some prunes, dates and figs. I macerated the fruit in a combination of cognac and stout (a big can of Guiness) for a few weeks. For good measure, last night, I added a splash of Irish whiskey. Mostly because whisk(e)y is as valid a choice for pudding as brandy. But too, partly because the decision to buy Black Bush rather than regular Bushmills was ill-advised.

Today I combined the above with 350 grams of suet (the real deal is hard to find but I'm told the 'suet mix' sold in supermarkets is okay--I guess we'll find out on Christmas day, right?), 200 grams of sugar (I used pure confectioner's sugar), 8 whole eggs (the recipe says size 55, which supposedly equates to the standard 'large' egg), 150 grams of treacle, 400 grams of breadcrumbs, 3 grams of ground allspice, 3 grams of ground cinnamon and 100 grams of self-raising flour.

I looked for a while--this was part of the delay--for small, cheap dariole moulds or large, cheap pudding basins. Neither existed. Sure. You can buy a dariole mould for two or three dollars a pop but, for the amount of pudding mixture I had, I'd need a lot of them. And I didn't fancy, not one fucking bit, messing around all day, rotating a half dozen dariole moulds. A solution presented itself earlier this week. Lincraft, a store that specialises in materials and etc, was selling calico pudding wraps of varying sizes. Three 90 x 90 cm wraps (turns out I only needed two) cost me just over $2 apiece.

As I write this, I'm beginning the process of boiling the two puddings--one small (for a given definition of small) and one large--for 4-5 hours. Then they'll need to hang somewhere for a couple of days.

more chicken

12. Basque chicken

This is a little different from the Les Halles version, which I've made a few times before.

Basque chicken is one of those dishes that just works for me. Chicken in an easy-to-prepare, rich sauce that's a nice change from all the dairy fat-laden things I've been making lately.

Tonight I worked with bone-in chicken thighs. Two reasons behind that: they're cheaper than boneless thighs and, too, of course, meat cooked on the bone tastes better. The bones adding goodness and awesomeness and etcness to the sauce.

Firstly, I took the chicken thighs, lightly seasoned them with salt and pepper and browned them in a mixture of butter and olive oil. Then turned the heat down and cooked them for about 15-20 minutes. I removed them from the pan, drained the fat from the pan and then deglazed the pan with a splash of white wine (the recipe in the book doesn't ask for this but cleaning the bottom of the pan was necessary).

I then sauteed a large onion (diced). Waited five minutes or so then added 100 g prosciutto (the recipe calls for Bayonne ham but I've never seen that anywhere in Melbourne, so far as I can remember, and Google told me prosciutto is a fine substitute), 2 capsicums (diced) and 2 cloves of garlic (crushed). Waited another five minutes and then added 5 tomatoes (peeled, deseeded and roughly chopped) and a bouqet garni of thyme, parsley and bay. This mixture was sweated with the lid on for 20 minutes.

Overall, the dish was okay. I think the sauce needed to be cooked for longer to get a smoother consistency. That or I could have attacked it with a stick blender. If I had one. Yeah. Too, I should have diced the onion more finely and given the tomato and capsicum more time to break down.

Too, that photo looks like arse.

into double digits

'Stanley: The name of various onion dishes seasoned with curry powder, named after the British explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.'
 - Larousse Gastronomique

11. Sauteed chicken Stanley

Larousse is full of interesting, if useless, tidbits like that and it's one of the many reasons I love it so. Anyway, here's a picture of Sir Stanley, the onion- and curry powder-loving (presumably) colonialist who maybe gave Conrad an idea or two. The horror, the horror.

Stanley's chicken is, again, simple fare. The recipe calls for jointing a whole chicken but given I'm cooking for two a whole chicken is a bit excessive. So: four bucks worth of free range drumsticks. The chicken components are sauteed in dairy fat and then, after a half hour, introduced to right proper quantities of onion and cooked for a while longer. When the chicken is done, it is set aside. Mushrooms are cooked somewhere along the line and, too, set aside. I opted for Swiss browns because, I guess, they were avaliable. The pan in which the chicken was cooked gets deglazed with, of course, of course, of course, double cream. The cream is reduced and strained and then laced with curry powder and chilli powder. Butter is then whisked in.

I like the sauce. It's mild in heat. I think, actually, it would work better with a boiled chicken than the sauteed chicken, although you'd probably want to fry up or roast some chicken bones and giblets to get a sauce of the same quality as this one.

I remember, with the previous sauteed chicken dish, feeling drumsticks were unsuited to cooking this way. I'm still of that onion. Cooking them over a very low heat (the recipe says they're not supposed to be brown) with the lid on, which the recipe didn't actually specify, does make for better drumsticks and as you can maybe see in my crappy photo, they reached the point of falling apart. There was still the odd bit of toughness from connective tissue, though.

12. Glazed carrots

The recipe calls for taking some carrots, placing them in a frying pan and covering them with water laced with butter, sugar and salt. The liquid is bought to a boil and what remains is wonderfully simple: you reduce and reduce and reduce the liquid until you end up with, well, glazed carrots. Said glazed carrots supposedly go well with parsley, chervil, roast meat juices, bechamel sauce and, naturally--this being Larousse after all--butter and cream.

The carrots were okay but, really, they're nothind that'd pull me away from just cooking baby carrots in butter. 

13. Sauteed cooked potatoes

Potatoes are boiled until almost done, cooled, peeled and sliced. Potatoes are then sauteed in a blend of butter and oil for 15 minutes and seasoned with salt, pepper and parsley.

I really liked the potatoes. They came out really crispy and, with the right seasoning, would emerge from the pan as perfect beer food. Too, only good things could happen if you replaced the olive oil and butter with duck fat.

And ...



My knife work is shit. I never thought it was good but, really, that finely sliced parsley on the potatoes is just shamefully bad. The potatoes were nice but the parsley, really, it was like eating grass clippings. I admit I don't work with fresh herbs too often--I don't have a garden where I am at the moment, so fresh herbs means paying $2-3 a pop and, truly, they're generally not that fresh. Luckily, I'll be moving soon and one of the first things I want to do is clear great patches of grass and plant herbs and vegetables.

I need to work on my knife skills and, too, basic things like finely dicing--as opposed to slicing or roughly dicing--onions. Just the most basic shit. I think in the next few weeks that'll be my goal and I'll focus, I guess, on Larousse recipes that will help me develop those skills.

french morrocan

10. Tajine of lamb and broad beans

This morning I woke up and knew--knew--I had to eat lamb tonight. Sweet delicious baby lamb. Wanted it. Needed it.


Haven't been feeling 100% or even 90% lately so this recipe was the friendly sort of preparation I was looking for: chop up some meat, slice an onion, brown said meat and onion and stew said meat and onion until yielding.

The recipe calls for lamb shoulder--one of my favourite cuts. I looked for a kilo or so of rolled shoulder but wasn't able to find any in Safeway's QV store. Looked, too, for shoulder chops. Couldn't find those. Luckily, half leg roasts were on special. I know, I know, I know. Shoulder tastes better. Shoulder is more suited to dishes like this. Shoulder, also, wasn't avaliable when and where I wanted it and I was in no state to go hunting for it.


I cut the meat into cubes and sliced two onions (the recipe called for one but I bought small onions). These were both cooked in a large saucepan for, oh, five minutes or so. The bone was thrown in for good measure. I then added three cloves of garlic (crushed) and gave them a minute or two before adding 500 mL water, freshly ground cumin and paprika. I brought the liquid to the boil then simmered the whole lot, covered, for 35 minutes before adding some fresh broad beans. The beans and meat were simmered for a further 15 minutes.

This dish was bland. I knew from the outset--and didn't care--that the spice mix was inauthentic. That, to me, wasn't the problem, as a dish like this doesn't have to be authentic to be good. I think it would've been better with a bit more cumin and paprika. And, too, homemade lamb stock instead of water.

poulet, poulet

'Archiduc: the name given to French dishes inspired by Austro-Hungarian cuisine at the time of Belle Epoque.'

- Larousse Gastronomique

5. Poulet saute archiduc

Larousse tells me it's very Archiduc to cook things with onions, paprika, brandy, whisky, port and Madeira. I like this Archiduc stuff already. The preparation for chicken described in the poulet saute archiduc recipe is simple and, incidentally, repeated almost verbatim in the chicken entry (although the latter has a slight difference: a splash of stock is added with the cream when preparing the sauce).

The recipe starts off like many of Larousse's chicken recipes. You joint a chicken (I took the lazy route and bought half a dozen drumsticks) and saute the pieces in butter. When they're half done you add some pre-softened onions and the paprika (I opted for a mixture of hot paprika and smoked sweet paprika). When the chicken has cooked through, you set it aside and deglaze the pan with white wine (naturally, still a skint student, I bought six buck utility wine). You reduce the wine and then add--because this wouldn't be a French book without calls for more, more, more dairy fat--150 mL double cream. Reduce the cream and then add some lemon juice and, naturally, a knob of butter. The recipe suggests pairing the dish with cucumber.

6. cooking French beans

French beans are, in Australia at least, more commonly sold as green beans. Larousse suggests a simple preparation and offers a handful of suggestions for enlivening it--for example, you could puree the beans with cream or serve them with anchovies and garlic. I hated green beans as a kid but now I rather like them. They're cheap and easy to cook.

I've always followed Neil Perry's method for preparing green beans. In his excellent book good food, he recommends cooking them until 'all the starch has converted to sugar'. Larousse suggests a slightly shorter cooking time: 3-5 minutes for small beans. I've heard debate over whether one should salt the water when cooking beans (for both fresh and dried beans). Larousse settles the matter: use salt.

7 & 8. Preparation of cucumbers, cucumber salad

I've never thought of salad as involving a single vegetable. Tomato salad, in my experience, is, sure, dominated by tomatoes, but also features garlic and maybe red onion and possibly even basil. Larousse's cucumber salad, though, is a salad of cucumbers.

Oddly, I've never really bothered with cucumbers. No idea why, but I just don't buy them unless I find myself craving freshly made tzatziki--and, mostly, I'm happy with good quality, pre-prepared tzatziki. Anyway. The process is simple. You take cucumbers. You peel cucumbers. You split cucumbers in half lengthways. You de-seed cucumbers.

To make the salad, all you do is slice the cucumbers and season them generously (as they are pretty bland, after all) with mint leaves or vinaigrette.

9. Vinaigrette

Vinaigrette is one of those basic sauces that, I think, everyone should be able to prepare. What's simpler than combining salt with something acidic (say, vinegar or lemon juice), something fatty (say, olive oil or creme fraiche), salt and, perhaps, something else (herbs and/or garlic--Larousse says you could even use mustard).  You put everything in a jar (or, if you're like me, a cup), put the lid (or cling film) over the top and shake it to emulsify it. A couple of minutes work and you're done. Making vinaigrette is a piece of piss and will result in, for sure, a better product than any of that crap that comes in plastic bottles.

I followed Larousse's instruction of a 1:1 acid:fat ratio: the acid being utility white wine vinegar and the fat being utility extra virgin olive oil. I had some chives leftover from the baked potatoes so, naturally, my vinaigrette was destined before it was even born to be a chive vinaigrette (which, coincidentally, Larousse says works well with cucumber salad). I also added a single clove of garlic (crushed) and freshly ground black pepper. Perhaps I was missing the point of the salad but I wanted a vinaigrette with guts.

I think, overall, tonight's menu was okay. The arciduc sauce had a nice but mild hotnes. As for the chicken itself, I should have chosen a better cut: thighs, perhaps, as the connective tissue that runs along the bones didn't fully break down. The beans were crisp and got on well with the vinaigrette--perhaps moreso than the cucumber. The vinaigrette tasted good on its own and, I think, would work nicely in some salads, but the flavour of the cucumbers was too mild to stand up to it. I had too much acid in there. An extra glug or two of oil and I think I'd have had a nicer dressing.