Merging Dorie Greenspan’s Chicken Recipes

When I was putting together the menu and looking at chicken recipes in Around My French Table, I found myself deep in indecision . . . so many delicious recipes! Hmmm, why not make a little Frankenrecipe? Why not, indeed.

I wanted to use the technique she describes in “Chicken in a Pot”, where the chicken is browned, vegetables are browned, and after these are placed in a dutch oven, a basic flour-and-water dough is made and placed around the rim of the pot and the lid squished down for oven cooking. The dough is more craft-project than edible, but I used a gluten free blend just in case we could use it later to sop up juices (we couldn’t; it was like eating Christmas tree ornaments):



Thankfully there is a picture of this on the cover of her book, because not one of my phone-photos is even viewable!



I had lovely organic prunes on hand and was fascinated by her recipe “M. Jacques’ Armagnac Chicken”, so this formed the base of my ingredient set – prunes, cognac, potatoes, onions, carrots. However, her “Hurry-Up and Wait” chicken had enticingly mentioned lifting up the skin and pushing in some herbed butter . . . and I still had some of that truffle salt . . . backtracking a bit, the ingredients:




Chicken ready to go in the oven:




Note the lovely truffle-salted-butter peeking out from under the skin!

This was understandably quite delicious. Clara commented, “I don’t remember ever thinking that carrots were so delicious that I’d eat as many of them as I could get”. Really all of those roasted vegetables were quite transformed. An amazing dish.







 

Boeuf à la Mode with Pumpkin Gorgonzola Flans

Boeuf à la Mode is the French version of roast beef . . . a way to make a less expensive cut of meat elevated. This version is from Around My French Table.

The beef was placed in our dutch oven overnight with wine, carrots, celery, and fresh herbs wrapped in a bundle. I had to send children out in the dark with a flashlight in the rain to collect the herbs – I would have done this, but they got so extremely excited about this adventure that I didn’t have the heart to say no. The beef is turned now and then the next day. About three hours before dinnertime, the beef is removed and browned in a skillet while the wine sauce is strained and reduced by half. More seasonings are added, and to the pan where the beef browned is added a half-cup of the wine sauce, four anchovies (!) and a little tomato paste, until the anchovies melt. I was enthralled by the addition of the anchovies for umami. What would it taste like? A tiny bit of cognac was added for depth, as well. Then the whole thing was put back in the dutch oven, and into the oven.

While I did take pictures of the beef, I did not notice that the batteries were almost dead, and every last picture was so blurry as to be unrecognizable. Still, you’ve seen roast beef, right? It was very good. Perfectly melty fork-tender, and if you listened to your tastebuds, they picked up all sorts of complicated notes. I was thinking about our recent “Meals in Minutes” roast beef, and I decided I was glad to have both recipes for obviously different times and purposes. I do have one note-to-self here: this dish longed for some little red potatoes added when the whole shebang gets put in the oven. There is plenty of time for them to cook, and while we definitely ate the sauce, potatoes would’ve been just the thing. Or colorful fingerling potatoes if they were available.

Also from this book, we made Pumpkin Gorgonzola Flans because it is October and cold!!! This was a quick-to-put-together little concoction of pumpkin fluffed in the food processor with seasonings, ladled into ramekins with gorgonzola and theoretically walnuts (we roasted up some pecans because that’s what Clara is safe for), and cooked in a water bath (with, oddly enough, a paper towel):




As I mentioned, my batteries were about to die, but here is a fuzzy pic of a finished flan:

Don’t you wish I’d photoshop my pictures like other food bloggers? I should totally get rid of the pumpkin splotches on the ramekin!

Both Sophia and Clara helped me to get this dinner to the table, bless them. Sophia even found the energy somewhere to help the little girls do a “Sugar Saturday”. We had found some actual Key Limes at our local Asian food store, so we picked up gluten-free graham crackers as well and the girls made Key Lime Pie:

They’d never made pie before, and we all found their first attempt at a pie delicious. It was based on the recipe found in The Essential Baker, just altered to be gluten free.




  

Oeufs en Cassolette Dijonnaise

I was looking for something quick for this Vendredis, since I’m coming down to the wire getting school stuff together – our homeschool year starts up Monday. Eggs to the rescue. I had chosen this particular dish because I wanted to use The Cuisine of the Rose , which covers in particular the cuisine of Burgundy and Lyonnais, and because it just had a classic set of ingredients – shallots, mustard, cream, white wine, and that lovely anise-y fresh tarragon.

My little pie bird is in there just because I like him and he keeps me company

Some notes here about duck eggs: I hadn’t thought this through, and when I went to the stove I switched to chicken eggs, which we happened to have in the house, fortunately. Usually we don’t, but the Patriarch sometimes uses our duck eggs for bartering-for-fish purposes, highly approved in this kitchen :-). Duck eggs are fresh and flavorful and useful for almost everything, but we’ve noticed that in a boiling situation they’re just strange. Size comparison to chicken eggs (the store chicken eggs are size “large” and are the brown ones):

We have Welsh Harlequin ducks, four of them, who provide us with over 2 dozen eggs a week. This breed theoretically doesn’t lay colored eggs, but as you can see, we sometimes get a green or blue-ish one, which is fun.

The shallots/wine/cream/tarragon/mustard is cooked over low heat for about ten minutes, the eggs are poached, the sauce is spooned over the top, fresh minced parsley sprinkled over all, and dinner is served. Not enough for my menfolk at ALL so they grabbed sandwiches, but surprisingly filling for the rest of us (doesn’t look like enough at all, does it?)

I think this would make a lovely luncheon dish, and this is what the cookbook author Mireille Johnston recommended. I’d like to try other flavorways she has with eggs, so you might see the general dish again.

Sweet Potato & Carrot Pancakes, Beet & Quinoa Tabouli

Lots of color here! A crazy running day, and feeling worse and worse before my iron infusions began. I corralled Clara to help in the kitchen. Apparently trying to wear the library’s copy of La Tartine Gourmande to shreds, I chose two more dishes. The sweet potato and carrot pancakes were similar to any zucchini pancake or potato pancake we’ve had, but were very sweet due to the nature of the vegetables. My niece was visiting, and I was thinking it would be a child-friendly-veg dish. It did not disappoint – well, not in the rate at which it disappeared, but they did fall apart quite badly no matter how we adjusted the heat. Still. We figured, “who cares, since they’re delicious?”



The quinoa tabouli was amazing, although frankly it looked a little bit like raw ground beef visually. The combination of earthy beets and feta cheese in this salad is brilliant. Again we substituted cashews for pinenuts; Clara pan-roasted them, and little cherry tomatoes are added for a pop of juicy.




Both excellent dishes. Definite make-agains.






 

Lemon Honey Chicken with Tomatoes & Haricot Verts

Why I don’t just buy a copy of La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life is a mystery at this point. I’m sure hogging a library copy, eh? This one was very good, too. Although it is going to look pretty simple on this webpage, the flavor combination was new to all of us and very, very good. A dish that sort of slowed the world down and took us somewhere else while we ate.

I couldn’t find haricot verts and so used regular beans, but they were quite fresh. The author called for zebra tomatoes, which were so not available here. But again, at least fresh ripe tomatoes are available at this time of year. I’ve got glorious oregano still in my herb bed, although sadly had to buy fresh parsley as that’s all gone.

The chicken is marinated first, just for 30 minutes, then the dish is oven-done. The combination of the beans and kalamata olives and herbs with the chicken was pretty outrageously good.

She does have a similar recipe on her blog if you’d like to try it. She doesn’t specify olives there – black kalamata olives were perfect, and you might like trying a tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley, as well. The blog version also is missing 3 minced garlic cloves! Quelle horreur!




Awaiting a starch:



Such a good book.





 

Lost Week . . . a Reconstruct

So . . . wow. Last week the score was something like, lymphoma 7, Kimberly 0. I didn’t even get the menu up on the chalkboard, although it was jotted on our paper menu on the fridge.

Someone was cleaning the kitchen and tossed that paper menu in the recycling, too! But here’s what I remember, jogged by the pics from my camera:

When last I blogged, it was a Wild Card Wednesday, and a delicious one, too. Next up was a “Fennel-Flavored Squash Soup” and “Thyme-Roasted Chicken”. These were both from The Food and Flavors of Haute Provence by Georgeann Brennan. That was a very challenging day, and Nigel offered to make dinner. I took him up on it, so he did the chicken but not the soup. No picture even, but the recipe was just salting and peppering a whole chicken, rubbing with olive oil, and stuffing the cavity with fresh garden thyme before roasting. Very very simple, good for when one is directing a son in cooking. He made potatoes to go alongside, and we called it good.

Littlest guy had a birthday, so we skipped our regular “Sugar Saturday”. In fact, we skipped two of ‘em. I made him birthday cupcakes, but didn’t use our regular cupcake book and the whole thing was so hilariously bad. The idea was this: vanilla cupcakes, strawberry buttercream frosting, spider web on the top with a candle to blow out. He doesn’t actually have any safe/allowed foods to make a cake at all – this is just for the candle to blow out, then someone else eats the cake. Does that seem cruel? It’s actually their choice – the little girls have always wanted us to make cakes on their birthdays that they can’t eat. Well, the frosting sort of liquidified, the candle fell over into the “web”; yikes.




From the 30th of July through the 3rd of August . . . that’s a week I just vaguely remember. There aren’t pictures from Monday or Friday. I went back on Zofran for the nausea, and it makes me so loopy and forgetful! Thankfully I did get a couple of pictures from Wednesday, because it was good and also pretty easy.

The recipe was “Chicken Paprikás” from Staff Meals from Chanterelle . The recipe called for both hot and sweet paprika, and I only had sweet paprika. I think to have both would be yet more delicious. This recipe starts with caramelizing onions and garlic, then pan-browning a cut-up whole chicken, then cooking over time in paprika, tomato, spices, and adding sour cream in at the end.





 
Other than that . . . I don’t remember! I’m going to try to not lose a week again. But sometimes the lymphoma doesn’t play fair.






 

Marjoram Ricotta Zucchini Tart

My kitchen is kitted out from thrift stores. I’ve been incredibly blessed to find everything from an electric grain grinder, a Bosch blender/mixer, two All-Clad pans, Corning Ware, down to much of my cookbook collection. I love to research reviews on Amazon (as y’all know), but then I watch my local thrifts. Well, I’d had a tart tin in the Amazon cart for awhile. Reviews had me being all picky about the brand, though . . . “this is the one you want, from France” advised one reviewer. I’m sure you know where this story is going! A couple of days before I made this last menu I found a pristine tart tin in the very brand recommended by Amazon reviewers. Naturally a tart went onto this menu!

A problem with tarts around here, of course, is making the tart shell without gluten. I still had La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life home from the library, and I noted that not only does she have several different gluten-free shell recipes, but had an interesting zucchini tart recipe as well. Sadly, the book went back to the library so I can’t report which crust I used! It involved millet flour, amaranth flour, and brown rice flour, so while it was gluten free, it was not Paleo and I’d like to refine it. What the recipe was was outrageously delicious.

Gluten free crust came out very well for being gluten free! After it was pre-baked, a ricotta/herb mixture was spread across the bottom of the tart:



Then sliced zucchini and Gruyère were alternated. This was supposed to have yellow and green zucchini alternating, which would have made it more gorgeous for sure, but my shoppers couldn’t find any yellow zucchini this week. And I’d already grated the last of our Gruyère, so I just put it in that way rather than the slices the recipe called for:



Baked in the oven, and oh yum. Pretty sweet dish with the ricotta and zucchini, and it reheated so well that next time I will definitely need to double this for more leftovers!



Good way to break in my new French tart tin.



 

Gratin de Courgettes et Tomates, and a Moroccan Bread

I have a bread cookbook that I used to use all the time back in the 1970s when I was . . . not a hippy, really, I was too young for that . . . let’s just say I was a gauze peasant shirt/sandal wearing vegetarian whose big vacation was attending a weeklong “midwifery skills workshop” and though in nursing school and then being a nurse, relied personally on a cupboard of herbs. And yes, I’m aware that is a mondo run-on sentence.

Anyway, the bread book is still one of my favorite books. And yes, I still have a copy of “Laurel’s Kitchen”, but I digress. It’s called The Garden Way Bread Book: A Baker's Almanac . I didn’t buy bread at that time, but used their “Farmhouse Potato Bread” recipe for my everyday bread. I thought of this book when I was thinking about something to round out a veg gratin, and what looked like it would suit was a recipe called “Moroccan Sesame Anise Bread”. Pretty straightforward – mixed whole and plain flour, and the mentioned spices. Dough:



And baked:




I didn’t use an egg-white wash, listed as optional. This is a really blurry pic, sorry, but wanted to show you that it’s a fairly tight/dense crumb:




I took one bite to be able to discuss it! Good bread, and really well suited to a dish like the gratin, for sure. The anise comes through, not obnoxiously, but I didn’t get a sesame hit at all. I’d like to play with that if I make it again. A bit of sesame oil or perhaps grinding some of the seeds.

The gratin was again from Bistro Cooking . We were debating at the dinner table whether this should be called a gratin, since there were no potatoes, or a ratatouille. Perhaps the addition of a cup of parmesan argues more for the former than latter. It was very simple (at least if you own a mandoline) and a very summery dish. Thyme was sprinkled about the top of the veg:




I utterly forgot to get a pic of the finished dish! I doubled the recipe for my big family, and we had about half a pan left for lunches. It re-warms just fine on the stovetop (we don’t have a microwave so I can’t weigh in on how it would re-warm there).
Very summery meal. A fruity drink would have gone well, but Sophia and I were also giving the goats a haircut through cooking dinner, so nothing extra on that night!