Apparently, many of you have enjoyed reading my French Fridays with Dorie Posts ( http:/www.frenchfridayswithdorie.com ) as much as I have enjoyed preparing them.
Last February I was asked to join an online cooking group that was working its way through Dorie Greenspan’s award-winning cookbook. I purchased her newest blockbuster, Around My French Table, when it was first published in October 2010. To cook my way through it, joined by other foodies from around the world, was a Grand Marnier Soufflé-moment. As good as it gets.
Every Friday we “Doristas” post our assigned recipes to her website and to each of ours. Everyone has a unique take on the recipe and I urge you to check them out here.
Many of you have questioned why I don’t include the recipes. We hope you’ll love these recipes so much, you’ll want to buy the book. In my writer’s world, we call that marketing. But, here’s the SNAP. Google is your friend and many times you can find the recipes on-line. Try Epicurious.com, or do a search for columns Dorie has written or interviews she has given.
Better yet, buy the book.That’s what my friend, Reneé, did, and she is one satisfied customer. “Dorie’s book has a warmth about it, very comforting, it draws you into the book. The recipes are very palpable with wonderful instructions,” she says in her e-mail.
Now Reneé is a pro. She’s forgotten more about cooking than I’ll ever know but she loves this book. What are her favorites?”I have many favorites,” she explains. “Scallops w/ carmel orange sauce, also Salmon and potatoes in a jar, awesome. Thanxs for turning me on to her book”
Here’s an idea, add it to your Christmas or Hanukkah List.
My friend, Consuela, rescuing the seeds from our Pumpkin.
This recipe, Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good, has now clamored to the top of my favorite three recipes since beginning “French Fridays with Dorie” (the others are Tourteau de Chevre and Slow-Roasted Tomatoes). First, it’s a Halloween Hoot to make. Next, it’s Goblin Gorgeous to serve. Lastly, it tastes Devilish Divine.
The Trick: my pumpkin, carefully removed from the oven and cast-iron pot.
The Treat: the”stuff” plus cooked pumpkin, bubbly and ready-to-eat.
Begin with a three-pound pumpkin. Yes, that’s fairly small. Carve the potiron (Fr. m.). Remove the innards (Do not even think of giving this pumpkin a face – just won’t work,). My friend, Consuela, was helping me last Tuesday when I made this dish. She couldn’t wait to get her hands “inside” to salvage the pumpkin seeds which she took home to roast.
Assemble the “stuff with everything good” which includes bread, three cheeses, bacon (Trader Joe’s turkey bacon) and scallions. Add some spooky spices: cloves, thyme and garlic. After mixing it together, pack “the stuff” into the pumpkin. Now is when you might choose to improvise, experiment and substitute with, what you consider, “everything good“. Next time, I might include dried fruit. Or, spinach. Or, trade bacon for sausage. Go “Casper the Ghost” crazy. In this recipe, anything goes.
Stir nutmeg into heavy cream and pour it over the mixture. To be honest, I used twice the cream Dorie suggested. There is a reason she’s bone thin and I am not!
Cook at 350 degrees for two hours, on a cookie sheet (it will lose its shape) or in a cast iron pot (Le Creuset – my choice). Take it to the table, intact, and serve in slices. For a light evening meal, I included a green salad and robust red wine. A new signature dish for my Autumn meals, for sure.
Bonnes fêtes d’Halloween to all my “French Friday with Dorie” followers.
Go Crazy. Go Walking. Go 10,000 Steps. Photo by chewthefataway.blogspot.com
SNAP # 14 – A PEDOMETER
Last week-end my family joined me to celebrate my birthday. Among the many gifts they gave me, there is one I wear everyday: a Pedometer. While my daughter insists she is sending no subliminal message with this present, she did include explicit instructions.
MOM:
1. Wear your Pedometer everyday, all day.
2. Keep a daily log of your steps in a tiny notebook. (She supplied me with the notebook and pen.)
3. Try to walk 10,000 Steps a Day.
She explained that the entire family is wearing Pedometers (True, I checked.) However, her husband, a lawyer, does not wear his Pedometer in Court.
This week I peaked at 17,000 steps (my friend, Ardyth and I walked the 4-mile Loop) and bottomed out, on Monday, at only 4500 steps.
It may not be your birthday but buy the cheapest and simplest Pedometer you can find. Make “Steps” your Mission. You’ll feel better and happier.
When Martin Sloboda was sixteen years old, he gathered, with the thousands of protesters pictured above, in SNP Square in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. It was November 17, 1989, the night before International Students Day, which, that year, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of Jan Opletal, a Czech medical student. During World War Two, the martyred Opleta, who was participating in a student peace march, was shot seven times by the Nazis. Following that protest, the German occupiers reacted by ransacking the dormitories, shuttering universities, executing nine students and sending over one thousand students and professors to concentration camps.
Fifty years later, Sloboda, along with other Bratislava high school and university students, organized a peaceful demonstration in the center square. If you remember, after the Nazi loss, the Russians triumphed, taking over the country and ruling it with a hammer and sickle . That there was an assembled crowd at all was a big no-no in Iron Curtain countries. The local Communist Party’s armed forces were put on alert while the students moved somewhat peacefully through the city.
With local street protests increasing in size, along with the collapse of other Warsaw Pact governments, the Czech Communist Party relinquished power and dismantled the single-party state. To the Czechs, the November 17-December 29, 1989, revolution is called the Velvet Revolution.The Slovaks prefer the name, Gentle Revolution (nežná revolúcia). Whatever your choice, within six weeks, Czechoslovakia joined other eastern and central Europe in freeing themselves from Communist domination.
What is even more astounding is three years after the revolution Czechoslovakia split peacefully into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Bratislava, near the Danube River, on a warm October day. Photo by Arthur Serating
Do You Remember 1989? George H.W. Bush was President. “Seinfeld: premiered on television. Slugger Pete Rose agreed to a lifetime ban from baseball. A Friday the 13th mini-crash brought the Dow tumbling to 2569.26. The Berlin Wall fell. Nintendo’s “Game Boy” was released in North America. “Breathing Lessons” by Anne Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Mikhail Gorbachev was named the Time Man of the Decade. The Last Soviet Union armored column left Kabul, ending 9 years of military occupation. We Baby Boomers were in our mid-40s. The first Global Positioning System satellites were placed into orbit. The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a disaster. “Rain Man” won the Academy Award for best film. Protests began in Tiananmen Square. The post-Cold War Period, characterized by American dominance in world affairs, began.
Today, the 37-year old Sloboda, who has a wife and two children, lives in Bratislava, belongs to Rotary, joined “Linkedin” recently and owns a Leisure, Travel & Tourism Business. He is an author, guide, photographer, lecturer, travel consultant and event coordinator, focusing on promoting Slovakia as an attractive tourist destination. In 2007, during the European Union’s 50th Anniversary in Berlin, Sloboda was selected into the European Union Panorama of ” 27 True Europeans” representing Slovakia among 27 member states.
I met this young Slovakian entrepreneur when he addressed our touring group during a day’s visit in Bratislava, the capital city. No longer a “freedom fighter”, although he had taken his share of abuse during the Soviet occupation, Sloboda, casually dressed in a polo shirt and blue jeans, spoke perfect English and was bursting with pride over his country’s progress the past 18 years since the Czech/Slovak split.
“Were we scared?”, he said, replying to a question from his audience.
Although noting that the student demonstrators in Prague were severely beaten back by riot police, he shrugged, adding, “Nah. We were kids. We were invincible.”
Reminiscing that his grandparents survived Nazism and his parents and siblings lived under Communism, he admitted, as a youth, to chafing at the restrictive lifestyle. “If things went wrong during these protests, we were putting not only ourselves but our families at risk,” he admits. “When we cut classes, our teachers knew where we were. Our parents even knew where we were. No one stopped us. I don’t think they could have stopped us”
Unwilling to dwell on the past, he’s eager to tout the virtues and strengths of Slovakia, a country that in 1997 was called by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “the black hole in the heart of Europe.”
OUCH!
Those were fighting words to the Slovaks who, in 2004, joined the European Union and in 2009, because of their growing economic prowess, were invited to adopt the Euro currency, beating “bigger bordering brothers”, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic who still use the forint, zloty and koruna. Therefore, this tiny land-locked country of 5.5 million, the second-poorest in the Euro Zone, sits at the table with a vote as powerful as the other 16 members, including France and Germany.
When I was in Slovakia, the jury was still out on whether their government was going to approve, like the other 16 EU members, a collective EU bailout fund to guarantee the debt of their richer neighbors like Greece, Spain and Italy. Although the Slovakian parliament did eventually pass the measure, the Slovakian people are outraged.
Nicholas Kulish, an International Herald Tribune reporter, relates the following:
In a television advertisement for the popular Slovak beer, Alzty Bazant, a grinning Greek man with a paunch stands on a sunny beach, nodding his head, as the narrator says, “To want to borrow from everyone: That is Greek.” The ad then cuts to a skinny Slovak man, standing in a field, who shakes his head back and forth. “To not want to lend to anyone,” the narrator says, “That is Slovak.”
Is it just me or does much of this sound familiar?
Bronze Sewer Sculpture. Slovaks have Fun. Photo by Arthur Serating.
Judy and I chatting with Napoleon in Bratislava. He’s fine.
Queue français in a Sanary-sur-Mer boulangerie to purchase, perhaps, a baguette, Pan Bagnat or Slice of Pissaladière. September 2011
My first taste of Pissaladière, a carmelized onion and anchovy tart, was 15 years ago at the Aspen home of my friend, Sistie. Sistie’s dinner invitations are treasured because she is a terrific chef, a made-from-scratch cook. Her appetizer that Winter evening was this tart, a concoction that requires time, patience and effort (a yeast dough and long caramelizing process).
When she lifted the baking sheet to place the tart on a platter, the sheet tipped and the tart hit the floor. Besides being a talented chef, Sistie is a fastidious housekeeper. So, another guest, Renée, just scooped up the now-disheveled Pissaladière and plopped it on the platter. It was delicious. We enjoyed it all-the-more because of its circuitous “oven-floor-table-mouth” journey.
The Real Deal – a classic Pissaladière. Photo by Georges Vernon and Margaret Skinner
Pissaladière is a treasured Provençal staple and is sold, by the slice, in every boulangerie in the South of France. Because of it’s name, I think of it as the “Frenchman’s Pizza”. However, its’ name actually derives from the anchovy paste, pissala, that is mixed into the sweet-tasting onion mixture to take it’s flavor ‘up a notch’.
My Version, without the decorative crosshatched-patterned anchovies
This is not a recipe for the faint-of-heart. As I said, making Pissaladière is an involved challenge but can be made-ahead, in parts, and thrown together later. Do not substitute puff pastry for the dough.
This week, I made this classic French tart, along with a salad and glass of wine, as a light dinner, and served it to my friend (and, good sport), Bill. Although I put anchovies into the onion mixture, I didn’t add the anchovy decorative crosshatch topping, suspecting it might be anchovy-overload for him. Trying to be positive, he remarked five times throughout the dinner how “delicious” the crust was, “just perfect”, he said.
Pissaladière is an “acquired” taste, I believe. Although he is French, he clearly, at this point-in-time, hasn’t reached the “acquired” stage! This is a classic French recipe that every wannabe amateur baker should try and Dorie simplifies this recipe better than any other I’ve seen.
Bonne Chance
Along with a green salad, a lovely light dinner
To finish the meal, a perfect autumn dessert, rustic apple tart.
