Great Greek green beans!

Three years ago, BE, we both went to the first Crete-Princeton Reading Group in, er, Crete. Crete is well-known for its cuisine, and it's true that we ate very well. Voula kindly gave us this book at the end of the trip:

The recipes all look delicious, some of them for Greek classics such as Moussaka, Soutzoukakia, Smoked Pork (something I remember really well from Crete), but also some less well-known dishes such as 'brawn made from a pig's head', 'snails with wheat grains', 'lamb with hylopites' (sounds like a nasty venereal disease). We had already discovered with this cookbook that you can find yourself dealing with a recipe which gives you little guidance: we had done courgette fritters (kolokithokeftedes) and stuffed vegetables (gemistes) for a Greek evening after that Cretan trip, and ended up making up most of those recipes...

This time, we did Greek-style green beans:

Start by chopping onion and parsley (parsley was our addition): 

 Then prepare 500g of fresh tomatoes - I blanched, peeled, and chopped them:

Then, wonderfully, put half a cup of olive oil in a pan (I think I cut back to about 1/3 cup because we had fewer beans that the recipe specified):

Followed by the onions:

Sauté (for how long? it doesn't say) and add beans, then (when? straightaway?) the tomatoes:

Then cook for 45 minutes, adding (if wished) some potatoes at the halfway mark:

To go with our beans, we had grilled marinated chicken breasts, Italian style:

 Here is the finished plate, complete with an oil slick that would make BP proud:

 We also had bread and olives on the side, to heighten the Greek feeling:

The bean dish was good, but the potatoes were not really done enough. Next time, I think I'll do the dish in a smaller pan, so that the potatoes are fully submerged while they are cooking. And I'll probably cook the whole dish longer than the recommended 45 minutes. And I'll substitute lamb for the beans (just kidding on that last one).

Parmigiana di melanzane

This entry is a little out of order. It's supposed to come after the Roubouchon recipe but before the Patricia Wells recipe (second time around). Benjamin was pretty busy at work at the time so I took an executive decision to make (what I knew was one of his favourites) Eggplant Parmesan from one of his cookbooks, called Soffrito! I find it difficult to really do much of any cooking while looking after the Monster, but I had decided I would make this during her nap. Because surely she would take a long nap. And even though her naps are in the afternoon, this dish is designed to be eaten at room temperature. Not straight out of the oven. Perfect. Slight problem: it was MUCH more convoluted than I had thought it would be - not to mention Evelyn decided she was only going to sleep for about an hour that day. So I had hardly got stuck in before babysitting duties commenced again. Hmmm.

So as this was done a few weeks ago I remember now that I had to fry the eggplant slices in several batches. I remember Evelyn tugging at my trousers to play and I remember being worried about the eggplant spitting grease and burning her so I was trying desperately to get her interested in something else. Anything other than sitting or standing near me while trying to fry all those eggplant slices - and man, there seemed a lot. Anyway - in the excitement of it all I completely forgot to take pictures. Doh! But I can imagine it went something like this. Slice your eggplant:

Then fry those perfect slices in several batches without burning your baby:

Construct your layers of eggplant, tomatoes, mozzarella, provolone, basil and parmesan. I looked on the internet for someone in action doing this but struggled so you'll just have to take my word for it. Here is what the final product is supposed to look like (picture taken from Soffrito): 

Although I didn't take any pictures of the process my husband was on the ball enough to take a picture of the end result after we'd eaten half of it.

Let's face it. I am pretty honest because it could have been sooooo easy to put something like this up:

Anyway, it was pretty darn good and I'd definitely want to do the dish again. However I REALLY didn't enjoy the skin of the eggplants at all. I had to remove all the skins so as to enjoy the dish. Which was a bit of a pain really. Apparently one can't remove the skins before frying because then the eggplant would fall apart. Not sure how you get around this but that would be my only major complaint. 

Oh! I can't believe I almost forgot to put up a picture of the wine we had that evening. I will have to leave Ben to talk about the merits of this wine but I can tell you I enjoyed it very much.

Born with a silver spoon?

Our next book is a large compendium of Italian recipes, written 'in the old style', that's to say, with a minimum of instruction.

In this case, though, the cause is not that the book itself is old, but that the publishers obviously wanted to have each recipe formatted to exactly half a page:

No doubt for some recipes, you can describe what to do in such a short space. For others, I'm not so sure. This recipe was actually quite well-written, although there were some puzzles. It's for a slow roasted leg of lamb, 'à la Périgourdine'. First puzzle: what does that mean? Literally, it means 'in the Périgord fashion'. Périgord is in France:

According to the internet, cooking something à la Périgourdine normally means preparing it using either foie gras or truffles. But this recipe has neither ingredient!

Anyway, McCaffrey's didn't have a bone-in leg of lamb, so I bought a butterflied leg and trussed it up:

The cooking started with browning the meat all over on the stove-top:

Then I poured a little brandy in the pan, and ignited it:

OK, at this point, Katherine took an amazing video of the pan flaming away. Except that I handed her the camera while it was actually filming and she didn't realise, so she pressed the record button (thus stopping the filming) and pressed it again at the end of the drama (thus starting it up again). Anyway, after that excitement, I added the aromatics: celery, onion, garlic, parsley, clove. Oh, I nearly forgot: and a full bottle of white wine:

All that was left to do was tent it up tightly, in preparation for its long roasting (in fact, isn't it really braising?):

OK, I was economical with the truth earlier on. I actually forgot to throw in the garlic with all the other aromatics, so I actually added the garlic after an hour and a half. And since the lamb was off the bone, we roasted it for a mere 4 hours, not 5. Out it came, and it was so tender it was just falling apart:

We did creamy mashed potatoes and crunchy beans in olive oil with salt and pepper too:

I strained the cooking juices and thereby got a beautiful jus, rather sharp (from the white wine) but very unctuous:

And in our haste to eat, we forgot to take pictures of the plated meal. But the dish was a success: surprisingly, it wasn't too rich. The other puzzle about the recipe is that they suggested that a good dish to accompany it would be zucchini purée. That sounded really good, but when I looked for the recipe in the book, there was none. Maybe it would be impossible to write the recipe in half a page, so they had to exclude it.

So good we had it twice

The next recipe book comes with happy memories since it reminds Katherine and me of one of our first holidays together! It's Patricia Wells: At Home in Provence.

In fact, I have a signed copy of the book, signed not by the author but by her alter ego:

We have done several recipes already from the book, and so the rules of the game dictate that we have to do a new one. So we decided on Maria's Ginger Shrimp:

 This recipe demands a lot of ginger and a lot of garlic:

You're supposed to slice the garlic, but that isn't really visible from the picture. Anyway, you also have to devein and shell the shrimp:

Before

2 hours later (not pictured: several glasses of wine)

I chose to use the shrimp shells to make a little shrimp jus to add to the dish:

Now for frying the garlic and ginger, and adding nearly a whole bottle of white wine:

Still no shrimp in the dish! You reduce that mixture until only about a cup remains. Only then do you add the shrimp, just tossing them in the hot broth:

Chiffonade some basil:

Then dish up, putting the shrimp on rice, and decorating with the basil:

Delicious! We had it again a couple of weeks later, this time with linguine, and it was even better. So thank you, Judy! Seven years later, and Provençal Patty is still coming up trumps!

Robuchon! Three months late!

Famously, In Diamonds are Forever, James Bond told Tiffany Case that she must be able "to make Sauce Béarnaise as well as love".

I think she's preparing to chop the tarragon

Bond meant that she should be able to make Sauce Béarnaise as skillfully as she makes love. But that's easy! After all, making love takes only three minutes, so Sauce Béarnaise should be quick and easy too, right?

Well, Joël Robuchon's recipe "Grilled Salmon with Béarnaise Sauce" seemed easy enough.

After all, it only took half a page:

Then I realised that it referred back to the Sauce Béarnaise recipe, which is three pages, albeit with an interesting little historical note about how no one knows where the sauce originated.

The principle behind the sauce is that you combine vinegar, shallots, tarragon, and black pepper, reduce, then whisk into egg yolk in a bain-marie, and incorporate clarified butter, like making a mayonnaise. See, easy! Along the way, there are helpful tips such as this: 'In the end, if you trace a curve in the sauce with a whisk, you should be able to see the bottom of the pot' (just like making love: 'In the end, if you ******* a ****** in the **** with a *******, you should be able to see the bottom of the ******').

I'm not sure I really succeeded with the sauce. I clarified the butter OK:

And I reduced down the shallots, vinegar, tarragon, and pepper with finesse:

And I separated out the egg yolks fine:

Then it's all a blur. The next photo is of the finished sauce:

Robuchon says you should strain it; this sauce was far too thick to go through any strainer. Maybe it was 'broken' (Robuchon's term, not mine), meaning that 'its components separate instead of staying together in a uniform emulsion'. I think mine was on the brink of breaking.

The rest of the meal was uneventful. We had potatoes:

And grilled salmon:

 And spinach. Note to self: wet spinach and crispy potatoes should not be put on the same plate!

Béarnaise is good with steaks too. Maybe one day I'll make it again to go with grilled steaks. We'll probably end up having Béarnaise once or twice a year (INSERT JOKE HERE).