Autumn's arrival

Apologies to anybody who actually reads this thing-- there's been plenty of cool stuff to write about lately, but time and motivation have been limited. Kind of literary constipation.

Maybe this post will be a move towards restored regularity.

My folks are in town, and so I've cooked for us a few times. Nothing fancy, but it's always fun to have people to experiment on. Since I was to cook last night, I went to the Prez Wilson market early in the morning before meeting my dad for some patrimonying.

No, I wasn't going to roll him for his retirement funds.

France opens up a bunch of its governmental holding to the public for touring each year, which is known as the patrimoine.

The French have had an love-hate relationship with the extravagances of their various rulers (monarchs, emperors), and with a lot of those extravagances being architectural or artistic treasures, it would be a waste to let them just degenerate, yet France is so lousy with the things, they can't all really support being tourist museums, either. So the government uses a lot of amazing old chateau or palaces for their digs, and for a few days each year, the public shows up to see these normally off-limits sites, and maybe to check up on the government, too. And boy do they show up-- the line to get into the Palais Elysees, the French White House, basically, had a line over half a mile long and about 6 people across. There were over 100 sites open in Paris, and other sites across France included places like this or this, both local govt offices in the Limoges region. We met in the 8e to see the Palais Elysees, but I got us into the wrong line and so we saw the ministry of the interior (Hôtel de Beauvau; not a hotel in the English sense, as one of the foreigners in line asked me, but a public building or mansion in the French sense), instead. Then we went to the 7e and saw the Italian embassy, a smaller mansion with genuinely spectacular interiors and garden and the Hôtel de Clermont, home to the ministry for relations (as in, "I did not have relations with that woman?") with parliament. All told, a pretty enjoyable morning and early afternoon, and we came home with pamphlets from each stop and even a souvenir DVD from the ministry of the interior.

Anyway, I had a lot of mutually exclusive ideas about what to cook for dinner, and as usually happens in that situation, I wound up coming home with way too much stuff and nothing appropriate for any of the original ideas. I blame the change of seasons. Even though the temps have stayed nice, we've clearly crossed the summer-fall food line. And I wasn't expecting such a rapid change.

First thing that tripped me up was the winter squash at Joel Thiebault's stand. I love winter squash. In fact, I've only ever encountered 1 winter squash I didn't like, and that was my first week in Paris, apotiron, a gargantuan orange squash they sell here by the wedge, since a whole one would feed the entire city of Paris. For a month. Maybe it was just a bad piece, but I made several days' worth of pasta sauce with it, and it was just nasty, with strong flavor of ... well, I still don't know, but something really objectionable. I don't really make it a point of sampling objectionable tastes, so my library is a little small, there.

So the bounty of different squashes on the back stand definitely had my interest. And since I've already learned that I have no idea what the squashes here taste like, I decided to try 2. Not the sucrine, which looked a dead-ringer for butternut, but 2 rather squat, wide varieties, one intensely green, the other the color of a butternut. I figured they had to be at least a little different from each other, and hopefully at least one of them would be edible.

The next find that derailed my plans was the availability everywhere of fresh cépes.

A cépe and its equivalent in 1-euro coins.

Quoi? Cépes-- porcini mushrooms. Or something like porcini mushrooms, since cépe can be used more generically for wild mushrooms. When we bike in Italy in the fall, it's always porcini season, and we often ride past porcini hunters. I absolutely love the things, but they're virtually impossible to buy fresh in the States. But as I said, they were everywhere yesterday at the market. They ranged from 12 euros per kilo (can't possibly be the desirable species that fall under that name) to 40 euros per kilo ($59 at the current painful exchange rate), so there's a lot on the line as you pick your vendor. I decided to try my potato-and-mushroom lady. Gotta figure that since that's all she does, they'd be killer. I bought 4. For $25. They'd better be killer...

And in fact, there was a little concern about that, because when I got home after the patrimonying, I noticed that one of the cépes was decidedly green on the underside of the cap, and it really didn't look much like the other 3 at all. I'm no mycologist, but I know that eating the wrong mushroom can go really badly for you, and I realized that offing my parents in Paris would probably fall pretty far on the low end of the bad-son/good-son scale, so I put the green one back in the bag to deal with later and used one of the good ones for an appetizer of fresh tagliatelle in a cépes cream sauce. Simple, delicate, let the flavor of the mushroom come through. The cépe was milder (wimpier?) than the porcini we eat in Italy, but it was still a nice mushroom. Having baked off both squashes (in quarters), I used half of the tan one for a squash puree to accompany the pork we had for the main course, since it was sweeter and moister than the green one. The rest of the squash, some leftover spinach, the mushrooms, and a big bag of band-sawed veal bones from the "crépine" butcher got stuffed into my tiny French refrigerator after considerable reorganizing.

Today, feeling a cold coming on and so not up for carousing, I set about emptying that fridge of leftovers, a kind of fall cleaning. The drier squash seemed a perfect candidate for either a pasta stuffing or gnocchi, just as I'd usually use a sweet potato. With a freezer already full of eggplant agnolotti, I made a big batch of squash gnocchi to keep the eggplant company: "rice" the squash by pushing it through a strainer, make a well, add an egg, some flour, seasonings (salt, pepper, nutmeg), cut that all in with a pastry scraper, form gnocchi, and freeze. Freeze 2 lbs, in fact. With a lamb or duck ragu, or just browned butter and sage (maybe some crushed amoretti?), they're going to make several great quick lunches or first courses for dinner.

The riced squash, egg, flour and spices before mixing

Dough combined and rolled out

Cut into portions

Rolled and ready for shaping

Forked

Frozen

But what to do with the 3 remaining cépes? Looking through the refrigerator, I saw that I still had some plums that I poached in red wine and spices earlier in the week. Plums are very much in season here, mostly tiny yellow, purple, and green varieties, very sweet, and delicious. But my yellow plums had gotten a little past perfect in the fridge and were too numerous to finish off quickly, so I poached them to extend their shelf life, as it were. I used them for dessert (with a genoise cake made with chestnut flour) in one meal and cooked down the poaching liquid to a syrup to serve with duck (with great success, if I do say so) in another. But I still have some left, and their (2nd) expiration is fast approaching.

So I decided to make a mushroom-and-plum dinner. Sounds weird, but combinations of fruit and mushrooms are fairly common in northern Italy, and I was hopeful that the wine-ginger-quatre-epice poaching liquid would really work with the earthiness of the mushrooms. With freezer space now fully accounted for, I made a lasagnette for dinner. Never made a lasagna with my own fresh pasta before, so this was to be a learning experience.

First, though, I still had the little issue of the green mushroom. I thought a long time about whether to use it or not. I mean, I paid $6+ for the damn thing. So it basically came down to wasting $6 vs dying in my sleep. Oh, what the heck-- I've had a good run. Throw it in! I did at least pull off the green fins under the cap and hoped that whatever poison might be lurking there would be protein, so the cooking would denature it. Mushroom baddies are usually alkaloids, though, so even I knew that was wishful thinking.

Rolled out pasta dough to match our little loaf pan, parboiled (15 sec, before moving to cold water and blotting), then layered with sauteed cépes, some chopped poached plums (just enough pieces so you'd get about one in each bite per layer), béchamel (enriched with a little truffle oil-- if I'm going to kick tonight, no reason to spare the extravagance), and some parmesan. Baked at high temp for about 20 min, served with simple green salad with mustard vinaigrette (I am still in France, after all).

Cépes and poached plum lasagna

Maybe it's the hallucinogenic effects of that tainted mushroom, but holy cow, was that lasagnette good. The sweetness and spiciness of the plums went beautifully with the mushrooms, and the homemade pasta in the layered section was perfectly toothsome, but crunchy and delicious on the curled up edges. It was heavenly. I don't think I'll ever make a lasagna with dried pasta again. I was only planning to eat half of the little pan tonight, but knowing it wouldn't be nearly as good tomorrow night, I had to make the sacrifice and finish it off.

I just hope it doesn't finish me off later tonight...

When life gives you cherries...

With Karen globetrotting again this week, I was set for another dinner destination cycling trip. Those trips take a lot planning: there's a wealth of worthy destinations within a 100-mile radius of Paris, and a wealth of possible routes for each, and I have to spend days scoping out the restaurant websites, needing a bib for me and a drool cup to protect my keyboard while comparing menus. It's hell, I tell you. But this week's trip was scrapped before it started, thanks to a new knee pain that's developed over the last 2 weeks. So there'll be no pictures of Fancy food to share this week. Instead, I was left here to wrestle with the excesses of food shopping in Paris.

It's not uncommon in Paris that I come home from the market with a lot more of something than I planned. When we first got here, that was because I had a hard time figuring out how much of something I needed. Not because I'm a metric-retard, but because I buy more foods by weight here than at home, and my guesses on portions were sometimes comically inaccurate. How much arugula do I need for 2 people for 2 nights? Considerably less than 500 grams. How many squid come in a kilo? More than 1 person could possibly need. Between calibrating my mass estimator and learning phrases for approximate amounts (a small bag, a handful), that doesn't happen (so) much, anymore.

These days, I come home with too much because I just get seduced by what I find, particularly fruit. Anybody with ears has heard me rant about the bitter letdown of bad fruit. But for those without, here it is for eyes. A main purpose of the succulent flesh of many fruits is purely seduction: to entice some creature otherwise minding its own business to take it and transport the seed(s) inside some distance from the parent plant. These fruits should be so bright, fragrant, and sweetly delicious as to be irresistible. Of course, most fruit is picked well short of ripeness, gassed for color, and shipped halfway around the world where it qualifies culinarily as colored styrofoam. Not to mention as an insult to nature. Ripe fruit, though, is always a treat.

You don't need to be a genius to figure out what the good fruit is. You just look for truck loads of it at reasonable prices at every market. Ignoring for a moment that they're pseudo-fruits botanically, the fraises (strawberries) and gariguettes (also strawberries; a variety grown mostly in southern France) have been abundant and (more) affordable lately. But cherries are the fruit of this moment, and the good ones are jammin'. Huge mounds of dark red, almost black, shiny fruit are everywhere, and just as nature intended, I can't help but buy loads of them.

So it was that I found myself with more time on my hands than I'd expected, and about a kilogram more ripe cherries in the refrigerator than I could gorge myself with before they spoiled. What to do? I'd already pickled a bunch of them a couple of weeks ago, and though a nice accompaniment for savory foods, there's only so much of that you can eat.

A collection of round foods: pan-seared cote-du-porc with baby potatoes, super-sweet early peas, and "pickled" cherries.

Cherry tart? Just made a rhubarb tart (with an almond pastry cream) last week to use up last week's impulse buy. How about something like a cherry polenta pudding? It wouldn't keep long enough for me to get through it; or more accurately, I shouldn't be eating as much of it as would be necessary to get through it. Don't have an ice cream maker, or I'd have been all over that. Chilled cherry soup (maybe with red wine, a little thyme, and crème fraiche?) would have been great, but again too much for 1 person to eat before spoiling. I needed to make something that would keep awhile. Chewing on a piece of one of Eric Kayser's amazing baguettes smeared with a little raw-milk churned butter, I reached for the jar of bitter orange preserves in the fridge to find it almost empty. I got halfway through writing “jam” on the grocery list before I realized I'd finally found my use for the jammin' cherries.

Now, I'm no baker, and I'm even less a confiturer (confiturist?), so I don't have a recipe for making jam. But really, how hard can it be? Cook fruit, add sugar, and cook until thickened. I don't have a cherry pitter, so I just cut each cherry in half, twisted it like an oreo, and popped the stone out with the knife tip. When they're really good and ripe, even a kilo goes pretty quickly. I chopped a bunch of them up a bit, put them all in a pan with a little lemon juice and cooked until they were soft. The only tricky part is figuring out how much sugar to add. Though the fruit is pretty amazing by itself, the high sugar content thwarts Evil growths. It seems that most people add roughly ¾ the volume/weight of the fruit in sugar, so that's where I started. For a non-confiturist, that made for an alarmingly large mound of sugar in my beautiful deep red pan of cooked fruit. So I added a bit more lemon juice and zest. And since I'm the one making up this recipe, I also added a little ground ginger and freshly and finely ground pondicherry black pepper (which has a little caramely/toasty flavor) to highlight the flavor of the cherries and add some zing, and cooked it quickly until it thickened a bit. It was remarkably simple.

My first ever jam. I like it.

Since I have space in the fridge to store it and will probably go through it in the next couple of months, anyway, I didn't bother sterilization and whatnot. I just boiled the jar and lid (and a juice glass for the overflow) ~5 min, added the hot jam, and chilled. It'll stay clean at least a couple months, by which time I'll surely have bought too much of something else. I just hope that isn't broccoli rabe.

Beets, beets, beets: Eating nothing but beets in Paris

Since I'm solo at the moment, there's been no eating out this weekend-- I figured it'd be more economical to make my restaurant meal at home. Which made me think of duck.

Duck is good bargain food. For ~$20, I get 2 nights of meals for 2 out of the breasts, another generous dinner for 2 out of the confit'd thighs and legs, the skin not on those parts gets rendered (for later confits, sauteing potatoes, etc), and the bones and scraps go into stock, which gets used for soup, sauces, and risotto. Besides being good value, it's also great taste. Meaty without being heavy, a little sweet, and very versatile-- friend to fruit and spice.

And, as relevant as good value to my cooking and eating right now, duck is not squid. Turns out 2 lbs of squid is more than (this) 1 person needs at one time.

Squid

Not squid

In Philly, I always buy whole duck from one of my vendors I know has it fresh. Ducks seem more expensive here, making confit is a long slow oven roast I like better in winter, and our tiny freezer with huge temperature swings isn't ideal for storing multiple stocks, so I'll hold off on the whole duck until I want to make ragu from the legs and thighs. But fresh duck breast, or magrets, can be found at most poultry purveyors, curiously always in vacuum-pacs. I got my first one today at the Prez Wilson market.

I did my vegetable shopping there too, at Joël Thiébaut's stand. Aside from having a name I have no idea how to pronounce, Mr Thiébaut is different from my produce vendors at home in that he sells only vegetables, no fruits, and he's vegetable provider to the restaurant stars. As such, the stand is always very busy, and so you might expect a bit uppity. But not so—they know their vegetables, love their vegetables, and share that knowledge and enthusiasm with their customers, many of whom are little old ladies who leave the stand carrying pallets of spinach or pulling huge carts groaning with vegetables. Today they had an assortment of asian greens I'd never seen before, including mibuna, which looks like a long, skinny spinach, and which they said was both sweet and peppery at the same time. Sounded interesting.

Mibuna, also not squid

For my dinner-out in, I made a spice mix to rub into the slits I cut in the duck skin to give the fat someplace to go so the skin would crisp-- coriander, cumin, and a little allspice. Pan seared, finished to medium rare in the oven, let rest, and sliced and served sprinkled with a few grains of gray sea salt. Simple and traditional. The duck was simply outstanding. While searing, it smelled pretty aggressively livery (US duck can taste livery if cooked much past med-rare), but when finished the flavor was rich, full, and mellow and the mahogany skin was cracklingly crisp with just a hint of spice. The mibuna was the perfect accompaniment-- sauteed with some garlic and just a little salt and pepper, it was indeed a little sweet and finished with a peppery, almost minty, bite. With some simple mashed potatoes and a rhubarb-ginger compote, I think this may have been the best meal I've eaten so far in Paris. I'll have to eat here again.

It's a shame I didn't anticipate this success and seek out a more deserving wine than our 5-euro house Cahors-- a more sophisticated Cahors, or a St Joseph, would have been ideal. It's also a shame Karen wasn't here to share in the eating, and she might be mad if she finds out what she missed. She hates beets, so I'm hoping she'll skip this post.

Nothing but beets

Just keep it away from the bagpipes

Wednesday is President Wilson market day, and since I'm abandoned in Paris for the next several days (awwww....), I decided to spend some time cooking. Not that I don't cook when Karen is here, but when you're feeding somebody else, there are time frames to be considered, odds of success to be calculated, etc. Home alone, there's more room to slide, and I was feeling adventurous.

I picked up what I needed to make vegetable stock. Too much vegetable stock, actually, since I keep forgetting that I don't have either a real stock pot or a freezer big enough to store anything. Got my eggs, some more arugula (is there anything better with just a little olive oil, lemon, and parmesan?), some beautiful swiss chard for a gratin with some leftover roasted potatoes, half a loaf of crusty and chewy polka bread (the only description of the origin of this name I could find refers to a bread of the Loire valley of a very different shape and style from what is called Polka in Paris; someday I'll ask the lady I buy it from why it's called that) and some big softball-sized globe artichokes for braising and adding to a light tomato sauce with pasta. On the way out of the market, though, I passed the best of the several fish vendors, and there on the end of the table was squid.

Though I like squid, I've never cooked with it. It's hard to find any truly fresh seafood in Philly, I think, so I cook with whole fish whenever the availability warrants it, but I've never seen squid that looked so good that I had the urge to try it. I'm not sure I did today, either, frankly. Judging by the dull gills and less-than-brilliant eyes I see on most fish sold in Paris, I'm not sure the freshness of the to-the-public seafood retail is that much better than in Philly. But today, as I said, I was feeling adventurous. And I've been thinking about squid for the past couple of weeks as a potential partner for the myriad of artichoke varieties that are everywhere at the markets. Heck, I already had artichokes in my bag, so even if it wasn't sparklingly fresh (there's nothing cheekier than a fresh squid...), a little over 2 pounds of whole squid came home with me. Hey, company for the week!

And they have friends

Once it was in the apartment, it was a little more intimidating. It didn't look anything like the calamari waiters bring when I order it.

Ummm, where's the dipping sauce?

I'd read about cleaning squid, but the first encounter was a little tentative. You've got to loosen the insides from the body, then pull the head-and-insides out (hopefully in one piece and without breaking the ink sac). Pull out the inedible cartilage quill and clean out the body thoroughly, making sure that all of the mucusy stuff has been pulled out, and then cut off the little wings .

Head-and-innards alongside the still-winged body, long feeler tentacles removed

If you separate the arms/tentacles from the just-dislodged head-and-innards just beyond the eyes...

Aim just below the eyes

... you can push the beak out intact in its little round cartilage pod and have a nice clean set of tentacles.

Beak and tentacles divided


The edible bits (membrane still attached)

Pull the pigmented membrane off, and you're done. One I got rolling, it was a little over a minute per squid. Not bad at all, really, and kind of fun once you get in there. Slice 'em up and you're ready to roll.

A bowl full of potential

By the 2nd (of 8) squid, it was pretty obvious I had way more squid than I could eat tonight, maybe all week. And it was also obvious that it wasn't going to get any better sitting in the refrigerator, so I cleaned them all and boiled them just 30 seconds in salted water before stopping the cooking in ice water. For a tender result, squid is supposedly best cooked either as fast as possible (eg, frying) or in a long, slow braise. I'm hoping the quick boil is allows me several options in future preparation while extending the squid's refrigerator shelf life.

After the quick cook

Tonight I braised one of those giant artichoke hearts in white wine with onion and garlic, and added both the artichoke and a handful of the squid pieces to a light tomato sauce just before adding the pasta. I wouldn't call the squid meltingly tender, but it wasn't rubbery, either, and the squid and the artichoke were definitely a nice pairing.


With 3 artichokes and a bowl full of squid still in the kitchen, I'm in need of additional ways of pairing them. I wonder how they'll taste with cereal in the morning?

A (near-) perfect day at the marché

Paris offers no shortage of places to shop for food. Supermarkets are useful for staples and 5-euro bottles of wine (we have found an outstanding 5-euro Cahors at Monoprix that has become our house wine). Then there are the rue commerçantes, streets with a high density of specialty food stores. Our local, rue des Belles Feuilles, is typical of such streets, with 2 butchers, 2 bakeries, 3 different fruit-and-vegetable vendors, a fish monger, 2 cheese shops, an Italian specialty store, and a variety of take-away food sources, all in a little over a block. Some of these shops are self-serve, some are not. Our preferred cheese vendor sells only raw-milk cheeses that they age themselves. It pushes the limits of my French, but I really enjoy talking with the cheese-guy about the various choices from given regions. I'm sure one could have similar conversations with most of the vendors, and recently a young enthusiastic fellow at a local fruit store took it upon himself to educate me about the differences between fraises (strawberries, from Spain in this case) and gariguettes (gariguette is a term that includes all strawberries, but here is used to denote a variation grown in France that has, according to the kid who was speaking at 400 kph, a more citrusy flavor). You see gariguettes everywhere right now, for a hefty 12 – 15 euros/kilo, compared to 3 – 5 euros/kilo for fraises. I intend to try some, but I want to make sure they're really ripe. Still seems early. There are 2 supermarkets on this same street, which seems like strange competition, but apparently there's business enough for everyone, and it's nice to be able to pick up milk and cereal at the supermarket and then get vegetables and cheese from the speciality vendors. Trés convenient.

The third shopping option is the myriad of outdoor markets that usually occur about twice a week in any given spot. The city of Paris lists no fewer than 79 such markets in the 20 arrondissements, and they vary widely in size and quality. I went to check out 2 yesterday in the 8th, since I had a couple of other errands to run there, and one of them had just 1 sad little stand by itself, and the other was basically a grocery store. On the other end of the spectrum is one of our local markets, on av President Wilson, a 3-block long run of raw food vendors, prepared food vendors, and people selling clothing, jewelery, rugs, you name it. Unlike farmer's markets in the US, the vast majority of people selling at the various Paris markets are not growers (though there are a few farmers markets and organic markets)-- they all buy their goods from the same gigantic wholesale market, and the full spectrum of quality and price is available.

Olive vendor at Pres Wilson
One of many butchers at Pres Wilson
Spice vendor at Pres Wilson

Though I enjoy shopping on the rue commerçantes, I enjoy the outdoor markets best. It takes a little while, but I do a full walk-through the market first to figure out who has the best looking, or best-priced, examples of what I want before buying. Today's trip to the President Wilson market was just about perfect.

I wasn't in the market for anything particularly special (just fava beans or peas, artichokes, potatoes, eggs, and lemons), but that doesn't guarantee success. After striking out at the 2 little markets yesterday, I bought some fava beans at a favorite rue commerçante in the 17th, rue Poncelet, but they weren't that great. Fava beans are very labor-intensive, so you want consistently full pods, and the ones I got yesterday were not big producers, meaning that I got only 80 grams of shelled and peeled beans from about 800 grams of pods after about an hour of work. Ugh. Today, though, I found a vendor who had big plump pods, and I nearly doubled my yield. We love them, and I cook with them whenever I can find somebody else to prep them. Artichokes abound here, in many more varieties than one sees in the US. The smallest varieties can even be eaten raw, and I found some good small ones at the same place as the favas. Good deal.

One of maybe a dozen veg vendors at Pres Wilson

What made the trip today special, though, was unexpectedly scoring some chicken carcasses for stock. In the States, any poultry vendor has an abundance of backs, necks, wings, and breast bones left over from all of the parts they sell, and picking up 5-10 lbs for stock is a sure thing. Here in France, though, people buy (and use) their chickens whole, so whereas I've asked at several butchers, I've never found any “waste” parts available for stock. Today, though, while waiting in line to buy eggs, the woman in front of me ordered a chicken and asked the butcher to bone it out. I watched as he broke it down and tossed the carcass in a bucket behind the counter, waiting for the lady to ask for it. When she left, I tentatively asked if he'd sell me the carcass and the various bones and parts he'd discarded, and it turns out he had 2 back there! And better, he charged me a total of 2 euros for them. The downside was that since they'd been sitting unrefrigerated for part of the morning, they really needed to be used today, which wasn't in my time budget. But priorities are priorities, and so I picked up some carrots, leeks, and onions and set off for home with a spring in my step and basking in my good luck.

A few steps from the market, I stopped to redistribute my haul. I put several of the bags down on a bench at a bus stop, and while moving the leeks into my messenger bag, knocked my box of eggs off the bench and onto the ground, where it landed with a pronounced CRACK. D'oh. Hoping it was only 1, I carefully picked up the box, and 6 eggs' worth of goo slid out and onto the sidewalk. Double d'oh! I tossed what was left of the mess in the trash and headed back to the market, where the butcher gave me a puzzled look as I stood in line. He laughed when I told him I'd broken all of my eggs and mock-sternly told me to pay attention this time. Expensive eggs-- sure hope they're worth it.



Florist and fishmongers at Pres Wilson

Some hours later, I've got 3 liters of roasted chicken stock in the freezer, and we had a nice dinner of a frisee salad with a potato-and-artichoke gallette and home-made pasta with merguez sausage, fava beans, and mint. Shame about the eggs, but a pretty good day at the market.

The day's haul (eggs in the fridge, for safety)

Something new (and delicious) to do with artichokes...

Spicy sausage, fava, and mint-- now that's good eating.