Posted in butter, cheap meal, France, French, game, Garlic, history, lemon, offal, parsley, pigs, pork, Potato, shanks, slow cooking, tourism, tradition, travel, trotter on Oct 4th, 2011
The largely unknown city of Compiegne, France, has the distinction of being the site of one of Louis XV’s most extravagant homes away from home. Under him, the Chateau de Compiegne became one of three distinctly opulent seats of government alongside Versailles and Fontainbleau. The latter French monarchs were hardly known for their desire to [...]
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Posted in chicken, cream, dining, easy, France, French, Garlic, mushrooms, tarragon, tradition, unhealthy, wine on May 12th, 2011
Classic French cooking doesn’t get much more classic than chicken in tarragon cream sauce. This bistro menu stalwart has all the unctious elements you instinctively associate with Gallic gastronomy: butter, cream, wine and mild herbs. Likely originating in that blessed triangle just north of Lyon where the famous blue-footed chickens of Bresse neighbor the Cotes [...]
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Posted in America, Christmas, Food Commentary, France, French, French-ness, holiday, holidays, Jacques Pepin, Paul Bocuse, tarragon on Dec 12th, 2010
The culinary memoir has to be one of my favorite genres of both cookbooks and books in general. Combining anecdotes, family history and delicious recipes, and spanning literature and cuisine, there’s really nothing better than a cookbook that you can actually read, that’s not just a selection of quick and easy recipes by some personality-laden [...]
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Posted in blogging, butter, Fall, game, Garlic, Jim Harrison, Meat, mushrooms, poultry, truffles, walnuts on Sep 8th, 2010
“Once, at the Denver Airport, a bald girl in an orange dress told me I could be what I wanted.” – Jim Harrison, The Raw & The Cooked There’s an awful conceit abroad the interwebs these days that seems to be encouraging more people than it should to title themselves “freelance food writers”. Perhaps you’ve [...]
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A lot has been made of the glory and diversity of America’s road-foods by such hit US TV shows as Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, which, if you haven’t seen it, features a bleach-blond moron traveling the highways and byways of this great nation gorging himself on deep-fried hamburgers, the world’s spiciest chicken wings, and platters of [...]
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Before we head off to England (and a five day side-trip to Northern France) to visit the across-the-pond family, we wanted to leave you with a different option for your Christmas Day meal. Some families love making hard-core meals for Christmas Day dinner – meals that take hours to cook and include many courses or [...]
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Posted in Alba, butter, cream, easy, French, indulgent meal, Italian, Italy, nuts, Pasta, Recipe, vegetarian, walnuts on Dec 1st, 2009
As with a few other fellow bloggers, we were lucky to receive one of my favorite “blog freebies” to try recently – truffle products by La Boutique de la Truffe. Cha-ching! As some know, for most of us, blogging will barely help us buy a cup of coffee at a year’s end – that is [...]
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Posted in appetizer, bread, Fall, flour, France, French, Garlic, parsley, Recipe, soup, wine on Nov 2nd, 2009
Turning rustic country fare into a slick restaurant best-seller has become so hackneyed these days that finding a post-modern reconstructed pot-au-feu for $45 in a hot new city dining spot can’t be far away. However, (and while we may be wrong) it might be a while before this garlic and wine soup hits high-end eateries [...]
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In the tiny Cheshire hamlet of Lower Peover (pronounced “peever”) is the delightfully rustic country pub “The Bells”, so-called because one has to literally walk around it to get to the parish church. In fact, so aligned are church and boozer that the two are separated by only fifty feet of graveyard, a low gate [...]
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Posted in butter, crimini, easy, egg, Europe, French, Italian, Jacques Pepin, Jeffrey Steingarten, mushroom, mushrooms, quick meal, Recipe, Recipes, truffles on May 3rd, 2009
In several of his well-known paeans to Provence, Peter Mayle describes, both lyrically and at great length, his love affair with the black truffles of that region. Sometimes couched as a cloak-and-dagger chase involving bizarre and nervy rendez-vous’ along dimly-lit back roads, or illicit dealings with “men with dirt under their fingernails and yesterday’s garlic [...]
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Posted in Italian on Jan 29th, 2009
So, class, welcome to your first day of Cooking 101. Today’s lesson is sauces. First sauce, velouté. What is a velouté you ask? Well, don’t ask a Frenchman because they’re likely to laugh in your face, spit on you for your ignorance and then leave you without any pride or dignity (or answers either). Velouté [...]
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Posted in America, appetizer, baking, butter, cheese, comte, delicacy, fish, French, herbs, Olive Oil, parsley, souffle on Jan 12th, 2009
Perhaps the day that both our teams (Manchester United & Philadelphia Eagles) won unlikely decisive victories in the realm of competitive sports, is the best day to dwell on the recent personal glory of our seafood soufflés staying up. However – even if (quite sensibly) you don’t give a rat’s ass about sports – anyone [...]
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