Collectages

  The night before I left for a workshop with rhythm master Bernard Lubat in Uzeste, I made a tourin in our fire place. This soup of humble origin is mostly known as tourin à l’ail —sopa de ajo in Spanish or garlic soup in English. Many variations are possible & in this case I [...]

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A simple & elegant dish for brunch lunch or buffet dinner that can be poached the day before. I use a  Norpro Stainless Steel Fish Poacher and find it quite useful though the  10 pounder salmon  (whole, gutted and scales scraped — I keep head and tail on) was almost too big! For the court-bouillon: [...]

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As I was picking  meat for the week at the Park Slope Food Coop, the “Wild Boar Mini Roast,  Distributed by d‘Artagnan” looked like the perfect piece for Pierre and I to make into one of our  celebration dinner sfor our 21st anniversary month —neither of us remembers the exact date, so that’s a good [...]

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I am back from a wonderful trip to the Pyrenees and a short visit to Paris. I arrived just in time to dive into the kitchen to prepare our Thanksgiving dinner. Husband, older son & daughter in law had been very efficient on getting all the necessary ingredients. They also took charge of brining & [...]

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I arrived Monday afternoon in Bourg d’Oueil after a long but pleasant trip. My Pyrenean home is closer to Spain than to Paris and I am not kidding: it takes 15 minutes by car to reach the Spanish border and about 8 hours to reach Paris!  My travels began Sunday at 1:30 p.m. from our [...]

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Hilh de puto or OMG! I had so much fun with this project. Truly a spontaneous affair. We had been so wrapped up in our respective working spaces that when dinner time came around Pierre & I realized that neither of us had roasted the chicken. He started by serving the aperitif and plugged WBGO [...]

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This is a very pleasant & simple dish. I called it Forestière because my grandfather used to call anything garnished with mushroom Forestière —meaning of the forest. Though the porcinis mushrooms are not wild & neither were all the mushrooms my grandpa used! Pan fry the cod  (4/5 mns each side) with a dollop of [...]

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Image from: Dictionnaire Universel de Cuisine et d’Hygiène Alimentaire —Joseph Favre  1894— In the the late 19th century French nomenclature for beef cut classification (see picture above), beef tail ranked as PREMIÈRE CATÉGORIE (first category) — for the top of the tail— &  CINQUIÈME CATÉGORIE (fifth category) for the rest of it, which makes sense [...]

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I am not sure what is the final mileage the 21st century Odysseus,  A.K.A. Douglas Rothschild, ended up walking along small roads between Troy (N.Y) & Ithaca (N.Y) but it should be pretty close to 170 miles in 8 days! Congratulations to Douglas & to Anna Moschovakis & Matvei Yankelevitch (both active members of the [...]

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The previous post showed  how to clean  squids while saving their precious ink to make the wonderful recipe Calamares in su Tinta,  Calamars à l’Encre or Squid in their own Ink. But first let me share some sweet family history about this dish. When we first moved to this country in 1987, my son Joseph [...]

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