It's my pleasure to share with you the new French and Parfait recipe...
Boeuf Bourguignon!
Hope you'll like it beaucoup beaucoup!
Ingredients
1 onion
1 pound beef roast or oxtail or beef cheeks (or all)
4 oz lardons (sliced bacon)
2 carrots, 1 turnip, 2 parsnips
AND A BOTTLE OF RED WINE !
What to do...
Stir the oinion and the lardons, and add the beef
Make sure all the cubes brown on each side
Then add the wine
Salt, pepper, some Laurel…
Put on sim for at least 3 hours…
Remember the good old time when you spent hours next to the mailbox (the real one, not you average hotmail-yahoo-gmail electronic version) waiting for a letter of your dear chéri? And then reading it again and again trying to figure out what he actually meant by "I like soccer and you too"?
Where are all those letters now?
I wonder how kids today will have a reminder of their first love letters... That's what I thought a few months ago when I was sorting out old drawers at my mother's house. All those silly post cards and pink note-letters suddenly confronted me to the funny, romantic, and a little bit too dreamy 10 year-old me. Trop bizarre! And that's when I found it. Written on a pink cardboard, with a very cautious hand. My first recipe.
Pain d'épices (du cahier de Mamie)
Ingrédients
1 cup sugar
1 cup honey
1 cup water or milk
4 cups flour
1 tbsp baking soda
I remember exactly when I wrote it. Another day of summer vacation. Sun, public swimming-pool, bike in the woods... and boredom. I was back at my grand-mother's farm and didn't know what to do.
She herself was more than busy as usual, in between the garden and the hens and the rabbits and the dinner to prepare. "Why don't you look in the recipe notebook and see what you can do?"
How I loved her recipe notebook! She had started it during World War II, when she was just une jeune fille en fleurs, a 20 year old mademoiselle. It was full of handwritten recipes copied from other friends notebooks, or cut out from the local newspaper. That day I decided to start my own collection. And copied her famous pain d'épice recipe.
Her gingerbread was awesome. So so simple. It's basically milk and honey and flour and c'est tout (that's all). Which makes it very very different from the anglo-saxon version of it. No spices for a cake called "Spices bread" (pain d'épices)! I know it's strange, but who cares when it's good!
She would bake one every wednesday, for me to have as a snack after the Ballet class. I would always share it with my friends, who loved it. So much that 15 years later, when my friend Stéphanie called me to invite me to her wedding, she asked for just one gift: la recette du pain d'épice de mamie Laurence. This recipe...
I still like to have it as a post work-out treat, but it's also great for a winter breakfast. Slice it and spread butter and you forget about cold feet and running nose!
La Recette
Put the milk (or the water, but really, milk is better) to a boil,
and then mix it with honey and sugar.
Add slowly the flour and the baking soda.
Mix it well.
Grease a pan in butter and pour the mix
Bake for one hour at 200F
The pain d'épices is great the next day, and even the following days.
Bon appétit les amis!
PS: I have to talk to you about my favorite processed pain d'épices: "Prosper" de Vandame. I can still see my little brother spreading tons on Nutella on it for his "4 heures" (litteraly 4pm, the time French kids were supposed to have their afternoon snack). And we loved their ad, a remake of a song of Maurice Chevalier, Prosper.
It’s hard
to admit for a French and perfect patriot like me, but I owe you to tell
the vérité, the entire vérité, and just the vérité…
Ok...
Sometimes the best French food is not
French.
Well… It’s
French… In the way that millions of Français cook it on a regular basis and consider it part of their cultural
heritage.
But it wasn’t developed in the strict Hexagon formed by our borders.
Like Tagine
for exemple.
Tagine de poulet
Ingrédients
4 chicken breast or thighs or mixed. (Or half a cut chicken) 1 diced Onion 1 diced garlic clove 1 tbsp diced fresh ginger
2 tbsp Ras el Hanout 1 cup chicken broth 3 Carrots 2 Zucchinis 1 eggplant
Tajine or
Tagine, is a North African tradition, but it’s on the top list of French people
favorite dishes. Pourquoi ? Well
because a huge part of our population comes from Maghreb.
There are
second, third generation of families who immigrated in France when there was a
lack of hands to work in the factories (Yes, I’m told that such a time has
really existed, as incroyable as it now seems).
There are
also descendants of French people who lived in North Africa before the
independence. They're called the pieds noirs, litteraly black feet. Don't ask me why, I've got one at home and I can guarantee he has nice and clean (and white) feet.
Tagine is
also the name of the pot in which you cook it.
This one
belongs to my friend Gaelle.
She’s
French, and lives in LA like me, but her
mom was born in Morocco.
When she came to visit her daughter a few months ago,
the first thing she did was to cook this dish and invite all her friends to
taste it.
Miam miam ! Dice the onion, let it sweat in olive oil in a cast iron pan (or a tagine if you have one)
Add the chicken, make sure the skin slowly changes color, and then add the sliced vegetables.
There are many combinations you can use (small peas and artichoke, preserved lemon and olives, almonds and prunes, dates...). But there's only one ingredient wich will always make the difference:
This is one of my most precious secret weapon. Whenever I go to France, I always come back with this very special blend I buy at the market in Capbreton, where my brother lives.
This is the yellow one, with cilantro, turmeric, caraway seed, fennel, red hot chili peppers, cumin, garlic.
Ras el Hanout means "top of the shelf", because it's the best spices you can find in a grocery store. If you can't find any in your poor, non French supermarket, I guess you can try and make your own blend, like any north african housewife does at home...
Spray the magic and take a good breath. I'm sure if you close well your eyes, you can walk straight in the narrow streets of the Kasbah of Algiers. Or heading to a Shishah bar in the Goutte d'or in Paris.
Add enough chicken broth to cover the vegetables. Cover the pot. Set to low, or even sim, for 1 hour. Now, pour yourself a thé à la menthe or an Orangina, You have 60 minutes to listen to Enrico Macias and pretend you're a pied noir nostalgic of Constantine...
Or imagine you're a young beur (a French guy whose parents were immigrants...) who doesn't want to leave his projects apartment for the summer and go to the traditional holidays with his family in Algeria, like this song from parisian band 113...
Lé le la!
And when you're ready,
Serve with some couscous you will cook with the broth remaining in the tagine.
