DORIE GREENSPAN

My Paris Kitchen: Then and Now

 After whining about how hard it was to leave my new, almost-finished kitchen in Paris, I got comments and messages from friends and readers (and my mom) asking me to post more pictures of the space.  Well, I don't have all that many pictures -- I seem to have taken the same picture over and over -- but I've got enough to give you an idea of what the space looked like when I first saw it and what it looked like the day we had to pack our bags and fly back to New York.

First a bit of background.  In what turned out to be a whirlwind, we sold our Paris apartment on a Tuesday in June and took another apartment that Friday!  The new apartment, minutes from our old place in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, was in really good condition -- except for the kitchen, the room that, not surprisingly, meant the most to me.   Here's what it looked like when I saw it that Friday:

The built-in table is in a nice-sized room that the couple before us used as a dining room - they had turned the "real" dining room into an office - and the kitchen, a very narrow galley kitchen, is right beyond the swinging cafe doors. 

The dining room and the kitchen were painted white, except for one wall, the wall with the arch, that was covered with a dark grasscloth.

Here's the kitchen behind the swinging doors

You can see where the wall (lower left-hand corner) enclosed the space and you can get a sense of how narrow it was.  The white appliance you can see a bit of in the lower right hand corner is the fridge.  I'm used to a galley kitchen -- it's what I've got in New York and the one you see me in in my banner picture.  In fact, my New York kitchen is probably as narrow as this one or narrower -- I can stand in the middle of it, put out both arms and touch both walls.  But this kitchen felt even tighter, perhaps because it was closed in by the wall or perhaps because it wasn't very deep.  Whatever it was, I felt I wouldn't be comfortable in it and yet I wasn't sure what to do with it.  So I called my friends.

I asked my friends -- and neighbors -- Patricia Wells, the wonderful cookbook author and teacher, and Helene Samuel, the restaurant consultant and creator of  Cafe Pleyel, to come see the space and give me their advice.  (I know, I'm lucky to have such talented friends.)  And they each had a different idea.  While both agreed that the swinging doors should be removed, ditto the wallpaper,  Patricia thought I should work within the galley kitchen's confines, and Helene thought I should move the kitchen's working area out into the "dining room" and use the galley as a giant pantry and storeroom for small appliances, the dishwasher and maybe the washing machine.

In the end, I took  the advice of both of my friends -- kind of.  I tore down the wall that separated the kitchen from the dining area, removed the doors, the built-in table and the grasscloth, and decided to use the whole space as a working kitchen/office/and eating area.  In other words, I built a country kitchen.

Here's the way it looks so far:

You can see how tearing down the wall really opened up the space.  The island, in the foreground, has lots of storage, is a great work space, a terrific place for an in-the-kitchen meal and it's where I'll be writing.  The bookcase that you can see along the right hand side, used to be in our living room, but it works really well here.  I've got flour, sugar, spices, canned goods and some serving pieces in there.

I haven't had a lot of time to figure out how I'm going to work in the kitchen, but so far it seems that I'll be doing most of my chopping and mixing on the far side of the island and on the countertop opposite it.  When I'm back in the apartment, I'm going to hang the magnetic strips for my knives over that counter.

Here's the galley part of the kitchen:

You can see that I've got a nice little nook for my mixer and, right behind the striped pot holders and bread bag (cute, isn't it?), where the refrigerator used to be, I've got metal shelving to hold other small appliances, like my blender, food processor and coffee pot.

Here's the last picture:

It's the view from the island.  You can see that we were able to tuck the refrigerator into a closet; finishing the trim is on the punch list.  Getting the refrigerator out of the working part of the kitchen made a big difference. 

There's still more to do, but it's all little stuff and fun stuff, like buying new bread baskets and actually getting into the kitchen and cooking and baking.  I can't wait!

Give A Man A Fish ...

On my way home from the Marche Saint Germain this morning, I kept thinking of the Chinese proverb:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I'd just bought a kilo (about 2 1/4 pounds) of sardines and I'd hoped that madame, the fishmonger, would filet them for me.  And she would have -- if I'd only wait 30 minutes, please.  Because it was a warm, sunny, perfect Paris day, and because I'd no more shopping to do to fill in the time, I said I'd filet them myself.  Madame gave me a quizzical look -- read doubtful -- and, because she was too polite to say, "I bet you've never done this before and don't know what you're in for," she said, "You know, you've got a lot of sardines and it will take you a while to filet them."

"Well," I said, "I really do have to get back home, so I'll take them as is.  But," I asked, "would you just show me how to do it?"

Madame pulled out a well-worn fileting knife -- very thin at the top and not so wide at the bottom -- laid the fish out parallel to her with the head to the left, made a diagonal slash below the gills, then pressing the flat of the knife against the backbone and rib bones (they're probably not called that, but the names make sense to me), she cut cleanly to the tail and lifted the filet away from the fish.  She flipped the fish over, still keeping the head to the left, and repeated the motion.  The skeleton that was left wasn't as neatly picked clean as the one Picasso made famous, but the remains looked clean and symetrical and she'd done it in 30 seconds.

Returning chez moi, I cleared the decks, sharpened a paring knife and put on some music.  I had 12 sardines and figured that had madame cleaned them, it would only have taken her 6 minutes.  I probably could have waited, but I'm glad I didn't because it only took me half an hour, I did a pretty decent job of it, and I learned something.  Not bad for a Sunday morning.

I also got to turn the filets into escabeche, a dish in which the sardines are first quickly sauteed and only partially cooked, and then drowned in hot aromatic oil and vinegar, a mixture that completes the cooking and pickles them, too. 

The downside of escabeche is the wait -- once the dish is assembled, it needs at least 6 hours in the fridge to cure.  Had I remembered that I'd have to hang for so long before tasting the my work, I might have found the patience to wait 6 minutes for the fish to be fileted.  Of course, what I would have made up in time, I'd have to forfait in bragging rights.

Here's a recipe for SARDINE ESCABECHE from The Cafe Boulud Cookbook (Daniel Boulud and Dorie Greenspan, Scribner's)

Makes 6 servings

1 1/4 cups extra-virgin olive oil

Flour for dredging

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

1 1/4 pounds sardine filets, skin on (from about 2 1/2 pounds whole sardines)

2 sprigs thyme

2 sprigs cilantro

2 sprigs basil

1 tomato, peeled, trimmed and thinly sliced crosswise

6 pearl onions, peeled, trimmed, and thinly sliced crosswise

3 cloves garlic, peeled, split, germ removed, and thinly sliced

2 small carrots, peeled, trimmed, and thinly sliced

2 stalks celery, peeled, trimmed, and thinly sliced

18 fennel seeds, toasted

18 coriander seeds, toasted

2 bay leaves

Pinch of red pepper flakes

1 tablespoon ketchup

1 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 cup white vinegar

Juice of 2 lemons

Lemon wedges for serving

Pour 2 tablespoons of the olive oil into a large nonstick saute pan or skillet and warm it over medium heat.  Spread some flour out on a plate, season it with salt and pepper, and dredge only the skin sides of the sardines in the flour, shaking off the excess.  Slip the fish into the pan, flour side down, and fry on the flour side for 1 1/2 minutes - the fish will be undercooked, but it will finish cooking in the marinade.  Lift the fish out of the pan and pat off the excess oil; discard the frying oil, wipe out the pan and set it aside.

Arrange the sardine filets attractively in an overlapping pattern on a rimmed serving platter or in an oval gratin pan that holds them snugly.  Strew the thyme, coriander, basil and diced tomato over the fish and set the platter aside for the moment.

Return the pan to medium heat and add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil.  When the oil is hot, toss in the onions, garlic, carrots, celery, fennel and coriander seeds, and bay leaves to cook, stirring, until the vegetables are almost cooked through, 5 to 7 minutes.  Add the remaining 1 cup olive oil and all the other remaining ingredients, except the lemon juice and wedges, to the pan, bring to the simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes.  Pull the pan from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Pour the hot sauce over the fish.  Cover the platter with plastic wrap and allow the mixture to cool to room temperature.  Chill the escabeche for at least 6 hours, or overnight, before serving.

To serve:  Serve the escabeche with lemon wedges on the side.  If you'd like, you can drain off some of the marinating liquid, emulsify it in the blender, and use it as the dressing for an accompanying green salad.

Roll-Out Cookies: A Shortcut

Yesterday, I decided to turn my Midnight Crackles (the recipe is from Baking From My Home to Yours), cookies that you form by rolling balls of dough between your palms then pressing the puffs down lightly on the baking sheet, into roll-out cookies.  I wanted something flatter than the pillowy buttons the ball-and-press technique gave me and I knew, because the dough was firmish right after it was mixed, and downright hard after it chilled, that it would be a good candidate for roll-out treatment.  I also knew that I could take a short-cut with the dough: instead of shaping the dough into a disk, chilling the disk and then rolling the dough, I went directly to roll-out without passing GO and without mishap.

Here's what I did: As soon as the dough was mixed, I divided it and placed each piece of dough between two sheets of wax paper and gently rolled the dough to the thickness I needed (in this case, the dough was about 1/8-inch thick).  I then slid the "sandwich" onto a cutting board and chilled the dough for an hour or so until it was very firm.  (Since this dough has a lot of chocolate it in, it firms quickly and thoroughly.)

Because the straight-from-the-mixer dough was soft, the rolling was easy; because the straight-from-the-fridge dough was hard, the cutting was easy - a happy combination of conditions.

This wasn't the first time I'd used this technique - it's what I do pretty routinely with shortbread cookies (actually, with sticky shortbread dough I scoop the dough into a zipper-lock plastic bag, roll it to fill the bag, chill it, then slit the bag and cut the dough into squares with a knife - I get the perfect thickness that way), but as I was rolling and cutting, it occurred to me -- again -- that it's a cool technique for making fast work of what can be a fussy job.

Rainy Day Salad

My husband, Michael, couldn’t resist this Siamese-twin tomato at the Lyme Farmers Market this week (it would have been a perfect match for the boomerang eggplant I bought the week before, but that had already become caponata)

Then, having bought it, he went back to New York, leaving me to tackle the double-headed monster on my own, which I did with one of my favorite knives

The knife (so elegant), made in Japan by Kyocera, has a ceramic blade with microscopic serrations that slice through tomato skin and soft tomato pulp effortlessly and neatly – the skin never tears and the fruit never goes ragged. 

Once I had separated the twins, I tasted the tomato to see if it was worth continuing.  The answer: yes!  In fact, the tomato was so good that I dashed out into the pouring rain to get some basil from the garden. 

With a tomato this good, less is just enough, so all I did was cut it into chunks, sprinkle it with fleur de sel and splash it with great olive oil.  Then I added some sliced plums, an idea lifted from a salad Dan Barber, the remarkable chef, had made at the remarkable Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

With a hunk of bread and good butter, it was the perfect lunch, made perfecter by the fact that I was alone so, when I finished the salad, I could drink the luscious tomato “soup” that had accumulated in the bottom of the bowl.  It certainly brightened a gray, rainy day.

Blueberry-Peach Cobbler on Serious Eats

This week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is Blueberry-Peach Cobbler.  It's simple, delicious and messy - just as it should be.  Enjoy!

Cooking in a Cocoon: Salmon and Tomatoes en Papillote

When I first learned to fold a parchment paper circle into a half-moon turnover in which I could cook just about anything en papillote, I cooked just about everything en papillote and thought that if I kept it up, I’d not only be among the healthiest-eating citizens in the land, I’d also earn the right to call myself an origami master.

Then, just as quickly as I became infatuated with this way of cooking, that’s how fast I put it on the back burner and moved on to the next thing.  I don’t know why I was so fickle and I certainly don’t know why I gave up on something so terrific.  But my papilloteless days are behind me.  The little packets have made a comeback chez moi and now it’s all anyone can do to stop me from whipping up a pouch and tucking something in it.

Almost anything - meat, fish, fowl, fruits and vegetables - can be neatly arranged in a tightly sealed cocoon of parchment or foil (so much easier) and gently cooked - kind of by roasting, more kind of by steaming - with little or no fat and almost no effort.

The principle here is to combine the "main ingredients" or a mix of mains (for instance, a chicken cutlet and some vegetables) with some herbs, spices or aromatics, so that as the ingredients cook, they are infused with flavor and fragrance.

The method works like a charm for individual servings - there's little better than being presented with a papillote and having the pleasure of opening it at the table, so you get that first perfumed puff of steam - but you can cook a whole fish in a packet or even all the fixings for a shellfish stew.  (And, of course, any recipe for one serving, like the one below, can be multiplied endlessly.)

These days, I often make it really easy on myself by crafting the cocoons from non-stick aluminum foil.  They don't look as elegant as parchment, but they seal super-tight with just a a quick pinch.  And there's a lot to be said for quick on a school night.

Here's a recipe for salmon and tomatoes en papillote.   You could do this same recipe with cod, monkfish or bass, or you could opt for a chicken cutlet.  And you could swap the tomatoes for zucchini or flat beans or cobless corn or any combination that appeals to you.  Naturally, the choice of herbs is up for grabs, too.  The only thing to keep in mind is that all of the ingredients should cook in the same amount of time.

Before tucking them into the packet, I rolled the grape tomatoes around in a skillet with a little hot olive oil to concentrate their flavor, but it's completely unnecessary. It was a day when I had plenty of playing-around time, which is also why I put the fish on a small parchment circle and then wrapped it in a foil pouch - again, a completely unnecessary step, but I thought it looked prettier and I had time for pretty.

SALMON AND TOMATOES EN PAPILLOTE

Makes 1 serving

2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil (more to taste)

4 grape tomatoes

About 6 basil leaves

One 5-ounce filet of salmon (skinless or not)

1/4 lemon

1/2 spring onion or 1 scallion (optional), finely sliced

1 sprig thyme

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

Center a rack in the oven, preheat the oven to 475 degrees F and have a baking sheet at hand.  Cut a piece of foil that is large enough for you to lay out the ingredients, lift up the edges of the foil and seal the packet with an inch or two of air space above the fish.

If you want to "sear" the tomatoes, warm 1 teaspoon of the olive oil in a small skillet, then saute the tomatoes just until their skins are wrinkled and bubbly, about 3 minutes.

Working in the center of the piece of foil, make a bed of basil leaves, keeping 1 leaf aside.  Sprinkle the leaves with a little salt and pepper, put the salmon over the leaves and season it with salt and pepper too.  (If the salmon has skin, lay it skin-side against the basil.)  Put the tomatoes on one side of the salmon and grate the lemon's zest over everything.  If you're using the spring onion or scallion, scatter the pieces over the fish and tomatoes.  Give the salmon a squirt of lemon juice, then cut two thin slices from the lemon and put them on top of the fish.  Top with the last basil leaf and the sprig of thyme; moisten with olive oil.

Seal the packet, making sure it's airtight and that there's puff space between the fish and the top of its cocoon.  Put the packet on the baking sheet, slide the set-up into the oven and bake for 10 minutes, if you like your fish pink and slightly jiggly in the center (great for salmon); bake 2 minutes longer if you want your fish better done.

You can either put the packet on a dinner plate and open it at the table, or  open the packet in the kitchen and arrange the ingredients on a plate.  If you plate the fish, you might want to finish the dish with a little minced basil or some snipped chives.

Bake With Me on Serious Eats

Starting today, and for every Thursday forever after (or at least for a long while), I’ll be posting a recipe with tips and a story on serious eats.

To kick off the series, there's a recipe for one of my favorite strawberry tarts.  It’s so simple that even first-time bakers can make it - yes, even if you’re a crust-coward, you can do this one. 

I hope you’ll make it and let me know!

Greenskeeping

I know, it looks a little weird, kind of like a terrarium for lettuce, but it's really a little bit of low-tech genius.  It's a terrific trick I learned from Michael Newburg, who grows the best, best greens at his Falls Brook Organic Farm.  Put your fresh greens in a big plastic bag, gather up the neck, blow a little air, aka carbon dioxide, into the bag, then seal it up quick.  If your greens are perfectly dry and really fresh (when Michael brings his to the Lyme Farmers Market, they’re only two-hours old), they’ll stay bright, firm and flavorful for at least a week like this.  The only problem is the amount of space the puffed-up bag takes in the fridge – but scrambling for a few extra cubic-inches of room on the shelf seems a small price to pay for greens that stay great from market day to market day.

French Chocolate Brownies

Julia Moskin’s got a terrific story about Brownies in the Dining section of today’s New York Times and I’m delighted that she’s included my recipe for French Chocolate Brownies.  I’m crazy about these brownies and love the story of how they came about.

The first time I made the recipe I was in Paris, preparing dinner for friends and thinking I was making a fondant for dessert.  Fondant, a creamy chocolate cake, is one of only a handful of sweets the French make for themselves at home.  I made my fondant in a square pan (not usual, but not so far-out) and added rum-flamed raisins (again, not usual, but not heretical either).  I cut the cake into squares and got the following reaction when I brought it to the table:  “Ooh, brownies – splendide!”

Fondant? Brownies?  Who was I to argue?  Maybe my friends assumed that if an American was offering them a soft, thin, crackle-topped chocolate cake cut into squares, it had to be brownies.  It didn’t really matter to me.  I liked the recipe in Paris and I liked it just as much when I re-tested it in the States.

Because Julia Moskin is a brownie-purist – she’ll allow nuts, but that’s the limit on add-ins – she understandably clipped the raisins from the recipe.  Without raisins, the brownies are a creamy, profoundly chocolaty tender treat; with them, they’re all that with a touch of exoticism tossed in.

If you want to add raisins to the brownies, here’s how to do it:

RUM-FLAMED RAISINS, for French Chocolate Brownies

(Adapted from Baking, From My Home to Yours)

1/3 cup raisins, dark or golden

1 1/2 tablespoons water

1 1/2 tablespoons dark rum

Put the raisins in a small saucepan with the water, bring to a boil over medium heat and cook until the water almost evaporates.  Add the rum, let it warm for about 30 seconds, turn off the heat, stand back and flame the rum.  When the flames have died, set the raisins aside until needed.  Right before you’re ready to put the brownie batter in the pan, fold in the raisins.

Friands from Oz, Financiers from France

I recently got an email from a food friend asking if I knew anything about Australian friands.  I was pretty sure I knew zip, but I was intrigued by the word because I knew it in French.  Kind of.  I knew the word friandise, which refers to a small delicacy – think petit four – and I thought I knew the word friand as another name for a financier.  I planned to do a little research, but before I could pull down a single book, I found Australian friands in the May issue of Bon Appetit.  I felt just like I did when I was a child, when as soon as I’d learn a new word, I’d see it or hear it.

In fact, the Bon Ap recipe was for a small cake that was clearly related to the French financier, one of my all-time favorite pastries.  I love everything about financiers, from their history and their name, to the way they’re made and the way they taste.

The financier is a pure-bred Parisian, having been created in the late nineteenth century by a pastry chef named Lasne, who had a shop on the rue Saint-Denis near the Bourse, the city’s stock exchange.  Lasne had a bead on his clients:  he knew that they were rich, discriminating and always in a hurry, so he designed his little unglazed cookie-cake so that it could be eaten without a knife, fork or spoon and without risk to suit, shirt or tie.  It was an early and classy form of fast food.

Financiers are as rich as the bankers they were named for.  They’re made from ground almonds, sugar, unwhipped egg whites, flour and an enormous quantity of melted butter, which is cooked until it is golden brown.  And, in keeping with the theme, the cakes were originally baked in rectangular pans, so that they ended up resembling ingots.

These cakes are sweet, tender and beautiful in their simplicity.  They have a nutty flavor from the browned butter and are perfect, served without any accompaniment or fuss, with coffee or tea. 

And they’re amenable to additions. They’re great with berries (not strawberries, because they’re too watery) and they’re happy to be made in whatever molds you have available.  You can make them bigger (I’ve made 8-inch round financiers, glazed them with ganache and called the dessert a torte) smaller, boat-shaped, square or round. 

Actually, for years, before I invested in rectangular financier molds, I made the pastries in mini-muffin pans and pressed a sliver of fruit into the batter.  Maybe I was Australian in another life because, as near as I can figure it, friands from Oz are made in small mini-muffin-like pans and usually have fruit in the batter.

If anyone from Australia wants to weigh in, I’d love to hear from you.

In the meantime, here’s a recipe for a classic French financier, one I learned to make from Parisian pastry chef/bread baker Jean-Luc Poujauran.  Feel free to play around with it or even to Australianize it.

FINANCIERS

Adapted from Paris Sweets, Great Desserts from the City’s Best Pastry Shops

Makes 12 cookies

1 1/2 sticks (6 ounces; 180 grams) unsalted butter

1 cup (200 grams) sugar

1 cup (100 grams) ground almonds

6 large egg whites

2/3 cup (90 grams) all-purpose flour

Put the butter in a small saucepan and bring it to the boil over medium heat, swirling the pan occasionally.  Allow the butter to bubble away until it turns a deep brown, but don’t turn your back on the pan – the difference between brown and black is measured in seconds.  Pull the pan from the heat and keep it in a warm place.

Mix the sugar and almonds together in a medium saucepan.  Stir in the egg whites, place the pan over low heat, and, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, heat the mixture until it is runny, slightly white and hot to the touch, about 2 minutes.  Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the flour, then gradually mix in the melted butter.  Transfer the batter to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, pressing it against the surface of the batter to create an airtight seal, and chill for at least 1 hour.  (The batter can be kept covered in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.)

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).  Butter 12 rectangular financier molds (these were tested in 3-3/4 x 2 x 5/8-inch [10 x 5 x 1-1/2-cm] rectangular molds that each hold 3 tablespoons), dust the interiors with flour and tap out the excess.  Place the molds on a baking sheet for easy transport.

Fill each mold almost to the top with batter.  Slide the molds into the oven and bake for about 13 minutes, or until the financiers are golden, crowned and springy to the touch.  If necessary, run a blunt knife between the cookies and the sides of the pans, then turn the cookies out of their molds and allow them to cool to room temperature right side up on cooling racks.