Mar 09 2008
French Supper
An invitation to a film about France, food and love. Time to wheel out the French classics.
- Oeufs en Cocotte
- Chicken Liver Salad
Those of you scrutinising our progress statistics closely (I’ll post them later, if you’d like to see) will have noted that, whilst we are steaming through the challenge, there are areas where we are doing less well than others. We’ve cooked lots from Instant Calmer but rather less, which is to say nothing from the Retro Rapido chapter. (There is another glaring absence but I’ll come back to that.)
I will confess that part of the problem has been that the recipes appeal a little less to me in this chapter than others. I mean really, a salad with iceberg lettuce and tinned sweetcorn? But one or two or the recipes have been on my to do list for a while and I was glad of the chance to cook them on Friday night. I was taking Dougal’s Mummy to see a French film, Hunting and Gathering, as she’d given me the book for Christmas. The book is strongly about food, so it seemed right to cook some French recipes.
I started with Oeufs en Cocotte. I have now a set of four glass ramekins (good old Gü puddings) and we’re working on some plain white ceramic ones, so I was able to present these properly. In fact, because I’d followed Nigella’s suggestion of having asparagus to dip (which required me to come up with a makeshift asparagus steamer, I think a did rather well!) the presentation of these wee pots of creamy eggy goodness was pretty gorgeous. I’d do this again as a starter as it was dead simple and looked and tasted very special.
To follow I made the Chicken Liver Salad, also from Retro Rapido. I’d been meaning to make this for supper for some time, not least of all because even Organic Free Range Chicken Livers from Waitrose are dead cheap- I bought 400g of them for less than two quid. Somehow though I’d not quite got round to it.
They looked beautiful as they cooked, whilst I arranged the salad and made up the sublime smelling maple syrup and sherry vinegar (I finally cracked- this woman is going to bankrupt me through condiments I swear) dressing. After the prescribed seven minutes of cooking I deglazed the pan with the dressing, served the meat and drizzled about the dressing. I forgot the sprinkling of wanky sea salt but I don’t think anyone noticed.
Sadly, Dougal didn’t enjoy his livers at all, and I’m not sure his mum was particularly keen either. For the most part I did really enjoy mine although there was one amongst them which felt kinda chalky and a bit too mousse-like. I only had Nigella’s seven minutes, turning frequently instructions to go on, so perhaps I did cook them all wrong. Nevertheless, I was a bit saddened that this somewhat rare venture of mine into proper, foodie cooking, with foodie, thrifty ingredients was not a Regards to the Chef success. It looked beautiful though!
[...] does not care for liver. I think he has probably only eaten it a handful of times in his life (chicken liver salad earlier in the year, for example) and finds the texture most off putting. This meal was always [...]