recipe

Burgundy eggs in red wine sauce

Posted on by Pat
Of all the wonderful food in Burgundy, I have a special soft spot for the bistro staple known as oeufs en meurette. The dish is hearty and warming on a cool autumn night and it is a classic in the region. Maybe I like it so much because sauce meurette is very similar to the sauce in coq au vin. Despite its rich flavors, French cooks usually pair meurette with mildly flavored proteins, like poached eggs or a poached fish. Restaurants in Burgundy often feature this dish as a first course (one egg per person) because everything but the eggs can be prepared ahead and re-heated, making it a quick dish to assemble. POACHED EGGS IN RED WINE SAUCE Most of the ingredients for this...Read More

Black pepper, red wine, and strawberries

Posted on by Pat and David
The conjunction of strawberry season with this series of blogs about French cooking takes us back to our first introduction to lightened French cuisine, which was not in France at all but in the second largest French-speaking city in the world, Montreal. Les Halles opened in 1971 as a grand Escoffier-like townhouse palace of dining in a city best known to that point for its great baked beans with salt pork. When Dominique Crevoisier took over as chef in the early 1980s, he skillfully blended the haute with the nouvelle to create magical meals that didn't give the patrons gout. He gave us the best idea of what to do with leftover red wine: Turn it into a peppered syrup to serve on strawberries! He...Read More

Making your own lunch in Paris

Posted on by David
We used to have a professional dancer friend from New York who always signed up for a dance class when she visited Boston. We thought it was an amusing quirk--until we discovered that most dancers take classes when they travel. At worst, they get a good workout. At best, they learn something new. In that same spirit, I signed up to make my own lunch in Paris with a half-hour express class through L'atelier des Chefs (Chefs Workshop), which offers a whole array of cooking classes for home chefs and, judging by my classmates, for bachelors who are cooking for themselves for the first time and women who would like to relieve them of that chore. Most classes take an hour to half a day...Read More

Reprising Julia Child’s first French meal

Posted on by David
The marvelously bourgeois restaurant La Couronne changed the way Americans eat, so when I was in Fécamp to write about Bénédictine for the Robb Report (see "Leisure: A Secret for the Centuries"), I had to stop off in Rouen on my way back to Paris. Mark your calendar: On Wednesday, November 3, 1948, Julia and Paul Child stopped for lunch after their ferry landed at Le Havre and they began the drive to Paris. Writing years later, Julia called it "the most exciting meal of my life." It was her first taste of French food. Founded as an inn in 1345, La Couronne (31 Place du Vieux Marché, 33-02-35-71-40-90, www.lacouronne.com.fr) has a strong claim as the oldest auberge in France, not that the countryside Art...Read More

More asparagus recipes from Friuli

Posted on by Pat and David
Perhaps I have such an affinity for Friuli because I lived for more than a decade in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, where Hadley asparagus, grown on the rich riverbank soils of the Connecticut River, is some of the finest "grass" in the U.S. I'm in Cambridge now, but I still gorge on Hadley asparagus during the short May season. For the last couple of years I have worked to adapt recipes from an authoritative Friuli book on the subject called simply Asparagi 103 ricette by gourmand Antonio Boemo. It just might be the final word in great asparagus cookery, featuring recipes from some of Friuli's finest chefs. (Thanks, Bepi Pucciarelli, for finding the out-of-print book and helping with the translations.) Here are a...Read More

If it’s asparagus it must be Friuli

Posted on by David
Guidebooks to Italy have a maddening tendency to completely ignore one of my favorite areas for gastronomic tourism: the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the northeast corner of the country. Sharing a northern border with Austria and an eastern border with Slovenia, Friuli has both a dialect and a cuisine with strong Germanic influences. The local version of Italian is full of the hard Rs and the chewy "sch" sounds of central Europe, and the menus are laden with pork and a bevy of mitteleuropan dumplings masquerading as gnocchi. Many of the dishes draw their depth of flavor from cream, butter, or smoked fish. [caption id="attachment_854" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Piazza Libertà, Udine"][/caption] But most food in Friuli is based on whatever is freshest from the fields....Read More

Rum cake finds a new incarnation

Posted on by Pat and David
Hot Miami chef Dean James Max (who happens to be up for a James Beard restaurateur award this year) is also the talent behind one of our favorite Grand Cayman restaurants, The Brasserie. Part of what makes The Brasserie so terrific is that Max and his staff use local fish, local produce, and all kinds of goodies they grow in the restaurant garden. The menu is also inspired by Caribbean traditions. Of the restaurant's complex chicken pepper-pot soup, he says, "The peppers you get here on Grand Cayman are just incredible." So leave it to Max to find a fun use for the ubiquitous island confection, Tortuga rum cake. (You might recall that we wrote about the cake in What to buy in a grocery...Read More

Down home flavors from New Orleans

Posted on by Pat and David
Whenever we’re in New Orleans, our favorite spot to splurge on a night out is Restaurant August, the linchpin of chef John Besh's six eateries. Not only is Besh a supremely talented chef and restaurateur who understands both great food and the whole concept of a great night out, he’s also one of the nicest guys in the business. His fried oysters with pepper spoonbread or his lacquered pork belly with crawfish, olives and blood orange are the very definition of refined Southern cooking. (He also serves a mean whole roast sucking pig with grits, roasted onions and blackberry jam. Mm-m-m-m.) It’s no surprise that he’s won a slew of professional accolades, including recognition as Best Chef Southeast from the James Beard Foundation. So when...Read More

The perfect pre-travel meal

Posted on by Pat and David
It seems that the airlines responded to complaints about bad food by simply eliminating meal service. So now when you do get a tray of gooey pasta or Silly Putty chicken—well, it’s better than nothing. Some of our food and travel writer friends beat the system by packing creative sandwiches on homemade bread, gourmet trail mix, or fancy cheese. We tend more toward convenience foods. We always have peanut butter crackers and little boxes of raisins to throw into our carry-on bags. But we compensate by having a soothing meal at home before we head to the airport. Ginger-carrot soup is our usual choice. The carrots pack a wallop of vitamin A and ginger is said to ease motion sickness and generally aid digestion. Our...Read More

Making patatas a la Riojana at home

Posted on by Pat and David
We don't feel too bad messing around a little with tradition to make this dish with New England provender. This rich stew hails from the Ebro River valley in La Rioja, but until Napoleon brought potatoes to northern Spain in the early 19th century, this dish was made with chestnuts! Of course, nowadays the local potato varieties of the Ebro valley are highly prized—considered by many the tastiest potatoes in Spain. In fact, the Riojanos tend to keep them for themselves. Not only do they have the rich potato flavor of say, a Kennebec, they also keep their shape like a waxy potato while containing enough starch to thicken a broth. We discovered that a mix of waxy potatoes (Red Bliss are the easiest to...Read More