Hors d'œuvre: Canapés au saumon fumé

A small, quick and tasty snack, nice to use as an appetizer. Pulse some smoked salmon in a food processor for a few seconds, and then add créme fraîche and process until smooth and creamy. Spoon some on a base of multi-grain wheat and rye bread (I made some with a sourdough starter), and top with a couple of capers. I served each canapé in an endive leaf, which added a slightly bitter, refreshing taste.

I set the table with two on every plate before the guests arrived, so we'd have something to escort the first glass of wine, before we started with the first course.

Detail of France

A picture Despoina took in Lyon.

Crêpe aux pommes et au caramel

A couple of weeks ago, I made crêpes with a mix of wheat and rye flour.

Crêpes are easy to make, so you can make a pile and store them in the fridge for a few days. Then you wrap a bit of cheese or jam in them, and you have a nice quick snack.

I thought a funny way to serve a sweet crêpe with apple filling and caramel on top is to wrap it like a giant tortellini. First pour a bit of the filling on the crêpe next to the center, and fold in half, over the diameter. Fold again in half, parallel to the first fold, and finally bring the edges together to form the tortellini shape. Then burn some sugar into caramel and use it to glue the edges on top of each other, and also pour some on top with a spoon to make crunchy caramel threads.
Here it is, surrounded with a bit of butterscotch caramel. OK, maybe I overdid it a bit, but I like the combination of apple with caramel.

I used a bit of compote de pomme for stuffing. I bought a jar from the farmer's market, it's a jam-like apple compote, but it doesn't have much (any?) sugar, so it's far less sweet than jam, more like apple purée. I warmed it up and added a spoon of honey and half a spoon of butter, before using it to stuff the crêpes.

Cabbage pattern

This is a photo from a while back, when the farmer's market was full of cabbages. I thought the pattern looked cool.

I made a simple salad by chopping this and adding some croutons and dressing. Make croutons by cutting stale bread in cubes, mix with a bit of olive oil and dry in the oven for a few minutes. To make the dressing blend an anchovy fillet and a small clove of garlic, add yogurt or fromage blanc or sour cream, salt, pepper, and mix until smooth. The dressing is strong and assertive, so adjust anchovy and garlic content to taste. If it's too thick, add a spoon of water to make it more liquid.

Carrot pasta

Remember the carrot leftovers from making all that stock? I puréed the carrots (peeled) in the food processor, and spooned it over about 2 to 3 cups of flour. I added two eggs, salt, and kneaded until I got a nice, soft, orange dough (add more flour if necessary, depending on how much water is in the carrots).

I put the dough in a plastic bag in the fridge to rest for an hour or so, and then it's ready to make pasta!

I rolled some dough thin, and cut it into tagliatelle.

Then, I laid the tagliatelle to dry overnight. Unfortunately, making tagliatelle was a bit time-consuming to do by hand. Maybe I should invest in a "pasta-rolling and cutting" machine (probably an inexpensive hand-operated one) for next time.

Too bored to roll the rest of the dough, I pulled the rest turned into shells (like thin gnocchi) as I showed in a previous post. I let the shells dry overnight with enough flour to avoid sticking, and put them in the freezer next morning.

The tagliatelle had also dried by next day.

Tagliatelle al forno

Here's how I cooked the tagliatelle the next day. Very fast and tasty.

Boil the tagliatelle for a couple of minutes, and drain them. At the same time, chop some mushrooms.

Sauté the mushrooms in a spoon of olive oil and mix them with the pasta. Top it with bits of reblochon cheese (rind side up), and ladle a bit of the water where you boiled the pasta over everything. Finally, put everything in a hot oven for 10 minutes.

Reblochon is a creamy cheese with a lot of flavor, and it melted quickly all over the pasta: Très bon!

Beef stock

I just have to finish this "stock" trilogy, don't I? Beef stock is essentially the same as all other stock, i.e. use whatever vegetable you have available, with one extra step. You need beef, preferably parts with bone. To get a nice dark broth, put all your beef in an oven pan, spoon a couple of tablespoons of tomato purée on each piece, and roast in a very hot oven for 45 minutes to an hour, until the edges of the bones and the tomato on the bottom of the pan start caramelizing (that's an euphemism for "burning"). Then put your meat in the pot along with all the vegetables, deglaze the pan over a medium flame on the stove using water and add that with everything else. Fill up with cold water, bring to a boil, and simmer for a long time.

The goal is to get all the collagen from the bones for full flavor. That can take up to 8 or 10 hours of simmering! If you're not afraid of accidents and getting burned in your sleep, you can do that overnight. I do it on Sundays when I stay at home all day, and have to read papers, or clean up, or read books, etc. After you're done, the bones should be full of "dots", and break with almost no effort. Wait until it's cold, skim the solid fat from the surface, and bottle. Again, this can be frozen for a couple of months, but only lasts two to three days in the fridge.

Vegetable stock

After the last post on chicken stock, Sophia asked about vegetable stock, so here it is. This one is easy, and way faster, since you don't need to wait until you break down and extract the collagen from any bones.

You could start by sautéing or roasting the onion-like vegetables and carrots in a bit of oil for extra flavor, but I just boil everything together. I used four leeks, two onions, a couple of carrots I had left, six cloves of garlic (crushed), a couple of pieces of ginger, three pieces of clove, a branch of celery, parsley, three (small) fennel roots and 4-5 mushrooms for color. Don't use fresh small white mushrooms, they don't have much taste. Instead, use leftover mushrooms you haven't used and they've opened underneath, and the black seeds are visible. Or you can get them from the "old vegetables" section in the supermarket, much cheaper.

Another thing you can do for vegetable stock is use all kinds of leftovers from ordinary cooking. I have a plastic bag in the freezer, and I add anything I don't use when cooking: carrot and potato peels (wash the vegetables before peeling), stems from parsley, dill and other herbs, seeds from green peppers, etc. So, add your bag of frozen leftovers to the vegetables, put everything in the pot, cover with cold water, bring to a simmer and simmer for about 2 hours uncovered to reduce.

If you want to make vegetable soup, add also a potato, don't use peels or add anything non-edible, chop vegetables finely, and stop cooking after 30-45 minutes depending on quantity. This way, you'll have a tasty broth, and the vegetables won't have lost all flavor and texture. To thicken the soup mash the potato and add it back, or just use potato flakes, and optionally finish with milk. It's a very nice soup. Alternatively, without potato, just add shrimp during the last 10 minutes. Also a very nice soup.

For general-purpose broth, take all flavor out from the vegetables by boiling for another hour. Then let it cool, pass it through a cheesecloth on a sieve (or just a strainer, up to you) to get clear stock. Since I'd used the vegetable leftovers, I threw away the solids. I only salvaged the carrots, they were the only that were easy to separate without much hassle. More on what I did with the carrots in a future post. I bottled the stock in freezer-friendly plastic milk bottles. Again, no salt. My freezer is now packed with bottles of beef, chicken and vegetable stock.

This stock is really good for making risotto, or for substituting for milk in mashed potatoes when one doesn't eat dairy products. And of course, for soup.

Chicken stock

This morning I went to the farmer's market. There was someone selling farm-raised poultry there, and I decided to make chicken stock. So, I bought a chicken, herbs and vegetables, and headed home. I've never bought meat from the farmer's market before. There was some extra overhead that you don't get with meat from a normal butcher. For example, I had to chop the head off from the chicken! Also, there were some feathers left on the skin, and I had to get rid of those over a flame, but then the whole house smelled like burnt hair.

I cut the chicken roughly into portions (although that's not necessary,) and put it in my stock pot. Then I added:

• Celery, stem and leaves
  
• 4 carrots (I didn't peel them, I just washed them very well, and scrubed them with the hard side of the sponge)
• Parsley, about a cup, coarsely chopped, including stems
  
• Two onions, quartered
• 6 cloves of garlic, smashed
  
• Two leeks
• One star-anise
• Three cloves
• Around 15 peppercorns
• Dried sage
• Dried thyme
  

I covered everything with cold water, and set it on the stove. This is my stock pot or "marmite" in french. It's quite big, with a capacity of 14 liters.
When it started to boil, I lowered the heat to low, and left it to simmer. After a few hours, the water had reduced quite a bit, and the house smelled very nice.

Then I strained the liquid and let it cool. I'm going to skim off the fat tomorrow after it solidifies in the fridge, bottle it in plastic bottles, and put it in the freezer.

As I've written before, this is much better than stock-flavored cubes, or even the stock you can get boxed from the supermarket. And low overhead, too, you just put everything in the pot and it takes care of itself. It takes a few hours, but it doesn't even need stirring.

The solid leftovers

Unfortunately, there's not much taste left in the solids after boiling for a few hours. Plus, the chicken had almost dissolved into fibers, and there were a whole lot of tiny bones everywhere. Normally, I just throw it away. This time, I had a different idea. I went through the solids to remove the small bones, by transferring small batches with a fork into a bowl, and throwing away any bones that came up. Very tedious and time consuming, I won't make a habit of it. Fortunately, you can multiplex this part, and also talk on skype, listen to the radio, or watch a movie (or all of the above) at the same time.

After the boring "separate from the bones" phase, I also took the carrots out. The carrots were the only thing in the solids that looked like itself, everything else had melted into tiny pieces, all mixed together. Remember I hadn't peeled the carrots before, so I peeled them now. Then I puréed them with the food processor, to get a nice, bright orange purée. I'm going to use it to color and decorate things.

The rest of the stuff was about 1.5 liters of dissolved solid leftovers to experiment with. After looking for ideas online, I decided to try making patties out of them. I took about half a cup and mixed it with a quarter of a cup of breadcrumbs. Then I added salt, pepper, and half an egg, and molded it into small kefte. I fried these in a stick-proof pan in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. They came out quite tasty!

I still don't know what I'll do with the rest. I might just make everything into kefte and fry it too, but I'm itching to try something new now. I'll keep you posted.