A French Friday’s with Dorie Feast: Salmon with Basil Tapenade, Yin-Yang Beans, and Semolina Bread to mop up the extra tapenade sauce.
Shortly after my daughter Melissa arrived to spend some time with me after the death of my husband, she made a suggestion. “I think, Mom, this is a time to stock up on Comfort Foods, just eat what makes you feel good.” Somehow, to hear her now irreverently tell it, I translated “Comfort Foods” into “all the Junk Food that you want” and went on a binge. My menu, for more days than I’d like to admit was:
Fritos, the Original Corn Chip;
Cheetos Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks;
Archway Original Windmill Cookies; (with milk)
Caramel Corn (Farmers Market); and
Premium Saltine Crackers (crumbled and mixed with sugar and milk).
Toss in one-half a Blueberry-Marscapone Roulade and a whole loaf of Semolina Bread and, to me, that spells c-o-m-f-o-r-t. For about ten days. After that, it spells j-u-n-k-f-o-o-d. That’s why it was a nice jog back to reality when this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe choice was Salmon with Basil Tapenade.
Wild Sockeye Salmon Fillets
There’s nothing difficult about this tasty main course which is explained beautifully here. It’s simply tapenade coaxed into two “pockets” created in each 5 ounce, thick, center-portion of salmon. The fillets cook 4 minutes in the skillet before heading into the oven for another 6. Add some leftover tapenade sauce for a lovely dinner entrée.
Fill a small plastic baggie with the olive tapenade. Then cut off a small tip of a corner and hold the “cone” tightly with your hand. Use this make-shift tube to fill the slit “pockets” in each salmon fillet. Massage gently to evenly spread the tapenade.
I thought that Yin Yang Beans, a favorite recipe from Grace Young’s “Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge” cookbook and featured on PBS a year ago, might be a complimentary side to the salmon. Even without the ground pork, which I left out, these green beans still have the tangy, spicy flair that is delicious with this salmon. So good, in fact, that I’ve joined Wok Wednesdays, a new twice-monthly cooking group that is woking it’s way through Young’s book. Next week, Kung Pao Chicken. If you want to see what others chose to serve with their salmon this week, go here.
It would be remiss and most ungracious of me not to acknowledge your many kindnesses and concerns expressed since the death of my husband. Quite remarkable, really. Six years ago, Michael wrote a letter telling me the life he hoped I would lead after he could no longer live it with me. Now, keeping in mind this is a Man’s Idea of how a Woman should live, he did leave behind good marching orders. Since by nature, I am a happy, optimistic woman, always willing to choose joy over sadness, he’s now made that even easier. In that vein, I am off to California this week-end to celebrate a lovely young lady’s 11th birthday. Life is Good.
Sunday morning began, to use a bread term, rather crumbly.
This week’s Tuesday with Dorie/Baking with Julia recipe, Semolina Bread. Ohhhhh, it’s so yummy.
Up early, as usual, to watch the 14th stage of the Tour de France. Sadly, the 150-some racers met Trouble. Towards the end of the race and just before the brutally steep Mur de Péguère summit, some idiot tossed tacks onto the road. Bicycle tires don’t play well with upholstery tacks. That appalling act of sabotage resulted in at least 30 riders suffering 48 punctures and one sustaining a suspected broken collar bone in a crash.
Defending champion Cadel Evans suffered three different punctures which stopped him cold and would have put him out of the competition. However, Tour leader Bradley Wiggins, a Brit now wearing the yellow jersey, drew approval and accolades for sitting tall on his bike, slowing the pace, and waiting for the defending champ and others to regroup and join the peloton. Score One for the Good Guys.
Watch Magic Happen: Start with a Sponge. Mix Warm Water, Yeast, All-Purpose Flour and Give It 2 Hours to Rise.
Following that drama it was on to this week’s Tuesday with Dorie/Baking with Julia. This week it’s a quickly and easily mixed Semolina Bread. As I walked into the kitchen, the tour over, I decided if Bradley could rise to the occasion,I could rise to the occasion, making bread that would, uh, rise.
Two hours later, the Sponge plus flours, salt and olive oil make this cute little ball of goodness. Don’t you love making bread?
Famed baker Nick Malgieri showed Julia how to make this deliciously nutty-tasting bread. If you’re thinking Semolina loaves are more Italian than French, you’re right. This flour is milled from durum wheat, the flour used to make pasta.
It takes ten minutes to whisk together the sponge and two hours to let it double in size. Once mixed together with flour, olive oil and salt, it turns into a lovely dough that needs another two hours rising time. Then you form the dough into a loaf, transfer it on to a parchment paper-lined baking sheet lightly covered with corn meal, and for the next two hours let that baby rise again.
Here, I admit to a little error . When I shaped and prepared the dough for the second rising, I “slashed” prematurely. Should have waited until after the rising. Whoops.
Slash and bake.
This is a tasty but unassuming and rather plain loaf of artisan bread. It’s color, a wonderfully warm golden brown, is what separates it from the crowd. Enjoy.
If you’d like to make this bread, I encourage you to jump to this site. To read what other Dorie/Julia fans baked this week, go here.
BLUEBERRY-MASCARPONE ROULADE, this week’s French Friday with Dorie recipe
When I spotted this week’s FFWD recipe choice, Blueberry-Mascarpone Roulade, I immediately thought of the Tour de France 2012. Stick with me here. Having begun Saturday, June 30th and continuing through Sunday, July 22, the world’s most famous bicycle race covers an astounding distance of 3,497 challenging kilometres (2173 miles). The term roulade originated from the French verb rouler which means to roll. Since I’m a bicycle fanatic, every morning, before going to work, I flip on my television and follow those two-hundred competitive riders as they roll through the French countryside. Go Bradley Wiggins!
This is the batter for the sponge cake, turned out on a jelly roll pan covered with parchment paper.
The batter is spread over the parchment paper. Next time I will be sure to blend the top more evenly.
Understandably, if you’re American, your first thought may be “jelly roll” because a dessert roulade is a sponge cake rolled around a sweet tasting filling. Although we’re most familiar with the Bûche de Noël, this week’s recipe would be a perfect dessert finale for your upcoming Bastille Day party on July 14th.
A traditional Bûche de Noël, made with a Génoise cake and chocolate buttercream, and garnished with powdered sugar, raspberries, and spruce sprigs. Photo by Wikipedia
Et, merci à Dorie, c’est facile.
We’re on a roll —– after cooling, the baked sponge cake is laid on a towel, coated with confectionary sugar, and spread with the prepared filling. Then the cake is rolled about one and a half times, finishing with the seam at the bottom. Refrigerate the wrapped cake.
The roulade is now ready to return to its “towel home” and return to the refrigerator for at least two hours.
Although a roulade can be filled with anything, this one is filled with ‘a mixture of blueberry-speckled sweetened mascarpone and whipped cream’. Because I’d never made a roulade before, I admit to approaching this week’s choice with trepidation. However, my worries were unfounded.
Dorie makes this easy for a first-timer like me. 1) Make the berries. 2) Bake the roulade. 3) Make the filling. 4) Assemble the cake. 5) Refrigerate. She also suggests making a berry coulis to serve with the roulade and this is a great idea. Next time.
If you’re game for making this roulade, stop here for a close version. To see what my colleagues baked this week, roll on over to this finish line.
There have been many challenges this past week or so since my stepfather died, but honestly, the one I feared the most was melding my baking style with my mother’s.
Let me explain.
My mother belongs to an online cooking group called Tuesdays with Dorie. Twice a month, she and approximately 500 other dedicated bakers from around the globe try their hand at creating an assigned recipe. The group is currently working their way through the book Baking with Julia, which was compiled and written by Dorie Greenspan. My mother was a recipe behind, so she suggested that we bake together to help her catch up.
Baking with Julia
Herein lies the challenge:
I am a by-the-seat-of-my-pants baker. I read a few recipes and then make it up as I go. I skip steps, omit or add ingredients, and rarely measure. Much of the time, my end results are good if not great, but occasionally there are some big flops.
My mother, on the other hand, is a by-the-book kind of gal. If she doesn’t have the precise ingredients on hand (may God strike you down if you substitute regular vanilla when it calls for Tahitian Vanilla), she will either run to the store or not make the recipe. She checks accuracy of liquid measurements by squatting to eye level, and she times everything to the second. As she says, “I don’t waver from the exact.”
I knew we were especially doomed when she opened the weighty Baking with Julia to page 315, and announced we were making Hazelnut Biscotti. “My biscotti always turn out awful,” I confessed.
“Mine too,” my mother countered.
Hazelnut Biscotti made by Katrina of BakingwithBoys.com
I would have considered throwing in the dishtowel right there, but I didn’t want to leave my mom in the lurch and I figured that during this biscotti round Julia Childs AND Dorie Greenspan had our backs. With uncharacteristic politeness and restraint, we began to bake. She got out the ingredients while I scanned the recipe.
We decided to make pistachio biscotti as those were the nuts we had on hand. (Thank goodness Greenspan offered them as an alternative in the preface of the recipe or we would have been in the car on our way to the store.)
Our first disagreement was over the merits of splat mats versus parchment paper. My mother had misplaced her silicone splat mats and felt they were too expensive to replace at $7.00 apiece. I couldn’t live without my splat mats and felt they were a more environmentally-friendly alternative to parchment.
“Well,” said my mother as she ripped a length of parchment paper from the roll to prepare the the biscotti baking pan. “Dorie advises the use of parchment.”
“Heaven forbid we should use something else,” I thought but smartly did not verbalize. I was on my best behavior.
Pistachios
My mother measured the 2/3 cup of pistachios on a cookie sheet (no parchment needed for this step) and put them in the oven to toast. We set the timer for ten minutes, and then got into a minor squabble about the necessity of mise en place. I preferred the grab-it-from-the-cabinet-as-you-need-it-and-then-put-it-back method, while my mom quoted Mary Sue Salmon, her first French cooking teacher, who said you always prepare a mise en place before you start cooking. Midway through our discussion and with four minutes to go on the timer, I smelled something burning.
“The nuts!” I yelled as I lunged for the oven. I pulled out the pan only to discovered that the nuts were already overdone. I examined one closely and then retrieved the bag of already shelled pistachios from the pantry.
“Mom,” I said carefully, we were both just barely hanging on this week and I didn’t want this to totally push her over the edge, “Um, these were already toasted.”
We looked at each other and started to laugh.
When we finally pulled it together several minutes later, we got serious about our biscotti. This wasn’t about baking styles anymore, this was about getting something posted. We both realized that we needed to join forces to make this work.
Chopping pistachios
We cleared the counter and started again. I chopped the nuts and my mom finished getting out the ingredients. I even measured the dry ingredients into a separate bowl rather than throwing everything together willy-nilly as usual.
“Where’s the baking soda?” I asked. According to Greenspan, “It’s the baking soda in the dough that gives the biscotti their wonderful open, crunchy texture.”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” said my mom, in a near panic. Before I could respond, she had grabbed her keys and flown out the door. “I’m just running over to a neighbor’s,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
While she was gone, I mixed up the rest of the batter. Earlier that week I’d read a baking hint that suggested always doubling the amount of vanilla you add to a recipe. So I did, hoping that Childs and Greenspan would approve. I couldn’t find the brandy, so I made a mental note to ask my mom when she returned.
Once I added the baking soda to the dry ingredients, I mixed everything together. I was just about to shape the dough onto the cookie sheet when I remembered the brandy.
“Oh man, I forgot the brandy and I’ve already mixed the wet with the dry,” I told my mom.
She retrieved the cognac from the pantry and handed it to me. Forgetting myself for a moment, I failed to measure, and simply chugged some into the batter, probably about three times the suggested two teaspoons. The room filled with the smell of alcohol.
“I hope these turn out,” said my mother as she retreated to the kitchen table where she’d set up camp since her baking soda run. She poured herself some more Fritos, her comfort food of the week. “I don’t want to get kicked out.”
No pressure there.
Batter complete, I began to shape the dough. Greenspan suggests making two chubby logs 12 to 13 inches long. “Chubby logs” was a vague description, so my mom got out a measuring tape and pulled up the food site Vintage Kitchen Notes. Paula, from Argentina, had kindly posted a photo of her biscotti logs before they hit the oven.
Chubby biscotti logs
After much shaping and reshaping, we put the biscotti in the oven for the first and then the second baking. As my previous biscotti attempts had been undercooked, I left the crescent cookies in the full fifteen minutes for the second go-around. For good measure, when the timer dinged, I turned off the oven and left them in another three minutes.
As you might imagine, with all that baking time, the biscotti were a little overdone. “Hard as a rock,” according to my mother. Nonetheless, we filled a special tenth anniversary bowl of my mom and Michael’s with our baking feat and headed over to a friend’s house. Adriana and her parents are originally from Sicily, and we knew they would be hard, yet fair critics.
Anniversary Bowl
I explained to our tasters that the cookies were a little firm. “Be careful not to break a tooth,” my mother helpfully interjected. I suggested they not only dunk them in a drink, but maybe soak them a while.
The verdict: Overcooked by several minutes, but great flavor.
Pistachio Biscotti
I guess my mom and I learned a little something from each other during our baking challenge: Exact is good as long as you are willing to throw in something extra now and then.
(If you are interested in the retro kitchen mixer tshirt I am wearing in the photo above, please visit Caustic Threads located at Etsy.com. Shop owner Erica Voges creates and prints these original designs for an amazingly economical price. Check out her wares and support a small business today!)
(My daughter Melissa, who is also a writer and has her own site, flyingnotscreaming, wrote this week’s French Fridays with Dorie post.)
by Melissa Myers Place
One of the things I admire most about my mother is her unwavering determination. When she sets her sights on a goal, she works steadily and doggedly, looking neither left nor right, until she reaches her destination. So when she called last week to tell me that her husband of twenty-six years died after a decade-long struggle with Alzheimer’s, I knew that in the days that followed one of the things we would be doing was a little French cooking. It is with no disrespect to Michael that in amongst making necessary phone calls, discussing future plans, and revisiting favorite memories of the man we both loved, we would be making sure my mother did not miss her French Fridays with Dorie deadline. And Michael, who was always the most proud of Mary, would not have wanted it any other way.
For those of you who don’t know, French Fridays with Dorie is an online cooking group. Members are cooking their way through Dorie Greenspan’s latest book Around My French Table, and each Friday they post their results on their own foodie site. (All 50 or so members cook the same recipe each week.) It is a Greenspan love fest, and some followers have taken to calling themselves “Doristas.”
Despite the fact that at one point in my life I earned my living by cooking, I was a little intimidated when my mom handed me Greenspan’s weighty volume. I know from following my mother’s weekly posts for the past eighteen months that these Doristas are SERIOUS about cooking. And the French Fridays with Dorie commitment is not for the faint of heart. Week after week, these dedicated food enthusiasts fearlessly venture out onto a new cooking limb, and yes, Greenspan has simplified each dish as much as possible, but it is still Frenchcooking for goodness sakes.
“I hope it’s an easy recipe,” I said, as my mother looked up our Friday cooking assignment. What I meant was I hoped the recipe didn’t require the mysterious technique of braising or call for ingredients outside of my comfort zone such as phyllo dough or lamb shanks.
Luckily for me, this week’s recipe was Crunchy Ginger-Pickled Cucumbers. I love cucumbers, pickled or not, and had picked up two at the market earlier that day. I skimmed the recipe’s preface. Greenspan describes these pickles as a “hotter, hunkier take on traditional thinly sliced cucumbers in vinegar.” The description tickled me. I haven’t heard a variation on the word “hunk” since I was in junior high. I flipped to the back flap and took a good look at the bespectacled Greenspan who the New York Times calls a “culinary guru.” I decided if Greenspan could use the words “hot” and “hunky” to describe a French dish, then I could make it.
As my mother read aloud the ingredient list, I prayed we didn’t have to make another run to the store. These days even the simplest errands seem momentous. “Can you substitute ingredients?” I asked.
My mother looked horrified. “NO!” she whispered, as if afraid the other Doristas could hear.
I realized at that moment that this was even more serious than I previously thought. And, that I would have to be on my best cooking behavior because I tend to be a sloppy cook: I don’t measure and I rarely follow a recipe exactly or even closely. I hadn’t felt so much pressure since I caught a frying pan on fire during a tryout for a cooking position, but for my mom, I was going to try with all my might to channel the Dorista spirit.
“Are you going to create your mise en place?” She asked as she headed to the other room to sort through some paperwork.
“What does Mikhail Gorbachev have to do with it?” I asked. My mom sighed, and I yet again regretted not paying more attention during my French language courses in college.
“Just take a lot of photos” was my mom’s parting advice.
Consulting the Dorista Bible closely, I gathered all the required ingredients, and arranged them carefully on a cutting board. Forty photos and twenty minutes later, I was finally ready to begin.
Mise en place for Hot and Hunky Cucumbers
“How’s it going?” my mom called. “It’s pretty quiet in there. Are you okay?”
“I’m just about ready to start,” I called back. “Could’ve made this five times by now,” I mumbled to myself.
And it was true. As I am committed to avoiding processed food, I have to cook fast to keep up with the food needs of my family of four. But taking the photos and documenting each step on the notepad by my elbow slowed the cooking process considerably. My admiration for Greenspan’s followers was growing by the minute.
I was glad I’d happened to purchase seedless cucumbers so I could eliminate a couple of steps, but I had to call my mom into the kitchen to double-check that I was cutting the cucumbers into the correct hunky shape. I carefully salted the cucumbers (holding back a little as I doubled the recipe and a full teaspoon of salt seemed like a lot), and while they stood for the required 30 minutes, I prepped and mixed the remaining ingredients.
Salted cucumber hunks
I have to confess that I have a love/hate relationship with fresh ginger. I love when it comes to the party, but don’t like when it hogs all the attention. I’ve found in the past that fine grating the ginger helps release the flavor, but eliminates the unpleasant stringy texture. Not able to locate my mom’s fine grater, I used her larger-holed grater and then minced the strands finer with a knife, hoping that Greenspan wouldn’t mind.
Grated and minced ginger
I combined the seasoned rice wine mixture with the drained cucumbers . . . and that was it. I scanned Greenspan’s recipe again to make sure I hadn’t overlooked a step. It had been almost too easy. I tasted a hunky cucumber chunk. I was disappointed by the blandness and wondered if I had been mistaken in doubting Greenspan regarding the salt amount. With a disappointed sigh, I put my Hot and Hunky Cucumbers (as I’d taken to calling them) into the fridge to chill.
Later that night, even though my mother and I were especially missing Michael and feeling pretty low, we headed to a small Fourth of July gathering with a few close friends, pickled cucumbers in hand. We were warmly welcomed by our lovely host and hostess, and each party member bravely took a spoonful of pickled cucumbers onto their plate. And to my great surprise, the cucumbers were good. As Greenspan already knows and I am beginning to learn, sometimes nothing helps like time. It helped my cucumbers, and it will help the grieving, sad hearts of my mom and me.
Although I will be happy to return to posting weekly personal essays on my own site–a much easier feat than the French Fridays with Dorie commitment–I enjoyed my foray into the world of Greenspan. I learned a thing or two, but mostly I discovered what a wonderful group of people you all are. My mother and I have been so grateful for the outpouring of kindness and support from the French Fridays with Dorie community this past week. It has been truly remarkable, and has proven that you Doristas are made of the very best ingredients.
