Honey Cream Pork

This is a recipe that Jan adapted from a dish served at Pissenlits Par la Racine, a cozy French restaurant on the Rue de Bourgogne. Pissenlits Par la Racine means "the dandelion by the root," a reference to the old expression "eating the dandelion by the root," a euphemism similar to the English "pushing daisies." A somewhat alarming name for a restaurant, but a wonderful dish. Very warming, very comforting. I'm not listing amounts for the ingredients because it's a very approximative and adaptable recipe.

 

Ingredients

• Cubed pork, such as pork chops or pork steak
• Butter, ghee, coconut oil, or whatever your favourite cooking fat or oil is
• Flour
• Salt and pepper
• Honey
• Cream
• Cinnamon
• Chicken bouillon or fond de volaille (optional)

• Potatoes, regular and/or sweet, cubed
• Cooking fat/oil
• Salt and pepper
• Garlic powder

Directions:

 

Toss the potatoes with the salt and pepper, garlic powder, and oil. Roast in the oven or fry until browned and tender.

 

Heat the fat/oil in a skillet over medium heat. Dredge the pork in the flour seasoned with salt and pepper and sautée (in batches if necessary) until browned and cooked through.

Add a good drizzle of cream (about 1-2 tbsp per person) and about as much honey. Sprinkle over a pinch of cinnamon and the bouillon, if using.

 

Serve the pork over the potatoes and serve nice and hot.

Posted with Blogsy

Cod and Cumin Soup

No no, really, it's delicious! Just try it! This is a slightly modified version of a recipe that I found in a French diet book (I know, right? but trust me) and it is very unusual in a very good way.

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp butter
• 2 bunches green onions (or leeks. But leeks can be expensive, and green onions are DELICIOUS), thinly sliced
  
• 2 cups chicken broth or bouillon (or fish bouillon, or vegetable, whatever's on hand)
• 1 cup almond milk (or regular milk, but almond milk is amazing in almost every soup ever, people!)
• 1/4 tsp cumin
• 1 bay leaf (optional. I usually forget to add it.)
• 1 lb (approximately) cod fillet. Or haddock; that's what the recipe originally called for.
• 1 lb (approximately) potatoes, peeled and diced. I like those little redskin potatoes, but use what you have.

Melt the butter in a pot big enough to hold the soup. Add the green onions and/or leeks and cook until translucent but not browned. Or just a little bit browned. This is a very forgiving recipe.

Add the broth, milk, bay leaf, and cumin and lower the heat. This is your poaching liquid. Have you ever poached fish? It's not at all scary. Add your fish to the liquid and bring it to just below a simmer. You should see very few bubbles, but you should see one or two every now and then. Now let the fish sit in that very-slightly-bubbly liquid for about six minutes. Remove it, check to make sure that it flakes like cooked fish, and set aside. You can poach your fish in two batches if you don't have room for all in one go.

Now bring that liquid back to a boil and add your potatoes. Simmer until tender, take off the heat, and add the fish back in.

Serve as an appetizer or main dish. Definitely serve with crusty bread.

French-style Green Beans

We're going to call this French-style because I found the recipe on a French website. And translated it for your dining pleasure. Really, though. It's now my favorite way to cook green beans. Actually, I wasn't a big fan of green beans before, but I could eat these every day.

It's the onion. I'll eat anything that has caramelized onion in it. I'd eat caramelized onions on ice cream.

The cream doesn't hurt, either.

Oh, and the almonds are great.

So yes, it's just generally a good recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 can of your favorite green beans - whole, French cut, regular cut, whatever. Use fresh if you want to. It's all good. Use two cans if you're really hungry. Use three if you have company.
  
• 1 onion, caramelized. The original recipe called for, like, 1/4 of an onion. As if.
• Slivered or sliced almonds. I use half of one small packet. Use as many as you like.
• 1-3 tbsp cream or coconut milk, depending on how decadent you feel.
  

Make sure you start caramelizing the onion early enough. Then start the green beans cooking and the almonds browning in some butter. Watch them closely. Do not burn them.

When everything is done, just drain the green beans (if all the liquid hasn't cooked away), mix everything in, and serve! It's a very pretty dish, as well as being super good and feeling way more indulgent than it really is.

Pasta Bolognaise

Another French recipe, but this time it doesn't call for a cup of heavy cream as a primary ingredient. Go figure. It's actually quite healthy.

Ingredients:

• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 or two cloves of garlic, chopped
• Olive oil, sunflower oil, butter, or whatever
  
• 1 small can of mushrooms, or some sliced fresh mushrooms
• 1 small can of tomato paste. Paste, not sauce.
• Sugar
• Cayenne pepper
• Oregano
• Basil
• Salt and pepper
• Some kind of meat, like chopped ham
• Pasta

Sauté the onion and garlic for a little while, add the mushrooms, and sauté for a little while more. Add the tomato paste and some water until you get a good consistency. Then add the herbs and spices. Cook for a while. Keep tasting to make sure you've got it right. Add the meat (it's precooked, right?) and heat through. Serve over pasta.

Pineapple Curry

This is another excellent "student food" recipe from Mathieu. It's quick, easy, and excellent.

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 can pineapple, cubed or tidbits
  
• 1 onion, chopped
• some bell pepper, if you have some handy
• 3/4 cup cream
• a tiny bit of ketchup or tomato paste
• soy sauce
• curry powder
  
• garlic powder
• ginger
• salt and pepper
• Some kind of meat, if you want it. Chicken is good, but even hot dogs will work.

Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the chopped onion and bell pepper. After cooking for about five minutes, add the pineapple (save the juice) and cook for another ten minutes or until the onion is tender. Add the cream and the pineapple juice. Stir some flour into a cup with some heated juice and add that to thicken the sauce. Add the herbs and spices. Lots of curry powder, not lots of garlic powder. Add some cayenne pepper for an extra kick. Then add the meat and heat thoroughly. Serve over rice.

This makes probably three servings for normal people, two for hungry people with no other side dishes.

Pasta Carbanara

Pasta Carbanara

This is the French starving-student recipe that I lived on when I was in France. We must have had this at least once a week. It's kind of backwards in the sense that I can usually take a complex, healthy recipe and turn it into a quick, less healthy one; with this one, though, feel free to do the reverse. Use real onion instead of fried or dried. Tomato paste or sauce instead of ketchup. Milk instead of cream? No, maybe not. But really. The possibilities are endless.

Ingredients:

• As much bacon as you want, cut into small pieces.
• About 3/4 cup heavy cream
  
• Ketchup
• Soy sauce
• Cayenne pepper
  
• Onion in some form
• White wine
• Flour for thickening
• Pepper

Cook down the bacon and get rid of most of the grease. If you're using fresh onion, add it now and cook until tender. Dump in the cream, then a few squirts of ketchup, a dash of cayenne pepper, and a splash of soy sauce, as well as the dried or fried onion if you're using that instead. I usually heat the white wine in the microwave and use it to make a paste with a couple tbsp of flour, then dump that in. Season with pepper. You probably won't need salt.

Serve over the pasta that you didn't forget to make (you wouldn't do that, would you?) and enjoy.

Galettes Bretonnes

Okay ladies and gentlemen, in honor of my upcoming séjour in France, here is the recipe for true Brittany crêpes, personally translated (and units converted) from the best and most authentic recipe on the French internets.

Ingredients:

2 eggs
1 1/4 cups buckwheat flour
1 1/4 cups whole milk, cold
2 tbps sunflower oil (it doesn't exist, really. Just use olive oil or whatever.)
1/2 sachet of baking powder. No, I don't know what a sachet is. Just add what seems right.
Salt
Pepper

Add the flour, milk, salt and pepper in a medium or large bowl. Dig a little hole in the middle and break your eggs into it. Carefully mix together with a whisk and add the oil a little at a time, then the cold milk.

Let it sit for at least 30 minutes, unrefrigerated. Or you can leave it your fridge for several hours, whatever works best.

Then, the fun part. Heat up a 12-inch nonstick pan and add some butter or additional oil. Then scoop up a ladle-full of batter and play French chef by gracefully pouring it into the pan with one hand while using the other hand to briskly swirl the pan and distribute the batter. It should coat the entire pan with a very thin layer, and if you do it like I do then it will get splotchy and gunky and you'll freak out and think it's all ruined. It isn't. Just wait and pretty soon you'll start to get really excited when you realize it actually resembles a true Bretagne crêpe. That is, if you've ever seen one.

Lay them out on plates or cooling racks until the last of the batter is used up. Then (the other fun part), add whatever ingredients you want to the middle, fold them over or roll them up, reheat them briefly in the skillet, and serve. This recipe works for both sweet and savory, so feel free to get creative. But don't use American cheese, because that's just sacrilege.