Luscious Lyon

After two and a half weeks I'm still a little bemused by French food. I understand the conventions, and have a reasonable grasp of the complexities of what you can eat where and when. But what I hadn't reckoned on is the Lyonnaise determination to ensure that there is not just enough food, there is too much food ( well for me, anyway). Up until now I've always been confident that French restaurant " formules" worked perfectly well because the helpings were small, so you go for that appealingly affordable three- course option. Not any more. The helpings in Lyon are enormous. I am having to learn to leave some, no matter how delicious. I had resolved to have small dinners but tonight I ended up over in Old Lyon, the world heritage listed  area of largely Renaissance buildings on the further bank of the Saone - I'd just been on an excellent guided walk there. 

It's filled with restaurants all claiming to be "veritable bouchon Lyonnaise" , renowned for low-priced menus of Lyon classics. So I decided I had to stay there for dinner, as it would be my only chance - it's too far to go back to at night from the hotel. 

    But where to go? I did what the French do - wandered round reading all the menus. One caught my fancy, Les Paves de Saint Jean. It looked cheerful and well-tended ( in Lyon red checked tablecloths don't mean " tourist trap" as they do in most cities) and  offered a three-course "Menu Bouchon" for 15 euro, considerably less than I'd been paying over near my hotel in Presqu'ile. But most importantly, I could see how to put together a dinner of homely Lyonnaise classics I would really like, without going near tripe, etc. And they had fillettes of decent wine - 250 ml, two glasses - for 6 euro. 

     It was only 6 pm, too early for dinner - they don't start serving till 7 - but the patron heard me asking the waitress and called out that for me, they could manage 6.30. So I sat happily in the warm light evening with water while the staff had their dinner. Then came the food. First, a Salade Lyonnaise - very like a Caesar salad but without the anchovies or Parmesan - it has a delicious tangy dressing all its own. I had been dreaming of poached eggs, and it comes with one.

Then the local sausage, with a lovely rich sauce (i tasted cloves in it, I think) and plain steamed potatoes, exactly what I wanted. 

There was, as usual in Lyon, far too much, and I did manage to leave some, assuring the staff that it was tres bon but just un peu trop ( sorry, blogger doesn't do accents on the iPad) - especially as I wanted to leave room for dessert. They were all maison (made on the premises) and I was ushered in to look at them all, under their big glass cloche or in the fridge, and choose. The praline tart was said to be tres typique, so I had that. A luscious texture, very sweet but satisfying. 

This time I didn't mind taking photos. I told them I was a food writer from New Zealand ("Ah" said the waitress, " i thought i could hear a little accent", which i took as a compliment). Then i took two more outside. While I was having dinner, a steady stream of French customers arrived. I've made a few foolish decisions about food in France, but tonight everything was perfect.

Hand to mouth in the Loire Valley

Doves cooing in the garden, sun on the pink geraniums. Ulrike and I both getting as much as we can done while we've got wifi. This is our gite...

... And this is the very kind owner's house  across the lawn.

We have to leave soon. I have so much enjoyed being able to eat 'at home' for the first time in France. We have a well- equipped kitchen, even a dishwasher. I haven't gone in for any fancy cooking, but it's been huge fun collecting bits and pieces from the local shops and occasionally a market (not often, too hard to park and we're usually out all day chateau- ing), and working out how to turn them into tasty suppers. Black pudding and couscous; omelette with potato, shallots and ham; fettuccine with cheese sauce made from three different ends of cheese; heated up little quiches from bakery; and lots of curly frisée salad and sliced tomatoes. Dessert is either cheese and white peaches or lemon tart.

We did manage two picnic lunches down by the Loire (see Elsewoman for a photo of how close it is, and my food memoir page on Facebook for the picnic), but often we went to a cafe or restaurant at the chateau of the day.. Cheverny: Orangerie setting, simple but delicious lunch of quiche and salad followed by a shared lemon tart;  Chambord: competition keeping the standard up (it works for restaurants) so we had a brilliant formule of linguine and smoked salmon, plus coffee with petit fours and chocolate mousse;  Chenonceau: lets its beautiful self down with horrible self- service caf, posh restaurant fully booked, me getting irrational the way I do when lunch is too late - rescued by croque Monsieur from kiosk at the gate, plus a lemon ice cream later; Villandry:learning from experience, we booked on the way in, advised by lovely energetic waiter, then returned at 1 for smoked duck salad, coffee and shared little cakes - expensive, but it was our last one so we didn't care, and we could have it outside. What I like is that so often, as at Villandry, the same attractive place with the same skilled professional staff serves everything from a simple and cheap sandwich to a four course gourmet lunch. 

But I think it's the dinners at home I'll remember with most pleasure. Now I'm off back to the city and then a river cruise, so I won't be eating at home again till I reach my friends in the UK. I can't afford and don't want to eat proper French lunches and dinners all the time, so I'll have to pace myself - a galette here, a sandwich there... But with a little forethought, the one thing I won't need to do is go hungry. Here's our remarkably delicious supper of black pudding, made by the local butcher in Menars.

Lisa's celebrated Raspberry Mousse

Sunday in Pankow, Berlin. Today we celebrated Matthias' birthday with a very long brunch/lunch for 13 people. We sat outside on a perfect day, warm, still, slightly cloudy, and worked our leisurely way through chicken kebabs, meatballs, prunes grilled with ham, assorted hams and salamis, humus, tomato salad with mozzarella and basil ( I made that), tiny baked potatoes (I prepared those), potato salad, smoked salmon and avocado, assorted cheeses and the usual basket of glorious bread. Then, after a decent interval, came the dessert: a splendid blackberry cake picked up this morning from the local bakery, and Lisa's raspberry mousse.
      I have a long acquaintance with this mousse. Back in the late 1990s when Ulrike, Matthias and their daughter Lisa were living in Wellington, we invited them to share our all-day Christmas dinner, and gave them the important role of providing the Light Dessert (which comes after the cheese and before the Christmas Pudding, served straight after the Queen's Message). They turned up that first time with raspberry mousse, and after that they were asked to bring it every year. Lisa was already an accomplished cook and took the lead role in making it. She's 24 now, and last night she made it again, along with the humus, the chicken and its peanut sauce.

Lisa's raspberry mousse
This serves 6 people generously - the one we had was double the size.

6 sheets gelatine (I'm not sure what the equivalent is in powdered gelatine - will try to find out later)
75 - 100g white sugar (depending on how sweet you prefer it)
300g puréed raspberries (fresh are good but frozen are fine - purée them frozen)
350g plain thick creamy yoghurt
150g cream
If you want to make it really rich: 50-100g white chocolate

Soak gelatine in a little water for 10-15 minutes until soft.
Put in pan with just enough water to coat the bottom, and heat very slowly in large pan on very low heat - about 10 minutes - until completely dissolved.
Remove from heat. Add puréed raspberries. Stir in thoroughly.
Fold in yoghurt.
Whip cream to soft peaks and fold in.
If using chocolate, melt in microwave or over hot water and stir in.
Put mixture into serving dish or mould (Lisa used a flexible mould).
Leave to set in fridge overnight.
About an hour before serving, remove from fridge and unmould if necessary, placing mould briefly in a sink of hot water to loosen mousse.
Serve with more whipped cream or just as is.

Europe, here I come

Badly neglected blog lately, sorry - and badly neglected cooking too. I've been rushing round getting organised for two months in Europe, including giving the house and especially the kitchen a long overdue spring clean because I have housesitters staying the whole time I'm away.
      Kind friends have helped to fill the culinary gap by inviting me round. (Most of my friends tend to be very good cooks, which is wonderful for me.) Last Sunday I abandoned my lists and cleaning cloths and went out for a very long lunch: seafood soup, followed by haloumi, broad bean and roast cherry tomato salad, poached chicken with watercress and avocado. Then a strikingly good NZ "Jersey camembert" made by Runaway Spoon, perfectly ripe; a peach sponge with cream; and a (small) piece of figgy stuff - I forget what it was called, sorry, but it was very good indeed - normally I don't like figs, but I liked this.
        So I am off on Friday - Berlin, then Tours, the Loire Valley and Lyon (renowned for its food). I have my iPad and all the connecting bits I need to feed it photos from my camera, and naturally a fair number of them will involve food. So watch this space, and also my Facebook food memoir page for brief updates (well, as brief as I can get - I don't tweet). In the meantime, here's the main course from that splendid lunch.

Beautiful buckwheat blinis

This week two friends came for our annual long lunch - they have birthdays close together. Last year we made ravioli. This year Ali had happened to mention she'd never made a souffle, so I did my Julia Child impersonation and made her classic cheese souffle. To start with, Lynn composed a toothsome salad with roasted pears and superbly fresh roasted walnuts. Ali had brought everything for blinis and showed us how to make them. It was not difficult at all, and I'll definitely do it again. 

Buckwheat blinis with smoked salmon 

(Adapted slightly from Cuisine magazine, September 2012)

Makes 18-24, depending on how big you make them. Can be made in advance, and gently reheated before
serving.

Batter

125 ml milk
¾ tsp active dried yeast
50 g buckwheat flour
50 g plain flour
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp sugar
1 egg, separated
butter for cooking

Heat the milk to lukewarm, then sprinkle the yeast over it.

Sift the flours, salt and sugar into a large bowl. Whisk in the warm milk and yeast mixture and the egg yolk.

Set aside in a warm place until the batter has doubled in size. (This can take up to an hour, depending on the air temperature and the freshness of the yeast. I find a metal bowl standing in about 5 cm of warm water in the sink, covered with a chopping board, works very well.).

When ready to cook, beat the egg white to soft peaks, then fold it through the batter.

Heat a non-stick frying pan over a medium heat, and use kitchen paper to smear it with butter. 

Add small spoonfuls of batter to the pan and cook until bubbles break through the surface, then turn and
cook the other side until golden. 

Leave on kitchen paper to cool a little.

Toppings

4 Tbsp crème fraiche or cream cheese, mixed with 2 tsp horseradish cream
150-200 g hot smoked salmon, skinned and broken into small pieces
1 Tbsp chopped chives and/or dill (Ali brought both from her garden)

Put a blob of the cream cheese mixture on each blini, top with pieces of smoked salmon, and garnish with the chives and/or dill.  

We scoffed three or four each and had to have a pause before the souffle. Then we had another pause before the lemon tarts - pastry by Ali, filling by Lynn. After all that I had a very late dinner of leftover souffle (see my Facebook page), and tonight I finished up the last bit of lemon filling by way of dessert. Waste not, want not....  

Pie time

Judging for the Bakels Supreme Pie Awards began in Auckland yesterday, and the results will be announced on Tuesday. One of the categories is chicken and vegetable. Last weekend, needing to produce a main course for four friends coming for a long lunch on Sunday, I decided to make a big chicken and vegetable pie. I'd had a really good one for dinner a while ago at my sister's place in Tauranga, so I'd asked her to photocopy the recipe for me. (Apologies - I didn't make a note of who wrote it or which book it came from - I'll check up with her later.)
          She assured me that the home-made pastry top was really easy, and it was - you make it in the food processor. But while the filling is easy too, it takes quite a while, because it's got so many neatly diced veges in it. Best to start early, I thought, so I made the pastry and the filling on Saturday, all ready to assemble and bake on Sunday.

Chicken and kumara pie with thyme pastry

For the pastry:
200g butter, diced and chilled
150g cream cheese, chopped
2 cups plain flour
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp finely chopped fresh thyme leaves
2-3 Tbsps milk
For egg wash:
1 egg
Another 2 Tbsp milk

Put all the ingredients except the milk and the egg in a food processor. Process until the mixture looks like coarse breadcrumbs.
Add just enough milk to bring the dough together. (My food processor is too good - the pastry never clumps. I add a bit of milk, gather some crumbs together with my fingers and test to see if they will stick together. I used all 3 tablespoons of milk this time to get the pastry right.)
Tip the pastry onto a board and shape it into a flat disc. Wrap in plastic film and put in fridge until firm. (I made this Saturday afternoon, put it in the fridge and took it out about an hour before I wanted to use it on Sunday morning.)

For the filling:
(I bought more chicken thighs than stated, with bones in, as it was much cheaper that way. You can use breast, but thighs have more flavour. I removed the bones and boiled them for a while in commercial chicken stock. Then I removed them and happily nibbled all the yummy bits of meat off them before discarding them.)
1 kg skinless chicken thighs, boneless, or 1.2 kg with bones in
1/2 cup plain flour
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 Tbsp olive oil
knob of butter
100g lean bacon, roughly chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 large leek, sliced
1 large carrot, diced
1 Tbsp dried or finely chopped fresh tarragon (I had just enough left in the garden)
300g kumara, peeled and diced (1 cm pieces)
2 cloves garlic, crushed
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
3 cups chicken stock (the recipe had 1 cup, but this isn't enough)
1/2 cup cream

Season the flour with salt and pepper and place in a plastic bag. Cut the chicken into strips about 4-5 cm long, removing the bones if necessary. If you do have bones, put them on to boil gently in the chicken stock.
Shake the chicken pieces in teh flour to coat them. Remove them and shake off the excess flour, saving 1 Tbsp to use later.
Heat oil and butter in a large saute pan and cook chicken pieces until lightly golden. Use a slotted spoon to move chicken to a shallow dish.
Add bacon, onion, leek, carrot and tarragon to pan. Cook gently until tender and starting to brown slightly.
Add garlic to corner of pan and cook briefly. Add kumara and lemon zest and cook another 5 minutes.

(If you're making the filling the day before, stop at this point, cool the veges, and put them, the stock and the dish of chicken into the fridge.)

Assembly:
(If making next day, take pastry out of fridge an hour before assembling pie. Take out chicken, stock and veges. Put veges back in pan.)
Stir reserved flour into chicken stock. Pour into pan with veges and cook gently to make thick sauce. Add cream and stir well. Add chicken and any juices in dish. Mix gently. Check seasoning.
Simmer for a few minutes to heat through and make sure sauce is cooked. Place in large 7-cup ceramic or glass pie dish.

Preheat oven to 200C.
Roll out pastry to make a rough circle large enough to cover top of pie dish and hang down over the sides.(see pastry tips here).

Make egg wash by beating 1 egg thoroughly with 2 tablespoons of milk.
Roll pastry loosely over the rolling pin. As you do this, use a pastry brush to lightly coat the outer side of the pastry with egg wash. (This is the side that will be in contact with the pie filling - the egg wash acts as a seal to stop the pastry going soggy.)
Carefully unroll the pastry over the pie dish, egg wash side down. Press the pastry down around the rim or the sides (my dish was rimless) and trim it to leave a border all round the filling of about 2 cm. Crimp border and seal it in place with the egg wash (brush a little more onto the dish if necessary).
Cut a cross into the top of the pastry and add a few pastry "leaves" for decoration.
Brush the top of the pastry with the remaining egg wash.

Place pie on oven shelf positioned so that the top of the pie sits a little above the middle of the oven.
Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the pastry is deeply golden and the filling is bubbling.

So, to the long lunch: a slow meander through Donna's broccoli soup and rye bread, then the pie with boulanger potatoes (chunks of potato baked in stock), and Dale's orange cake with lemon syrup. I didn't need any dinner... well, only the last couple of bits of rye bread with a chunk of cheese and an apple.

Flawless flourless chocolate cake

It was my turn to host my book group this week. We have informal rules about supper that we sort of stick to: cheese, crackers, maybe dip or pate, and something sweet. I know one of the members is gluten free, so there are always rice crackers - but what about that "something sweet"? So I hunted through my cake file and found a flourless chocolate cake I'd never made before, from Ray McVinnie. He says he got it from Glenn, a colleague at the School of Hospitality and Tourism at AUT. He says it's "the true chocoholic's cake, which needs nothing with it except cream...a little goes a long way." You really do need an electric whisk or beater for this - unless you've got Wonderwoman arms.

Glenn's flourless chocolate cake

300g dark chocolate, chopped 

(Annoyingly, one block of Whittaker's Dark Ghana is 250g - I reckon you could probably get away with that.)

5 eggs

90g brown sugar

1/4 tsp cinnamon

finely grated zest of 1 orange

2 Tbsp brandy

150ml creme fraiche, whipped to soft peaks (don't overwhip), then refrigerated

cocoa and whipped cream, for serving

- Preheat oven to 175C. Line the bottom of a 23cm diameter non-stick cake tin with baking paper.

- Either put the chocolate in a heatproof bowl and melt it slowly over a saucepan of barely simmering water, then stir it until it's smooth; or put it in a large heatproof glass jug and microwave it for 2 minutes, then stir it gently with a wooden spoon until it's smooth. (If it hasn't quite got to melting, give it short bursts of time - say 30 seconds. The pieces don't look as if they have melted, but when you start to stir them, you find they have.) Set the bowl or jug of chocolate aside.

 - Get out your electric whisk. Put the eggs, sugar, cinnamon, zest and brandy in a stainless steel bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water, and beat until the mixture is very thick, pale and creamy. This takes what seems like quite a long time.

- Take off the heat and  beat with electric whisk until cold - or put into electric mixer and then whisk it. Add chocolate in a steady stream (this is where the jug comes in handy), whisking continuously. 

- Fold in the creme fraiche. Pour mixture into cake tin. Boil a jugful of water.

- Place cake tin in a large roasting pan. Fill pan with enough hot water to come 3/4 of the way up the sides of the cake tin. Let mixture settle for 10 minutes.

- Place roasting pan with cake tin in the oven and cook for 30-40 minutes, until set. Remove from oven and take cake tin out of water. 

- Cool cake completely before turning out onto a serving plate, bottom side up. Peel off paper and dust cake with cocoa through a sieve. 

Serve in wedges with whipped cream.

I didn't turn mine upside down as I should have, as the photo shows - but it still looked good and tasted sensational. Not fudgy, just very dense and dark and rich. I'll be making this again - wonderful for dessert, though I think in that case I might disobey Ray and serve it with a little fruit of some kind - maybe apricot puree - as well as the whipped cream.