A friend from college started a wonderful thing, a food club called the International Dinner Club here in Chicago. This month was my turn to cook, and I was asked to prepare a French dinner. I decided to take my time on the farm in France as inspiration – thinking that the food there was simple, fast, beautiful, fresh (perfect for early summer) and delicious – and I prepared the following meal, presented simply in pictures:

An aperitif of sparkling white wine (somewhat less sparkly due to my somewhat failed preparation) infused with cherries and mint

Un amuse bouche of turnips with tasty salted butter, followed by the meal of “grilled” (baked) whitefish with lemon, plums, shallots, thyme

Roasted tomatoes and asparagus with rosemary and oregano

“Fougasse,” a sort of French “foccacia” with mushrooms and rosemary

Then the interesting part:
Homemade cheese!

And a delicious strawberry and blueberry vanilla cream tart

…devoured quickly and completely

Offal in the pot! (Yes, that’s my camera strap in the way -sssshhhhh.)

Beautiful broken heart

Happy, even though this year a parasite I brought back from the Grand Canyon meant I couldn’t partake in the whiskey part of the evening.

This inability led to a revelation – without Scotch, haggis is kind of gross.

But this year I got the proportions better, cooked it all longer so it was nice and tender, and the stomach was larger and better shaped and not so full of holes, so it was a grand success.

Deanna’s tasty and beautiful Guinness cupcakes crowned off the evening, though, and the haggis was finished off with no problems.

Could she be any happier eating that lunch on a box?

Pretty flash kitchen.

Appetizers, hell yeah.

High class dessert, fo’ sho.

AND apéritifs – no doing things halfway!

Incomparable lunches

And no better dinner “table” imaginable.

• pozole – a decent success
• quince, pear, and cranberry chutney – a great success
• blood sausage, apple, and potato gratin – a miserable failure

I guess 2/3 is still pretty good.  But I will NOT be buying this blood sausage again.

The inspiration was one of the best dishes I have ever eaten, at Le Felteu, a little restaurant in a small street in the Marais in Paris.  Of course, that’s hard to live up to.  But, I had extended conversations with my parents and Tom and Raymond, and I had a pretty good method worked out.

First, I cooked the potatoes, cut into thin rounds, in milk and nutmeg, until almost cooked.  In a separate pan, I then briefly – because they softened REALLY fast – slices of apples.  I used one granny smith and one winesap, because I’m kind of crazy about winesaps this season.  I have no idea what they’d use in France, to be honest, but these apples got mushy really really quickly and I wanted them to hold together.  So next time, I think I’ll almost sear them, because I want a little caramelization, but they’ll get plenty soft when they bake later in the process.  I sauteed the blood sausage, also separately, because wanted to crisp it up a little before baking, but this sausage was so awful I’m not even going to get into this process.

Paul and I trekked to Cori and Colin’s at this point, but I’m also pretty confident this is something you should just do from start to finish and serve right away.  When we got to the site of the feast, I put the sausage (without the casing) and apples in the bottom of the dish, layered the potatoes over top, and added heavy cream and a little more nutmeg.  I then stuck it in the oven and baked it until brown.  Temperature?  No clue.  Sorry.

The taste of the potatoes and apples would have been fine had they not been infused with the odor of the blood sausage, which was so wrong it honestly made me lose my appetite.  Obviously, that will have to change next time – this blood sausage smelled a bit rancid, it was too much purple in color and not enough red, and it looked like it had some sort of grain in it, which is not like the French boudin noir I love so much.  Another thing I’ll change for next time is to add some cheese to thicken the gratin (with the cream it’s baked in) and a little butter to crisp and brown the top a little.  It’s a beautiful winter dish, so if I can find some more blood sausage I’ll definitely try this again.

Ingredients:

Soak hominy with quartered lime and 4 crushed garlic cloves in hot water.  (Boil it if you use dried hominy, like you would dried chickpeas or beans.)  Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a deep pan, saute garlic and guajillo peppers, and sear the meat, taking care to not crowd the pan.  This is apparently against Mexican rules.  You’re supposed to just stew it, and not add garlic or salt and pepper, but that sounds bland to me.

I then added the onion to the pan with all of the pork, about 5 cups of water, and the drained hominy.  Let it all simmer away!  The longer the better, so the pork gets really tender and the flavors all blend together well.  Serve garnished with lime, avocado, onion, radish…the list goes on, depending on traditions and tastes.  Yum.

I talked to Cristina and Leo afterwards, and it sounds like I went wrong in three places.  First, I assumed it’s supposed to be a spicy soup.  It’s not.  I added Turkish red pepper flakes and the garlic to make it spicier.  Which was delicious, but apparently not traditional.  Second, you’re supposed to purée the pepper and strain everything in the broth (so the limes the hominy was cooked in, the onions and garlic, and the pureed pepper) so you end up pretty much with pork and hominy in a bright red broth.  I couldn’t do this because I can’t puree, and I like a chunky soup so I didn’t really want to get rid of the onions and garlic and all the other good stuff.  But I see the advantage, because now the soup looks really messy and it doesn’t feel like something that should be garnished at serving.  The third place I went wrong was with my pepper choice.  Cristina’s recipe called for chilacate peppers, which they didn’t have at Hyde Park Produce.  I asked the guys there, however (they all know me, and followed me around the store making sure I found the other pozole ingredients alright), and they stood in a crowd around the peppers discussing in Spanish before selecting guajillo from their frankly meagre selection.  Leo later said I should have used a combination of guajillo and ancho.  Ah, well.  As long as it’s red.

Leo also said there are three different kinds of pozole, depending on where in Mexico you’re from: green, red, and white.  There are differences between all of them – white has peanuts in it, I think – but he didn’t really know the details.  A task for the future…

Also, I think I need to invest in a blender.

But look how beautiful they are!

I didn’t have any preserved quince this year to use for the syrup, so I added some red wine and honey to the boiling water at the beginning of the boiling process.  Yum.

Grocery shopping is fun : )

Coconuts are stubborn.

And banana leaves are ENORMOUS!!!

We asked the guys in the produce section about banana leaves, and they didn’t know what we were talking about.  Luckily I had planned ahead, and I pulled out my phone and showed them the text message from Cristina with the Spanish term she thought would work, and they pointed us to the frozen section.  There they were!  Success!

I recently picked up the latest issue of Saveur magazine, all about markets around the world, and drooled over every page.  Then, much to my astonishment and happiness, sour cherries from Michigan appeared at the great 61st Street Farmers’ Market the next weekend!  So, what was I to do but make the Hungarian Sour Cherry Cake that had been featured deep in the pages of deliciousness!  The only thing I didn’t follow (believe it or not) was that I added one plum, sliced, because I thought it would be pretty.  Yum!