Seafood Twist on Chicken

Chicken supreme is one of those dishes that would seem like it had taken you more than a couple of hours cooking in the kitchen. The stew has that rich, savory flavor made even more special with a stuffing of anchovy and rosemary. At the L'Oustau de Baumaniere, chef Jean Andre Charial makes it in less than an hour and so can you.

The term chicken supreme, or suprême de volaille in French, refers to the chicken breast with the wing bone attached. This cut of the chicken yields a larger serving than usual. The chef sears the chicken supreme in a pan with butter until it turns golden brown. Not only does it seals in the juicy chicken, it also helps intensify the flavor of the chicken surface through browning, thereby producing a tasty dish that seeps into the fowl stock and cream as it cooks.

With such a focus on the chicken, it is advisable to purchase chicken meat that is fresh, not frozen. If you use frozen, you will have to defrost it, which in turn can make the chicken lose its natural moistness. Cook the chicken with the skin on so that it holds the juices in, increases tenderness, and makes it crispy and more flavorful. Take extra care in keeping the chicken skin and the whole form of the chicken supreme intact during the pan-frying. Use a nonstick skillet for this purpose.

Since the chicken is to be stuffed with salt anchovy, there is no need to marinate the chicken meat anymore. Anchovies are sold salted and packed in tins, which is the one used for this recipe. Pick the ones that are whole, not crumbled. They also should have a slightly rose tint, which is a good indication that their delicate flavor is intact. To further add depth and heft to the dish, the stuffed chicken is stewed in cream with carrots, onions, and fowl stock flavored with rosemary. Serve with a bottle of Arbois blanc for a nice lunch or dinner.

Ingredients

1 fatted chicken from Bresse about 3 2/3 lbs.
4 anchovy fillets
1 carrot
1 onion
2 spoons fowl fond
2 dippers cream, butter,
1 ½ tablespoons rosemary

1. Wash and pat dry the chicken supremes. Use a small knife to cut 5 or 6 slits into the meat. Stuff the anchovy pieces inside the slits.
2. Prepare the vegetables. Peel the carrot and onion. Slice into small, round pieces. Brown the supremes in a cocotte pan with 1 oz. butter for about 1 minute.
3. Then add the carrot and onion, 2 spoons fowl fond, and 2 dippers cream. Cook on a medium flame for about 15 minutes.
4. Add the rosemary into the sauce and reduce until smooth in consistency. Strain. Taste and season with salt and pepper as desired.

Pigeon on the Table

A dinner of roasted squab stuffed with shallots and foie gras and glazed with coriander, clove, anise, honey, and gravy is something to look forward to. It’s exotic at the onset but its execution makes it into a sophisticated dish. The addition of rich and buttery foie gras keeps it moist and flavorful. The honey and spices give the skin a crispy and golden crust. Layer after layer of flavors and textures are your rewards in every bite of this unforgettable dish. Pair it with a bottle of Crozes hermitage rouge.

Squab, which is the meat of pigeon, is dark, succulent and tender. It can be sourced at specialty stores or farmer’s market. The squab has less fat than chicken and therefore easily dries when cooked for too long. Hence, the incorporation of the foie gras stuffing keeps it moist and juicy. Squab cooks quickly since it is relatively smaller than the chicken. Prepare the squab by rinsing it well under cold water and patting dry with a paper towel.

In this recipe, the squab is stuffed and cooked in the oven and roasted for 8 to 10 minutes. It should be arranged on the roasting pan breast side down with its wing tips folded under. Use a thermometer to determine the doneness of the bird—internal temperature should be at 165 degrees Fahrenheit. When done, allow the meat to rest. Then baste it with a spicy sauce mixture made with honey, vinegar, ground spices, and pigeon gravy and then cooked again in the oven to brown and crisp. You can make gravy out of the drippings from roasted pigeon and serve alongside this savory dish.

Ingredients

Ground spices
4 young pigeons weighing about 2/3 lb.
1/4 lb. pigeon breast
2/3 oz. foie gras
1 teaspoon coriander
1 star-shaped anise seed
1 clove
0.88 oz. pigeon foie gras
1 teaspoon shallots
½ oz. honey
1 pint pigeon gravy
1/4 lbs. wine vinegar
salt, pepper

1. For stuffing: Chop the pigeon breast and mix with shallot, foie gras, salt and pepper. Stuff the young pigeons with this mixture. Roast in the oven for 8 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to rest.
2. For sauce: Place the honey in a saucepan and mix with vinegar. Caramelize. Add the ground spices and moisten with the pigeon gravy. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes. Strain and bind with butter.
3. Cover stuffed squab with the honey and ground spice mixture. Place in the oven for another 3 minutes.
4. For garnish: Prepare 4 carrots (with greens), 4 turnips (with greens), 2/3 oz. gourmand peas and 8 small onions according to personal preference. Mix.
5. For presentation: Place one young pigeons on each dish. Pour some sauce around them and make a small pile of vegetables. Serve the remaining sauce in a separate bowl.

Having Desserts with Passion

Passion fruit layered with sweet strawberry sauce, fresh wild strawberries, and whipped cream makes an elegant dessert especially when served in passion fruit shells. This gourmet dessert by Michelin Chef Etienne Krebs is easy to prepare and best served chilled. You can prepare it ahead of time and store it in the refrigerator so that it is perfectly chilled and ready to serve when your guests arrive. This is a very refreshing and light end to a heavy or spicy meal. Passion fruits and wild strawberries make an exotic presentation and a lovely dish.

Of course, you can also use raspberries or regular strawberries if you can’t find wild strawberries to make this recipe, but wild strawberries add an exciting touch to the dish. The appearance is different from commercial strawberries and it has a mildly sweet flavor that complements the subtly sweet and wonderfully tangy passion fruit. Wild strawberries are smaller than cultivated strawberries and look more like wild berries. They grow wild in fields and in forests.

Wild strawberries are delicate and bruise easily and should be consumed as soon as they are harvested or they will turn soft or mushy. They also make a delicious strawberry sauce since they have plenty of juices. To make a simple strawberry sauce, simply use a food processor to puree fresh strawberries. You can pass the resulting puree through a sieve to get rid of any pulpy material if you want the sauce to be fine, although pulpy sauce is fine and can be pleasurable in the palate.

An exotic fruit, passion fruit is not always available and makes a rare treat. As its name suggests, it helps lighten up the mood and quite nutritious too. The seeds of the fruit are eaten together with the pulp and separating them can be difficult. Some pass the flesh through a fine sieve to extract the juices of boil it down to make syrup.

Ingredients

18 passion fruit
1 cup whipped cream
7 tablespoons sugar
5 ½ tablespoons powdered sugar
6 teaspoons strawberry sauce
0.77 lbs. (about 1 ½ cups) wild strawberries

1. Split the passion fruit into two and scoop out the flesh. Reserve the pulp and the emptied fruit shells.
2. In a saucepan, add strawberry sauce and 7 tablespoons sugar and heat over low fire. Reduce until you get a thick liquid. Cool.
3. Whip the cream with the powdered sugar. Add the passion fruit, reserving 6 teaspoons for garnish.
4. Place the emptied passion fruit shells in dessert bowls and pour a spoon of strawberry sauce into the bottom of each.
5. Place the wild strawberries on top then add the beaten cream.
6. Decorate the dish with the passion fruit and strawberry sauce. Serve with a sugared biscuit.

Loving Crepes

French crepes are actually something that was celebrated every 2nd of February. It was a day where every French home would make a good dozen of lovely crepes to eat together. It was believed to be for the return of the light (spring is coming and no more long winter nights ahead) and it is called "La Chandeleur". The crepes were the pride of the Britanny region (Bretagne) in the North West of France, where they make the recipe extremely big and paper thin. They usually eat them with a bit of caster sugar spread on the top. It was then rolled in a big "cigar" or folded in four and eaten while drinking some bubbly apple cider of the same region. Savored for centuries, crêpes are celebrating a revival today, with crêperies opening throughout France, North America, and Asia.

Most cuisines all over the world make crêpes in one form or another. There is the Italian crespella, the French crêpe, the Chinese mandarin pancake, the Mexican tortilla, the Indian dosa and the Russian blinchki. In France, the crêpe used to be called pannequet, from which the word pancake is probably derived. A very thin pannequet resembles the wrinkled, fragile looking fabric, which we know as crêpe—hence its name.

The word 'crêpe' is French for pancake. A crêpe is an unleavened, flat, thin pancake of cooked dough or batter, which is used as a wrapper for another food. Crêpe batter is generally made from flour, eggs, milk, butter, salt, sugar, water and oil. Until recently, crêpes were cooked on large cast-iron hot plates heated over a wood fire in a fireplace. The hot plates are now gas or electric heated, and the batter is spread with a wooden spreader and flipped with a wooden spatula.

Ingredients

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon granulated sugar (optional)
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 teaspoons butter, melted
1/2 cup seltzer water or club soda

1. In a blender or food processor, combine the flours, sugar (if using), salt, eggs, milk, and butter. Process until smooth. Pour the batter into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least half an hour, or overnight.

2. Remove the bowl from the refrigerator and gently whisk the seltzer water into the batter.

3. Place a large skillet over medium high heat and spray with non-stick oil. Pour 2 tablespoons of batter into the skillet. Tilt and rotate the pan, spreading the batter all over the bottom of the skillet. Cook for about 30 seconds, or until the bottom side of the crepe is golden. Flip the crepe by lifting the edge of the crepe with a fork and using your fingers to grasp and turn it. Cook another 20 seconds, or until golden.

4. Fill and serve the crepe, or continue making crepes until all the batter is used.

Choosing Tart Over Pie

I know this is a trivial matter to some people. If your choosing pie over tart it's fine with me but hey why not like both? I mean pies have it's own sets of unique features and also tart. A tart is a baked dish consisting of a filling over a pastry base with an open top not covered with pastry. The pastry is usually shortcrust pastry; the filling may be sweet or savoury, though modern tarts are usually fruit-based, sometimes with custard. Tartlet refers to a miniature tart. Examples of tarts include jam tarts, which may be different colours depending on the flavour of the jam used to fill them, and the Bakewell tart.

The categories of 'tart', 'flan', and 'pie' overlap, with no sharp distinctions, though 'pie' is the more common term in the United States. The French word tarte can be translated to mean either pie or tart, as both are mainly the same with the exception of a pie usually covering the filling in pastry, while flans and tarts leave it open. The Italian crostata recipe, dating to at least the mid-1400s, has been described as a "rustic free-form version of an open fruit tart". Early medieval tarts generally had meat fillings, but later ones were often based on fruit and custard.


Ingredients

10" uncooked pie shell
5 tart apples
1 cup pastry cream (crème patissiere), cooled
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
For the pastry cream:
4 egg yolks
½ cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon all purpose flour
2 cups milk
½ vanilla bean, cut in half lengthwise

1. Begin by making the pastry cream; in a large mixing bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar. Whisk in the flour. Set aside.
2. In a large saucepan placed over high heat, pour the milk and vanilla. As soon as the mixture begins boiling, remove the pan from the stove. Remove the vanilla bean. Scrape out the seeds from the bean and pour them into the milk.
3. Whisk ½ the milk mixture into the egg mixture.
4. Place the saucepan back onto the stove over high heat. As soon as the mixture starts boiling, pour everything in the bowl into the saucepan, whisking constantly until smooth. Once the mixture starts boiling again, stir and boil for 2 minutes more.
5. Remove the pan from the stove and place some plastic wrap directly on the surface of the pastry cream; this prevents a skim from forming on the top of the cream. Cool completely.
6. Transfer the pre-made pie dough to a pie pan. Refrigerate.
7. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
8. Peel, core, and thinly slice the apples.
9. Spread the pastry cream over the bottom of the pie shell. Lay the apple slices over the cream. With a pastry brush, brush the melted butter over the apples. Sprinkle with sugar.
10. Bake until golden, about 50 minutes. Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack. Carefully remove the pie from the pan and serve.

Playing with Bread Sticks

In Italian restaurants, breadsticks are often served as an appetizer. This recipe is a spicy herbed version adapted from “The Bread Bible” by Rose Levy Beranbaum. It is shaped using a pasta maker so you get perfectly sized pencil-thin, crispy and spicy breadsticks. They are long, tall, and twisty uniform sticks that look so pretty when placed in a holder. In an Italian-themed dinner or lunch spread they make a fabulous centerpiece. It is nice to place them in a vase or decorative container for a spectacular bouquet of breadsticks that your guests will feel free to pick and munch on as much as they want.

These breadsticks are easy to nibble because they are thin and crispy without making you or your guests feel full. This is a really enticing treat that will stimulate your appetite for more because they are spiced with Tabasco, pepper, and aromatic herbs. If you find the cut too long and don’t fit into your oven, you can simply slice the dough into two depending on your preference. This recipe makes use of a liberal amount of cornmeal. It adds texture and will also keep the dough from sticking and bunching together. This way, the breadsticks dough is also easier to handle.

You can serve this yummy spicy bread sticks with tomato or mushroom soup or as a side dish to spaghetti for an extra kick that will turn a meal not only good but great. For a quick and stupendous snack, they can also be dipped in cheese sauce, marinara, or red pepper coulis. They are also the prefect companions to chili beans and hearty stews. Dip them in the hot soup and they will absorb the flavors of the sauces and taste extra delicious when you bite into them. For a quick savory snack during sports season or game day, make these breadsticks and share it with everyone. An ice-cold beverage goes perfectly well with it.

Ingredients

2 4 cups bread flour
½ teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/8 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
2 tablespoons minced herbs (like chives, thyme, sage, and rosemary)
½ teaspoon Tabasco
1 cup room temperature water
Cornmeal
Sea salt

1. Use an electric mixer to blend the flour, yeast, salt, peppers, garlic powder, cheese, herbs, and Tabasco until well incorporated. Switch to a dough hook and, little by little, add the water, mixing on low speed. Keep mixing until the dough starts pulling away from the bowl. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface, adding more flour if the dough is sticky.

2. Lightly spray the top of the dough with olive oil. Place in a container sprayed with olive oil. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 6 to 12 hours, pressing down gently on the top of the dough after the first 2 hours. If the dough more than doubles in appearance, press it down again.

3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F one hour before baking. Sprinkle the counter with cornmeal. Cut the dough into 4 pieces and turn each piece into a sphere. Flatten each sphere. Cover and refrigerate all but 2 pieces of dough.

4. Pass the dough through a pasta machine on the widest setting to flatten it, and making the dough about 1/8 in. thick. Be sure to sprinkle the flattened dough with cornmeal to keep it from sticking. Set aside and do the same for the second piece of dough.

5. Run the flattened dough through the pasta machine using the setting for fettuccine (about ¼ in. wide). Then lay the slices on the counter and toss them until they are fully coated with cornmeal. Separate them and lay on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Make sure that the pieces don’t touch each other. Spray with olive oil. Sprinkle sea salt and more cornmeal over the bread sticks.

6. Bake for 12 to 16 minutes, or until golden brown and crisp. The bread sticks should curve up from the parchment paper. Then move the bread sticks to a wire cooling rack. Let the baking trays cool completely before baking another batch.

Lavalicious Chocolate Cookie

Chocolate comes from a fruit called a pod that grows on the cacao tree. A seedling tree generally must mature for five years before it produces pods, with peak pod production happening at 10 years. A cocoa tree can bear fruit and produce pods for 30 to 40 years. Each pod is similar in size to a football, and contains up to 50 cocoa beans. To make one ounce of milk chocolate, it takes 4 cocoa beans, and one ounce of dark chocolate requires 12 beans. An average American or Canadian will consume about 12 pounds of chocolate per year. However, the Swiss are the world’s largest consumers of chocolate, eating about 22 pounds of chocolate per person per year!

Chocolate can be bittersweet, and we don’t mean literally. Although chocolate has many benefits to your health, some facts about how chocolate is made may make you want to munch on a different snack, or at least lower your chocolate intake.

Ingredients

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup melted butter
3 large beaten egg whites
1 tsp. vanilla
5 tbs. icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degree F.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugars, cocoa, baking powder and salt.

3. Stir in the butter until the mixture is well combined and crumbly.

4. Add egg whites and vanilla and stir until the dough just comes together.

5. Place the icing sugar into a shallow dish.

6. Roll the dough into small balls and coat the balls in icing sugar.

7. Place the cookies on a well greased cookie sheet. Using a spoon, flatten the cookies a bit.

8. Bake for 12 - 14 minutes, until just set around the edges; the cookies should be soft in the middle.