Beef with pepper sauce.. bœuf au poivre

Ok, I will gush and brag just a little.

This was so good that a die-hard liberal, Demacr…, vegetarian actually ate rare tenderloin.

Separated butter, four tablespoons

Filet, as may pieces as you have guests

Salt

Pepper, fresh cracked

Shallots, two table spoons

Garlic, 2 cloves fleshly minced

Chicken stock, one cup

Brandy, one cup

Heavy cream, one cup

First off, shake an extra dry martini, and pour it into a properly chilled tall martini glass.

Drop two fine green olives in and take a healthy pull….

Breath…….. exhale.

Cook

Start by patting dry the beef, with paper towels.

Season the hell out of them. This means actually crust the in fresh cracked pepper and fresh ground sea salt

In a hot sauté pan, with the clarified butter, sear the steaks.

Let the beef caramelize, but don’t let it cook too much.

Flip and make sure the sear is even on all sides.

At rare.. pour in the brandy and flambé.

Pull the stakes and let rest

In the pan, add the rest of the ingredients and begin to reduce the sauce.

Re-season, by grinding in more fresh pepper.

As the sauce reduces, it will become a nice light brown color.

Watch the bubbles.. They will get bigger and bigger..

Learn how to judge them. There is a point where they will not get any bigger, the sauce will show signs of breaking, then it will break. If this happens don’t worry.

Pour in more fresh cream and continue reducing, learning of course where that fine line between perfection and disaster is.

Plate, sauce and do enjoy..

Rochelle, Rochelle

A newfound friend of mine is Rochelle Bilow.

I met her, when I did a charity throw down here in Syracuse. She wrote a review for a local paper.

Rochelle has a foody blog too. She is the one who inspired me to do this crazy thing. Over a glass of wine, she told me that she would love to read what I eat every day. Quite the complement. So, here I am writing away.

Rochelle lives the life I dream of. I have to say I am a little jealous of her. She lives in Brooklyn, and is attending the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan. She dines in the best restaurants in NY if not the world. Who would not be jealous??

When I was a boy, I used to sit on a stool in my mothers kitchen. Louise is a formidable cook, and I owe the most important lessons of this art to her. She used to feed me nonsense about Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and how I will go when I am ready. I never did. Life got in the way. Well Rochelle, is going to the school that I consider to be the American equivalent. The biggest difference is that it is not located in a Parisian neighborhood.

If you love food, and life, you will love Rochelle, and her writings. She is brilliant. I look forward to her pieces every day. I am sure you will love her joy and zest for life, bright perspectives, and immaculate writing as much as I do. Besides, look at that smile… what’s not to love.

http://sexygirlseat.blogspot.com/

The Occasional Seasonal Sinner

I confess. On occasion I do buy asparagus in mid summer, buy shrimp when it is winter and eat apples all year round. I do not buy canned asparagus, or that stuff that grows in a pond in Thailand. Yes, I am the occasional seasonal sinner..

Late summer means one thing in upstate NY: Produce…finally real, local, and fresh produce. For a place where winter lasts about ten and a half months, ripe produce is big news.

This recipe is a celebration of that produce, namely red peppers.

Roasted Red Pepper Soup

8-10 red bell peppers

2 large yellow onions, coarsely diced

4 stalks of celery, coarsely diced

4-6 cloves garlic, whole

4 cups vegetable stock

½ cup heavy cream

½ cup dry white wine

Salt

Pepper

This simple recipe celebrates the flavor and vibrant color of fresh red bell peppers.

In a large stockpot, sweat all vegetables except for the peppers. Add the wine and vegetable stock, but do not season the pot.

Break down the peppers Pre-heat the oven to high broil. Cut off the tops of the peppers and then cut them lengthwise into strips. Remove the inner ribs. The strips should be cut in a manner so that they lay down flat, skin side up when they are being roasted. Cut the peppers as widely as possible, but without too much curve across that width. You want as much of the peppers’ surfaces as possible to directly face the heat of the oven coils. Place the peppers skin side up, on a roasting pan or a rimmed cookie sheet, on the center rack, in the oven. Be careful to watch the peppers. After several minutes, the skin will begin to blister. The skin can brown, but try not to let it burn. When pieces become well blistered, remove the finished pieces to a cutting board, leaving the rest. Move the remaining pieces to a more centered position, and fill the void with your remaining raw pepper strips. Continue until all the pieces have been roasted.

Skinning the peppers - If they are well roasted the skins will come off easily. Be careful to remove as much skin as possible. The more attention you pay now the easier you work is later on.

Once you have pealed them, roughly dice the peppers and add then to the stockpot. Gently cook the stock over medium heat for about an hour.

Puree the vegetables - Next we puree the stock. I pour some of the stock into a tall and narrow plastic pitcher, and use a stick blender, but a regular blender or food processor works just as well. As the ingredients become well pureed, begin to pour them through a course sieve into a bowl. There will be a lot of pulp, skins, and seeds, left in the sieve. Stir the mixture enough to coax what you can through the sieve. Take what is left over each time and put it back in the pitcher as you blend more of the stock. (These remnants will be blended into the next batch of stock.) When you are done with this process you will have two things: a sieve full of waste, which you will discard, and a bowl of smooth vegetable puree.

What you have in the bowl is pretty good as is. It will have a little texture, and it will make a beautiful soup.

Purists will choose to take the contents of the bowl and sieve it again using a fine-meshed chinoise. This will make a beautiful, silky, smooth, and yes, sexy soup.

Final Preparations – Pour the cleaned soup into a fresh pot and bring up to heat. Once it has been heated, add the cream, and season it with the salt and pepper. I feel that this soup is best as-is. You may consider adding fresh finely chopped basil or parsley.

A fine drizzle of cream swirled into the surface will add an interesting contrast to the bright red color of this soup.

Breast of Duck or "Ménage à trios”

There are three components to this dish that are equally as important, hence the “Ménage à trios”. These components are the duck breast, a brown double chicken stock and finally the sauce. This is my favorite dish, and one that can be absolutely amazing or horrific.

What makes duck, duck is its fat. A properly cooked duck is succulent and so moist and flavorful you won’t believe it is poultry. Improperly cooked it is greasy, nasty and just terrible. If you chuck a duck in the oven and treat it like a chicken you are in for a nasty surprise. The fat must be reckoned with or it will turn the game against you.

First partner: Brown Double Chicken Stock – I use this stock if I have too. I prefer a good game stock or duck stock if I have it.

• Scrap chicken bones ( as many as you have ) – I buy chicken on the bone, and butcher it my self, storing the bones in the freezer to use in stocks.
• 3 lbs plus of Chicken thighs – remove the skin, cut the meat off of the bone and into smaller pieces
• 1 lrg Onion – coarsely diced
• 4 stalks celery – coarsely diced
• 3 large carrots – coarsely diced
• 4 cloves garlic – whole
• Several whole black peppercorns
• Un Bouquet garni ( see bellow )

Please Note, Salt is not on the list of ingredients. You can use pepper, but use whole pepper. A fundamental rule of stock making is DO NOT SEASON YOUR STOCK!! Season the dish you make with the stock.

In a large sauté pan, add some of the chicken fat, left after butchering, and the meat and leg bones. Sauté until cooked, and browning begins. It is important to give the ingredients room so that they brown and don’t steam. The goal is a nice brown font in the pan. When done they go into a stock pot with the rest of the ingredients. With water, deglaze the pan and into the stock pot with this Carmel colored mixture. Repeat until all the bones and meat have been browned.

Add cold water to the stock pot until the level is just below the top of the ingredients. Add un Bouquet garni of thyme, bay leaves, and sage, tied with a string, or better in cheese cloth. Slowly bring up to heat, and simmer for several hours. As the stock cooks, de-skum. You may use a special spoon that we all have and may not know what it is. It is flat round and has a ton of little holes in it. A better tool is a small fine hand sieve.

After cooking, strain the stock through a colander, a large sieve or best of all a chinoise or aka China Cap. (yes a great opportunity for a restaurant supply store shopping expedition ) Remove all of the fat from the stock. You can put it in the freezer and wait for the fat to congeal and simply lift it off the top.

You know have a Single Brown Chicken stock. To make it a double stock, repeat this entire process using new ingredients except for one. The water. To make a double stock you simply make a regular stock in the exact same manner except you add stock instead of water. You wind up with a stock that is twice as flavorful and intense and a regular old stock.

This is a fundamental and commonly misunderstood concept of stock making. To make a more intense stock you DO NOT REDUCE IT. Reducing a stock intensifies salt, and all the bad things. The flavor boils away. To make a stock more intense you make a double stock, or a triple stock. This process continues until you wind up with a “Glace de Viande” The ridiculous volume of ingredients is why this or its short cut “Demi Glace” are so expensive.

Partner Number Two: The duck breast. Take fresh duck breasts, skin on, and pat them dry using paper towels.

Using a sharp knife cut a diagonal cross-hatching across the skin of the breast. The squares should be about half an inch in size.

Liberally season both sides with good sea salt and fresh ground pepper.

Place the breasts skin side down in the bottom of an empty cast iron Dutch oven.

Slowly bring up the heat until it is about medium, and let the breast sit untouched. The fat will slowly render out of the breast through the cross hatching that you cut in the skin. This process continues for about 10 minutes until the fat has been mostly rendered and is now in the bottom of the Dutch oven and gently lapping up around the sides to the breasts. Officially this is a confit. Cover and let it cook for several more minutes. Test by touching the breast, is should be starting to get a little firm, but still very soft.

Check internal temperature. You are looking for about 125 Degrees for rare. Duck should be served medium rare or about 135 to 140 degrees internally. If you want it on the rare side, cook less from here out.

Remove the breasts to a plate and pour the fat into a small sauté pan. Return the breasts skin side down. Let the skin finish crisping up until nicely caramelized. Quickly flip the breasts for the first time and give the other side about a minute of cooking time.

Remove the breasts to a cutting board and let rest for at least 5 minutes.

The Third Partner: Red Current Sauce.

• 1 cup Brown Double Chicken stock
• 1 cup good red wine – a cab or a merlot or port no real guide lines other then a GOOD red wine
• 2 medium shallots – finely diced
• ½ cup malt vinegar
• ½ cup current jelly
• Duck fat
• Flour

In a medium sauté pan on high heat, add the stock, wine, vinegar, shallots, and a couple cranks of black pepper from the grinder. Begin reducing.

In a small sauté pan over high heat add the fat and enough flour so that when the two are mixed it is still a little runny. You do not want a very stiff roux. Cook the roux until it is almond colored, and starts to smell a little nutty. Take off the heat and retain for later use.

When the liquid ingredients have reduced, add the roux, and mix in hot. ( Hot roux into hot liquid) or (cold into cold) never mix hot and cold. Stir in let it thicken the sauce, add the jelly and let it melt in. Taste, re-season, and adjust with either wine if it is to intense or vinegar if it is too soft. The consistency should be thicker but not like gravy. This is why we used a thin roux.

Finally: The Duck breast is now rested, I use a very sharp filet knife and slice it in thin ( 1/8 “ ) slices, across the breast and fan it out on the plate. Sauce, and serve..

Nutz.......

I just walked in for a second attempt at making my coffee, and it didn't get any better.

Carnage, absolute carnage....

Friday Morning Food Bomb Damage

You know....

It is easy to know when some one is a food freak.

Certain days always start the same way.

They wake up, still feeling full and with a slight twinge.

Their kitchen looks like a freeking food bomb went off and every possible ingredient, pan, dish and beverage container was tightly packed in it before the explosion.

Well, if I had a good camera (coming soon) I would show you the damage a 500 lb, air bust food bomb can do to a perfectly Innocent by standing kitchen.

I have this wonderful tradition.

Every Thursday evening, Several of my friends get together and we have a drink or two, we sit in the kitchen, we cook and then, yes we eat. It is a forum for revamping old stand by's, as well as testing new dishes. It is creative, it is fun, and at least one time in my weekly schedule it is about and only about the food.

Well here is it Friday morning, and the Bomb squad failed again last night.

The damage starts with martini and wine glasses, spreads through pots, pans, sauce stains, pasta stuck to the wall, dishes, bowls and some how ganash got mixed into the lethally explosive mixture. Between all the food utensils, and the linen napkins it looks like a there was either a Roman orgy involving a dozen people, wine and a cart load of food, or there was some kind of horrific and most likely fatal explosion..

geeeesh all I wanted was a nice cup of French pressed coffee...

(Hey, coming later, “Ménage à trios”……)

Knucklehead Bouillabaisse

Bouillabaisse (Unrefined Recipe)

1 large onion- diced

6 cloves garlic – diced

Celery – 1 cup diced

Bell pepper diced

4 cans of vegetable broth

Fresh Squid 1 lb + tentacles and rings

Dry acidic white wine 1 cup +

Saffron large pinch

Combine ingredients in large stockpot and bring to a gentle boil

Let simmer for up to an hour, while preparing the additional ingredients.

Add additional ingredients:

1 to 2 lbs good fresh fish, can be any of these:

Haddock, Monk, snapper, grouper, dolphin, ect

Do not USE oily or game fish!!! Make sure it is fresh, that means smell it at the

Counter, it should smell like the ocean. (Do not use mackerel, blue, sword, shark, ect)

Shrimp 1lb, shelled, and butterflied (get the best you can buy)

Clams, or muscles, but you are rolling the dice here. (Know your fish seller)

One bunch of fresh parsley finely shopped

1 bunch fresh tarragon finely chopped

Several bay leaves

4 tomatoes coarsely diced

Season with salt and pepper.

Server with or over rice or pasta

Cajun Jambalaya

Cajun Jambalaya

I learned this recipe 25 years ago when I was a college kid living in New Orleans. I was working the line in a little neighborhood French-Creole restaurant in Uptown New Orleans. I have been cooking it for 25 years.

A little Info:

Cajun = Country: Cajun food is country food from the poor people who live out in the country side of Louisiana( “Lousian” ) They and there food is poor, rustic, hearty, HOT, and a unique comfort food with a kick in the rear.

Creole = French City: The French people who lived in New Orleans (“Narlins” please don’t miss pronounce it, you are guaranteed a poor drink and a scowl from your bartender), needed help for the kitchen, and turned to the Cajuns for it. They filled their kitchens with this inexpensive country people and tried to get them to cook French again. Yes again, the Cajuns or Acadians are French settlers who originally lived on the New England Coast. The result is a cross between country Cajun, and classic French aka Creole.

This is Cajun Jambalaya, a poor mans dinner. It is made with Chicken, Andouille sausage, and cured pork. Since we live in NY and I refuse to use frozen, packaged or inauthentic product, I have adapted this recipe to NY. I instead use fresh Italian Hot Sausage, and chicken, where as Creole Jambalaya uses seafood. Again since we do not live on the gulf coast I will not attempt that dish here.

Cajun Jambalaya

Stock Base:

1 lb Hot Italian Sausage – cut into inch long pieces

4 chicken breasts – Cut into 1 by .5 inch pieces

¼ lb butter

4 cloves fresh garlic

Good salt

Pepper

Stock:

6 stalks of celery diced, into medium pieces

2 yellow onions, diced medium

Bell Pepper, diced medium

Large pack of large mushrooms – sliced

2 Bay leaves

1 Tb Oregano - dried

2 Tb Basel – dried

2 cups dry white wine

1 bunch Italian parsley, cleaned, and chopped fine

Seasoning:

Salt

Pepper

Cayenne Pepper

Finishing:

6 Cups Cold Water ( or Good Chicken Stock)

1 ½ cup Long grain rice

6 oz box Wild rice

2 bunches Scallions diced

Stock Base: Melt butter in large stockpot, add garlic and all meat. Season with salt and pepper. Brown the meat, while constantly stirring, and then remove all meat from the pot leaving its font and fat. Set the meat aside until ready to finish the dish.

Stock: Add all ingredients and cook until vegetables are cooked, but still have a good crunch to them. Season the stock. When veggies are done, make your first pass with the cayenne pepper. A couple of shakes is all that is needed. The longer it is in the pot, the hotter it will get. Be very careful, cayenne can ruin a dish.

Finishing: Return the meat to the stock, and mix it back in. Add water or stock, and bring to a rolling boil. Add scallions. When stock Is rolling add all of the rice, cover and turn the heat off. Wait 20 minutes and DO NOT TOUCH THE POT!!!!

After 20 Minutes check the dish and stir. Test the rice. If there is too much fluid, ( leave it moist for better leftovers ) and the rice is under done, let it sit longer. If the dish is dry and the rice is underdone add water, or stock and let it sit longer. If it is done but to wet, then over very low heat or no heat, while constantly stirring continue to let it evaporate to a good consistency. In this case, stirring speeds up the evaporation process allowing it to thicken before becoming over cooked. This is where Jambalaya is done correctly or done poorly.

Eric Loves To Cook

Several months ago, I cooked Jambalaya in a Jambalaya throw down. The throw down was with a local chef and at her restaurant, done to raise money for a local cause.

An amazing food writer was there, and since then I have had some wonderful foodish conversations with her. She told me that she would love to read what I eat every day.......

So, here it is...