Tag: french

I have always made my own bread crumbs for this recipe. In my opinion the larger crumbs work better than the small size of a prepared bread crumb. You can use any flavor of bread (white, wheat, french bread), day old bread works great, as does the heel of the bread. If you would like to use a prepared breadcrumb rather than crumbling up some bread you might consider using some panko style crumbs

Creamy Spinach

• 2 package (10 oz each) frozen chopped spinach
• 1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Topping

• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 cup small bits of torn up bread (about 2 slices)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• seasonings of your choice. (I use 2-3 tsp Italian Seasoning).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cook the spinach according to the package directions and drain well. Combine the spinach, cream cheese, butter, and salt. Pour into a greased or buttered 8in by 8in baking dish.

Topping: Pour the melted butter over the top of bread crumbs. Use a fork to stir well making sure to moisten all of the crumbs. Add in the salt, pepper and seasonings. Spread out evenly over the top of the spinach mixture.

Bake uncovered for 30 minutes or until lightly browned and heated through.

(Note: If you double this recipe, bake it in a 9 in by 13 in dish following the same cooking time.)

Since we get so many visitors to our site looking for Pain Perdu recipes and the like, I figured I'd make a little mashup of recipes from around the web. Maybe soon, I shall make the Pain, and consume the Pain, but for now, I shall impart some Pain on you.

Note: PP == Pain Perdu. That is all.

• Fluffy banana stuffed PP @Astray
• PP with poached apricots @Epicurious
• PP @FoodNetwork

And the one I am probably going to make, when I make it:

• Bananas Foster PP @Astray

And yes, I'm well aware that Pain Perdu is basically French Toast. WHY MUST YOU TAKE THIS AWAY FROM ME!?!?

Oh, that little ubiquitous display in the produce section of the grocery store. You know exactly what I mean- the really expensive-seeming meat and cheese display, where markets display their largesse and where seemingly only the rich and epicurean seem to shop.

I've long lusted over this section, as it seems to have the most concentrated stink of adventure in the entire grocery. Seriously, even more than the cultural foods. On one weekend, our curiosity was so potent that we had to take the dive and grab ourselves a hefty chunk of diversity.

As Americans, we tend to be less curious about cheeses than our friends overseas. I'm guessing a few too many folks who watched Pepé Le Pew get mistaken for limburger as children grew up frightful about the entire variety cheese concept. Wake up, America. You're missing out.

In the center of the cracker tray above is a container of Greek-style hummus, a Middle-Eastern favorite made of garbanzo beans and tahini (which is essentially sesame-seed butter). Hummus is fantastic. If you're not eating it, you're missing out. This particular variety was strongly flavored of pepper, garlic, and lemon juice.

The triangular wedge on its own platter is Brie, a relatively familiar French cheese. The white coating on the outside is mold, but don't let that put you off- soft, spreadable Brie is fantastic with or without this part, but definitely has a bit more zest if you take it altogether. Brie is a cow's-milk cheese, and is nutty-flavored and delicious.

The other plate has a few pieces of summer sausage, as well as some folded pieces of Italian salami, cured in oil. Off these meats, we played a few different cheeses.

In staying with our American/British roots, there were some slices of hickory-smoked cheddar, probably the most familiar cheese in the States. Cheddar is named for the process by which it is made- stacking the cheeses until the bottom ones are pressed firm. As a result, it is a sturdy and strongly flavored cheese.

The small white-yellow strips of cheese are Gruyere, a Swiss cheese (but not 'the' Swiss cheese, which is known as Emmenthaler). Like Emmenthaler, it is a bit waxy, and is very delicately flavored- I was a bit put off by it, because the flavor was not apparent when combined with other ingredients.

Possibly not showing in the photo above were some slices of Havarti, a Danish cheese often impregnated with dill. This tasted almost exactly like Emmenthaler, but with a much more pleasing texture. It's enough to make me swear off the Swiss cheese for good.

Finally, there is a small container of goat's cheese, or chevre. This has a very strong flavor that is somewhat gamey; we ended up not eating very much of it. But I did use it later in the Greek night lamb recipe.

Don't let fear get you down. Eat the cheese. Learn to experiment. Live a little. You only get to do it once, after all.

Curse those fancy chefs.

You know who I mean. The ones who sort of offhandedly whip up some crazy roux and serve it with diminished flair by squeezing their thick, colorful pastes from what we suburbanites call ketchup and mustard squeezes. The ones who manage to generate two or three sauces for use on the same plate.

My first few experiments with roux, I have to say, were shameful. Sometimes I generated something blissful; other times, I'd end up with a pot full of flour porridge.

Was it the AP flour? Was it the temperature? Was there too much (or too little) whisk action? Actually, it was part flour and mostly temperature. But enough of that.

I doubt I'll ever be accepted into a French cuisine chat group, let alone hall of fame, but cornstarch is the simple American answer to a difficult task. Sources indicate that cornstarch thickens at low temperatures instead of high ones. Bah, I say. I don't do sauces over high heat anyways, for risk of scorching the butter, and I've never had a cornstarch sauce come out lumpy.

Oh, they say. But the roux. It will be marred by the flavor of cornstarch. Maybe it's because I'm a smoker, or maybe it's because old wives' tales start in the kitchen due to those chauvinistic simpler times- cornstarch sauces taste like whatever I put in them.

The technique: melt a stick of butter, or put in some tomato sauce, or chicken broth, or whatever you want to use as your base. Add cornstarch to your liquid [edit] very slowly, and in small portions. [thanks Savory] Whisk like the devil. Add seasoning. Presto- a sauce that tastes exactly like what you put into it, without lumps, without suffering, and without all that uncertainty that comes from novices attempting roux without the Necronomicons of chef-ery. Which is a word I just made up. Because I am an expert.

Let me tell you- any situation that calls for 'seasoning' is technically a sauce waiting to happen. And if you want to get all fancy and squirt designs all over your plate- well, that's your business, isn't it? Recent dinners here at Edible Unknown Research Center Zero (EURC-0) are simply blossoming with wonderful sauces. Live it. Love it. Accept it. The sauce commands you.

I was going to make pancakes for breakfast this morning, but that plan was foiled. Then I remembered this muffin recipe I had seen in Family Fun Magazine for French Breakfast Muffins. (You know my tendency towards desserts and sweets!) They have this great section called “Let's Cook” where they give you recipes that are simple enough to cook with your kids. Tele is much more patient with LittleRoq than I when it comes to cooking in the kitchen, but this was one recipe I thought I could tackle with him. Sure enough LittleRoq and I survived the experience with him doing most of the mixing and then spooning into the muffin stone (Pampered Chef of course). These muffins have a mild sweetness to them so everyone including Tele (who doesn't have much of a sweet tooth) enjoyed them. In searching Google I found that there are many similar recipes available out there so you should be able to find one to suite your fancy.


I think this would be a great recipe to use as a mix from your pantry. Just decide how many batches you would like to have on hand. Mix up the dry ingredients according to the directions and place in a zip-top baggie. Voila! Your very own muffin mix with no preservatives.

This was surprisingly wonderful. It sounds very simple, but hey, everyone likes a ham and cheese that thinks it better than you.

Ham and Cheese Toast

Serves 4

• 1 small French stick, sliced into 12 rounds (we used a sourdough baguette)
• 50g/2 oz/ ½ cup grated cheese, such as Manchego or Cheddar. (We used Cheddar, damn albertsons and lack of Manchego. Parmesan cheese would be grrreat here too.)
• 1 large garlic glove, peeled
• 3 slices of salt-cured ham (prosciutto), quartered
• Coarse black pepper

Toast the bread under a hot grill until both sides are golden brown. Cut the garlic glove in half and rub the cut surfaces over one side of each piece of toast. Put the ham on top of the garlic-flavoured toast. Wrinkle the ham so that it fits loosely on the toast round. Top each toast with grated cheese, then sprinkle with the pepper. Get back to the grill and cook for about 1-2 minutes until the cheese is melted.

We used a Pizza oven that Tele had laying around his living room for this, but a toaster oven would work just as well.

Serve hot.

While I'm still at the point where every bechamel has a fifty percent chance of turning into gruel, I can admit with some well-deserved selling-out shame that I can do French Toast just as well as anyone else.

With indeterminate origins shrouded in the mists of time, French Toast (known colloquially in some American regions as 'Fried Eggy Bread', to the sounds of every dead Frenchman spinning violently in his grave) is known by several names throughout the world, including Bombay Toast, arme riddere ('poor knights'), and the term en francais, pain perdu.

Regardless of its origin, I got up this morning determined to eat something other than cereal or pork chops in hot sauce, so I started poking through the pantry looking for things that I might have, at one point in time, heard of as a potential ingredient in french toast. Unfortunately, her Tartiness immediately sensed the twinging of directionless fumbling resonating from deep within my Y chromosome, and hauled out her favorite french toast recipe.

As I reluctantly set down the Clabber Girl (we might have had an interesting breakfast indeed) and perused the recipe, my inherent fiddliness blossomed into full-on transmogrification mode. I mean, the recipe she gave me had six ingredients. Six! I believe in simplicity for simplicity's sake as much as the next man, but this morning I was feeling much more Da Vinci than Kazimir Malevich, and ornery besides. I glanced longingly at the Clabber Girl. Her disturbingly large Victorian eyes seemed to be pleading with me to ignore the pragmatic whims of my wife and instead follow her down a psychedelic yellow brick road of chaos, pestilence, and creative breads.

Unfortunately, looking at the bread and thinking 'yellow brick' inspired in me an unsettling urge to return to simplicity.

In a Pyrex baking dish, I added the two eggs, mixed in brown sugar (take that, recipe), and mixed in the rest of the ingredients in old-school eyeballing fashion. Since it was French toast that I was making, I used half a stick of butter and made sure to scorch each piece slightly.

The result was delicious- but heavy. Brown sugar and butter with a particularly absorbent bread do indeed yellow bricks make. Though they were pleasantly crunchy in a waffle-like fashion, they weren't too sweet, and didn't mind being dusted with confectioner's sugar (I think it was confectioners sugar, but where did little miss Clabber go?), nor did they mind a little pure maple in the tradition of the great French Toast Eating Lumberjacks that used their mighty axes to pave the way to our modern landscape of McDonalds and california rolls. I only managed to eat one piece, but the other slices quickly disappeared due to guerilla action from the other family members. Let freedom ring.

Recently, I've decided that I'm going to learn the ins and outs of French cuisine- the most famed ethnic cuisine in the entire world- and document the entire learning process here on Edible Unknown.

Say what you will about their modern military prowess, the cuisine of France has not only helped modernize the world through a living philosophy of art and cuisine before conflict, but several Enlightenment-era thinkers, as well as two of the most famous military personages of all history (Napoleon Bonaparte and Jeanne D'Arc) were Gallic. It's a bit of a shame on my part that what I know, firsthand, about French cuisine comes primarily to me by accident.

There's a legend about the baguette- that stereotypical French bread often titled as such in the supermarkets. What I do know about a baguette is that, when cooked properly and served fresh (crisp exterior, creamy inside)- it is quite possibly one of the most transcendental base foodstuffs known to man.

Anyhow, the legend states that the baguette was invented during Napoleon's winter campaign against Russia- that the troops, with little room to pack extra belongings, created a foodstuff that could be stored in trouser legs. Right. Interesting story? The truth, to me, is far more interesting, and indicative of the legends behind the food.

Napoleon's troops had no need for storing bread during a winter campaign. The French army at the time apparently included such a thing as a mobile bakery unit. While this isn't particularly devastating (I can imagine seeing America's enemies struck with fear at a rolling Winchell's), it does show the type of artistic pragmatism that makes France an interesting country, at the very least, and provides some clues as to their culinary stylings. Stay tuned.