Shaun Kelly

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Meg

With Shaun Kelly, chef at the hot Paris bistro Au Passage, The Everyday French Chef inaugurates a new occasional feature: interviews with our favorite Parisian chefs. To kick off the series, I went to see Kelly on a recent afternoon. Young, edgy and ultracreative, he seems to be having a picnic in his first job fully in charge of the kitchen. Aged 28 and originally from Australia, he has lived in Paris only since March. And despite his growing star power, this, he confided, is his first interview.

Shaun Kelly / A chef in Paris

Before moving to Paris, Kelly worked in London with the English chef Fergus Henderson, and is a firm believer in Ferguson’s ‘nose-to-tail’ approach to cooking – the idea that chefs should use every part of the beast, including the offal, and also every part of the plant, for example using the stems of dill in broths and the fronds as a garnish. The result is dishes that are not just delicious and beautiful, but ecological as well. In the interview, Kelly talks about his approach to food, where he finds his inspiration, and how he made his way from a tiny town in Australia to the capital of French cuisine.

Site news: It is the French school holidays now and The Everyday French Chef is taking a break. We will be back on Monday with recipes with a Burgundy accent. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the interview with Shaun. And happy cooking!

Posted in Et cetera | Leave a comment

Salade d’épinards avec pancetta

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Meg

I often find myself craving this salad as winter sets in. The deep green leaves of the spinach topped by crispy brown pancetta look so appealing on the plate. The sauce of lemon, olive oil and garlic is so tangy it knocks your socks off. But it isn’t just esthetics and flavor that make us desire this sort of salad when the weather turns cold. Spinach is packed with vitamins and iron, lemon has Vitamin C, olive oil is said to lower the risk of heart disease, and garlic — used by humans in cuisine for at least the last 7,000 years — has been variously credited with warding off the common cold, lowering cholesterol and preventing certain kinds of cancer. Et voilà — a delicious winter salad that is also good for you!

Salade d’épinards avec pancetta / Spinach salad with pancetta

For any readers who may be interested in food history, I’d like to invite you to take a look at the recent contributions of Professor Luciano Granozzi on the origins of a recipe I posted on this site in September, proscuitto with figs. You can find this under Starters on the recipe page for Jambon de pays aux figues. Il dottore Granozzi, who teaches history at the University of Catania, questioned the national origins of the dish — Italian or French — and when I challenged him to tell us more, he found a hilarious text about the possible inventor of the fig-and-ham combination. I have done my best to translate the gist of it.

Coming tomorrow: The Everyday French Chef will launch the first in a series of interviews with chefs at some of my favorite Paris restaurants. The series begins with Shaun Kelly, the 28-year-old chef at Au Passage in the 11th arrondissement. A self-described former punk rocker, he has transmuted his musical energy into a modern, exciting culinary style. Not to be missed.

Posted in 3. Salads | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Profiteroles

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Meg

Cream puffs filled with vanilla ice cream and topped with hot chocolate sauce — who first came up with this wonderful idea? It turns out that profiteroles have a long and complex history. Apparently a 16th-century Italian chef named Popelini, who worked for Catherine de Medici, wife of the French king Henri II, was the first to think of putting a filling inside cream puffs. (Whether or not he actually invented the puffs is not clear). Various brilliant French chefs later added savory fillings, whipped cream and, eventually, ice cream. And then an unsung genius added the hot chocolate topping.

Profiteroles / Profiteroles

I first tasted profiteroles at a Paris restaurant called Le Procope, which funnily enough was founded by another Italian chef, Procopio of Sicily, who is credited with introducing ice cream to France. This was about a century after Popelini moved to France. Having tasted profiteroles, of course I had to try to make them. They are prepared with a dough that is cooked on the stove top, hence the original French name of this pastry: pâte à chaud (heated dough), which later segued into pâte à choux (dough for cabbages, because to the French cream puffs look like mini-cabbages). This in turn has segued into a French endearment, ‘Mon petit chou,’ which does not mean ‘My little cabbage,’ but rather, ‘My little cream puff.’ And indeed, when you open your oven door to find your mounds of dough puffed up and golden and round as cabbages, you may find yourself crying out, with warm feelings of endearment, ‘Ah, mes petits choux!’

The Everyday French Chef will be back on Monday. Happy cooking!

Posted in Desserts | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Salade de cresson

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Meg

watercress salad2Crisp, peppery, dark green and packed with vitamins, watercress can be grown all year round and makes a wonderful winter salad. It is most often seen in Paris as a garnish to meat dishes, with no dressing. But it takes on star quality if dressed with a sauce of oil, lemon and just a little salt. I can still remember how surprised I was by its sharpness when I first tasted it, just after moving to France. It made me wake up and say, ‘More, please!’

Salade de cresson / Watercress salad

Watercress may be cultivated today, but it also grows wild along riverbanks — and people have been eating it pretty much since the dawn of humanity. It is well loved in cuisine: the watercress sandwiches of England are delicious, and the plant’s pretty green leaves make a fabulous soup (coming soon). But watercress just on its own has been credited with almost magical powers over the years. The Romans thought it could cure baldness, the Greeks believed it could cure madness, and Dioscorides, a first century pharmacologist, prescribed it as an aphrodisiac. Who knows? He may have been right. Try it and see.

Posted in 3. Salads | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Pommes de terre au romarin

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Meg

rosemary potatoes2Potatoes roasted with rosemary and olive oil — nothing so melt-in-the-mouth delicious could be as simple to make. Preparation time is five minutes or less, although you do need to be around for the next hour or so while your potatoes turn a golden brown, their aroma drawing everyone in the house into your kitchen. Fend them off with promises of things to come, for these potatoes marry well with so many other dishes — roast chicken, pan-seared fish, an omelet or simply a green salad.

Pommes de terre au romarin / Roasted rosemary potatoes

Site news: Today I launch The Everyday French Chef on Facebook. Simply click on the Facebook button above to go to the page. Here you will find new features including an Events section, the first event being a soufflé demonstration in my Paris kitchen on Nov. 6. If you happen to be in Paris, please sign up — space is limited, but the demonstration is free. The Facebook page is a place for readers to interact with me and each other, for example by suggesting recipes to include on this site, or by sharing your own culinary tips. If you are enjoying The Everyday French Chef, please share the new page with your Facebook friends. Your support means a lot to me! — Meg Bortin

Posted in 8. Vegetables | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Steak maître d’hôtel

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Meg

Who was the genius who first conjured up this simple but delicious way of serving steak? My guess is that it was a head waiter with a big crowd coming in and a dearth of ingredients for sauces. But every restaurant kitchen in France has butter and parsley on hand — and so, voilà, a new dish was born. But this is just my imagination speaking. I plan to track down the culinary origins of beurre maître d’hôtel — or ‘head waiter’s butter’ — and will get back to you on that. In the meantime, why not just enjoy the steak?

Steak au beurre maître d’hôtel / Pan-seared steak with parsley butter

This is a great recipe for any everyday chef, for it takes a total of 10 minutes to prepare, from fridge to table. With a very high quality steak, it may be served on its own, garnished with a little bunch of watercress, for example. Or accompanied by the great French classic, pommes frites (French fries). Or by any number of vegetable dishes, from rosemary potatoes (coming tomorrow) to green beans to purées and beyond. Happy cooking!

Posted in 7. Meat Dishes | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Crème de lentilles

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Meg

It only takes one word to describe this creamy lentil soup: sublime. Created by Rodolphe Paquin — the chef and owner of Le Repaire de Cartouche, one of my favorite neighborhood bistros — it is a soup that will knock your socks off. Not for the faint-hearted, it is richissimo, with vast quantities of cream. But that is what makes it oh, so delicious.

Crème de lentilles / Creamy lentil soup

M. Paquin, who kindly contributed his recipe to The Everyday French Chef, uses either chicken stock or water as a base when he makes this soup. As for the lentils, he prefers the small green lentils found over here called lentilles du Puy. If they’re not available where you live, just go for high-quality lentils.

Rodolphe Paquin, who comes from Normandy, has been chef at Le Repaire de Cartouche since 1997. The restaurant is named for a dashing bandit and ladies’ man who ran a gang of thieves in the Bastille area in the 18th century, before the French revolution. Cartouche is perhaps France’s version of Robin Hood — he took from the rich and gave to the poor (up to a point). His repaire, or hide-out, was reputedly in the building on the Rue Amelot where the restaurant now stands, its walls covered in murals depicting the exploits of Cartouche. Despite his legendary prowess in evading the royal authorities, Cartouche met a bad end. He was arrested, deserted by his comrades and tortured to death on the wheel at the esplanade where the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris city hall, now stands. Nonetheless his legend lives on in poetry, theater and the movies, notably a 1962 film in which Cartouche was played by the equally dashing Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Posted in 2. Soups | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Figues rôties à la crème

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Meg

Fresh figs roasted in vanilla cream flavored with ground coriander seeds is a dessert that will have your guests begging for more. There is something about the muskiness of the figs that gives off a wanton come-have-me aroma en route from the oven to the table. When I made it other night, I thought it would serve six — but happily we were only three, for we finished it in a flash. And had there been more, we would have finished that too.

Figues rôties à la crème / Fresh figs roasted in vanilla cream

I had never encountered a fresh fig before coming to France, and can still remember my surprise at the taste of it. No relation at all to its cousin, the dried fig, which we’d enjoyed over the years in my family at Christmas time. The fresh figs of Avignon were already ripe in July, hanging low on the boughs of trees lining the road that I took to my daily classes on French structuralism. It was drowsily warm in the classroom, and the odor of the figs outside would send me into reveries that unfortunately affected my grades. To this day, the fresh fig is for me the most voluptuous of fruits, its elegant shape and rounded bottom enhanced by the sculpted beauty of its leaves, its exterior, deep purple or green, concealing the sweet lush red within.

The fig season is coming to an end, at least over here in France, so if you’d like to try this dessert now’s the time. The Everyday French Chef will be back on Monday with a recipe from one of my favorite neighborhood bistros. Happy cooking!

Posted in Desserts | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Tomates provençales

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Meg

provencal tomatoes1There are many approaches to this classic dish from Provence — the slow way on the stove-top, the quicker way in the oven, with or without breadcrumbs, with thyme instead of parsley, etc. For the purposes of an everyday French chef, the quick way works just fine and produces a classic version of the garlicky roasted tomatoes of southern France. Preparation takes 10 minutes, and then you can pop them into the oven and get on with the rest of the dinner while enjoying the intoxicating scents wafting through your kitchen.

Tomates provençales / Roasted tomatoes, Provence-style

I first tasted these tomatoes when I spent the summer in Avignon as a 19-year-old (let’s not mention the year). I was staying with a French family composed of the mother, the daughter, the newborn granddaughter, the dog and the 100-year-old tortoise named Caroline. Madame Bergier took in boarders because her husband had died and she needed the money. He had been a doctor in French colonial times, and their rambling house was filled with treasures from Africa, Indochina and the Middle East. There was notably a scimitar — call it a sword of Damocles — hanging above the entrance to my bedroom, and over the bed a huge red parchment parasol with little red pompoms all around. In this exotic ambience, dinnertime was a welcome return to southern French reality. I have been trying to replicate Mme Bergier’s fabulous roasted tomatoes ever since.

Posted in 8. Vegetables | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Filet de porc au romarin

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Meg

pork rosemary1The most succulent cut of pork, roasted to a crispy golden brown on the outside, meltingly tender on the inside, infused with rosemary and garlic — this is a recipe fit for the most discriminating palate. The meat is lean and juicy, its elegance enhanced by the spicy earthiness of the rosemary. And the beauty of the dish is that it takes just 5 minutes to prepare, plus roasting time of about half an hour.

Filet de porc au romarin / Roast pork fillet with rosemary

Roast pork fillet marries well with country dishes like vegetable purées or Provence-style roasted tomatoes (coming tomorrow). I could say more, but will not as I’m rather tired, having been up from 3-4:30 a.m. watching the U.S. presidential debate. Like many Americans in Paris, I am very concerned about the outcome of this election — we may be an ocean away, but we feel very close to the situation back home. But that is not the subject of this web site, so I will save my thoughts on the matter for another occasion.

Instead, here’s some site news: My young French computer genius stopped by yesterday and added share buttons to the bottom of each page (except the home page). Which means that if you like a recipe, you may send it to friends via Facebook or Twitter. Meanwhile I have begun building a Facebook page dedicated to The Everyday French Chef. The page will inform its readers about upcoming events — the first of which is a soufflé demonstration scheduled for early November — and hopefully also include video interviews of some of my favorite Paris chefs. If you’d like a sneak preview, search on Facebook for The Everyday French Chef.

Posted in 7. Meat Dishes | Tagged , , | Leave a comment