Crisp Potato Cake (Galette de Pomme de Terre)

As part of my Paris "Try the World" box, I received a jar of persillade as well as some large grain salt. This was not a term in cooking that I was familiar with, but I looked at the ingredients on the jar and set it aside figuring I'd use it in a meat or fish dish in the future. It includes parsley, onion, garlic, and salt and they are all dried little bits. Little did I know that I would have a chance to use this item with a potato dish far sooner than expected.

Aside from the persillade, this is actually a dish with fairly conventional ingredients. It's also simple, but creates a version of a potato dish that isn't common due to the effort that goes into slicing potatoes super thing, slow cooking the "cake," and carefully flipping it over. The persillade merely adds some flavor depth at the end which definitely raises the bar on this. The real star is the textural complexity of the crispy potatoes on the outside and tender ones on the inside. The devil is in the details in getting this right.

The instructions for this potato cake - which sounds so much more impressive when you call it by its French name of Galette de Pomme de Terre - makes it clear that overly starchy or wet potatoes will create issues for the dish so I decided to do what I could to avoid either of these interfering with a good result. I sliced the potatoes to 1.5 mm on a mandolin and then rinsed them three times then let them soak in cold water in the refrigerator for over five hours. This hydrated the potatoes and allowed a lot of the external starch to wash off. When I was ready to make the dish, I laid out a kitchen towel and laid the potatoes out on it in a single layer then put another towel on top and allowed them to dry between them for about a half hour. 

Other than that extra care, I made a persillade by putting a tablespoon of oil into a small glass dish and a half teaspoon of my dry persillade mix in it and heating it in the microwave. I let that sit around a bit as well to allow the flavors to mix a bit and soften up the herbs. This was what I planned to drizzle on the finished galette.

Mine looked like this:

My photo isn't great-looking because it was taken at night with a flash, but this was a really tasty dish. The textural elements were an absolute delight. My husband likened it to a potato chip on the outside. The complexity the olive oil and herb drizzle gave it was just enough to liven it up a bit. 

I not only will make this again, but will make it two days in a row because it was such a hit. It's also really not that hard to do. You just have to be patient and a little careful. It was far easier to flip over than I expected and cooked faster than I anticipated. I did use a non-stick pan, however, because I don't have a cast iron pan at this time and I don't trust my stainless steel not to create a problem. I don't think it suffered any for the choice and it certainly did not stick despite the fact that I forgot to intermittently shake it to stop it from sticking.

Garlic Soup

When I try a recipe from the Times, I'm always careful to look at the comments first to see what people suggest or say. Often, this can avert all-out disaster or improve the outcome. In this case, there was an element of this recipe which I wasn't happy about and one of the comments made me even more concerned for how it would affect the outcome so I made an alteration which was likely for the worse.

In this recipe for garlic soup, the thickening agent is crust-less bread. I'm rather familiar with this style of thickening soups or stews because my sister used to be in the SCA and a lot of medieval recipes call for bread crumbs as their way of thickening. The problem I had with this was two-fold. One of the commenters said that her soup was a "gluey mess" and I also felt it was adding calories without either an interesting taste or nutrition. When another commenter mentioned using white beans instead, I felt that would be a better bet. It turns out that I was wrong. While my soup wasn't bad at all, it did suffer from some issues that could definitely have been avoided and may have been had I been faithful to the original recipe.

The main problem with my soup was that the sweet smoked paprika flavor was too strong and it was far too thin. Also, it was too oily, especially when it cooled as my soup totally separated such that cold oil congealed on the top and the pureed white beans settled onto the bottom. I'm guessing the bread would have prevented this from occurring, but I also think that the recipe simply has far more oil (1/4 cup) in it than is really necessary.

On the bright side, this soup tasted like authentic Spanish chorizo smells. If you want to drink some of that type of sausage, this is your soup. The flavors are generally good, and I think it helped in my case that I was using some really great homemade chicken stock that I had leftover from making pollo en pipian verde, but I need to tweak it and make changes to turn it into something that meets my tastes.

Though I regard this generally as a failure, I'm very happy that I tried it as I think it will form the backbone of a different soup with a flavor profile I never would have come up with had I not tried this. In the future, I hope to make a soup with a lot more diversity, less oil, and similar flavors. My general plan is to do something which includes these ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil (1/2 the original)
6 cloves of garlic (same as original)
1 small onion (diced and sauteed after the garlic is removed - not in original at all)
2 teaspoons smoked paprika (a little under 1/2 the original)
4 cups chicken stock (same as original)
2 cups cooked white beans (not in original)

I haven't decided yet if I'll toss in other vegetables, but I think that it needs more thickening agents or taste modifiers. It's possible that I'll throw in a potato as well. When I try this again, I'll post an update of the modified recipe.

Puree of Chickpea Soup

The internet is full of lies. I know this comes as no surprise, but there is no greater concentration of lies than in recipes. Bloggers offer gorgeous galleries of food porn and gush about the deliciousness of their recipes when the results are often quite terrible. They lie to your eyes as well as your ears.

This is something I have known for a long time, but I still am occasionally suckered in by a certain picture. Such was the case with this recipe for puree of chickpea soup. While looking over the ingredients, I couldn't help but think, "this looks like nothing more than hummus in soup form." I don't mean that anything with chickpeas is going to be like hummus. This actually duplicates a lot of the ingredients in hummus (garlic, olive oil, cumin, coriander, lemon juice, salt) and doesn't add much that hummus excludes. Red onions are pretty much the only deviation. Of course, there is also the method of preparation, but I was still drawn in by the gorgeous picture of a snowy white puree with golden droplets of olive oil and bits of fresh mint.

I don't know where the author got her chickpeas or how she got them to be so incredibly pale, but I'm guessing more than a little Photoshop trickery played a part. After all, you've got red onion, brown cumin, and coriander, and off-white chickpeas. How does any of that add up to a creamy pile of whiteness? At any rate, my soup looked like what it largely was, a bowl of slightly runny hummus:

I followed the recipe faithfully for this including going out of my way to purchase a red onion for the dish.  I even went so far as to pass the soup through a fine mesh sieve to get a super smooth texture and it is very velvety if you do that. I'd say it's worth it for the finer texture, but I'm sure it's very good chunky as well. The only thing I did not do is garnish it with olive oil and mint. I don't mind adding in the oil, but this is a delicately flavored soup and I found that stirring in the olive oil at the end of making the soup had already made it taste too strongly of olive oil. I didn't want this to be overwhelmed by more olive oil flavor and I frankly don't care for mint so I had it without the accouterments. I will note that you have to salt this very heavily to bring out the flavors.

In terms of how this tasted, it was very good if you like hummus, and I do. My only disappointment with this was that it wasn't unique enough nor did it provide the visual appeal of the pictured recipe. I may make this again, but, if I do, I'll likely make it in a pressure cooker as the dry chickpeas took forever to soften and even then they weren't super soft. 

David Taniss Persian Jeweled Rice

I've never been a fan of mixing sweet and savory and what few experiences I have had with such dishes have been less than stellar. Dishes like sweet and sour pork or chicken are barely tolerated and I would never entertain the idea of pineapple on pizza despite the enthusiastic endorsement of said combination by more than one person that I am friends with (including my sister).

The point of this blog, however, is to push myself to try things I wouldn't normally try, and this "jeweled rice" recipe seemed to have more going for it than other sweet and savory combinations. Rice goes well with both of those flavors and I'm a fan of all of the spices (cinnamon, cumin, black pepper, cardamom, and allspice) in this particular recipe. The only weirdness from my limited taste perspective is the mixing of various sweet dried fruit types with onion. Still, onward and, with any luck, upward.

I largely followed the recipe as offered with a few exceptions. One is that I cut the volume of everything in half because my husband won't touch a dish like this and I don't want to eat an enormous amount of rice by myself. There is also the fact that, if I hate it, I don't want to waste a lot of dried fruit. The other thing which I changed was that I added 2 dates into the mix because it sounded like a good idea and one of the commenters mentioned it would be a good addition. I used gojiberries because I have no access to barberries and I think cranberries would be far too tart.

The biggest change that I made was to not parboil the rice. I did this for two reasons. One was simply that I didn't have the time or inclination at the time that I made this to go through the time and mess. Another was that I didn't trust that this was an important step. It turned out that it was not except for one point. Without the parboiling stage, I had to add in more water and steam the rice to cook it. I didn't realize this until after it was done, but that guaranteed that I wouldn't have a crispy crust on the bottom of the rice. Everything cooked just fine. Mine just had less contrast and a uniform texture.

To be honest, the browning of the rice part of this was the most tenuous and least predictable part as the instructions recommend that you do it "by nose." I'm a pretty experienced cook, but I have no clue what browning rice is supposed to smell like (nor did a few of the commenters). The rice at the bottom of mine was slightly brown, but my best guess is that adding in more water washed away a lot of what may have been brown. It was the price I paid for refusing to parboil.

I am pleased to say that the flavor and texture did not suffer at all. The rice was properly cooked - tender, but firm. The contrasting flavors balanced each other well. The picture does not show it, but I did add nuts to each serving before I ate it. While the recipe recommends almonds and pistachios, I liked pecans better. The fruit was just amazing in this and I think the spice level was fine, but it might be interesting if it were a bit more intense. I used 1/8 teaspoon of every spice because I have no idea what a "large" pinch is, let alone how I'd cut that in half.

This is actually a restaurant quality dish. It's exotic, but approachable and complex, but not too time-consuming to make, especially if you don't fuss with the parboiling and just add enough water to cook your particular volume of rice and cook it normally (low simmer for 20 minutes, allow to rest for another 20 minutes). 

Creamed Spinach

Creamed spinach sounds a food that was popular in the 50's. It conjures up visions of slimy greens swimming in gray canned cream soup. I've had spinach plenty in my life; at least I have done so in my later adult years when my desire to try more health-promoting foods outvoted my wish to consume highly palatable foods from my younger days. I never even considered having it "creamed" until The New York Times Creamed Spinach recipe made an appearance on my Facebook feed.

While "creamed" made me think there would be actual, well, cream, in the dish, it is actually a white sauce (Béchamel sauce). For those who don't know what that is, it's essentially flour cooked in butter with milk added to it. It forms a creamy base for the pureed spinach in this dish. It's incredibly simply and comes together rapidly. Mine looked fairly similar to what was picture on the Times page, but it's less vibrantly green. I attribute this to both my using the stems (which are lighter in color) and the fact that I didn't adjust the colors in Photoshop to make mine look more verdant.

I followed the recipe fairly faithfully, though I had less spinach on hand than the recipe called for so I cut it in half. The white sauce came together beautifully, but I was careful not to get the butter too hot and that helps. I also used a pretty light hand with the nutmeg and didn't add any salt until the end.

After tasting the final result, I was quite happy, but I wanted more depth and complexity. I especially wanted more savory ("umami") notes so I added a tablespoon (keep in mind that I cut the recipe in half) of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. I think this punched up the flavor a bit and would probably include this variation again. 

Lancashire Cheese-and-Onion Pie

When I was growing up, the closest I came to a savory pie was the cheap little frozen pot pies that my mother picked up for about a quarter when they were on sale. That was a very different little beast from the sorts of pasty and pie offerings that are common in England or Australia. Pot pies are filled with frozen vegetables and thickened goop. My limited information about more advanced savory pie cuisine lead me to believe that the filling was more substantial and the flavors more developed.

My knowledge of such things is largely confined to what I learned from documentaries. In fact, the largest source of my savory pie education comes from a documentary on Victorian farm life. As part of the recreation, one of the gentlemen manning the farm constructed a pastry case and filled it with meat and spices. The historians role playing as Victorians stated that the pastry at that time was not meant to be eaten, but merely served as a way in which to cook the filling.

I imagine that pastry was not wasted in a similar fashion at all times or in all cases in British cuisine and I hoped that the recipe that I found on the Lancashire Cheese-and-Onion Pie was going to produce an edible pastry. That being said, I did note that the recipe was different from conventional pie crust. The fat to flour ratio was lower, which would likely result in a harder, tougher crust.

I followed the recipe as described on the New York Times page, except that I had no choice but to use more ice water and I used black pepper instead of white. In fact, given the amount of flour, I'd be stunned if anyone could make it work with only three tablespoons. Even with five, my pastry was cracking and separating all over the place and it was a struggle to get each piece to roll out large enough to create a top and bottom that could come together. My final result looked a bit rough because of this problem:

Despite the difficulty with the crust, the pie turned out very well. Since I opted to use cheddar cheese, it was pretty salty and I wished I'd added less salt to the onions while cooking them. That being said, I didn't use a lot and it was still very tasty. It was immensely savory and flavorful and the onions cooked down to being quite sweet and mellow.

My main worry was this was that the sparse seasoning would result in something which was lacking in flavor depth. I desperately wanted to throw some garlic into the onions, but resisted the urge in favor of something which I suspected was more authentic. Though garlic was brought to England by the Romans, it wasn't widely used in British cuisine. It turned out that the onions and cheese were more than enough complexity to provide a homey, but interesting side dish.