So after much debate, price comparisons and checking of Consumer Reports ratings, the husband and I finally got our first grown-up grill this weekend. It’s a Char-Broil Red grill, with “Red” referring to the infrared heat the grill uses. Instead of an open flame, three stainless-steel tube burners are tucked away beneath a U-shaped trough, providing high, even heat to the cast-iron cooking surface. Not only does the infrared system save someone like me from catching their hair on fire, it also prevents meat from drying out and losing all of that juicy goodness.

Despite the horribly hot weather (100 degrees! 110 heat index!), Saturday evening we grilled a couple of inaugural rib-eyes, and they were phenomenal. The grill is easy to use, with a “SureFire” electronic ignition button and individual burner knobs with a range of temperature settings, including one for rotisserie, should we ever feel the need to purchase the electric grill rotisserie. Which we won’t. But the lower setting is ideal for fish and veggies, which can also be cooked on the side burner.

The grill heats quickly, and only uses a third of the propane regular gas grills require, and our thick, juicy steaks were perfectly cooked in about 10 minutes. Even better, it has a cleaning mode that ramps the heat up to around 700 degrees and basically disintegrates anything left on the cooking surface, rendering that grill brush completely useless!

Even after one use, I think we’re really going to like this grill. It’s not gigantic and takes up minimal space on the deck, but it’s the perfect size whether we’re cooking for just ourselves or for a few other folks. Considering the easy operation, the side burner and the storage space, not to mention the effortless clean up, I can see a lot of our cooking moving from inside the kitchen and out onto the deck, especially in the evening and when the weather cools. But for now, I’m looking forward to grilling up some fabulous burgers (I have the most excellent recipe!) over the 4th of July holiday this weekend, no matter how hot it is!

Don’t ask me how, but my husband has a knack for finding cool kitchen accessories that actually live up to their claims, and this thing is no different. Because that’s what I thought when I opened it during what I like to refer to as “A Very Foodie Christmas” last year—what is this thing?

This thing is the Herb Savor from Prepara. Aesthetically pleasing in its design, the Herb Savor was created to prolong the life of fresh herbs for up to three weeks. Having been in a cooking slump, until recently the thought of cooking with fresh herbs really hadn’t crossed my mind. But last week, I decided to reinvigorate one of my favorite go-to recipes—oven-roasted fingerling potatoes sprinkled with sea salt—with some fresh Italian parsley. Noting the presence of the still-unused Herb Savor sitting on the kitchen cabinet, I figured I might as well buy a big bunch of parsley and finally give it a whirl.

The Herb Savor works like this: stuff your herbs in the clear, two-piece basket, close it up and put it in the water well base. Fill the base with water, plug it and stick it in the fridge. So after I chopped half the bunch and added it to my potatoes, I put the remainder into the Herb Savor, put it in the fridge (it fits perfectly in the door shelf) and forgot about it.

Tonight, when I made the potatoes again (like I said, easy go-to dish), I checked the status of the parsley, fully expecting to find a wilted mess. But I was so wrong. The parsley was as perfect and fresh as the day I bought it, a week-and-a-half ago, and I am incredibly impressed. With all of the crazy products that promise to keep food fresher, longer, I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of the Herb Savor. I highly recommend it to anyone who cooks with fresh herbs, and plan on using it again when I raid the containers of basil and cilantro I planted last weekend.

Yes, I admit I missed it — the Feast of the Macaron Day last week, to announce the burgeoning Spring. It was on March 20th and I was elsewhere, no doubt shopping in some department store.

This lovely Macaron day tradition was instilled five years ago at the initiative of Pierre Hermé, a French pastry chef formerly of Ladurée fame who invited you to taste free macarons in his Parisian shops or any of the participating Relais Desserts boutiques in support of rare illnesses.

Charitable causes aside, it is a little heaven to bite into a lovely, bright macaron – and there is every color in the spectrum of a rainbow. Past that crunchy shell of meringue, you are met with a downy softness like smooth velvet that explodes into an exuberance of flavor – be it sensual chocolate, light lemon, tangy raspeberry, heady vanilla, or exotic jasmine. It is the perfect pastry companion for an espresso, a cup of tea, or a flute of champagne. Or just by itself, followed by another, and another.

The macaron came into vogue in France about a decade ago when its appearance in restaurants and on dinner tables were de rigueur. With the years, they evolved into myriad sizes and shapes from little hearts to the double-decker version and even to the size of a cheeseburger, and available to epicureans all over the world. Flavors can range from the most traditional chocolate to exotic like rose petals, green tea, and ketchup (!).

But what exactly is a macaron?

What it’s not is a macaroon (with two ‘oo’s) made of egg whites, sugar and shredded dried coconut baked into a soft peaked mound.

The macaron at hand (with one “o”) is a small cookie the size of a half dollar consisting of crunchy egg white meringue, almond powder and sugar exterior and soft cream filled interior. Its origins are obscure and contested. The macaron appeared in Europe in the Middle Age where it would diversify and find new shapes and flavors. Its simplest form can be traced back to Italy during the Renaissance, according to “Larousse Gastronomique,” an encyclopedia of food, wine, cookery, and culture which suggested that this little pastry, also known as a monk’s navel, was invented in 791 in a convent near Cormery in the Loire region.

Filled with jams, spices, liqueurs, this crunchy soft cookie would come to be known as the Parisien macaron or “Gerbet” starting in the 1880s in the neighborhood of Belleville in Paris. It was made popular in the Latin quarter by the now defunct salon de thé Pons, as well as by the Ladurée house, which introduced the concept of “macarons season” corresponding to fragrances that are available only for the limited season. Ladurée also takes credit for the double-decker macaron variety.

Ladurée features a permanent collection of flavors to suit your tastes: chocolates – dark, bitter chocolate – vanilla – coffee – rose petals – pistachios – raspberry – violet cassis – caramel with salted butter – red fruits – orange water – licorice – lemon – coconut – icy mint – almonds – spices & dried fruit – chestnuts – praline – mocha…

So readers, what would be your pick for the day?

Pierre Hermé, 72 rue Bonaparte
La Durée, Boulevard des Champs Elysées
Paris

Pan-seared chicken, asparagus, and spinach raviolis

Recently, I had dinner with two wonderful friends at a renowned restaurant called Casa Olympe in Paris, where celibrities are frequently spotted. Reservations are tough unless you know one of the regulars who can get you in. This eatery isn’t much to look at from the outside, but its chef, the famous Olympe, has built her golden reputation on it since 1973 with her esoteric dishes made from out of the ordinary ingredients. Trusting that I can’t go wrong no matter what, I ordered pigmented squid on a bed of vermicelli. And when the waiter deposited the plate of food in front of me, I could swear that for a moment my stomach went cold.

There was vermicelli alright — and spread out on top of it was a mush of black inky colored strips that looked like fish bait gone bad. The whole mess was barely brightened up with a sprig of parsley. It was revolting to put it mildly, or as my daughter would say, “Ew.” But when I gamely tried a bite, it was devine. I couldn’t describe the taste for you, but my friends could testify that I cleaned my plate. Which goes to show that you can’t judge a dish by its unpalatable looks.

Baked fish with pesto, acorn squash, green salad

But not all of us can be the chef Olympe. The art of making a meal look appetizing is as significant as preparing it. Because from a decorator’s point of view, the food must be pretty no matter what; but from the cook’s, if people don’t eat what’s on their plate, then it’s a waste and a failure. Yet it’s possible to reconcile these two mindsets, especially when they tend to inhabit the same body.

Making attractive meals is particularly important when you’re feeding young children with developing taste buds. When something looks appealing, kids are more likely to give it a try — even if it’s healthy for them. My friend Yvonne Wade Sanchez from Houston is an expert in this field. As a working mother of two young boys, she doesn’t dispose of more time than any of us to make dinner. Her approach to cooking supper is simple and procedural, as befits her technical communication background:

1. Open the fridge and select a vegetable (or two).
2. Open the freezer and select a protein.
3. Open the pantry and select a carbohydrate.

Simple Saturday supper

With this triad, Yvonne creates simple and nutritious meals that her children and husband are happy to eat. Occasionally, she even ups the ante with “advanced” ingredients to cultivate their taste buds for further sophistication. On top of that, Yvonne uses creative ways to make her dishes so visually appealing that you’d think she could invite 12 people over for dinner at a moment’s notice.

Egg salad sandwich

So try applying color contrasts to liven up a dish. Yvonne uses simple white plates as a backdrop that won’t clash with anything she puts on them. Think of parsley, basil, and cucumbers for green; carrots, sweet peppers, and tomatoes for orange/red; then put them together for an eye-pleasing effect. Imagine a tuna sandwich cut in triangles and garnished with cherry tomatoes, cucumber slices, and extra mayonnaise (yellow). And of course, if the food looks good, it will taste good. It’s psychological. Hence the ‘food stylist’ (Yvonne’s term) and the cook can cohabitate and children as well as adults are happier for it.

I bet that even Chef Olympe’s inky squid would go down without a fight if Yvonne had found the right color scheme for it. Perhaps with white rice, and served for supper at a black and white ball?

Share with us your meal presentation secrets — on how to make a meal a feast.

Bon appétit!

For simple meal ideas, see Weeknight dinner strategies.
All photos are courtesy of Yvonne Wade Sanchez.

(*) Feast”ful\, a. Festive; festal; joyful; sumptuous; luxurious. “Feastful days.” –Milton. — Feast”ful*ly, adv.

Basic French toast

Contrary to popular assumptions, the French toast’s claim to fame was not laid by the French themselves, as they can rightfully boast about their ingenious inventions such as the French bullet train, Pasteurization, Braille, or the Guillotine.

The appellation “French toast” dates back from 1871 according to Merriam-Webster. As Brendan Koerner wrote in Slate magazine, “Culinary historians disagree over whether French toast has exclusively Gallic roots. The simple concoction of bread, eggs, and milk likely dates back to Medieval times, when the battering process was used to make stale loaves more palatable. The question is whether the French were truly the first to dip and fry their bread, or whether other Europeans stumbled upon the ‘invention’ on their own. For example, a similar dish called ‘suppe dorate’ was popular in England during the Middle Ages; it’s unclear, however, whether it was brought over [to them] from what’s now France by the Normans, who may have delighted in something called ‘tostées dorées’ before toppling King Harold II in 1066.”

French toast with raspberries

One thing that almost everyone can agree upon — even among the contentious French themselves — is that this dish was originally poor folks’ fare. You take stale bread, dip it in a simple batter of eggs and milk to soften it up and then fry it. The French call it “pain perdu” or “lost bread” but contrary to Americans, they serve it as a dessert topped with sugar or whipped cream or jam. It would make sense to devise a use for old bread, as it is firmly ingrained in people’s mindset in France to never, ever, waste bread. When it becomes absolutely inedible, you feed it to ducks and rabbits. (I don’t keep ducks or rabbits, so I just toss it out when ZH isn’t looking.)

French toast with syrup

“French toast” enjoys many international variations according to Wikipedia:

• In the UK, it’s called “eggy bread” or “Poor Knights of Windsor”. Sometimes the batter has marmite mixed into it. (Unless you’re British, you won’t understand marmite — that’s OK, you’re not alone.)
• In Italy, it’s a salted version called “mozzarella in carrozza” (“mozzarella in carriage”) and can be topped with tomatoes and parsley to recreate the red, white, and green colors of the Italian flag.
• In Spain it’s “torrijas” — bread soaked in wine or milk and dipped in beaten eggs and fried, popularly served during Lent.
• In Canada, patriotic citizens eat their French toast topped with the national maple syrup.
• In New York, Jewish cooks use leftover challah from Friday night Sabbath dinner to make French toast on Sunday morning.
• In Hong Kong, French toast is called 西多士, which is an abbreviation of 法蘭西多士” (the pronunciation differs depending on whether you’re speaking Cantonese or Mandarin) and is either served for breakfast or afternoon tea.
• In India, the batter includes onions and green chili and the bread is deep fried, and eaten with ketchup.

French toast, caramelized with semi-salted butter

French toast is a good example of how a simple dish can evolve and adopt so many facets to suit different cultural palates. A French friend from the Brittany region has a singularly tasty recipe. She uses sweet-salted butter to fry the bread dipped in batter; then as one side is cooking, she sprinkles the top of the other side with brown sugar before turning it over to cook. The result is a caramelized soft-crunchy toast with a subtle salt-buttery flavor that you can eat without adding any other topping.

But back to our original question — how did French toast get its name despite so many other legitimate national claims? Koerner offers this interpretation: “A highly dubious myth holds that French toast owes its creation to an Albany, N.Y., innkeeper named Joseph French. Legend has it that French whipped up a batch of these golden-brown treats in 1724 and advertised them as “French toast” because he’d never learned to use an apostrophe ‘s’.”

And that is as good an explanation as any, given how the true origins of French toast have been lost in the darkness of time.

To all you French Toast lovers, bon appétit!

Microplane Classic Premium Zester/Grater

I have to admit that on Monday I wasn’t certain what I would write about today. It’s been one of those weeks, right? But Tuesday morning I was putting together a crock pot dish before work, and when I started grating the ginger it dawned on me—Microplane’s excellent (and sharp!) kitchen tools. I have the zester/grater pictured above (in red), and a spice grater sans handle, both of which I use on a fairly regular basis.

Aside from being well made, extremely sharp and impossibly sturdy (I’ve had mine for five or six years), I love that they’re made right here in Arkansas, about an hour or so north of Little Rock. Located in Russellville (aka RussVegas), Microplane started out innocently enough as a woodworking tool, created by brothers Jeff and Richard Grace, whose company manufactured parts for the printing industry. But it was a Canadian woman more than 1,400 miles away who helped bring Microplane into our kitchens.

And it’s a great story. From Microplane.com:

“The big moment came in 1994, when Lorraine Lee, a homemaker in Ottawa, Canada, was making an Armenian orange cake. Out of frustration with her old grater, she picked up a new tool her husband, Leonard, had brought home from their hardware store, Lee Valley Tools. She slid the orange across its blades and was amazed. Lacy shards of zest fell from its surface like snowflakes. The Lees marveled at the tool, ate the cake, then promptly changed the product description in their catalogue. The Microplane® grater had earned permanent space in the kitchen.”

How fantastic is that? And now, 15 years later, with several tools to chose from, Microplane is sold around the world, and available everywhere from Amazon to Williams-Sonoma (as well as on the company’s own site). Here, a sampling of their wares.

The Gourmet Series fine grater is designed for puréeing onions, garlic and ginger, and makes grating hard spices like cinnamon and nutmeg a breeze.

The Professional Series coarse grater features a stainless-steel handle instead of plastic, and is ideal for chocolate, coconut and cheeses.

Also from the Professional Series, the large shaver produces wide curls of chocolate and cheeses, making it a good choice for topping off desserts and salads, and would also be great for creating veggies chips for snacking.

The four-sided box grater gets a safe and stylish makeover here—a sturdy handle and rubber grips on the feet prevent slipping—and includes fine, medium and extra-coarse blades, as well as a slicer blade on the side.

Make quick and easy work of all sorts of hard and soft cheese, fruits and vegetables with the hand-held slicer. The blade is adjustable, and the slicer includes a food holder that protects fingers from the ultra-sharp stainless-steel blade. A must-have in every home cook’s arsenal, the peeler boasts a straight-edge blade and a soft, ergonomic handle.

I may have mentioned that Microplane’s wares are quiet sharp—the stainless-steel blades are specially created to have very sharp cutting surfaces. Most of the hand-held tools come with blade covers to keep them safe while being stored, but if you’re particularly accident prone, one of the company’s cut-resistant safety gloves might be a good choice. Especially if you’re preparing large quantities and tend to speed through this sort of prep work.

Over the past 10 or so years that I’ve been cooking, I’ve accumulated numerous pots and pans, in an “oh, I need a bigger sauté pan…oh this stock pot will do for now” sort of way. But I never went all out and purchased a full set of proper cookware, mostly because there’s too much to chose from and the decision-making process would be, for me, never ending. But luckily my husband decided to make the decision for me, and surprised me with my first grown-up set of matching cookware for Christmas. And considering he’s the good cook that taught me how to cook, his decision making was spot on!

I am so incredibly happy with my 10-piece set of Emerilware (made by All-Clad) which has a porcelain hard enamel exterior with a sleek black finish and wonderful ergonomic handles. The set includes 8- and 10-inch fry pans, 1- and 2-quart sauce pans, a 3-quart sauté pan and a 6-quart tall stockpot, plus lids for the sauce and sauté pans and the stockpot. The tempered-glass lids, by the way, are almost the best part, because they have two sets of straining holes, which eliminates the need for a precariously perched colander in the sink for draining pasta and the like. But the best feature of these excellent scratch-resistant, nonstick pots and pans are the pouring spouts on the sauce pans, which is awesome for, well, sauces! Not to mention having another option for draining veggies and the like! It’s one of those things where you think, “yeah, that’s alright…” until you need it, and then you think, “wow, that’s pretty handy!”

The nonstick surfaces are super easy to clean, almost effortless (completely effortless if you just stick them in the dishwasher, where they are indeed safe), and I love that everything is also oven safe…which means I officially no longer have an excuse for not making that beef bourguignon, as I’ve been promising to do! The set is well-priced and available all over the Web, and some open-stock pieces, like the 5-quart sauté pan and 3-quart sauce pan, as well as a griddle, are also available to round out the collection.

… But not just in any frying pan.

Have you ever been baffled over a recipe such as a paella or couscous that requires a huge cooking receptacle — and you had to use several pots and pans to make do? It’s enough to want to give up before you even start.

For all you space-frustrated cooks out there, I would like to introduce you to a revelatory frying pan/skillet that will change your culinary life. It is the one kitchen item that I cannot function without. This skillet is large, 33-cm (13 inches) wide and 7-cm (3 inches) deep. It has a straight bottom instead of the usual curved skillet bottom. It is so spacious and friendly, it can take anything you throw in it.

Remember Julia Child’s tenet “Don’t crowd the food”? That’s exactly what we’re not doing here – crowding the food. When working with reasonable quantities at a time, the meat and fish will brown nicely, the vegetable will fry easily without getting squished out of form, shape, and texture.

This skillet is also oven proof and can double as a Dutch oven. I’ve made boeuf bourguignon in it, disposing meat cubes and carrots and onions in one layer. It has a matching lid that can also go in the oven. (Just make sure you don’t forget the lid is hot when you take it out.)

Its ability to go in the oven is very handy with fragile items like chicken breasts or fish fillets. In this case, you brown it on the stove, and let it “finish” cooking in the oven while you work on the sauce. This preserves their shape and prevents overcooking.

Using a big skillet can also save on washing up. I use the same skillet to brown the meat or fish, then remove it to sautée vegetables in it. It’s so roomy that I often serve both meat/fish and garnishes together. And the bonus is that it’s attractively designed enough to go directly on the dinner table.

The inside is Teflon coated so take care to use the appropriate utensils. It is completely dishwasher-friendly.

Seafood curry with coriander

This kitchen hero, which I use daily practically to the exclusion of every other pot and pan, comes from IKEA for a modest price of 35 euros (approximately $50). The lid is about 14 euros ($20). Its baptized name is “STIL” in the IKEA catalog.

Be STIL, my heart.

What is the history of the Christmas log cake? According to Wikipedia, “A Yule log is a large wooden log which is burned in the hearth as a part of traditional Yule or Christmas celebrations in several European cultures. It can be a part of the Winter Solstice festival or the Twelve Days of Christmas, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or Twelfth Night. The expression “Yule log” has also come to refer to log-shaped Christmas cakes, also known as “chocolate logs” or “Bûche de Noël”.

In France, the Bûche de Noël is the requisite dessert at any Christmas dinner. Each year, French pastry cooks of all levels of renown apply themselves in the creation of imaginative, original, and tasty log cakes for the season. One of these premier chef-patissiers in French history is Gaston Lenôtre.

In 1947, Lenôtre opened his first patisserie on the rue Gambetta in Paris. Bounding from one success to the next, the name Lenôtre gradually became synonymous with luxury brand pastries, and his reputation and business grew to international fame.

One of the Lenôtre House traditions each year is collaborating with a famous couturier to create a Bûche de Noël. This year, faithful to its custom, Lenôtre chose Kenzo Takada, the Japanese clothing designer, to produce the log of his dreams… Dream enchanter, daring dream, delicious dream… Working with the Lenôtre team of patissiers, Kenzo Takada imagined a log with purified lines where the bamboo, a veritable decorative centerpiece in Japanese hearths, becomes a culinary showpiece for the celebration of Christmas.

The Lenôtre-Kenzo alliance between Haute Couture and Haute Gastronomy gave rise to a composition of three bamboos. “I wanted to give expression to the inter-relationship between Eastern and Western cultures, and visually recreate the atmosphere of Japanese ceremonies,” said the designer.

The Lenôtre team won’t reveal its recipe (not even to me!) but here are some hints if you want to try making it yourself: the bûche is wrapped in a sweet green almond paste subtly flavored with macha tea, while each bamboo roll encases different savours of chestnut, crystallized orange, and red bean paste. The integral chef d’oeuvre is tied together with a twine in the form of a bellflower which is the seal of the Takada family.

This piece of epicurean refinement is a limited edition and costs a modest (or princely) sum of 98 euros.

Gaston Lenôtre died on January 8, 2009 in his house in Sologne. He is interred in the family vault in the cemetery de la Couture in Normandy, France. The brand Lenôtre is now owned by a private holding. But the tradition of the Lenôtre Bûche de Noël will live on for a long a time to come.

Joyeux Bûche de Noël!

Bises, from Paris with love. Tammy

Although I have no statistics to back this up, I feel like it’s safe to say that the holidays are probably the time when serious baking is undertaken the most. I know it’s when I am more likely to make fresh bread or try to recreate (with some similarity) one of the complicated recipes in my Baking at Home with the Culinary Institute of America cookbook. So, during my most recent trip to Fresh Market, I was wandering the aisles in that “I only came in for a couple of things, but now I need all of this stuff too” stupor that always overtakes me the second I walk through the door, when I stumbled upon the small but well-stocked pet section.

And that’s when I decided I would actually bake treats for my dogs.

I’m pretty sure I went for CloudStar’s Buddy Biscuits partly because the cute burlap-style packaging and bone-shaped cookie cutter had me at hello, but hey, why not do something a little different and bake fresh treats for my furry little children?

And bake them I did…

These bake at home dog treats could not be simpler, and that includes the ingredients—unbleached white and whole wheat flours, dried cheese, lecithin (it emulsifies), rosemary powder and parsley flakes. That’s it. No preservatives, salt or sugar, and no faux flavors or colors. All you add is warm water and vegetable oil to the pre-packaged mix, stir it up with a spoon until it’s all combined, and then knead it for a bit. And just as you would a batch of cookies, roll out the dough, cut out the treats and bake.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never been able to cut out cookies—what should be a tree or star always ends up a misshapen mess. But I recently learned a new trick thanks to some show on the Food Network: instead of rolling the dough out onto a separate surface, roll it out onto your baking sheet, and cut out your cookies/dog treats as you normally would. Gently pull up the rest of the dough and you’re ready to bake.

After 45 minutes or so…

Horray! Homemade dog biscuits! And even better, they smelled so good while they were baking. A lot like focaccia bread, actually.

Even though the second batch cooked a little longer and some have a little baked-in flour decoration, ultimately they turned out great (yes, of course we tried a bite) and the dogs totally love them.

The kit makes around 48 little biscuits, which can be kept in an airtight container or even frozen. Because while I don’t see baking homemade dog biscuits becoming a weekly thing, making and freezing a few batches might not be such a bad idea, as these two can be quite demanding.

Happy baking!

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