Salad, Please!

This was a bit of a ho-hum week, with the return to routine after last weekend's great escape. The recipes are all beginning to resemble each other: cook meat (grill, fry, braise, poach, or bake), make sauce, reduce reduce reduce, and cut vegetables into a series of impractical and time-consuming shapes that comprise one of the more anachronistic elements of classic French cuisine.

(I must admit, though, that taking the time to calmly "turn" vegetables-- basically, carving them into little torpedoes-- is a much-needed break in the bustling student kitchen, where we spend most of out time running around, making sure our meat isn't burning and our water isn't boiling over, finding the right pots and pans, and lining up for the deep fryer/grill/food mill. Just don't expect me to do it in the light and airy peace of my own home kitchen.)

A turned potato

Exam Madness has set in, with students asking teachers about our upcoming written and practical exams at every opportunity. Perhaps it's that I'm only here for my own amusement and not for my career, or maybe I'm comparing the relative merits of replacing the mental hard drive space currently occupied by the details of the Russian Revolution with the exact amount of paprika in Beef Stroganoff... in any case, I think that studying too much would be a poor use of my time, and that I'd rather hang on to the history stuff and crack open a recipe book when I need to know about paprika.

And so, without further ado, here's the barnyard range of furry and feathery creatures we served up this week:

Roasted Duck with Turned Turnips

Grilled Veal Chops with Turned Potatoes (Cocottes), Mushrooms, and Pearl Onions

Beef Stroganoff with Brunoise Vegetable Rice

Pan-fried Pork Medallions with Pommes Dauphine

Do you see any patterns in the color of what we're preparing?

I haven't mentioned it, but we usually clean up the cuts of meat ourselves. We're given a hunk of meat that contains the cut we're preparing encased in bone, gristle, and fat, and we have to carve out the good parts. This little bit of butcher work is actually quite useful in getting to know various cuts of meat and what to look for at the market. For the pork medallion, for example, we were given part of the loin with the ribs and an extra bits of flesh still attached. We trimmed the loin off the bone and sliced out four medallions, reserving the gristly meat between the ribs to form the base of our sauce. For the veal chop, we had to scrape all the meat and fat off the bone to expose it ("Frenching" the bone), and chop off the tip. Very useful stuff.

All this meat has turned me into a temporary vegetarian. It's just too much meat, day in and day out. So instead of filling my belly, I've been filling the bellies of others or, at the very least, my freezer, and opting for the green stuff when I get home at night. And I can't wait for spring produce in California!