Category Archives: French Fridays with Dorie
French Fridays with Dorie: Cola and Jam Spareribs
It is with a heavy heart that I write my post about this week’s recipe for French Fridays at Dorie. I’ve learned some new techniques, explored new combinations of ingredients, and experienced some new flavors. It’s been a new adventure every week. After nine months of cooking from this fabulous cookbook, this week I hit my first complete dud: the Cola and Jam Spareribs.
In my house, when it comes to big slabs of meat, particularly ribs, this is normally my husband Howard’s domain. His usual treatment is a long, slow cook on his fancy Texas smoker. When I announced this week’s recipe, Howard was initially doubtful. But, over many months of my cooking from the book, he has faith in Dorie, too, so kept an open mind.
We were expecting guests (my friend and two teenaged girls) so doubled the recipe and made two racks. The ribs are rubbed with fragrant ginger and five-spice powder. The glaze was a mix of orange juice and apricot jam (Stonewall Kitchen’s Apricot and Ginger Jam) with a dosage of Coca-Cola for the final hour. The preparation was quite simple.
The only preparation glitch was that I didn’t check with the in-house Coke drinker (Howard) and made the faulty assumption that we had cans of Coke in the basement. We were out of stock, so someone had to make an extra trip to the store while the ribs did their initial roasting.
The ribs looked great as they cooked. I had to open the oven for basting, and it smelled good too.
Unfortunately, when we served dinner, Howard and I were completely underwhelmed. The sweet stickiness suggested by the bubbling glaze was absent from our tastebuds. The ribs themselves were a little chewy, certainly without the melting off the bone quality from a smoker. It was a total disappointment. (My friend said they were good, but I think she was just being polite.)
In the end, the teenagers opted out, and didn’t show up for dinner, so there were plenty of leftovers. After bringing ribs for lunch on the day after, Howard and I both sheepishly admitted to each other that we weren’t enjoying the ribs and neither of us wanted to bring them for lunch again. I ended up tossing out a full rack of spareribs. I hate wasting food, but I just couldn’t make myself eat them again.
I’m really not sure whether I did something wrong or it just wasn’t to our taste. I did add water to the pan to keep things moist, but, because the pan was almost borderline dry between bastings, I can’t imagine that I added enough water that it diluted the flavors.
I’ll chalk it up to “you win some, you lose some”. I’ve cooked close to 40 recipes from this book, and, as I said, this was the first loser (to me), so the odds have been favorable.
I can’t wait for next week’s recipe: Roasted Rhubarb. I already know I’m the only one who will eat it at my house, but if, it comes out as I hope it will, it just means more for me.
Click here for links to other bloggers’ posts on these ribs. Hopefully, they had a better experience than I did. Until next week…
French Fridays with Dorie: Warm Weather Vegetable Pot au Feu
This week’s recipe for French Fridays with Dorie took me by surprise. I love vegetables, and I love soups and stews. And yet, when I read the recipe through, I felt ambivalent. Even the picture didn’t help. But I carried on.
Though Dorie says to use whatever’s fresh in this recipe, I stuck with the vegetables called for, including the lemongrass, because they all looked great at the market. The asparagus and the baby spinach were local. Also in the mix were a Vidalia onion, a leek, carrots, baby potatoes, and shiitake mushrooms.
I found the recipe a little vague about how to cut up some of the vegetables. It seemed like the leek and asparagus were left whole, but I don’t like having to cut things when I’m eating with a spoon. I ended up thinly slicing the quartered leek and cutting the (unpeeled) asparagus spears into 2-inch pieces. Also, I used only half the spinach called for because more seemed overwhelming.
Because this dish was simply vegetables in broth, I knew the flavor of the broth would be key to the success of the dish. I thought I had homemade chicken broth in the freezer, but instead, I struck gold when I came across a container of duck stock I’d forgotten about.
When the pot au feu was done and I tasted the broth for seasoning, I was surprised by how sweet and springy and delicious it was. I loved it! After our violent midweek thunderstorm (fortunately no tornadoes here), the oppressive heat has been traded for crispness in the air (almost like fall, even though it’s June). A bowl of light soup was perfect for the cooler weather.
I served this in low and wide pasta bowls, with a poached egg in each bowl. I also snipped from herbs from the garden: chervil, tarragon, and parsley to sprinkle over top.
I was pleasantly surprised how fast it all came together. Dinner was ready in less than an hour. I did have help. Howard helped with chopping the vegetables and poaching the eggs. He also made some quick guacamole to snack on while we cooked. I like having a sous chef!
I can definitely see making this one again, varying the vegetables with the season. Once again, even though I wasn’t that excited about the recipe at the start, it turned out to be a winner.
Dorie said that leftovers on this won’t be so good, but we only ate half, so we’ll give it a go again tomorrow.
I do have a lot of leftover lemongrass. I had to buy a bundle with several stalks, and only used a 2-inch piece. Anyone have suggestions of how to use the rest?
One of the high points of my weekends is reading the posts of the other FFwD bloggers to see how they changed up this week’s recipe. Check out their links at French Fridays with Dorie. We don’t post the recipes, but consider getting your own copy of the book, Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table. Maybe you’ll even want to cook along with us on Fridays. It’s a blast!
A Plateful of Happiness 