Category Archives: French Fridays with Dorie
french fridays with dorie: roasted salmon & lentils
This week’s recipe for French Fridays with Dorie seemed old hat to me: Roasted Salmon and Lentils. Salmon is one of my favorite kinds of fish, and lentils is my #1 favorite bean or legume. I make both frequently, so I knew I would enjoy the menu.
My in-laws were in town, and I thought that my mother-in-law, a loyal follower of my blog, would enjoy sharing a Dorie meal.
The primary surprise for me was that even though this recipe seems like a old friend on paper, I learned something new about cooking both the salmon and the lentils.
When we prepare salmon, we typically grill it in summer, or broil it in winter. For Dorie’s version, a large salmon fillet (wild coho salmon, for me) was roasted in a very hot oven. I was a little skeptical because, I find that a large fillet is seldom done in the recommended 12 minutes when cooking under the broiler. What a revelation that roasting the salmon worked out to perfection. While we’ll still be grilling in the summer, roasting will be the new off-season cooking method chez moi.
As for the lentils, I have been in on the secret of the tiny green Le Puy lentils for years. I think I first discovered them in the bulk section at Whole Foods, but they hae been my lentil of choice for salads and sides for many years. Dorie’s method for cooking the lentils again seemed similar to mine on paper, but the actual execution taught me a few new tricks.
I normally just cut the aromatic vegetables into bite-sized pieces and cook them with the lentils, but by the time the lentils are tender, the vegetables dissolve into oblivion. Cooking large pieces of the vegetables with the lentils and then chopping them up afterwards worked out really well. Also, pureeing some of the lentils to thicken the lentil mixture added a nice creamy texture to the final dish.
I served the salmon over a bed of lentils with roasted broccoli alongside. My in-laws enjoyed the meal as much as we did. Chalk this one up in the “Definitely Repeat” column of the Dorie scoreboard.
If you’d like to see how other bloggers’ roasted salmon and lentils came out, check out their links at French Fridays with Dorie.
french fridays with dorie: cheese-topped onion soup
It’s the last recipe in February for French Fridays with Dorie, and, in my opinion, the month ends on a high note. This week’s assignment was cheese-topped onion soup, in other words, classic French onion soup. We loved this soup at my house. It definitely ranks in my (constantly changing) top 10 FFwD recipes so far.
I think it’s safe to say that the last time I made French onion soup was at least twenty years ago. Previously, I’d always made a version from Julia Child. While I always enjoyed it, the deterrent was its beef broth base. Homemade beef stock was never in the cards, and the canned version was never very appealing. I usually resorted to beef stock from boullion cubes, but that was always very salty.
The revelation with Dorie’s version of this soup was its chicken stock base. It never occurred to me on my own to use it, and now that I’ve done it, I can’t imagine why I’d ever make it any other way. I even had time to make my own stock which I’m sure gilded the lily.
Fortunately, I didn’t work on Monday, the President’s Day holiday. My onions took the better part of the day to caramelize, and, even then, they were closer to golden than caramel. I thought the color was good enough, and the taste was very sweet. My onions were also extremely wet as they cooked. They exuded onion juice. I poured about half a cup or more of liquid off at one point because the onions were steaming with no chance of browning.
Before
I don’t know why onions take so long to caramelize for me. I remember having the same experience when we made the pissaladiere. I wonder I’m taking the directions about using low heat too literally.
After
You know how you are always torn when you have some special-purpose kitchen item, a dish, tool, or gadget that you seldom use, but can’t bear to part with? Well, I guess that’s why I still had the ovenproof soup bowls that I last used a couple of decades ago. They were sitting in the cabinet just waiting for this week.
Before
The bowls were filled with oniony broth, a spoonful of brandy and topped with toasted hearty bread (I used pumpernickel) and a hefty dose of grated Gruyere cheese. After a couple of minutes under the broiler, voila! A burning hot soup, which Dorie tells us is called brûlante in French.
After
We had cheese-topped onion soup as a starter before dinner two nights this week. It’s not very easy to assemble the full treatment at work with just a microwave, but this soup on its own (naked?), without the cheesy topping, also made a satisfying lunch.
All in all, this was a sure-fire winner. I typically make soup at least once a week, and Dorie’s version of onion soup will become part of my soup repertoire.
We don’t share the recipes in this cooking club, but you can find it in Dorie Greenspan’s book Around My French Table. You can read what the other FFwD bloggers thought about this week’s recipe here.
A Plateful of Happiness 