Category Archives: Winter CSA
French Fridays with Dorie: Spiced Butter-Glazed Carrots
I’ll be short and sweet this Friday. Actually, I almost skipped this week. It hasn’t been a great week for cooking at home. I was home alone last weekend, out for my birthday on Monday, latkes on Tuesday, and holiday events on Wednesday and Thursday. I was just plain short on time.
The carrots looked easy enough. I had carrots from my Shared Harvest Winter CSA share. So I squeezed in a Dorie recipe after all.
This recipe didn’t bowl me over. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but it was sort of boring, despite interesting ingredients. I think the main thing was that it took much longer to cook that I expected.
Cutting up the carrots and aromatics was quick. Sautéing the aromatics was also quick. Simmering the carrots until just tender only took 10 minutes. However, it took a really long time to boil off the liquid. I ended up transferring the carrots to a skillet to hasten the evaporation.
Final verdict: Perfectly adequate side dish, but I’m unlikely to repeat this recipe. Hopefully I’ll have better luck next week.
If you want to read about others’ experiences cooking from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table this week, check out their links on French Fridays with Dorie. You can always buy your own copy of the book, and join in the fun.
French Fridays with Dorie: Potato-Leek Soup
This starts the third month of French Fridays with Dorie. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s an online group that has set out to cook our way through Dorie Greenspan’s relatively new book, Around My French Table.
I’m really enjoying this cookbook and being part of this cooking community. So far, all of the recipes have been ones I wouldn’t have thought to make anyone, or they were versions of things I already make, but exposed me to a different way of doing it. I’ve eaten lots of good food and learned quite a bit along the way, both from Dorie’s book and from my fellow bloggers from FFwD.
As in November, in the holiday-laden month of December, there are five recipes to be cooked, but I can pick the order that works best for me. I had a beautiful bunch of leeks from our Winter CSA share, so I selected the Potato-Leek Soup.
I’ve been making James Beard’s recipe for potato-leek soup from American Cookery for many years. However, I was willing to try to make Dorie’s French version.
The recipe gives options to tweak this soup in many ways. The choices I made were to substitute leeks for the onion because my bunch of leeks was big enough. I also went with the chicken broth and milk instead of water, though I used 1% instead of whole milk. As for the final texture, I love an excuse to use the food mill, so I pureed it for a very smooth soup.
I loved the velvety texture. I think it would work well as an appetizer soup, though it will also be good for lunch. The soup was an easy recipe, and with the different choices you can make, it can be a different soup the next time. My verdict: Très Bien!
A Plateful of Happiness 