Apples of the Earth {CtBF}
Simple or dressed up, I love potatoes. As the fall harvest ends, I placed a bulk order of root vegetables from a local farm, including a 10 pound bag of gold potatoes and a pound of garlic. When I read through this week’s recipe for Cook the Book Fridays, I was excited I could enjoy my local vegetables in Scalloped potatoes with blue cheese and roasted garlic by adding only a few more ingredients: cream, sage from my garden (instead of chives), and the wedge of Jasper Hill Farm’s Bayley Hazen Blue in the fridge.
First, a few cloves of garlic are roasted until they are soft and mellow, then mashed into a paste. The garlic is infused into some cream (which I lightened with some half-and-half). Layers of thinly sliced potatoes are seasoned, then scattered with chopped sage and chunks of the blue cheese: three layers of potatoes in all. The fragrant garlic cream covers it all. The casserole is then baked for an hour until the potatoes are tender.
The potatoes were delicious. They reminded me of the Pommes Dauphinois we made for French Fridays with Dorie back in 2010. I served this one night with sous-vide turkey thighs confit that Howard and the next with roasted chicken thighs. Both were a nice foil to the potatoes. However, this one was a little rich for a weeknight dinner, probably more appropriate for a meal shared with company.
Read what my Cook the Book Fridays friends thought of the potatoes here. You can make them yourself. You can find the recipe here or on page 211 of David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen.
As a side note, I’ve been working my way through the approximately 3 gallons of green cherry tomatoes I harvested before our first frost last week. I love this recipe I found for Tiny Fried Green Tomatoes. They are so cute and quite delicious. Also loved this seasonal cocktail, Autumn Margaritas, with apple cider, fresh squeezed lime, and tequila served in a cinnamon-sugar rimmed glass.
Got Eggs? {CtBF}
It’s Cook the Book Friday again! Have I said how much I’m enjoying this book? Out of the recipes we’ve cooked from David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen over the past 8 months, the proportion of winners has been astounding. My favorite thing about the recipes is that they are an excellent jumping off point for other variations. I went wild with the dukkah. I’ve made the oven-roasted tomatoes from the crostinis multiple times this summer to top quiches.
This week’s recipe, Baked Eggs with Greens and Salmon, is destined to be the blueprint for a dish that works for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The formula starts by layering individual baking dishes with a bed of sautéed greens. The recipe called for kale, but I used the cooked beet greens I had in the fridge. Next comes a layer of smoked salmon, then the eggs. I made this with two eggs when I had it for lunch and again dinner, but it also works with just one for breakfast. The eggs are topped with some crumbled cheese (I used feta), a dose of cream and the most delicious garlicky breadcrumbs.
This concoction is baked until the whites set. For me, this took much longer than the called for 10-12 minutes, even 15 minutes wasn’t quite enough. I am starting to believe that David’s 350 oven is more like my 375 (though I have calibrated recently, and my oven should be accurate). Hopefully I remember next time we bake one of his recipes to hike the temperature.
My favorite part of this recipe was the breadcrumbs. I don’t know how the butter and garlic transformed the breadcrumbs into something that tasted somewhat like bacon, a little bit smoky and a little bit meaty, but it did. I can’t wait to make another batch and sprinkle them on EVERYTHING!
You should try this yourself. It’s delicious for any meal. Made in individual bakers, it works if you’re alone, or scales if you have people to share with. You can find the recipe on page 151 of My Paris Kitchen by David Lebovitz. To see what my friends’ thought of the eggs, you can follow their links here.
A Plateful of Happiness 