F -Fats, Fresh F&V, French Words
I was going to have a lot of F-words for today. I had big cooking plans for this past weekend. Lots of time to use F-words. As luck would have it, I only had one chance; Saturday morning breakfast. One chance and I came up with three.
Fats, Fresh Fruits and Veggies, and French Words.
Let's talk fats and get this subject out of the way. Butter, buttery spreads, margarine, and butter spreads are all different. I don't care if the buttery spread says it can be used for cooking, it's not the same as butter. Different smoke points, different contents, different results, and differences in how your crepes turn out. Crepes - is that a French word? My point is this - if it calls for butter, USE BUTTER. Don't substitute on key ingredients, especially if you're cooking a dish for the first time. There are too many unanswered questions when a dish is botched and there's no excuse to blame a faulty ingredient.
And speaking of key ingredients, for the sake of all that is good in this world, can we PLEASE use fresh fruits and vegetables? Go to your local farmer's market or road-side stand and get fresh tomatos, peaches, beans, lettuce, carrots, apples, peppers, SQUASH, MELLONS, IT'S ALL GOOD! [takes deep breath] And it's cheaper. My local grocery store sells jalapeno peppers for $3.00 for a very small handfull of the green goodies. My local farmer's market sells about 12 peppers for $1.00. If you'd rather buy for convenience, go right ahead. And when you spend $15 for pickling peppers to my $2.00, know that convenience runs around thirteen bucks.
Remember when I said crepes? French cooking terms are easily found via search engines. That's the good news. Bad news is many french glossaries leave you with a la carte, a la mode, and a la-la-boom-de-a. Great education for reading a menu but it's not helpful when you must create a mirepoix. And with that, I want to discuss the single most important French term; mise en place. Mise en place (MEEZ ahn plahs) refers to having all ingredients necessary for a dish prepared and ready to combine up to the point of cooking. Mise en place is simply dicing/slicing/prepping/chopping/grading/measuring all ingredients ahead of time. This means when it's time to add chopped carrots at a crucial time, you aren't stuck holding a pan off the heat with one hand and whacking at a carrot with the other. I've found this method has saved me from starting a meal without all the required ingredients.
All this leads up to one thing - my attempt at the Saturday morning breakfast. The main dish - Fresh fruit fixed in Crepes using Fat. It started out great, mono-e-kitchen. Then whooooooooooosh, my plan goes out the window. We were out of bananas and butter was no where to be found. So I improvised. We did have peaches and a "buttery spread." At this point, I'll admit I should have grabbed my car keys and gone for some butter. Instead, I decided to use the "buttery spread." Oh, it worked well enough but I'm still stuck wondering "how much better could it have been?" Anyway, using AB's crepe recipe, I eventually found myself over the stove with a 1-ounce cup of crepe-batter and a hot pan. By the time it was all over, I was left with 14 good crepes, 2 crepes that suffered from poor flipping, 1 burned crepe, and 1 burned finger. Then it was on to the crepe filling. Ricotto cheese whipped with powdered sugar and then folded in some chopped peaches. And FoodDude said "it is good."
Finally, I found crepes were great for chinese leftovers. I think I'll keep crepes on hand as often as tortillas and loaves of bread.
The blog entry on eggs flowed like a runny yolk. This entry is much like my first attempt at crepes - affective with room for improvement. I'm off to get a stick of butter.
Fats, Fresh Fruits and Veggies, and French Words.
Let's talk fats and get this subject out of the way. Butter, buttery spreads, margarine, and butter spreads are all different. I don't care if the buttery spread says it can be used for cooking, it's not the same as butter. Different smoke points, different contents, different results, and differences in how your crepes turn out. Crepes - is that a French word? My point is this - if it calls for butter, USE BUTTER. Don't substitute on key ingredients, especially if you're cooking a dish for the first time. There are too many unanswered questions when a dish is botched and there's no excuse to blame a faulty ingredient.
And speaking of key ingredients, for the sake of all that is good in this world, can we PLEASE use fresh fruits and vegetables? Go to your local farmer's market or road-side stand and get fresh tomatos, peaches, beans, lettuce, carrots, apples, peppers, SQUASH, MELLONS, IT'S ALL GOOD! [takes deep breath] And it's cheaper. My local grocery store sells jalapeno peppers for $3.00 for a very small handfull of the green goodies. My local farmer's market sells about 12 peppers for $1.00. If you'd rather buy for convenience, go right ahead. And when you spend $15 for pickling peppers to my $2.00, know that convenience runs around thirteen bucks.
Remember when I said crepes? French cooking terms are easily found via search engines. That's the good news. Bad news is many french glossaries leave you with a la carte, a la mode, and a la-la-boom-de-a. Great education for reading a menu but it's not helpful when you must create a mirepoix. And with that, I want to discuss the single most important French term; mise en place. Mise en place (MEEZ ahn plahs) refers to having all ingredients necessary for a dish prepared and ready to combine up to the point of cooking. Mise en place is simply dicing/slicing/prepping/chopping/grading/measuring all ingredients ahead of time. This means when it's time to add chopped carrots at a crucial time, you aren't stuck holding a pan off the heat with one hand and whacking at a carrot with the other. I've found this method has saved me from starting a meal without all the required ingredients.
All this leads up to one thing - my attempt at the Saturday morning breakfast. The main dish - Fresh fruit fixed in Crepes using Fat. It started out great, mono-e-kitchen. Then whooooooooooosh, my plan goes out the window. We were out of bananas and butter was no where to be found. So I improvised. We did have peaches and a "buttery spread." At this point, I'll admit I should have grabbed my car keys and gone for some butter. Instead, I decided to use the "buttery spread." Oh, it worked well enough but I'm still stuck wondering "how much better could it have been?" Anyway, using AB's crepe recipe, I eventually found myself over the stove with a 1-ounce cup of crepe-batter and a hot pan. By the time it was all over, I was left with 14 good crepes, 2 crepes that suffered from poor flipping, 1 burned crepe, and 1 burned finger. Then it was on to the crepe filling. Ricotto cheese whipped with powdered sugar and then folded in some chopped peaches. And FoodDude said "it is good."
Finally, I found crepes were great for chinese leftovers. I think I'll keep crepes on hand as often as tortillas and loaves of bread.
The blog entry on eggs flowed like a runny yolk. This entry is much like my first attempt at crepes - affective with room for improvement. I'm off to get a stick of butter.
posted by Chris at 2:31 PM
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