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I bought I Know How to Cook (the first English edition of Je Sais Cuisiner) on sale on Friday, and so far I have made three, count them, three recipes, which I think is as many as I've made out of Sundays at Moosewood in six years of owning it. It helps that there are about eighty recipes that are essentially just eggs.
Only the fact that I couldn't find my camera saved everyone from a giant picture of the particular eggs I had this morning. I have already forgotten the name - which was just eggs in the style of either a lady or a place - but they involved making a meringue, covering it with cheese, pouring on a yolk layer that sank as it baked and became like a cheesy yolk sandwich between fluffy meringue layers, and coating the entire thing with salt-and-pepper crème fraîche.
Needless to say, I am learning to take the serving size suggestions seriously, because I figured I was American and could eat three eggs where the cookbook recommended one per person (partially because it's hard to make a one-egg meringue) and now I feel like I just ate a particularly delicious bowling ball. The pride in having made a soft meringue by hand before the sun was fully risen ameliorates this a little, however. For once I listened to the internet when it said to let the whites come to room temperature first, which probably saved my entire morning.
As the above recipe might indicate, this is a hopeless cookbook for vegans unless you just really love the taste of Earth Balance in the dozen or so vegetable dishes that don't have piles of cheese, and saying "there's a whole lot of meat" does not even come close to describing the issue. This cookbook has recipes for pretty much every part of everything that hoofs, swims, or flies in Europe, along with plenty of bacon and goose fat gaily sprinkled among the potatoes. Still, the cookbook is so vast that the number of recipes that don't have meat in them is still larger than the number of meatless recipes in, say, one of the early Moosewood cookbooks.
I also have to say that as someone who learned to cook from American-style health food cooking - with its dab of this and dash of that and umeboshi plum paste mixed with chipotle adobo mixed with just the tiniest bit of curry powder and tahini - recipes that for the most part rely on six or seven ingredients (again, staying mostly vegetarian here helps, as I don't know where to begin to look for lung of lamb) seem so ridiculously simple and straightforward that it's boggling. This is one reason why I'm hesitant to consider substituting in fake meat for the meat in the couple of recipes that use it as flavoring - where the ingredients are so few, and the recipe is so disinterested in covering them up with spices, it does not seem like the time to bring out science's best approximation of a cafeteria-grade sausage. But I already made a pint of creme fraiche and went out and bought a parsley plant for the window, so I guess I am in for at least the rest of the egg chapter. Maybe by the end I will be somewhere close to the preparation time described in the recipes. I don't know who those are based on, but possibly they have superhuman potato-grating speed or tiny elf helpers.
This concludes my ramble about my new cookbook. For now. I am so excited about this thing that I actually called my boyfriend and read him a list of all the different sorts of teas made by the French over the phone. This is something which he endured with good grace, which means I will let him have half of those cheesy eggs next time.
Only the fact that I couldn't find my camera saved everyone from a giant picture of the particular eggs I had this morning. I have already forgotten the name - which was just eggs in the style of either a lady or a place - but they involved making a meringue, covering it with cheese, pouring on a yolk layer that sank as it baked and became like a cheesy yolk sandwich between fluffy meringue layers, and coating the entire thing with salt-and-pepper crème fraîche.
Needless to say, I am learning to take the serving size suggestions seriously, because I figured I was American and could eat three eggs where the cookbook recommended one per person (partially because it's hard to make a one-egg meringue) and now I feel like I just ate a particularly delicious bowling ball. The pride in having made a soft meringue by hand before the sun was fully risen ameliorates this a little, however. For once I listened to the internet when it said to let the whites come to room temperature first, which probably saved my entire morning.
As the above recipe might indicate, this is a hopeless cookbook for vegans unless you just really love the taste of Earth Balance in the dozen or so vegetable dishes that don't have piles of cheese, and saying "there's a whole lot of meat" does not even come close to describing the issue. This cookbook has recipes for pretty much every part of everything that hoofs, swims, or flies in Europe, along with plenty of bacon and goose fat gaily sprinkled among the potatoes. Still, the cookbook is so vast that the number of recipes that don't have meat in them is still larger than the number of meatless recipes in, say, one of the early Moosewood cookbooks.
I also have to say that as someone who learned to cook from American-style health food cooking - with its dab of this and dash of that and umeboshi plum paste mixed with chipotle adobo mixed with just the tiniest bit of curry powder and tahini - recipes that for the most part rely on six or seven ingredients (again, staying mostly vegetarian here helps, as I don't know where to begin to look for lung of lamb) seem so ridiculously simple and straightforward that it's boggling. This is one reason why I'm hesitant to consider substituting in fake meat for the meat in the couple of recipes that use it as flavoring - where the ingredients are so few, and the recipe is so disinterested in covering them up with spices, it does not seem like the time to bring out science's best approximation of a cafeteria-grade sausage. But I already made a pint of creme fraiche and went out and bought a parsley plant for the window, so I guess I am in for at least the rest of the egg chapter. Maybe by the end I will be somewhere close to the preparation time described in the recipes. I don't know who those are based on, but possibly they have superhuman potato-grating speed or tiny elf helpers.
This concludes my ramble about my new cookbook. For now. I am so excited about this thing that I actually called my boyfriend and read him a list of all the different sorts of teas made by the French over the phone. This is something which he endured with good grace, which means I will let him have half of those cheesy eggs next time.
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