Sauce Moutarde a la Normande

I made this amazing sauce from Mastering the Art of French Cooking to spice up a pork shoulder steak. I loved it so much I wanted to marry it. If Pee Wee can marry a fruit salad, I can marry a sauce, right?

Even though I halved the recipe, we still had over 1/2 cup left. Nathan suggested that it would be great on burgers, and it was. I think this would be awesome on any mammal or any green leafy vegetables with strong flavor.

Sauce Moutarde a la Normande

[Mustard Sauce with Cream]

• 1/3 cup cider vinegar
• 10 crushed peppercorns
• 1 1/2 cups whipping cream
• salt
• 2tsp dry mustard mixed with 2 tsp water
• 1 to 2 Tb softened butter
• a warm gravy boat 

1. After the pork (or whatever) has been cooked, strain the meat juices into a bowl and degrease them.
2. Pour the vinegar and peppercorns into the casserole (pan) and boil until the vinegar has reduced to about a tablespoon. Pour in the meat juices and boil them down rapidly until they have reduced to about 2/3 cup.
3. Add the cream and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring in salt to taste. Beat in the mustard mixture and simmer 2-3 minutes more. Sauce should be thick enough to coat a spoon lightly. Correct seasoning.
4. Off heat and just before serving, swirl in the butter by bits, then pour the sauce into a warm gravy boat.

I don't have a gravy boat. I make a lot of sauces and gravies because I like to use Mastering the Art for meats. I feel that I should have a gravy boat, so I looked up my dish set (Noritake Colorwave in a mix of graphite and chocolate) to see if there was a gravy boat. it exists, but it's $65 ($41 on sale). I guess I can continue to serve gravy in a pyrex measuring cup.

The March 5th Haul

Saturday School has ended and I can finally go back to my normal Saturday routine. Most (childless) people would balk at the idea of willingly getting up at 7 on a Saturday morning after a full work week just to go get produce, but I love it. It feels like Christmas, "What will I get?" So, I woke up at 7 and gleefully got my big gulp, drove to Sunny Springs Park, and picked up a giant box of fresh surprises.

butter gold potatoes, turnips, green beans, spinach, tomatoes, yellow squash, acorn squash, bananas, mineola oranges, braeburn apples, mangoes, and a pineapple

So I get home from the park around 8:15, turn NPR on the radio in the living room (because Weekend Edition, Car Talk and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me are awesome), and wash all the fruits and veggies, put them away where they belong, clean my kitchen and sit down and plan what I'll cook during the week. I flip through 5 or 6 of my favorite cookbooks and browse Recipe Zaar to try and use as much as possible from my basket while buying as little as possible from the grocery store. I wonder what the people at the store must think of me every time I buy nothing but meat, butter, cheese and spices from them.

I settled on a lamb stew to use some of the turnips and potatoes as well as carrots I still have in the fridge and some aloo saag to use more potatoes and the spinach. The recipes come from these beautiful cookbooks. I also want to dust off this recipe for stuffed acorn squash. There are some amazing sites for recipes and cooking online, but I love cookbooks. I love flipping through them and seeing gorgeous professional pictures, and I love having them on my book shelf.

What the *&#^ is That: Jerusalem Artichoke Edition

The Jerusalem Artichoke or Sunchoke

Every couple weeks, the produce co-op I use likes to surprise their participants by sending us home with something uncommon, unusual or exotic. That's how I ended up with these gnarly little tubers. No, they're not ginger root. They're Jerusalem Artichokes or Sunchokes, and they're kind of awesome.

According to Wikipedia:
The Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), also called the sunroot, sunchoke, earth appletopinambour, is a species of sunflower native to eastern North America, and found from Eastern Canada and Maine west to North Dakota, and south to northern Florida and Texas.It is also cultivated widely across the temperate zone for its tuber, which is used as a root vegetable.

Turns out, they're pretty tasty too. They're a bit crisper than a potato - almost like a very starchy apple - and have a nutty taste. But what to do with them? The first idea I got came from a post on the Bountiful Baskets facebook page. A poster suggested making a hash, so that's exactly what we did.

Root Vegetable Hash

1. Dice potatoes, sweet potatoes, sunchoke and onion. Drizzle the vegetables with oil, season with salt and pepper, and roast in a 400 degree oven for 15-20 minutes - until soft.
2. After roasting, pan fry the veggies until they're crisp. (I fried them in bacon drippings, but olive oil or butter would work great as well) In the last few minutes, wilt in some spinach leaves. 
3. Top with Parmesan cheese. I tried to make curls, but they didn't curl.

Brunch

 Later, Nathan took his bachelor-pad-days deep fryer down from the top of the fridge and made chips with the rest of the roots. They were so crispy and great with soup. He fried them for 3 minutes at 360 degrees.

 

This one is a piggie.