Poulet Saute aux Herbes de Provence

Doesn't everything just sound better in French? In English, that title is "Sauteed Chicken with Provence Herbes." But in French, it's "Poulet Saute"...it just sounds better!

Anyway. It would taste better in France, too, I'm betting, because I kind of completely screwed up. The recipe (Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child, Vol. I) says that you should end up with a kind of sauce like hollandaise, but that's definitely not what I had. It tasted fine...but Mom said it would benefit from a sauce, and since she very rarely offers something so near to a criticism, I'm thinking it would most definitely absolutely benefit from a sauce.

Here's what we ended up with.

Trust me, it tasted a lot better than it looked.

But as you can see, it's hardly a sauce. More like...salad dressing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but IT WOULD BENEFIT FROM A SAUCE.

Okay. I'm definitely obsessing about this.

It looked far yummier on a plate, with some lovely...um...sugarsnap peas. I think. And it really did taste okay.

Let me acquaint you with the difficulties I met during cooking. First, Julia Child calls for white whine. We do not happen to have any white wine in the house. So I used sherry. Not cooking sherry, sherry sherry, the kind you drink. (I cannot fathom why; it is absolutely repulsive.) You pour this sherry into a saucepan and let half of it boil off.

What it doesn't say in the recipe is that you have to remove the juices from sauteeing the chicken. So I didn't. I dumped the sherry into the pan and let it boil away, breathing in these disgusting sickly sherry fumes the whole time - I swear I started to feel light-headed. And it was a pretty hot day, in the upper 80s, and even in a cool house when you're slaving over a sherry-scented fumes (have I mentioned how absolutely revolting sherry is?) it starts to feel the tiniest bit uncomfortable. Read: hellish.

Okay, so the sherry boiled off (along with half the sauteeing juices) and I added whatever it said to and dumped in the chicken and kind of swilled it around to coat it in the dressing. It definitely wasn't sauce.

See, what you're actually supposed to do is take the saute juices out, and then you boil the sherry (gagging the whole time) and then you remove the pan from heat and wait till it's way cooler. And then you add lemon juice and egg yolks. And then you add the saute juices by tablespoons, until it is sauce. Like hollandaise.

Remember that if you're going to make this. Because it was okay without a sauce, but it would benefit from one.

The Verdict: Decent enough. Would benefit from a sauce.

Today, or maybe tomorrow (depends if I can tear myself away from my novel), I'll be making a Dark Chocolate Tart. And sometime this summer, if I can get my nerve up, I'm going to make Le Glorieux, a devishly difficult chocolate cake from Vol. II of Julia Child. Wish me luck. Though that won't be anytime soon. End of July, earliest.

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Hey, guess what? I figured out how to subscribe to this blog! (If anyone is interested. Which I hope you are. I hope all those pageviews on the Settings screen aren't mine.)

Anyway. If you scroll aaaaalllll the way down to the bottom of the page, there is a link that says Subscribe: Post (Atoms) or something like that. Click on it. You'll get a new tab with a yellow box at the top of the page. It'll say: Subscribe to this feed using...

If you click on the arrow on the right of that "subscribe to this feed" box, it will give you a list of applications - Google, Yahoo, etc. Find your email program and click it and then click Subscribe now.

If you, you know, want to subscribe. If you're interested.

*My casual tone could easily be mistaken for open desperation (SUBSCRIBE!!! SUBSCRIBE!!! PLEASE!) but I assure you, dear readers, that is not the case. I'm merely asking for your interest and support in my...ah, cooking endeavors.* Do I sound pompous? I sound pompous. Sorry.

Lemon Cake!

Well, contrary to expectations (after the batter was sickly sweet I had my doubts) the lemon layer cake turned out surprisingly good! I did overbeat it, so it's a bit tough - be careful with that if you decide to make it yourself. Also, I spent at least twenty minutes grating and squeezing lemons, and if you have any paper cuts or scrapes or anything, the lemon juice somehow gets into them and then seeps through your bloodstream, so by the end my whole hand was throbbing. Although that might have been because I have weak fingers and I'd spent a lot of time squishing lemons into a bowl.

Okay, moving on to the cake itself. It is good. I, however, like creamy icings more than liquidy ones (not to say vaguely mucussy) and also, if I'd put in three cups of powdered sugar, instead of two cups of that and one of flour, it would have been WAY too sweet. I had to add extra lemon juice to both cake and icing. If I hadn't, I think it would have been really, really sweet.

Right. Moving on....

Cake in the oven.

The icing. Or frosting. Yes, it was that liquidy...it kind of soaked through the whole cake, too. But it's very lemony.

The finished cake! I put raspberries on it in a spiral, but it really looked horrible so I just scattered them all over it. Without them the cake would have been a) hideous and b) not nearly as good. I think next time I'll put more raspberries on top and some in the middle - prettier, tastier and far more expensive.

 

After a few hours it looked less mucussy, because the icing soaked in - it was really good, very lemony. Nothing on the Killer Lemon Souffle, but relatively yummy.

Behind the cake, there was a disaster zone. Icing dripped all over the counter; two plates, one ceramic and one paper, and there's one out of sight; crumbs everywhere; wax paper covered in cooking spray; buttery pans...oh, it was a complete mess.

The Verdict: It's good. Better with more raspberries, and be careful of overbeating. Overall - very yummy.

The Song: My most recent favorite song. This is becoming a trend. Good luck surviving the heat - here in Central PA at noon, it's over 90.

Confession

So, remember how I said I'd only be using recipes from our collection of cookbooks? Well, I'm not. We have no good lemon recipes. Anywhere.

Actually, that's not true - my mother makes a KILLER lemon souffle. It is one of the best desserts on this earth. If you have not tried it, then you are denied one of life's great pleasures.

My mouth is literally watering just thinking about it. So, anyway, because I haven't been able to find a good lemon recipe in any of our books, I've resorted to the Internet. (N.B.: If you google "good lemon desserts" you get almost too many to choose from.)

I'm not exactly proud of this, but I love the Internet. It's completely invaluable. And the recipe I found - for a lemon layer cake - is going to be incredible. I hope.

I found the recipe here. And I'm going to be making it this afternoon. Hopefully - if all goes well - if it doesn't just crumple like that stupid Millionaire Truffle Cake, I will have pictures!

Yeah, this post is kind of...completely superfluous. Well, that's what happens when you have 1 bored tenth grader, 1 blog, and 1 computer. And 1 lemon layer cake recipe.

Pictures!

I promised you pictures, didn't I? Well, lucky people, here they are.

 

That's the chocolate cream pie. Delicious, right? Well, not so much. Actually it's a bit slimy. And that picture is quite a bit yuckier than it actually is...I've thought about, next time (if I'm feeling adventurous or martyrous), adding beaten egg whites to make it airier. Well, that will happen next summer. Hey, that's an idea!

Moving on.

That, unfortunately, is the Stoved Chicken from Best Ever One-Pot Meals (Lorenz Books). It calls for thyme and bay, but I forgot the bay and skimped on the thyme, because not everyone (aka Jem, my younger brother) is all that into spices. Unfortunately this left the whole thing tasting like...well, like chicken broth. Not unpleasant, but not delicious. Despite the mounds of pepper I put in...Plus the recipe called for two whole onions. Next time I'm only putting in one. Not that the onions weren't good...but there were a LOT of them. There was an awful lot of chicken broth, too. It was quite soupy.

Anyway, Jem and Dad enjoyed it more than I did. Other people like what you make more than you do. (The memorable Carrot Soup Incident - I actually couldn't eat it, it was that bad, but Mom and Jem have asked me more than once when I'm going to make it again. NEVER!!)

Back to the Stoved Chicken. The potatoes were lovely and tender...the bacon definitely added some flavor, but I'm afraid my family fought over who got enough, even though I doubled the amount the recipe called for. I think I should just put in the whole package and be done with it.

Next time, I'm hoping to do a vegetarian dish and a non-chocolate dessert. We'll see how that works out. Hang in, everywhere. I promise this blog won't be a complete waste of your time.

This is my new favorite song ever. Just adding some spice.

Getting ahead of myself

I've already made three cakes - before I'd decided to do the blog. But I'm going to write about them anyway.

The first one was the Millionaire Chocolate Truffle Cake in our folder of loose dessert recipes; my mother's friend sent it to her in a letter. It involves beaten egg whites, cream, and a pan smaller than the one we had. So as I was getting it out it just kind of...fell apart. It's now in a circular plastic container...otherwise known as Tupperware. Not only did it fall completely apart, I overcooked it and burned it, so it's not even worth eating.

But when that one fell apart, I had all this whipped cream (special whipped cream with cream cheese in it) and chocolate icing, and I had no idea what to do with it. So I made another cake. That one was the Luscious Chocolate Cake from the Chocolate Deck by Lori Longbotham (Chronicle Books); it's not a cookbook so much as a deck of cards with chocolate recipes on them. We absolutely love the Chocolate Deck.

Unfortunately, the "Luscious" cake turned out kind of flavorless. It tasted me more like yogurt than chocolate...even the icing, which was supposed to be really chocolatey, had too much cream cheese in it, so the whole thing was just kind of blah. I made up the icing as I went along - it had melted chocolate, butter, cream cheese, and heavy cream in it. I don't think I even added sugar.

So those two were both not that exciting. (Especially Millionaire, who is now sadly reposing in its container, uneaten and unlikely to be.) Yesterday I made a Classic Chocolate Cream Pie from Best-Loved Hershey's Recipes (Publications International, Ltd.) and it wasn't great either.

Tasted like gelatin.

As I get more adventurous, I'll screw around with the recipes to see what happens, but for now I'll stick with the direct recipe.

I may post a picture of the Chocolate Cream Pie and some main dish later tonight or tomorrow morning, if I can figure out how to work the camera. Just wait for it.

Summer Cooking Project

So, in a complete absence of anything else to do the summer between ninth and tenth grade, I am undertaking a project something like Julie-and-Julia, only minus the obnoxious Julie and, unfortunately, Julia Child. I just don't have the time or the energy or the cooking skill to cook all of Julia Child...sigh...

Anyway, that's not what I'm doing (and not what I'm supposed to be writing about). I'm planning to cook at least two dishes a week - one a dessert, one a main dish - and them I'm going to blog about it. Hopefully there will be pictures. Hopefully I'll manage one post per week. Hopefully I won't give up halfway through...

I am an okay cook, and an excellent eater, so I think this is going to be fun. Please agree with me. If you don't, why would you be reading this blog? All my recipes are going to come from the collection of recipe books we have, and because I think posting the direct recipes is some kind of copyright infringement I'll just give the name of the recipe and the book I got it from (in case you ever, you know, wanted to make whatever-it-is yourself).

Right. Here we go.