My Own French Kitchen

“Thank God that’s over. Visits tire me to the bone. I don’t mean you, of course, mon père; my weekly visit to you is a luxury, you might almost say my only one. ” – Harris, My French Kitchen












August 19


Getting us to a fine French restaurant on a sunday night on a whim is not as easy as it should be. There is always what we might call the wish cycle in kids and young adults eating desires -- one of my wishes? To eat a traditional French cuisine based food program daily; or a frequent visit to any number of four to five French restaurants here in Madison, to take in the beautiful ambience, to watch out over Lake Monona from the deck of Sardine as we sample from a cheese plate. But, oh well, it does happen and maybe most importantly it does serve as very powerful motivation to begin the process, once and for all, to bring some of that French right back here in the house. I have the cookbooks, I have the interest, and for now it is all about the cooking backbone to execute. We made a fine batch of purple macaroons yesterdays – it was a fair start, especially since they turned out quite good. We bought a little kit at Sur la Table which consisted of a rubber mat indented with the circles for laying down the batter, a hand held nozzle and tips for squeezing and a little book of recipes. The technique seemed to work just fine. The batter was a perfect consistency and once it was dolloped into the circle it spread just to the edges and stopped, creating perfect circles of purple. They were supposed to bake for some 20 minutes but our own oven runs quite hot, so I turned down the heat and I pulled them out a bit early; after they cooled, they were crisp on the outside, somewhat textured and only a touch sticky on the bottom, but most of them easily usable for our experiment in lathering in as the filling strawberry frosting or pre-scooped ice cream that made sure came out hard and obviously still frozen. For being so few ingredients – powdered sugar, almost flour, egg whites and a pinch of vanilla – the crisps were excitingly good and sweet. The extra pop of ice cream was really quite a nice idea and I would very much recommend this for an macaroon maker. We were told by the store clerk that these were quite a process but they ended up fairly easy, although it was suggested to let the batter sit in the circles for 30 minutes to properly form.

Our visit later to Sardine was a little more sophisticated, but there they did all the cooking for us. On a recent visit to Spain, we decided that we liked cheese plates – and had a wonderful batch at a tapas shop a mound of gorgonzola infused with honey and a bit of olive oil, and fell in love. The cheese plate we ordered at Sardine was nice, including a brie, but the harder varieties were a bit pungent for our tastes. I tried for the first time was is called a housemade merguez, what reads a complicated mixture of fennel, coriander, cilantro, and a few other spices in addition to the ground lamb. This was really an amazing dish, albeit a bit challenging on digestion. Paired with a wonderful selection of greens, and topped off by the French 1665 beer, it was a nice early evening French dish, oysters already sampled, cheese tasted, and the prospect of a dessert (beyond macaroons!) on its way. The wish French food thinker in me always imagines that it is deck of Sardine that is my own summer haunt, and that I am in the kitchen plying my hands at the marguez myself and serving it to whoever might decide to stop by for a bite.