Catching Up: A New Cookbook

I buy most of my cookbooks used, so I rarely have the newest ones out there, but as I mentioned in the last post I sometimes obsess over a certain cookbook to the point where I buy it just so I can stop wanting to buy it. Too often, once I have one, it goes the way of my long-neglected brioche pans. But when I bought Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours (after making the tremendously delicious sample recipe for pumpkin stuffed with everything good) I was determined to try at least three recipes. 

Above is cauliflower-bacon gratin, and for once I thought mine looked as good as or even better than the food stylist's version in the cookbook. It was very good, but not great. Next time I don't think I'd bother with the expense of Gruyere as I think I'd have liked it as well with ordinary Swiss. Also, while the cookbook said it was best warm from the oven, I much preferred it cool the next day. 

Next was a similar (white vegetable, cream, Gruyere) potato gratin. It didn't look quite as beautiful--the liquid bubbled up the sides and engulfed the pretty browning on top--but tasted even better. I guess I like garlic more than bacon for adding flavor, and unlike this one, the cauliflower gratin had flour in it which made it stodgier. My favorite part about making the potato gratin was rediscovering the wonderful ease of using a mandoline to slice thinly. After a little trouble remembering how it worked, I decided I would start to use it frequently (and haven't used it since).

 

Third, and least successful, was beef cheek daube with carrots and elbow macaroni, substituting chuck roast for the beef cheek. I might try this again with better-tasting meat (instead of grass-fed but disappointingly weird-tasting cow) but I think there are better things to do with a good chuck roast that don't involve chocolate and macaroni.

On a cooking-from-a-cookbook roll, I tried one more: spur-of-the-moment vegetable soup, aka stone soup (the carrot version). I felt silly even following a recipe as it was very much what one would do without one, making soup from what's in the fridge, but I was so glad I had: It was the biggest success of this post and healthy to boot! Garlic, ginger, sweet from carrots and onions, salty from chicken broth. . . mmmm. . . .

I don't regret buying this cookbook new and plan to try more soups from it next winter.