Fish with Leeks and Tomatoes

We're still traveling, and won't be home for a couple of weeks. Here's a recipe from the archives to keep you busy and happy till we get back. Bon Appetit!

Growing up in an Irish Catholic family meant that we ate fish on friday. Every friday, without fail. 

Actually, as Catholics, we weren’t obliged to eat fish. We just couldn’t eat meat. At our house, though, 'no meat' meant fish. So we ate fish every Friday. We didn’t live especially close to the sea (Atlanta), and the selection of fresh fish at that time wasn’t great. We were also a large family (Irish Catholic, remember?). All of this meant that we ate a lot of the dreaded Tuna Noodle Casserole. With potato chips on top. No peas. We also ate a lot of salmon patties made from canned salmon. I still like these. I haven’t made them in a long time, though. Hmmm....

New Year's Traditions: Hoppin John

I have a confession to make. I really don’t like New Year’s. To me, it’s an artificial thing. Don’t get me  wrong, I love the IDEA of it--a new start, wipe the slate clean and begin anew. What’s better than that?

The problem is that we seem to take all our problems, resentments, wounds into the new year. We can’t seem to leave them behind. We try to feel as if it’s a brand new year, but if we’re honest with ourselves, nothing is different, is it? At midnight we say HAPPY NEW YEAR! and we pop corks and throw confetti and set off fireworks and we try to feel as if something is different, something is new. But it really isn’t. At least for me.

The Reckoning (recipe: Fish Terrine)

In restaurants in Germany, when you finish your meal you don't ask for the bill. You ask for 'die rechnung'. It's what tells you how much you have to pay for your excesses at the table. As you may have guessed, this word is the root of our English word 'reckoning'. Which also has to do with paying for your excesses.

Rabbit and Merguez Tagine

I have two tagines, those lovely Moroccan cooking dishes. The big one is a traditional cone-shaped one, made from glazed terra cotta. I bought it from a Moroccan shop in our town not long after we moved here. I fell in love with it when I first saw it--it’s old, a little wonky, a little chipped. It wasn’t new when I bought it. The shop owner tried to talk me out of that particular one, pointing out that there were new, colorful ones available. I can only use it for serving, not for cooking. It’s too big for my oven, and I can’t use it on the stovetop because the bottom’s not exactly flat. But I love it.

Oven Roasted Ribs

Someone recently remarked that we must only eat desserts at our house, judging by my blog. It’s not really true that we only eat desserts. It’s just that they’re so pretty! Really, don’t you think so? They’re like the cheerleaders of the table, jumping up and shouting “me! me! look at me!” “take MY picture!” Ahem. Maybe they don’t really do that--maybe it’s just me.

Oven Braised Pork and Winter Vegetables

The weather here has been very wintery—it's put the BRR in NovemBRR! Rain, cold, fog. Perfect weather to hunker down and stay home with something warm and hearty for dinner. Me, I also want something easy. Something that I can stick in the oven and not think about. This is the perfect thing! 

Spicy Cheesy Lamburgers

My friend Françoise is the source of many good things for us. She's brought us friendship, good advice, English novels, the odd vocabulary lesson, and lots of good food tips. Recently, she shared with us some cheese that a friend had brought her from Turkey. We don't know the name of the cheese, but it was a hard, crumbly, salty cheese—sort of like Feta but with a more buttery flavor. At my house we just called it Turkish Cheese.

At the same time that we received this wonderful cheese, I found some lovely ground lamb. I wanted to make some lamb-burgers, and I was thinking of the wonderful spices in some of the Moroccan dishes we can find here. I wanted something a little hot, a little exotic. This buttery, salty cheese fit right in with what I had in mind.

Two Pesto Pasta

This is a re-post of a recipe that I cook often. It's one of my all time favorites. Why? Let me count the ways: it's easy, it's healthy, it's made in the time that it takes the pasta to cook, and it uses ingredients I always have on hand. I first posted it when my blog was brand new. Almost nobody saw it. I decided to re-post it so that you could all see it. You're welcome!

Blue Cheese, Cranberry and Pecan Lunch Quiches

Many years ago, when I was just starting to cook in my first tiny kitchen, I made a quiche. This was before the wave of quiche mania swept across the US in the late '70s. This wave was so ubiquitous that there was even a book called "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche". (Heh, to which a friend of mine replied that REAL men ate whatever they pleased...)

Mojo Pizza

I have a confession to make. No, two of them. First, I'm a yeast-o-phobe. I love things made with yeast: fresh dinner rolls, good crusty bread, cinnamon buns. Pizza. And I absolutely love the smell of yeast. But I never bake with it. I buy it regularly―in my supermarket they have these pretty little cubes of fresh yeast that look so nice in my fridge until they're about 3 months past their expiration date. Sigh. I love the IDEA of baking with yeast, but I just don't do it. I'll make anything with baking powder. But yeast, that's another story.

Broccoli, Leek and Goat Cheese Tart

Broccoli. Probably the most under-rated vegetable ever, with the possible exception of beets. What’s not to like? It’s full of vitamins and minerals, it’s low in calories, and it goes with almost everything. OK, not with ice cream, but with most vegetables.

Leeks. One of my all-time favorites. We always have leeks in the house. I love their gentle, garlicky, oniony flavor. They smell soooo good when they’re cooking that the neighbors are sure to stop by to see what’s on the stove.

Goat cheese, Chevre. Food of the gods, truly. Fresh, its mild flavor is a good mix with many sweet and savory dishes. Aged, it packs a punch that can stand up to any blue cheese on a cheese plate.

ASPARAGUS!

It’s asparagus season, and we’re eating a lot of it. Steamed, baked, roasted. It’s everywhere. Green, white, tiny, enormous, baked, grilled, roasted, in soups and salads. In Germany it’s called Spargel. I love that word--it sounds like sparkle, and that’s what happens when the asparagus hits the market. It’s the official signal that Spring is here.

In our markets there are mostly white asparagus, often bigger around than my thumb. Its flavor is more delicate than the green kind, and it’s highly prized. I confess that I prefer my asparagus green, though. It has more flavor, and I like its slightly bitter tang. However you buy it, there are many ways to eat it. We’ve had most of them this week, and I finally used the last of it in a tart.

Well, ok, in truth it’s a quiche. Or, as a friend of mine once called it, a 'quickie'. Waaay back when I was in grad school, quiche wasn’t really well known in the Southern part of the US. I went with a friend to a restaurant much prized by poor students. This restaurant was a favorite because it was sort of ferny and bright inside, and it served cheap but ‘cheffy’ food (or at least our idea of cheffy food). We went there for special occasions. I’ve forgotten what this occasion was, but I remember that my friend took one look at the menu and said to the waiter, “bring me some of that quickie Lorraine”. He never lived that one down.

When I made the crust for this I used some of the duck fat I had left from the cuisses de canard. I wanted the flavor of the duck in the crust. If you leave that out, this dish is vegetarian. I used half butter and half duck fat. When I do this the next time I think I’ll use less duck fat--the flavor was good, but a little too strong for this. Next time I’ll use 2 tablespoons duck fat and 1/2 cup butter. Since I think you may not have duck fat sitting around in your fridge, I’ve written the recipe using only butter.

My tart pan is 27 cm / 10 1/2 inches wide, and shallow. The baking time wasn’t very long, and the crust wasn’t as brown as I’d like it. Next time I’ll blind bake the crust so that it will be browner. I’ve adjusted the recipe for that as well.

Asparagus Tart

Crust:

350 g / 2 cups flour

2/3 cup butter, chilled

1/2 tsp salt

4-5 tablespoons ice water

Filling:

100 g / 4 oz gruyere cheese, grated

4 eggs

a good pinch of cayenne pepper

fresh ground pepper

3/4 cup milk

3/4 cup cream

5 cherry tomatoes

8 spears broccoli, crisp-steamed

Preheat oven to 160 C / 375 F.

• First, make the crust. In a large bowl, mix the flour and the salt well. Cut the butter into small cubes and add to the flour. With your fingers, crumble the butter pieces until they resemble fine sand. You can also do this with a fork, but it’s not as much fun. Add ice water, one tablespoon at a time, until you can make a loose ball of the dough.
• Form the dough into a ball, and roll it out to fit your tart pan. (Unless you have a pan as large as mine, you’ll probably have some left over.) If there are holes, be sure that you patch them well.
• Put a piece of baking paper in the pan and fill with beans or pastry weights. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and remove the weights and the paper. Let it cool.
• Put the grated cheese in the bottom of the pan.
• In a large bowl, beat the eggs and add the cayenne, the milk, cream, and the pepper.
• Arrange the broccoli spears in the pan on top of the cheese.
• Carefully pour the egg mixture over the broccoli spears. I used a funnel to pour it into the center of the tart so as not to disturb the broccoli or cover it with the egg mixture.
• Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and arrange the halves between the asparagus spears. I also used pieces cut from the spears to decorate the spaces.
• Bake for 30 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• If you don’t have gruyere, cheese, you can use any mild hard cheese: swiss/ementhal, gouda, cheddar...
• I don’t peel my broccoli--it seems like such a waste. I break off the hard part at the bottom and eat the rest. Sometimes the result is that it’s hard to cut with a fork...
• Because of the duck fat that I used, this crust is very short, and was sticky to roll out. I rolled it between two sheets of plastic wrap, but next time I’ll chill it first.

DUCK REDUX: Duck and Lentil Tarts

Leftovers. I love ‘em, don’t you? I mean, what’s better than finding food already cooked in the fridge? That way you can re-combine it with new ingredients and make something au pif, something on the spur of the moment, something that’s never been done before. Or at least not this week.

Because there’s normally only two of us eating here, we often have leftovers. When I made cuisses de canard confit, there were leftovers. The next day I used them to make these little tarts.

To make the tart shells, I put some puff pastry in a little tart tin (these are 11 cm 4.5 inches across) and covered it with another tart tin. I weighted the top one with beans and baked them for about 10-12 minutes. This kept the puff pastry from puffing up too much, and kept the form clean. One note: on half of these I trimmed the puff pastry before I baked it, so that there was no overhang between the tart tins. On the other half, I left some puff pastry hanging out, thinking it would make a pretty puffy collar for the tarts. WRONG. The puff pastry sort of melted down around the sides of the bottom tart tin, making it impossible to get the tart shells out of the tins. We had lots of puff pastry crumbs to sprinkle on salads...

These little tarts are pretty hearty. They’ve got lentils and duck and veggies in them, and with a salad they’re a nice lunch. They’d also do for a first course if the main course was light.

Duck and Lentil Tarts

3 small carrots

2 stalks celery

1/2 bulb fennel

1 leek

1 Tablespoon duck fat

250 g / 1/2 pound lentils, cooked

1/4 cup cider vinegar

2 Tablespoons olive oil

juice of 1/2 lemon

shredded meat from 2 cuisses de canard confit

Salt and pepper to taste

4 pre-baked tart shells

• Chop the carrots, the celery and the fennel about the size of the end of your little finger. Include the green tops of the celery.
• Clean the leek: cut off the tough part at the top and cut the leek in half lengthwise. Holding the two halves together, wash the leeks under cold running water, making sure to check between the layers where there’s often sandy dirt lurking to chip your teeth. When they’re clean, cut them crosswise into small strips.
• Melt 1 tablespoon of duck fat left from the cuisses de canard in a large-ish pan. Add the vegetables and cook till they’re softened, about 7-10 minutes.
• Add the lentils, mix well and drain if necessary.
• In a separate bowl, mix the vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice. Pour over the lentils and vegetables and mix well.
• Add the duck meat, fill the tart shells and garnish with whatever greenery you have.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• For me, this is essentially a leftover dish. I used the vegetables I had. You could also add tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, onions instead of the leeks.
• Duck and lentils are a classic pairing here, but you could use chickpeas or white beans instead of the lentils. You’d be kicked out of the confrerie des amateurs du canard, but you don’t really care about them, do you?

STUFFED ZUCCHINI

Note: We're still on holiday. This is the last of my pre-programmed posts. I'll be home soon with fresh ones!

Do you see these things? Aren't they adorable? I love it when I find these in the market. They're perfect for stuffing. They're also perfect for playing zucchini bowling, but that's another story. Today we'll just stuff them. Not in the rude way, of course.

This is a great weeknight dish. It's not too hard to prepare and it uses up leftovers. Perfect for when you're getting ready to leave on a trip and you need to clean out the fridge. Or just when you have some leftover rice and sausage.

I used a sausage that we have here that has swiss cheese in it. Any fresh sausage that you like can be used. Italian Sausage would be very good in this. Merguez would be awesome.

If you can't find these round zucchini, you can make these with the long ones. Just cut them in half, hollow them out, and stuff them. Not in the rude way, of course. If you use the long ones, you won't have the cute little hats to put on them, but you could top them with some grated cheese. I think grated cheese makes up for a lot of things.

Stuffed Zucchini

8 round zucchini or 4 long ones

350 g / 12 oz sausage

1 medium onion

1 large tomato

1 ½ cups cooked rice

• Preheat oven to 160 C / 350 F
• Cut the tops off the zucchinis and hollow them out with a spoon. I used a grapefruit spoon because it has those little teeth to help scrape the insides out.
• Crumble the sausage into a pan and cook over medium heat till it releases some of its fat.
• Chop the onion and put it in with the sausage, cooking till the sausage is beginning to brown and the onion is soft and translucent.
• Chop the tomato and add to the pan with the rice. Cook till the tomato releases its juice and the mixture is moist, about 1-2 minutes. Don't worry if the sausage isn't fully cooked—this is going in the oven to cook some more.
• Stuff the zucchini with the mixture (not in the rude way, of course) and put it in the oven for 40-45 minutes, until the zucchini are soft.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don't.

NOTES:

• I think if you put these in the oven in a dish with a cover they would probably take less time to cook and they wouldn't risk drying out. I'll have to try that next time and let you know.
• Obviously, you can add anything you like to this mixture. Peas, cut up green beans, leeks, bell peppers. If you want a little crunch, you could add pine nuts. If you want it spicier, you can add some chili peppers. Just remember that when you put it in the oven it will dry out, so you want the mixture to be really moist when you put it in the zucchini.
• If the mixture is dry, you can moisten it with stock or wine or tomato juice.
• Pasta would substitute nicely for the rice.

What would you put in it?

CUISSES DE CANARD. CONFIT.

One of the wonderful things that we discovered after we’d moved to Belgium is duck confit. In French, it’s called cuisses de canard confit. Cuisses de canard means duck thighs. Confit is a word that doesn’t translate well into English. Prepared? Pickled? Preserved? Not exactly the same thing, but in that family of ideas.

Here’s how they’re made: duck thighs are packed in a mixture of salt and herbs for a day or so to draw out the moisture, and then they’re cooked gently in goose fat (or duck fat) for a few hours. This produces a meat that has a very special texture and a wonderful flavor. Cooled and packed in the goose or duck fat, they keep about six months. Making them, though, is a complicated process, so we just buy them.

Finding them at the supermarket, though, is not without its problems. The first time I went looking for them in my supermarket, I went to the aisle I thought was the appropriate one, and found a (very nice looking) young man stocking the shelves.

In my very best French, I asked him if he had ‘cuisses de canard’, duck thighs. You can see what’s coming, can’t you? No, actually, it was worse than that. In French, the word canard means ‘duck’. It’s pronounced KAH-nahr. Being a native English speaker, I tend to be a little sloppy with my vowels. What I actually asked him was if he had cuisses de KUH-nahr. Not really hard to understand, given my (ahem) slight accent.

The problem is that there’s another word that’s close to that one--connard. Pronounced KOH-nahr. It’s a word that Sister Mary Francis didn’t teach us in French I. Or even French IV. It’s extremely rude.

So when I asked this young man if he had cuisses de KUH-nahr, he looked down at his own thighs and said, “I hope not, Madame.” Oh, man. What could I do? I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Confit, Monsieur. Confit.” At which point he laughed and showed me where they were. Since then I’ve been veryvery careful with my vowels when discussing cuisses de canard confit. I’d advise you to do the same thing.

Normally I find cuisses de canard in cans or glass jars. However, the ones I bought most recently came vacuum packed in plastic. To prepare them, you put them in a pan in a moderate oven for about 10 minutes. The idea is just to melt all the goose fat around them so that you can get the gorgeous meat.

When they’ve cooled, you still have to remove the skin and the gristle and the bones. You’re left with shreds of duck meat that is deeply flavorful, with a texture sort of like prosciutto. It can be used in many ways. One of my favorite is in a salad of greens with a blue cheese vinaigrette. This is a really nice dish for this time of the year--the meat is hearty and the salad is light.

If you're like me, you'll have made more of this than you eat at one time, because you LOVE leftovers. Here's an idea for how to use leftover duck.

Salade de Cuisses de Canard Confit

2-3 cuisses de canard

approx 3 Tablespoons mild vinegar

1/2 teaspoon mild mustard

3-6 Tablespoons Olive oil

approx 50 g / 2 oz blue cheese

Lettuce--your favorite mixture

• Pre-heat the oven to 160 C / 350 F
• Free the duck thighs from their packaging (can, jar, plastic). Put them in an oven-safe pan in the oven for about 10 minutes or until the fat that they’re packed in is melted.
• Remove the pan from the oven and take the duck thighs out of the fat. Drain on paper towels, and leave till cool enough to handle.
• Put the vinegar in a large salad bowl. Add the mustard. I use Dijon mustard for this. It really doesn’t matter too much, because the mustard is mostly only there to make the oil and vinegar emulsify. Whisk the mustard and the vinegar together till combined well.
• Add olive oil slowly, whisking constantly to form an emulsion. You want this to be a runny vinaigrette, so you’ll use about the same amount of oil as you had vinegar, maybe a little more.
• Crumble the blue cheese into the vinaigrette, and let sit while you wait for the duck to cool.
• When the duck is cooled, remove the fatty skin and bones and gristle from the meat. Shred it into pieces as large or small as you want and set aside.
• Wash and dry the lettuce, tear it into the salad bowl. Toss gently until the dressing is thoroughly mixed with the greens.
• Put on your prettiest plates and top with the duck confit.
• Practice your French pronunciation: KAH-nahr. KAH-nahr. OK, now you can eat.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• Traditionally, after the duck thighs are removed from the fat, they’re fried (skin side down) to make a crispy skin and served like that. That’s a wonderful way to eat this, but for me it’s a little too fatty. I like to take the skin off and just eat the meat.
• After you’ve used the meat, the fat that it’s packed in is wonderful for cooking. Traditionally, it’s the fat that’s used to cook potatoes or to fry anything that needs flavor added. It keeps for a long time in the fridge.
• If you can’t find cuisses de canard confit in your area, here’s a recipe for making them at home. Here’s a video from Gourmet Test Kitchens that shows it too. I encourage you to look for them, though. It can be fun. Just be sure to specify that you want them confit. And watch your vowels...

FRIDAY FISH

Growing up in an Irish Catholic family meant that we ate fish on friday. Every friday. Without fail. The only exception we ever saw was when my older brother had rheumatic fever and the doctors wanted him to eat beef every day to strengthen his heart. Heh. I know. But it was the best medical wisdom at that time. My grandfather had the same advice after his heart attack, and he lived to be 87.

Actually, as Catholics, we weren’t obliged to eat fish. We just couldn’t eat meat. Except my brother. At our house, though, 'no meat' meant fish. So we ate fish every Friday. We didn’t live especially close to the sea (Atlanta), and the selection of fresh fish at that time wasn’t great. We were also a large family (Irish Catholic, remember?). All of this meant that we ate a lot of the dreaded Tuna Noodle Casserole. With potato chips on top. No peas. We also ate a lot of salmon patties made from canned salmon. I still like these. I haven’t made them in a long time, though. Hmmm....

Because we didn’t live near the sea, the fish we ate was most often canned. Tuna and Salmon. Sometimes frozen, from the kitchen of our friend Mrs. Paul. She always made her specialty for us, fingerfish, a species that must be extinct now. At least I hope so.

In the summer, it was different, because we could go to the beach (St. Simon’s Island). At the beach we ate fish. Crabs. Shrimp. Lobster. All of it. We loved it. Somehow, though, we didn’t eat fresh fish at home. In later years, my parents used to bring home frozen shrimp and crabs. But they waited till I had left home to do that. I’m not bitter, though.

All this meant that I didn’t have a big taste for fresh fish. Shrimp, yes, but not fish. I didn’t know anything about them either. I liked to order trout in restaurants because I loved eating the flesh on one side and then unzipping the backbone to get at the other side. I still like to do that.

It was only when we moved to Belgium that I began to seriously cook and love fresh fish. Here, we are close enough to the sea to have fresh fish readily available. Everyone has their favorite fish market. For some, it’s in nearby Soumagne. For others, it’s in Herve. Or even the supermarket. My friend Françoise swears by the fish monger who’s in the town of Ensival for its weekly market. Me, I shop around.

I’ve developed a taste for fish. We still associate it with Fridays, but we eat it other days of the week as well. I find myself in the strange position of knowing the names of my favorite fish in French but not necessarily in English. Some of them have names that are not so pretty in English--rouget, for example, is mullet in English. Makes me think of a bad hair style...

Where was I? Oh, yes. We try to buy fish that’s sustainable and relatively local. This usually means tilapia or plaice or pollack or cod from Iceland. My favorite fish is the trout caught by one of our friends. He doesn’t really like to eat it, so he and his wife freeze it and sometimes they give it to us. YUM!

This dish is one that I first made one night when we were going out of town and we had some leeks and tomatoes in the fridge. And some fish. You can use any firm-fleshed white fish for this. It’s veryvery easy, and the flavors are delicate and healthy and clean--tomatoes, leeks and of course the fish. I serve it to company. On Fridays, of course!

Friday Fish

4-5 large leeks

10-12 small tomatoes (golf ball size)

400 g / 1 pound white fish

2 Tablespoons + 2 Tablespoons olive oil

• Preheat the oven to 160 C / 350 F.
• Cut the root ends off the leeks, and the hard green part. Cut them in half lengthwise, and wash them thoroughly under running water to remove all the sand and dirt between the layers. I just hold them near the base in one hand and with the other separate the layers and wash between them.
• Slice the leeks into pieces about 2 cm / 1 inch long.
• Heat 2 T olive oil in a large pan and add the leeks. Cook over medium-low heat till the leeks have released their liquid and are soft. This should take about 10 minutes.
• Put the leeks in a baking dish.
• Cut the fish into pieces about half the size of the palm of your hand. They should be roughly the same size so that they cook at the same rate. If there are some that are thinner than others, double them up. Nestle the fish pieces down into the leeks.
• Cut the tomatoes in quarters. Put the tomato pieces down into the leeks between the fish pieces.
• Drizzle 2 T of olive oil over the fish.
• Bake till the fish is opaque and flakes easily--about 20 minutes.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• I often serve this with new potatoes, steamed and then crisped in a non-stick pan in a little olive oil. The crunch goes well with this dish.
• Good crusty rolls go well too. I think you need some crunch.
• Sometimes I just steam the potatoes and add them to the dish with the fish. Then I need crunch from rolls or something else.
• You can use flavored oil to drizzle over the fish--sometimes I use lemon flavored oil. Pepper oil wouldn’t really work here--it would kill these delicate flavors.