Still cooking.
June 10, 2009 10:02 Filed in: In the kitchen
As promised last week we opened My French Kitchen
over the weekend and cooked up Warm Tuna and Potato Salad, a very nicoise combination of haricot verts, boiled new potatoes, roasted cherry tomatoes, and tuna tossed with a dijon dressing. The dish is easy, but a wee bit labor intensive -- there’s trimming and boiling the haricot verts (that’s French for “skinny li’l green beans”), cutting up and boiling the potatoes, roasting the cherry tomatoes, mixing up the dijon dressing. None of it is difficult, but we ended up with a kitchen full of pots, pans, and olive oily bowls. (Tip: wipe those bowls clean with slices of good bread!)
The effort was worth it: the resulting warm salad was delicious! And perfect with some toasted pugliese bread. It felt like cold weather comfort food -- much needed because lately all we’ve gotten is RAIN and temps in the 60s.
I love to cook new dishes and try new flavors, but I don’t have the time or patience to drive hither and yon for obscure ingredients, nor do I want to spend a fortune for fancy, organic, imported or otherwise expensive foodstuffs. Instead, I scheme to find inexpensive, lower-fat, easy-to-locate substitutes at my local grocery store. I’ll maybe drive the extra way to Whole Foods, as long as there’s something else I can get at the same time, like my favorite green tea. We also have an excellent “european market” nearby called Treasure Island. Need chestnut pate, tinned duck breast, white truffles, or Italian torrone? They’ve got it.
But I amlazy time conscious, and cheap thrifty, so I try to get everything at Dominick’s. I’ve never seen haricot verts at Dom’s, but luckily there are tons of green beans in their produce department right now. I simply picked out the smallest, slimmest beans and they easily (to the untrained tongue) passed as their sophisticated French cousins. I also plucked up a bag of petite golden potatoes, an 8 oz. carton of grape tomatoes, and a few miniature cans of Genova Italian Tuna. Oddly, our grocery store sells the little 3 oz. cans at a better price per ounce than the 5 oz. cans, so make sure you read those pricing labels!
It is this olive oil-packed tuna that really makes the dish. Once we finally started putting out the extra cash for this imported tuna, we couldn’t go back. There might be better Italian tunas on the market, but if it’s not at my grocery store 3 blocks away, I can’t be bothered. For every day tuna salad with celery and mayo, trusty white (dolphin safe!) tuna is fine, but for a really special tuna flavor, get the Italian sort. Don’t let the fact that it’s swimming in olive oil (or distributed by Chicken of the Sea) put you off -- just drain it good and dive in. You’ll live longer consuming olive and omega 3s anyway, so treat yourself!
The salad was followed by Chocolate Cheesecake for dessert. Not cheesecake as we know it, full of cream cheese, eggs, and baked in a graham cracker crust -- this cheesecake calls for creme fraiche, melted dark and white chocolates, and heavy cream, and it is chilled rather than cooked.
I substituted creme fraiche with sour cream, and heavy cream with a combination of milk and evaporated milk. I used Nestle Toll House Chocolatier dark chocolate, and Ghirardelli white chocolate, both from the baking aisle. The crust is ground up chocolate chip cookies (I used lowfat Chips Ahoy) mixed with melted butter (Lucerne canola oil spread). The crust alone would have suited me just fine! I love just about anything with butter. I wasn’t sure if the mixture would set up properly in the fridge, so I froze it to save time (we wanted to eat dessert as soon as possible). We’ve been eating it in sweet, cold slivers almost like popsicles. It’s truly smooth, chocolatey, and delicious! I am more of a cake/cookie/pastry/straight up chocolate girl, so I probably won’t voluntarily make this cheesecake again. Still, it’s turned out to be a hit with everyone in the house, which is immensely gratifying.
over the weekend and cooked up Warm Tuna and Potato Salad, a very nicoise combination of haricot verts, boiled new potatoes, roasted cherry tomatoes, and tuna tossed with a dijon dressing. The dish is easy, but a wee bit labor intensive -- there’s trimming and boiling the haricot verts (that’s French for “skinny li’l green beans”), cutting up and boiling the potatoes, roasting the cherry tomatoes, mixing up the dijon dressing. None of it is difficult, but we ended up with a kitchen full of pots, pans, and olive oily bowls. (Tip: wipe those bowls clean with slices of good bread!)The effort was worth it: the resulting warm salad was delicious! And perfect with some toasted pugliese bread. It felt like cold weather comfort food -- much needed because lately all we’ve gotten is RAIN and temps in the 60s.
I love to cook new dishes and try new flavors, but I don’t have the time or patience to drive hither and yon for obscure ingredients, nor do I want to spend a fortune for fancy, organic, imported or otherwise expensive foodstuffs. Instead, I scheme to find inexpensive, lower-fat, easy-to-locate substitutes at my local grocery store. I’ll maybe drive the extra way to Whole Foods, as long as there’s something else I can get at the same time, like my favorite green tea. We also have an excellent “european market” nearby called Treasure Island. Need chestnut pate, tinned duck breast, white truffles, or Italian torrone? They’ve got it.
But I am
It is this olive oil-packed tuna that really makes the dish. Once we finally started putting out the extra cash for this imported tuna, we couldn’t go back. There might be better Italian tunas on the market, but if it’s not at my grocery store 3 blocks away, I can’t be bothered. For every day tuna salad with celery and mayo, trusty white (dolphin safe!) tuna is fine, but for a really special tuna flavor, get the Italian sort. Don’t let the fact that it’s swimming in olive oil (or distributed by Chicken of the Sea) put you off -- just drain it good and dive in. You’ll live longer consuming olive and omega 3s anyway, so treat yourself!
The salad was followed by Chocolate Cheesecake for dessert. Not cheesecake as we know it, full of cream cheese, eggs, and baked in a graham cracker crust -- this cheesecake calls for creme fraiche, melted dark and white chocolates, and heavy cream, and it is chilled rather than cooked.
I substituted creme fraiche with sour cream, and heavy cream with a combination of milk and evaporated milk. I used Nestle Toll House Chocolatier dark chocolate, and Ghirardelli white chocolate, both from the baking aisle. The crust is ground up chocolate chip cookies (I used lowfat Chips Ahoy) mixed with melted butter (Lucerne canola oil spread). The crust alone would have suited me just fine! I love just about anything with butter. I wasn’t sure if the mixture would set up properly in the fridge, so I froze it to save time (we wanted to eat dessert as soon as possible). We’ve been eating it in sweet, cold slivers almost like popsicles. It’s truly smooth, chocolatey, and delicious! I am more of a cake/cookie/pastry/straight up chocolate girl, so I probably won’t voluntarily make this cheesecake again. Still, it’s turned out to be a hit with everyone in the house, which is immensely gratifying.
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