Vegetable Barley Soup with the Taste of Little India for French Fridays with Dorie

We truly enjoy being a part of the online food blogging community. We love having the opportunity to share recipes, tips, tricks, family traditions and stories about food and drink. Food is such a huge part of our lives. We are not the type of people who eat to live. Food is not just fuel for us. Rather, it is pleasure - not just the act of eating delicious food, but also the act of creating it and sharing it. It's how we experience other cultures. It's how we show our love and caring. And it's great to be in a "club" with others who feel that way.

That's why we joined French Fridays with Dorie, a group of cooks who all make the same recipe from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table each week. Although we don't have the time to participate as often as we would like, this week we just had to find the time. It was a good week to do so, as the recipe was quite simple and easily made with a few basic kitchen ingredients. And also, because even though it's the end of March, it's still as cold and briskly windy as mid-January around here! So this week we, along with others around the world, made "Vegetable Barley Soup with the Taste of Little India," accented with such warming spices as garam masala, turmeric and red pepper. Perfect for this terrible weather!

We won't post Dorie's recipes here, as we'd rather encourage people to buy the book. The stories that go along with her recipes are entertaining, the pictures gorgeous, and it's a great big book filled with plenty of amazing recipes, making it well worth the cost. But this week, there's a loophole, in that Bill Daley of Tribune Newspapers did a feature on online cooking communities and in the feature, he included this very recipe. Here is the link to that article, and a longer version of the article can be found here. Bon appetit! 

Moules Marinière for French Fridays With Dorie

We haven't been very good members of French Fridays with Dorie. In fact, the last time we participated was back in October of 2012. Mon Dieu!!! In case you don't know, FFwD is a group of food bloggers and cooks who, every Friday, post their experience making and eating a recipe from the amazing Dorie Greenspan's incredible book Around My French Table. So, with every intention of improving our FFwD participation for 2014, we give you a glimpse into this week's "assignment," mouth-watering Moules Marinière.

Moules Marinière is a classic dish from Normandy that is at the very basic level, mussels in an herby white wine broth. We are big fans of mussels, and recently won a Whole Food Market recipe contest for our Curried Mussels with Lemongrass. But we are also big fans of French cuisine, so we were definitely interested in this particular recipe. First and foremost, it looked so delicious, but also, it seemed very very simple to make. Actually, it only took us about 20 minutes, so it's a perfect weeknight meal, rounded out with a side salad and some bread.We could barely believe how flavorful the broth was, especially with the small number of ingredients and the sheer ease of it all.

Now, we can't give you the recipe, because that's part of FFwD rules. The group wants to encourage people to purchase the book and participate in FFwD along with us. To that end, the recipe for Moules Marinière can be found on page 312 (with a gorgeous accompanying photo on page 313!).

Nonetheless, you can see in our photos all the ingredients ready to go. You might notice that we took a couple of liberties. (When do we not?) First, we were only using two pounds of mussels, so we halved the amount of onions, shallots and garlic, but we kept the same measurements for the herbs and broth so we had plenty of it to dip our crusty bread into. Regarding those herbs, we bought fresh thyme because we will use that for other things, but we are tired of buying and throwing away parsley, so we tried a tablespoon of this parsley paste (which will last much, much longer in the fridge), and we felt it worked just as well. Just keep in mind that the mussels should be clean, that is, de-bearded (our favorite market carries them already cleaned, thankfully), and if they are unopened after cooking, don't eat them but discard them or you will pay the price. 

MMMMMmmmmm...Moules Marinière. Magnifique! 

You will be on our French table again very soon.

And just to prove our recommitment, here's a picture of Dorie and Amy (at Wesleyan U's Foodstock in May, 2012)!

Shrimp with Cellophane Noodles (French Fridays with Dorie)

We somehow don't have the time to participate in French Fridays with Dorie as often as we would like. But this week's recipe, Shrimp with Cellophane Noodles (page 322), seemed pretty easy, and so we made it last night. Basically, it involved preparing Asian noodles (we used rice vermicelli), then cooking shrimp with onions and garlic and spices (cayenne, five spice, white pepper) in a wok, then adding tomato puree (which we couldn't find so we used an immersion blender on some crushed tomatoes and added that). For a little fun, we even made garlic chips (thin slices of garlic "fried" in a little olive oil), as suggested, for a garnish.

Now, we love Dorie Greenspan, love her recipes, love her book Around My French Table (from which this recipe comes, and around which French Fridays revolve). But as for this recipe, it was just sort of weird. It tasted like an oddly sweet shrimp spaghetti that seemed neither Italian, Asian or French. After we ate it, we actually felt bad that we had treated those beautiful shrimp in such a way. We won't be making that mistake again.

 

FFwD: Crispy Crackly Apple Almond Tart

Last weekend, which was a long weekend, we spent Saturday taking a drive around the southeast corner of Connecticut, picking apples and visiting wineries. In other words, we had a perfect fall day. We'll tell you more about the wineries later, but as far as the apples go, we picked some big beautiful sweet-tart Winesaps and some deep dark maroon Macouns (considered by some to be the finest eating apple there is). Then we saw that this week's French Fridays with Dorie (in which we haven't been able to participate in some time) was "Crispy Crackly Apple Almond Tart," and we were totally psyched. How fortuitous!

The "French Fridays" Bible

A baking recipe, with a guardian angel for the baking-challenged.

Mise en place is fancy for "uncork the (French!) wine and let's get this recipe started"

Yes, it's fall, ya'll. And what says fall in New England better than apples? We have posted plenty of apple recipes over the years: recipes for doughnuts, pies (not one but two!), risotto, and other savory dishes (here and here), have featured apples and/or apple cider. But this fall, we were looking for something new, and Around My French Table (the book members of French Fridays with Dorie cooks from) had just what we needed.

Whisking together almond flour, sugar, egg, vanilla and heavy cream... 

...makes a heavenly almond cream topping for the tart.

Ooh la la - buttered and sugared sheets of phyllo dough!

After the cream is chilled...

it is carefully spread over the delicate phyllo.

While we can't give you the recipe (club rules!), we can tell you that it wasn't particularly difficult, even for the baking-challenged, and even with working with phyllo dough (which seems scary, doesn't it?). Dorie's direction are clear and straight-forward. We followed them strictly (except for using a different type of apple), and the finished product was incredible - both crispy and crackly, with a delightful balance of tart, juicy apple and sweet, nutty almond. The neighbors loved it, we loved it, and it made us that much more comfortable with baking and with using sheets of phyllo - that ever-versatile yet oh-so-elegant ingredient.  

Chris is a slicing wizard

Laying them perfectly over the almond cream.

It almost looks easy!

Some local apple maple jam makes a nice post-baking glaze.

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: buy the book and start making the recipes. From what we can tell, there isn't a bad one in the bunch.