Pot herbs part one
May. 5th, 2008 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrissePot herbs
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rhiannonhero wanted easy recipes. I hope yesterday's lentil recipe was helpful. I think Sunday will be my recipe day as that's the day I'm most likely to have a great deal of time to copy out/explain things. If anything is confusing, please just leave a comment, and I'll do my best to explain.
The larger question though is "one pot meals" or convenience cooking, and that boils down to a question of approach.
This is taken at least in part from the Cooking within your Persona class that I occasionally teach. I'm going to be doing it in New Jersey in June, so I'm going through my list of questions and my fictional recipe.
One concept that seems to have been lost in the last decade or so is the idea of pot herbs. Virtually every Belgian recipe for a stew or soup begins with a carrot, a leek, an onion, a sprig of chervil (or parsley) and, depending on time of year and/or food being prepared either celery tops, celery root, or fennel.
None of these is fancy. None of these is something we usually think of as an herb (well, parsley/chervil maybe). These are the base, the foundation, for the recipes. If you're expected to chop it all fine, then the carrots are probably going to dissolve and act as a thickener. Sometimes things are pureed at the end of cooking. Often they are chunks to give texture to the waterzooie, stew, or hutspot.
In virtually every recipe, these ingredients, often with a bay leaf and some thyme, is cooked until soft in a mixture of oil and butter. Everything else, is another layer of flavor on top of this basic.
When I was living witheanja, we talked about how I made my one pot meals. These were things that were fixed for dinner, often after we got home from work.
I usually started with an onion. If I was making an Italian style meal, I'd add garlic; if I was leaning toward Indian or pseudo chinese, I'd add ginger. The choice of oil came into play here, too. Indian demands ghee. Italian requires olive oil, and Chinese would generally be made with safflower oil. But there were also recipes that used bacon and then sauteed the onions in that fat. French recipes used unsalted butter. But I could never go wrong, upon walking in the front door, with starting to chop an onion.
rhiannonhero wanted easy recipes. I hope yesterday's lentil recipe was helpful. I think Sunday will be my recipe day as that's the day I'm most likely to have a great deal of time to copy out/explain things. If anything is confusing, please just leave a comment, and I'll do my best to explain.The larger question though is "one pot meals" or convenience cooking, and that boils down to a question of approach.
This is taken at least in part from the Cooking within your Persona class that I occasionally teach. I'm going to be doing it in New Jersey in June, so I'm going through my list of questions and my fictional recipe.
One concept that seems to have been lost in the last decade or so is the idea of pot herbs. Virtually every Belgian recipe for a stew or soup begins with a carrot, a leek, an onion, a sprig of chervil (or parsley) and, depending on time of year and/or food being prepared either celery tops, celery root, or fennel.
None of these is fancy. None of these is something we usually think of as an herb (well, parsley/chervil maybe). These are the base, the foundation, for the recipes. If you're expected to chop it all fine, then the carrots are probably going to dissolve and act as a thickener. Sometimes things are pureed at the end of cooking. Often they are chunks to give texture to the waterzooie, stew, or hutspot.
In virtually every recipe, these ingredients, often with a bay leaf and some thyme, is cooked until soft in a mixture of oil and butter. Everything else, is another layer of flavor on top of this basic.
When I was living with
eanja, we talked about how I made my one pot meals. These were things that were fixed for dinner, often after we got home from work. I usually started with an onion. If I was making an Italian style meal, I'd add garlic; if I was leaning toward Indian or pseudo chinese, I'd add ginger. The choice of oil came into play here, too. Indian demands ghee. Italian requires olive oil, and Chinese would generally be made with safflower oil. But there were also recipes that used bacon and then sauteed the onions in that fat. French recipes used unsalted butter. But I could never go wrong, upon walking in the front door, with starting to chop an onion.
