A few posts back, I documented the three day epic of demi glace. The technique I used was adapted from one of my culinary idols, James Peterson, writing in Saveur magazine. In the same article he provided a handful of sauce recipes using demi glace, including a derivation of the classic pork Sauce Robert, called Sauce Charcutière.

I wanted to try this with some mustard and herb crusted roast pork tenderloin, and man was it a good match. Read to the end for our next giveaway!
Pork and Demi Glace inside…

(Don’t forget to check out our giveaway at the bottom of our Christmas Dinner post!)

Sauces are my favorite part of cooking, from ketchup to béarnaise. Since I love (and aspire to) French techniques, a good chunk of the sauces out there are based on some form of stock — vegetable stock, chicken, fish, beef, veal, lobster, lamb, duck, and so forth.

Making stock is usually a pretty simple thing to do, but there’s a technique used to take a certain type of stock to the next level of culinary refinement — demi glace.
The journey begins…

Christey and I started blogging about food on LiveJournal, just as a fun way to shoot what we would occassionally have for dinner. When I decided to step up my cooking, and Christey decided to step up her food photography, we realized we needed something a little more robust than LJ. We moved to WordPress’s site, then eventually to our own server using WordPress software. One year ago on April 1st, we bought the domain FotoCuisine.com (PhotoCuisine.com was taken, ironically on several levels, by a French company) and linked it to our WordPress site. The lines of where our food blogging started are a little blurry, but buying the domain is a pretty good line in the sand, so welcome to the second year of FotoCuisine!

Christey and I thank you very much for your support, comments, links, suggestions, and all-around fellow-foodieness!

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When I lived in Atlanta, I made a lot of gumbo. I haven’t made it in a while, though, and when I saw Top Chef’s New Orleans episode a few weeks back, I told myself I had to make it again soon.

There are factions within the gumbo world that I don’t pretend to fully comprehend. Just like wet vs. dry barbecue, if your family hasn’t made their particular version for a century or so, you’re pretty much dismissed to the sidelines of the argument. One of the biggest gumbo controversies is okra vs. file as a thickener. Personally, I annoy both sides, because I like both about equally. But, when I make it myself, I almost always use file. And, when you get right down to it, the thickener isn’t really what makes gumbo a good gumbo. If there’s any agreement at all about gumbo it’s this one fact: it’s all about the roux.

gumbo gumbo

On the 14th of June, 1800, in the Northern Italian town of Marengo, Napoleon’s troops were hit with a surprise attack from the Austrian forces, commanded by General Michael von Melas. Napoleon figured the Austrians were retreating from Italy, and spread his army widely to try to cut them off. Instead, von Melas attacked directly, with a much larger force. Napoleon was forced to fall back. Some of the French outliers were able to reach and join up with Napoleon’s main force, and a counter-attack by the French regained the battleground and scattered the Austrian army, thus winning the Battle of Marengo. By the next day, the Austrians negotiated a retreat from Northern Italy.

Hungry after the long day (over 12 hours of combat), Napoleon commanded his chef to make something in a hurry. The chef was forced to scrounge the countryside and found herbs, chicken, tomatoes, garlic, wine, olives, and appropriated some of Napoleon’s personal stash of cognac. With these foraged ingredients, the chef whipped up a meal so tasty, Napoleon considered it his “lucky meal” and requested it before many future battles.

So goes the legend of Chicken Marengo. Though Napoleon ordered that the dish never be altered, many have done so over the last couple centuries. My basic “source” recipe came from The Joy of Cooking, and I’ve gone back and forth over several years altering and changing the recipe, from making almost a casserole version, to a more traditional approach. This version leans toward traditional.

March on in…

Christmas Eve dinner is a special event for me. Every year, I cook a four-course themed dinner for my family. One year the theme was “wrapped” foods, one year the theme was red and green, that sort of thing. Since I only go to this extreme once a year, I like to go all out and push what I’ve learned about cooking. Over the years, I’ve seen some good improvement in my cooking techniques, but also in my meal planning as these dinners have been for as many as eighteen guests.

This year was a first in a few ways. My brother, who is an excellent dessert guy, developed the dessert course in harmony with the earlier courses, and he also gave me a lot of help as my “sous” this year. Previously, I’ve done the entire meal on my own, which can be limiting. Also, this was the first year in which I asked my guests to pick a theme ingredient, Iron Chef style. In years past, I would surprise my guests with the theme — this year the surprise would be on me. I did ask for a week notice, but I also had to come up with the courses, shop, prep, pre-cook, and cook for fourteen adult guests.

After Thanksgiving, the guests emailed back and forth and compiled a possible list of ingredients on which to vote:
Agar gum, liquid nitrogen, miso, the whole goat, goat dairy, filo dough, bacon, rosemary, chili pepper, green chilis, orange, pomegranate, cocoa, rum, bourbon, avocado, sugar, cheese kids like, tomato, cilantro, hazelnuts, pistachio, nuts in general, coffee, beer, deep-fried everything, bread, rice

The semifinals simmered down to coffee and avocado, with a tie-breaking vote creating another tie. So, a coin was flipped, and coffee won the spot of honor.

I created an amuse bouche and three courses of dishes using coffee, and my brother came up with a final dessert (I don’t know what he would have done with avocado).

I asked Christey if she wouldn’t mind printing a tasting menu, just a 1/2 sheet with some different fonts. Of course, she came back with a two-piece vellum and card-stock menu, tied with a coffee-colored bow. It blew me away as well as our guests.
ho ho ho

The cooler months are upon us, and one of the most colorful and healthiest ingredients for this time of year is the pomegranate. Fall and winter seasonal foods might sometimes seem a little bland — parsnips, cabbage, potatoes, squash. Pomegranates, in season from roughly September to January, offer a striking contrast with their brightness in flavor and color.

The folks at POM Wonderful were kind enough to send us a case of POM Wonderful 100% pomegranate juice, and an invite to enter their blogger recipe contest if we were so inspired. They didn’t have to ask twice.

In keeping with the seasonal theme, I created a seared duck breast, with a flavorful reduced pomegranate juice sauce. The duck was served over a “nest” of duck fat fried matchstick potatoes, and the plate was garnished with a scattering of fresh pomegranate arils.

What’s an aril? Come inside!

When I was a kid living in Ft Lauderdale and Miami, we had graceful, sweeping coconut palms on the beach. They were the palms of South Pacific and Gilligan’s Island — exotic, beautiful, and always ready to brain someone walking underneath.

Unfortunately, the coconut palms in South Florida and the Keys got hit with a blight in the 70s, and they all died out. These days, another variety of coconut palm grows in Florida, blight-resistant and just as bountiful, but they are short, squat trees that grow straight up with no arc or sweeping curve.

The last couple years I lived in Atlanta, I knew I’d move back to Florida some day, and there were two things I wanted: a fishing boat, and a coconut palm.

I got the fishing boat fairly quickly, but the first place I lived had no coconut palm. A coconut did wash up under my dock after a storm, so I planted it for fun (it may take a year for one to sprout), but it never grew. These days, we live in a house with two coconut palms in our yard, (the boat is another story — my first got swamped and destroyed by Hurricane Jeanne, and I’m currently rebuilding a project boat for fun).

We live at the northern limit for coconut palm growth. They won’t take a freeze, or even a frost, and our trees probably wouldn’t survive inland a couple miles. It takes a palm just about a year to mature a coconut, which seems like a long time, except that the palm will flower and grow another cluster about once a month, so there’s always a rotating bounty of nuts. When we first moved a little over a year ago, there were no nuts on the tree, someone had cleared them off. So now, we are harvesting our first ripe coconuts since we’ve moved in.

The coconut milk found in cans, commonly used in curries, comes from a process of extracting the liquid fat from the coconut meat found inside. I’ve always wanted to try to do this, and with a bunch of harvested nuts, I figured I’d give it a try.

I made a green curry chicken with sprouts, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, garlic, and scallions, and served it over pad thai noodles.

Sing along!

I like to keep my jalapenos on the bush until they turn red. There’s much more of a complex flavor, sweet, rich, earthy, compared to the more bitter and grassy green peppers. It’s similar to red and green bell peppers, as is the cost of the final product — the red peppers take longer to ripen, and perish more quickly, so if they’re offered in the store at all, they’re three times the price. Which doesn’t factor into things when I’m growing them in my own yard.

That said, I have to come up with recipes to use red jalapenos, or fry up a bunch as poppers.

When I was a teenager in metro Washington DC, the Washington Post had a cooking section in the weekend paper. I had some disastrous results from the more adventurous recipes (I made a stuffed squid dish, when I had no concept about seafood freshness, nor temperature control, and I’m sure that house still has a residual odor). However, one of the recipes was a chicken breast, oven baked, with a sour cream topping mixed with diced jalapenos. That one turned out pretty tasty, but I haven’t actually made it since then…and that was maybe 25 years ago.

Still, with a couple red jalapenos sitting on my counter, the sour cream and jalapeno chicken recipe from my teenage years jumped into my mind, and I tried to recreate it — from memory and a little more culinary experience.

Spicy….

I went to college in upstate New York (RPI), which meant lots of buffalo wings. There were many local hole-in-the-wall places that would deliver them to your door, just like pizza or Chinese. My spice tolerance back then was through the roof, though it’s mellowed a bit since I moved to the tropics.

Still, I make wings every now and then when I get the urge, as well as the usual standards today, like buffalo chicken tenders, buffalo chicken sandwiches, or even grouper, buffalo-style. Butter, tomato, and hot sauce is as much an upstate New York trinity as bell pepper, celery, and onion is Louisiana’s.

I like my roasted chickens simple — hot temperature and no liquid. But, I had some cornish game hens in the freezer, and it’s fun to dress up a personalized chicken, and what better way than to give it some heat, New York style?

little chickens, lots of heat

Jenn, The Leftover Queen, has a monthly Royal Foodie Joust. This month, the ingredients are: apricots, ginger, butter.

I made a pan seared duck breast, served it over stewed apricot slices, and made a ginger and apricot sauce with shallots and chives. When the duck breast had finished cooking, I fried long potato crisps in the duck fat to serve as a garnish.

Let the jousting commence…