Tag Archives: tarragon

Warm Radish Salad with Bacon and Pea Tips

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Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.  That’s the way it was with Warm Radish Salad with Bacon and Pea Tips.  Salad is a killer to photograph.  Light glints off the dressed surfaces, producing bits of glare or “hot spots.”  And if the salad is one part greens and another part something else, then while it may taste delicious to toss everything together, that homestyle approach doesn’t make for an alluring photo.  The heavier components tend to weigh down the more delicate ones.  What’s a guy with a camera and a chef for a wife to do?

Make the damn salad and photograph it a second time, that’s what.*  The salad above is composed with a photograph, or dinner guests, in mind–radishes here, salad there, easy on the dressing.  The photo shot from straight down later in the post is the way we’d normally eat the salad in all its messy collapsed glory.  Different stees.

You choose.

Happy Birthday to us – Poached Chicken Breasts with DIY Mayonnaise

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We’re on an egg roll these days.  Last week zabaglione, this week Poached Chicken Breasts with DIY Mayonnaise–and next week… well, you’ll just have to check back next week.  One hint, picnic.  And no, I’m not talking about deviled eggs.

As a younger–and thinner–man, I used to make mayonnaise a lot.  I also used to eat chicken breasts.  Then the original “white meat” took over the world as the healthy convenient food of choice and I just walked away in search of tastier pastures.  I can’t explain why I stopped making mayonnaise, except to say that after I got involved in the restaurant biz, we just drifted apart.  So here we were, decades later, bumping up against each other. Can you ever really go home again? I wanted to find out.

Flageolet Soup with Crème Fraiche, Tarragon and Mustard

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After getting back from California we wanted to catch our breath with a simple dish that wouldn’t require a lot of effort. If it went with the the crazy New England weather this week, warm or cold, all the better. Herewith Flageolet Soup with Crème Fraiche, Tarragon and Mustard. Flageolets (fla-as in flag-zhay-oh-lay) are a small, delicate bean, usually (but not always, as you can see in the photos) an alluring pale green. If you examine them closely they’re covered with faint green stripes. They’re removed from the pod before reaching full maturity, which contributes to their delicate flavor. My first encounter with them was an impulse purchase – how could I not buy a package of beans the color of young grasshoppers?