Preserved grape leaves are a standard ingredient in many Mediterranean cuisines.  Greek dolmathes, those tasty little bundles of rice, herbs and spices wrapped in grape leaves, are perhaps the recipe best known to Americans.  But they are also great for wrapping meat and fish for grilling or for wrapping goat cheeses during aging. A warm, wet spring here has meant that our grapes have gone crazy, sending out tons of  vines and leaves that needed to be trimmed back to favor the development of grapes.  Fortunately, preserving grape leaves is quick and easy.  I easily fit 80 leaves in one liter jar, which should be plenty for this summer’s cooking.
By the way, I always assumed that the lemony flavor of dolmathes came from lemon juice added to the filling. But while working this recipe, I tried one of the fresh grape leaves and found it to have a distinctly lemony flavor all its own.  I cant wait to wrap up a nice piece of merlu or cod for the barbecue this summer!

Apple sauce is so completely easy to make that it hardly seems necessary to write a recipe.  Peel apples, add sugar, cook, cool, that’s about all there is to it. However, there are a few tips that help assure that your results with be top.  Here are a couple:

• Apple sauce is a great destination for bruised or damaged fruit or even apples that have insect damage. Just cut out the bad parts and use the rest for applesauce. This is especially helpful if you have your own apple tree and need to use fallen or overripe fruit.
• Peel or not to peel?  Well, leaving the peel means that your apple sauce will have a maximum of good nutrients, most of which are concentrated in the peel.  But not everyone likes having pieces of peel in the finished sauce, its not a great textural thing. My solution is to simmer the peels with the water to capture all the nutrients, then strain this cooking liquid over the apples to make the sauce.
• If you are not a fan of white processed sugar, use honey. By selecting a honey with a flavor profile you like, you can add a lovely flavoring element to your applesauce. Ask your local honey artisan, as honey from different parts of the year can taste very different. Also, you can vary the amount of sugar or honey you use to suit your taste for sweetness.
• While peeling and coring your apples, it is best to hold them in a bowl of water acidified with lemon juice or apple cider vinegar. This will prevent them for oxidizing and give a better color to your sauce.

Clafoutis is basically a dense custard cake, differing from a flan in that its custard is made with the addition of flour.  The result is almost like a crepe batter, and it forms the perfect vehicle for soaking up the juices of any fruit baked in it. At the restaurants, we made clafoutis with a whole range of fruits, including pears, berries, cherries, plums, figs, peaches and more.  But pie cherries are the classic version of clafoutis and my personal favorite.

The question of whether or not to pit the cherries before baking them into a clafoutis is one that is hotly debated here in the southwest.  Some say that leaving the pits in makes for cherries that are full of juice and more delicious.  Others say the whole idea is for the juice of the fruit to mix in with the clafoutis batter.  The receptionist at the veterinary clinic where we take our cats (who seems pretty well informed on the matter) says that the choice is regional:  around La Rochelle and the Poitou, she claims, pits are left in. In the deep southwest, like where we are in the Béarn, pits are removed.  For me, the inconvenience of eating a dessert with unpitted cherries seems to be the most important point, so I pit.

One note on alcohol used in clafoutis.  Dark rum and a little vanilla are traditional.  However, when making this clafoutis, it seemed to me that the combination of cherries and Armagnac would be a winner. So I left out the vanilla and substituted a few tablespoons of Bas-Armagnac for the rum.  I think it worked out very well!

Gnocchi alla Romana is a wonderfully comforting dish.  Bubbling and crispy with cheese on the outside, soft and rich inside, it makes a fantastic side dish with a roasted leg of lamb or even as the center of the plate with grilled asparagus.  It was also a trademark dish for my mother-in-law, Marianne, who almost always served it with a thick sirloin steak, grilled to perfection by Bill, her husband, on his faithful Weber Kettle. I wheedled the recipe out of Marianne after my first taste and have made it many times since.

Here in Orthez, grits are not readily available, so it has been a number of years since we’ve had it. However, I recently got the bug to give it a try using the course polenta  made from the Béarnais corn variety called Grand Roux Basque – see my earlier post for more info on this local specialty.  The results were pretty darn good, although slightly different from the original;  the Grand Roux Basque cornmeal is nuttier and more finely ground than grits, so the gnocchi were more robustly flavored (a plus) and a bit softer (a minus).  All in all, I’d call it a success that deserves further refinement.

For the recipe, I can offer no better than that written by Marianne herself, pictured below.  This original recipe card is a bit of a family heirloom, which I have preserved carefully.  Enjoy!

Wondering what to do with that celery root that came in your CSA farm box? Here is an idea that may sound a little out-there but really works:  celery root frites!  These are really quick and easy, and roast up tender on the inside and even a bit crispy on the outside, especially if you have a convection oven.  Plus, the strong, almost bitter flavor of celery root melds really well with warm spices.

A recent inventory of my freezer revealed a significant number of chicken livers, the result of my inability to waste anything that can be later turned into something yummy!  To explain, each time I buy a whole chicken, the carcass, heart and gizzards all go into stock.  Chicken livers, on the other hand, are no good for stock, as they will make it bitter and cloudy.  So I save them up, tightly wrapped, in the freezer, until I have enough to make chicken liver mousse, a favorite around here.

This is not so much a recipe as a general discussion, as chicken liver mousse adapts well to improvisation and ingredient substitutions.

This recipe, featuring the snap of yogurt, is inspired by a recipe from the excellent Vancouver BC restaurant Vig’s.  The very simple curry sauce works well also with chickpeas, diced sweet potato or winter squash, and also makes a great accompaniment to a poached whitefish filet, like cod or halibut.

Serves 4

In his book “The Unprejudiced Palate” (which is part personal history, part practical garden and kitchen guide, part cookbook, and all a fun and interesting read), Dr. Angelo Pellegrini says that soft polenta in Italy has roughly the same relationship to pasta as brown country bread has to the baguette in France: it is what everyone ate as a daily staple until the industrial revolution made the more highly processed replacement product widely available. Cheap, filling and warming, cornmeal porridge was the ideal peasant food.

Although it is most often associated with Italy, it is also found in the cuisines of southern France, where the growing of corn has a a long history.  Near us, in the French Basque countries, the organic farmer’s cooperative Arto Gorria has brought back the production of Grand Roux Basque corn.  This heirloom field-corn varietal, known for its multicolored ears, with variations from gold to red to maroon to almost brown, is milled into corn flour and course polenta meal.

This easy recipe is excellent made with Grand Roux Basque polenta meal, which give the polenta a nutty, whole grain flavor. But works as well with any organic polenta. Very simple and very rich at the same time, creamy polenta is great served with a hearty winter beef stew, or as I did, with pork cheeks simmered with vermouth, rosemary and fennel.

I was recently in Segovia, Spain, where we enjoyed the local specialty, roasted suckling pig…crackling, mahogany colored skin on the outside and meltingly tender meat on the inside. Yum!  However, getting hold of a sucking pig is not the easiest  thing for most people. So instead, here is a recipe for roast whole pork shank that give the same crisply/tender feedback.  The trick to getting the skin crispy is 1) make sure that you ask your butcher for skin-on shank, as otherwise it will almost surely be removed 2)  rubbing the skin with a salt rub at least 24 hours before roasting dries out the skin, making it easier to crisp up 3) roast the shank first in a very hot oven for about 45 minutes, then lower the temperature and let the shank cook until crispy and tender.

For the second anniversary party at O Panier Local, we made a community-sized pot of garbure to offer to our friends and neighbors.  Like all good soups, we started our garbure the day before the fête, and let it simmer slowly for hours.  Yummy!

If you are not familiar with garbure, it is an emblematic dish of the Béarn, sort of like a cassoulet but more soup-like, without the tomatoes found in cassoulet and with a lot of seasonal veggies added.  Cabbage and potatoes are a must, and root vegetables like turnips, carrots and rutabaga are often included. Depending on your budget, garbure can include a ham bone (from the famous jambon de Bayonne preferably), pork, sausages or duck confit. I like to make it with confit duck neck and gizzards. Check out this post (from 2011!) for a longer discussion of garbure.