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.

Tomatoes from our garden, ready for roasting, to go into a soup made with roasted tomato and garlic, basil and a bit of crème fraîche.  If you are thinking “do we have to hear more about what Jim is growing in his garden?”, I can only ask for your indulgence.  I am a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, and the only serious gardening I have ever done has been since we arrived in France full time.  Our (very) modest harvests still seems at least a bit miraculous to me!

Fresh Washington State morel mushrooms being sauteed as part of the oil preserving process. These beauties will end up as garnish for our potato-leeks soup, currently on the menu at Café Presse. Yum!

Here at Café Presse, we are busy getting ready for the debut of our new summer menu that starts Wednesday June 26th!

Creamy leek-potato soup garnished with crispy jambon de Bayonne

Our Quarterly Chef’s Dinner took place at Cafe Presse last evening and frankly it was a blast. The theme for February’s dinner was  “Celebrate Sparkles” and  it offered a great opportunity both to try some of the lesser-known sparking wine of the French countryside and to also see how well these wines pair with food (all year long, but they seem to really lend themselves to a winter menu!).

Here are some photos of the dishes we served at last night’s event – Enjoy!

Pureed soup of roasted butternut squash and honeycrisp apples, garnished with chèvre crème fraîche. Miam Maim!

 Menu

Les amuse bouches
Mimolette and bacon gougères warm from the oven
Black cod tartare, pink grapefruit, chervil, shallots on house-made buckwheat baguette

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Potage aux légumes d’hiver et son consommé aux crevettes
Shellfish consommé with leeks, spinach and celery root, smoked prawns and Brittany sea-salt butter

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Salmis de canard au Cremant rosé de Loire
Muscovy duck simmered with rosé Cremant de Loire, roasted turnips and greens, brown bread trencher spread with duck liver mousse

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Tomme de Laqueuille au bleu, biscottis salées au thym et noisettes torréfiées
Cow’s milk bleu cheese from Auvergne served with savory biscotti scented with thyme and toasted hazelnuts

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Financier au citron et son sabayon au Cremant
Lemon financier cake served with Meyer lemon-Cremant sorbet and Cremant sabayon

For reservations, please call Café Presse at 206.709.7674

Cafe Presse chef de cuisine James O’Hern unveiled his new menu for Spring 2018 today with the traditional staff tasting.  The staff tasting is sort of a cross between a dinner party and a training class on all the details of the new menu; food, friends and lots of talk about the dishes.

Here are some photos to whet your appetite. Hope you will come by Cafe Presse soon to try the new dishes for yourself.

And watch this space for photos of the new dessert menu coming soon!

Serves 8