French Cooking

I have been enjoying watching the new Cooking Channel and in the process, I have found some new chefs that I'm looking forward to experimenting with. Last night's menu came from Laura Calder's French Food at Home show. We started with Hot Mussels, steam mussels for about 3 minutes, until the shells open. Remove the top shell and place the mussels in shells on a baking sheet. Top them with an herb butter and sprinkle with fresh breadcrumbs. Pop them under the broiler for a couple of minutes until the breadcrumbs are golden. A nice switch from simple steamed mussels.

We followed this with a poached trout stuffed with mascarpone cheese. The trout is poached in a wine flavored bouillon, and cooled. The mascarpone cheese is seasoned with chives, lemon zest and juice, and salt & pepper. The cheese goes into the middle of the cold fish. A little more cheese is spread on the outside of the fish and very thinly sliced cucumber rounds are added to look somewhat like fish scales. This was a very cool, refreshing dish; perfect for a hot Texas day. This was served with a Pea and Fava Salad which was perfect.

The only disappointment in the menu was the Angel Cake for dessert. It is very much like an angle food cake, except it does include the egg yolks, making it a denser cake. The instructions were to bake this cake at 400 for 1 hour and it came out rather crisp. I will try this recipe again, but either turn down the oven or cut way back on the baking time.

The whole meal turned out to be a nice change of pace!