Andrew Carmellini's Bow Tie Pasta with Tomato, Arugula, and Mozzarella

Café Boulud Cookbook: Recipe 5

This was a mistake.  I should have known better.  I had such poor results with the Urban Italian cookbook, why would I take on another Carmellini recipe?  Is his food better under the wing of Daniel Boulud?  No.  As a side note, however, this is not to say I wouldn't go to his restaurants, I just can't trust him to write a recipe for the home cooking audience.  That said, this did not come together, quite literally.  Boulud praises the sauce, says that that is what this dish is all about, but it was not special and  it was not even that good.  The small bow ties did not hold the loose sauce well at all, and I had to think the sauce should have been thicker, but it doesn't stay on the stove very long.  Too much olive oil is used throughout the recipe which I think adds to the loose consistency. You add the cooked pasta to the sauce and then, after plating or bowling, add the cherry tomatoes, arugula, and mozzarella on top of it.  This is not what I call a recipe.  This is what I call making pasta and putting things on it.  It tasted fine, but only just that and I had a difficult time finishing my portion.  Glad there were no leftovers.

Corn Soup with Nutmeg

Boulud Recipe 4

Making this recipe was sort of cheating because it is from a different Daniel Boulud Cookbook, Cooking with Daniel Boulud.  Being somewhat discouraged with the three "Café" recipes I have made, I thought going a step up to a more "restaurant" type of focus that I might have better luck.  And I did.  Since I moved back to New York (state) I felt like I could start eating corn (on the cob) again.  Sorry midwest, but I don't trust you when it comes to corn.  Your fields are too vast and the sacks your corn comes in, even at the farmers market, seem a little too corporate to be non-gmo or monsanto or both.  But back here in the empire state, Hand Melon Farm in Greenwich grows a number of varieties of corn, all unsprayed.  The variety I bought for this soup was Providence, and it was sweet.  Best eaten uncooked.  But cook it I did, because though Boulud's recipe makes a cold soup, I wanted a hot soup.  He offers in his introduction to the recipe that you can throw in the some aromatics, celery, carrots, onions, perhaps some potatoes, and make this into a corn chower.  Corn chowder was just what I wanted, but how to make it come together as a chowder is information that is not offered.  Undeterred, I simply cooked the vegetables in butter until soft and set aside, following the recipe the normal way, then adding the vegetables back into the mix at the end.  This worked just fine.  And it wasn't difficult.  The soup had good corn flavor, though less strong than I had expected. The chives were a nice touch as a garnish, and my only qualm was that the nutmeg was barely discernable which is easily resolved by adding a little more than called for in the recipe.  Overall, this was a success and enjoyable to eat both hot and cold, as well as a few days later as leftovers.

Heirloom Tomato and Goat Cheese Salad

Café Boulud Cookbook: Recipe 3

Made this back on July 22 and it was not a recipe to repeat.  For something as simple as tomatoes and goat cheese with a pesto vinaigrette, it was way too fussy.  Had the recipe been straightforward this could have worked.  Instead, Boulud has you marinating the tomatoes in a pesto.  But this pesto is thick and terrible, really.  Had the pesto been the simple basil, pine nuts, parmesan, olive oil variety then all might have been well.  In addition to the pesto, you throw parsley and oregano into the salad, which is not necessary as the herbs add little to nothing.  This was a complete flunker and I think even the worst cook could have put together a more successful version of this salad by just using common sense.  Please note that I photographed the salad before adding the goat cheese.  The goat cheese covered a lot of the salad and it is easy to imagine what goat cheese would look like on this.

Salmon and Sorrel Troisgros

Café Boulud Cookbook: Recipe 2

I made this recipe on July 21st- I am behind in posting my Daniel Boulud recipes due mainly to moving to another state and getting settled in.  But as for the recipe- Boulud says to use a non-stick pan to cook the fish.  I didn't have a non-stick pan and thought that my relatively non-stick Lodge pan would be just fine.  I was wrong.  You need a true non-stick pan for this recipe.  The Salmon is cut thin, like pork or veal cutlets would be, and thus the fish cooks quickly.  Despite the my fish sticking to the pan I somehow cooked it perfectly even if it did not look perfect on the plate (as you can see in the photo). The sauce was supposed to go under the fish, not on top, but i used the sauce to cover my aesthetic errors instead.  The sauce was good but we didn't know what the sorrel brought to it, and Paul rightly brought up that the sauce should have been thicker and richer.  Boulud calls for the sauce to simmer for a mere 15 minutes, which we both thought was way too sort a time for a french white sauce.  That or butter, more butter!  If you are good at cooking fish and making sauces, i'd give this recipe a try.  If you don't have a non-stick pan, definitely skip this recipe, or cook the salmon however you like it and make the sauce to go with it.

Creamy Lemon and Raspberry Tart

Café Boulud Cookbook: Recipe 1

This didn't look or taste special, and when I make a tart, I want it to be special.  Made with a Pâte Sablée tart shell that didn't fully bake- I guess it needed to be in the oven longer, despite my following directions correctly.  That was the first problem, and correctable, so not a big deal.  The lemon base was very tart.  I like my lemons tart, but this was perhaps a bit too tart.  The raspberries, which I got fresh from the Farmers Market were only ok and didn't not bring the flavor that I expected.  Usually when there is a tart in the house it gets devoured.  But this one stayed around for a few days.  The good news is that it improved with age, though not enough to try repeating the recipe.

Daniel Boulud's Café Boulud Cookbook

There was never a formal decision to make the Café Boulud Cookbook the next recipe book to focus on.  Paul was itching for me to make a tart, and I had had my eye on one in this book for a few weeks now- the Creamy Lemon and Raspberry Tart.  So while I was flipping through the book to find the recipe, I figured I should take a closer look at the recipes to see if anything else looked good for the weekend.  I found a number of recipes I'd like to try  and then passed the book off to Paul to peruse.  He marked recipes he was interested in, but his excitement upon seeing the photo of the Sea Bass en Croûte sealed the deal.  It was the biggest excitement since Coulibiac of Salmon (which we still have not made).  We made a list of ingredients we'd need for the first few recipes and went off to the farmers market and Whole Foods to get started on the project.  French pastry and dessert aside, we don't eat much French, or French-influenced food, but that is only due to our relative lack of exposure.  It's an area we would both like to explore further and hope that Boulud's "French American recipes for the home cook" will get us off to a good start with french cooking.

Chocolate Chubbies

Sarabeth's Bakery: Recipe 3

Faced with the situation of moving soon and having way too much chocolate on my hands, it didn't take me too long to turn to Sarabeth's recipe for Chocolate Chubbies.  As fortune would have it, this recipe called for the exact amount of chocolate I had left in my cupboard (minus the Valrhona which I reserved for snacking).  On the plus side these cookies were very easy to make.  They were best the same day they were out of the oven- maybe an hour after cooling. Every day after they deteriorated in quality, and were not really that enjoyable to eat by day 3, so if you make these cookies plan to share them, the recipe makes 2 dozen.  But do I recommend making them?  No, I can't say I do.  While they surely are chocolatey, they are lacking a certain something to boost them to the next level.  Maybe a bit of espresso would do them some good?  A good brownie makes for a better baked good in this case, and if you're after a really chocolatey cookie, go for Cook's Triple Chocolate Cookies, which are pretty perfect.  I don't think much of Sarabeth as a cookie maker so far.  Stay tuned to hear about her linzer cookies, however, which I am committed to making soon despite my shaky outcomes thus far.