Around My French Table (67 page)

I
FIND IT BOTH DELIGHTFUL AND ODD
that I've never been served baby bok choy at a single Parisian dinner party, since it's a vegetable that I can count on finding at just about every market. Who, besides
moi,
is buying it? Most often used in Chinese cooking, baby bok choy takes perfectly to the French technique of cooking
en papillote
—oven-steaming keeps the bok choy's pale celadon color, the delicacy of its leaves (I love the slight furling at their edges), and the firmness of its bulbous body. While you can cook bok choy with Asian flavorings—toss it with soy, ginger, garlic, and one drop of sesame oil—I like to give it a more Europe-in-the-spring accent by having it share the pouch with bright green sugar snaps, baby white onions, and slim, slim slices of garlic. Finishing it with olive oil, mint, and orange zest makes this pure invention taste as though it might have come from somewhere along the French-Italian border.

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Cut four 12-inch squares of nonstick aluminum foil, and have a baking sheet at hand.

If necessary, string the sugar snaps by pulling on the little bit of "string" sticking out from one end of the pea, then pull the string across the top of the pod. Cut the sugar snaps crosswise in half and toss them into a bowl. Quarter the bok choy lengthwise and add to the bowl, along with the onions.

If you'd like, you can finely chop the garlic, but I prefer to slice it. If you use a garlic mandoline (a mini mandoline), a Benriner slicer, or a regular mandoline, you'll get lovely, petal-thin slices of garlic; if you're sans mandoline, cut the garlic into slivers with a small, very sharp knife. Toss the garlic into the bowl. As for the orange zest, I like to have skinny ribbons of zest for this dish, so I use a zester—a little scraper with tiny holes in the top that removes the zest in strands—but you can remove the zest with a vegetable peeler and chop it, or you can grate it. Toss the zest into the bowl, pour in the olive oil, add the mint sprigs, and season generously with salt and pepper.

Spoon an equal amount of the mix onto the center of each piece of foil. Draw up the edges of the foil and seal the packets well, but don't crimp the foil too close to the vegetables—you want to leave room around the ingredients so they can steam. Put the packets on the baking sheet.

Bake the
papillotes
for 15 minutes, or until the bok choy is tender—carefully open a packet and poke a piece with the tip of a knife to test.

Serve the vegetables in their packets, or spoon them into individual bowls. Have a bowl of minced fresh mint on the table, if desired, so each serving can be garnished to taste.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

SERVING
The vegetables should be served as soon as you pull the packets from the oven. You can put each packet on a plate or in a shallow soup plate and open them at the table, or you can open them in the kitchen and plate them there. Have minced fresh mint for dusting each portion on the table, if you'd like. While this is perfect as a side dish—it's particularly good with fish—I think it's so pretty and so tasty that I often serve it as a starter.

STORING
You can assemble the packets a few hours ahead of time and refrigerate them; just add another minute or two to the oven time.

M
Y FRIEND DIDIER FRAYSSOU,
a wine master who can match any dish to its soul-mate wine, has a quality I adore in French men: a sophisticated palate and a love of his mom's home cooking. I don't think I'd known him five minutes before he started telling me about his mother's
farçous,
a type of crepe or galette that's loaded with greens, most especially Swiss chard. Didier comes from Laguiole in the Auvergne, but
farçous
are a staple throughout Southwest France, where all the moms have their own way of making them.

In French homes,
farçous
are a robust main course, most often served with a salad. Served as supper, the pancakes are usually fairly big, sometimes even as large as a skillet, but they can be made smaller (my preference) and served as an hors d'oeuvre, starter, or side dish. And while I'm sure that moms all over France insist that their combination of chard and herbs is the best (if not the only acceptable one), I'm equally sure that thrifty cooks vary the recipe without apology, adding whatever herbs they can snip from the garden or scavenge from the refrigerator bin and opting for another onion instead of a shallot if that's what they have on hand. I like the addition of parsley and chives to the pancakes, but if you've got rosemary or thyme instead, or if you prefer basil or sage, feel free to play around. I'm sure that somewhere in the rule book it says that
farçous
can only be made with Swiss chard, but spinach, however unorthodox, is also awfully good.

This makes a lot of pancakes, but they freeze perfectly, so I always make the full recipe. If you think this is going to be too much for you, cut the recipe in half and use 1 egg and 1 yolk.

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with foil, and line a plate with paper towels.

Put everything except the Swiss chard and oil in a blender or food processor, making sure you season the mix generously with salt and pepper, and whir until the batter is smooth. (If your machine won't handle this quantity, work in batches.) Little by little, add the chard to the mix and whir to incorporate it. There's no need to pulverize the chard—having some strands is nice.

Pour ¼ to ½ inch of oil into a large skillet and place the skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot (a drop of batter should seize immediately), spoon in a scant ¼ cup batter for each pancake—don't crowd the pan: depending on the size of the pan, 4 pancakes is probably max per batch. Cook the pancakes for about 3 minutes, until the underside is nicely browned and the edges are browned and curled. Flip the pancakes over and cook for another 2 minutes or so. Transfer the pancakes to the paper-towel-lined plate, cover with more towels, and pat off the excess oil. Place them on the foil-lined baking sheet and keep warm in the oven while you continue to make pancakes, adding more oil to the pan as needed.

MAKES ABOUT FORTY 5-INCH PANCAKES; 12 SIDE-DISH OR STARTER SERVINGS OR 8 MAIN-COURSE SERVINGS

SERVING
Traditionally,
farçous
are served with a salad as a main course, but you could serve fewer per portion as a starter or omit the salad and serve them as a side dish. If you want to serve the
farçous
as an hors d'oeuvre, you might want to include a dipping sauce or topping of crème fraîche,
cervelle de canut
(
[>]
), or plain yogurt. You might also think about drizzling them with a little basil or parsley coulis (see Bonne Idée,
[>]
)—they don't really need the coulis, but it's a good combination.

STORING
You can make the
farçous
a few hours ahead, keep them covered at room temperature, and reheat them in a conventional oven or microwave before serving. Or you can pack them airtight (make sure to separate them with small squares of wax or parchment paper) and freeze them, then reheat as needed.

I
T'S EASY TO GET CARRIED AWAY
in the Paris markets. Everything is displayed so fetchingly and while you're waiting for the vendor, you watch what everyone else is buying, talk to a few people, spy one or two things in the back of the stall—and then, when it's your turn, you buy very little that's on your list and everything that's caught your eye in the past few minutes. That's how you end up with a little of this and a little of that in the vegetable bin, and it's how new dishes are created. As you can see from the ingredient list, this dish was created in late fall. What pleased me most about this serendipitous side was the play between earthy and sweet. I don't think I'd ever have put the squash and Brussels sprouts together if they weren't packed into the bin side by side. And it was just a stroke of luck that I had both an apple and fresh sage, which is perfect with the vegetables and fruit.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Cut four 12-inch squares of nonstick aluminum foil, and have a baking sheet at hand.

Toss the squash, Brussels sprouts, apple, and olive oil together in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper, and spoon an equal amount of the mixture onto each piece of foil. Sprinkle a little bit of brown sugar over each bundle—you can use more brown sugar if you'd like—and top with a sage leaf. Draw up the edges of the foil and seal the packets well, leaving room around the ingredients so they can steam. Put the packets on the baking sheet.

Bake for 25 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender. You can open a packet to test.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

SERVING
The vegetables should be served as soon as they're cooked. You have a choice: you can open the packets in the kitchen and spoon the vegetables and their
jus
onto dinner plates or bring the sealed packets to the table on the plates and let each guest have the pleasure of savoring that first fragrant puff of steam that's released when the seal is broken.

STORING
You can make the packets a few hours ahead and keep them in the refrigerator; bake them directly from the fridge, adding a couple of minutes to their cooking time.

F
OR REASONS THAT ARE NOT CLEAR TO ME,
Jerusalem artichokes are usually pureed. They're pushed through a food mill or beaten in a mixer and served like mashed potatoes or pureed into a soup (see
[>]
for one of my favorite Jerusalem artichoke soups). These knobbly vegetables, which look a little like darker, rougher-skinned relatives of ginger, are sold mostly under the name of sunchokes in the United States—they're actually sunflower tubers. When they're pureed, you catch their artichokeness, but when they're roasted, they're more difficult to place: their flavor is mostly toasty and sweet, and their texture, so crunchy when raw, becomes soft and light, like the inside of a perfectly cooked French fry.

For this dish, the roasted artichokes are paired with another full-flavored ingredient: garlic. When you slice the garlic into translucent petals (I do this with a small mandoline made specifically for garlic or with a Benriner slicer), it browns and crisps in the oven and emerges tasting like the best snack food you've ever had. It's tempting to want to pick the petals out of the roasting dish and nibble them, but don't—as good as they are alone, they're so much better with their culinary companion, the sunchokes.