by Ellise Pierce who also writes the blog Cowgirl Chef. I received a review copy, and the publisher has provided an extra book to give away. Ellise and I have chatted via Twitter, visited each other’s blogs, and emailed up and back for a couple of years now. All the while, I’ve been green with envy over the fact that she lives in Paris with all those boulangeries and patisseries right outside her door. And, since she’s from Texas, she’s been maybe a little jealous of my easy access to Tex-Mex restaurants and our amazing, summer peaches here in Austin. But, as she explains in this book, one way to close that gap between far-away places is through cooking. When she arrived in Paris and things felt unfamiliar, what made everything better was cooking the dishes she missed from home. Then, little by little, she started finding new favorite foods and warming up to her new home. In the chapter intros and recipe headnotes, which are so well-written, you get glimpses of Ellise’s Parisian life, navigating different markets, learning to substitute ingredients, and working on her French accent both in the city and on trips to other parts of the country. The recipes are either Texas-style food with French flair or homemade versions of French restaurant dishes. There are Chicken Empanadas with Cilantro Yogurt made with classic roast chicken, Cowgirl Quiche with a polenta crust, My Big Fat French Salad based on one from Le Relais du Gascon, Spinach Potato and Caramelized Onion Tacos served with homemade salsa if you can’t get Cholula, Basque-style Fish en Papillote, Brown Butter Walnut Cakes, and French Chocolate Sauce. I especially enjoyed the tips or Double-Duty suggestions for recipes. For instance, the Gascon-Style Pork Chops with Pepper Honey includes suggestions for other uses for that black pepper honey like spooning it over slices of Manchego. Another tip that caught my eye was in the recipe for Cauliflower Galettes with Chipotle Creme Fraiche in which she suggests the option of using zucchini instead of cauliflower. I had just received some zucchini from my CSA, and I couldn’t wait to try those little, savory cakes made with cornmeal and topped with spicy creme fraiche. If you do use cauliflower, there are instructions for roasting it first, but with zucchini, you just grate it, leave it raw, and add it to the batter. The batter is made by whisking cornmeal, baking powder, sea salt, cayenne, and cumin in a bowl. In a separate bowl, eggs, plain yogurt, and water were combined, and the wet mixture was poured over the dry ingredients and mixed. The grated zucchini, some grated cheddar, and sliced green onions were folded into the batter. Little pancakes were fried in vegetable oil over medium-low heat so the middles could cook through before the surfaces browned too much. Chopped, canned chipotles were stirred into creme fraiche for the topping. 
I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program. Ellise will be in Texas for book signing events at the following locations: Tuesday, May 15 Austin, TX Westwood Country Club (invitation only luncheon) Saturday, June 2 Dallas, TX Southern Methodist University bookstore, 2 pm Sunday, June 3 Fort Worth, TX TCU campus bookstore, 1 pm Saturday, June 9 San Antonio, TX The Twig Bookshop, 10 am – 12 pm Sunday, June 10 San Antonio, TX Quarry Farmers Market Saturday, July 7 Fort Worth, TX Cowtown Farmers Market Monday, Aug 13 Austin, TX Lake Austin Spa Resort Cauliflower Galettes with Chipotle Creme Fraiche Recipe re-printed with publisher's permission from Cowgirl Chef: Texas Cooking with a French Accent by Ellise Pierce, Running Press, 2012.Makes about a dozen (2 1/2-inch/6 cm) galettes 1 medium head of cauliflower, cut into florets olive oil sea salt and pepper 1 cup/145 grams of cornmeal 2 teaspoons of baking powder 1 teaspoon of sea salt 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper 1/2 teaspoon of cumin 2 eggs 1 (5.29 ounce/150 gram) container of Greek yogurt 1 cup/240 ml of water 4 green onions, sliced 1 cup/60 grams of grated cheddar cheese 4 tablespoons of vegetable oil Chipotle Creme Fraîche (recipe follows) 1. Preheat your broiler and line a cookie sheet with foil. Position a rack in the middle of the oven. 2. Toss the cauliflower florets on the foil-lined cookie sheet, add a little olive oil, and salt and pepper. Toss it all together with your hands, then slide the pan into the oven. The florets will begin to brown after about 10 minutes—when they do, pull them out of the oven and turn them over, so the other side browns, too. This’ll take about 10 more minutes. When browned on both sides, remove from the oven and let cool. 3. To make the galettes, in a medium bowl, whisk together the cornmeal, baking powder, sea salt, cayenne pepper, and cumin. 4. In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, yogurt, and water. Add this mixture to the dry ingredients and stir together. If the batter is too thick, just add a bit more water. Gently fold in the cauliflower florets, grated cheddar, and green onions, reserving about 2 tablespoons of green onions for garnish. 5. Heat 2 tablespoons of the vegetable oil in a skillet and turn the heat to medium-low. When it’s hot, spoon about 2 tablespoons of the batter for each galette into the skillet, fitting in as many as you can. You’ll need to work in batches. Cook the galettes for 3 to 4 minutes, or until the bottoms are brown, and flip to the other side for another few minutes. You don’t want these to cook too fast, or they’ll be wet in the middle. Repeat with the remaining vegetable oil and batter. Serve immediately with Chipotle Crème Fraîche, and sprinkle some chopped onions on top. ADVANCE PLANNING: Roast your cauliflower ahead of time, so all you have to do is assemble and cook them up. COWGIRL TIP: Reheat your leftover galettes the next day—just pop them in the toaster. SWAP-IT: Try using grated zucchini instead of cauliflower. Chipotle Creme Fraiche Makes 2 cups/480 ml 16 ounces/480 ml of crème fraîche or sour cream 2 to 3 chipotle chiles in adobo sauce Toss your chipotles in a food processor to finely chop them up, or do this by hand. Add your crème fraîche or sour cream, and stir it up. Voila!
UPDATE: 21 May 2012 The winner of the cookbook is Sarah from the blog Thyme.
For the sweet potato cakes:
Adapted from Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi(Makes 34 small cakes)
2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into large chunks
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
5 green onions, both white and green parts, finely chopped
4-6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4-6 tablespoons butter
-Steam the sweet potato chunks for 15-20 minutes until completely tender, and then transfer to a colander and allow to drain until dry.
- Once very dry, place sweet potato chunks in a large mixing bowl and mash with a potato masher to break up chunks. Add flour and finely chopped green onions, and mix with your hands to form a smooth batter. Using your hands here is best so that it doesn’t become over mixed. In a food processor, the sweet potato mixture could quickly become gummy. Taste for seasoning and add more salt and pepper if needed. Once the mixture is smooth, and the flour and green onions are mixed in, you’re ready to fry. Note: the mixture should be sticky but not wet, so more flour may be needed.
- In a non-stick skillet, heat two tablespoons extra virgin olive oil and two tablespoons butter over medium-high heat. Form round, flat cakes from about two tablespoons of batter per cake, and fry four or five at a time for three minutes per side until golden. Transfer finished cakes to a paper towel-lined baking sheet to drain and cool. Add more oil and butter to pan between batches as needed, and continue frying a few cakes at a time until all are ready for their toppings.
For the black bean salsa:
1 16 oz. can black beans, rinsed and drained
1-2 chipotles in adobo, finely chopped
1 small, yellow bell pepper, small diced
¼ cup finely minced red onion
¼ cup cilantro leaves, chopped
Juice of 1 lime
¼ teaspoon salt
-Combine all salsa ingredients, starting with one chipotle, in a small bowl and stir to combine. Taste for chipotle heat and add more if desired, and taste for seasoning and add more salt if needed. Salsa can be made in advance and stored in the refrigerator.
To assemble for serving:
½ cup sour cream
- Place sweet potato cakes on a serving platter and add a small dollop of sour cream to each. Top sour cream with a small spoonful of black bean salsa, and enjoy.
Roasted Tomatillo Chipotle Salsa
inspired by La Condesa
2-3 chipotles in adobo depending on size and how spicy you want your salsa to be, plus 2 tablespoons adobo sauce from can
1 large red onion
12 tomatillos, husks removed and washed
4 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for roasting
Salt and pepper to taste
-Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees F. Chop onion into wedges and place on a baking sheet with tomatillos, and drizzle with olive and season with salt and pepper. Roast in the oven for about 20 minutes or until the vegetables are softened and browned.
-Transfer roasted vegetables to a food processor and add chipotles and adobo sauce. Puree until smooth and then slowly add olive oil while the machine is running. Taste for salt and add more if needed.
In the December Food and Wine, there was a story about Boston chef Ken Oringer and the tailgate party he hosts on the day he cuts down his Christmas tree. The picnic menu for this party was a really good one, and I have to keep the pages I cut from the magazine because I’d like to recreate the entire thing some day. It included cubano sandwiches, this black bean and quinoa salad, mulled cider, an avocado, grapefruit, and hearts of palm salad, artichoke and spinach dip with spiced pita chips, and caramel pecan bars. Reading that list again just now made me a little hungry. Last week, I wasn’t ready to throw a picnic party and prepare all of that, but I had a plan for jibaritos and thought this salad would fit well with them. As usual, when I cook dried beans, I cook a lot of them at once. I planned ahead, cooked a lot of beans, set aside the amount needed for this recipe, and stored the extra beans in the freezer for future uses. With the black beans already cooked, prepping the salad was quick and easy.
First, the quinoa was cooked and then spread on a sheet pan to cool quickly. A dressing was made by whisking together sherry vinegar, soy sauce, lime juice, and a chopped chipotle chile, and then olive oil was incorporated. Sliced scallions, minced red onion, finely diced yellow pepper, and chopped cilantro were combined with the cooked and cooled black beans and quinoa. The dressing was poured over the mixture, it was tossed to combine, seasoning was checked, and that was it.
The salad is so full of flavor and varied textures you won’t even pause to think about how healthy it is. The chipotle added a little spiciness, and you could increase that and taste as you go while making the dressing. Obviously, you could change the vegetables in the salad, but the ones suggested were a nice mix of colors with the yellow pepper against the black beans and flecks of green cilantro and scallions here and there. This makes a very large quantity of salad, but it stores well in the refrigerator. It’s also great on a bed of arugula and topped with some crumbled feta, so I didn’t mind having a big bowl of it in the refrigerator for a few days.
For a combination of six ingredients, eight if you count water and salt, this soup has amazing flavor. I wanted a hearty, wintery, bean soup, and I was willing to expend the energy to soak the beans, chop vegetables, and stir for hours while it simmered. Then, I found this recipe, and almost none of that was required. Did you know you don’t even have to soak baby lima beans before cooking them? I didn’t. They’re big enough, even though they’re babies, that I would have assumed they should be soaked overnight like other dried beans. In less than an hour of simmering, they were cooked through and tender. As they cooked in plain water, a head of garlic bobbed along with them and added flavor. Sauteed onion and chipotles were added once the beans were cooked, and other than squeezing in some lime juice, that was all the effort that was needed. This soup is found in Super Natural Cooking, and it was part of a nice, light meal with a citrus and celery salad.
As I mentioned, the baby limas were not soaked. They were simply washed and then placed in a pot with water. The top was cut off a bulb of garlic and it was added to the water. This was left to simmer for 40 minutes. Meanwhile, I finely chopped an onion and a few chipotles from a can, and those were sauteed in clarified butter. The beans really don’t demand any special attention while they cook, but you should check them for doneness just before 40 minutes have elapsed to be sure they don’t get to a point of mushiness. When they were just cooked through, the sauteed onion and chipotles, some adobo sauce from the can of chipotles, and salt were added. After a few more minutes of simmering, the soup was ready.
The soup was so easy to prepare that I actually went ahead and made the suggested garnish as well. Crunchy topopos were made from a multi-grain tortilla which was thinly sliced, the strips were tossed with some vegetable oil, and they were baked for a few minutes. They were a nice textural contrast on top of the spicy, brothy soup. The butter sauteed onions added richness while the chipotles’ smokiness and spice worked some kind of magic. This tasted far more complex than it actually was, and I might not have believed how simple the recipe was had I not prepared it myself. 
When your CSA gives you greens (lots and lots of greens), make, well, make greens several different ways. Here we have quesadillas with greens and then polenta with greens and blue cheese. First, the quesadillas, and that begins with a story. A few years back, I attended a Tyler Florence cooking demonstration at a wine and food festival here in Austin. He sent someone with a microphone into the audience so questions could be asked while he cooked. There was a lot of excited giggling among the ladies, and one pointed, culinary question asked was “boxers or briefs?” He feigned embarrassment and continued cooking his spicy black eyed peas to which he had added some salt pork. Then, a serious question was asked regarding how to add flavor to the peas yet make it a vegetarian dish. Tyler began his answer with something about life without pork and then said that if you really want to leave out the pork you could use a smoked turkey wing. The woman who asked the question gave him a quizzical look, and he said, oh right, vegetarian! You could add chipotles instead for smoky flavor. I’m so glad that stuck with me. That’s exactly what I did to impart a smoky character to the greens that I cooked for the quesadillas.
Multi-grain tortillas were layered with shredded dry Jack cheese and a little shredded cheddar along with the chipotle sautéed collard greens and some seeded and chopped tomatoes. The quesadillas were fried until golden on each side and served with a homemade chipotle tomato salsa and fresh guacamole with cilantro. Our CSA provided the tomatoes this week as well. Getting local tomatoes in November is one more reason to really like Austin. Shoe leather would probably taste good melted into a cheese-filled quesadilla, but these fresh, spicy, cooked greens were especially delicious in them. To about four cups of chopped collards, I added one big finely chopped chipotle as they sauteed. For the salsa, I had two ripe, medium tomatoes which I chopped and plopped into the food processor along with two chipotles, about a quarter of a cup of finely chopped onion, and the juice of one large lime. I also added chopped cilantro and salt after pulsing a few times. This was a rather hot salsa, so you could start with one chipotle and add more to taste.
The next day, greens were sauteed with garlic and served over polenta with parmigiana topped with Maytag blue cheese. I’m afraid I don’t have a story to go with this one. I just blatantly stole this idea from the amazing Herbivoracious site. I used collard greens here again, and this time they were sautéed in olive oil with sliced garlic and crushed red peppers. The polenta was simply cooked with water, and parmigiana was stirred in when it was done. The greens paired very well with the creamy, mild polenta, and the crumbled blue cheese amplified the overall flavor. This was a great dish. It was hearty and filling, and the cheeses worked perfectly with the slight bitterness of the greens.
We also received tatsoi, arugula, eggplant, daikon, green peppers, carrots, and cilantro from our share. The quality has been fantastic, and I’m having fun coming up with new and different ways to use every bit of what we receive.
Every once in a rare while, Kurt will make a suggestion as to a type of food or a particular dish that I should attempt. Once, it was a request for potato leek soup. Another time, it was something Argentinean. Often, it’s mac and cheese. Last week, perhaps inspired by Tony’s visit to Colombia given that it came up while watching that episode, he issued a Latin American cooking challenge. There were no specifics; the meal was not required to be Colombian. This was just a general hankering for Latin American or Mexican flavors. I, of course, was delighted to comply.
In an effort to further complicate the meal, we also conducted a beer tasting during the hors d'oeurves course. To explain, we have become enamored with wheat beers (or weisse, wit, white, hefeweissen, etc.). We taste, take notes, compare, and contrast, and we have our favorites. This week, the tasting included Allagash White and Schneider Weisse. The Allagash White was light and refreshing although low on carbonation. The mild flavor was mostly of yeast, and it was the better pairing with the tostadas. The Schneider Weisse was on the darker end of the wheat beer spectrum but also mildly flavored. Both were good but neither changed the top three slots on our scorecard. Our current top three continue to be:1. Mothership Wit by New BelgiumNothing touches it. This is hands down our favorite wheat beer with its crispness and slight citrus flavor.2. White Rascal by Avery Brewing Co.An excellent summer beer with a unique but subtle acidity.3. Dog in Heat Hefeweissen by Flying DogThis is also darker than most wheat beers and therefore more full-flavored and pleasantly so.I should note that Live Oak HefeWeizen is a favorite of ours, but it is not sold bottled. We’re always pleased when we find it on tap. 
Now, back to the food. I noticed these tostadas on Epicurious and thought they would be perfect for an antojito/beer tasting. I wasn’t able to purchase fresh corn tortillas on Saturday, so I used fresh whole wheat tortillas. Other than that, and skipping the scant amount of sugar listed, I followed the recipe exactly. And, wow, these were good. They were exciting to eat because they were so right. When a bit of chipotle was noticed while chewing, it was a happy moment. More chipotle would be welcome. However, the pumpkin seeds left us a little ambivalent. They were fine but didn’t really bring anything noteworthy to the mix. Definitely skippable. Everything else about these tostadas was excellent. Get the best tuna you can find, compose these quick little bites, and enjoy them as much as we did.
