Carbonnade à la Flamande ~ Belgium Beef & Onions Braised in Beer

Carbonnade à la Flamande, a specialty of Belgium and northern France, is beef braised with onions and beer and is the last dish featured in my series on French braises. Beef Carbonnade is one of the classics and a recipe for it can be found in almost any French cookbook. For St. Patrick's Day, you can turn it into an Irish stew by braising the beef and onions in Guinness.

Julia Child, in her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, said “Beer is typical for the Belgian braise and gives a quite different character to beef than the red wine of the bourguignon.” And that is very true – the carbonnade is different from beef bourguignon or coq au vin. A carbonnade is best known for its sweet-sour combination of caramelized onions with beer. Personally I found that when comparing the beef carbonnade to the other two dishes, it doesn’t seem to have quite the depth of flavor or earthy richness of the other two French braises.

In fairness to the carbonnade however, it has only three major ingredients – beef, onions, and beer. That’s why we’ve chosen to serve potatoes and carrots alongside. But the biggest difference is that beef bourguignon and coq au vin are wine based, as compared to the beer in the carbonnade.

For the beer we used Hoegaarden (pronounced “who-gar-den”), a Belgian wheat beer with a delicious, refreshing taste. Any dark Belgian-style ale would be a good choice here.

There are probably some purist out there that would disagree with me, but I think Guinness Draught Irish dry stout is also good in a beef carbonnade, which would make it an ideal dish to serve for St. Patrick’s Day. After all, they say everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.

As tempting as it might sound to cook some vegetables in this, I think it's best to serve them on the side. By doing so you maintain the integrity of this classic dish and don't muddle the flavors of the sweet-sour caramelized onions. Potatoes are definitely an excellent accompaniment. I’ve seen it served over creamy mashed potatoes as well as buttered noodles. We’ve served ours today with boiled potatoes tossed with parley and butter and roasted carrots. Beer of course is the drink of choice with a carbonnade. As with most stews, this dish will taste even better a day or two after it's made.

Beef Carbonnade is definitely one of the classic braises that should not be overlooked.

Carbonnade à la Flamande ~ Belgium Beef & Onions Braised in Beer 
Adapted from Essential Pepin by Jacques Pepin – serves 6 to 8

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 pounds boneless beef chuck, cut into 1/3-inch-thick slices, about 3 inches wide
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
3 cups thickly sliced onions
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
Three 12-ounce cans beer, Guinness for St. Patrick's Day
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
2 bay leaves
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
Arrowroot or cornstarch slurry if needed for thickening

In an enameled cast-iron casserole, heat 1 tablespoon of the butter along with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Dry the beef well with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. Brown the beef in the casserole over moderate heat in batches, turning once, taking care not to crowd the pan or the beef will stew instead of browning. Transfer the beef to a plate and repeat in batches, using more butter & oil if necessary.

Add the onions to the casserole, cover and cook over low heat, stirring often, until browned, about 8 minutes. Stir in the flour until the onions are well-coated, and then slowly add the beer. Return the meat to the casserole along with any accumulated juices. Add the thyme and bay leaves, cover and simmer over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the beef is tender, about 2 hours.

At this point, you may refrigerate the carbonnade, when cooled, for several days in the refrigerator. Scrape off any accumulated fat on the top and return to room temperature before proceeding with the recipe.

Uncover the casserole and transfer the meat to a bowl. Add the vinegar and simmer the sauce over moderate heat until thickened slightly. If necessary, thicken with a slurry using either arrowroot or cornstarch and water. Before serving, taste for seasonings.

Printable recipe

This will be shared with Foodie Friday at Rattlebridge Farms, Miz Helen’s Country Kitchen Full Plate Thursday, Foodie Friday at Simple Recipes, Foodtastic Friday at Not Your Ordinary Recipes, Seasonal Sunday at the Tablescaper, the Clever Chick's Blog Hop, and On the Menu Monday at Stone Gable.

Have a great weekend everyone and Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Jacques Pepin’s Pork Sausage Rolls with Potatoes, Onions & Tomatoes

One of the joys of having a recorder is to be able to record our favorite television series and watch them at our convenience. Jacques Pepin’s Essential Pepin is one of our favorites. The other night we watched him make a sausage dish and remembered fondly that Stuart, my brother-in-law, had made the very same dish recently and shared one of the sausage rolls with us. If it's possible, Stuart loves Jacques Pepin even more than we do.

Today I’m going to share some of the photos we took of the sausage rolls Stuart made instead of preparing the rolls myself because for the next several weeks I’m seeing a physical therapist who has put me on a very restricted schedule of what I can and cannot do right now in addition to therapy sessions that will last for possibly as long as a month. Neck pain has recently cropped up that stems from my chronic back pain and primarily I’m not too happy about it because I won’t be able to be out-and-about visiting your blogs as much as I would like. Pardon the pun, but it's a "pain in the neck" to have to be aware of how I'm holding my head all of the time. Of course my time allotted at the computer has also been drastically restricted and that of course will also affect the regularity of my posts. So if you don’t hear from me as much as usual for a while, you’ll know the reason and please don't forget me.

Jacques’ recipe is available on-line at his website Essential Pepin here and also in his book by the same name. This is an interesting recipe because instead of using casings to make the pork sausage, its wrapped in plastic wrap to create a log, then cured in the refrigerator for 2 days. In the cookbook he browned the sausage logs on top of the stove with onions and potatoes, which is how we cooked it. Meakin threw in some halves of cherry tomatoes for color as you can see in the photos. On the television series, Jacques showed an alternate method of cooking them which was to cook them in about 2 inches of water at 150 degrees on top of stove for one and 1/2 hours. Either way works very well.

The recipe called for black trumpet mushrooms, which Jacques finds in the woods around his house. If you don’t happen to have trumpet mushrooms in your woods, he suggests that you substitute dried porcini mushrooms, which are easier to find. When Stuart made his sausage rolls, he adapted the recipe by using a mixture of sliced shiitake, wood ear, porcini and oyster mushrooms and instead of pistachios, he substituted pine nuts. He also added a tablespoon of Italian seasonings.

This recipe makes two impressive sausage rolls that happen to also be very easy if you have the time to cure the sausage for 48 hours. When we prepared the dish, Meakin added the tomatoes to the potato and onion mixture when he cooked the sausages for fun as well as color and we served it with fresh spinach.

Thank you Stuart for helping me out and sharing Jacques fabulous sausage rolls you made for us.

This will be shared with Foodie Friday at Rattlebridge Farms, Miz Helen’s Country Kitchen Full Plate Thursday, Foodie Friday at Simple Recipes, Foodtastic Friday at Not Your Ordinary Recipes, Seasonal Sunday at the Tablescaper, and On the Menu Monday at Stone Gable.

Have a great weekend everyone. I hope to be back in full swing soon.

Monkfish à l'Américaine – Essential Pepin

Jacques Pepin is probably the best known French chef in America. Through his popular cooking programs on public television and his many cookbooks, he’s been teaching us French cooking for, believe it or not, six decades. His latest cookbook, Essential Pepin, contains seven hundred of his favorite recipes from his career in cooking.

Often when someone writes a big “all my favorite recipes” kind of book, it includes a lot of recipes from previous books. I have a lot of Jacques Pepin’s cookbooks and, as much as I love Jacques, I wasn’t certain I really wanted another one. However, flipping through Essential Pepin was enough to convince me that this one is by far his best and contains a lot of new recipes plus some old favorites updated.

When I get a new cookbook, I grab a pen and a piece of paper and make notes on recipes to try. So far I’ve come up with at least thirty five. Jacques has a knack for finding the shortest route to flavor without complicated techniques. This recipe for Monkfish à l'Américaine stew is a perfect example. Monkfish can be tough if not cooked properly, but here Jacques gently simmers it in a flavorful tomato based broth scented with fennel seeds and cognac and finishes it with French tarragon. French cooking has never been easier or tasted so good.

Is Essential Pepin essential?  Absolutely! 

Monkfish à l'Américaine
Essential Pepin by Jacques Pepin – serves 4

About 2 pounds monkfish, preferably large fillets
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, cut into ½” pieces (1 cup)
1 carrot, peeled and cut into ½” pieces (1/2 cup)
1 small leek, trimmed, leaving some green, split, washed and cut into ½” pieces (1 cup)
1 stalk of celery, cut into ½” pieces (1/3 cup)
1 ¼ cups chopped tomato
2 tablespoons tomato paste
3 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon herbs de Provence
1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon fennel seeds
½ cup fruity white wine
1 tablespoon Armagnac or cognac
1 cup water
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon

Cut monkfish into twelve pieces. Heat the oil in a large heavy saucepan until hot but not smoking. Add the onion, carrot, leek, and celery and cook over medium-low heat for 5 minutes. Add tomato, tomato paste, garlic, herbs de Provence, salt, cayenne, fennel seeds, wine, brandy, and water, bring to a boil, and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes.

Add fish, cover, and simmer gently over low heat for 15 minutes. Remove the pieces of fish from the saucepan and set aside on a platter. Add the butter to the mixture in the pan and, using a hand blender, emulsify the vegetables into a fine puree. You can also leave the sauce chunky if you prefer. Add the fish back into the sauce, sprinkle with the tarragon, and bring to a boil to heat through. Serve with rice.

This will be linked to Food Friday at Designs by Gollum, Miz Helen’s Country Cooking Full Plate Thursday, and On the Menu Monday at Stone Gable. When you get a chance, please stop by and welcome back Yvonne at Stone Gable. She took a break for a while and our foodie blogging community has missed her greatly.

A Jacques Pepin Dessert That Looks Like Sunshine on a Plate

This dessert from Jacques Pepin is simple, healthy, yet elegant, and is perfect served with a little cup of coffee after dinner. Speaking of coffee, our coffee maker just died a week or so ago. No warning, no nothing. It just quit. I must have been living right as they say, because that same morning that the coffee pot gave up the ghost, an email came from CSN asking me if I would like to review one of their products. I couldn’t say yes fast enough.

Our last coffee maker ground its own beans. While that sounds wonderful, our first experience with the bean grinding feature wasn’t all that great. In fact it was eye opening. We set the coffeepot to grind the beans, hit the switch, and went to bed. The next morning we woke to a very loud, screeching noise coming from the kitchen. It was the coffee maker grinding the beans. I don’t want to tell you exactly what my husband said when he was rudely awakened by the coffeepot happily whizzing the beans around in the grinder, but it was similar to “what the H is that noise?” Since then we’ve laughed about it, told the story to friends, but from that moment on, we’ve not allowed the grinding of coffee beans to be our morning wake-up call.  

Photo from CSN

Our new Cuisinart coffee pot from CSN is a high tech looking brushed stainless, Brew Central model that will be perfect with our other stainless appliances in our new kitchen at the condo. I love the brew pause feature, allowing me to grab a cup before the brewing is finished. The other feature that impressed me is one I’ve never had before – a carafe temperature dial. I can to set the temperature of the coffee after brewing to high, medium, or low. As much as I dread replacing coffeepots and other small appliances, this has been a very pleasant experience. From choosing the coffeepot from CSN’s vast array, to being pleasantly surprised that their shipping on the model I chose was free, to the UPS man delivering my package within days of placing the order, I could not be more pleased.

Back to Jacques’ dessert. This is a simple, healthy recipe that allows you the freedom to “make it your own.” You could substitute peaches or nectarines for the mangos. To save calories, you could use Splenda in place of the sugar. When it comes to the choice of liquor, I always favor rum because for years we lived in the Caribbean, which I sometimes refer to as "de land of de rum and coconuts”, but Jacques suggested Cognac or whiskey. It’s fabulous over vanilla ice cream, or serve it alone as I did here. Have fun with this one. It looks like sunshine on a plate.

Mangos with Dark Rum
Adapted from Cooking with Claudine by Jacques Pepin – Serves 4

2 ripe mangos
Julienned zest of two limes
3 tablespoons sugar or Splenda
2 tablespoons Meyers dark rum, Cognac or whiskey
3 tablespoons fresh lime lime juice

Peel the mango, cutting deeply enough into the fruit so than any green-colored flesh is also removed. Then, cutting inward, toward the pit, slice each of the mangos into slivers about ½” thick. Discard the pit. Using a zester, remove the lime peel from the limes and set aside until you are ready to serve.

In a bowl, combine the mango slivers with the sugar, rum, and lime juice. Either serve immediately or, for added flavor, chill for at least two hours, stirring occasionally before serving, then bring to room temperature. Sprinkle the mangos with the julienned lime peel just before serving.

Printable recipe

Jacques Pepin's Smoked Salmon Pizza on Naan Flatbread

I was flipping through Jacques Pepin’s newest cookbook, More Fast Food My Way, when I came across a recipe for Smoked Salmon Pizza served on naan flatbread. Naan resembles pita bread and is a staple in places such as India, Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. I had seen it in the grocery store and was anxious to give it a try.

Jacques baked the prepared naan in a hot oven for about ten minutes, removed it from the oven and let it cool for a few minutes. He topped it with a mixture of sour cream and prepared horseradish, slices of smoked salmon, slivers of red onion, a few capers and fresh cilantro leaves. Ours looked just like the picture in his book and it was a nice change from smoked salmon on toast.

I was so intrigued by the naan that I decided to make a tomato pizza using the naan as a base. It’s fast and easy and took care of our pizza craving.

Tomato Pizza on Naan Flatbread

Excellent with a green salad

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 naan flatbread

¾ cup grated fontina cheese

2 tomatoes, peeled and sliced

Dried oregano

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Brush a small baking sheet with the olive oil, turn the naan in the oil to coat on both sides. Bake for ten minutes until it is crusty and brown, add sliced tomatoes that you have generously sprinkled with dried oregano, kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper and top with the fontina cheese.   Return to oven and cook until cheese melts and tomatoes are hot. Serves 2.