Thursday, February 06, 2003

Truffles are the MSG of French cooking. Last night I made Supremes de Volaille a Brun again, this time with a deglazing sauce with truffles.  No, I didn’t go out and purchase a truffle – I may be nuts, but I’m not crazy.  I lucked into one.  Pat, a co-worker and “foodie” – don’t you just hate that term? -- had some jarred truffles lying around, as it happens.  Says she got them in a food basket for Christmas.  Says she doesn’t much like truffles, and is besides (probably rightly) suspicious of truffles in jars.  Luckily for her, I was here to take it off her hands.  As it happens, JC never specifies fresh truffles, probably because they didn’t exist in the U.S. in 1961.  She always calls for “jarred” or, even more bizarrely, “canned.”  I did the chicken the way I’ve been doing it the last few times, dredged in flour and fried up in clarified butter.  It’s great how easy things become after awhile.  Clarifying the butter is child’s play.  The only problem with clarified butter is that when it’s in the refrigerator it looks like a lot of other things.  I nearly used a small cup of pale yellow hard stuff I found in the fridge, thinking it was butter left over from last time, but when I put my finger on it, it squooshed oddly and oozed some clear grainy stuff.  I don’t know what that was.  Don’t much want to know. Before I did all of that, I boiled some asparagus and stuck it in the fridge.  I would be serving it cold with Sauce Ravigote, which is great because a) saying “ravigote” is just a fun thing to do, and b) I like anything I can make by shaking the ingredients in a jar.  Sauce Ravigote is just a vinaigrette, wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper & dry mustard, shaken with chopped capers, minced shallots, and minced parsley.  Easy.  I like it. The chicken fried up very nicely.  I managed to get the butter nice and hot this time before I put in the floured chicken breasts, and they got nice and crispy and brown.  When they were done I set them aside, tossed in some minced shallots for a second, then threw in some Madeira, beef stock, and a minced truffle, with a little bit of the juice from the jar.  Cooked that down until syrupy.  Rice got made somewhere in there.  And there you have it.  I swear to god, I very nearly got dinner on the table by 8 o’clock. And the thing was, you couldn’t actually taste the truffles at all.  There was no stab of recognition – Ah, so THIS is the taste….  Just this amazing, ineffable, expensive flavor.  More like, Ah, so THIS is what rich people eat. The asparagus also was good.  I find that as winter wears on, my need for carbohydrates is being supplanted by a desperation for green, sans cream.  The vinaigrette was blessedly light and sharp. I keep saying I’m going to stick to one serving.  I’m going to be disciplined, lose some weight, blah blah blah.  Clearly, truffles make this impossible. 7:37:41 AM    comment []