chez pim

Roast Chicken, Christian Delouvrier's way

Recipes come to us in odd little ways.  I remember learning how to make truffle omelettes from a gigling, nearly toothless old lady in Southwest France.  Of course I took her seriously, she happened to be Marthe Delon, the famous truffle huntress who has been training a truffle-hunting pig a year for over 50 years.  She calls them all Kiki - couldn't be bothered to remember a new name each year, she said. 

This roast chicken recipe came to me from not so exotic a location but no less interesting a source.  The scene was the dining room at Manresa, the participants were Laurent Manrique, our dear friend and the famous chef of what I like to call the-dearly-departed-Aqua, his much-fairer-and-better-half Michelle, and yours truly.  We had just been served a deceptively simple truffle omelette.  Yes they certainly do omelettes at Manresa, hardly a greasy-countertop-diner-variety made from Nearly Eggless Goo^TM, but one comprised of Porcini puree, freshest farm eggs, and housemade salted butter, oh, yes, and a generous showering of white truffle at the table.  It's the kind of dish that made us stopped in our tracks.  "Elle m'a mise sur le cul", Laurent said of the dish, a French expression meaning something to the tune of being so gouud it knock' ya on yur ass, hon.  That got us talking about deceptively simple dishes that shocked us with their greatness.  That's when Laurent brought up this roast chicken recipe he learned from Christian Delouvrier. 

The best fig tart, ever (a recipe from The Foodie Handbook)

I could also call it the easiest fig tart, ever.  Really.  It has an astonishingly small list of ingredients: a pie crust*, some luscious figs, with a hidden layer of frangipane, which, despite the fancy-sounding French name, is simply a concoction of toasted almonds, sugar, butter, and egg that you can make easily in a food processor.  

The key to the magic here is the frangipane.  It's one of those things that sound far more difficult and fancy than they really are.  My frangipane recipe came from the one in Michel Bras fantastic Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts. It's basically equal quantity (by weight) of almond meal, butter, and sugar, with one egg to bind it all together.  That's a truly fantastic recipe, and one so versatile I find a use for it in practically all my fruit tarts, from the summery stone fruits to the fall harvest of pears and apples.  Right about now, with melting soft and tantalizingly sweet figs make an appearance all over the place, you can make a fig tart with a base of this frangipane and it will turn even the most ardent fig hater into a lover. 

How to make a crispy fruit crumble

I don't know about you, but I think all this talk about baking being a-precise-science-and-all-that is scaring a lot of people away from baking.  I mean, I'm sure baking a ten-layer wedding cake or five hundred tarts may well be precise science.  But baking just a pie or a few cookies, that's hardly more so than making a simple bowl of soup.  

So, if you're one of those people, I have just a recipe for you to try.  Or even if you're not, try it anyway, it's so simple and so good, you'll thank me for it later.  (Hold it with the proposals though boys, I am otherwise occupied.)

This is going to be the easiest dessert you’ll ever make.  Really it will.  It’s basically comprised of two parts, an unusually crisp crumble topping, which comes together in minutes, and a fruit filling, which can be just about any fruit in abundance at the moment.  At my market, stone fruits are just about done.  So I'm sending them off with the last hurrah with the French prune plums - quetsches as they're called over there. 

The Foodie Handbook, the movie!

Ok, not really, just a video trailer we did for the book. Watch it and enjoy (I hope.)

You can also see it in HD on YouTube.

And if you're in the New York area I hope to see you tomorrow at the beautiful Rizzoli bookstore for a cocktail reception and my very first book signing!

Rizzoli Bookstore

31 West 57th Street (between 5th & 6th Avenues)

New York, NY 10019

5.30-7pm

Impressions from New York, so far