Scallop pie

When we went to Tasmania a couple of years ago, I discovered the delights of scallop pie, and since then have made it on several occasions, in different variations. It's a delicious and unusual dish which does equally well for lunch or dinner, is simple to make and not expensive either, despite the often high price of scallops, as you only need about 150-200 g of scallops to make a decent-sized pie that will easily do for four people. Fresh of course is best but as I can testify to, frozen scallops also work well, as the sauce that they are poached and cooked in really brings out their flavour.
I always lightly poach the scallops first, in a liquid made up of a/a little melted butter; a little white wine; herbs; salt and pepper, and maybe a little fish stock if I happen to have some around, or else a little water. The scallops should not be poached for more than 3-4 mins, 5 if frozen, then left to cool while you prepare the pastry. I always make the same kind of pastry: a basic short-crust pastry, but instead of adding water to the flour/butter mixture, I add yogurt or sour cream. This makes for a beautiful, soft, moist but not sticky pastry which doesn't dry out at all and tastes really good even the day after it's been cooked(if there is ever any leftover pie, that is!) But though the sauce always uses the poaching liquid as a starter, along with a roux(a little flour and butter), the flavour of it varies every time I make it, depending on what I feel like doing, and what herbs are to hand. For instance, I've made sauces strongly French in influence, with cream, white wine and tarragon; others with a more Middle Eastern touch, with a hint of cumin, mint and cardamon; and the other day I made one with an Asian-flavoured inspiration, featuring Vietnamese mint, lemongrass, lime and kankung(also known as entsai or Chinese water spinach) for a special Sunday lunch with friends. Here's how it was made:
Poach the scallops in a liquid made of a dab of melted butter, some white wine, some chopped lemongrass, and the juice of one lime. Add salt and pepper. Liquid should be enough to well cover the scallops. When the scallops are poached(no more than 5 mins), take off stove and leave to cool while you prepare the pastry: rubbing butter through plain flour then adding enough plain creamy yogurt(not fat-free)and/or sour cream so that you end up with a good ball of dough--add extra flour if too sticky, or extra yogurt/cream if too dry. Set aside to rest while you prepare the sauce: Make a roux with some flour and butter, then slowly add the poaching liquid, stirring as you go so that it thickens well. Add chopped Vietnamese mint, a little extra lime juice if you have some, season to taste. Separately, cook the kankung(a few seconds only needed) with a little onion.
Roll out the pastry: you will need both a bottom and top to the pie(more needed for the bottom as it needs to be thicker). Lay out the bottom of the pie in a glass buttered pie dish. In a bowl, combine the scallops, the cooked kankung, and the sauce, and mix well till all combined. Now lay the scallop mixture on the pastry, and cover with the top half of pastry, making a small round hole in the centre to let steam out. Cook the pie in a 180 C/350 F oven for about 35 minutes or until the pastry is golden-brown.
As it was for lunch, I served it with various salads--but as a main course for dinner it's also excellent paired with cooked vegetables.

Simple scallop salad

Scallops--coquilles St Jacques in French--are often overlooked by home cooks, but that's a pity, because they are not only delicious, they are very versatile and can be used in all sorts of dishes, from the very simple--scallop brochettes and scallop salad--to the rather more complex, such as scallop pie(a dish traditional to Tasmania, where we enjoyed several fine examples  when we went there a few years ago.)
The trick is that scallops should not be overcooked, or they risk losing their fine, delicate flavour and buttery texture. Fresh scallops need only a minute or so to poach or grill; frozen ones maybe a half-minute more.
Here's a simple yet deliciously intriguing dish I made the other day: scallop salad, based on combining a recipe from my battered old Larousse Gastronomique with ideas of my own(and lots of lovely salad ingredients fresh from the garden).
For each person, you'll need at least two scallops of reasonable size. You use both the white and the coral. You need some court-bouillon to poach the scallops--I was lucky enough to have ready-made court- bouillon cubes from France in my pantry, but you can make your own with a little fish stock plus a little lemon, or failing even that, some water, salt, pepper, herbs(tarragon is best), and a little lemon, boiled up to make a nice tasty liquid. Put a little white wine in with the court-bouillon, bring to a simmer, drop in the scallops, cook, covered. When cooked,  take out of the liquid, let cool. (Keep the court-bouillon separately)Slice thinly. Prepare a bit of sauce for the scallops: make a roux with a little butter and flavour, add the court-bouillon, stir till thick, season to taste, add herbs and a little lemon. Let cool too.
When you're ready to assemble the salad, use whatever ingredients best suit you as the 'backing salad'--I used soft lettuce, a little chopped sorrel, tomatoes, and some avocado I had in the pantry(chopped into small pieces). Then put the scallop in the middle of the plate, top with a little sauce, arrange the rest of the salad around it--sprinkle the vegetable ingredients with a nice tangy vinaigrette--and hey presto, an intriguing and simple entree!
Enlarged, it could also make a great lunch dish.

Deliciously simple: Iced passionfruit parfait

I just love desserts that are both simple to make and luscious to eat, and iced desserts would have to be among my favourites of these. And this lovely little number is high up on the best-seller list for me! Combining the custardy richness of egg yolks and the smooth lusciousness of cream with the airy lightness of egg whites and the tangy sweetness of passionfruit, this is a dessert that's super easy, never fails and always provokes 'oohs and aahs'! Any drawbacks? Only that you have to plan it ahead of time--if you want the dessert to set, you should make it in the morning, for the evening. Or at night, for lunch the following day!
Ingredients (enough for 6 people):
3 eggs.
200 ml pure (whipping)cream.
125 gms castor sugar
4 medium size passionfruit or 3 large ones.
Separate the eggs into yolks and whites. Beat the egg yolks, add half the sugar, beat till frothy. Separately, beat the cream, add the other half of the sugar, beat till thick. Cut the passionfruit in half, scoop out all the pulp and juice, mix in the cream till well combined. Beat the egg whites separately until standing in stiff peaks. Now fold the cream into the egg yolk mixture, and then fold in the egg whites after that. Mix till well combined. Transfer mixture to a freezer container, freeze several hours(at least 8). Serve as is or, if you want to dress it up, topped with more whipped cream and maybe meringues on the side!
Iced parfaits can be made in lots of delicious flavours, but this one's my favourite!
 

Ratatouille frangourou style

What's not to love about ratatouille, with its colour and vibrancy, its robust flavours and its ease and rapidity of preparing and cooking? Here at our place we eat a lot of it at a time when the garden is full of ratatouille ingredients, but we never get sick of it, because there's so many ways you can vary it, just by putting in different herbs, or wine, or chilli(not traditional in Provence of course, but this is frangourou style!) Cooked in a wok or a frying pan, it's prepared, cooked and on the table in less than half an hour--and that includes picking the ingredients in the garden! We often team it with grilled meat--lamb or chicken particularly good with it--fresh bread to mop up the lovely juices, and a nice tangy, garlicky green salad.
Here are the basic ingredients(can be varied at will):
Onions, chopped (one is enough unless you're making a lot for several people. Red or brown onions fine.)
Garlic--at least three cloves, crushed
Tomatoes (small Romas preferably)
Zucchini and/or squash
Capsicum(red, yellow, green, your choice)
Eggplant(aubergines)--best  sliced and grilled first then set aside. Our eggplants don't need salting first as they are so fresh, but shop-bought ones need to be 'sweated' first by sprinkling slices with salt before grilling, then wiped to removed the bitter 'sweat' that comes off them.
Herbs: Basil, oregano, thyme, in any combination
Wine--white. I also use Tokay occasionally as its slight sweet taste enhances the tanginess somehow!
Chop the onions, fry in olive oil. Add one of the garlic cloves, stir. Add the zucchini/squash and the capsicum, then half the herbs, and a small splash wine, enough to give it a nice glaze. Stir, cook for two-three minutes. Add the tomatoes(cut in half), stir vigorously. add the rest of the garlic, stir.Add salt, pepper to taste. Chilli if you want to. In last minute or so, add the pre-grilled eggplant, then half the rest of herbs, then put into serving dish, sprinkle with remaining herbs, and serve!

Baker's delight--memories of French bread

Several years ago, when Jacques Chirac was President of France, he gave an internationally-reported speech to the country's master bakers, causing a storm by lamenting the fact that so much of the bread that was now sold in France was no longer fit to be called real bread.
Bread certainly arouses passion in France; remember the fate of poor Marie Antoinette, who, supposedly upon being told the people had no bread, blithely advised them to eat cake. Of course she never said such a thing; it's a nasty slander designed to destroy even further the 'Austrian woman's' reputation; but it is an illustration of the fact that to say such a thing is not only insensitive, it's also complete heresy. Cake is all very well; but bread, ah, bread! It was always the first thing I and my siblings would dive on when we came back to France for holidays; real bread, yes, and real butter, long before we even thought of nice little gateaux!
In France, people still drive kilometres out of the way to queue up in more or less patient lines outside bakeries reputed for their bread. (A visiting East European friend of ours, seeing this once many years ago, couldn't believe his eyes."I never thought you had rationing here!" he exclaimed.) Today, the battle rages over whether the fluff contained in cardboard which too many supermarkets and hypermarkets hawk under the name of bread, should be declared illegal to save France's reputation. Meanwhile Poilane breads and their imitators--wholemeal, multigrain, rye--have also made inroads into the traditional wood-oven-fired, crusty white baguettes and ficelles that are still very much the stereotypical image of French bread (and if you truly want the real thing, ask for baguette tradition at the baker's, and not just baguette) .
People argue over whether 'real' French bread is the city type (baguettes, ficelles and their ilk) or country breads such as pain de campagne, a big round whitish bread made using not baker's yeast but sourdough, which keeps much better than the city breads.
In many villages, the baker still calls in his van every few days. It is an occasion for gossip and the surreptitious summing-up for more gossip opportunities. I remember when we used to go on holidays to Empeaux, the little south-western village where my parents had a house, being pumped by all the village women as to what my parents, 'the Americans', as they were called(despite the fact they were actually French and lived in Australia!) were up to now. Old people no longer capable of hobbling out into the street to commune with the baker, like the 95 year old woman across the road from us one summer a few years ago in yet another little Southern village, hoisted baskets down to him into the street on ropes. The baker knew everyone's preferences; and for the old lady, a countrywoman through and through, who had scarcely ever left the village, (and had some deliciously scandalous stories to tell about the intrigues that went on that little hothouse society!) it was fine city bread she preferred, just as she preferred fillet steak to the rich, pungent peasant stews we all exclaimed over.
 In French markets, whether in the city or the country, people stop in front of the bread stalls and critically prod, poke and look carefully, while the baker extol his or her wares in a raucous voice, sometimes stopping to castigate a customer taking too many liberties. Some of the breads aren't cheap, either. Staff of life they might be; but some of those staffs of life must have been gilded to warrant their price! French food has always been as diverse and as rich as it has, because of the country's strong peasant heart combined with equally strong bourgeois traditions. In the past, it was not easy to find exotic food there--there were many cafes and restaurants serving excellent, reasonably-priced French food, but very few, and even fewer in the provinces, offering 'exotic' cuisines. As in China, the variety and diversity of food here did not incline people to experimentation with other kinds of cooking. That has now changed to some extent, perhaps as the peasants have become rather richer, more powerful and fewer in number, due to the EU. It is rather an irony--and a pity--to think that French people might be getting more of a window on the rest of the world's table, but less variety, less real taste in their own. French culture is closely bound up with its 'quality of life', the prime strand of which is food. Bread is the litmus test for that and we have to keep a close eye on it, for if that goes, then everything else will follow.

Crème caramel à la frangourou

I've always loved the luscious creamy slipperiness of crème caramel, and always loved too, that it's such an easy dessert to make, yet so good-looking and tasty. Really the only thing to remember is to plan ahead--it should be made a few hours before serving so it's nice and cold when you eat it.
Here's my simple recipe(enough for two-three people): Two medium-size eggs, 250 ml milk, a large tablespoon sour cream(for an extra nice texture) or plain cream; three tablespoons vanilla sugar(castor sugar flavoured by having vanilla beans in the jar for some time)or just castor sugar with vanilla essence.
Prepare oven--180 degrees C, 350 F. Get a large roasting tin or similar, fill with enough water so it will come about half way up the ramekins/moulds you use to bake the dessert in, and put in oven to warm while you make the crème caramel. This will be the bain marie.
Bring the milk/cream mixture to lukewarm, take off stove. Beat whole eggs and sugar(and vanilla essence, if using) together till frothy and light. Slowly pour the milk mix into the egg mix, beat till well-combined. For the caramel, simply melt a couple tablespoons castor sugar with a trickle of water, stir over the stove(on a simmer) till it turns golden brown. Pour caramel into ramekins or other moulds, pour in custard mix over it. Put ramekins in the bain marie dish. Bake for about 30 minutes, or till set. Let cool, then put in fridge so as to serve cold. Can be eaten by itself or with whipped cream on the side, and either turned out of the mould, or left as is(which is what I personally prefer.) Et voilà!

Satay(peanut) sauce, indo-frangourou style

My parents lived and worked in Indonesia for several years, and two of is siblings were born there: me in Jakarta, while my younger sister Camille was born in Surabaya.  I was only there for a few months, as I became ill as a baby and had to be taken back to my grandmother in France, where I stayed till I was five, when we went to Australia. But it greatly impacted on my parents, who not only learned to speak and read Bahasa Indonesian but also immersed themselves in finding out more about the culture of Java, especially, and so, growing up, we always had a certain familiarity with Indonesian culture, including food--a familiarity which made my trip as an adult back to Java, in the 90's, feel like an odd and exciting combination of the exotic and the homely.
Maman often made--and still makes--Indonesian food, interpreted in her own way, and one of our great favourites were satays. Dad would make the satays themselves, marinating the meat and grill it on its sticks over a charcoal-fired barbecue, while Maman concocted the sauce and all the things that went with it--vegetables, rice, condiments. Maman's version of satay(peanut) sauce is the base from which I always create my own version. It's super easy and fast to make, tastes great, and always works. Plus you can vary it just as you wish, according to taste.
My satay sauce has the following ingredients: peanut butter(if possible fresh coarse-ground from a health food store, with nothing added); chopped tomatoes; crushed garlic; splash sweet Indonesian soya sauce, small splash ordinary soya sauce(prefer only a tiny amount), few drops fish sauce, crushed chilli or chilli sauce, teaspoon brown sugar, teaspoon rice vinegar. Sometimes I also add coriander, a little coconut powder(or a little coconut milk) and chopped onions. It varies. And proprtions are to taste(with the peanut butter dominating, of course!)
Anyway, what you do is put all ingredients together in a pan(it should be nice and thick) and stir quickly on the stove(over a moderate flame.). Only cook until all ingredients are well blended together, which takes only a minute or two. Remove from stove and serve either cold or warm, with satays or stir-fried chicken or other meat. And that's it!
The sauce here is pictured with some of the ingredients for the vegie stir-fry I made to go with the chicken--all from the garden.