Prepping for Easter

Before we talk about Easter, let me say:
                                            "Happy St Paddy's Day everyone!"

We have just come back from a dear friend's house where we had a little bit of a celebrations. A fab afternoon with a couple of Irish friends, some Germans and a Brit. What better mix can there be?! :-)






Easter is coming,  I can see the signs everywhere. The snow is melting, the days are getting longer, and at a friends house I ate my first chocolate Easter egg this week. Quite timely, at culinary school, it's been a week of egg, lamb and fish preparations. All things I associate with Easter.

Perfectly poached eggs

Wednesday was 'Egg' day at school. My husband and I love eggs and so I have been preparing eggs for weekend brunch for years. Despite all this practice though, I am the first to admit that cooking a perfect egg is not that easy. I think cooking the perfect egg it's a task one has to perform with love. For example, my husband really likes poached eggs. A simple dish, right?!? Well not quite, for me anyway. I grew up with soft-boiled eggs, so poaching the eggs perfectly has been a challenge for me ever since I tried it first. I have also gone to great length to convince him that other ways of cooking an egg are so much more interesting; to be honest simply because I felt much more comfortable to boil and egg or fry in in the pan. Not anymore! I have finally mastered  the art of poaching an egg and it is divine. It's so simple but so delicious (given one uses very fresh tasty eggs) that I cannot believe I spent so much effort convincing my husband otherwise.  As you can see on the picture, the egg white should just be set, while the egg yolk is very easily oozing out when cut. Perfect.
 

Deep fried egg

French omelet with fines herbs

One of the things I really like about eggs, is their versatility. There are so many different ways to prepare an egg that one could easily put a weekly breakfast menu together and never get bored of eggs. That day at school, we also prepared a French omelet, an egg over-easy and a deep fried egg. Yes, even eggs can be deep fried. How decadent is that? We placed it on top of a noodle dish that one of the chefs from the other classes brought in for us to try.The french omelet is a much more delicate omelet compared the ones we mostly eat here in the US. It is has a shorter cooking time so that the egg is just set and instead of flipping it over to cook both sides it is folded into a neat oval shape. Some chefs place the filling inside the omelet before it is folded, others cut a pocket into the top of the oval shaped omelet and place their fillings into it. Above picture shows you my version with a pocket cut into the top of the omelet.

Navarin of Lamb

Semi-boneless leg of lamb

The other item I associate with Easter is eating lamb on Easter Sunday. I happen to very much like lamb what ever time of the year. Usually I would prepare a leg of lamb, based on a recipe by Nigel Slater who is one of my favorite food writers. And I like to eat it on the rare side of pink. What I hadn't tried yet, was to prepare a lamb stew, and that is excatly what we did in school on Thursday. I was a little disappointed first because I have prepared many beef stews before (we call them Gulasch in Germany), so I thought I wouldn't learn much that day. But, trust the French to make it interesting, they prepare their stew on a much more sophisticated level. Navarin of Lamb (brown lamb stew) is certainly not a one pot dish. The meat is braised very much in the same way than I would prepare it for Gulasch; however, the vegetables are a whole different story. First , some of the vegetables are tournéed, that means they are cut in the football shape called Tourné I talked about in one of my early blogs. Then, all the vegetables are prepared separately. That means the green beans are blanched, the tournéed root vegetables are steamed in a buttery liquid and so on. In addition to this, the sauce of the braised meat is strained to create a perfectly smooth texture but with all the flavor of the mirepoix, herbs and spices.  So, about three or four saucepans later, all the components are finally arranged on the plate, with the perfectly cooked vegetables still showing their natural bright colors rather than being a brown-ish, over-cooked part of the stew. And because they are cooked and seasoned separately, they create a more complex flavor profile for the stew. Very nice indeed; rustic Gulash no more. From now on, more stews will have a sophisticated edge.

Finally the fish for Good Friday. We did have our 'Fish and Chips with tartar sauce' day at the college last Friday and we eat some fish at night for dinner at home. At college the fish was breaded and pan fried. Although I love all things fried (especially french fries), at home we opted to steam the fish and therefore create a more healthy version. The item we didn't skip on was the tartar sauce I had made at school earlier that day. We prepared a  basic mayonnaise and added ingredients such as lemon juice, capers, shallots, gherkins and fresh herbs (parsley, chervil and tarragon). Delicious.

So, all there is missing is for Easter is the pastry. At school we won't be doing any baking just yet, but at home I will. A few years ago, I found a good recipe for a traditional German Easter Bread. I am certainly looking forward to baking it and i will let you know how it turns out.

Until then, I wishing you a good week and happy eating.