America Eats Tavern

What's happened to Jose Andres? This blatantly commercial attempt to gussy up American classics is too precious by half. The food tastes good -- Andres would not serve bad food -- but who needs overpriced Buffalo Wings seen through the eyes of a Spaniard?

After seeing the price creep at Jaleo, the mediocritzation of Oyamel and now this pretentious act of hubris, one can only conclude that Andres has sold out. They want $6 to have some of their precious bread and there are very few wines on the list under $100 a bottle. Who but lobbyists on expense account are going to spend $386 for a half bottle of Chateau d'Yquem with their dessert.

We spent $100 for two people and got at best what could be described as a light supper. Thanks but no thanks. We'll explore other eating options.

Catering a book party

Andrea and her brother Henry operated a catering service for a couple of summers in Rehoboth, back in the day when they could name their service SABU for spinster aunt, bachelor uncle. Both are happily married now, but they revived their collaboration to cater a book party for my new novel, The Grand Mirage, and the food was terrific.

Andrea baked hundreds of small biscuits, only about an inch in diameter, that were flaky and buttery and light. She sliced each one in half and Henry put on some cranberry-pear chutney with roast pork tenderloin on half of the biscuits and a mustard sauce with roast turkey breast on the other half to make delicious little sandwiches.

Henry also experimented with grilled skewers of winter vegetables -- Brussels sprouts, beets, parsnips, shallots and others -- to make a refreshingly different vegetable finger food. Andrea made some light, buttery tuiles that she topped with a smoked salmon tartar and creme fraiche. She also made a goat cheese galette that resembled a small pizza with a great crust and a white cheese mixture that included ricotta and mozzarella with the goat cheese, then cut into thin slices. For light snacks, she had savory biscotti with aged gouda and shallots, spiced almonds and dates stuffed with blue cheese.

Did I mention that the food was terrific? Virtually everything was gone at the end except some of the biscuit sandwiches because they had made truly a boatload of those. As Andrea said, if every guest had eaten just one more biscuit, they would be all gone.

For the wine, I experimented with Paul's and was very happy with the 2007 E. Guigal Cotes du Rhone and the 2008 Macon-Villages that we got from there. We also had some wonderful fresh apple cider from the farmer's market and chilled San Pellegrino. Simple and perfect for a fall afternoon.

Still grilling

As the days get shorter and the weather gets colder, it's clearly less inviting to grill something up for dinner. Usually about this time of the year, I swap out some of the grill cookbooks on the kitchen bookshelf for those focused on braising, slow cooking, stews -- the good winter stuff.

But we enjoy grilled food so much -- whether it's the pork chops from our 1/8 of a pig or salmon fillet from The Fishery or asparagus or eggplant -- that I still find myself out there once or twice a week. Last year, I covered the Weber and Big Green Egg ahead of a snowstorm and they stayed that way for a couple of months. We'll see what the weather brings this year, but maybe we'll be grilling in January!

An 1/8 of a pig

It sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Blue Rooster Farm, which started selling its meat at the New Morning Farm market in DC a few months ago, emailed customers with an offer to buy 1/8 of a pig in late September. The haul is a collection of pork chops, bacon, sausage, Boston butt, cured ham slices and a couple of other cuts. Some cuts aren't included and are presumably sold separately. It is essentially a big shopping bag of frozen meat that fit easily into our limited side-by-side freezer.

So far, as with all the other meat we've gotten from Blue Rooster, the pork has been terrific. These are Berkshire pigs grown only to a year old and a hundred pounds. The bacon and ham have been flavorful and juicy (saftig in the German sense), the sausage fresh and mildly flavored. It's not that it's a big savings buying in "bulk" like this -- it's only a 10% discount from buying each cut retail -- but that you get it at all and you get it all at once so you have a nice store in your fridge.

When I picked up my 1/8 pig I jokingly told Julie Hurst from Blue Rooster that I've decided to regard buying meat frozen as a plus. For a long time, I resisted buying frozen meat at farmers' markets. I longed for the markets in France where refrigerated counters display the fresh meat openly. That's just not the way it's done here, and these vacuum-packed fresh frozen meats don't lose any quality over what you buy in the supermarket, even WholeFoods. After all, how does that lamb get here from Iceland and New Zealand?

The advantage is you get local farm-raised meat, butchered by local butchers, that is healthier, fresher, and as a rule tastier. Blue Rooster's lamb and beef are also delicious.

I'm  not quite there yet but I don't exclude the possibility of getting a deep-freeze in the basement to store a side of beef or a 1/2 pig. Once growing up, we bought a side of beef and stored it in a rented freezer locker. I thought it was pretty cool at the time to take a trip to the locker and pick up some steak and ground beef. It seemed like free food, though of course it wasn't. My mother grew up on a farm and I think for her it was a small way of recapturing that feeling. Maybe I have that gene.

e-Cookbooks

The New York Times had a story last week about how Julia Child's pathbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking was now available, finally, as an e-book. The article discussed the particular challenges of putting a cookbook onto an e-reader, from the often complicated layout and color photos to the concern about splattering grease onto your Kindle or iPad.

Now apparently technology has advanced enough to have column formats in e-books, and new readers like iPad and Kindle Fire have all sorts of color. As for the grease, I have experimented with downloading a Kindle single by Mark Bittman on grilling and using it. I usually keep the recipe across the kitchen on the table anyway, so the real danger, especially with a touch screen, is having dirty or greasy fingers when I want to consult it.

What would really be cool and would get me to take the plunge immediately is if somehow your entire cookbook collection would be searchable (or even your entire Kindle library because the search terms would be specific enough). The big plus of Epicurious, of course, is that you can search by ingredient or technique. This is virtually impossible to do with the hard copies, because you pick a likely book, check the index, are invariably disappointed, check another index, and so on, and usually end up at Epicurious anyway.

The only way I can navigate my print cookbooks is to pick one arbitrarily at random and leaf through it looking for likely prospects that use seasonal agreements. It would be more satisfying to go to the store or market and simply pick what looks good, then come home and easily find the right recipe.

Nonetheless, I may experiment. Paula Wolfert has a new cookbook out, The Food of Morocco, and it will be available in a Kindle edition on Nov. 15. I love Paula Wolfert's books and we have been on a real Morocco kick, so I will get one edition or the other. The hardcover print edition is just $27 on Amazon, and the Kindle edition, at the insistence of the publisher, will be $20, so it's hardly competitive given the uncertain performance of a cookbook on an e-reader. We'll see what people say.

Chicken with escarole, apples, and potatoes

Sara Jenkins has done it again. A delicious, simple, elegant dish for a weekday that is really something special. The trick here is that everything gets cooked in the same skillet, so the flavor accumulates.

You boil 12 oz. of new potatoes until just tender (7 min.), let them cool and flatten them a bit. You season 4 8-oz. boneless chicken breasts with skin with salt and pepper. WF doesn't have boneless breasts with skin so we deboned regular breasts -- the skin adds a lot of essential flavor in this dish. You cook the breasts in 2 Tbl. oil until skin is golden and then turn over for another 3 min. Transfer to baking pan, cover with foil and put into preheated 250-degree oven. Drain oil and melt 2 Tbl. butter in skillet and cook apple sections (2 tart apples, peeled, cored and cut into eighths) in single layers. Add more butter and saute the potatoes. Add a garlic clove smashed and peeled and escarole leaves (WF had no escarole so we used spinach). Wilt and add 1/2 c. wine to finish cooking. Put apples back in to warm through. Assemble on plate with potatoes, chicken breast, escarole and apples. Syrupy, buttery, flavorful, rich and satisfying. Drink white or red wine with it.

HalfFoods and other disappointments

WholeFoods has been at pains to expand its prepared food offerings -- it's a shame they don't take a little more pride in it. I was astonished to see how unappetizing all of it has become by the late afternoon since I'm not often there shopping for dinner. The hot food was dry or mucky looking, the deli counter dull beyond belief, the kabob station offered nothing enticing. Went to the meat counter and got a ham steak packed in cellophane. What a half-a***d approach to food service!

We've had other disappointments lately in the DC food scene. Brunch at the Poste restaurant in Hotel Monaco was no culinary delight. An uninspired menu and half-hearted execution made it truly lackluster. We had an out of town guest so brunch was not just about the food and we had a good time, but it's sure off our list for the future.

An even bigger disappointment was Oyamel, which we always treasured for its fresh, inventive rendition of Mexican cuisine. It seems to have fallen into some sort of rut. The food was just all right, but these small plates seem to have gotten even smaller -- and way to small for $10-11 a pop -- so it's kind of hard to tell with what you actually get to eat. If the food isn't magic you notice much more how loud and unpleasant the ambiance is.

Chili à la Cindy Lou

Getting a little head start on our winter repertoire, I decided to try this chili recipe from Steve Sando's new book, The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower's Guide. I don't have any plans to grow beans, but we're such fans of Sando's beans and his earlier cookbook, I wanted to have this one for its recipes and comments on the various kinds of beans.

My usual chili recipe is for Cincinnati-style chili from Epicurious. That is mostly about putting a good mix of spices in with the ground beef and adding a can or two of beans. This recipe, of course, starts with the beans, in this case, Good Mother Stallard beans. I soaked and cooked a pound of these with a mirepoix. When they were soft, I sautéed the ground beef with some more onion and garlic and added it into the beans with 2 cans of diced tomatoes (I took that to mean 28 oz. but it was pretty tomato-y), 1/4 c. cider vinegar, 2 Tbl. balsamic vinegar, 4 Tbl. each of cumin, Mexican oregano, New Mexico chile powder, and brown sugar, 1 Tbl. paprika and 1 tsp. salt. Cook all that for "several hours" -- in this case 3-1/2 -- and you've got yourself a pretty good pot of chili. Can't beat those beans.

Grilled potatoes

Batali's recipe for grilled potatoes caught my eye and it seemed like a simple recipe for a weekday. Equally simple was Sara Jenkins' recipe for grilled skirt steak with cucumber and avocado garnish, so it had the makings of a great weekday meal.

With the potatoes, you essentially end up with a warm potato salad. You parboil the Yukon gold (or other waxy) potatoes in salted water -- he says for 6 minutes but his potatoes were smaller than mine so I let them go longer, maybe a bit too long. You cut each potato into 3 or 4 thick slices and toss the slices in a mix of olive oil, celery seed and sliced scallions (which I forgot to buy so used shallots). Then you thread them, horizontally, onto skewers, about 5 per skewer. You grill them for 15 min., he says, though my time was a little shorter because of the longer parboiling, and get a nice crust on them. Then, you remove the potato slices from the skewers and toss them again in a mix of oil, Chianti (or other red wine) vinegar, and Dijon mustard. Delicious!

After I took off the potato skewers, I put on the skirt steak, seared it on one side for 2 min., turned it, sprinkled salt and pepper on the cooked side, and grilled the other side for another 2 min., removed the steak from the grill, turned and sprinkled salt and pepper on the unseasoned side and let it rest 5 min. before slicing it. A mix of diced avocado, cucumber (peeled, halved, scraped clean and sliced into half moons), basil, oil and lemon juice goes on top of each serving of meat.

We had a very nice, and very cheap, Spanish red wine to accompany.

Spit-roasted duck

I bought Mario Batali's Italian Grill after a friend asked for a grilling cookbook that also discussed wine pairings. I ended up recommending this one and liked the description so much I got one for myself. I haven't used it too often, but after trying out his Spit-Roasted Duck with orange and rosemary and the Butternut Squash with vin cotto to accompany, I will be using it a lot more.

The two dishes had a similar treatment. The duck was covered with a glaze made from simmering 1/2 c. orange marmalade, 1/2 c. orange juice, 3 Tbl. balsamic vinegar, 4 minced garlic cloves and 2 Tbl. chopped fresh rosemary for five minutes. Batali makes a big point of pricking the duck skin all over, especially in the thighs, for a total of at least 50 times. This of course permits the fat to escape in the roasting process and makes the skin very crispy.

Well, it was delicious. Duck is always such a treat and the meal seemed very special. The squash gets sliced into 1/4-inch slices and marinated in a mixture of 1/2 c. olive oil, 1/4 c. red wine vinegar, 3 Tbl. honey, 1 Tbl. chopped fresh rosemary and 4 minced garlic cloves for 2 hours.

Once I took the duck off the spit and let it rest, I drained the squash and grilled it over the same fire. Truly delicious sweet, nutty taste. I would slice them a little thicker next time because the thicker pieces seemed to let more of the squash flavor come through.

The spit-roasting attachment to the Weber grill has proven to be a great investment. It's not that I use it so often, but it's nice to be able to follow a recipe like this without any workarounds.

I steamed some wild rice as a second side. Rebecca Wood, in her cookbook The Splendid Grain, makes a big deal about getting the organic wild rice that is hand-harvested by native Americans in Minnesota as opposed to the commercially grown California version. Too late. The wild rice I had from Rancho Gordo proudly proclaims itself to be California wild rice. Wood has a helpful table for estimating the amount of water and cooking time needed for different types of wild rice and a nice variation on the basic recipe that involves sauteeing chopped onion and celery with the rice in butter and oil before adding the boiling water to cook it.

Grilled top round, Cuban style

The "Basque" chicken wings from The Thrill of the Grill by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby tasted so good the other day, I decided to try another recipe and this was also a hit.

You just take a nice, thick slab of top round, otherwise known as London broil, salt and pepper and grill it to medium rare. You cut the nicely seared meat into cubes and mix in a bowl chopped red onion, red pepper, green pepper, slice radishes, minced garlic, olive oil, tabasco sauce, chopped parsley and cilantro, ground cumin, chili powder and fresh-squeezed lime juice. Not the tenderest cut of meat even after a hot grilling, but flavorful and nicely set off by the vegetables.

Also used their recipe for black beans to accompany, which they cook with lots of onion and most of the same flavoring as the steak salad. They also recommend fried plantains and rice as sides, but that's way too much for us for a weekday, so we stuck with corn tortillas from the Latino market.

Pork

I got a 7-lb Boston butt from the Virginia farm that raises forest-fed pigs ("Babes in the Woods"). I'd been wanting to try pulled pork in the Big Green Egg since I got it, but the 10+ hours of cooking it was a daunting prospect. So Labor Day became the big day to try it.

As always, I used my barbecue bible, the Jamisons' book, using their rub of paprika, pepper and other ingredients and their mop of vinegar, leftover rub and more pepper. I applied the rub the night before and another coating in the morning when I took the butt out of the fridge. I lit the fire at 7 and got the pork in at 8 at about 220 degrees. I mopped it every 45 to 60 minutes and in the afternoon inserted my newly acquired digital thermometer probe into the meat. It was at about 120 degrees and needed to go to 180 according to Jamisons. Other recipes had put the internal temperature at 160 to 180, so I was willing to accept the lower end of the range. The new probe, for what it's worth, registered the "oven" temperature about 20 degrees lower than the Egg's own thermometer. I pulled it out at 6:30 at 160 degrees and wrapped it in foil for half an hour.

The pork was delicious and was a big hit with the family members who came over for the holiday, but it was different than I anticipated. I thought I would have a tender, fibrous, gray pork that would shred at a touch to turn into those piles of pulled pork we had on our road trip last summer. I had prepared the vinegar sauce to go on this pulled pork. What became evident as I sliced through the crust to the pink meat underneath was, as Henry said, "I don't think this is the shredding kind of pork." It was in fact, as Henry also observed, much more like ham, though with more of a smokey, porky flavor than you usually get with ham. It was very tender and pretty moist, but firm and I carved thin slices for the platter. The vinegar sauce was still delicious on it.

Clearly there's some things I don't understand about barbecuing. Was this more of a picnic cut, so that I got smoked pork shoulder, rather than a real butt with the marbling that would yield the shreddy texture I anticipated? Are these forest-fed pigs, which have great flavor, simply too muscular to get that kind of marbling? (There was plenty of fat, but as a slab along one side of the cut.) Is the Egg simply not going to yield the kind of result that a real smoker would?

Don't get me wrong -- it was a great meal and a very successful recipe. But I would like to have a better idea of what I'm doing. Everybody brought great sides and Andrea did her delicious corn sticks. I also grilled some wings (about three dozen) and sopped them in a "Basque" sauce from Thrill of the Grill (this was very good and will prompt me to try more recipes from there) and in Frank's Louisiana sauce, said to be the sauce of the original Buffalo wings.

Locavore flavors

We're getting the hang of being locavores. Went to the farm stand on Beech just off East-West Highway for peaches, plums and heirloom tomatoes, picked up some green beans at the Silver Spring market, and a Boston butt from a Virginia farm that has forest-fed pigs.

Used the tomatoes and beans for a couple of simple recipes from the oft-cited Olives and Oranges by Sara Jenkins (can't wait for her next book). Her subtitle talks about "recipes and flavor secrets" and it is all about the flavor. I cut the tomatoes into eighths, sprinkled a little salt on them and let them sit for 5 min., then crumbled feta cheese (the Greek kind, not locavore) and sprinkled chopped cilantro over them before drizzling with sherry vinegar and olive oil. Her point is that as good as tomatoes taste with basil, they also taste great with other herbs and that certainly was true in this case.

The beans were simmered for half an hour in a tomato sauce made by sauteeing diced onion and minced garlic in 2 Tbl olive oil, then adding a small can of tomatoes (she says through a food mill, I just pulsed a few times on my mini-processor), simmered together for 10 min before adding the beans. This gets chopped parsley at the end.

The two simple dishes were a great accompaniment to fried chicken with some end of the season rose wine. Terrific.

Tagine bis

Alas, careful as I was, my first tagine cracked and then broke in circumstances I won't go into. I've decided that Tunisian clay pots probably work well in Tunisia, simmering away over some embers, but they are too anxiety-ridden for cooking on gas stoves.

So Tagine bis is a hardened clay artifact from Emile Henry. Even though they do specify it has to be heated up slowly, it seems a good deal more robust than the first one, though the color is not as pretty.

I inaugurated it with another one of Ghillie Basan's recipes, this one a simple chicken with artichokes and green grapes. Chicken breasts are cut into thick slices and marinated for a couple of hours in olive oil, garlic and turmeric (great color!), then cooked with lots of onion for just 15 min. before adding artichoke hearts, another 5 min. cooking, then add grapes and lots of cilantro. Even better the second day with flatbread (in this case, naan from Whole Foods).

Ribs

I've been wanting to try ribs in the Big Green Egg since I got it. Let me say right away the ribs came out really tasty and fairly tender, but they were not moist and falling off the bone and I'm not sure why -- whether it was the meat, the recipe, the Egg, the execution (timing, temperature?).

I followed the Kansas City recipe from Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking, which had a rub of many ingredients (paprika, chile powder, smoked salt, etc.), applied one-third the night before, one-third just before smoking, and one-third halfway through the cooking. I got three St. Louis cut slabs which weighed 6.25 lbs altogether. I also went ahead and got the Weber rib rack to hold them in the Egg. I used just beer and Worcestershire sauce for a mop (every hour). I kept the temperature pretty steady at about 200, though in the late stages it snuck up to 250 when I wasn't looking and I had a little trouble bringing it down. I gave up on them getting more tender after 4 hrs and applied the sauce (tomato sauce, brown sugar, corn syrup, tomato paste, etc.), cooking for another 40 min. Then I wrapped then in a double layer of foil for about 45 min.

It occurs to me that brining might get them more like the Rocklands finished product, but I also think these ribs (from Whole Foods) may have been a bit too lean. Researching a bit just now, I'm thinking the "country style ribs" from WF were more like baby backs and less like spareribs. Also the 4-hour cooking time specified by Jamison is too short, 6 hrs would be better. Temperature usually given as 225, so outside the 180-220 range Jamison calls for. Live and learn. I will no longer take Jamison as the last word or the gospel, but will consult other sources, too.

Used the pinto beans with beer and pepper from the same book, with the Rancho Gordo pinto beans. They were great but the recipe called for 2 Tbl of lard to sautee the onions that are added towards the end of cooking and it tasted too much of lard. Also, the beer does lend a slightly bitter taste, which I didn't mind but I might use a blander beer next time (or Mexican, as they recommend).

But it was a great meal, rounded out with Andrea's corn sticks, a big green salad with goat cheese, and a very seasonal fruit salad (peaches, plums, nectarines, raspberries) in mint sugar.

Chicken with plums

I've acquired some new cookbooks recently and I'm going to be trying them out. This simple recipe from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food was great for a week night.

Originally, this Turkish recipe (Tabaka Piliç) was made with a whole boned chicken but she calls for chicken fillets, both white and dark meat. I shopped at the co-op and all they had was chicken thighs so I skinned and boned them and flattened them into fillets. These simply get sauteed in a skillet and then the plums added to soften. The co-op plums were big and a bit hard so I cut them up to soften more quickly. The real addition here is a sauce made of plum jam (St. Dalfour) with a Tbl of vinegar, a crushed garlic clove and a pinch of chile pepper flakes. I also cooked up some bulghur wheat from the co-op (too much, two cups!) and sauteed some zucchini to stir into that. Nice little meal.

Re-creation

You can never really duplicate a meal you eat in a restaurant and that was not our goal when we nonetheless set out this weekend to approximate a couple of the meals we had in France.

If the market had had girolles or any suitable mushroom, we would have tried the tagliatelle with girolles, but it didn't so we went to Plan B, which was to have the salmon rillettes on toasted baguette for a first course and a version of Christophe's pork and polenta for a main course.

The salmon recipe came from Susan Loomis's Cooking at Home on Rue Tatin. It had a great flavor though it did not come out as fluffy and light as the one at Bastide de l'Odeon. Andrea thought it needed more olive oil in proportion to the butter. Other ingredients were steamed fresh salmon, smoked salmon, shallots and chives.

We obviously were not going to get Basque country heritage pork and I'm not sure you can even get an "echine" cut here (which, according to Julia Child, is the shoulder or blade end of the loin). So we opted for pork tenderloin and used piment d'Espelette to acknowledge the Basque country. I got the tenderloins out of the fridge an hour ahead of time, salted (with our coarse salt from the Camargue) and peppered and pimented them. To cook, I seared them in a combination of lard and peanut oil then put them on a sheet pan in a 350-degree oven. I wanted to pull them out at 140 degrees, but by the time I realized the one instant-read thermometer wasn't functioning correctly, they had reached 160. So no pink, but still very moist and not overdone. I had deglazed the skillet and reduced that in a saucepan, enriching with butter (and a little jam since it was a bit bitter) to drizzle over the carved tenderloin.

The polenta I baked at 350 in my cazuela for an hour and a half, stirring after an hour and checking seasoning. I turned it out onto the pizza paddle and let it cool, cut it into small rectangles, then sauteed the rectangles in olive oil and let them crisp up in that same oven. It actually made for a very nice meal.

We had a white Cote du Rhone with hors d'oeuvres (cheese and crackers) and the salmon, and a slightly chilled Fleurie with the pork. Andrea had her first go at re-creating Ladurrees macarones, but may have made a mistake putting them in the fridge after they cooled because they came out a little tough.

Southern France

We had many nice meals when we were staying with friends outside Uzès, including friends of theirs who kindly included us in dinner parties. But the highlight of the week was a lunch at one of their neighbors. It was a repast that shows how deep the culture of food goes with the French and how intertwined it is with social interaction.

We started with champagne -- what else? -- and munchies consisting of olives, saucisses and a saucisson roquefort. We sat at a table in the courtyard under a big tree that created lots of shade. The hosts had decked out three outdoor tables for a dozen guests, tablecloths of Provencal colors, and several glasses at each place.

The first course was the classic melon and prosciutto, though the melon was from the market and perfectly ripe, so unusually flavorful. (The host had been a farmer and grown melons himself, so he knew how to find just the right ones.) The ham was local jambon de pays.

What followed was an assiette de crudités that raised this humble dish to a new level -- cucumbers, tomatoes and wonderful beets with vinaigrette, all fresh from his own garden. In the meantime, our cook lit some dried oak branches and let them burn down to charcoal so he could grill lamb chops from the local market. These he served with individual vegetable (courgettes) casseroles. No salad course but some beautiful cheeses that we lingered over with much more wine. And then large portions of a creamy, smooth flan, more champagne, music, coffee, more wine. We started at noon and left at 4:45.


The other culinary highlight was our meal at L'Olivier in nearby Serviers. It was a small simple restaurant with a fresh and innovative cuisine. We ate in the courtyard. Because it is limited to five tables some of the dishes were no longer available. Andrea got the daily special of foie gras de canard in roasted fresh figs for a starter -- a very nice combination -- and then got the scallops as a main course. I took the sauteed crayfish tails with chervil and ginger for a starter and filet of sandre, a freshwater fish similar to perch, for the main course. We had a white Cote de Rhone with it. Dessert was an assortment of chocolate dishes, with the standout being a kind of pudding that was like the molten part of a molten chocolate cake.

On our last day, I fixed a meal for our hosts that I had often fixed in France, a grilled chicken with lemon from Roger Verge's Cuisine du Soleil cookbook, paired with his tomato salad and grilled eggplant. We got two poulets fermiers at the market, along with the tomatoes and eggplant. You butterfly the chickens, flatten them as best as possible, then marinate four hours in salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano on a bed of sliced onion with lemon slices covering them. You remove the lemon slices, grill the chickens on both sides, then return them to the roasting pan with the onion, put the lemon slices back on top and pop them in a very hot oven. The tomato salad is very simple -- you put a couple of tablespoons of salt on the tomatoes, immerse them in red wine vinegar, drain after half an hour or so then dress with olive oil.

Paris

We had many nice meals in Paris and especially nice times with old friends. We tasted some classic French specialties in places like Fontaine de Mars (the foie gras!), Perraudin and Wepler.

But for the blog I want to focus on two restaurants where young chefs are adapting classic French cuisine in new ways. Chef Gilles Ajuelos at La Bastide de l'Odeon, a small restaurant tucked in next to the Odeon where we had lunch the day we arrived, seeks to reinvent Provençal cuisine.

For starters, we had rillettes de saumon and a roasted eggplant timbale they called a millefeuille. Both were delicious -- the rillettes were fluffy on toasted baguette slices and the eggplant was al dente with a great vegetable flavor. What stole the show, though, was Andrea's tagliatelle with girolles. The homemade noodles were perfectly cooked and the girolles were redolent of garlic and butter without reeking of either, firm and tender without being chewy or tough and were simply delicious. I had a very nice mullet filet with a version of ratatouille also done as a timbale (yes, somewhat similar to my starter).

On Sunday, after a nice appero at Closerie des Lilas, we walked down to Christophe, another small eatery behind the Pantheon on Rue Descartes, for another inventive meal. Where Bastide was all warm Provençal colors, Chef Christophe Philippe wants to paint in earth tones.

I had a spring roll with cochon basquaise that was delicious and we were asking ourselves what was Basque about it because Andrea ordered the echine as a main course. It turns out there is no spice or rub, these are simply a breed of pigs that are raised in France's Basque country. So Andrea's echine (loin) had the most marvelous pork flavor, savoring of the marbling that characterizes this cut. It was a dark brown rectangle on a white plate, with another brown rectangle of polenta overlapping it. Not a presentation to my taste, but the flavors were delicious.

I had a similarly monochromatic main course with my sweetbreads and mashed potatoes, both an off-white on a white plate. It was certainly the largest portion of sweetbreads I've ever eaten and tender beyond belief, with that oh-so delicate flavor of this cut. The potatoes may have been the smoothest whipped potatoes I've ever had, with a strong earthy taste and just the right hint of butter. Andrea's starter, by the way, were some very green haricots verts with a slice of bacon, no doubt from those same Basque pigs.

Wines were a good deal here (three young diners at the table next to us went through at least four bottles), and we had a nice chilled red (sorry, forgot where it was from).

Both of these restaurants were among the 102 reviewed in Alexander Lobrano's Hungry for Paris. These chatty descriptions, apparently a collection of magazine reviews, are supplemented by a helpful "In a Word" summary and a "Don't Miss" catalogue of signature dishes. Equally helpful are the listings at the end. We found both these restaurants under the heading "Bistros, Contemporary", as opposed to "Bistros, Traditional" and other restaurant categories ("Haute Cuisine", etc.).

To my amazement, under "Foreign Cuisines" (a short list of four), Lobrano listed L'As du Falafel, which indeed was exactly the takeaway falafel place in the Marais that I always went to on Sunday and that we visited again on Sunday for a falafel sans pareil.

Pesce

Serendipitously we were looking for a place to eat at Dupont Circle and Pizzeria Paradiso had a 40-minute wait so we went across the street to Pesce. It was our first visit since the restaurant had moved down three doors to a space at one time occupied by Johnny's Half Shell (since, of course, moved to Capitol Hill).

Pesce is one of those restaurants pretty much under the radar but an old favorite of ours because we ate there so often with Andrea's parents. So it was sentimental to go back there. The new space, while not as charming as the smaller former location, was still very familiar, and the fish, as always, was very fresh and prepared just right. We split the popcorn shrimp appetizer, which was about as good as popcorn shrimp can be. I had the whole grilled Branzino, which was moist with just the right taste of fishiness, and Andrea got the lobster risotto, a super-rich buttery concoction that was enough to have leftovers for lunch the next day. A glass of Sancerre was the perfect accompaniment.

Update, Oct. 11, 2012: On Tuesday we actually booked a table at Pesce to meet downtown after events. Perhaps it was an off night. The waiter was distracted and intermittent; the chalkboard menu seemed to have fewer seafood choices; the dishes were all a bit "precious" with elaborate sides; the fish did not seem all that fresh. This is all the polar opposite of what we remember and like about Pesce.

I had grilled sardines, which were fine, but very fishy and perhaps not real fresh. Then I had seared tuna, which was served sliced on what turned out to be a "salad" of black peas and a few hundred other things. Perhaps I had the wrong thing in mind, but I had not been expecting a cold dish (yes, I know that seared tuna is not hot). When I queried first the bartender then the waiter, their answers were perfunctory. My glass of Sancerre cost $14 and when the bill came the waiter had charged us for a bottle; his apology was once again perfunctory.

Now it may seem this is the case anyway, but for sure we will not rush back.