My Blog

MON 14 JAN

Book Review: Le Cordon Bleu at Home By Marcelo Calbucci

    This book is the reason I started this blog. I'll cook all the recipes in 90 separate events over the next 3 years. You can read more on how this got started on the About page.

MON 14 JAN

Book Review: Le Cordon Bleu's Complete Cooking Techniques... By Marcelo Calbucci

    This was my first Le Cordon Bleu cookbook. It's a technique book (like the title says), and it focus very much on how to prepare, cut, boil, roast, etc. There is a lot of explanation around types of vegetables, meats, sauces, utensils and pans.

    The thing that I like about this book is that it doesn't assume you know anything. It gives you precise instructions, with lots of pictures and most of the time cooking the recipes yield great results. However, because it's so focused on the details of the techniques some recipes take a lot of time.

    One of the best foods I had my entire life is a Seafood Risotto from this book. Everything is done from scratch, so it takes a lot of time, work and uses lots of pots and pans, but the result is just ridiculously good!

    It also contains one the best pizza doughs recipes that I managed to make.

TUE 15 JAN

Lesson 1: Roast Chicken, Peas and Fruit Salad By Marcelo Calbucci

    First time was very easy, although, it required a lot of chopping, peeling and slicing. Who'd have thought a fruit salad can take two hours to prepare? I'm trying to be as close as possible to the instructions on every detail. So, if the book says you have to slide the orange in a specific way, that's what I did.

 

 

 

    The recipes of this weekend were (I'll add the French name to look fancier)

1. Cucumber Salad with Mint (Cocombre à la Menthe)
2. Roast Chicken (Poulet Rôti)
3. Spring Peas with Lettuce, Chervil and Onions (Petits Pois à la Française)
4. Fresh Fruit Salad with Cointreau (Salada des Fruits)

 

    Roasting the chicken was easy, trussing it (aka tying the legs and wings) not so much. I found two videos on the web, because the explanation from the book was too hard to decipher. At the end I realized that if you tie the wings and legs well, it really doesn't matter how you did it.

 

    I used frozen peas instead of fresh ones. I just thought that it would be hard to find and they might not taste so good because they've been sitting on the grocery shelf for a while.

 

 

Results

    By far, the best part of the meal was the Peas w/ Lettuce and Onion. Everybody just loved it. The chicken tasted like roasted chicken. No better, no worrse. The cucumber salad end up tasting not what I expected. It was very bland. And, finally, the Fruit Salad was not good, probably because the fruits were very acid and I forgot to add the sugar.

 

 

Technical data

 

Guests: Daniel, Manu & Hiram

Total cost: $47

Item hard to find: Chervil (not super hard, but had to go to two markets)

Utensils bought: none

Appliances bought: none

Best Dish: Spring Peas with Lettuce, Chervil and Onions

Worst Dish: Cucumber Salad with Mint