I did Incredible Feast this year again.  The event keeps getting better and better.  This year Campagne was teamed up with Stoney Plains farm.  Patrick provided some beautiful vegetables and we served them as bagna cauda.  According to the late Richard Olney, bagna cauda is  “an import from Piedmont, Italy, by way of Nice…” which is now firmly implanted in and embraced by all of Provence.

As with so many dishes from the south of France, bagna cauda is simple and magical all at the same time.  It is basically a traditional vegetable  platter with warm anchovy sauce.

First assemble your favorite fresh vegetables.  I like to cook my green beans, but everything else is great raw. For 4 persons, combine 4 cloves of garlic, a pinch of salt and pound into a paste in a mortar. Add  10 to 15 anchovies, which have been desalted, into a mortar and pound until broken down into small pieces. Transfer paste to small saucepan and ad 2/3 cup of oil and heat gently.  Continue stirring until the anchovies have almost dissolved into the oil.

Adjust seasoning with fresh pepper if desired.  Dip vegetables into warm sauce and voila, you have bagna cauda.

I have always been curious about the weird looking geoduck. Bill Whitbeck from Taylor Shellfish has been trying to get me to use it at Campagne  for quite  some time.  Last Wednesday, Bill came by with a couple 2 pound samples and made a presentation to Randy, Campagne’s Chef de Cuisine, and me.  Well I think I am hooked.

It turns out that peeling and cleaning the geoduck is pretty straight forward.  A quick blanch in hot water and a shock in an ice bath and the skin comes off like a sock.  After separating the flesh from the shell on either side, most everything is usable. We just trimmed  the gills and the other dangling bits and we were ready to go.

Typically the siphon (the part that is outside of the shell) is used for raw or nearly raw  preparations and the mantle (body) is cooked. The mantle was sauteed, deep fried in flour and deep fried in a tempura batter (yes I know tempura is not French). The best siphon preparation was a salad of shallots, cucumber, lemon juice and organic canola oil.  We started getting this great  organic canola oil from some guys out in Snohomish.  I was very surprised at the amount of flavor in the oil.

We topped the salad with a little tempura fried mantle.  voila:

http://twitpic.com/29mjqj

We are now serving it as a special, so come in and give it a try.

Cheers,

Daisley

I have been buying lettuce from Brian MacWhorter from close to 13 years.  Brian and his wife own  Butler Green Farms located on Bainbridge Island.

The way I know that the local growing season has started is when Brian calls me from Bainbridge and Merv Dykstra calls me from Yakima.

In addition to the greens we regularly receive from Brian, he also brings extraordinary strawberries, raspberries, fennel, fantastic basil and beautiful tomatoes.  We used Butler Green Farms strawberries this year as the dessert course for our annual Bastille Day prix fixe menu and the dish was sensational.

Here are a couple links with info about Brian’s farm as well as Brian himself.

Cheers,

Daisley

http://www.butlergreenfarms.com/

http://www.soundfood.org/sfcommunity/sflocalfood-/138-butler-green-farms.html

http://www.kitsapsun.com/photos/2010/may/31/111410/?enlarge=1

Pike Place Market Sunday Chef Cooking Demonstration July 25, 2010

I love carrots.  I like the flavor and the color and the endless ways to prepare it.I like them raw, roasted marinated, baked, fried and pureed. Their tastes can range far and wide depending on the variety and how they are prepared.

In my early days as the chef at Campagne and Café Campagne my love of carrots went a bit too far.  I had prepared a summer menu to be evaluated by the owner.  He said: “what’s up with all the carrots?”  Apparently it was a menu fit for Bugs Bunny.

I had a particular recipe where I diced them really really small and blanched them in salted water and then marinated them in truffle oil.  I called the preparation vegetable caviar.  I think I tried to put it on every fish special I made for a while.  But that’s how it is when you get obsessed with things.  You do not realize that the rest of the world doesn’t love it as much as you do.

My goal now is to get you to share my obsession with carrots and give it the rightful place in you cooking repertoire.  In the summer when they are in abundance, I think it is good to have some options. These are three ways that we prepare it a Campagne and café Campagne.

Carrot Salad

1 # organic carrots

12 each garlic cloves, fresh

3 lemons, juiced

1 T Dijon mustard

Sea salt

Fresh ground black pepper

Blender

Wash, then peel bunched organic carrots. Make thin slices by using a Japanese mandolin. In blender, combine 12 medium fresh garlic cloves and the juice of three lemons, 1 Tablespoon of Dijon mustard, puree until smooth, and then add olive oil in steady stream until thick and creamy. Pour vinaigrette over carrot slices and marinate at least 1 day. Adjust seasoning with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. These need a minimum of one day to taste good. The day of marinating will allow the carrots to release some of their juice and mix with the marinade and then you will get this pale creamy carrot colored vinaigrette that is really delicious.

Now the magic of this dish is in two places.  First: the carrots.  Then it is in the garlic cloves.  When the garlic is relatively fresh in the growing season, it has a softer slightly moister consistency, since it hasn’t been left to dry as most of the garlic you find in the store (which are perfectly good, by the way). Most of the time when we make creamy vinaigrettes in restaurants, we use an egg or at least and egg yolk as an emulsifier (this stabilizes the vinaigrette and keeps the oil from separating). The fresh garlic is a great emulsifier, so along with a little mustard you are able to make a purely vegetarian vinaigrette which has great creamy consistency.

Currently at Café Campagne, we use this salad on salad Nicoise plate along with lots of traditional things like egg, tomato, tuna, potatoes and marinated vegetables.  We also use it on a tartine which is made with this fantastic bread from Grand Central bakery.

I must give credit to one of my culinary heroes, Joel Robuchon (  http://twitpic.com/28nen7 )as I was inspired by a preparation years ago in his first book Simply French.

Glazed Carrots

I pound organic carrots, peeled and sliced thinly, discs or sticks, your choice.

Water to cover

2 Table spoons butter, unsalted

1 teaspoon sugar

1 pinch sea salt

Fresh herbs: parsley, basil or mint

A shallow stainless steel sauté pan (straight and short sides)

The heart of the glazed carrots is the French technique of glazing vegetables.  This is one of those things you learn very early on at culinary school or in French kitchens and I think it remains very useful. It is a technique that can be used with other root vegetables: celery root, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, even beets, though I think it is best with carrots.  At the heart of things is keeping the flavor by keeping the juice.  Typically when carrots need to be cooked, they get boiled.  Boiling gets the carrots to a point where they are easier to eat and digest-meaning softer.  The problem is, when you dump the water, you dump most of the flavor and vibrancy that was in the carrots.  Glazing helps you keep that juice and that is where the flavor is.

Here is the procedure:

Place prepared carrots in sauté pan.  Add enough water just to cover the carrots; and a pinch of salt, little sugar and a couple tablespoons of butter.   Bring the water up to boil, then, turn it down to a simmer.  At this point, allow the carrots to cook gently until they just get tender.  If the water goes down below the level of the carrots, before they are finished cooking, add more water. When the carrots are ready, remove them from the pan with a slotted spoon and hold them on a plate.  Turn up heat and return the liquid to a boil.  Continue to boil until the liquid reduces and begins to get a little thick and glossy and there is just enough to coat the carrots.  At this point return the carrots to the pan and gently coat in the glaze.  If more time is needed to heat the carrots, add a little water and heat until hot and glazed. The combination of sugar, butter and the carrots juices create the glaze. Finally finish the dish with your favorite soft herbs, parsley, basil, mint, tarragon, even chervil.

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EasyFrench

and at  http://twitter.com/daisgord

I love the traditional big French peasant loaves.  I first experienced them at Poilaine in the 6th  arrondissement in Paris on one of my early trips.

http://www.poilane.fr/pages/en/company_univers_histoire.php

Poilane is very serious about the traditional peasant loaf and  the third generation head of the company, Appollonia,  has even expressed a desire to have it displace the baguette which is universally associated with France.

Anyway I have enjoyed this bread many times, on it’s own and as part of a sandwich or tartine.

Some years back,  I noticed Grand Central Bakery had the bread for sale in Portland.  I started pestering them: will you make it in Seattle? Will you ship it to Seattle?  I tried lots of angles and this year, my persistence paid  off.  Apparently, some of my other fellow chefs around town wanted that loaf as well.

When  the loaf became available, I immediately put it to work by starting a long list of tartines on Cafe Campagne’s lunch menu.  At lunch we now serve tartines made with   marinated leeks and carrot salad, fromage blanc, house-made chicken and pork sausage on a base of  Comte cheese, salmon gravlax, and also beef tartare topped with  a quail egg yolk. All have a base of a little Dijon mustard.

Just last Friday we added a salmon roe tartine to  to be served upstairs at Campagne. We get the bread nice and toasty with good color, spread it with a little softened butter and then top it with salmon roe which comes from the gang at Loki.  A little grind of black pepper finishes it off just so.  Right now we we serve it with a little dressed pea vine and the combination is just fantastic.  It’s the perfect snack .

Daisley

Last fall I visited Kelley Moore’s “Moore to Life” TV show which was focusing on charitable work in the community. I still had loads of beautiful basil pesto puree which I had made during the bountiful summer and I had been featuring a mussel dish on Cafe Campagne’s menu. Here is a link to the video of the show. My part is about six minutes into the segment.

Basil and Tomato Mussels with Kelley Moore

Cheers,

Daisley

Sunset magazine did a story on the Pike Place Market which was featured in their May Travel Issue. Here’s a groovy picture of me on “le grande scooter rouge”
Sunset Scooter

Bouillabaisse is one of the quintessential dishes of southern France and the port city of Marseille holds enthusiastic claim to the definitive way to make it. Originally this stew was a collection of fish from the end of the market day, combined with sea water and available herbs. This was boiled vigorously and served from a communal pot along with traditional accompaniments and not much fanfare. Over the years bouillabaisse has evolved from simple peasant food into a dish which represents the soul of the region and stirs quite a bit of passion.

I first had bouillabaisse de Marseille at Chez Michel on Rue des Catalans and it remains one of my most memorable food experiences. The Michel family has been serving bouillabaisse since 1946 and they are sticklers for the tradition.

The magic of this fisherman’s stew is in its many components and details: fresh seafood, aioili, spicy red pepper rouille, a stock made out of the fresh fish bodies, plum tomatoes, fennel, garlic and saffron cooked potatoes. The bouillabaisse broth or soup is served separately from the fish and you are free to enjoy it in any combination.
Bouillabaisse de Marseilles at Campagne

Hey Friends,

here is a shot of me during my Iron Chef America battle against Bobby Flay.

We are having a viewing party on October 11th starting  at 6PM.  The entry is $25 for assorted charcuterie and snacks.  There will be a cash bar. Reservations are required.  If you can’t make it to the party, be sure to tune in on the Food Network

I just started serving this new dish at Cafe Campagne  petit’ sale aux lentils.

it is a variation on a traditional dish of the Lyon region, as we run a program called French 101 at Cafe Campagne consisting of changing 3 course menus for a month at a time or so.

The dish actually started out as a charcuterie project.  I love the taste of pork hock and wanted to do something to capture the fantastic flavor that comes from the long simmer of the connective tissue and ligaments.  I placed  the hocks in a brine, then cooked them in a vacuumed bag  with mirepoix for several hours.  When the cooking was complete and the hocks were sufficiently tender, I pulled the bone from the center and dressed the insides with minced shallots, parsley and red wine vinegar.  I reshaped, pressed and refrigerated the hocks.  The finished product was sliced and dressed with a simple vinaigrette. It reminded me of several meat salads I had had in France-pigs ears and snout and beef nose/snout.

Anyway, every time I was assembling this item I would nibble on the hot meat just out of the bag and the flavor and texture was so good it would make my toes curl.   I thought,  I gotta put this on the menu as a hot item. The aroma was fantastic and the flavor and textures were so satisfying.

Here is a pic of the finished product and my challenge to my twitter followers.

“If u think u r man or woman enough, step up to Cafe Campagne’s French101 special petit’ sale aux lentilles”