This month the Café is taking you through a tour of Languedoc-Roussillon for your Easy French experience!

This southern region puts a great focus on ingredients such as olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, onions and aromatic herbs. Traditional cooking in the Languedoc region has its roots in the same primary products as those also found in Provence, with the most obvious difference lying in the amount of garlic used in the food.  Seafood products are an essential part the cuisine often featuring oysters, cod, and anchovies as prominent ingredients.

For the French 101’s first course chef has created Poivrons Rôtis aux Anchois et Oranges. The roasted sweet peppers and oranges are dressed in a savory vinaigrette of anchovies, olive oil, capers, shallots, and lemon juice, finished with a touch of lemon and lime zest to add a little acid to pique your palate.  Served on a small salad of Bibb lettuce and Escarole, the greens create a balance of bitter and sweet that lays the foundation, literally, for the rest of the dish.

Chef’s second course is Brandade en Rayte – pan-fried salt cod in a traditional red wine-tomato sauce.   The sauce begins with a red wine reduction and incorporates onions, tomato, and fennel seeds, finishing with capers and black olives to add a wonderful briny contrast to the sweetness of the red wine and tomato.  The fish and the sauce lie atop a few of our infamous potatoes fried with duck fat to balance out the dish with a little bit of extra richness.

For dessert, the classic Bras de Venus is a beautiful a sponge cake with a hint of pastis.  The cake is rolled with a luscious fennel cream, served with candied fennel and finished with a drizzling of fennel syrup.  The fennel flavors are muted, adding a very subtle licorice flavor that tastes fantastic but is hard to pinpoint at first.

Come in this November and discover Languedoc-Roussillon in it’s finest form – a delicious dinner – at Café Campagne!  Pictures coming soon!

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

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

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

This month the Café is focusing on the Loire region of western France. Following the longest river in France, the Loire, some of the area has shifted sovereignty throughout history between the French and the British, with even a bit of linguistic influence from the Celts in nearby Breton. Famous for its illustrious Châteaux, it also brings an incredibly diverse offering of wines and cuisine.

The first course is a Salade Tourangelle, which means a salade made in the style of the city of Tours, located the middle to middle-east part of the Loire region.  Common vegetables in the region are artichokes, asparagus, green beans, and mushrooms, most often the Champignon de Paris, so you’ll find the latter two marinated and then tossed in a creamy mustard vinaigrette for this salad.  We dress some celery with lemon and toss all this together to be finished on the plate with a couple rillons.  These are chunks of pork belly that are marinated with white wine and herbs for twenty four hours, braised and then crisped in fat to make a rich, textured addition to the salad.

The second course is Cuisse de Lapin aux Pruneaux.  Although often a dish made with pork, this rabbit variation is exquisite.  The leg is marinated in red wine, browned then braised in red wine and chicken stock.  The last half hour of the braising, port-soaked prunes are added.

The third course, the traditional Pain d’Épices, which literally translates as “Bread of Spices”, is a dense bread made with cinnamon, clove, cardamom, anise seed and honey.  The bread itself serves as a wonderful bed for a house-made honey ice cream.

We’ll have this available for dinner all month long.  We first started serving it last night and sold out of it by about 8:30! Needless to say, we’ll be happy to prepare more to meet the demand.   The whole meal is $35.00 per person.  Hope to see you soon!

Keep an eye out for another post later this weekend about the wines we’ll be featuring this month too!

Matt Longman

IN THE HEAT OF THE BATTLE

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