Chef Michel Trama runs one of the French Southwest's culinary treasures, Les Loges de l'Aubergade, a stylish three-star restaurant in the region of the Agen. There he produces ethereal, flawlessly balanced dishes using local products. This deceptively simple recipe includes chicken breasts coated in a sweet nutty flavored sauce made with garlic-infused white wine.
Pork shoulder roast is also known as Boston butt. This cut benefits from long, slow roasting or braising. Try braising some pork bones along with the pork shoulder. While cooking, they'll release a tiny bit of gelatin to give the dish a rich, unctuous texture.
Note: We found that 1 green chile was enough, but add more if you like things fiery.
This is the basic, classic Chinese preparation for any live seafood, and it always is a hit, underscoring the prawns' natural sweetness. Most seafood sellers will package spot prawns to stay alive for several hours. If you get a few with roe attached, consider yourself lucky; it is a delicacy.
Cook's Notes: When buying dried soba at Asian or health food stores, you may or may not be able to figure out the percentage of buckwheat to wheat flour from the package label. Sometimes the labels are only in Japanese, sometimes they just don't say. Unless you know a good Japanese grocery store, the best bet for high-quality 80 percent buckwheat soba (hachiwari soba) is to mail order it (see Resources below).
Sometimes the eating-close-to-the-ground concept needs a night off. You want a piece of meat, a potato and maybe a salad — the stuff of old-time grillers' dreams. With a grill and a pair of tongs, you can have it all.
While writing this book, I read as many picnic and summery cookbooks as I could find, just to see what other people had done. By far the best book I came across was Claudia Roden's 1981 Picnics. It was packed with great recipes, ideas, and an astonishing amount of research. She graciously allowed me to reprint this recipe, which I adore for its simplicity and the clarity of its flavors.
If any of your guests have a problem with shellfish, you can make this soup without the shrimp and it will still taste sublime, just set a helping of soup aside before you add the shrimp. Look for fennel bulbs with light green fronds in the center.
This sauce is a sharper version of pevra, a peppery bread sauce that is one of the four traditional condiments that accompany bollito misto, the grand array of boiled meats served throughout Italy's northern regions. Spiked with young balsamico, it is a perfect match to boiled chicken, my comfort dish for a cold evening. In order to avoid overcooking the breast before the legs are done, water is added to the level of the top of the thigh joint, leaving the breast exposed. When the legs are tender the chicken is inverted to finish the cooking of the breast. The flavorful broth that results is used to moisten the sauce.
I love risotto, but not as a main dish, unless something has been done to it to give it form. Here, a lemony risotto is formed into ovals, then shallow-fried until golden and crisp and served over a bed of finely slivered spring vegetables. These croquettes make a lovely supper dish for company and can be made vegan if no butter and eggs are used, although the egg does help bind the rice.