Spring Hat Trick

A couple of my Navy friends were coming for lunch one day last week - Sunny and Bonnie, whom I met when we three were more or less imprisoned in a French boarding school back when President Kennedy was refusing to let the Russians place missiles in Cuba. Of the ten or so American girls at the school, only four of us have stayed in touch and three of us live locally so we get together three times a year to swap stories and catch up.

Spring may not be here officially yet, but signs of it are everywhere - daffodils and flowering trees are brightening the landscape, it's no longer pitch black dark at dinner time and the neighbor's kids have switched from hockey to baseball. Best of all, new potatoes and asparagus from Zuckerman and green garlic are in the markets. With a hat trick like that, it seemed perfect to tip winter into spring by serving a raclette version with green garlic over those tender little spuds and nestled next to some grilled asparagus.

There isn't really even a recipe for a meal so simple and direct. Slice some green garlic, sauté it in a little butter. Steam some little potatoes and cut them into more or less bite-size pieces. Mix the potatoes and the green garlic together and top with slices of raclette cheese. Run under the broiler until the cheese melts, bubbles and just lightly browns.

Drizzle a minimal amount of olive oil over some fresh, washed asparagus once the ends are snapped off. Arrange them on a hot grill (I used my Jennair, since it was raining outside by then, but a grill pan works just as well and, if it's sunny, a barbecue is the best for smoky flavor) and roll them around as they brown and even blacken in spots. If the heat is very hot, watch them carefully - this only takes a very few minutes. Serve hot or cold or room temp - they are deliciously sweet any way they come!

Sunny and I walked Cora around the town while we waited for Bonnie to arrive, then we all sat outside for a few minutes on the new deck, enjoying the fresh air just before the rain moved in (again!) and catching up with each others' lives. Bonnie will have a third grandchild in the summer. Sunny's husband is publishing a book. I'm anticipating an Easter visit from our granddaughter. Sharing a meal and a natter with these women is my idea of a hat trick.

Raclette Fiend

I'm a half-Irish woman who came of age in France. I guess I should have known that raclette was going to be my all-time favorite dish. If you've read enough already! about raclette here, you can just skip this post and come back tomorrow, 'cause here I go again.

Boiled red spuds (again!), smothered in raclette cheese under the broiler (again!) but this time with lightly sautéed pancetta wafers here and there through the cheese and potatoes. I'm in true danger of becoming a raclette fiend. 'Nuff said.

Mon Petit Chou

We seem to be on a raclette kick now that the weather is definitely wintry. It's all relative, of course, as "wintry" here means you might possibly have to scrape your windshield with a credit card to get the frost off in the morning, but usually it's not as severe as that. I did have to bring my poinsettias in off the front steps last night - oh, the hardships we suffer!

Back to the raclette. I had fully intended to add some pancetta when I made the raclette this time but I totally spaced it and, instead, had the idea to add some gently steamed Brussels sprouts before melting under the broiler all that lovely cheese over the red potatoes.

The ticket with these tiny cabbages is not to boil them on high heat - that brings out all their aggressively smelly cabbage-family genes - but rather to cook them gently and only just until they are tender on medium heat with a little water to coax out their sweet side. They like it when you say "pretty please" rather than "Hurry up!"

This simple dish, completed with some tiny, intense cornichons and pickled onions (I like Maille brand but have enjoyed others as well), even got the thumbs-up from My Beloved, who is normally not a huge fan of "mon petit chou." We were murmuring endearments all the way through this delicious dinner. Charles Boyer comes to mind.

Swiss Taters

Cruising through the supermarket aisles the other day, I happened upon a nice brick of cheese from the Swiss/French mountains and was reminded of the dish that bears its name.

Raclette; the very idea starts my mouth watering. This time, it was little more than a slightly tangy, earthy cheese melted under the broiler over some boiled red potatoes and sprinkled with a little bacon but what a lovely late fall meal it made!

I added dark green Swiss chard that I had sautéed in some of the bacon drippings with a minced garlic clove or two - just seemed like the right combination since the origins match - and sprinkled the raclette with a little Italian parsley for color and a bright taste. Added some very puckery cornichons and pickled onions to the plate and, man, does that ever liven up the tongue! Alternating bites of pickle with bites of unctuous cheesy spuds is a screaming, arms-in-the-air roller-coaster ride for the taste buds.

If you were struggling home after a tough day at work or from driving the kids to all their soccer, ballet and playdate activities, this would put delicious dinner on the table in less than half an hour. Even if you're retired like me with lots of time to spare, you could spend it reading a trashy novel or visiting with friends and still have a lovely meal in a flash. Raclette - keep it in mind.

On A Raclette Kick

I'm learning more about raclette every time I make it, which is frequently in the past month or so - I seem to be on a raclette kick. Something about my Irish side loves the idea of spuds in any form whatever and if you add slightly stinky French cheese and (this time) bacon, all the rest of my genes sit up and beg for dinner.

I wish I had known about raclette while I was still working - this is the perfect dish for a busy worker bee, ready in a flash. The traditional pickles and pickled onions are already prepared and I would have boiled a bunch of small red potatoes and fried a few extra strips of bacon on the weekend so I was ready to heat them briefly in the microwave, pop on the cheese and other toppings, run it under the broiler while quickly steaming a veg or tossing a salad, et voila! Even without pre-cooking the spuds and bacon, this dish could go from ingredients in the fridge to finished dinner in about half an hour.

The block of raclette cheese I bought this time was softer and riper than the previous two I have tried, nicely stinky and a little sticky when I unwrapped it, less like Swiss and more like epoisse. Trimmed of it's orange outer rind, it made a simply killer raclette. Had I not added the bacon bits, it still would have been one of the best raclettes I have made; with the bacon bits it was Raclette Nirvana.

I promise not to post every single variation of this recipe that I try on my raclette kick, but the possibilities are endless!

Variety Is The Spring Of Life

The raclette we ate a couple of weeks ago was so easy and so scrumptious that I couldn't wait until a decent amount of time had passed so I could try it again.

I had found some green garlic at the farmer's market but I didn't have any more back bacon, so I decided to use some of the corned beef left over from St. Patrick's Day.

Raclette is so very simple, that it's easy to tweak with just a change or two. This time, I sauteed the chopped white and light green parts of a green garlic shaft in a little butter before adding lardons of the corned beef to the pan to heat briefly. I layered the garlic and corned beef into a small casserole dish, topping them with boiled red potato chunks and slabs of raclette cheese before running the dish under the broiler just long enough to bubble and lightly gild the cheese before serving.

The green garlic gave little pockets of intensely sweet spring flavor to the slightly salty beef and savory cheese. What might otherwise have been the perfect winter dish was brightened by the presence of spring in the form of green garlic freshly sprouted in the warming sunshine.

Swissish

Lacking the Swiss chalet covered with snow, the roaring fire and, incidentally, the fireplace, still I wanted to try making raclette, a dish made classically by melting cheese next to a fire and scraping the lovely, now-gooey stuff onto warm potatoes. Sounds heavenly, doesn't it?

When my pal Sari and I were at Market Hall in Oakland, we visited the cheese shop where I spied a handsome wedge of raclette. It smelled wonderful, nutty like Swiss cheese but a little smellier, earthier. Here was my chance to try raclette.

Once I got home, however, and the girly thrill of brunch and shopping wore off a bit, I realized that My Beloved would ask, when served raclette, "Where's the meat?" Meals are not meals to him if they don't contain some serious animal protein and no amount of explaining that cheese is exactly that will convince him.

Then I remembered that he had bought some Irish back bacon when he was last at the store (I love sending him to the store - he always brings home stuff I would never think of buying) so I thought to add that to the classic spud-and-cheese raclette recipe.

I boiled some chunked red potatoes while the back bacon sizzled in the iron frying pan, removing the bacon when it was lightly browned and cutting it into bite-sized pieces. When the potatoes were tender, I drained and tossed them in the frying pan, stirring them around to coat with the small amount of bacon fat (back bacon is very lean compared to belly bacon), then topped them with the bacon and thick slices of the raclette cheese. Under the broiler to melt and lightly brown the cheese, and less than five minutes later we sat down to an amazing meal.

The potatoes made a wonderful undercarriage for the salty bacon and earthy, unctuous cheese. It's simple food, hearty and sustaining. Makes you wish you were Swiss, or at least had spent all day schussing down the slopes.

Years ago we tore out our fireplace in favor of a sweeping view of the bay and we rarely miss it; last night might have been one of those times. We'd still have been missing the snow and the chalet, however, so we lit the candles and called that good enough.