It’s Food Revolution AND French Fridays with Dorie today!! WOW!!

So I’ve got an exciting recipe to share with y’all but first let me explain a little bit about what Food Revolution Day is.

Food Revolution Day is a global awareness day of sharing good food and kitchen skills. There has been a major push the past few years to get back to local food sources, to make “real” or unprocessed foods for your family and to re-learn those dusty skills that are long forgotten or hardly used. This means something different for each person but in every case, I’m sure we all have our crutch for processed “quick” foods in today’s busy world and while making “real” food may take a little longer, it is certainly something that we should all aim to do more of! For me, that means getting away from making microwaveable Kraft Mac-n-Cheese for my daughter and making it from scratch as I love to do “when I have time.” And each time I watch that litltle bowl of Mac-n-Cheese rotate in the microwave, I vow to make her “real” mac and cheese “next time.” That’s most of us, isn’t it?

I can’t count the number of times we have been too tired to cook and thrown a frozen pizza into the oven instead of making something wholesome, from scratch. Even if it’s just a sandwich. But gone are the days where most families know how to make a cheese sauce for their pasta to make their own mac-n-cheese at home and Food Revolution Day is about arming each person with the skills necessary to cook healthy, local and wholesome food for yourself and your family!

For the past few weeks, I have mulled over which recipe I would like to share for Food Revolution Day and after discussing it at length with my husband, we chose a recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table” that changed our families eating habits and took it one step further.

~~Pickling!~~

Pickling is a great way to preserve the fresh veggies that we get out of our garden or pick up at the farmer’s market that we get local produce at each week and they make for great appetizers and sides in your lunch!

One recipe that added a neglected vegetable back to our rotation were the two beet salad recipes that are in “Around My French Table.” My husband especially loves the beet salad with “Icy Red Onion” best and our favorite pickled beet recipe includes red onions, so we thought we would simply pickle the beet salad so that we could have it all the time! And to surprise my husband, who loves nearly anything pickled, I added hard boiled eggs to the mix since they are a favorite of both my husband and Mei!

We have really been lucking out and finding some great, organic golden beets lately so I decided to use them because they are a happy, sunny color and many people forget about the golden beets! I think they even have a slightly sweeter flavor and don’t have that woody taste or texture that the regular red beets tend to have during the summer months.

Let’s do this step-by-step! Let’s make Sunny Pickled Beets & Eggs! 

Ingredients:

• Beets (1-2 lbs)
• One or two onions (use white or yellow onions for golden beets and red onions for red beets)
• 4-6 hard boiled eggs, peeled
• 2 C vinegar
• 1 C sugar
• 3 tsp kosher salt
• 2 C water

First, give your beets a quick rinse, getting off any mud & dirt then trim the greens. Preheat the oven to 425F. 

Emily helping me wash and rinse beets!

Cut lengths of foil, just long enough to fully wrap each beet individually. If you have a few smaller beets, they can be wrapped in pairs. Place your foil-wrapped beets on a foil-lined baking sheet and slip into your pre-heated oven for 40-90 minutes.

 After 40 minutes, check your beets by piercing each with a knife or skewer and if it slips easily through the center of the beet, then it is ready to be taken out of the oven. If you feel resistance or the knife doesnt easily pierce the center of the beet, continue to roast the beets at ten minute intervals until the centers can be easily pierced.

Once the beets have roasted thoroughly, allow them to cool until they can be handled. I like to roast off the beets in the morning and come back to them after lunch when they are room-temperature.

Peel back the foil wrapping, scraping the skin off the beet as you go. The foil is abrasive enough to remove any tough bits of skin that are determined to stay on your beet and you will also avoid temporarily, dying your hands while removing the skins. Place the peeled beets on a cutting board.

Slice the beets as you like; the goal is to make them bite-size. We like to cut smaller beets into wedges, quartering each beet and for larger beets, we will wedge them into quarters then slice each quarter into more manageable, bite-size pieces. But cut them as you like to eat them!

Once the beets are sliced, place them into a container large enough to hold four cups of pickling solution, one onion and 4-6 eggs.

Next, slice the onions. I like to chop them in half then slice 1/4 inch slices off of each half. Add them to your sliced beets.

Get out a medium saucepan and add the vinegar, sugar, kosher salt and water to it. Heat the ingredients over high heat, stirring constantly until the sugar and salt are completely dissolved.

Pour this mixture over the beets and onions. Add the peeled, hard-boiled eggs, completely submerging each egg in the pickling solution. Allow the mixture to cool completely to room temperature before covering it securely and refrigerating it. It will need to sit in the fridge for three days to fully pickle. But don’t worry, it will be completely worth the wait!

Once the pickled beets, onions and eggs are ready to eat, we simply whip up Dorie’s vinaigrette to drizzle over top of it and chow down! We eat these at least two or three times a week with dinner, as a cold appetizer or even for dessert when we aren’t interested in something sweet and it hits the spot every time!

Ingredients: for Vinagrette

• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tsp honey
• 1 TBS of pickling liquid
• 2 TBS extra-virgin olive oil
• salt and pepper, to taste
• minced fresh oregano (optional)

Put the mustard, honey, vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper in a small jar or a small Tupperware and shake until the dressing is emulsified or whisk in a bowl. Drizzle over the beets or toss in a bowl, sprinkle the minced oregano on top if desired and enjoy chilled!

I especially love the ombre effect the pickling liquid has on the egg, going form a sunny yellow along the edges and paling as you approach the yolk and the taste is phenomenal! Or so I’m told. I’m actually not that into pickled eggs, so Mei and I just keep a few hard-boiled eggs in a Tupperware to have with our meals and let the hubby indulge in all the pickled eggs he likes!

Check out what Food Revolution recipes and skills the other Doristas have chosen to share with you this week, there are some truly fabulous ones out there and if it doesn’t send you running into the kitchen to try some out – you may consider picking up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table” to see what other delicious bites could be had!

ON YOUR PLATE

I’M BACK!!

I have been away from FFWD since this past February when my family made (yet another) move from England to California and let me tell ya, it’s certainly been an experience!

What I can say about California in the few short months that we have been here, or back in the States in general, is that it is sunny and I actually enjoyed being an expat overseas than being “home”…. I think my heart belongs overseas. The States are nice for visiting and shopping but in general, we really enjoyed our life in England, the pace of everything, the customs, etc and back in the States it just feels really impersonal, distant and well – commercialized. And while most people may not understand this feeling we have or seem to think that we will settle down in California and find it hard to leave eventually, it is certainly not the truth for us. We are desperate to move again – and I’m sure we will in a couple short years.

But our focus has been finding Mei a school to start in the fall, establishing our garden, exploring our surroundings, un-packing and making our house a home and just enjoying our time in California since I’m sure it will pass quickly.

And now that most of that is done, I can focus on getting back in the rhythm of French Fridays!!

My goal was actually to post last week’s recipe but as things happen, I didnt read the recipe until Thursday night and it didnt seem to be a recipe not to share with the hubby, so we will be having our mushrooms and eggs this weekend with a report next Friday! But we did manage to have the Chicken Breasts Diable for dinner, so that’s one more off my “to-do” list!

In the meantime, I do have a lot of catching up to do as well as this week’s post to write about – so without further ado, the coupetade!

with a dusting of powdered sugar and a drizzle of maple syrup, we were ready for dessert!

A nearby grocer had “sweet french bread” which looks, tastes and smells a lot like brioche, so I bought a loaf of that to use in this week’s recipe.

I don’t know why I haven’t always been making french bread like this but I know that I won’t ever be using ANY other type of bread ever again, unless forced. The french bread part of this was UH- MAZE – ING!!

just before pouring in the custard…

We made a half-batch since I felt that a full pan’s worth for two and a half of us was a little much, and even that is a good three servings for us. I also added a teaspoon of cinnamon to the custard mixture, since to me, french toast isn’t all it could be without a dusting of cinnamon. We also included cranberries instead of cherries since I couldn’t find my bag of dried cherries in my soon-to-be-sorted pantry.

It made the house smell great, and our mother’s helper and the girls shared one of the slices of french toast while I finished whipping together the custard because it smelled THAT great! Yeah, that’s right! All three of them wandered into the kitchen looking for a little taste….

I had to sneak this in here, I minced the garlic greens and added them instead of the garlic cloves for the diable sauce and what a deep garlic flavor!! Try it sometime!

A little splash, ok, maybe a generous splash, of cognac was added to the custard mixture with the vanilla and it was entirely necessary. It really enhanced the flavor of the custard. I totally and utterly condone this. Pretty much, I will add a “splash” of rum or cognac to nearly anything I bake after my experience with French Fridays…!

As things go around here, I got a little distracted once I poured the custard into the dish with the french toast slices while we were waiting for the hot water to boil and  the bread had sucked up quite a bit of the custard by the time I got it into the oven so once it baked, there wasn’t as much custard as I had anticipated, so when we make it again, I will be sure to make sure there is ample custard.

And a rum sauce.

The maple syrup was nice but rum sauce would be better.

Don’t ya think??

Next time. Next time.

This is certainly a make again, although I will probably dice the french bread and make it in individual ramekins instead of a large “casserole.”
If you would like the recipe, please find a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table” at your local library, amazon or bookseller. And while you are thumbing through your copy and deciding to join our group or not, you can peruse our upcoming “assignments,” HERE!

Have a fabulous Friday!!