Charles

Croque Norvegien

May 31, 2009 by Charles 2 Comments

If you’ve ever been in a Parisian café, you’ve seen Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at work. In this environment, waiters move about like errant electrons, brushing past you with little care for their momentum, their movements, or their duties. To a stationary observer, it is impossible to know both the location of a server and the speed at which he is ignoring you.

The croque-monsieur made its debut in 1910, in a café on the Boulevard des Capucines. The origins of the name are unknown, but I suspect the etymology is quintessentially French. An exasperated Frenchman …

Mornay Sauce

May 30, 2009 by Charles Leave a Comment

To make a croque monsieur – or in this case – a croque norvegien, you need to make a mornay sauce. And to make a mornay sauce, you need to trace through two of the most basic sauces: the roux and the béchamel.

Together with hollandaise, velouté, tomato sauce, and espagnole, béchamel is considered one of the five “mother sauces,” – so named, because these five sauces form…

Roasted Yam and Sweet Potato Fries

May 27, 2009 by Charles 2 Comments

Like strangers on the same page of a phone book, sweet potatoes and white potatoes share nothing more than a common last name. Both potatoes are, of course, plants. But sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family, while white potatoes belong to the nightshade family – sometimes called the potato family. More to the point, sweet potatoes are roots of the dicotyledonous plant; white potatoes are underground stems (tubers) of the potato plant.

Yams, meanwhile, belong to the yam family, and are tubers of the monocotyledon plant. But even though they are tubers, yams have a closer lineage to lilies, than to either the white potato or the sweet potato. The confusion over yams …

Almond Butter, Banana, and Membrillo Sandwich

May 24, 2009 by Charles 1 Comment

The PB&J Sandwich needs no introduction. Its ingredients and structure are tried and true. Add slices of banana, and the PBB&J Sandwich might merit a fleeting handshake. But the ABB&M Sandwich is all but unknown – a foreign dignitary of sorts, whose presence deserves a formal introduction.

Membrillo is Spanish for quince, a lumpy, yellow-green fruit that resembles a cross between an apple and a pear. The quince, born in the Caucasus, dates back to man’s earliest conquests and temptations. The quince started the Trojan War, after Paris awarded the fruit to Aphrodite for the hand of Helen of Troy. The quince is also said to be the apple that tempted Adam and Eve. Which may have been somewhat disappointing for Eve, since the quince is a hard and bitter fruit. Only a few varieties can be eaten raw.

In its modern form, membrillo usually refers to …

Almond Butter

May 24, 2009 by Charles 7 Comments

When I made my Chinese Chicken Salad, I had to find a substitute for the peanut butter – the result of a peanut allergy. The substitution was hardly a problem; Whole Foods carried freshly ground cashew butter and almond butter in its bulk section. After sampling each, I decided to go with the almond butter. The rest of the recipe went according to plan.

After sampling the chicken salad, Caitlin suggested that I should make my own almond butter. I was skeptical. Just a few weeks earlier, I had made Almond-Stuffed Baked Apples, and after several seconds of grinding almonds, no such butter had appeared.

But sure enough, …