Meat | Food Nouveau

A Classic Québécois Dish: Beef and Winter Vegetables "Bouilli"

It’s such a universal truth that it has become a cliché: cold, winter temperatures make one yearn for comforting dishes. As much as I love delicate salads, they are definitely not what I need to fuel up on after shoveling show for over an hour.

Last weekend, as I was getting my workout shoveling said snow, a family dish popped into my head: I wanted make a bouilli (“boiled”, literally), just like my mom used to make when I was a kid. Bouilli is a classic Québécois dish which is a close cousin to the French pot-au-feu. It is usually made with low-cost cuts of beef and winter vegetables like potatoes, carrots, turnip and cabbage, all of which are slowly cooked in a broth flavored with herbs.

Shoveling makes me hungry for hearty comfort food! After a snowstorm last week:

Posted on February 10, 2012 • Category: Mains, Meat, North America, Quebec (Province), Recipes • 3 Comments

Poor Girl Gourmet’s Braised Pork Shoulder

At home, we don’t eat a lot of meat. This happens naturally, not because of personal beliefs or meatless trends. For a very long time, I was disdainful of manipulating raw meat (especially bone-in cuts), so I only bought prepared, cleaned meat cuts that required as little touching or cutting as possible. Yes, I’m now ashamed to admit, that included those pre-cut chicken strips I used to make fajitas once in a while. I didn’t buy pre-cut chicken strips to save time; I bought them just because I didn’t want to touch raw chicken.

Because I so rarely cooked meat, I became wary of cooking it at all; afraid I would botch good cuts or serve tough steaks. We are far from being vegetarians, though, and I continued incorporating easy, prepared cuts of meat into dishes like pasta, curries or stews. We chose meat-centric dishes when we went out to restaurants and enjoyed the fabulous slowly cooked or barbecued meats some of our friends turned out.

Posted on June 28, 2011 • Category: Mains, Meat, Recipes • 41 Comments

Growing Up with Jacques Pépin

I’m trying to remember how old I was when I first watched Jacques Pépin on TV. I was in my early teenage years and already a fan of cooking shows. In the home where I grew up, the first floor was an open plan where the kitchen opened onto the dining and living rooms. The TV was often on in the living room, and we could watch it all the way back from the kitchen. My Mom and I would often cook or bake while watching cooking shows – I inherited her ability (or need) to do two things at once – and it strikes me today that most of the cooking shows produced in Quebec back then were hosted by homemakers rather than chefs, which made their cooking very approachable.

My Mom very often jotted down the recipes we liked as we were watching live, and I remember, reading her notes, feeling I still had a lot to learn because she only had to write down the ingredients and a few keywords (oven temperature, cooking times) to remember how to make a dish.

Posted on June 16, 2011 • Category: Giveaways, Mains, Meat, Recipes • 75 Comments

How to Make Authentic Pork Satay

My desire to make satay sauce spawned in a bit of an unorthodox way. No, I didn’t go to Thailand: I watched “MasterChef Australia.” One of my favorite contestants in season 2, Marion, was half Thai, and she excelled in showcasing this exotic cuisine’s flavors in a modern, unusual, and nearly-always successful way. Near the end of the season, (spoiler warning!), she had to compete in an elimination challenge. The dish she needed to make was none other than satay sauce. This might have been considered a given considering her heritage, but it’s the dish that forced her to leave the competition.

Watching both contestants attempt to put together their own version of satay sauce (without a recipe) was intriguing, as they chose different ingredients and wound up with fairly different sauces. I thought of all the versions I had tasted up until now–some heavy on coconut milk, others on peanut butter, some very sweet, and others very spicy.

Posted on March 15, 2011 • Category: How-Tos, Mains, Meat, Recipes • 5 Comments

How to Make and Wrap Dumplings: Three Methods and Recipes (Video)

Last weekend, as a belated nod to Chinese New Year, I decided to stock up on dumplings. Once in a while, I make a big batch of these bite-size wonders and freeze them for future use. It’s a time-consuming task, but I find it relaxing and I’m rewarded with many great meals to come. Whenever I want a quick & easy lunch, I take out exactly the number of bites I need, cook them from frozen and voilà, I enjoy their crispy and moist deliciousness. Industrially-made dumplings sold in the frozen section of Asian supermarkets are fairly popular and some brands are not too bad, but making them yourself is lots better, believe me. First, you control the thickness of the wrappers you’re using – nothing worse than biting a dumpling and discovering that it’s mostly made of dough, not filling. Second, you know exactly what you put in your dumplings: no fillers, no mystery ingredients, just goodness.

Posted on February 9, 2011 • Category: Appetizers, Fish/Seafood, How-Tos, Meat, Recipes, Snacks, Vegetarian • 8 Comments

Review: Harold Dieterle’s Kin Shop / Recipe: Spicy Thai Laab Salad

Our visit New York in the first week of January was organized like clockwork. I had a “celebrity chef” week in mind and I knew we couldn’t improvise as most of the places I wanted us to go to are fully booked weeks in advance. Turns out right after New Year’s was a good time to dine in New York: healthy 2011 resolutions made tables easy to find at the city’s big name restaurants.

Here’s what our schedule looked like: Try one of David Chang’s restaurants to see what the hype is all about, go to Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 to refresh my molecular memory, visit Susur Lee’s first restaurant in the US to make sure he does Canada proud and try Harold Dieterle’s new Kin Shop because… Well, just because I like the guy and I was curious to see how he manages to pull authentic Thai off.

I loved our four celebrity-meals for widely different reasons and I will tell you more about it in the next few days.

Posted on January 25, 2011 • Category: Appetizers, Meat, New York City, North America, Recipes, Restaurants • 4 Comments

On Overcoming My Disdain for Carcasses and Being Rewarded by Chicken Tostadas

I think all cooks have their Achilles’ heel, something they just can’t or don’t like to do. Mine is meat. Don’t get me wrong, I like meat, I eat it and I’m far from being a vegetarian, but I don’t cook it a lot. Many of our meals at home don’t include meat and when they do, meat isn’t the star, merely the supporting role. You won’t be served a T-bone steak at my table. Not that I have something against it, but I lack confidence in preparing it.

And I hate bones and giblets and offal and everything that reminds me meat has once been part of an animal.

There, I said it. E often mocks me and says that I prefer to think that chicken breasts grow in trees all plump and pink – well, I’m ashamed to admit it but he’s kind of right. There’s a famous restaurant chain in Quebec that’s known for its roasted chicken.

Posted on November 23, 2010 • Category: How-Tos, Meat, Recipes • 0 Comments

Book Week: Lamb, Olive and Caramelized Onion Tagine; Blackberry and Cherry Crisp

The first dish I cooked from Nigella Express wasn’t fitting for this time of year, really, but I was drawn to the bold flavors of the lamb, garlic, black olives and caramelized onions blended together. The Lamb, Olive & Caramelized Onion Tagine, appearing in the “Quick Quick Slow” chapter, indeed takes a bit of time to cook but as with most mijotés, it’s even better made in advance and reheated: it allows the flavors to fully develop and to blend together. The dish is very quick to put together so simply plan on making your tagine over the weekend and portion it for a lightning-fast-to-prepare dinner later on in the week.

To make up for the rather autumnal main dish, I chose a very bright dessert: a Blackberry Crisp. I cheated a bit, however, mixing seasonal cherries with the berries. Crisps are very basic desserts but I liked Nigella’s nutty and crunchy topping blending sliced almonds and sunflower seeds.

Posted on June 17, 2010 • Category: Books, Desserts, Meat, Recipes • 1 Comment

Cooking for Spring in Green and White

There’s this period somewhere between winter and spring: the sun is out, weather is getting warmer, tulips are shyly showing their first leaves, but mounds of snow are still melting slowly. You feel for lighter, fresher food but can’t let go of comfort dishes yet.

With spring coming more than a month early in Quebec, some of my friends are already barbecuing away. Mine is still hidden in the shed so I turned to ethnic foods, dishes with flavors infused by the sun.

One of my favorite go-to snack foods is hummus. I have bought too many containers of this creamy dip to count, gradually personalizing it by adding a bit of lemon zest, a dash of spicy olive oil – until my parents gave me a shiny new food processor (I had managed everything with a hand mixer until then) and I figured I could whip up my own.

Posted on April 5, 2010 • Category: Appetizers, Meat, Recipes • 3 Comments

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