This is some serious gingerbread

Dark molasses, black pepper and Chinese five-spice powder make for big-flavored gingerbread with plenty of spicy bite. Recipe below.

As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, I hardly ever bake. Fortunately for me—and for you—Marion does. Wonderfully. So I’ll just get out of the kitchen and let her take over this week.

I know it’s May, but it’s become cold here again. Spring had a few tentative successes—the young leaves started emerging, all soft and green, the small brown birds came back and began claiming real estate and singing to each other, pollen floated from the trees and we put away our duvets and down coats and brought out the light blankets and the little thin jackets. Then on Friday, it rained—where we were, it rained a lot and the atmosphere was quite unsettled—and then the temperature dropped very aggressively. Last night, shivering and muttering, I gave up and dragged the duvet out for what I hope will be its last hurrah.

On the other hand, I also resumed baking gingerbread. The ancestor of this recipe originally came to us from one of the Silver Palate cookbooks, 15 or so years back. Over the years I’ve monkeyed with it in a number of ways—different sweeteners, varying volumes of spices, assorted toppings and accompaniments. Certain failed experiments included butter, orange peel, raisins, honey. Crystallized ginger was added, then rejected. It’s gone through a lot in our hands. For the past few years, this is the version I’ve almost always made.

There are plenty of gingerbread recipes that call for light molasses and a teaspoon of ginger and a pinch of cinnamon and maybe quickly hold up a nutmeg in front of the oven while you’re baking the bread: Bland to the vanishing point. To me if you are serious about gingerbread, you don’t use recipes like that. Just make yourself some white bread toast. Gingerbread to me is about bite and spiciness. I am looking for high impact power gingerbread.

This is intensely flavorful, and it doesn’t have the high-fat challenge of a cake or pie. It’s a great casual dessert, ideal to end a family dinner or a simple brunch. The ancestor recipe called for a lemon glaze, which in this evolved version is unnecessary. I myself like this gingerbread cut into squares and served plain, along with a cup of coffee or a glass of cold buttermilk [and, sadly, I am the one person in our entire family who likes the latter]. It’s good with whipped cream, it’s great with vanilla ice cream or a delicate nutty gelato, like hazelnut. It’s also one of those things that, eaten for breakfast, cheers you up inordinately even though it may not be the most healthful way to start the day. Not as evil as cold pizza or leftover devil’s food cake, but just as alluring.

We love this recipe in the cold months, but honestly, we have it any time of year.

Pasta Frittata: Eggs elevated

Peppers, Parmesan and leftover pasta come together beautifully to give eggs a rustic sophistication, as Pasta Frittata. Recipe below.

I don’t know about where you are, but here in Chicago, gas has already blown past four dollars a gallon. And milk is getting close to that price. So when I saw that Ginny over at Just Get Floury had posted a challenge to make a dish that serves at least two people for five dollars or less, it sounded like an idea whose time had come.

Ginny calls her event the Dollar Dish Duel, and while she just challenges her readers to “make a dish for $5 that must feed at least two people,” I took it to mean more than a simple side dish [who can't steam some green beans for under five bucks, for instance]. To me, the challenge was to make something substantial that either stood alone as a meal or became a meal with the addition of a small salad or the aforementioned green beans or, as I chose at the last minute, some fresh strawberries.

Ginny says in her rules that you can use three staples from your pantry—salt, pepper and oil were her examples—without counting them in your budget [there's still time to enter, by the way—the deadline is May 5]. I further interpreted the rules to mean that if I only used a portion of something and the rest were saved for a later use, I could count the cost of only the portion I used against my five-buck limit.

With this wiggle room, even meat could work within the guidelines. And after all, I’ll often buy a package of chicken breasts or ground beef planning to get two meals from it. But as much as I love meat, I decided it would be more interesting to make a meal without it for this event.

Most important, though, it had to be good. I wasn’t interested in simply proving I could whip up a meal for cheap. The meal had to be something I would happily serve, if not to company, then as a family dinner. Something we would happily eat. And something I would happily make again.

Soups and scrambles and stir fry all immediately came to mind, but nothing really got me excited. Soups and I are taking a little break right now; I just feel the need to see other courses. Scrambles sounded too breakfasty. And stir fry main courses without meat almost always involve tofu. Yawn.

Then I thought of an elevated form of scrambled eggs: Italian frittatas. Specifically, a frittata Marion has made a number of times, using leftover pasta. She hadn’t made it in so long that we’d forgotten where she first saw a recipe—or even what to call it. The classic frittata is kind of an Italian omelet and doesn’t include pasta.

A little noodling around on Google, though, turned up boatloads of frittata recipes using pasta—and leftover pasta, at that. Some were baked, some were started on the stovetop and then broiled to finish [the classic frittata technique]. Some used cheese, some didn’t. Some even insisted on using pasta mixed with red sauce, which sounded more like a desperate measure than a recipe to me. But virtually all of them involved mixing the beaten eggs with the boiled pasta before any of it went into the pan. I followed Marion’s approach instead, sautéing the cooked pasta in the skillet before adding the eggs. It gives the frittata a satisfying crunchy quality we really enjoy.

The taste of spring: Seasonal fava beans and pasta

Celebrate spring with colorful, lively Fettuccine with Fava Beans, Red Bell Pepper and Bacon. Lemon juice and zest help brighten things up. Recipe below.

Fava beans have always sounded like too much work to me. I mean, you have to shell them twice—once to get them out of their pods and then again to remove the tough, waxy skin on each bean. It didn’t sound like there was an actual degree of difficulty involved, as they say in certain sports competitions, just more like a degree of pain-in-the-buttedness. But then Susan over at Food Blogga did a post that made shelling them look fairly easy, maybe even semi-fun. Okay, I was semi-interested.

Then the current issue of Bon Appétit featured a beautiful pasta dish using fava beans, Italian sausage and plum tomatoes. I was a little more interested. So I started poking around on epicurious.com, where more than one recipe compared them to edamame, the delicious protein-rich, slightly crunchy, slightly nutty Japanese soybean snack. Sign me up.

Taking my usual approach, I read a number of recipes and then came up with one of my own, a pasta dish that celebrates the seasonality of fava beans—they’re only readily available a couple/few months in spring/summer. I added red bell pepper as much for color contrast with the bright green beans as for flavor, along with some onion and garlic. Then I brightened the flavor with lemon juice and zest. And I balanced all this lively produce goodness with nature’s perfect food, bacon.

Shelling the beans. This is the elephant in the room. May as well get it out of the way right now. I’d always been put off by what sounded like a labor intensive, time-consuming task. Susan made it look easy—just blanch the beans and squirt them right out of their skins. The truth fell somewhere in the middle for me.

One food blogger called shelling fava beans almost zenlike, and I could kind of see what he meant. Simple, humble processes like this are why we cook. Why I cook, anyway, or part of the reason. The very act of making something with my hands, something I will eat and share with others, is one of the most direct things I do in the everyday living of my life. By way of contrast, my equivalent of hunting and gathering, of helping put food on the table and a roof over our heads, is writing advertising copy.

Zen, schmen. How do you actually shell them? Put a pot of water on to boil so you can blanch the individual beans for part two of the shelling process. While you’re at it, put something on the boombox or radio or TV or whatever for company. Then have at it.

Grasp a fava bean pod in one hand and twist/snap/tear off the end that attaches to the plant. Then tear open the pod and remove the beans. Sometimes the pod will split open along the seam, sometimes not.

When the water is boiling, dump the shelled beans in and blanch them for 2 to 3 minutes. Then drain them and plunge them into a bowl of iced water to stop the cooking. When they’ve cooled, remove the tough outer skin. According to Susan, you can just squeeze them at one end and the beans will pop out. That didn’t happen for me, so I was delighted to later read that even Clotilde over at Chocolate & Zucchini had not been able to do this. We both came upon a similar simple solution, though. Just pinch a little tear in the skin with your thumbnail; then when you squeeze it, the bean will indeed shoot right out.

A pound of unshelled fava beans in their pods will produce about a cup of shelled beans. While producing my cup for this recipe, I remembered wandering through my Aunt Veta’s Mississippi kitchen one summer as a boy. Three or four women were in there shelling just-picked butter beans, bushel basketsful of them, probably still warm from the summer sun. It didn’t look like my idea of fun, but they were having a high old time, gossiping, laughing and “carryin’ on,” as Aunt Veta would put it.

Ethnic Paris: Spicy shrimp from the Indian Ocean

Easy, flavorful Shrimp Rougail [Rougail de Crevette], originally from tiny islands in the Indian Ocean, is one of many exotic taste treats found throughout Paris—and in The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. Cumin, fresh ginger and a fiery little Thai pepper [whose heat can be dialed down] make it a lively main course.

Last week I wrote about crêpes, calling them the ultimate French comfort food. And they are indeed quintessentially French, as are old men in berets, accordion players on the Paris Metro and six-week vacations.

But in Paris, there’s a whole other culinary world besides crusty baguettes, café au lait and stinky cheeses. As with many major cities, Paris is a magnet to people from all over the world. And those people bring their cooking with them, giving each neighborhood or arrondissement its own special flavor.

On one visit to Paris, for instance, Marion went with our friend Marianne, who lives in Paris and who was born in Hong Kong, to the 13th arrondissement for lunch. The 13th really is a mix of things Paris was and has become—the pretty little Butte aux Cailles neighborhood, a tiny quiet 19th century enclave; and the biggest Chinatown in Paris. The latter was their destination. They perused a high-rise shopping mall and then had lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant. What impressed Marion most that day was that all of their transactions there in the heart of Paris—in the restaurant and in the mall—were conducted in Mandarin. English would get you nowhere, French and German would get you nowhere.

As further proof of the diverse wealth of Paris, just take a look at The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. Sarah over at The Delicious Life recently received a review copy and generously offered it up as a prize in an impromptu drawing. And I won!

This colorful cookbook has more than 100 recipes from internationally renowned chefs who have come from all over the globe to make Paris their home. Everywhere from Cameroon to Cambodia, China to the Caribbean.

And then there’s the delicious, lively shrimp rougail above, from the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius. Nominally part of Africa, these tiny specks of land some 500 miles east of Madagascar are more shaped by their inhabitants’ ancestries—Indian, African, Malagasy, Chinese and ethnic French—and by their ties with France and Great Britain than they are by their proximity to the African continent.

Rougail can be a fiery condiment or a simple, spicy tomato-based sauce as it is in this easy-to-make main course, which I adapted from the book.

Crêpes: A delicious way to always have Paris

I’ve been thinking of Paris lately, and that has me thinking of crêpes. And as wonderful as dessert crêpes may be, the savory variety is what I always crave. Recipes for these delightful, paper-thin French pancakes and a satisfying poulet aux champignons [chicken in mushrooms] filling below.

This week, Blue Kitchen is all about France. A couple of events conspired to put me in this state of mind. First, the excellent biopic of French singer Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose, has come out on DVD [more about this at What's on the kitchen boombox?]. And just last Friday, our friend Cara Black was in town promoting Murder in the Rue de Paradis [An Aimée Leduc Investigation], the latest in her acclaimed series of Paris-based mysteries [more about this at WTF? Random food for thought]. If you’re still hungry for Paris and France when you’ve finished here, you’ll find some interesting links at the end of this post.

A movie and a book got me pointed in the general direction of “something French.” What focused me on crêpes was Ben’s post about strawberry crêpes at What’s Cooking?

For me, crêpes are the ultimate French comfort food—the humble pancake made elegantly thin and filled with all manner of delicious concoctions, both sweet and savory. In Paris, they can even be gotten as street food, an even bigger treat. You get to watch your crêpe be made right in front of you, and then it’s wrapped and ready to eat on the go, as you make your way to your next attraction.

In Chicago, my go to place for crêpes is La Crêperie. This very French little neighborhood bistro opened its doors in 1972 and probably hasn’t been updated since. It has the wonderful, slightly scruffy, tobacco-stained patina that only age can give it. Some days, the food is stellar, others merely dependably good. But given the friendly, unhurried service and charming setting, that’s plenty good for me.

La Crêperie makes two different kinds of crêpes for their sweet and savory offerings. The crêpes for savory main courses are made with buckwheat flour. So when I started looking for recipes, that was one of the ingredients I had in mind. As always, I found numerous recipes, looked for similarities and differences, then created my own.

For the filling, I just knew what I had in mind, my own take on poulet aux champignons—chicken, mushrooms, wine, cream—and winged it. One of the beauties of crêpes, though, is that they are so wonderfully versatile; La Crêperie’s menu includes 15 different fillings that run the gamut from coq au vin to scallops to a chicken curry! So while I’ll give you my recipe below, once you’ve made the crêpes, feel free to experiment away with the fillings.

Straddling seasons: Pot roast and fresh asparagus

Cooking for the calendar, this weekend saw some beautifully skinny fresh asparagus, simply prepared. Cooking for the actual weather, though, called for a hearty pot roast. Recipes below.

Before we get to the food, a quick little digression about blogging.
When I started Blue Kitchen a year and change ago, I knew it would be a way to indulge my passions for food, photography and writing. I also knew it would make me think more about food and cooking, ultimately making me a better cook. What I didn’t know is what a wonderful international network of warm, sharing friends and fellow bloggers I’d be plugging into.

This kind of welcoming environment isn’t necessarily unique to food blogging, but it seems to be more prevalent here than elsewhere. Interestingly, according to a food blogger who specializes in restaurant reviews, it’s mainly found among bloggers who write about making food, not critiquing it. My friend Ronnie writes two blogs, the wonderfully eclectic Out Of My Head and the advice-filled Work Coach. She also reads a wide range of blogs and says she hasn’t found this kind of community anywhere else.

The latest example of this comes from Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry. She was just given the E for Excellent Award—by four different bloggers, no less. She then took a turn, passing the award along to five other blogs. Including this one. Thanks so much, Lydia! I learn something new every time I read your blog, so it means a lot that you thought of me.

And now my turn. The easiest thing would be to award it to everyone in my blogroll. They’re all wonderful sources of information and great reads to boot. But I’ll try to narrow it down to five. And I’m sticking with food blogs, just because [we food bloggers are a clannish lot]. Just as Lydia was in her choices, I’m every bit as swayed by entertaining writing as I am by good food. Maybe even more so. These bloggers deliver, post after post. Every one of them has made me think—and made me a better cook in the process:

Ann, at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart; Christina, at A Thinking Stomach; Jennifer, at Last Night’s Dinner; Patricia, at Technicolor Kitchen and Toni, at Daily Bread Journal.

Okay, back to the kitchen. Here in Chicago, the calendar says spring [yeah, it says that everywhere north of the Equator, I know]. The thermometer takes a different view, often dipping below freezing. In fact, the tulips you see here were an impulse purchase, something to remind us that it is indeed spring. So when we were planning one of those Sunday dinners we don’t do enough of, I decided to split the difference. For the calendar, I made fresh asparagus, suddenly plentiful and affordable again. And for the chilly weather, I made a satisfying pot roast, complete with chunky vegetables. Let’s start with that.

I’ve been on an oven braising kick lately. Soon the weather will heat up and I won’t want to do the same to the kitchen. But for now, it’s a great way to let tough cuts of meat like chuck roast get all nice and tender without drying out. You’ll find more about the technique here. My other pot roast recipe in the archives is a more exotic take on this humble, hearty meal, made with Biryani Curry Paste and pan roasted on the stovetop. I call it Terry’s Mysterious Pot Roast. You can use the stovetop technique for the more traditional recipe below, but honestly, oven braising will keep it more moist.

Sweet fire: Chicken, chili paste and maple syrup?

East meets Nor’east in an improvised Chinese chicken dish that gets its heat from potent chili paste, its complexity from five-spice powder and its subtle sweetness from New England maple syrup. It’s paired with another improvisation, my first attempt at Szechuan green beans with garlic. Recipes below.

The first full day of spring in Chicago saw snowflakes the size of dinner plates. Lots of them. Just to the north of us, near the Wisconsin border, they got 11 inches of the heavy “heart attack” snow. Having lived here as long as I have, I’m not even surprised by this anymore. I am annoyed by it, though.

My first thought for this week’s post was something hearty—a soup, a stew—something that reflected the actual weather, not the calendar. But then I decided to turn up the heat with spiciness instead. My patented poking around—online, at the library, in our cookbook collection—got me started down the path to making something Chinese. When I found a pork dish that combined chili paste [you can also use chili sauce with garlic---see Kitchen Notes], five-spice powder—both Chinese staples—with maple syrup[?], I was intrigued. But having just served up pork here last week, I decided to adapt it for chicken.

The main course sort of nailed down, I started thinking vegetables. Just about our favorite restaurant in Chicago’s Chinatown is Lao Sze Chuan [the only reason I slightly hedge my bets here is that owner/chef Tony has recently opened two new restaurants, also wonderful, Lao Shanghai and Lao Beijing]. And one of our favorite vegetable dishes at Lao Sze Chuan is the Szechaun green beans, crisp and garlicky. I knew I wouldn’t match these, but I thought I might find a recipe to help me come close. What I found was a bewildering array of recipes, none of them even sounding vaguely close to this pared down dish. So I improvised, coming up with something very different but pretty good, if I say so myself. Best of all, the most exotic ingredient in it is soy sauce. So if the chili paste and five spice powder have put you off the chicken, give these a try.

But first, about those exotic ingredients. Living in Chicago, I have access to a dazzling array of ingredients from many cultures and cuisines. And in many cities, both these ingredients are available in Asian markets and in a growing number of supermarkets.

Chili paste or sauce is made of crushed chili peppers, oil, vinegar, seasonings and sometimes garlic. It has been accurately described as fiery hot, but you can control the heat by adjusting the amount you use.

Five-spice powder is a dry spice blend that incorporates the five basic flavors of Chinese cooking—sweet, sour, bitter, savory and salty. Used widely in Chinese cuisine, there are many variations on the theme. But a fairly standard recipe calls for fennel, cloves, cinnamon, star anise and Szechuan peppercorns. It is a very intense spice mix, not in terms of heat, but in terms of flavor. Recipes tend to call for fairly small amounts. Trust them.

I searched the Internet for what seemed like minutes for substitutes for these ingredients. Alas, no luck. The couple of recipes I found for chili paste sounded pretty dubious. And every recipe for five-spice powder called for Szechuan peppercorns. If you can find those, finding actual five-spice powder should be a breeze. And as Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry rightly points out, they’re not even really peppercorns, so substituting regular peppercorns will yield something that falls far flat of the real thing. If anyone out there has substitutes they’ve tried and like, please leave a comment.

Well, blah, blah, blah. How about some recipes?

Delicious, delicate: Tarragon mustard sauce

Cream, tarragon, wine and mustard add up to a sauce that brings a delicate finish to pan-seared pork medallions. Recipe below.

I just checked our fridge. We currently have six different mustards in there, most of them either from France or French in style. And ironically, even our über-American yellow mustard is French’s brand. Obviously, mustard is big with us.

It’s big with France too. A city in Burgundy even gives its name to perhaps the most famous mustard or moutarde. According to The Nibble, the city of Dijon had long been a gourmet center. The mustard, developed in local monasteries, “was based on particularly strong and piquant mustard seeds grown in their chalky soil and densely wooded terrain.” In the 1850s, a local mustard producer substituted verjus [an acidic, sour liquid made from green juice of unripe grapes] for vinegar, creating a smoother, less biting product that became the standard. Today, while mustard is still a big industry in Dijon, the term Dijon now refers to a style of mustard rather than place of origin, and vinegar has again replaced verjus in most commercial mustard.

The venerable French mustard maker Maille has been at it since 1747, and their Dijon Originale is my go to for straight Dijon. Just how seriously France takes its mustard—and indeed, pretty much all of its food—can be summed up in this statement from the Maille website: “Its recipes have not changed since they were written down by Antoine Maille in a vellum notebook watermarked with the Arms of the King of France.”

Mustard figures prominently in many French sauces. That’s because, when you combine it with butter or cream and perhaps some herbs, it takes on a wonderful delicacy. Forget the puckery, vinegary zing straight mustard delivers. Mustard sauces offer a subtle, complex liveliness shaped equally by all the ingredients. And when I started experimenting in the kitchen, that’s exactly what happened with this sauce.

Rosemary Potatoes: Little spuds, big taste

A mix of fingerling and petite new potatoes adds more than just visual interest to Roasted Fingerling Potatoes with Rosemary; each variety has a distinctive flavor as well. Recipe below.

Recent oven-braising adventures aside, I’m pretty much a stovetop kind of guy. Give me a pan and a flame, and the kitchen is open for business. So I’m just as surprised as you are that roasting the potatoes above led to making an entire dinner in the oven. And I’m not talking a one-pot wonder here—I roasted three separate dishes. Also being a keep-it-simple kind of guy, I can’t for the life of me say why I don’t do this more often. Everything was brainlessly easy, and dinner was delicious—better than it had any right to be, given the simplicity.

So how did I get started with the potatoes that snowballed into a stovetop-free dinner? I blame Daylight Savings Time. This twice-a-year ritual of moving our clocks backward or forward an hour has overstayed its welcome, as far as I’m concerned. And the Wall Street Journal recently reported on a study that shows that, even though Congress extended Daylight Savings Time by three weeks in 2005 expressly to conserve energy, it actually wastes energy.

It certainly wastes mine. My life is one long sleep deprivation experiment to begin with, so losing an hour of sleep is the last thing I need. My plan for Sunday had been to get over my fear of pie crust and bake something for Alanna’s Pi Day Event over at Kitchen Parade.

When I woke up even an hour earlier than way too early Sunday morning, my first thought was that baking a pie was not going to happen. My second thought was, “Great. Now what do I do for my post?”

The age-old question of “What’s for dinner?” that home cooks stare down every day gets ramped up considerably for food bloggers. You can’t just trot out one of your old reliables you’ve made a thousand times—it has to be something new. Preferably something photogenic and preferably something you’re not only happy to eat, but you’re okay with admitting you cooked.

Staring bleakly at the computer screen Sunday morning, I was cruising food blogs and checking the latest comments on my own, gearing up for a possibly long search for a food idea that would fit those criteria. Inspiration came quickly and unexpectedly, in the form of eight simple words tucked inside a comment on my pâté post, by Kelly-Jane over at Cooking The Books: “I only use duck fat for roasting potatoes.”

Even inspiration does not handle Daylight Savings time well. My first thought was basic—feral, even: “Want potatoes.” Gradually, almost reluctantly, another thought formed: “Hey! I have duck fat!” [I'd frozen some left over from last week's pâté adventure.] You could almost hear static and the grinding of gears in my head as those two thoughts came together and synapses finally fired and I realized I’d found the basis for my post.

Once I got going, though, I started thinking where else I could take it. One thought was roasting a mix of vegetables: potatoes, carrots and big chunks of onions, perhaps. But remembering the amazing duck fat fries we’d recently had at Hot Doug’s, I came back to just potatoes. And as I started researching roasted potatoes, two elements kept coming up in recipe after recipe: rosemary and garlic. The rosemary sounded like a great idea, but as much as I love garlic, I didn’t want it overpowering whatever the duck fat was going to bring to the party.

Regarding the duck fat, by the way, if you don’t have it or are less than interested in tracking some down, you can substitute olive oil—see the Kitchen Notes. You can also substitute red or Yukon Gold potatoes for the mix of fingerling and baby potatoes. Again with the Kitchen Notes.

Now back to “What’s for dinner?” Once I’d decided on the potatoes and was on my way to the store, I settled on roasted chicken thighs for the main course and maybe a salad. Then I saw the fresh asparagus. Beautiful, slender, little spears. I could quickly steam them at the last minute. Orrrrr… I could roast them too. Perfect. I mapped out the oven real estate in my head [there was even room for Marion to roast a couple of beets for a later use] and decided on a temperature that would work with everything and went to work.

So easy, so impressive: Let’s get this pâté started

This easy make-ahead pâté makes for an elegant first course or party appetizer. Recipe below.

I’ve been thinking about duck fat lately. It all started with reading about fries cooked in duck fat, maybe in Bon Appétit, but more likely in a breathless restaurant review in New York magazine. Next, one of Marion’s colleagues proclaimed that her favorite snack was duck fat french fries and a martini. Wow. I’m pretty sure if you look up sophisticated decadence in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of this very snack.

Then a week or so ago, Christina over at A Thinking Stomach did an excellent post that was not so much a recipe as a jazz melody line on cooking fresh vegetables that invited endless improvisation. Basically, you take some vegetables [she includes many intriguing things growing in her winter garden right now, such as fava beans, sugar snap peas and tatsoi], an aromatic or two, flavor enhancers [bacon, parsley, lemon juice...] and some fat. Read the whole post, because it’s much more eloquent and informative than this feral description. But the reason I mention it here is that one of the fats Christina suggested was duck fat.

Suddenly duck fat was popping up all over my radar screen, and I was wondering where it would land first. The answer came last Saturday afternoon at Hot Doug’s, Chicago’s wildly popular [as in line up around the corner for half an hour or more] “sausage superstore & encased meat emporium.” Doug is Doug Sohn, a graduate of Kendall College’s culinary school. Before opening possibly the best hot dog stand on the planet, he “worked in restaurants, did some catering and corporate dining gigs, and edited for a cookbook publisher,” according to a NEWCITY CHICAGO profile.

Hot Doug’s motto is proudly emblazoned on the wall as well as on T-shirts worn by the staff and also offered for sale: There are no two finer words in the English language than “encased meats,” my friend. And Doug takes encased meats to exciting new places. In addition to a dazzling array of perfectly prepared hot dogs, brats and sausages both Polish and Italian, he offers up a changing menu of exotic gourmet fare, including his “Game of the Week” sausages. This past Saturday, it was the Three-Chili Wild Boar Sausage with Chipotle Dijonnaise and Raschera Cheese, but every kind of game from alligator to pheasant to rattlesnake has been featured. And yes, he also does veggie dogs.

One of Doug’s offerings [and apparently yet another claim to fame], is his Duck Fat Fries, available only on Fridays and Saturdays. Now, if you’re a fries fan like me, you’re probably wondering how much better can they get? I mean, they’re fried potatoes, for crying out loud, nature’s perfect food. The answer is, to quote all three of us sharing a generous basket at Hot Doug’s, “Oh. My. God.”

Unfortunately, we don’t deep fry things at Blue Kitchen. We sauté, sear and pan roast like there’s no tomorrow, but no deep frying. We just can’t get our heads around that much hot grease at one time for one dish. So no fries were going to happen here.

But I’ve also been thinking about pâté lately. Let me start by saying I don’t like liver per se—the mere thought of liver and onions makes me shudder. But oddly enough, a good pâté in a little bistro is one of the great food pleasures, as far as I’m concerned. Flipping through my recipe binders recently, I came across a pâté recipe I’d been meaning to try. It sounded good—easy to make too. So easy, in fact, that I of course had to tinker with it. I turned to the classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking for some ideas. The recipes I found there were at the opposite end of the easy spectrum—not difficult, but involved. Still, I found a couple of ingredients and little tricks that made their way into my recipe. And I of course added a little twist of my own.