French Fridays with Dorie

Je suis vraiment, vraiment, vraiment heureux aujourd'hui parce que c'est vendredi - pas un vendredi ordinaire. C'est vendredi français avec Dorie!! Donc voila, voici mon gougères!

Unlike my struggles with French language, Dorie's gougères were a breeze to make. Truth be told, it was >/span> actually my third time making gougères from Dorie's latest book: Around my French Table but the only time I had the chance to snap a photo before these puffy deliciousness disappeared.


I've been so fascinated by Dorie's book ever since it arrived - and what perfect timing - on the same day I got home from Paris. I read the book from cover to cover, marveling at the stunning photos (by the way, the photography of this book is really awesome; each dish seems to just jump out at you), picking out the recipes to try and making dinner from the book for almost 3 weeks now.

And you bet there were gougères each week but alas, they never lasted long enough for me to take a snapshot. The first time I made it was for a birthday dinner; I had timed it so that the first tray would be out of the oven just as my guests arrived. They were pretty much gone in a jiffy. "Puffy clouds of cheese" "Ooh, these are so light!" "Hmm, how surprisingly airy and cheesy!"Our friends sang praises with each bite. We had

another dinner party just couple days ago and Dorie's gougères have now become the mainstay appetizer at our home. This time I got smart and baked them in advance just so that I could take photos before hungry hands snap them up. I used emmenthal for this batch, gruyère the first time and cheddar the second. Definitely a matter of taste - I love the emmenthal version best whereas D prefered the ones with gruyère.

I've also attempted the Chicken in a Pot (pages 206-208) and while mine didn't look half as good as Dorie's cover version, it was certainly one of the most flavorful chicken we've had.

 By the way, the recipe called for preserved lemons and I got mine from Sur La Table but you can also get them online here

For our dinner party earlier this week, I made the perfect dish for a slacker like me: Roast Chicken for Les Paresseux (pages 200-201) -  paresseux literally means lazy people. See, Dorie knows me well! Mr. Poultry Man had already cleaned my chicken for me so all I had to do was season the chicken, place it into my Le Creuset, crank up the oven, slide the dutch oven pot in and presto, a perfectly roasted chicken with crispy golden brown outer skin and extremely moist flesh! We didn't even bother to serve the chicken on a platter as none of us wanted to wait any longer to tear into the plump, juicy bird!

Corn soup (page 60) is another household favorite; I've made it twice but unfortunately, did not have the chance to take pictures, although I'd like to share a funny incident. I made the corn soup for our dinner event couple days back, but due to my poor multi-tasking abilities - greeting, entertaining guests, making sure everyone's glasses were always full and that there were enough appetizers to go around, checking in on the chicken and other dishes in the oven,  then again, making sure everyone's glasses were filled, etc. that when it came time for dinner, I completely forgot about the soup!  So the corn soup became more of an entremet rather than starter but our guests were too busy drinking the soup from the shot glasses that I ended up serving them in to even notice! We had some leftover so I had the corn soup with toasted baguette for lunch the next day. It was so, so, so good!

Here's another wonderfully simple and colorful dish from page 158 of the book: Quiche Maraîchére - a vegetable and cheese quiche that works well both as a starter or as the main plat.

Cooking from Dorie's new book: Around My French Table truly transported me back to Paris - the familiar pre-dinnertime smells that wafted from the neighbors on the lower floors up through the windows into my rented apartment - wonderful aromas of vegetables browning in the skillet, poultry roasting in the oven, meat searing in the pan.....I only wished I had Dorie's book to cook from while living there; dinner time would've been less of a torture! I've learnt so much from Dorie's Baking from My Home to Yours, which gave me a glimpse into the world of French pastries and helped prepared me for pastry school in Paris, and I know that her new book Around My French Table will be yet another precious tool to introduce us to simple French cooking at home.

If you'd like to learn how to make these great dishes at home, come join us at French Fridays with Dorie, a fanstastic virtual network of over 700 members  who exchange tips and pointers on a weekly basis, sharing our experiences on cooking from Dorie's latest book Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. You'll probably never have to pose the question "What to make for dinner?" again.

Those of you who are in the Bay Area, note that Dorie will actually visit us in two weeks! She will have a book-signing event on 16th October at San Francisco's Omnivore Bookstore so all of you Bay Area Dorie fans, please make plans to attend! If you love Dorie's book and her writing style, just wait till you meet her in person! She's so warm and endearing - the type of person you'd want as your BFF! Please head to Dorie's website for her detailed schedule.