Guinea Hen Jean Cocteau

Christmas dinner needs an important dish for a centerpiece. This year Tom and I started cookbook research and planning for the meal weeks in advance. We finally chose an elaborate recipe that we’d never made before from Raymond Oliver’s La Cuisine: Pintadeau farci Jean Cocteau, stuffed guinea hen served with boudins blancs, boudins noirs, and sautéed [...]

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Christmas Cookies!

Oh, the annual agony of choosing what kinds of cookies to bake for Christmas! Or, perhaps more accurately, what kinds Tom and I can bear to forgo this year. I try to keep quantities down so we don’t wind up being reproached by tins of rapidly staling cookies on through the end of January. Yes, [...]

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Two Exotic Legume Dishes: Mujaddara and La Loubia

Toward the end of each year, as the weather declines from chilly to frigid, I start thinking of long-cooking, rib-sticking legume dishes, based on beans and lentils. I have good French, Italian, and American recipes for these pulses, but this week I was feeling global, so I looked in my cookbooks for something more exotic. [...]

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“Really Spicy” Shrimp Creole

Musing over the mildness of the “creole” shrimp fritter recipe I wrote about here several weeks ago, I found myself remembering actual Shrimp Creole, a definitely spicy dish. I’d had it in New Orleans restaurants years ago but had never made it at home. Research in my cookbooks produced three very different shrimp creole recipes, [...]

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