Bacon in gratin dauphinois

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How to waste a perfecly fine Thursday evening that should have been spent marking... make this delicious dish, gratin dauphinois, which I tweaked by adding bacon. Yeah. The necessary ingredient. There were four of us enjoying this last Thursday (I'm becoming the weekday bacon annex to the Bacon Saturdays, I think).

Now, the idea for making this dish came from my having invited Cinnilla, X, and The Chemist over for dinner and not having much at the ready... and as I was about to leave town for a few days, I did not want to generate leftovers or worse, have to go to the store for anything. Mulling over my inventory, I thought of the potatoes I had in the cellar and of the broth I had made from my holiday turkey, and decided to make a variation of a French classic: gratin dauphinois. Normally, eggs are necessary for this recipe, and opinions differ as to whether it should include cheese, but heck! Beggers can't be choosers! I had to do with what was at hand.

So, here's how it works:

• 10 potatoes
  
• 1/3 pound bacon (about eight slices)
• 300 g grated sharp cheddar
  
• Seasoned béchamel
• [There normally would be eggs in the recipe to help thicken the sauce]
  

For the béchamel:

• ¼ pound (125 g) salted butter
• ½ cup (125 ml) flour
• ½ an onion, finely chopped
• 1,25 l (5 cups) turkey broth (I happened to have that in the fridge)
  
• 2 chopped green onions (they were in the crisper and looking forlorn)
  
• 3 finely chopped garlic cloves (to taste, really!)
  
• Salt, pepper, nutmeg, cumin, thyme, and ½ teaspoon (2,5 ml) chicken bovril.

First fry the bacon and prepare the béchamel, adding the finely chopped onion to the melting butter before preparing the roux (adding flour, cooking together for a couple of minutes). When roux is ready, gradually add the broth and then the seasonings. Stir very regularly over medium heat, until quite thick (about 15-20 minutes).

Peel and wash potatoes, and slice into thin slivers. Lay in a gratin dish, layering in bacon and grated cheese.

Pour béchamel over potatoes, making sure it reaches down to the bottom of the dish (the béchamel is shown here midway through cooking; it was quite a bit thicker.

Cook in preheated oven (ideally around 300°) until top becomes golden and the entire mixture has become more or less one solid mass. We were in a bit of a rush to eat and only cooked it for an hour at 375°, finishing it off under the grill. It still was delicious, if still a bit "liquid" and the centre potatoes were a tad firm.

Happy Valentine's day to all! Even if like ourselves you're single, that's no reason to be grumpy! This is a day to love and share the love!

Denver Cupcakes?

So Cinnilla and I are going down to a conference in New Orleans in April, and Air Canada has just "rescheduled" our already-booked flights so as to stick us with an 8-hour layover in Denver.

After we'd finished swearing, we thought, "Okay, at least that might give us time to leave the airport and poke around. What's in Denver?"

Then some tumbleweeds blew by.

Seriously, we have nothing against Denver, we just know nothing about it, and it's hard to pick one thing to do in a giant city you've never been to before. Unless -- as we do -- you really, really like cupcakes.

Does Denver have a cupcakery? Why, yes. Yes it does! The only truly cruel twist of fate is that on Wednesdays and Saturdays, this lovely bakery serves a maple bacon cupcake -- and we will be there on a Tuesday. Oh, woe.

But I have a whole new respect for Colorado.

What Men Must Know About Women?

Okay, so everyone is breaking out the Valentine's Day material and there's a weird article on Yahoo today which is a strange hodgepodge of humanities-based gender research (it takes a sharp left at point #5 when it moves from 'don't be an aggressive jerk' to 'watch her increased tendency for heart disease'). But the point that caught my eye was this:

2. Practice saying "thank you"

When it comes to a committed relationship, spats about money and household chores top the list of sources for marital rancor. And research has shown women take on the lion's share of laundry and such.

Listen up, guys: One simple way to keep a lady happy even while buried beneath chores is to say "thank you."

Um... or, you could pitch in and do the dishes. You know. It's just a thought!

Bacon Salmon Pie

The original for this recipe came from the old, trusty Purity cookbook -- and then I went and made it more complicated than it had to be, but man was it delicious. I could tell you that comfort food should not be complex; I could tell you that I made a mess of my kitchen; but most importantly, I should tell you that this pie was awesome and Cinnilla and I were thrilled that there'd be leftovers.

Although it is my standby for many things, the Purity cookbook reminds me of its age whenever its dinner recipes call for things like canned salmon and instant minced onions. So admittedly, standing there in the grocery store and choosing between the no-muss can of pre-cooked salmon or the pricier and uncooked but so-delicious-looking fresh salmon filet, I made my own life more difficult. Still, putting this recipe together only took about an hour (plus another 20 minutes for baking). The trick is to do multiple things at once: fry the bacon while the salmon is baking, chop the veggies while the bacon is frying, make the biscuit dough in between stirring the sauce, and -- if you are like me and do sometimes cheat -- steam the veggies in the microwave at the end.

BACON SALMON PIE

1 extra-large salmon filet

Heat oven to 400. Add a bit of butter to pan, put pan in oven. When butter is melted, add salmon filet and top with salt and pepper. Bake about 20 minutes, until fish flakes easily with a fork.

After you remove the salmon, leave the oven on and raise the heat to 450.

6 slices of bacon cut into 1-inch pieces
1/6 C chopped onion (you will need 1/2 C onion in total; just chop some onion and divide the pile into 3 equal parts.)

Fry bacon with onion until bacon is crispy. Remove bacon from the pan, but leave the caramelized onion with the drippings (save the drippings).

1/4 C bacon drippings (I only had about 1/8 C from my bacon frying, so I added 1/8 C butter to compensate)
1/6 C fresh chopped onion
1/6 C caramelized onion
1/3 C flour
1/2 tsp salt
dash of pepper
1/2 tsp summer savoury
2 T fresh chopped parsley (or 1/2 tsp dried parsley if you can't find fresh)
2 C milk

Over the stove, letting the butter melt, add everything except the milk to the bacon drippings until you have a smooth paste. Then, gradually add the milk, stirring and cooking on low-to-medium heat until sauce thickens.

For the biscuit crust:
1 C flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 C shortening
1/4 C grated cheddar
1/6 C chopped onion
1/2 C milk

Sift together flour, baking powder and salt, then gradually cut in the shortening. Add cheddar and onion; stir. (The cheese and onion are optional; I added them on a whim but I think they were really good.) Add milk, and stir for fluffy biscuit dough.

TO ASSEMBLE:

Flake the salmon into pieces.
Add salmon to casserole dish.
Add bacon.
Add white sauce.
Add about 2 cups of any cooked vegetables you prefer. I used broccoli, corn and asparagus, steamed for a couple of minutes in the microwave.

Stir together, then pat your biscuit crust into place on top.

Bake at 450 for about 18-20 minutes.



This is "pie" in a "shepherd's pie" sort of way, but "casserole" just sounds too unappetizing to do this baby justice. Or maybe that's just me.

Spiced Bacon Twists

This Saturday's experiment was the spiced bacon twist recipe from allrecipes.com -- essentially, take some bacon, press it into a mixture of brown sugar, mustard, cayenne, cinnamon and nutmeg, then bake it in the oven (on a metal rack, on a cookie sheet) for about half an hour at 350.

Overall, these were pretty good, although there were a couple of hitches: the spices didn't adhere as well as I'd hoped when I dipped the bacon in, and I had to resort to just sprinkling them over top before putting the bacon into the oven. Even then, a lot seemed to run off -- and since I couldn't pat the bacon down when it came out of the oven, it got pretty greasy when it cooled (answer: make sure you serve it hot, of course).

Served with Cinnilla's mother's most excellent French toast recipe.

Bacon Barbecued Taters

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Yes, it is winter. Yes, it is cold outside. And yes, Cinnilla and I were feeling rather despondent after a somewhat bleary Monday. So I invited her over for dinner... if she could contribute her own steak (I had a slab of rib-eye that had been taken out of the freezer and therefore commanded to be eaten tonight, but it was not big enough to share). I'd barbecue the rest and supply some wine. You know, being French and all that...

And suddenly, as I was contemplating making dinner, inspiration struck. Of course, it came from bacon, that ingredient that always saves the day. When I first experimented with barbecuing, I developed a way of making baked barbecued potatoes by stuffing onion pieces in them and dousing them with olive oil. Why not replace the onions with... bacon?

Here's the result. First, brush the potatoes under cold water and slice them lengthwise, without cutting across entirely. I also had to thaw some bacon from the freezer, as I did not have any at the ready in the fridge (shocking, I know!).

Then put the potatoes on a sheet of tinfoil and insert slices of bacon into the slits. Close the potato.

Wrap bacon around it and douse with a generous dose of... pure maple syrup (the French Canadian touch here). Bake on the top grille of the barbecue over medium heat for roughly 40-45 minutes (depending on size). This can also be done in the oven like any other baked potato if you don't happen to have a barbecue handy.

Carefully unwrap (the carmelised syrup makes the foil stick to the potato). Yum!