Poached Filet of Sole in White Wine Sauce

I must start this post with a confession – I am no great lover of cooked fish. When I was younger, I used to eat it all the time, but somewhere along the way my taste buds decided they weren't having it anymore. These days, the majority of my fish consumption comes in the form of sushi, but an enjoyment of cooked fish is starting to slowly return to me! Even so, I’ll still only go for white fish that doesn’t taste particularly fishy. Salmon is still a no go for me.

Of course, a nice pan reduction sauce can make almost anything taste better than it was originally intended. Such is the case with this filet of sole recipe, called “Sole Vin Blanc” in French (Sole with White Wine). The filets are rolled, skewered, and then cooked in a pot full of aromatic vegetables, white wine, and stock, then served with roasted potatoes and sautéed mushrooms. It’s a fairly simple dish to prepare and, like me, you’ll probably wonder why it took you so long to try fish prepared this way.

Potage Cultivateur

Sorry it’s taken so long for me to get to the next recipe. Between school and work, I don’t have a ton of time for posting these days! I’ll do my best to make more regular updates, but this is kind of the nature of the beast right now.

Anyway, Potage Cultivateur is a hearty vegetable soup and would normally not exactly belong on a site called Screw Your Diet. It’s actually quite good, and good for you. It’s not an especially difficult soup to make either, though it can be time consuming due to the type of knife cut it calls for. The cut is called paysanne, and basically that means you’re looking for relatively flat squares, about ½” x ½”. While you don’t have to cut your vegetables in this way, it certainly makes for a nice presentation and helps to ensure that they’ll all be cooked evenly - it’s worth the extra bit of effort.

New England Clam Chowder

The start of the fall season also happens to be the start of soup season. After all, what’s better than a hot bowl of soup on a cold or rainy day? It’s just as well then that my schooling has taken a turn toward soups in the past week, and there are a number of fantastic recipes I’m excited to share with my readers here. So over the next week or so, I’ll be posting all soup, all the time.

First up is a creamy, flavorful, New England clam chowder. It’s always been one of my favorite soups, and I was surprised to learn how easy it is to make.

Dauphinoise Potatoes

I've been cooking with potatoes quite a bit these days. That's no accident - potatoes are what we've all been using in class to practice our knife skills. Rather than tossing away perfectly good potato, why not put it to good use? And speaking of class, that's where I learned about dauphinoise potatoes, the delicious dish you see here. It's similar to scalloped or au gratin potatoes, but a bit richer and made specifically using Gruyere cheese. It's fairly simple, doesn't use a ton of ingredients, and is incredibly tasty, so give it a shot!

Potato Soup

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to make julienne potatoes. The problem with julienne potatoes is that they leave a lot of excess potato, and there's no sense letting it go to waste, right? Rather than toss it out, I put the excess potato to good use in a creamy, cheesy, potato soup. It was my first time making soup from scratch, and it's not an especially difficult recipe either, so follow along and you'll have yourself some delicious soup in no time.

Parmesan Julienne Potatoes

A Julienne cut is defined as being 1/8 inch x 1/8 inch x 2 inches. It's a very specific measurement, and only one of a staggering number of ways to cut a potato (or pretty much any vegetable for that matter). How to properly julienne a potato is one of the first things I learned at culinary school, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's easy. To julienne by hand is a pretty laborious process, but the resulting matchstick fries, as they are more commonly called, are crispy and delicious.

In this post, I'll walk you through how to properly julienne a potato, and in my next post, I'll be detailing a creamy potato soup that I made using the left over potato trimmings. So stay tuned!

Stuffed Pork Loin and Garlic Hassleback Potatoes

My experience with pork has been pretty limited since I started getting into cooking. In fact, my Mongolian pork chops were probably the first time I ever attempted to work with pork. This time, I decided to get a little more ambitious and grill a huge, stuffed pork loin served alongside garlic hassleback potatoes and baby broccolini. It turned out to be quite the ordeal, with things going wrong at seemingly every possible opportunity. I guess that’s what I get for improvising so heavily! The end result, however, was far from disappointing, so hopefully you won’t run into as many problems as I did.