Crepes with chicken & sauce velouté, ciabatta toasts with chicken liver mousse, and cucumber-dill salad. Where to begin, where to begin?? The crepes are the infamous Julia's recipe from MtAoFC, of course, filled with some diced chicken (we had some leftover chicken thighs to use up that day, is how the whole thing got started) sautéed with minced shallot and finished with a splash of balsamic vinegar and grated gruyère. The sauce, sauce velouté, is a classic white sauce (one of the four famous 'mother sauces,' according to those wacky sauce-loving French). The chicken liver mousse recipe comes from the NY Times Sunday magazine of a few weeks ago; they suggested serving it with cornichons but i knew better, having been served almost the exact same dish a few weeks ago at another lovely restaurant in Portland (a wonderful place on Couch called Ten 01) only with lovely golden fig jam. So, fig jam, it is!
If the accompanying cucumber salad (nothing more than sliced cucmbers, dill, and a drizzle of red wine vinegar) seems a bit of a weird choice, well, it was because we had been given yet another bag of pretty organic produce by my friend (the one whose dad has the green thumb) and the cucumbers needed to be eaten IMEDIATELY. Luckily, in my experience, cucumber-dill salad is a nice palate cleanser and goes with just about anything. Mmmmmmmm........
Martha Stewart's pecan shortbread cookies.....I'm no Martha-hater, although i have been, on occasion, a bit of a Martha-mocker. It's in my nature! However, when you need cookies, Martha is the queen of all queens to whom you must appeal for help. And when you're pulling your hair out over computer software and wedding invitation graphic design and a friend calls and offers to do the whole thing for you that very evening if you just bring everything over.....well, the only appropriate thing to do is to also bring cookies! I modified the great Martha's recipe just slightly by toasting the pecans prior to mixing them into the dough and by adding more salt than she called for. I like salt. She seems to like very, very sweet cookies...I personally like them a little more challenging, with a somewhat salty finish (especially when they are largely butter-based, and let's not kid ourselves that that's exactly what these are, ha ha) for added roundness. I'd possibly tweak them a little further in the future for the sake of experimentation, but this recipe as it stands is simple and delicious, so let's just leave it at that. All hail Martha.
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