Anyway, after a fruitless trip to BHV in search of an oven fuse, where Erik and I got separated, we met up at the gym and had a fantastic workout. I love going to the gym. We're in the process of learning all the new classes right now, and so far they are all amazing. And Erik is revelling in his strength that has all the French gym rats checking out the charges on his bar.
As I mentioned yesterday, last night we were cooking from Ina Gartens Barefooot in Paris cookbook. I received this book as a birthday gift before we left Toronto, and although we've made a couple of dishes from it, for some reason we've never really gotten into it. Until last weekend when Erik made boeuf bourguigion, and we started drooling over all the fantastic recipes that are in there. So last night it was pear, endive and roquefort salad, and steak with bernaise sauce.
The salad was so ridiculously easy, I can't believe we've never made it before. The hardest part was finding the walnuts at the grocery store, without the shell. All you do is arrange the endive leaves on each plate, toss slices of pear in the dressing, arrange the pears on the endive, crumble on the cheese, add the toasted walnuts, and drizzle the whole thing with more dressing. And the dressing was the exact same vinaigrette that we always make, mustard, vinegar and oil, with the addition of an egg yolk, which I added because we're in France, and we're into 'extreme' eating here. I think the egg yolk just thickened up the dressing, and made it bright yellow.
The steak was pretty basic, although next time I think we should head to the butcher to get really good ones. I somehow managed to leave two ingredients for the sauce off the grocery list, so instead of the tarragon, I used parsley, and I only had about half the amount of butter that was required (I'm really getting irritated by the imperial quantities used in American recipes. How am I supposed to know how much two sticks of butter is? What the heck is a quart?). As a result (I think) the sauce was really runny, and very vinegar-y. But Erik liked it, and it still tasted good. We served it with boiled potatoes.
The meal was so good that I'm having a hard time remembering what we had for dessert.
This morning I woke up craving pancakes, and decided to give them a try without butter. I have never made pancakes without butter, because butter makes everything better. I have to say, not only was it way easier to just use oil, I think they came out crispier in the end too. I may be converted. I added cinnamon and banana slices, and we slathered them with, what else, Nutella. To die for.
I wonder what we'll have for lunch....
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