Saturday's Cooking Festival

It wasn't too hot yesterday and we didn't have too much other stuff that absolutely needed to get done, so I ended up doing a lot of cooking.

In addition to the poulet en saucisse that we had as a main course, I made a batch of gazpacho, some potato salad, and sauteed greens.

For the gazpacho I followed the recipe for Gazpacho Andaluz in La Cocina de Mama pretty closely aside from using a long green pepper instead of a red bell pepper (that's what was in the biokiste). I used a slightly different technique though: I started by putting the tomatoes through the food mill to get rid of the skins. I pureed the other ingredients (garlic, pepper, bread, sherry vinegar, olive oil) separately with the stick blender, added them to the tomatoes and then mixed a while longer with the stick blender. The result, garnished with chives and finely diced cucumber, was a really nice soup (though I wished for a bottle of tabasco to lend it a bit of heat). I like the addition of cumin to the dish, though I wouldn't do that all the time.

The potato salad ended up being a real star. I started from an uncharacteristically vague recipe from this month's Le Menu for a potato "sauce" to be served with the Pouletbraten recipe (that inspired me to make ballottine in the first place), but I think I ended up far from where they intended. Since the final result was so good, I'm not too sad about this. :-)

I started by cooking some whole potatoes from the biokiste. I did this very slowly in order to get to the persistent firmness stage (thank you Harold McGee for this trick!). After cooling the cooked potatoes, I peeled them then grated them into a bowl (this is where that persistent firmness thing was needed). To this I added a minced clove of garlic, some mayo, quark, chopped basil, chopped parsley, some veggie bouillon, salt, and black pepper. After mixing well I let the salad sit for half an hour before serving.

I'm not sure what it is, but there's something very "Swiss" to me about this potato salad. It's not exactly light, but the flavors are very clear and fresh. Fantastic stuff.