If you’re new to the blog, it might surprise you that we didn’t opt for Julia Child’s famous boeuf bouguignon recipe.  Actually, there’s a slightly deeper reason besides Bourdain’s status as penning my favorite cookbook.  One of the main reasons I gravitate away from Julia Child’s recipe is because of that one line in Julie and Julia where Amy Adams’ character is reminiscing over ‘Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon.’

Don’t get us wrong- we love Julia Child.  ’My Life in France’ is one of our favorite books, and we’re re-reading it now by listening to it on CD, and it’s just as fantastic.  On the other hand, the more we learn about the ‘Julie’ character featured in the movie, the more we dislike her.  (This week, we watched the movie, skipping all the Julie scenes… it made for an even better film!)  So, to boycott Julie, we hope you enjoy Bourdain’s recipe and eat it in a way that honors Julia too.

Recipe: Boeuf Bourguignon

We’re looking forward to a great year- graduating law school, lots of good times with friends and family, and cooking and eating as much as we can (but renewing the continual resolution to so in a healthier fashion and accompanied by more exercise…)

On 2frugalfoodies, we look forward to another fun year of sharing recipes and food experiences.  We hope to continue our trend towards more international cuisine and adventures, shopping more often at our local international market for healthy and delicious new ingredients and recipes.  To balance our carbon footprint, we’ll also try and focus on local, seasonal ingredients to shift the focus of our blog throughout the year.

Despite changes and tweaks, comfort food never goes out of style, nor does The Les Halles Cookbook!  To usher in the new year, we offer an adventurous recipe from Bourdain- Rabbit with olives.  It’s flavorful and warm- perfect for winter or early spring.

Hope you have a great New Year!  We look forward to seeing you and hearing from you soon!

Recipe: Lapin aux Olives (Rabbit with Olives)

First- the relatively low frequency of posts recently is due to lots of work for Mary Katherine and exams for Gardner.  While the work is still going strong, exams finished yesterday!  One more semester of law school left, and then I’ll hit the real world again- which is an exciting prospect.  (Especially once I figure out what I’ll be doing…)

In the meantime, with no studying to do, why not celebrate the holidays, snow, friends, family, and all the good things with a decadent plate of rillettes.   We’ve talked about rillettes before, but this is the first time that we’re posting a recipe so that you can make them too.

Rillettes is one of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite dishes- when he first saw it on the menu at Les Halles, when he was thinking about working there, he said it was “like finding an old friend.”  (By the way, yes, we did order it when we were there and it was fantastic.)  Not only would we recommend ordering it at a restaurant or buying it a butchery, but we also recommend making it!!

Tony describes it better that we can: “[I]t sets the tone for an enjoyable eat-with-your-hands-and-have-a-good-time kind of evening.  Kick off a meal with rillettes and you don’t have to wipe the plate rims, garnish the entree, or remember to keep your elbows off the table.  Rillettes is something you serve friends- and people you already know you like.”

Recipe: Rillettes

Meeting Tony and getting our cookbook signed:

(Who’s that guy talking to Tony with the goofiest grin on his face that you’ve ever seen?  Oh yeah… that’s me.)  And, just three days later, we went to Les Halles:

Dinner was amazing!  We started with rillettes for an appetizer, then had two different versions of steak frites for our main course.  (You may remember that Tony recommended steak frites when we asked him what to order.)  I got steak tartare with frites and Mary Katherine got filet mignon with bearnaise sauce and frites.  Both were perfect.

Our waiter told us that Tony still comes in about once a month to Les Halles.  Sometimes he just eats, and sometimes he jumps in and cooks some too.  I was very proud to learn that he often orders the steak tartare when he’s there to eat.  By the way, our table gave us a fantastic view into the kitchen, which made everything all the better.

So this post isn’t just an online diary of us over-eating in NYC, here’s a recipe from The Les Halles Cookbook that we tried recently.  It’s originally with tournedos of lamb (basically lamb tenderloin), but since we couldn’t find that, we went with bone-in lamb chops instead and they were delicious.

Recipe: Lamb Chops with Fig Confit

Tony’s talk was hilarious- we were laughing most of the time he was up there.  We tried to jot down some of the best quotes, and we’ll be sharing those with you over the next few weeks/months.  For today though,  I want to focus on how the evening shaped our understanding of food, and consequentially,  our blog as well.

For anyone who hasn’t seen his show or read his books- Anthony Bourdain has opinions, and he’s not afraid to share them.  Among the many gems of wisdom, one of the points that really affected us was the idea that people who love food use it as a means to separate themselves from others.   When we talk about going to a great restaurant, are we really sharing it because we love it, or because it makes us ‘more in the know,’ or somehow just a little bit classier than someone who hasn’t been?  From sustainability to gourmet tasting menus, there’s a fine line between enthusiasm and snotty bragging.

It’s ironic that food, of all things, is sometimes being used to separate people.  The corollary to this point was that food should be just the opposite- food matters because of the story it tells and the people who you share it with.  Great food is something to respect, to  be sure, but food fanaticism often misses the real point behind why we value it.

So – we hope our blog does just that: we hope that when we talk about what we cook, it’s in the interest of respect for food that tells a story and brings people together.   We love food, we have fun with it, and we hope that we don’t ever lose sight of the real reasons why.

If you’re tired of the rambling, we’ll make this worth your while.  Or, more appropriately, Tony will.  Here’s his recipe for Steak au Poivre from the Les Halles Cookbook.  We had it when Averil came to visit as a special meal, and we definitely encourage you to try it:

Recipe: Anthony Bourdain’s Steak au Poivre

(this is the plated version of the hanger steak from yesterday’s picture)

Well, for all of us new-look-haters out there, 2frugalfoodies just joined the fray. Sorry. The thing is- we’ve learned so much over the course of this blog that pictures we posted last spring just don’t look as good anymore.  For one of the most fundamental recipes of the blog, it’s a little embarrassing that the picture has looked like this for almost a full year and a half:

Roasted Chicken AFTER the Oven!

We’ve gone back to our basic roasted chicken recipe from Anthony Bourdain many times.  Sometimes we stick with the original recipe, and other times, we make new variations.  (Tune in this weekend for Blue Moon Roasted Chicken…)  It’s a great idea for a warm, comforting, delicious meal.   Now when you want to come to 2frugalfoodies for your roasted chicken inspiration, we hope this gives you a little bit more to get inspired about:

Food & Wine or Saveur might turn us down, but we think it’s a pretty good improvement.  (By the way- taking a picture of a full roasted chicken is difficult!)

(Same Delicious) Recipe: Roasted Chicken

The technique is simple.  Once your meat is out of the pan (non-stick cookware doesn’t work here), pour in some kind of alcohol to deglaze the pan.   White wine, red wine, bourbon, brandy, etc. all do well.  Usually, red wine and liquors are best for meat, but in the recipe we’ve included today, we actually used white wine for steak and it did well.  Once you pour in the alcohol, use a wooden spoon to scrape up all the fond- that’s the brown bits that the meat left behind.

Now that your deglazing is done, you can continue with the rest of your pan sauce.  Add whatever other ingredients work with your dish – veal stock, chicken stock, cream, juice, spices… anything you can think of.  With this technique, we’ve had fun creating new dishes and sauces by trying new additions to the simple technique.

For today’s recipe, we converted a recipe for a mustard cream sauce to a mustard cream pan sauce.  Drizzled over rare slices of sirloin steak, it was perfect!

Recipe: Sirloin Steak with Mustard Cream Pan Sauce

Oh, by the way.  We have a recommendation for you about a needed kitchen tool.  We love our meat thermometer and think you would love one too.  It allows us to cook great, rare steaks every time and with pinpoint precision.

Stock Your Kitchen:  Meat Thermometer

Now that we like French food and are learning a lot more about it, I understand that there’s a history and a reason behind the name.  Real french fries actually are French, and they are really, really delicious.  Our recipe for cooking fries comes directly from Anthony Bourdain, which shouldn’t be a surprise.   Check out the recipe below for our paraphrase of his great recipe, but really, you should just go buy The Les Halles Cookbook.

That’s the frites part of the recipe, but we also include information on the steak part of the recipe when you click the link below.  We went to Belmont Butchery and got these incredible new york strip steaks… the regular grocery store just isn’t the same anymore.

Summer comes into this dinner through the watermelon salad inspired by Real Simple that we’ve posted before.  The recipe is real simple: watermelon, onion, and torn mint leaves.  And it’s delicious.  I guess that why they named the magazine the way they did…!

Recipe: Summer Steak Frites

This time, we’re not venturing very far in the world like he does on each episode. What we’ve cooked tonight is commonplace in many southern gas stations at 99 cents per bag. Admittedly, we’re not huge fans of the from-the-bag-pork-rinds… so this is somewhat of a bold move for us. Results? Porky, crispy, salty and delicious! The recipe couldn’t be simpler and the taste is wonderful.

While we hope to make this again, part of the deliciousness of this preparation might come from the kind of pork rind we used, which is from an Ossabaw pig. You might remember when we made cassoulet and needed pork rind? We saved some of the good stuff for another pork rind special occasion and here it is!

Recipe: Homemade Pork Rinds

The words “wintry mix” showing up anywhere close to our weather forecast is something we definitely won’t miss. As wonderful as snow can be, the feeling of bracing yourself for the frigid air before walking to your car is not much fun. Nor is running to the car when you’re already late, only to find that you also have to scrape the windshield.

For the good and the bad, we decided to send winter off in style with Anthony Bourdain’s cassoulet. It’s an incredibly rich, warming, delicious recipe with good hearty ingredients: duck (we used goose!), pork belly, sausages, beans, and onions. One of our favorite ingredients was fresh pork rind – how often do you get to use that in a recipe? We, of course, went to our favorite butchery to find fresh pork rind, and they didn’t let us down. The pork rind we used came from an Ossabaw pig, a close cousin to the revered iberico pigs of Spain, and as they explained to us at Belmont, meat from these pigs is hard to come by. For more information on Ossabaw pigs, click here.

Recipe: Cassoulet