Quenelles

Here comes the first crazy French recipe... I hope you are ready!


Start time: 5:30pm



Step One:
Make a paste out of butter and flour and eggs on the stove. Then put the pot in a bowl of ice and stir continuously to chill the mixture. It doesn't taste like anything. Remember when I said I was going to try and taste as I go?


Step Two:
Let Bean help in the kitchen. Here he is getting the salmon off of the skin while I am continuously stirring the mixture mentioned above. By the way, these recipes are a good arm workout. There's lots of rapid whipping, grating, and stirring.


Step Three:
Start putting stuff in the food processor- salmon, salt/pepper, heavy cream, and eventually that well chilled paste. Blend it up! Make a small tester in your pot of barely simmering water (what does that mean, anyway? I was paranoid to see any bubbles at all!) Then taste and adjust seasonings. I did a test sample, and I tasted it. It tasted like salmon, and since I've never even heard of a Quenelle before, I assume it tasted alright.


Step Four:
Quickly shape the mixture into ovals with two spoons and drop them in the barely simmering water. Let them cook until they easily roll over and have grown twice their size. At this point, I'm so worried about doing it quickly enough that I didn't realize the recipe is for 16 quenelles. I ended up with about twice as many. So I put the leftovers in a lightly buttered dish and brushed them with melted butter like Julia said to save them for a couple of days.

Yum. Poached fish mousse.

Step Five:
Try not to think about what you are cooking. Do not imagine what it will taste like. Remind yourself that it is in fact a fish mousse which can't be all that bad, right? Meanwhile, make a white butter sauce to go over the quenelles. I would like to mention that nonstick pans are not appropriate according to Julia. I should have purchased an entire new kitchen set for these recipes, but I decided to make do. I don't know if we will have teflon poisoning after all of this.

Step Six:

Let your helper clean the cabinets (and the floor) for you.

Step Seven:

Serve your husband hot quenelles covered in hot butter sauce!

Seriously, make sure it is hot because by the time we took a bite of these, they had cooled off considerably. Not even lukewarm. Don't they look tasty? Kind of like uncooked biscuits and gravy. Remember they are fish. Bean said they have the texture of beans. They are fluffy and airy, kind of like scrambled eggs, with a bland fish flavor. The sauce was really excellent, though.

Finish time: 7:15pm

Time we put the quenelles down the drain and had Hershey's kisses for dinner: 7:20pm

Brooklyn did get to taste a bite. She liked them, but then again she also eats her poop.

Next up: Gratin de Quenelles. I'm not ready to give up on these strange French fish balls! Since I have so many left over, there's a recipe where you cover them in sauce, plus cheese and butter and bake them like a casserole. Maybe they will taste better covered in cheese.