The recipe scheduled to be prepared for this week's assignment for
Whisk Wednesdays is from Class 25, Menu 3:
Civet de Lapin à la Française (Rabbit Stew with Red Wine). I tried to be a player this week and order a rabbit and stew it, but somehow I just couldn't do it. I took a poll and no one here wanted to eat stew in summer, and they particularly did not want to eat a stew prepared by boiling a bunny. Me either.
Before I joined Whisk Wednesdays, Shari had been happily cooking her way through the curriculum alone and she had done many wonderful recipes at that time. I decided I would pick a seasonal recipe that Shari had already done from the book and substitute that in the menu. I wanted the recipe to be able to fit in nicely with the rest of the menu, so I chose the Salad Nicoise. It can be found on pages 218-219. It went well with the Souffle and the Bavarian Cream dessert.
The salad is served cold, consists of many vegetables, lettuce, olives, canned tuna, and a vinaigrette dressing. I am not fond of canned tuna, but I chose the albacore all-white meat tuna packed in water, and with the vinaigrette on it, it was okay.
Mark grilled some asparagus and a red and green pepper because we like them grilled and I needed to sub the asparagus for the green beans that are traditionally in this salad. All the green beans at the market had rust stains on them from all the recent rain, so those did not look appealing in the least. The asparagus looked very nice, so that worked just fine.
The serving plate is lined with butter lettuce leaves, and the tuna mounded in the middle, sprinkled with diced red onion. Around it are red, orange, and yellow tomatoes, red and green grilled peppers, grilled asparagus, sliced hard boiled eggs, and boiled, peeled, sliced new potatoes with the dressing on them. I added some kalamata olives (because I could not come up with nicoise olives), splashed a little of the vinaigrette around, and the salad was complete.
Lovely for this time of year. Lovely with a souffle. I will definitely make it again.
If you would like to see how the other Whisk Wednesday members fared in this class, click here, and then on the Whisk Wednesdays connect to individual bloggers, or better yet, come and join us! Shari has the ingredients posted on her site at the click, so while we can't post the recipe instructions, you can at least look at the ingredients, and I bet you can figure out a lot of it from there.
The Next Assignment
The next few assignments are Menus, so we are going to make the menu for one meal (hopefully), but then post each dish separately in its own week as posting it all at once seemed a bit much, following the schedule below.
• Civet de Lapin à la Française (Rabbit Stew with Red Wine) pages 452-453 (Post Wednesday, June 17, 2009)
• Soufflé au Comté (Cheese Soufflé) pages 82-83 {discussion of soufflés} (Post Wednesday, June 24, 2009)
• Bavarois à la Vanille, Coulis de Framboise (Vanilla Bavarian Cream with Raspberry Coulis) pages 40-41 (Post Wednesday, July 1, 2009)