Spring Supper

We had friends over for dinner yesterday, and I really enjoyed planning and cooking a spring supper. With scores of cookbooks and hundreds of cooking magazines in the house -- plus all my favorite Internet cooking sites and blogs -- choosing a menu can be overwhelming. So I set up a limiting principle: I chose one cooking magazine, the April 1994 issue of Cuisine Gourmande, and selected the menu from that magazine only. Saveurs de printemps were exactly what I was looking for. And yes, we included the champagne!

My daughter and I decided on the following menu:

Salade tomates mozzarella: Not very imaginative, I admit. This simple salad has become a real classic in France. I suppose it's of Italian inspiration, but it's on a lot of restaurant menus here and has become a popular element of cuisine quotidienne. It's always a hit with children, so it sounded like a good choice for a family meal with five young diners but....

As it turns out, my guests showed up with a delicious Cake au saumon fumé, and I ended up serving that with a little lamb's lettuce and sliced tomatoes as the starter -- so the mozzarella salad never got made. I love flexibility!

The picture isn't so great, but the cake was. Cakes salés are also all the rage in France, especially since the publication of the book Les Cakes de Sophie, one of the most popular French cookbooks in recent years.

If you don't feel like buying the book, although I tend to think you should have it on your shelf, you can find a lot of its cake recipes on Chez Zounette.

The main course was a delicious Blanquette de veau. I've decided not to include recipes as such in this blog because there is so much else to write about, but this link from About.com will tell you all about the dish and give you a number of different versions.

I tried a traditional French dessert that I had somehow never made before, a Tarte aux fraises. I usually serve strawberries on their own, macerated with star anis and vanilla sugar, but the Tarte was a delicious change. I made the classic French recipe where you bake the crust, add a pastry cream, and place the strawberries, uncooked, on the top. I couldn't find a proper version of the recipe in English on the Internet -- perhaps one of my readers has one?

Of course, you could say I should be translating all of these recipes for the benefit of my readers, but for the moment that's not part of my plan. I'm a maman qui travaille and have beaucoup à faire...

And by the way, Bonne Fête des Mères to all of you French or expat moms out there -- and to me!