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Dorie’s French Supper

by Pim under Dinner @ 8 with 35 Comments

Saturday, October 2, 2010

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Welcome to the brand-new Dinner @ 8 feature, a step-by-step guide to help you cook an entire dinner and have it on your table on time!  I’m so excited to finally launch this, and even more excited that my debut dinner is based on the new book by one of my favorite authors Dorie Greenspan.

Instead of listing four separate recipes for the four dishes on the menu, Dinner @ 8 does all the planning for you, taking apart recipes and weaving them back together efficiently, then walks you step-by-step through it all. This way, you can manage a 3-course menu from Dorie’s new book in only 3 hours. Yup, THREE hours, that’s what I said.  A delicious soup to start, a juicy pork roast for the main course, a surprisingly delicious vegetable on the side, and a lovely apple cake for dessert – on your table at 8pm if you start cooking at 5.  Oh, shake that look off your face, you can do it.  I promise you.

The timeline is built so that you don’t have to make like Road Runner-weilding-a-knife to get all the steps done on time. You can cook at a somewhat leisurely – if purposeful – pace and have your dinner @ 8. And, no, you don’t need a tricked out kitchen for this. When I plan each Dinner @ 8 menu, I’m assuming that you have a good kitchen, you know, a normal kitchen for a normal food lover. You’ll have a 4-burner stove top. The regular kind, not the super high charged one hundred seven-five thousand BTU or anything. I’ll assume you’ve got an oven, a stand mixer, a food processor, etc. Any special equipment required will be called out on the shopping list so you are warned.

Check out the nifty prep/cooking timeline on the right sidebar, and some handy quick tips about how to navigate through Dinner @ 8 (it’s all pretty intuitive I say) and let’s get cooking!

Alll recipes adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s book, Around My French Table (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)


Dorie’s French Supper Menu

Serves 6

Starter: Béatrice’s Red Kuri Pumpkin Soup

A simple recipe that produces the most velvety and delicious soup. Perfect for a crisp fall evening.

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Main Course: Chard-stuffed Pork Roast

I’m not a big pork tenderloin fan, to tell the truth, I find them somewhat bland. Dorie changed my mind with this recipe. Rubbed with sweet coriandar seeds and spicy black peppers, stuffed with slightly bitter chard, sweet raisins, punctuated with bits of red pepper flakes, this roast pork loin is far from bland country. My apology to pork tenderloins of the world, it wasn’t you, it was me all along.

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Side Dish: Endives, Apples, and Grapes

I’d never thought to put these three ingredients together, but I supposed that’s why I’m not Dorie Greenspan.  My one word reaction: wow.

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Dessert: Marie-Hélène’s Apple Cake

To finish this simple French dinner, a very simple, and very French, cake. This cake is everything I love about homey French desserts: beguilingly simple and not even very pretty, but presents the very essence of what it’s supposed to be. In this case, the spirit of autome itself. Be sure to serve it with a generous spoonful of crème fraîche instead of whipped cream. Did I mention it’s French?

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Let’s get cooking! »

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