February 16, 2013 Dinner Frog’s Legs in parsley, garlic butter with asparagus with hollandaise sauce and Cous cous with tomato; Belated Valentine’s Dinner

February 16, 2013  Dinner Frog’s Legs in parsley, garlic butter with asparagus with hollandaise sauce and Cous cous with tomato; Belated Valentine’s Dinner

Suzette worked at the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery for their big Valentines Dinner on Thursday evening and we did not cook Friday night, just heated up the last of the PPI Ma Po Dofu and rice.

So Saturday we decided to cook a nice dinner of Frog Legs with champagne or a belated Valentine’s Dinner and cook.   So I thawed the frog legs out [Pro’s Market ($4.99/lb.)], while Suzette was attending the Annual New mexico Organic Growers’ Conference.

When Suzette arrived, we found that we did not have any parsley, so she drove to Lowe’s and bought some.

We opened the other bottle of Henriot champagne “Le Souverain”, Suzette had bought and added a bit of the rose flavored wine we had bought at The Line Camp tasting room of Don Quixote Winery .  The rose wine had a rather bitter taste that overpowered the delicate French champagne’s almost non-taste, so we decided to not flavor the champagne with the rose wine and put it back in the fridge.

I then chopped up 1 Tbsp. of garlic and about three Tbsp. of parsley, three small shallots and a tomato for the cous cous.  I divided the shallot between the garlic and parsley mixture for the frog legs and the tomato for the cous cous.

I made the blender recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1, which is simple. It calls for 2 Tbsp. of lemon juice and three egg yolks placed in a blender and then slowly adding 1 stick (1/4/lb.) of heated butter.  I fetched the egg whites that were left from the Hollandaise sauce and Suzette placed them in a shallow baking dish and then crushed some panko and flavored it with salt and dipped the frog legs in the egg and then coated them in the panko mixture.

While Suzette was sautéing the garlic, shallot and parsley in a large pan with butter and olive oil for the frog legs, I made 1 cup of cous cous by bring 1 ½ cups of water and the tomato and shallot mixture to a boil with 1 Tbsp. of butter and then adding the cous cous and reducing the heat to a low heat for five minutes.  At the end of five minutes I tossed the cous cous with a fork and turned off the heat. 

We steamed seven asparagus each in the steamer and then when everything was almost done, I heated the butter until a froth appeared on the surface in the microwave and drizzled it through that opening in the top cover into the egg and lemon juice in the blender while the blades were spinning at high speed.

When the frog legs were sautéed, Suzette deglazed the pan with more butter and a bit of white wine and we served dinner by plating the asparagus and drizzling hollandaise sauce over them, scooping a pile of cous cous onto the plate and making a pile of three sautéed frog legs on the cous cous.  See Picture.

When we started eating the frog legs we discovered that they were not fully cooked so Suzette removed the egg wash from the steel baking dish and cleaned it and placed the frog legs in it in the oven and baked them for an additional twenty minutes while we sipped Henriot champagne from beautiful handmade and decorated champagne glasses Suzette had bought at Murano, Italy and discussed the best strategy for cooking frog legs.  She said that they needed to be baked or roasted like chicken.  After the frog legs had been baked in the oven for an additional twenty minutes, we re-plated them and when we tasted them again, we agreed that Suzette’s decision to bake them like chicken was correct.  The frog legs had a much better, more cooked and less elastic texture after they had been roasted.

The frog legs in the butter, parsley, shallot and garlic sauce tasted wonderful and the hollandaise sauce was right on.  Unfortunately, my stomach reacted to the abundance of butter early Sunday morning, so I ate a bowl of LaLa Mexican Mango yogurt mixed with Pace Greek strained yogurt and read my new Book Club selection, Barney’s Version by Mordicai Richler, the quasi-autobiographical journals of an older Jewish man living in Montreal, Canada discussing his life, his three wives and his life in Paris in the 50’s.

Bon Appétit