Julia Child's Buerre Blanc

Buerre Blanc is one of the five French 'mother sauces' and before you guess it, yes it has like a heart-stopping amount of butter. Simply translated, it means 'white butter'...sauce. You serve it on fish. Tonight I served it on baked salmon, but usually a white meaty fish like a seabass will work great. Julia Child described her initial 'religious experience' with food that turned her into a bona fied French chef was having sole meunière (filet of sole, deboned) with buerre blanc at a restaurant in Rouen. As a mother sauce, you would think it's very dainty, french and for lack of a better term, frou frou. But it's actually very simple and affordable and can spice up any thing. I had a veggie friend over for dinner tonight so while I poured it on my fish, I poured it on her roasted eggplant and she loved it (pats oneself on back). Julia Child somehow through her charm and wit finagled a very confidential recipe from one of the top masterchefs in France for her signature buerre blanc, but don't be intimidated, it's super easy, super delicious, and super fattening!
You'll need the following:

1/2 cup of minced shallots (cutting these is worse than cutting onions, wear goggles, trust me)
1/2 cup of white wine vinegar
1/2 cup of dry white wine (I personally like a Robert Mondavi Chardonnay, but definitely not something that is too sweet or fruit forward, usually a Sauvignon Blanc will do, but you know me. I like my Chardonnay)
1/4 tablespoon of salt (again, try to get sea salt or some kind of coarse salt, no fancy pink salt necessary)
1/4 tablespoon of fresh white ground pepper (here's where you can cheat, white pepper is hard to find and expensive, go ahead with the black pepper just make sure it's fresh ground)
and FINALLY...
1 1/2 cups of BUTTER!!!!! (That's three sticks people)

The cooking is so easy it will shock you that this is a super fancy masterchef specialty. Brown the minced shallots, add in the vinegar, wine, salt and pepper and put on a VERY LOW heat to reduce it to a mixture that's about two tablespoons. (Forgot to add, please use unsalted butter, you're using salt in the recipe already). After you have the reduction. Put in the butter that you have cut up into pieces while it's cold (DO NOT USE ROOM TEMPERATURE BUTTER) Here's where it gets a little labor intensive. With a gentle whisk, mix in the butter piece by piece, and you should have about 15 pieces, but at the end of it all you'll have this beautiful yellow frothy, velvety, creamy, heavenly, gift from the gods that you'll want to drink with a straw but don't because you'll end up at the cardiologist's office. The acids in the wine and vinegar work on the milk solids of the butter, it's basically delicious chemistry. Pour over anything, your naked body if that's your thing. But it will elevate anything you add it to. That's a promise. Enjoy, and you're welcome! 

Summer Potato Salad with Parsley

A perfect accompaniment to sweet tea is a light starch-based salad. People always think of potato salad as being grainy, heavy, and too dressed. And that doesn't have to be the case. The key to a good potato salad is cooking the potatoes correctly. They should be almost undercooked. Right when the begin to soften, stick either the sharp part of a thin knife or a wooden stick to see if you can stick it all the way through if you can, immediately take the boiled potatoes off the heat and shock them into cold water. Try to cook them without the skin as that will release all of that grainy mess and make them less starchy. To accent the heaviness of the potatoes you want to use fresh spring ingredients like onion and parsley. Parsley is such a godsend, it tends to perk up any dish. It's up there with my three favorite herbs next to thyme and dill, and has a quality of freshness that can clean up even the densest and heaviest of dishes. Also, it's good for breath and garnish. 

So basically break off about 20 stems of parsley off a bushel and slice up half of a yellow onion (yellow is better for eating raw than a white onion, it tends to be not as acidic). Mix the two together and once you've chopped up your perfectly boiled potatoes (3-4) add them all together. 

The other ingredient I like to put in just for silky texture is about 2-3 hard boiled eggs, but you don't have to. The flavors go really well, and when dressing something with mayonaisse, like this salad it is always good to have some kind of egg component. Boil the eggs for roughly 15 minutes until hard but not overboiled to where they are green. Chop finely and add to the mixture. 

Now my favorite part, the dressing. Most people dress potato salad with mayonnaise perhaps a dash of paprika, and in most cases yellow mustard which I find beyond disgusting. My secret ingredient is Lowensenf Mustard that you can buy at any European market. It's imported Bavarian mustard that I first tried at Schmidt's perhaps the most authentic German restaurant in California on Folsom street in San Francisco. It is to die for. It is sweet, a little bit tangy, and full-flavored with just the right amount of crunch from the mustard seeds. A heavy dollop of that with two tablespoon fulls of mayonnaise, as well as a generous amount of seasoning with kosher salt (or preferably pink Himalayan salt) and fresh ground pepper and you're ready to mix until the salad is evenly coated. Serve on a piece of rye or pumpernickel toasted bread and a glass of sweet tea. It's the perfect light lunch for the hot weather.