Gourmet home cooking

Wanting to experiment more with French cuisine, I recently began cooking using recipes from Joan Nathan’s cookbook “Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous.” The book contains an interesting compilation of recipes and the stories behind them. For each of the 200 recipes, Joan, who is the wife of esteemed chef and restaurateur Jeff Nathan, has written a brief paragraph that explains their history and often has a picture of the family or chef from which the recipe originated.

Sharing how food is made with others is quintessential to the experience of cooking and is why so many people keep notebooks filled with collected recipes. With her book Joan Nathan takes the concept of passing down recipes and takes it a step further by traveling to France and gathering some of the best family recipes from a country that is known for its phenomenal cooking.

I tried making a number of dishes in “Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous,” finding them to be deceptively simple in their construction and amazingly complex in their flavor. I particularly enjoyed the eggplant caviar; fennel salad with celery, cucumber, lemon and pomegranate; and the stuffed breast of veal with parsley and onions.

What I found really tremendous about these in particular is how gourmet they sound and yet when prepared and eaten they taste like home cooking and have the distinct feel of comfort food. Special notice need to be given to the chocolate truffles that originated in the kitchen of Francoise Tenenbaum, deputy mayor of Dijon.

These truffles, which are parve and kosher for Passover, are one of the most delicious, chocolatiest, and simple recipes I have ever made. I presented them with desert to a number of friends one Friday night and before I could blink they had disappeared.