Cordon bleu cookery

[igenlode]

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The last of the milk smelt as if it might be starting to go off, so instead of keeping it for porridge tomorrow (where I'm sure it would have been fine), I paged through my cookery books and launched into an 'onion timbale' — which, according to the recipe, contains no actual onion but only the ghost of its flavour in the white sauce in which it was steeped, but I'm afraid I couldn't see my way to throwing away half a milky onion, so I put it through the Mouli and stuck it back into the 'white mixture' at the top and bottom of the loaf.

That may have made it a little wetter and slower to set than it should have been, but then I forgot to mix the stuffing with a teaspoon of lemon juice before putting it in, so that part was drier than it should have been :-p With hindsight I should have halved the quantity of breadcrumbs in the stuffing to match the reduced volume of milk, but after I'd grated half a roll it didn't look like very much, so I put in the whole thing, and the finished roast is about 50% stuffing!

Served with roast potatoes and sauce Espagnole, as recommended, albeit without the garnish of lemon slices and parsley due to a shortage of both. (I've never really seen the point of garnishes anyway, unless they're to be eaten, and nobody eats lemon slices for pleasure...)

The entire meal took about two and a half hours, by the time I'd infused my sauces, grated my crusty roll into breadcrumbs, pounded my chopped nuts to powder in a pestle and mortar, processed various elements to puree in a hand mill and spent forever attempting to brown my roux (in the end I gave up and just bunged the vegetable cooking water in anyhow, because I was worried the potatoes would overcook — luckily it was the water from purple sprouting broccoli, which combined with the tomato colour to make quite a convincing brown!) I can't say I'd bother with it again, certainly not as a vegetarian Christmas centrepiece as suggested, but I was very pleased with the roast potatoes done in dripping, which caused far less trouble than anything else while producing perfect results. Especially given that I've never actually roasted potatoes before!

Comments

[erimia]

Throwing away a milky onion would be wasteful indeed, especially considering that it may even taste quite nice. When mom cooked bread sauce once we didn't throw the onion away either.

Though I'll have to disagree that no one eats lemon slices for pleasure. :D I, um, know such persons.