Welcome, summer! Cooking with herbs...

Summer has officially arrived today, and I am finally getting around to posting some recent developments. I have to admit that I've been slow at this, mostly because of the World Cup! If you have been following the tournament, please comment on what you think of the games and teams so far. It was nice to see Portugal live up to their potential today, albeit against really weak competition.
Back to the food... With the arrival of basil last weekend, all of the herbs necessary for fresh summer meals are now available in Middle Tennessee. The best method of keeping herbs, suggested to us at the Richland Park market on Charlotte Ave., can be seen below on the top shelf of our fridge:


And now to two recent meals...


Heather suggested a brown butter sauce to celebrate the season's first fresh sage. A little crisping in the butter intensified the sage's deep flavor. I roasted the salted fresh carrots (absolutely unlike supermarket "baby carrots" that look as if they have been marinating in orange paint) in a little olive oil to go with the WF bone-in pork chop. 4 ingredients: magnificent minimalism!
If you have read about the late Bernard Loiseau, you are familiar with "cuisine des essences" (which Loiseau inherited from the father of nouvelle cuisine, Fernand Point). The whole point was cooking delicious dishes with very few, very fresh ingredients, so that the food's true essences stood out rather than the richness of an Escoffier-era sauce that blanketed everything. This is definitely the way to go in the summer, although I do admit that I love old-school sauces and recipes, especially in the fall and winter.
If you are not familiar with Loiseau, read the first chapter of Rudolph Chelminski's well-written account, The Perfectionist here. It is, second to Bill Buford's Heat, the best book I've read about cooking.
Also, here is a great article about the legendary Fernand Point, who began his daily magnum of champagne every morning while getting his daily shave!


Back to the food. As the hanger steak awaits its fate in a cast-iron skillet, parsley and fresh garlic await theirs on the chopping block.

The result: Rare hanger steak with parsley-garlic sauce.

With a lettuce and herb salad and roasted potatoes and carrots ready, I whipped up a quick sauce to go with the steak. Hanger steak, a cut which the French call onglet (and which in Omaha was referred to as the "hanging tender"), is best cooked rare and sliced before plating. It is used a lot in French bistros because it is a relatively cheap cut while almost gamey in flavor (probably due to its proximity to the kidneys). It works very well for steak salad.
I was making a broth yesterday (the results of which I will discuss tomorrow) and used a quarter cup in the blender along with a small bunch of parsley, three cloves of the fresh garlic (still very strong despite its virgin state), about half a cup of olive oil, and S&P. The result was a very tangy sauce that I cut with lemon juice...

No need for sherry-mushroom sauce in the summer!

More soon... in the meantime I'm looking forward to tomorrow morning's Mexico-Uruguay game. As for the French... ils ont mangé la feuille!