Recipes

Artichokes, eggplants and cucumbers

Summer dish menus should consist of light, refreshing dishes borrowed especially from the plant kingdom. Moreover, the provident nature, at this season of the year, offers us in abundance the most varied plant products. Let us limit ourselves to providing gourmets with a few recipes for preparing the vegetables of the moment.

Pebble artichoke bases:

Half-cook (in a stock made from water, a spoonful of oil, a drizzle of lemon juice, salt and pepper) six raw-trimmed artichoke bases. Drain them and finish cooking them in butter, in a flat pan, covered. Stuff the artichoke bottoms with a stuffing composed of a chopped hard-boiled egg, 50 grams of chopped cooked mushrooms and chopped parsley, all combined with four spoonfuls of very tight béchamel sauce, and seasoned with a small spoonful of curry. Arrange the funds in a gratin dish on a layer of tomato fondue, peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes, cooked in butter with chopped onion, parsley, pepper. Cover each base with a spoonful of béchamel sauce, not too thick. Sprinkle with grated cheese, drizzle with melted butter and gratin.

Artichoke bases gratinated with Mirepoix:

Cook the artichoke bottoms in butter as described above, adding to the pan four spoonfuls of fine mirepoix of red vegetables, carrot, onion, leek, celery cut into tiny dice, seasoned with salt and a pinch of sugar, gently melted with butter. Place the funds in a buttered gratin dish. Top them with the cooking mirepoix, deglazed with half a glass of white wine, reduced, mixed with five spoonfuls of meat juice and buttered. Sprinkle with cheese and gratin.

Eggplant with cream:

Cut 4 peeled eggplants into half-centimeter-thick slices. Soak in salt for an hour. Cook these eggplants in butter. At the last moment, sprinkle them with cream sauce (béchamel with crème fraîche, reduced and buttered).

Peasant-style stuffed cucumbers:

Cut a large cucumber into eight sections of equal thickness. Peel these sections, trim them, scoop out two-thirds of them using a small vegetable spoon. Blanch them for three minutes in boiling salted water. Drain them and stuff them with a stuffing composed of half of finely chopped boiled dessert beef and. of fine pork stuffing, all well seasoned and added with chopped parsley. Place the cucumber sections in a heavily buttered gratin dish. Cook them covered in the oven for twenty minutes. Sprinkle them with bread crumbs and grated cheese; drizzle them with butter and finish cooking them by gently browning them in the oven.

PROSPER MONTAGNÉ