What I've Been Cooking - 4

Chocolate orange tart

As is our custom, we spent the end of the year in Paris. We mostly eat out when we're there, and what I cook there is often not very photogenic. In fact, most meals are half cooked and half provided by the excellent traiteurs and charcutiers and fromagers in the neighborhood.

Until Christmas, that is. As is our custom, we invited our Japanese ceramics artists/friends for Christmas dinner.

We started with salted pork tenderloin from the Vosges, which I found at Maison Plisson, not far from where we live and an easy visit during my daily walks. Very tender and perfectly seasoned.

Salted Vosges pork tenderloin

This was followed by Serendipity Chicken Livers, invented by the renowned Dorie Greenspan the day we shopped and had dinner together en famille at her apartment. We were shopping at a very fine volaillerie in the Richard Lenoir market, near the Bastille, when Dorie spotted some gorgeous chicken livers, which she said were a favorite of her husband's. So she bought a bunch and prepared them that day, roughly chopped with various Asian flavors: a wildly successful improvisation! After refining the recipe a bit, she graciously furnished it to me under strict orders not to share it unless and until she published it. So I have jealously guarded the recipte, but I did make and share the chicken livers themselves, and they were almost as great as when Dorie made them. We had them for lunch several times in the days after Christmas.

Serendipity chicken livers

For the main course, I made slow-cooked lamb shoulder over pommes boulangère, a classic from Tom Kerridge, the owner-chef of the only pub in the world to hold two Michelin stars. Starting with amazingly good (and expensive) lamb from Boucherie Gardil, on the Île Saint-Louis, what could go wrong? And nothing did.

Lamb shoulder with pommes boulangère

After a light green salad with a perfect Vacherin du Mont d'Or, my absolutely favorite cheese, only available in the winter months, I served a chocolate orange tart from Milk Street TV. Pretty and tasty if a bit too sweet for my taste. (Pictured above.)

We finished with some Armagnac and then more or less collapsed.

Bobby Jay