French food focus-About living and cooking in rural France,recipes,lifestyle,comments

FRENCH FOOD FOCUS Latest Post Other Posts Recent Truffles Index of Recipes L inks House Sitters FiFi About me About 'My' France Comments to: yankinparisot@gmail.com Archives		Life in rural France - Food - Friends - Wine - Cheese - Comments Welcome to French Food Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food and because I live in rural France the stress will be upon French food. There are numerous posts concerning life in France and, certainly, opinions about anything that strikes my fancy. If you have some good recipes or if you want to rave about any great French restaurants this is the place to do it. I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France! Click Here to send me a comment
		This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right.
	A new twist on an old favorite I've always loved Prawns Bordelaise. Lovely prawns with a garlic & lemon sauce. Ymmmy! So, I decided to make them a couple of weeks ago having found some nice peeled prawns at market at a good price. Now, I don't know about you, but I get confused amongst prawns, shrimp, scampi, gambas and so forth as to which is which. We seem to call them one thing in the states & another thing in England. Anyway in this case what I'm calling prawns would weigh in at about a 50-60 count. Fairly good sized. Back to the recipe. As I looked in the fridge to get my prawns out I noticed that I had a nice bunch of mushrooms. Just ordinary cultivated mushrooms. (the French call them Champignons de Paris). Inspiration struck! Why not use them, so I did and the result was delicious. Here's what you do: Peel your prawns if not already peeled. Cut you mushrooms into slices at a right angle to the direction that they grow. (trim off any bits, but save & use the stems); make the slices fairly thick, say about 1/8th inch thick. Chop some garlic up finely. Cut a lemon in half ready to squeeze. In an appropriately sized frying pan put in a good sized knob of butter. When it has melted & starts to foam dump in your mushrooms & garlic all at once. Toss continually until the mushrooms are just barely cooked. (you may have to add more butter). You do NOT want the mushrooms to give up thrir water! Add the prawns and cook just until pink or if the prawns are pre-cooked just until they're hot. Squeeze in the lemon juice to taste. Artistically arrange the mushroom slices & prawns over a bed of greens, your choice of type of greens (I use Lamb's lettuce or baby spinach leaves) Meanwhile quickly melt some more butter, add lemon juice & pour over the whole plate as a sauce. That's it! It turns out that the mushroom/ prawn combination really worked well. The flavors compliment each other. I wouldn't use stronger flavored mushrooms (wild mushrooms for instance) as they might overpower the prawns. As a bonus the colours look really nice on the plate. Try it; you'll like it. Let me know what you think.