Weekend Cooking

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

For Ricardo, Quebec’s top food celebrity, the weekend means more time
to lavish on special dishes, a chance to prepare more ambitious recipes
than would be feasible on busy weekdays. It is this tone of semi-leisure
plus a nod toward casual entertainment that shapes this collection of
100 recipes.

The recipes cover breakfast and brunch dishes, appetizers, fish, meat,
and desserts. Most are dressed-up variations on classics: French toast
with a unique crunchy coating, pancakes with a Ricotta stuffing, melted
Brie with a decadent topping, Jerusalem artichokes in the potato salad,
limes in the lemon pie. For those who find comfort in the familiar,
Ricardo includes recipes for the ultimate chocolate cake, a smartened-up
pizza and modernized lasagna, and a fresh approach to the standards of
flank steak, barbecue chicken, and rib roast. For the more adventurous,
he offers challenges such as Stuffed Salmon, Sweetbreads, Double
Chocolate Eclairs, Smoked Trout Rosti, even Foie Gras Terrine. The
selection is unique in the number of recipes using duck meat and/or duck
fat.

The recipes use imperial measures first, with metric given in brackets.
The methods include nothing an experienced cook couldn’t handle
(deglaze, for example). Some ingredients, such as skate, black salsify,
ice cider, soba noodles, and fleu de sel, while now mainstream in urban
centres, will be a challenge to find at most small-town supermarkets.

No nutritional analysis is given, which may be a case of ignorance is
bliss, as the recipes call for lots of whipping cream and butter. One
recipe requires eight cups of duck fat.

Suggestions for wine accompany most recipes, as does a chatty line or
two to put the recipe in context.

The book is illustrated with full-page colour photos that excel at
their task of “selling” the sumptuous recipes.