Tarragon Cream sauce Pasta

I'm telling Esme about another one of the family recipes that I want to make and show her how to make - and every other recipe I've been finding for it uses white wine in it for reduction in the sauce. And I had to think, ah.. yes, my mother never cooked with that (cooking alcohol) at all, so of course the 'family recipe' that I know doesn't have it, so.. do I try to do it 'correctly' according to the books or do I cook what I know so I don't 'mess it up'? I'm choosing option two, and then maybe we can learn how to make the 'actual French recipe version' later.  Apparently there is a 'boil the onions in white wine' step that I've never done in my life.. and am not sure I want to.  

 This is usually served with chicken breast, but can also be served with eggs.  We didn't have fresh garden tarragon, but I was inspired to make this by the dried tarragon packet I got in our spice sampler.  Tarragon goes bad quickly, much quicker than many spices - and the reason I haven't made it in many years is that it is hard to find it, and then when you do, a little disappointing to throw much of it away later.  I used finely diced zucchini instead of the real chopped tarragon plants that were in a recipe I found - I think maybe it was made with canned green beans at times in our household, my mom canned a lot of green beans every summer.

 We decided to make it with eggs.  It is not an easy dish to make with three burners by yourself - will need to practice again, as one of the burners was an omelette to go with it and that got a bit messy in between - started pasta, then melted butter in a big pan and added finely diced zucchini and sliced sweet onions, cooking them until the onions were translucent, then added a bit more water to make sure there was enough liquid - added a few tablespoons of flour until it began to form a paste with the butter, added some grated cheese (used the last of the gruyere block we had, about 3 by 2 inches) to that to finish making it a full paste (roux), then began to reliquify with half-and-half, then whole milk, until the sauce and melted cheese came to the right consistency, added dried tarragon and lots of black pepper (should have added more salt, I had hoped the butter and cheese was salty enough) and removed from heat as the omelette was getting done to put on the plates and drained the pasta, stirred it into the tarragon cream sauce and added more black pepper and shredded cheese on top of each plate after serving. It's been years, maybe a decade, since I made this dish, but I thought I'd give it a go again to show Esme.

Ginger Garlic Guajillo Zante barbeque sauce

ZANTE currant 'vindaloo' barbeque sauce

1 large guajillo chile, dried - this is a fruity chile that smells almost like raisins - or zante currants, which I also ended up putting in this recipe.  I keep the Zantes for my welsh biscuits (bara brith or welsh cakes).

So this recipe asked to keep the seeds from the chile, but cut off the top, and take out the spine/veins and tear the chile into one inch pieces.  Place in the microwave in enough water to cover and steam for a minute, then time it for 3 to 5 minutes to soften.

spice mix from the vindaloo last night - cumin, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom pods, pepper, salt, paprika, ground cloves.  I put all the rest of what I had from those in the mix, probably about a tablespoon plus a bit of the entire mixture.

1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of cider vinegar, some salt, about a 1 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and cut up, about 4 to 5 small partitions of garlic, peeled and cut up.  Combine all that with the chile and the water from it and bring it to a boil - the more 'syrup' you want the sauce the less water from the chile to add.

I brought that all to a boil and then reduced it to about '2', enough to bubble but not enough to roil.  Mostly covered, cooked at '2' for about thirty minutes stirring often.  Then I put in two handfuls of Zante currants and cooked it again for about ten minutes.  Poured it all up in a glass jar and let it cool down for several hours.

Then I put it through a food processor and spooned out the really large chile and cardamom pods that didn't process.  Next time I will take the cardamom through a coffee grinder before I add it to the spices - I just mashed it for a while with the mortar and pestle this time but it wasn't enough even with cooking, a couple of them still were there at the end.

This was a sweet, fruity, hardly any heat 'bbq' sauce taste.  I drizzled it over some rice and pork I had set aside and it was wonderful.  Definitely will use the rest of it on my remaining rice, and will be making more like it in the future.


Vindaloo dry spices :

1 tsp black pepper, freshly ground
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tabelspoon paprika
1/2 tsp salt
6 cardamom pods, pulverized (better ground)
1 tsp ground cloves

I think I used about half of this in the vindaloo last night (with wet ginger and wet garlic, and two chiles, prepared as above steamed in a little water but with the seeds thrown out) and then a splash of cider vinegar, no sugar, a little peanut oil in the pan with some onion until clear, add precooked meat, cook for a minute, add the sauce, reduce heat and let it steam until the water is absorbed enough.. that was pretty good over rice.. but this sauce was even BETTER