Hey all! Here’s my latest Food 101 column, published in The Orange County Register’s print edition today. It’s not on the OCR site, so I’ve placed it here. Enjoy!

Go for croque
By CYNTHIA FUREY
Special to the Register

Not many can resist the call of buttery, crunchy sandwiches oozing with Gruyère and piled with lacy slices of Black Forest ham – especially the ones that require a knife and fork. These lunchtime and brunch-time French staples, called croque-madame and croque-monsieur, are simple ham and cheese sandwiches with toppings to dress them up. A bonus: The sandwiches can easily be prepared at home, usually for a fraction of the cost that a single croque would fetch at any restaurant.

Croque-madame and croque-monsieur are toasted in the oven so the ham heats through and the cheese melts into a blanket of gooey bliss. Croque-madame has an egg on top, its yolk serving as a sauce. Ditch the egg and ladle on some Mornay sauce, and you have a croque-monsieur. Because there is little preparation time, you can make both croque versions without spending all afternoon over your stove.

Traditionally, croque-madame’s egg is served sunny side up, but an egg cooked over easy works just as nicely. Part of the fun of eating a croque-madame is piercing the yolk with a fork and watching it dribble over the sandwich and rest in a puddle underneath. The other fun part is sopping up the puddle with the sandwich bread.

For the croque-monsieur, you will be making a Mornay sauce, which is essentially a béchamel sauce with cheese added. A béchamel is a milk- or cream-based sauce. It’s considered one of the five classical “mother sauces” – the others are Espagnole, made with brown stock; velouté, white stock; hollandaise, butter; and tomato sauce. With the addition of other ingredients, hundreds of sauces are derived from these five.

Start the béchamel by making a blond roux, made of equal parts butter and flour. Heat this mixture until the flour’s starchy flavor cooks away, leaving behind a nutty smell and flavor and an ivory or off-white mixture. The roux will help thicken the sauce once the milk is added, and the little bit of Gruyère added at the end will transform the béchamel into a Mornay. Once the sauce is ladled onto the sandwich, an additional bit of cheese goes on top to give that gorgeous, bubbly look when the sandwich is heated under the broiler.

You can serve these sandwiches with a spring salad, with french fries or as appetizers: Cut the sandwiches into smaller servings, skewer with a toothpick or wooden skewer and place on a tray. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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In high school, an old boyfriend took me to a tiny, fancypants French restaurant in a neighboring beach city, named after a wine we couldn’t pronounce. Based on that fact alone, we knew it was going to be a worthy (and expensive) place to spend our first anniversary.

The two of us were completely out of place in this cramped dining room, tucked away from view in a corner nearest the bathroom. Other diners were either yuppies discussing business deals over elegantly plated dishes, or the retired crowd, with men in khaki pants and women dripping in jewelry. All of them carried on their conversations looking completely at ease, as if they knew the scene in the dining room was built for them to be part of it. I looked at my beau, who upon being seated, had immediately buried his face in his leatherbound menu. Though I sensed he was also uncomfortable, he said not a word about it.

It’s funny how totally unrelated things can trigger a memory. If you can believe it, that awkward memory surfaced after I sat through an IHOP commercial. The ad is for the restaurant’s all-you-can-eat pancake promotion where a man eats a stack that magically regenerates right before his eyes (see clip). He’s got this baffled look on his face that I’m sure I had when I was stumbling through those French words all those years ago.

The pancake guy’s good fortune stuck with me throughout the week. Who doesn’t have a meal they would love to eat all over again, either because of the food or company? I’d pay to relive the first date I had with my current boyfriend, where we wolfed down wood-fired hot dogs with bacon and mushrooms. Or when I sat down to a chicken roulade meal in my best friend’s new home with her new husband, an ocean away from where we met. Or even that awkward meal I had at that now-shuttered French restaurant, just so I could choose a dish based on something I liked, rather than through a meticulous system of tallying how many ingredients we recognized in each description. I bet that regenerating-pancake guy doesn’t know how good he has it. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe)

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