Tl;dr version — this diary contains veggie and non-veggie tarragon recipes and ideas, as follows:
- The way Mr pixxer and I first discovered tarragon — in Bearnaise sauce
- Two completely different chicken breast, top-of-stove recipes — the one in the main photo, and another served over confits of carrots and of scallions
- An unusual and delicious potato salad (veggie)
- Salmon cooked in tarragon cream sauce (that’s basically the whole recipe right there)
- Links to two dishes with asparagus: risotto and bread pudding (veggie), and a new risotto, too
- Random ideas without recipes: (perking up flavorless baby carrots; omelette; salad dressings)
All the recipes are for two people unless otherwise noted.
Mr pixxer and I were fortunate to be able to travel to London back in the nineties, and we ate at a restaurant touted as one of the best in London. (This was in an article about how we have to stop joking about English cuisine being awful — which is true!) The staff seemed a bit snooty to us; I imagined they were thinking “Oh, Americans — they’re just ignorants who know nothing about fine food.” I also imagined saying “My favorite local restaurant is Chez Panisse — perhaps you’ve heard of it?” But I didn’t. Anyway, they probably did think we were ignorants b/c when the meat (beef? lamb?) arrived with accompanying Bearnaise sauce, we decided we liked the sauce better on the potatoes than on the meat, and ate it thusly.
But wow, we LOVED that sauce, and vowed (ok, we must have been ignorants, actually) to look up the recipe to find out what that fascinating herb was. And it was (as you may have guessed...)
Tarragon
So we tried to find good ways to use tarragon, and we also now grow it. In the garden, it sleeps under the dirt in a large pot for the winter and peeks out in early spring, thriving in the summer months. It turns out “tarragon” was not previously in the tag list at dailykos, so I guess this is our first for WFD :)
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Bearnaise Sauce
After all that, I don’t think I ever actually made Bearnaise, but maybe I did, back in the 90s, the long-forgotten past. Here is one recipe for Bearnaise (from Epicurious). It’s picky, like making mayonnaise (it’s similar to a warm mayonnaise, actually), but if you enjoy cooking, I’m sure it’s worth the effort. Epicurious confirms that the above-mentioned London restaurant was right about using Bearnaise over steak, but points out how good it is also “over poached eggs or roast fish.” OK. I really should make this.
Tarragon vinegar
A music bud of mine once gave me a bottle of tarragon vinegar that she and her husband had made using tarragon from their garden. I think this is simply: scrupulously clean the tarragon; insert whole stems into bottle, cover with unopinionated vinegar. Be sure the vinegar always completely covers the tarragon. We have topped this off many times with white vinegar and it’s still great.
A quick Google search tells me tarragon vinegar is, unsurprisingly, available commercially (should I do a vinegar diary? :) I bring this up b/c tarragon vinegar is used in the next recipe:
Chicken Breasts with Vinegar [and tarragon]
This is my adaptation of a recipe from a very nice little book called Recipes from a French Herb Garden, by Geraldene Holt. It consists of chicken cooked in butter, served over rice with a butter/red onion/vinegar sauce and chopped tarragon over the top.
I’ve changed kind of a lot from the original. I typically cook a Costco packet of two huge boneless chicken breasts, slicing them into two or (usually) three thinner slabs. The original recipe just calls for “2 breasts of chicken, skinned.” After the chicken is cooked, I use two slices for the two of us for dinner, and put the rest away for sandwiches or salads. I also double the sauce, b/c it’s great, and use extra on the sandwiches.
- 2 chicken breasts [I use boneless, and slice them. I could use just one b/c I cut thinner slabs, but they come two to a pack.]
- salt, freshly ground pepper
- 4 Tb butter [I use 5, b/c of the extra sauce]
- 1 small red onion, finely chopped [I use more for our doubled sauce]
- “2 Tbsp raspberry and tarragon vinegar” (ambiguous: 2T total? or 2T each? I use 2 Tb each for our sauce.)
- The recipe calls for 2 sprigs of tarragon as a garnish. *No way.* It’s hard to eat tarragon from a stem, so totally pull off the leaves and chop them. I sprinkle more than 1 Tbsp chopped tarragon* over the top of the chicken and rice.
*This brings up an interesting issue with tarragon: it’s basically two-dimensional, and thus, creating any volume ought to be literally impossible. However, after pulling countless leaves and chopping them, it does fill up actual volume. Be persistent!
The original recipe has you brown the skinless chicken breasts, lightly salted and peppered, in 2 Tb butter, and then cover and cook till done for 10-12 minutes, or move to a 400 degree oven for that length of time. Since I use what amount to fillets of chicken, the extra 10-12 minutes is excessive. Just get it done. Have a low-warm oven ready so you can move the cooked chicken to it while you do the rest (may as well put the plates in there, too).
Add the chopped onion (I double this — how much is “two small onions” though?) to the pan and cook 5-7 minutes, stirring as necessary. Add the vinegars and cook rapidly till the sauce becomes “slightly syrupy.” Remove from heat and add the remaining butter (for the original, this would be 2 Tb, but I add 3 Tb b/c increasing it).
I slice one “fillet” crosswise for each diner and serve over white rice (Thai jasmine is especially good), pour sauce over the top, and sprinkle on the chopped tarragon.
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Here are some other favorite ways we use tarragon in our day-to-day cooking.
Grilled* Chicken Breasts on Carrot and Green Onion Confits
(Chicken marinated with tarragon, and served over long-cooked, sweet carrots and scallions)
*We have a grill on our range, which makes this easy; I expect you could also pan-cook, or even better, broil them reasonably well.
This recipe is adapted from Potager, by Georgeanne Brennan (image below), one of the best cookbooks we have ever used. Highly recommended! (The link is to a random online seller. Pick your own. Brennan’s site, La Vie Rustic, does not have her books, I won’t link to Amazon, and DO NOT try hernameDOTcom b/c it seems to have been taken over by an ED ad!) (And now I want her new cookbook, too!)
For the two of us, I use
- Two slabs cut from boneless chicken breasts, cut as described in the recipe above. They are marinated in:
- 1 Tbsp chopped fresh tarragon
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- ½ Tbsp fresh lemon juice
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper
Grill the chicken till tender and cooked through. For un-filleted, boned, skinned half-breasts, Brennan calls for grilling on medium-high heat 5-7 minutes on side one, 4-5 minutes on side two. Ours are thinner, so they cook more quickly.
Separately, cook the carrots and scallions:
I find the scallion measurements way off on this recipe — unusual for this book. Scallions shrink when long-cooked, so I start with
- Two bunches scallions (one bunch, about 8ish, per person), sliced into 1/4” pieces, including the dark green parts
- 8ish large carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/4” pieces
- 2 Tb butter
- olive oil
- 1 Tb sugar
The carrots take longer to cook than the scallions, so start them first. Put 1 Tb butter and 2 Tb olive oil into a pan and heat. When the butter has melted, add the carrots and cook at very low temperature for 30-40 minutes.
In a separate pan (sorry about the washing-up) melt 1 Tb butter and 1 Tb oil (my notes say 2+1 was too much for the scallions; YMMV), and likewise cook the sliced scallions very slowly till very soft. Then add 1 ½ tsp sugar to each of the veggie pans, and stir 5-10 minutes, till they “begin to glisten and melt slightly.”
Preheat the plates.
Create a bed with one pile of scallions and one pile of carrots; lay the finished chicken across them in an attractive manner and serve (see image above).
Random chicken experiment — try your own
From my dinner journal one night: “[Mr pixxer] pan-cooked some Costco chicken breasts, slicing them crosswise first and topping with tarragon and some grated tangerine and lemon zests. He served these with short-grain brown rice.”
Tarragon potato salad (veggie)
One thing I love about Berkeley Bowl is that the “temptation racks” by the checkout stands have great magazines — not candy bars, and not the National Enquirer. Once several years ago while standing in line, I picked up A Taste of Summer, which I later noticed was a special issue from Saveur (to which I then subscribed after Gourmet [R.I.P.] was killed by Conde Nast — and now Saveur is gone). It was this potato salad recipe, which just looked inviting to me, that convinced me to buy the mini-cookbook/issue. I was not disappointed!
This is a recipe for 6-8 servings, not 2.
Be sure to have your tarragon ready by the time the potatoes finish boiling. Note that cleaning and chopping this much tarragon takes more time than you think, b/c of the aforementioned tendency of tarragon to be 2-dimensional and therefore not to fill up actual volume.
- Boil 2 lb of halved (or quartered, if large) fingerling potatoes in salted water till done. Drain. [I have used multi-color marble potatoes, which are pretty, or Yukon golds, but fingerlings really do work best.]
- Immediately, while they are still hot: in a bowl large enough to stir the potatoes and small enough for your fridge, gently mix the potatoes with 3 Tbsp vinegar (I just use white), 1 peeled and finely chopped shallot, and 3 Tbsp chopped fresh tarragon. The recipe says to salt and pepper to taste, but I typically do not want any more salt.
- Chill. Stir in 3-4 Tbsp mayonnaise. Enjoy!
Salmon Baked in Tarragon Cream Sauce — super easy!
This is based on a recipe from a cookbook from my late and much-lamented mother-in-law (who also appeared in my pie crust diary as the person who actually taught me the secrets!). The book is Fifteen Minute Meals, by Emalee Chapman.
These are the measurements I use, with my notes. They are mostly the same as in the book.
Preheat the oven to 400F.
Lay two thin salmon fillets, ~1/3 of a pound each in a baking dish into which they will just fit (if it’s too wide, the sauce will be too shallow). I ask for the tail-ends of the salmon b/c it is the thinnest part. Have the fishmonger skin it for you unless you want to do this yourself.
Sprinkle chopped tarragon over the fish — at least 1 Tbsp or more. (Original calls for laying in tarragon sprigs, but then it’s really hard to eat the tarragon leaves, which one really must.)
Pour ½ cup heavy cream over the fish. (I didn’t say this was health food.) Season with pepper.
Bake in the pre-heated oven. For thin fillets, 15 minutes is what seems to work for me, using a Corning Ware baking pan.
I always think of cooking these in cute little individual Pyrex containers, but then I always realize that I want to serve them over rice, with the sauce over everything, so I’ll have to remove them from the little containers anyway.
Asparagus and tarragon seem to go together
I previously wrote a WFD on asparagus, which described both an asparagus spring risotto, and an asparagus bread pudding. The risotto requires a full 2 Tb of chopped tarragon (and an equal amount of chives and parsley). The bread pudding has two choices of herb blends, and tarragon/chives/parsley is one of them, - it’s superb. [Do you notice a trend here in herb blends?]
Mr pixxer created his own asparagus risotto, which also used tarragon. [For risotto instructions, see SandraLLAP’s WFD.] Mr pixxer also added 2 slices of Kentucky Legend Ham, cut into stamp-sized chunks, and a set of herbs from the garden: chervil, tarragon, and chives (and salt and pepper).
He cooked the arborio rice in the Costco boxed chicken stock and added grated Grana Padano cheese, and then asparagus about 2 minutes before the end of cooking. The asparagus continued to cook in the hot rice/liquid mixture, and was perfect when served.
Random other ideas of things to do with tarragon
Two salads from outstanding restaurants:
Salads love tarragon
We have dinner at Chez Panisse when someone has a birthday ending in “0.” Since there are four of us (including pixxer-son and pixxer-DIL) that averages once every 2 ½ years. Here is the menu description of the first-course Crab Louie from one of Mr pixxer’s “ends in zero” birthdays: “Dungeness Crab Louie with Little Gems lettuce, tarragon, celery, and golden beets.”
The worst things I’ve had at Chez Panisse have been excellent. Most dishes have been just superb. Spine-tingling.
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Salads still love tarragon
A friend of Mr pixxer’s who is a winemaker (ah, California living) was honored back in the day with a wine-tasting dinner at a since-closed restaurant called Local Mission Eatery, which was in the Mission District in San Francisco. We loved it! Ate at the counter overlooking the blazing stoves, which was great fun.
My notes from that visit say:
“Our first course was a fascinating salad with roasted tomatoes (still juicy) and fresh cherry or grape tomatoes, cooked (probably steamed?) split green beans, treviso, and almonds (toasted?) in a very light yogurt-tarragon dressing.”
Eggs love tarragon:
Mr pixxer is our omelette chef, and he enjoys using the garden herbs. He has made omelettes with tarragon, chives, and chervil.
He has also used tarragon, chives, and parsley (a continuing theme of this diary). Once he made something between a frittata and a scramble (not pictured), thus:
“He started with chopped onions, cooked in olive oil, then added garlic and the boiled potatoes, then the cooked [green] beans, and three scrambled eggs with ricotta, parsley, tarragon, salt and pepper.”
How about another salad dressing?
More from my dinner journal:
“[Mr pixxer] made a lovely salad again, this time with the last of the lettuce pillow, some thinly sliced Romano beans, celery, and a vinaigrette with tarragon vinegar.”
I see I neglected to include the hard boiled eggs in my description. Oops.
Brighten up dull veggies:
Mr pixxer and I returned from a family trip to Florida with some of those bagged baby carrots that are so tasteless. They probably have nutritional value, so that’s good, but it’s nice if they also have flavor. My notes say:
‘...the “baby” bagged carrots we bought at Publix – kinda tasteless – were leftover from the plane trip and D cooked several, cut into rounds, in butter and tarragon, with a tiny bit of sugar. They were tasty that way!’
Not a lot of them, to be sure. That’s a 4” or 5” plate (with picholine and Nicoise olives). But nice to perk them up that way!
Even green beans love tarragon:
One Thanksgiving we used this recipe from Gourmet (R.I.P.) for green beans with lemon, shallots and tarragon.
My notes on this dinner say that the dish was really excellent.
So, try it!
If you’ve never used tarragon, try one of these ideas to get a sense of it.
If you have used tarragon:
Tell us about it!
So, what are you having for dinner tonight? We’d love to hear about it.
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