Fun on the Web April 29 '10 - en Papillote

With school coming at me I'm looking for ideas to cook in a flash but still get something delicious.

From the archives of the LA Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jun/23/food/fo-papillote23

Scissors, paper, flavor
You can cook almost anything in parchment, especially now.
June 23, 2004|Regina Schrambling, Special to The Times

My kitchen stove is one of those gorgeous 1950s Wedgewoods with serious pilot lights that keep the whole room pretty close to incubator temperature all year round. If I'm going to turn on one of the ovens in the heat of summer, I need four good reasons: What I'm putting in it has to be quick and it has to be easy. And what I take out has to be radically transformed, with no slaving over a hot sink afterward.

Not that I have a weakness for vintage, but to me the best solution is actually one of the most traditional in the French kitchen: cooking en papillote. Anything sealed in baking parchment with a little liquid will emerge as something almost magical in less than 20 minutes, less time than it would take on a grill if I owned one. And it's about as close to carefree as you can get without breaking open a package of paper plates. There are no pots or pans or even baking dishes to scrub; you can just wipe a cookie sheet off and call it a night (some of us Luddites do not have dishwashers).

Cooking en papillote is a great idea no matter what page is open on the calendar, but it suits summertime surprisingly well. Typically, it's most often used to cook fish: With just a little butter or oil for moisture and a few herbs for perfume, it's a foolproof path to juicy fillets.

But it's even better applied to foods that need barely enough exposure to heat to qualify as cooked, like those June-July specials of sweet scallops and corn off the cob, or to peaches and other ripe fruits that need a little something extra to qualify as dessert.

Baking in paper last went through a big revival in the '80s, when spa "cuisine" was all the rage, which in my mind took half its French appeal away. Undeniably, it's the next-best thing to steaming for most ingredients, because it imparts flavor where fat would normally have to do the heavy lifting. But there are far better imperatives for indulging. This is a technique that stands on its own.

Nothing could be easier, as long as you have a roll of parchment paper (still easier to find than that other artifact, kitchen twine) and cut it into the proper shape. "Papillote" is derived from the word for butterfly, which is a hint of how to proceed: You fold a long sheet in half crosswise and scissor out butterfly wings -- a piece that looks like half a heart or, when you unfold it, a valentine. As the food inside cooks, the fat top will puff perfectly while the skinny end captures the juices.

Look for recipes on my Cooking Blog
http://bluesbabys-rants.blogspot.com/