Solid freaking gold. Plus potatoes. And garlic.

Alongside a multitude of pages devoted to the wonders of Thanksgiving, Saveur's November issue included a guide and tribute to the traditional Parisian bistro. It was, in a word, amazeballs. It made me want to book a trip to Paris immédiament. It made me want to cook some seriously delicious potatoes.

Anyone who's eaten in a bistro knows that they elevate the cooking of potatoes to an art form. Be they puréed, sautéed, roasted, smashed, gratinéed, fried...you name it, the bistro kicks ass at it. And so when I read about L'Ami Louis' recipe for a potato galette topped with fresh parsley and chopped garlic, I knew I had to have it.

Responsible woman that I am, I decided it was probably best to forgo dropping all obligations to fly off to Paris. Lucky for me, the potato galette with which I'd become enamored was one of the bistro-style recipes Saveur included in the issue. Score!

Now, one of the reasons that bistros ace Potato 101 is that they follow a couple of basic, core rules: first, cook the potatoes in more than one stage. Fry them twice, simmer them before roasting, whatever. But cook them in stages. Second, cook them in animal fat. Butter is fine; duck fat is best. Bacon fat or schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) are pretty damn good, too.

Which brings us to my big bowl of golden deliciousness. This, my friends, is my bowl of schmaltz. Each time I roast a chicken, I carefully pour off the fat from the pan juices and store it, tightly covered, in the fridge. After a few chickens, I have a good 1/2 cup of rendered chicken fat, and I start using it all over the place. It goes into the oil I use to fry my latkes. It goes into soups, where I use it to brown the vegetables. It goes into vegetable sides, where I use it to saute the sprouts or cauliflower. Hell, in Europe, they spread it on bread, so who am I to skimp?

So, while you can certainly go out and buy a big old tub of duck fat to have on hand, I highly recommend being patient and frugal with your chicken. It'll be more rewarding than the skip-to-the-end solution, and you'll always have a supply on hand, assuming you roast a chicken once or twice a month. Boom.

Oh, and the galette? So ridiculously delicious that I ate the whole thing (well, a half-recipe version) for lunch, garlic and all.

Potato Galette
Adapted from Saveur

2 lbs. Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1⁄2" x 1⁄4" pieces
Kosher salt, to taste
2 tbsp. rendered chicken fat
2 tbsp. unsalted butter
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 tbsp. minced flat-leaf parsley
1 tsp. minced garlic

Place potatoes into a 4-qt. pot and cover by 1" with well-salted water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low,and simmer until potatoes are tender, 20–30 minutes. Drain potatoes and spread on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil. Transfer to the refrigerator, and chill for at least 20 miunutes. (If you're roasting a chicken to eat with the galette, let the potatoes chill until the bird is almost ready to come out of the oven.)

When you're ready to make the galette, heat oven to 400°. Melt fat and butter in a 6" skillet over medium heat.

Put chilled potatoes into a bowl. Pour fat and butter over potatoes (reserving skillet) and season with salt and pepper; toss to coat. Tranfser potatoes to reserved skillet and cover with a piece of parchment paper cut to fit inside rim of skillet.

Cook, smashing potatoes into skillet with a metal spatula, until edges begin to crisp and brown, about 30 minutes. Transfer skillet to oven and bake until potato cake is golden brown, 10–15 minutes (to check, use a fork to lift up one edge of the potato cake).

Invert a small serving plate over skillet. Using 2 tea towels, hold plate and skillet together firmly and invert skillet. Remove skillet and garnish potato cake with parsley and garlic. Serve hot.

Serves 3-4.

Wowza.

It started out so innocently. I spied a recipe that included chicken, which I already had, and broccoli, which I love. Not to mention milk, which I needed anyway, for a pie. And, of course, parmesan cheese. Which is tasty.

But only when I started making Saveur's recipe for the incredibly old-school casserole chicken Divan did I realize what I'd gotten myself into. This is a recipe that calls for - I kid you not - butter, whole milk, cream, cheese and flour. Yeah. I know. Not my usual weekly lunch fare. But, you know, sometimes it's okay to fold whipped cream into your cheese sauce and pour it over chicken and vegetables and then bake it.

Really.

The good news is that the resulting dish is tasty, and not just in a happily retro kind of way. It's rich, yes, but there's just enough sauce - not too much - to coat the peppery broccoli and tender chicken, and the nutmeg makes things nice and wintry. I used a healthy amount of salt and skipped the almonds, since I'm not a big fan, and I'm convinced it's just as good as it would be with nuts. (Though I do think walnuts or pine nuts would be worthy substitutes.)

In short, I highly recommend indulging yourself with a little cheese sauce casserole sometime soon. If nothing else, you'll get to tell people you had whipped cream for dinner.

Queenie's Treasury

Happy weekend, my lovelies! Many of you are, no doubt, otherwise occupied in Washington, D.C. right now (Rally To Restore Sanity FTW!). For the rest of you poor schlubs who, like me, are stuck at home this weekend, here are some Treasury delights for you!

First up, an incredible house tour from Design*Sponge. Kate Schintzius' house is, to put it mildly, haunting my dreams. I love pretty much everything about it, from the teardrop chandelier to the needlepoint pillows to the dreamily colored rug. I'll take it. It's for sale for a really reasonable amount, furnishings included, right?
Next up, some amazing vintage and estate jewelry. I have a yen for old-fashioned pieces, especially cocktail rings and brooches, so I was delighted when Oh Joy! mentioned Claude Morady's site. It's a veritable treasure trove of perfect specimens. I have my eye on the aquamarine ring. By "have my eye on" I of course mean "dream hopelessly of." Sigh.

Finally, a different kind of treasure trove - slightly less literal, but, perhaps, even more valuable. Saveur's picks for the top 18 bistros in Paris are up on their website (the full list of 23 is available in the November issue, which also has recipes for things like steak with mustard cream sauce, oh yes), and it's making me ache to hop across the pond. Like, right now. Now, now, now.

A tradition is reborn.

Just like your family (I'm making what I think is a safe assumption here), mine has certain inviolable Thanksgiving traditions. One of these is serving creamed onions with the meal. For the last 29 years, I've been a reluctant consumer of that dish. Definitively Waspy both in frugality (it consists of little more than onions, flour and milk) and flavor (as in, not a lot of it), it's a staple for most New Englanders, and my mom has served it every year in living memory. As did her mother before her.

This year, I stumbled across a recipe in Saveur's November issue that gave me hope for creamed onions. Saveur chronicled several American Thanksgiving feasts, one of which was cooked by Anna North Coit, a 101 year-old woman from Stonington, Connecticut. Anna (a fellow Yankee - even better for authenticity's sake, a fellow Connecticut native) spikes her creamed onions with curry powder and Tobasco. Surely, I thought, this will make the onions at least a bit more edible, and curry goes so well with turkey.

Luckily, I was right. My mom was out of Tobasco and I had to substitute cayenne, and her Florida grocery store only had jarred pearl onions, but none of that really mattered. This year, the creamed onions were not only edible, but tasty. And instead of being yet another white or brown element of the traditional Thanksgiving plate, they were a gorgeous yellow.

I hereby declare a tradition.