Set in a charmingly renovated farmhouse, artist Teresa Krieger’s tablescape evokes a wine dinner in the French countryside. Her poured paint napkin rings and glass bead chargers are distinctive and simple to make.
Chef Lorie Fangio prepares a classic French menu of crunchy lettuce cups with Dijon vinaigrette, bourbon-ginger glazed pork tenderloin with brown butter smashed potatoes and ratatouille, and chocolate pot du creme for dessert.
I’m Lauren Palmer. In today’s episode of Artists And Chefs At Home, artist Teresa Krieger creates a rustic French tablescape with poured paint napkin rings and glass bead chargers. Chef Lori Fangio shows us how to make a delicious French inspired meal that matches the table’s theme. All set in
A gorgeously restored historic farmhouse that we’re about to see. I’m here with Angie Cavalier, owner of this beautifully restored historic farmhouse here in McKinney, Texas. Angie please take us on a tour. I would love to. The history of the house dates back to the late 1800s and
It actually is two houses that were combined to make one house. I’ve been an antique collector for years so it was fun to collect all of the different parts for the house. The barn beam that is in the kitchen. There’s a French factory window that divides the breakfast area from the kitchen.
The iron ballustrades for the stairs that came from France. Very simple white furniture that just gives a calming sense of peace. The fire place it is original to the structure and I love wood with character and just a home that looks lived in and really makes you feel comfortable when you
Walk in. You just want to take off your shoes and make yourself at home. It was a lot of fun to just gather ideas and bring them all under one roof and we really just kind of created the house that we
Had dreamed of. I’ve been a professional artist for over 13 years and I currently specialize in mixed-media, contemporary artwork. When I paint I try to think about some of the awesome things I’ve seen in nature in my travels, paying careful attention to texture and color and light and
Shadow. For my theme of the French country wine dinner I envisioned a wine dinner outside near a vineyard. I wanted to evoke a very natural but European kind of table with a French flare. So I have been teaching French cooking for over 25 years and I was inspired by the luxurious foods
That France has to offer. Many trips over studying cooking from some of the best chefs that Paris has to offer. And I would come back and adapt those recipes for the American home chef, and that was the foundation for my cooking classes. So in preparing for the French country wine dinner I
Really wanted to incorporate lots of color and flavors. A meal that you might enjoy out on a patio and reminiscent of an evening in Provence. For our appetizer tonight we’re making a beautiful salad. It’s a strawberry salad in lettuce cups. I’m going to use bib lettuce to create lettuce
Cups and then I’ll fill it with Romaine lettuce because it’s nice and crunchy. And then we’ll just simply add the rest of the ingredients. So each salad will get several strawberries. It’ll get a little sprinkling of blue cheese. Some dried cherries. I always like a salad with some crunch
And something chewy and sweet so between the pistachios and the cherries we’ve got it. And of course everybody loves bacon. So a little bit of bacon is always a great addition to any salad. A few tomatoes. And that’s really all there is to it. Now I like to make my vinaigrettes from
Scratch. I put a shallot or a garlic clove, some red wine or white wine vinegar, a little bit of honey, a little bit of Dijon mustard, olive oil, and it will be ready for the table. For the napkin rings I drew inspiration from my large poured canvases. I always start with white. And
Layer. Then a darker color such as purple, aqua, gold, and then phthalo blue. [Music] Next, let’s bring our card stock, placing it in front of you. I’ll take my paint, beginning at the edges, and working in. Many of my paintings are water themed,
And through the paint pour process I am able to create some of those very intricate designs that really you cannot do except for allowing nature and the properties of paint to create. I will add gold. Gently, carefully, pick up your paint pour and start tilting it gently.
And starting to create different combinations and different compositions. Just make sure that you cover the entire card stock with paint. I’m going to set it down and allow it to dry for 24 hours. These are the paint pours after 24 hours. So using sharp scissors just begin to
Trim. First thing you do is unroll it and count 1-2-3 big circles. And from here we’re going to make the basket. I have two ends. I will wrap them around each other, tucking them in. Next, roll your card stock. It will adhere to itself. When this is completed,
You will fit it into one of the baskets. To create a very artful table I thought it would be really nice to have a very creative design. And paint pours lend to creativity because you really cannot control them — the paint controls itself to a large
Degree. Our main dish tonight is going to be a bourbon marinated pork tenderloin served with a peach and jalapeno relish. So to get started with the pork tenderloin we need to make our marinade. So we’ll start by adding bourbon to a bowl. I like to whisk all of my
Marinade ingredients together. The biggest thing I’ve learned in cooking in France, and that I really love to convey to my students and really anyone, is that confidence is the biggest key. If you tell yourself something is easy, guess what, it’s easy. But you just have
To approach every task with confidence. Just know it’s going to be great. We’ll add about a 1/4 of a cup of olive oil. And then to this we’re going to add some garlic, brown sugar and ginger. We’ve
Just chopped our ginger finely. So we’ll just add all of these ingredients into the marinade. This is a really balanced marinade. You just whisk this together. And then in a Ziploc bag I have three pork tenderloins — the perfect amount for our dinner party tonight. And then we’ll put it in
The refrigerator for 2-3 hours. You could even do this the day before and let it marinate overnight. That would be really wonderful. The sugars of the meat come in contact with the heat and they create this caramelization. It’s actually sugars that caramelize to create the brown crust that’s
So delicious. To make the peach salsa I’ve got three peaches that I’ve diced. To this I’m going to add just a little bit of peach preserves. I’m going to add some red onion, a diced jalapeno,
Basil that’s been cut into a chiffonade. I’m going to give it just a little bit of lemon. The acid is just going to brighten up all the flavors. So just a squeeze of lemon. We’re going to give it
A stir. If it’s not quite sweet enough, just add a little bit more peach preserves. And this will make a fresh and beautiful topping for our pork tenderloin. Also to go with our pork tonight we are going to make a classic ratatouille. This is such a wonderful dish, really one of my favorites.
This dish comes from the Provencal region of France and they use lots of olive oil instead of butter. So we cooked our onions in olive oil. We don’t really want to brown our onions this time; we really just want to cook them till they’re soft. We’ve added a garlic clove. Now we’re
Going to add these gorgeous red and green bell peppers. And I like to add both red and green just because it adds beautiful color. We’re going to let this cook until those get soft, about 7 or 8 minutes. So you can see that the peppers have cooked down really nicely.
We’ll go ahead and we’ll add a little bit of herbs de Provence, about a teaspoon. Next, we’ll add our eggplant that’s been chopped. Eggplant is a traditional ratatouille ingredient. And then we’ll add one can of diced tomatoes. That’s going to give the mixture just a little
Bit of liquid. And again we’ll cook this down for 7 or 8 minutes before adding our final ingredients. So you can see that the eggplant and tomatoes have cooked down really nicely. And now it’s time to add our squash and zucchini. I like to add this towards the end because I like these
Colors to stay vibrant. I don’t want to cook those until they’re mushy. I’m also going to add some fresh basil. This is just basil out of the garden or from the market. And I like to just pinch it
In. And just to thicken this up and make it really extra rich I’m going to add about a tablespoon or two of tomato paste. We’ll let this continue to cook for 20 minutes or so. We’ll taste it
For salt and pepper, and it will be ready for the table. For the table chargers I drew inspiration from my resin and glass bead artworks. I chose the wood-look chargers to continue the rustic theme and tie into other brown color tones in the table design. At first I chose a little bit
More monochromatic, which you can do. You can have like two blues or two greens together. And that was because of the tablescape. I wanted it to be as natural as possible with greens and blues evoking the blue of the sky around us and the greenery of the moss runner. For this
Charger I chose to use all of the glass beads. The next one I used only two colors of beads. This is a more tonal one. You may also choose to use more of the glass beads and have them closely
Placed. Or you can place at a different angle. It is up to you. So it is your inspiration and your design for an artful dinner charger plate. To go with our pork tenderloin, we’re going to make a beautiful brown-buttered-chive smashed potato. One of the reasons I like to use Yukon
Gold potatoes so much is because you don’t have to peel them. So we’re going to brown the butter for our smashed potatoes. This is really one of my favorite things to do. So we’re just taking a
Stick of butter. It can be salted or unsalted, it really doesn’t matter. And then what’s going to happen is the milk solids in the butter are going to begin to brown. And when they do, they’re going to create this really wonderful nutty flavor. Once I start to see the brown swirl,
Now I know it’s happening and I want to go ahead and pull it quickly. You always want to have a dish ready to go. Pour it up. And we’ll be adding this to our delicious smashed potatoes. So we’ve
Boiled our potatoes for about 20 minutes in a pot. So I’m just going to start to add our other ingredients. The beautiful brown butter we just made. We want all of the brown bits. That’s what’s going to give it great, great nuttiness. Really my favorite thing about cooking French food,
And the approach that the French take, is that quality is everything. If you start with quality ingredients, you can never fail. Now we’re going to give it a little taste for seasoning. That’s good. A little more salt. And lots of fresh ground pepper.
And that is going to be the perfect side for our delicious pork tenderloin. We’ll start by creating a bed of potatoes right in the center of the plate. So in thinking about the French country wine dinner and preparing for it, I really wanted to think
About the beauty of the season. You know, the colors that are going to be on the plate, how to bring in lots of different flavors. And I think that’s always a good approach no matter if you’re cooking a big meal for a big group or if you’re just making family dinner. Your
Plate really needs to be colorful, and so think about that when you’re selecting your foods. I chose a moss-like runner for the table that has lots of texture and as natural as possible. I wanted to evoke the sense of a stream in the French countryside with beautiful
Green verdant moss growing along side of it. I wanted to have a multi-layered centerpiece that had organic quality but also color. I chose a friend’s handcrafted platter to form the base. I found a metal topiary to create height and to evoke the feeling of an outdoor garden sculpture.
The wine corks play on our theme and also hide the batteries for the lights. I chose the grapevine garland because of its organic nature. And it also had enough height that it would hold the fruits and vegetables in like a cornucopia. And to illuminate the vegetables and fruits in
The centerpiece, I placed the fairy lights all around the grapevine garland. The wine bottles that had the fairy light in them, I just loved that because it had to glow through the color of the wine bottle. They will become more stable once we place the fruits and vegetables on the
Table. We have our candles — a little bit more light. When you are thinking about designing your tabletop think of variety in texture. Be careful with the placement of color. You don’t want to have several items the same color all grouped together because they will kind of disappear. So
Place complimentary colors like a red apple next to the purple eggplant. And then a yellow lemon. Have groupings like that. The next element in your tablescape is burlap. Burlap is very organic. I love the textures coming together of the burlap and the lacy garland and the moss. In designing
Your actual place settings think in layers. So I began with a woven rustic brown mat. And then the next element was the wood-tone glass-bead charger. And then from there I added a dinner plate, which was white. It was white but it had small beads around the edge because I wanted to be a
Little bit more elegant and also a little bit more European. From there we added the poured napkin ring. The small vase of fresh flowers adds another touch of nature to our theme. In my canvas artworks I use color, texture, and three-dimensional elements to achieve a cohesive vision. I used this approach in the
Table design as well. All of the elements tie into a natural theme of the French countryside with grapevines and fruit orchards and gardens bursting with vegetables and flowers. For dessert tonight we’re going to make one of my all-time favorite French desserts.
It’s called chocolate pot de creme. To get started making our chocolate pot de creme, we take a heavy bottom pot. I like to use my copper pot because it heats so evenly. We’ll just start by adding our milk and our cream. So it’s 1 and 1/2 cups of whole milk. 1 cup
Of heavy cream. So the richness of the milk and cream is really what makes this dish so luxurious. So we’ll add half a cup of sugar, just half a cup. And this is going to make six to eight servings depending on the size of the serving of course. We’ll add six egg yolks,
The egg yolks only to this dish. So what we’ll do is we’ll just whisk this together and then we’ll take it over to the burner and we’ll get started. Our burner is set to medium to medium-low. I want to keep it moving because once this mixture gets warm it will start to
Thicken. And we don’t want any parts to thicken in the corners. We want it to all thicken evenly. Okay, so we have our custard all ready to go. We’ve got our blender ready. We’re going to add
9 ounces of dark chocolate to our blender. We will add the custard mixture just right on top. And then we will turn our blender on. But this is really important: you need to vent your blender.
So take the hole out, take the lid out. Cover it with the dish towel before you turn it on. Take the lid off and oh it looks beautiful. All right, so we’re just going to take our pitcher off. Tonight I’m going to serve the chocolate pot de creme in beautiful martini glasses. So
I’ll just pour it in. This is very rich so I won’t take it all the way to the top. That’s about good. So our chocolate pot de creme has been in the refrigerator covered with plastic
For 3 or 4 hours. And we are just going to take an ice cream scoop with our whipped cream and add it to the top, just like that. I think it makes it look really pretty. We’ll add
A few raspberries right to the top. And then a sprig of fresh mint to make it look really special. Lorie did a fabulous job with the menu, creating dishes that just really covered every aspect of seasonal flavors. The strawberry salad in the lettuce cups was one of my favorite
Dishes. It was definitely a highlight of the meal. The vegetables and the ratatouille were so wonderful. She really did capture the feeling of a summer French country wine dinner. Teresa did a beautiful job of creating a lovely tablescape for our guests. I really loved
The idea of having a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables on the table that just really gives a feel of an abundant dinner and made it a really special. To friends. To friends. [Music] Thanks for joining us. On our website ArtistsAndChefs.com you will
Find detailed recipes, table creation tips, and a list of local retailers where you can purchase our table and meal kits to create your own custom dinner party.