Apples, juniper and sage--and where they come from.

     That sprig of sage is from the huge bush in the garden, grown from a cutting given me four years ago.
     Trying to avoid the prickly spikes surrounding them, we picked the juniper berries in Provence last October when we visited Jean-Marc and Annick. Months later, the colours are still gorgeous, and opening that little glass jar unleashes a heady smell of gin.
      Yesterday, I bought a 2 kg bag of Chantecler apples in SuperU which, like most supermarkets here, strongly supports local producers and growers. These pommes grew in Cazals des Bayles, about 20 km away.
      All went into Nigel Slater's recipe for pork with apples and cider, nice on a rainy night. Here's the link to the recipe http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/porkchopswithapplesa_92491

Using up leftover duck confit

   Two legs of duck confit left from various recent meals. Four of us for lunch. Some leftover cooked potatoes too. 

    First, I fried the chunks of potato in duck fat, along with two chopped green onions. Then I stripped the duck meat off the bones and chopped it into small pieces. That got added to the pan and heated through. 

    Finally I made a bed of frisée, tossed it with vinaigrette, spooned the warm duck mixture on top, and tossed it all again. Chopped parsley. Chunks of baguette. Red wine...

    I've worked the same trick with leftover roast pork too, warming it and potatoes through in leftover jus

A Few Friends Over for Drinks

    We hadn't had a proper house-warming since we moved in, which was a gradual process over several weeks. But what with that and Christmas coming, it did seem a good idea to throw a party. French, English, Dutch, Irish, Indian, ages ranging from single digits to low eighties, it was a good mix. 

     Many friends brought food as is the custom around here. The whole salmon I cooked almost disappeared. Peter chopped off its head so it would fit in the oven. I stuffed it with lemon, parsley and bay leaves, sloshed a lot of white wine over it before closing its foil overcoat, and baked it for an hour. An hour at 190°C. When that came out, in went the porchetta.

    I've been wanting to make this ever since I first tasted it years ago in Florence, sliced off a huge roast and crammed into a bun. As well as selling whole pork legs to make into hams and sausages, the local supermarket has recently had pork loins on special. I bought one weighing a bit over three kilos and this is what I did:

    Two days before you want to eat it,  you remove all the string that the butcher has carefully tied it together with and slice the pork lengthwise so it opens like a book. Next, you make a paste of fennel seeds, rosemary and garlic, pounded together with a good glug of olive oil. Salt, pepper... That gets slathered inside the pork. Next, and this is the tricky part, you tie the pork back together into its original "log" shape. Cover it with foil, put it in the fridge and forget about it. 

     On the day you want to eat it (and remember this is best at room temperature) bring it out of the fridge a couple of hours before you mean to put it in the oven. Then bake it uncovered on a rack for an hour at 190° C. It seemed to me that it needed an unflinchingly bold sauce so I made a batch of salsa verde with parsley, cilantro, garlic and olive oil.

     As Jamie Oliver would say: easy-peasy. 

     Now, sadly, I forgot to take photos so I can't show you how pretty the salmon looked once I'd skinned it and arrange a line of lemon slices along it, or how tempting the pork was, browned and with a handful of rosemary sprigs chucked in its general direction. Fortunately, Kate did take photos of the party in progress. 

A Healthy Few Hours at the Hazelnut Festival.

  Because our choir had a date in church at 4:15 p.m. (see a later post) we broke with tradition this year by not attending the afternoon-long lunch that's the high point of Lavelanet's annual hazelnut festival. 

    But we couldn't miss out on the event itself so after a successful trawl of the vide grenier in Chalabre, we drove the few miles to Lavelanet where we ran into friends and had lunch. 

   Close your ears, nutritionists, because what we ate is so dietetically incorrect it doesn't bear thinking about. We crowded around an open-air bar watching a man grill sausages and pork belly over charcoal.  Once crisped but still with plenty of good juicy pork fat present, the belly slices were slapped into split baguettes, and topped with frites. Three large dispensers held ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. As we leaned on the bar munching away, we reckoned we'd hit all the four food groups--pork fat, baguette, frites and mayonnaise--with the plastic glasses of rosé meeting our fruit and vegetable needs. Meanwhile, the band played on...

   Not far away, a display of an old-fashioned classroom showed modern kids how their grandparents learned their ABCs. Other teaching aids were the posters showing the importance of good health and what happened to your body if you took the wrong route. 

    

The Christmas Feast

Our good friends John and Lee-anne had invited us for a lunch that started a bit after 1 p.m. and saw us wandering home through the village about nine hours later. There was a walk in there somewhere and a spirited carol session around the piano so it's not as debauched as it sounds....quite. 

We began with hot sausage rolls, then moved to the dining table for oysters, followed by foie gras. After that, we got into serious eating. There was a chapon--a capon, a castrated rooster if you want to be technical--and sage-onion-and-apple dressing. Kate made a marvellous dish of Brussels sprouts braised with lardons and white wine. Lee-anne roasted pork stuffed with prunes, tender enough to cut with a fork, and made broccoli au gratin. Leeks, carrots, potatoes parboiled and roasted while, like an actor between gigs, the bird was resting...two ovens-worth of food in all. 

Sometime later, we ate dessert, a fruit cake but made with chocolate which made it the best, moistest fruit cake I'd ever tasted. 

Champagne, blanquette, white wine, red wine and, for the men, a concluding shot or two of single malt. Friendship, memorable food and wine, singing and laughter. It doesn't get any better than that.  

A Long Lunch in the Third.

Third arrondissement that is. Coming here on the train, I read my way through Pudlo Paris, a book of reviews by Gilles Pudloski, restaurant critic for Le Point. I jotted down names of places that were close, interesting and affordable which is how we came to have lunch today at Au Fil des Saisons. Pudlowski describes it as "snug" and "rustic," seductive adjectives on a rainy day. 

Eventually we found it, or rather we assumed we must be in the right place even though this particular restaurant had no sign or street number. 

Inside were 36 seats. A couple of elderly ladies sat at one. A couple at another around the corner of a huge circular brick column which contained a staircase belonging to another building. At the table next to us was a solitary businessman. Another came later, obviously a regular--he's the one in the shot at the top of this post. 

The menu was written on a large blackboard carried from table to table. Dishes looked simple but inventive and that's how they turned out. Peter began with artichoke flan served with ham from the Vendée and a mesclun salad. I had confited gésiers (gizzards)--chicken rather than the usual duck ones we get in the south. They were mixed in with Puy lentils and lardons with--the unusual element--shavings of Parmesan cheese on the top. It sounded weird but worked. 

Main courses. Peter's was chicken breast with a sauce of ceps and cream, and a little potato flan. My slices of pork fillet were interspersed with smoked ham; the sauce had a whiff of truffle in it. The potatoes, sliced and cooked with cream, were in a small side dish but too rich to finish. As I write this, it's after 8 p.m. and I very much doubt we'll want anything for dinner beyond the baguette, cheese, grapes and wine we bought on the way back to the apartment.

Platters for the Barbecue

It's good to know exactly where your meat comes from. This sign stands outside a butcher's shop in a shopping mall in Pamiers. It tells potential customers that the steaks, chops and roasts are all from local animals. Here are their photos and their owners' names--Mr. Fauré and Mr. Soula--to prove it. 

Some of the cuts sold here will be ideal à griller. French people are as nuts about cooking hunks of protein over charcoal as any other culture. It took Peter a while to get the knack of using French charcoal which he now uses along with vine clippings, either bought or from our own vine. 

Tonight, a friend who lives near Beziers is staying with us. Earlier today, we bought a "plateau" of meats: a mix of merguez, Toulouse sausage, pre-impaled pork kebabs and slices of pork belly. Included with the meat was a little sachet of mixed herbs to sprinkle over the meats before they went on the grill. 

Timings were detailed on the label. A little longer for the kebabs, a little less for the pork belly, the sausages somewhere in the middle. While Peter was grilling, I heated up some duck fat, chopped a garlic clove into it and browned some potatoes I'd steamed this afternoon. For a salad, I sliced the last of the heirloom tomatoes. Dark crimson inside, this one was big enough to do the three of us.