On the other side of simple

Blanquette de veau

On Monday, I boasted the goodness of simple French cooking.  Simple is good, but I also enjoy the other end of the spectrum: the classic dishes that have a list of ingredients an mile long and take all day to make.  Of the known classics, my favorite is blanquette de veau, or veal stew.  It’s classic French country cuisine, using common vegetables and finishing in the dish off with a rich sauce; in this case, its cream based.  What’s amazing about this dish is not that its popularity partially comes from it being the “ultimate French comfort food”, but in my view, the variations of this dish.  I’ve seen it served with capers, Roquefort cheese, and all sorts of vegetables.  Every working French chef has revisited this recipe, swapping out one cut of meat for another while trying to modernize it or tweaking the list of ingredients of the usual suspects one comes to expect in this dish.  Nothing strays too far from the original, which is telling.  There is a lot to be said for the weekday dinners that take a short time to make, but there is also a choral of songs to be sung for the Sunday lunches that need to be started around 9am to be on the table at a reasonable time.  Complicated can be good too, really good, and when that comes in the form of a slow cooked veal, a plethora of vegetables, and a hint of dried herbs covered in a rich cream sauce, I’m in.

Simply, good

The French cuisine can be terribly complex, it’s part of its charm, but it also embraces a simple, fundamental food: soup.  Soups of all types are popular in France, from bisques and bouillabaisses to creams and vichyssoises, most of which have humble beginnings.

We made pumpkin or potiron soup this weekend from the garden.  It contained two ingredients: potiron and milk, nothing more.  This velouté is all what a soup needs to be: simple good can be and good does not need to be complicated.

Happy Thanksgiving

Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, 1943.

 

No days off here, but we will be celebrating Thanksgiving later this week.  As I see it, one needs to adapt.  It’s not the day per say that is important; it is the spirit behind the event.  Enjoy, eat well, rejoice, and be thankful.

That day between Halloween and Christmas

Somewhere in between Halloween and Christmas, we Americans have a great holiday called Thanksgiving.  Besides being the start of the holiday season, it also seems to unofficially mark the appropriate time to start even start thinking about Christmas.  As a kid, I never saw Christmas ads until after the Thanksgiving Day parade, and decorations, in my home anyways, didn’t go up until we saw the last calendar page of the year.  But, times have changed, and I’ve witness the over burdensome Christmas ads push their way through to Halloween to get my attention, and I don’t like it.

Moving to France, I thought got away from the over-commercialism of the holiday.  During my first few years, I saw Christmas decorations arrive sometime in mid-December.  While I didn’t fully understand why the nylon stuffed Santa, or Père Noël was always found climbing up the side of a house, I did appreciate the timeliness of the décor.  The lights were simple, the Santas humble, and there were no giant blow up yard balloons.

Thankfully, the later has still not arrived, but I have already been completely over saturated with Christmas paraphernalia.  Advent has not even started and I’m being directed to what chocolates I should stuff into the child’s shoes.  There is no metaphorical dam of Thanksgiving, and the flood gates have opened all the way to Halloween.  Christmas in October has arrived in France and I openly admit I’m disappointed.

As a bicultural home, we celebrate holidays that appear on both sides of the ocean.  Christophe is a strong believer in Thanksgiving and what it represents.  He might not be American, but the idea of bringing family and friends together to reflect upon our good fortunes is something he truly appreciates.  Sometimes, that’s hard to do with the noise of consumerism breathing down our necks.  So with that, we stand united on the idea to celebrate one day at a time; fall before winter and Thanksgiving before Christmas.  I still have a menu to plan, a table cloth to iron, and a few pies to make before I’m willing to discuss Christmas.  That is, I’m still preparing for Thanksgiving; that wonderful November holiday. 

For me, Christmas is not until next month.  I’m going to enjoy the turkey before anything else and remember the holiday is not just a precursor for what’s ahead.  Heck, I might even wait and see the last calendar page picture before I decide to go out and find my tree.

 

A blowup snowman dressed as hunter, for Christmas.  Really?

Think you know me?

This is a photo I posted on Facebook yesterday:

Frank's Red Hot Sauce - my favorite!

It got some interesting comments, offers, and even recipes; all of which I thoroughly enjoyed.  One of the points I was trying to make, other than my love for hot sauce, is there are something you just can’t get in France.  I’m okay with that; I can take the trade-off and bring back a bottle of hot sauce every year.  This doesn’t bother me.

France is the height of gastronomy; one cannot talk about France without talking about its food and one can rarely talk about food without mentioning something French.  I am one to defend the rich French culinary traditions, but with the highs come the lows, and sometimes those valleys can be pretty deep.  The discussion developed from my hot sauce photo turned to barbeque sauce and quickly went downhill from there because there is no real barbeque sauce is France.  Alright, perhaps not truly the pits of the valley and something that one can do without, but what the market has created in its place is as just about as low as you can go: spicy ketchup.  It’s not just that I’ve seen people use ketchup over pasta, or that the very mildly spicy version is “just too spicy” for many tame French palettes, but it’s what it represents: this is what they think American food is about.  It’s not. 

The facsimiles of “American food” are shocking and somewhat telling of how we Americans are looked at from afar.  Anything “American Size” is huge; sandwiches à l’Amércaine are topped with fries; and American sauce is some pink concoction I’ve never seen before.  I’d love to know where this is coming from because while barbeque is tomato based, I’ve never seem one confused for the other – and this is coming from a Midwesterner; a region generally considered novice when it comes to spices and all that cooking over fire thing Texas has going for it.  The sad news is, France has hooked into what is bad about the American cuisine.  I like American cooking, heck, I’m a big fan of ham and cream cheese roll ups and I know they’re not considered high class, but what represents us food-wise elsewhere is not doing any favors to our reputation.

So now, when I tell people from the United States, and in particularly Chicago, I can now add ketchup to the list of things people think they know about me: Coca-Cola, Al Capone, and (thankfully) Michael Jordan.

What do you think about the quality of your food?

Our solution, at least to the lardons problem: do it yourself.

Lardons: matchstick sized pieces of cut bacon commonly used in French cooking.  Bacon, as we Americans know it, is not found in the supermarkets.  In fact, anything I’ve seen marked “bacon” resembles more of a sliced piece of ham with a bologna like resemblance.  Potrine, which is actually thinly sliced bacon, is used to wrap around green beans or meat, but is never served for breakfast.  I’m no trying to write in circles, I’m just laying the foundation for my discussion.

I’m far from being the first to make note of this, but the quality of food sold in stores is declining.  There will always be higher end grocery stores or organic chains that offer high quality foods, so I’m referring to the stores where the majority of people do their weekly shopping, you know the everyday grocery store.  We shop there.  Christophe and I don’t buy transformed foods, frozen pizzas, or microwave lunches.  These products have already been under scrutiny, and their lack of quality is not under debate.  We try to buy products as close to their natural state as possible; vegetables, eggs, flour, meats, and cheeses.  Part of this is because both Christophe and I really enjoy cooking, and you can’t do that with a microwavable fettuccini alfredo, but another large part of this is we just can’t tolerate bad food.  Not bad food as in “I accidently overcooked the chicken”, but bad food that is being made as cheaply as possible regardless of the end product.  Some of the products we buy are not in their 100% natural form.  Lardons does not roam freely around a farm, but I can at least identify the product I’m consuming.  The meats has been cut, cured, and salted; a form of preservation, but as anyone bacon lover would attest to, it’s just darn good – until now.  What should be a simple process of adding salt and time, has now become an overindulgent salt lick that spoils a dish.  And “smoked” flavor is simply a chemical injection.  We’ve tried several brands, but have come up with the same conclusion: the quality is declining, and those who make it seem to really not care.

I read a book over 20 years ago called Human Scale by Kickpatrick Sale. Clearly, it left a mark on me. While the premise of the book is about the size of communities and creating those that respond to individuals’ needs, there was an interview with the current president of one of the largest beer companies in the United States.  He basically said, the company will continue to make a lesser quality beer, thus focusing on profits, just to the level to which society will accept it.  Got that?  The beer quality stops just before it becomes undrinkable.  That was 20 years ago, and now that philosophy has grown to touch about everything we eat, from over salting foods to using chemical injections.

What to do?  Not everyone can raise a garden to eat for a year.  Those who know us know we have an immense garden and we don’t come close to that.  Raise your own livestock?  Not likely.  Protest?  Sure, but that only goes so far and you eventually get hunger and buy something in haste.  Be aware?  That works, but what next?  What happens when we know this decline is happening and cannot do much about it?  What do you foresee as feasible options?

 

What's for dessert?

Veal Scallops, stuffed with white mushrooms and onions, in a green olive-beef broth reduction, served with tomato Quinoa

This is what we ate for lunch on Sunday.  We tend to indulge on Sundays when we have more time to spend together.  Even after a terribly satisfying meal like this, we often ask each other, “What dessert would you serve after this?”  Or, to take the rather French approach, “What cheese should follow?”

It’s not that we walk away from the table hungry; in fact, the contrary.  We tend to eat light or very little for Sunday dinner because of the copious lunch we consumed.  The questions are hypothetical; there is no next course, but we ask them each Sunday all the same.

We laugh at ourselves with these questions, and Christophe thinks it’s a very French thing.  He claims if the French aren’t cooking or eating, they’re talking about food.  Nothing is more exciting than the next meal nor more nostalgic than the last one, well prepared that is.  He believed talking about food was just a French thing; that is, until he meet my family.  We might not discuss the values of a medium aged goat cheese, but we know that a piece of chocolate chip pie just might put the topper on that dinner we just had.  And, who can forget that awesome roast we had for someone’s birthday or how good the pizza was at the Wii bowling party last year?  Talking about food, even when sitting in front of well-licked plate, is not unique to a singular culture; everyone does it.  (Elsewhere, I image someone suggesting churros after those tacos or a good gelato after the pasta meal.) Maybe it’s because we dream of that perfect dinner, or secretly want to be a 4 star rated chef who simply oozes with good taste and knowhow, but talking about food or “what’s next” seems to be as natural as putting shoes on in the morning.  We do it because, that’s all.  

So, to answer this week’s questions, I replied, “a young Cantal and for dessert a poached Bosc pear with dark chocolate sauce”.  Christophe smiled.  Apparently, he agreed.

November Tomatoes

I’ve bragged to my fellow gardener friends that we can have tomatoes as late as December.  Granted, they aren’t the kind you can eat just off the vine, but once the skin is removed they are excellent for cooking because they are so sweet.  Autumns can be wonderfully mild here due to the Mediterranean climate, but they can also be somewhat unpredictable.  So far this season, we’ve had high winds, torrential down pours, and even some snow flurries; clearly, not tomato weather.  Any tomato in contact with the ground froze, but some found just enough shelter to make it through the storm and are continuing to ripen.  I don’t think those that remain will make it until next month, so this year, it looks like our last few tomatoes will be from the month of November, and not December.  So, without further ado, my November tomatoes: