Advent Dinner: Our Quiet Before the Holiday Storm

Before the holidays have us running half way across the world, Christophe and I always have a low key celebration just between us.  We call it “le dîner de l’Avent” or our Advent dinner.  It’s not quite Christmas, so it would be silly to call it that.  It’s our quiet time before the holiday storm.  The weather warmed up enough to have the aperitif outside, but we moved the meal indoors afterwards. 

The Menu

First Course: Crème of Potimarron, Smoked Salmon, Fresh Fennel Sprouts; Homemade Foie Gras cooked in Port, Toast Points

Main Course:  Veal Roast in a Green Olive-Vegetable Broth, served with Carrots

I think it’s important for every family to create their own traditions, whatever it may be; this is ours – a small overindulgence, to say the least.

The blog will be taking a break for the holidays, but will be back in January.  Until then, have a wonderful holiday season.  I’ve got gingerbread cookies to make – no, I’m not kidding.

Come on… humor me.

The holiday season is here, and like most people, I’m in a litte over my head.  Here’s a post from December 2011 which includes one of my favorite holiday movies: Elf.

 

For me, one of the hardest things about living with a new language is not the lack vocabulary, but the loose of humor.  In English, I think I am funny, at times I even make people laugh, but in French, many my comments fall flat.  Half of humor is timing, and I’m often still translating as the conversation moves forward.   Slowly, I’ve gotten better at this, but there another factor of humor I can’t control: culture.   Humor is cultural; a shared experience that collectively strikes a chord in our being.  Perhaps it something built upon moments in our childhood that form our understanding of an idea and it is that shared upbringing that makes us laugh at the same things.  Christophe and I grew up in completely different cultures; he’s French and I’m American.  We can watch certain films together and find the humor, but there are other films that are completely elusive.  Once, we were watching the movie Elf and he turned to me and said, “I don’t get it.”

“How do you not get it?  The man is over 6 feet tall and thinks he’s an elf”, I said wiping tears of laughter from my eyes.

“It just seems, I don’t know, not funny”, he replied.

And that is where our cultural differences collided.  Elf is a modern American Christmas classic.  It is built around our childhood ideas of Christmas, Santa Claus, elves, and the North Pole.  Christophe is from the South of France.  He grew up with Provincial traditions such as blé de Sante Barbe, the crèche or nativity, and traditional foods.  Elves existed, but they are tacking lawn ornaments.

Elf takes explaining to Christophe, and sadly, most of its humor is lost in translation but I’m still trying, and I believe.  And that’s all it takes, right?

 

Past cables

It looks more like a stick than a cable in this photo, but this end is located just at the entry of the village.

This looks like an ordinary cable, but at one point, it crossed this valley:

Somewhere far on the other side of the trees, where the mountains start to rise up again, the cable ends.  Just a few generations ago, men crossed the valley using this cable.  I don’t know if they zip lined across or had some cart that toggled along, but the cable used to hang hundreds of feet above ground.  The villagers would cross the valley so they could cut trees down in the forest unnoticed.  Then, they would burn the wood, smothering it to created wood charcoal, and sell it to the inhabitants of the plain.  The plain is only 15 miles away, but at that time, it was a different world.

Nowadays, most of the cable is buried in the ground, but Christophe followed it a few years ago.  Where it ended, the trees were younger than the surrounding forest, and he found a giant, blackened cauldron, which was most likely used to burn the tress.  A neighbor has the lid; which must be a story in itself as how something so big made its way back to the village.

It’s just a small reminder of the village’s history. It’s over 600 years old, and while some of its past has been unearthed, I’m betting most of it is still undiscovered.

Just wait a few minutes …. the weather will change

First snow, then sun.  What's next?

One thing that struck me since moving to the Pyrenees Mountains in Southern France is how quickly the weather changes.  Currently, the Midwest, where I grew up, has temperatures hovering above freezing after reveling in 60 F degrees and record highs.  In my recollection of things, there was always a warm up and cool down time as the seasons changed.  It’s somewhat “normal”, if we can call any weather pattern normal these days.  The changes that struck me the most since arriving here is that these extremes can happen all within one day.  Right now, it’s snowing; ten minutes earlier, it was sunny.  I can literally be outside working in a t-shirt one day and be trapped in the house the next due to strong winds and a foot of snow on the ground.  I’ve never experiences such extremes in such a short amount of time, unless you counted the mood swings from my high school Spanish teacher.  That aside, I never know what to expect; the laundry takes days to dry on the line and I don’t know what to wear.  Perhaps that is why Europeans are known for dressing in layers; one can simply peel off or slip on whatever whenever it’s needed.

The snow has stopped and it’s clouding up.  We’re either in for a warm up or a blizzard is coming.  I’ll get out my swimsuit…. and my wool hat.

Frenchgiving 2012

Frenchgiving dinner

We finally got around to celebrating Thanksgiving here in the South of France.  As I wrote earlier, it’s not the date that’s important to us, but the sentiment behind it: the gathering of friends and family, enjoying a meal, and reflecting upon the things for which to be grateful.  We revel in the tradition of the meal, but openly adapt it.  Second year running, the game is to use all the traditional ingredients in a Thanksgiving dinner, but change it.  Oddly enough, it’s not stressful and has actually freed up the common problem of the ballet of dishes in and out of the oven.  There are some region substitutions, such as red currants for cranberries, but the goal is to have all the players present, just dressed up differently.

Frenchgiving Menu 2012

First course: Soufflé of Potimarron

Dinner: Turkey Two Ways: Grilled Turkey Breast, Roasted Turkey with Stuffing

Rustic Dinner Rolls

Roquefort Stuffed Mushroom Caps

Bacon Wrapped Green Beans

Red Currant Chutney

Gravy 

Dessert: Pumpkin-Chocolate Cheesecake

Thanksgiving preparation looks a little like this for just about every cook, but here is how the day went for me: (Note what time the turkey went into the oven!)

·         9:30 am wake up; thankful for a day to sleep in.

·         10 am Coffee.  Think of Thanksgiving as a child and remembering my Mom already had the turkey in the oven for hours by now.

·         11 am Think that perhaps I should start making dinner, which is planned to be served at 8 pm.  Start first step of homemade rolls then get the stuffing started.  (This is one dish that has not changed for I cannot call a dinner Thanksgiving without my mother’s stuffing.  It’s nothing fancy, just white bread, onion, celery, spices, and pork sausage, of course.  I am from the Midwest after all.)

Two bowls of stuffing get made because one gets eaten before it even gets into the bird.

·         11:30 pm Step two of rolls: knead and let rise for an hour.

·         12 pm Christophe has promised to vacuum the living room, but his car won’t start.  It’s parked out in front (I’m still not sure why he needed to start his car to vacuum the living room, but….).  Living room goes un-vacuumed and I start the red current chutney and peel the potimarron for the soufflé.

·         12:30 pm Fold roll dough over on itself as directed; left to rise for another 30 minutes.  Start gravy.

·         1 pm Christophe comes back in the house convinced he has a sparkplug problem and declares we will be grilling cheeseburgers for lunch.  He claims we will be eating “All American” today.

·         1:30 pm Fold dough over on itself for second time; by now am only “slightly” covered in flour.



Potimarron cooking for the souffle

·         2 pm Potimarron has been cooked and drained.  I’m beginning to think that I should prepare the turkey, and am starting to guesstamate how long a breastless turkey will take in the oven.  Remember I need to continue with the rolls.

·         2:30 pm Go out and look at Christophe’s car with Christophe. No turkey prep yet, but the rolls go in the oven.

·         3 pm Prepare the Roquefort stuffed mushroom caps, rolls come out of oven.

·         4 pm Christophe brings in the heating wood and vacuums the living room.  Claims he will worry about his car tomorrow.  I pull the turkey (a whopping 8 pounds) out of the fridge.  Last minute hesitations about not deboning the entire thing, but decide to go with my first idea of turkey 2 ways: grilled roast turkey breast with herb butter, and roasted turkey with stuffing.  Remove breast meat and tie into roast.  Christophe declares it to be “cute”.

·         4:30 pm Some guest arrive.  I nix my idea of a shower.

I'm adapting recipes from both French and English cookbooks.

·         5 pm Prepare the bacon wrapped green beans.  Change into clean clothes and wipe the flour off my face.  Christophe irons the tablecloth.

·         6 pm Look long and hard at the “two” turkeys.

·         6:30 pm Decide to finally put one turkey in the oven.

·         7 pm Rest of the guest arrive.

·         7:10 pm Appetizers get served.

·         7:15 pm Remember that I still need to get the turkey breast roast on the barbeque.

Grilled turkey breast is done and the green beans and mushrooms are waiting to be cooked.

·         7:45 pm Turkey comes out of the oven.  I separate egg whites to beat into a soufflé with the porimarron.  Place soufflé in oven.  Start sautéing the green beans and mushroom caps.

·         8 pm Turkey breast roast comes off barbeque.  Soufflé oddly not cooking.

·         8:10 pm Notice we are out of cooking gas; tell Christophe he needs to change the bottle of gas.  (Think of like the gas bottles for a barbeque.   This is the country; there are no gas lines that run up here.)

Potimarron souffle - individual portions.

·         8:15 pm New gas hooked up, soufflé start cooking again, and by some miracle, has not fallen.

·         8:45 pm Dinner on table.

It was only 45 minutes late, which by some Thanksgiving standards, is pretty darn good.  Here, in Southern France, anything up to an hour late is still considered right on time.  Very proud to have the turkey in and out of the oven in less than 90 minutes and the grilled turkey breast roast was a big hit.  I admit, the pumpkin-chocolate cheesecake for dessert was made a day in advance, but it’s a cheesecake, it needs time to set.  No panic over oven space, reheating already cooked dishes, or serving in “turns”.  Changing it up, but keeping the ingredients the same is a challenge I’ve embraced.  Now, all I have to figure out is how to top that next year.

A little ambiance.