Jocelyn Campbell

Like Ron's pumpkin pic above, only in a pandemic would we have Halloween decorations like this:



Hm. What are they trying to say? (heh heh)

Two good ones today.

Look what I saw today:



SO fun!!

Olga Booker wrote:
In the North of France they do 'Coq à la bière' which is pretty much the same except you replace the wine with beer. It is lighter and I admit to prefer it to 'coq au vin'.

Anyway, tonight I cooked wild boar ribs with cabbage, carrots and roast potatoes- all from the garden, followed by apple crumble with cream and a dash of agave syrup.

Ohhh. Now I want to try Coq à la bière with a gluten-free beer. Lighter sounds great because the coq au vin was a bit heavy.

Also, your wild boar dinner and apple crumble sound like the perfect fall meal! YUM.

This made me chuckle this morning. Stacking functions for the win!

Heh heh!



Though I thought about changing this for permies who feel that pee is liquid gold. Maybe something like:

2020:  'that's petrol, isn't it?...'

Aw, but even petrol is a resource, and not as often used as a joke in place of a drink, so it somehow ruins the funny here.

Anita Martin wrote:Since I bought the Veg Everyday Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall I have been intrigued by the Tourte de Blettes, a traditional swiss chard pie from Nice, France.

I still have lots of Swiss chard in the garden, and when my neighbour brought me my annual treat of Boskoop apples (an historic variety from the Netherlands/Germany) I decided it was perfect time to bake it. Dough and filling takes its time, but I really liked the outcome. The recipe is for the sweet type of Tourte (with apples, raisins, nuts, eggs, swiss chard), powdered with sugar.
(I don't have a nice pic to upload, it looks like this: http://www.lemanger.fr/index.php/la-tourte-de-blettes-la-vraie/)

I also made a cream of leek soup (leeks given to us by our allotment neighbours) with croutons, and baked beets with goat cheese (beets also from the neighbours).

A very local and seasonal meal (and frugal). I enjoyed it very much, the kids more or less!

Wow, I had to look at the picture of the sweet (and savory?) Tourte:


It looks amazing!

Hm...

This was worth...all the things.

Coq au vin
(Cock/rooster in wine)

Where I'm living now, 8 eggs were hatched and 6 turned into roosters, making 7 roosters in the flock. It's not a large flock.

The owner harvested one rooster, and I harvested 4, leaving 2 roosters to guard the flock - in case the bobcat or another predator takes one. (That wasn't intended to sound like a math problem...)

Anyway. I combined coq au vin methods from Alton Brown's recipe online and my dear friend Francine, who is French, and a chef, and who learned a traditional way to make it at the Cordon Bleu in Paris.

I kept running out of time to do the slow braising, so the rooster and the veg marinated in the wine and aromatics quite a few days longer than normal - a whole week!

Tonight, I finally finished it off by reducing the wine and broth. Then I chose to take the meat off the bone and out of the skin because the skin was too soft for my liking.

I used veg that I had on hand in the brining and braising, and put them back IN with the meat chunks after reducing (unlike Alton who fed the mire poix to his dog!!). Alas, I did not have mushrooms which would take this up a notch.

Mushrooms next time. I have 3 more in the freezer.

This was yum.

Oh my gosh. A business strategy!!



I think I want a "Vinnie" from Brooklyn to say this to me!