December

Here in Lyon, we’re looking to the Christmas holiday as sort of a distant milestone to reach. Although I have got the tree up and decorated, I have to say that the Christmas spirit has yet to sweep me up. I have tried to get crafty but honestly it’s been sort of a haul. We see the store windows all gussied up, the little Christmas village set up at place Carnot, but the weather has been so warm it has seemed silly to even wear a sweater. How can we think of Christmas in weather like this? Apparently the weather has never been this warm in December.

In Lyon, the season is kicked off when every family lights candles in a row along all of their windows facing the street. This is a tradition that began in 1852. We stroll out around town in the evening to see the whole city alight. It is a tradition that began with a change in weather, over 150 years ago. On the day originally previewed for a ceremony commemorating the reception of the statue of the Virgin Mary that now sits above the Cathedrale de Fouvière, heavy rains threatened to cancel the event, but suddenly stopped, the skies miraculously clearing. The people of Lyon lit candles along their window sills to give thanks to Mary for the wonderful turn of weather. People began to come out of their houses and everyone walked onto the streets. Soon the entire city was bathed in a warm and mysterious evening glow of candle light and neighbors walked together enjoying the spectacle. Since that time, everyone has lit candles on their windowsills every 8th of December, a homey, family tradition I like.


Lyon’s Fête des Lumières began in 1999 and is now an international festival that fills the whole city with even more light. For the last 5 years, the festival has drawn over 5 million visitors a year, and it gets bigger every year. The exhibits have grown to monstrous proportions. International artists design performance art pieces on a grand scale using sophisticated light and sound systems and the existing architecture and each square in the city is like a contemporary art exhibition. This year some artists have been setting up some cables between the trees on our square. I am anxious to see what they have planned for us. It is fashionable in this festival to blast exceptionally loud cacophonous discordant music designed sweep people up in the effects. Sometimes it is effective and sometimes it gets old as it repeats. It’s true, it is designed to be sort of a mini-show, for people passing by, and if you live on any particular square you have to listen and see the show repetitively late into the night. Hopefully ours will be a quiet one.


While Christmas shopping last night, I happened upon the Place Bellcour, where and enormous plastic bubble has been erected around the statue in the center of the square. I had my pocket camera with me at the time.

Getting Spices

Climbing up the hill to the Croix Rousse plateau today, I counted the steps. Images came to mind and I counted, days and weeks the years here in France in which I endured some disappointments but also had some of the happiest days of my life. I took a moment as I mounted the steps one by one to review the main archives of the last seven years.

There was that carefully crafted poem typed with an Underwood on a post card that symbolizes something very big that I will one day open out. There's the dissertation on onion skin, the ideas I dwelled on for perhaps too long but like many of these things can leave a feeling of the good that has come from conscientiously maintaining a commitment to a principle. There were the administrative files, the carte, the country, the file to request and the file to explain and the file that was lost at the prefecture and had to be filed again. These files give us an official history, and here in France this history is meticulously kept for the benefit of future generations.

The unofficial history is altogether another story. The kitchen notebooks and stories of families and friendships are very important to preserve. It is being able to choose and encapsulate, to focus and prioritize that allows us grow stronger in our abilities to do these stories justice. I thought about these things as I reached the top of the first one and then found a different stairwell to climb. But then again it is also learning to take a moment and live it.

Soon my thoughts began to become more fluid and far between as they often do when I undertake repetitive activity like climbing stairs, and I probed the hopeful places in my heart. I rested lightly on these thoughts, just very briefly and respectfully, and did my best to heed Clare’s advice and breathe to allow myself to be open to their implanting and coming true the way they should.


Here at the present at the top of the hill I went about my plan to stock my larder with a trip to Cap Epices, a store that sells spices in bulk, dried imports, and olives. We see them on the Quai St. Antoine, and I often wait in line there to get a ladle of this one, a scoop and a pinch of that from them during the bustle and hustle of the market. People jostle and poke and lean against one another as they call "next!" until it is your turn. For this reason I also go up to the shop where I can inhale the singular aromas and stand in the wooden cave that is their boutique and mull over them. It is the only time I can really envision how I can use them, and think about their provenance.


There are 23 jars in my sliding racks for spices, many of which are empty at the moment, mainly due to my own impatience and lassitude, and a habit I have of only buying what I need. Aside from the three large jars continuously in a state of use containing sea salt, herbes de provence, and my spice mix maison, I only sometimes have a nice full selection of the spices that might come in handy. Today I purchased enough for another batch of my mix, the best curry I have found, and a few other things, including an interesting mix of spices to make pain d’epices, kind of like a gingerbread honey cake that is very popular around the holidays.

New Themes!

Dear faithful readers and friends, now is just the time to inject a new energy to my Kitchen Notebook! This is the two weeks I have to get the house in shape for Christmas, and plan a buffet lunch reception for 40 in celebration of a career milestone for Loic. So the blog will take on a French Holiday Crafts and Party Planning theme.

On the 14th of December I will begin a new professional project (currently the contract is set for 6 months) which will take a great deal of my attention and time. For those months, my blog will take on a new theme French Cooking for the Busy Career Woman, and have tons of tips for keeping quick meals elegant the French way. What a great challenge! I will take you along as I discover the new neighborhoods where I will begin to run errands, help compile a list of simple and do-able after work meal plans, and share my journey as I learn to as I adjust to new schedule and timing. It should be an interesting change from the detailed projects I embarked on in these past few months. I look forward to the new challenges, and the new theme. December is just around the corner!

Ready, Set, Go!

Thanksgiving 2006

View from the couch the morning after Thanksgiving.

Our meal was on Saturday, to give family and friends a chance to travel since the third Thursday of the month of November is not a holiday here. The meal itself went more smoothly and was a better success than any of the 6 French Thanksgivings we have had here so far. This was of course was a combination of good luck and nice people.

What struck me this year as the overall theme was the way that others reached out and took over when it was time, without question and in perfect synch with my expectations. In the days leading up to the meal, I was busy all week, many things in advance, even more than usual, just because I was not sure when and how I would be available. By the time the day came, my planning had been put on paper, and I had given everyone responsibilities. I called out the requests to my entourage to cover every detail.

Callan, our expat American guest this year, brought forth an excellent idea for the Apéro cocktail, which was called a Rasmopolitan, like the Cosmopolitan, which she got from Glamour magazine. You freeze raspberries into ice cubes (very elegant). our rendition of the recipe was to spike the cranberry juice & vodka with a little bit of raspberry syrup (the original recipe calls for sugar syrup). Callan brought the fresh raspberries to the house in the morning and prepared the ice cubes in short order and disappeared into the day again, the raspberry ice angel! We so appreciated her contribution and attention to detail. It started the meal off really well.



I was not sure about what I’d be able to do on the day so I was pretty meticulous about preparing the consommé in advance. During the week I hit the Bresse chicken man at the producer’s market and he had 3 old hens from his barnyard just for me. They made the most flavorful broth! The color was really gorgeous this year. We served this enriched with a capful of Madeira and floated poached cèpe ravioli and fresh minced fines herbes.



What is a verrine, you ask? A pretty and entertaining shaped individual serving glass in which colors and textures in the form of foams, mousses, and various ingredients have been artfully layered and sprinkled for a stimulating visual effect. But most of all a verrine is an opportunity to inject flavors into a second introductory course while remaining light as a feather.

Since this is a festive holiday being celebrated in France, of course foie gras made an appearance. Last year it was in the raviolis I made to serve with the consommé.

This year they appeared in the second course verrine. I started by preparing first a simple foie gras terrine, which is actually very easy to do. You remove the large veins from your foie gras, marinate the foie in cognac and sea salt overnight, and then after pressing it into a terrine, let it cook in a bain-marie which has been placed in a very slow oven. This refrigerates as long as you want it to, up to two weeks by the book, or longer. In the minutes we served the verrine, we put a good hunk (about a cupful) of the foie terrine which had been warmed to just above room temperature along with a few tablespoons of heavy whipping cream, a tablespoon of Madeira, and seasonings like salt and touch of paprika into a bowl and whipped it up into a very smooth thick liquid puree. This was put into a gas charged canister which we call a siphon here in France, in which we normally make chantilly, and piped it into glasses. In the previous days, we did some taste testing and chose a ginger preserve from England and a fig compote that both really set off sparks with the flavor of the foie gras.

The siphon went into a warm bath (actually the water in which we had poached the raviolis in the previous course) When it was time to serve, Loïc was delegated the technical task of inserting the gas capsule piping the just warmed foie gras, which was the consistency of whipped cream, into little oval shaped glasses, layering it along with the different compotes. Heart shaped brioche toasts and a glass of fruity Gewurztraminer completed the course. The guests broke out into applause. It was a strange moment, knowing how easy this was.




The third course was the Turkey, stuffed with the usual freshly cracked at the last minute oyster and regular corn bread stuffing. Mom brought those bags in which you can cook the turkey, and once we’d convinced Loïc that this would not kill us, we used it – really a wonderful invention. The bird steams in its own juices and your effect is so fabulously silky and moist that I think that this imported American innovation in turkey roasting technology is vastly superior to any other roasting method. It saved our eyebrows, it gave us time to spend with the guests, it saved our lives. Thank you Reynolds.

I arranged sage leaves in a decorative pattern over the simply butter slathered bird and then covered this with a veil of crepine, which fused to the skin becoming invisible in roasting and held the herb arrangement in place. I will develop this idea and share it with you with a how to in the weeks to come, because I feel that it is a great trick and it can apply to much more than Thanksgiving.

The sides consisted of A real winner of a recipe which we do every year now for Autumn Vegetable Succotash from Martha Stewart's on-line recipes, a chestnut and bacon puree which was inspired by a dish I once enjoyed in China, glazed carrots (I insisted that Loïc do those again), and thin green asparagus tips wrapped in bacon. Green asparagus is not as common to the French as the white, and since our guests were mostly French I knew that it would be appreciated.

The cheeses this year were all from within a couple of hours by car from Lyon, Epoisse, Langres, an ash covered chevre, an Arome de Lyon, and a fruity Comte. Dessert, which Loïc always prepares, dessert being a man thing in this household, included a Kentucky Bourbon Pecan Pie, and a take on the pumpkin pie using butternut squash, a recipe that has been tweaked and adjusted from a 1985 Southern Living cookbook.

Three guests independently arrived with bouquets of orange roses, a strange and interesting coincidence which I am convinced means something wonderful. The smallest flowers made their way into the table arrangements.

Dinner Guest Notes

There are no pictures of last night's dinner with Francine and Lucas, but I thought I would go over the menu and include some notes.

Aperetif, brined picholine olives and local thin sliced dried sausages. The olives were a different kind from the ones we usually get at the market. I got them at the olive oil store on the quai last week, after tasting them in the shop. They aren't aged in any way. They get picholines straight from the tree and put them up immediately in a salt and water brine. Nothing else. I really enjoyed the clean fresh taste of these picholines. The sausage came from our friend in the Bugey, who keeps herds of foraging black pigs. We had envisioned serving a muscat, but Lucas brought a very nice 1999 Chateau Barriere Monbazilliac, all the better!

First course, Autumn veloute with wild pheasant hen and caramelized shallots. The soup was a continuation of a soup I have had going, with a recent addition of duck and chicken stock, rutabaga, and parsley root. This was pureed and strained. For service, I sliced shallots in a julienne and slowly cooked them until they began to caramelize, then added shredded wild pheasant breast and finely siced pheasant skin to brown and slightly crispen. I placed a mound of the shallots and pheasant on the top of each bowl of soup. Around each mound of pheasant, I drizzled garlic infused olive oil. For the wine, we had pulled a 2003 Pouilly sur Loire and had it chilled and ready, but Loic opened the wrong bottle - a Cote du Rhone. When he came and told me, we gave it a quick taste and both agreed that we could go both ways with this soup, being slightly spicy and smoky and topped with the wild game. We decided to stick with the Cote du Rhone Chateau Ruth 2003.

Second course, Rolled lamb saddle cut into slices served with reduction sauce, herb infused soissons, and steamed vitelotte potatoes. The lamb was beautiful, sliced crosswise, very nice. I dry braised it with a splash of duck/chicken stock at the bottom of the casserole. Prep included buttering and salting the outside, slipping bay leaves close to the skin, and tucking thyme around the meat to let it infuse with the juices. Lucas also brought a simply lovely bottle of 2001 Chateau Sesquieres Cabardes, which he chose specifically for the lamb. It was perfect.

Note to self: don't ever throw your battery operated instant read thermometer into the dish water, ever, ever again! Bad girl. I tossed it in the sink with all the rest after I made the caramel sauce for dessert, and somehow the water got run on it. When I receive guests, I always do best testing the meat by temperature. Too many distractions and too much chance of cooking something improperly. Since my thermometer conked out, I went by touch and feeling method, and the meat was fine, but it's not a good idea to take risks that way. About the potatoes - let them cook longer. Don't bring out the soissons and potatoes until you have already sliced the lamb saddle medallions. It would have been much better if I had let them gently continue to steam together while I was carving the meat and served them all at once, and put the jus on them instead of serving it seperately.

Palate cleanser, Arugula with light white Modena balsamic sauce and crushed green peppercorns. This might have been better as mixed greens. Note to self: Take the time to choose greens carefully.

Cheese plate - St. Nectaire, Comte, St. Marcellin, Tomme au Marc, producer's Sechon.

Dessert, individual cheesecakes with salted butter caramel sauce. I used too many eggs in the cheesecake, having split the recipe in half. The original recipe called for 3 eggs and instead of breaking in 3 eggs and splitting that in half I chose 2 smallish eggs. It tasted vaguely eggy to me. Everyone seemed to like it but I think I could have done better. Next time make the crust thinner. I could have made these cheesecakes smaller. Perhaps a white chocolate mousse with the caramel sauce would have been better. The sauce was fine, using the Fleuron les Glieres butter and a touch of added fleur de sel. We served a thimble of the house vin de noix with this dessert.

About the sauce: My initial attempt at the sauce was a dud because I let the sugar cook slightly too long and used creme fraiche, not having regular whipping cream. It had not only the bitter burnt flavor, sugar's flavor reinforced the flavor of the creme fraiche, and it seemed to have a strange sour undertone to it. It could have been interesting if I hadn't burned the sugar. Since this sauce literally takes about 4 minutes to make, I could easily do it again. I made the second sauce with milk and it was technically perfect. Unfortunately, it had very little personality in comparison to the first one. Therefore I mixed 1/3 bitter sour caramel sauce with 2/3 perfect pretty caramel sauce made with milk, and voila, a sauce with a hint of complexity. Just right. I spread it on my breakfast toast just to be sure this morning.

I want to do this lamb saddle again, stuffing it next time. I should think of a better use of the vitelotte potatoes.

We really enjoyed the great conversation and the super personalities of these two interesting people! Conversation highlights - telling our respective 'how we met' stories, Francines tales of the slopes, Lucas and his adventures abroad - all in all a great evening!

Greens & Game

A nice salad was in order after dinner last night, in which I had the foie gras two ways and a succulent veal sweetbreads & kidney with a fresh morel fricasee. The only green I got with that meal was a sprig of chervil. I woke up in the night worried that I needed to eat more greens. The arugula is out in full force now at the market, and we are beginning to see some of the common roots that will see us through winter.


Today we had Franck for lunch and before we served an autumn pepper and rutabaga velouté with crispy duck neck slices similar to this soup and flavourful faisanne (wild pheasant hen) roasted on the spit, we enjoyed a nice salad of celery rave (celery root), carrots, roquette (rocket or arugula), leaf lettuce, parsley and chervil, ciboulette (chives), and radis noir (black radish). The vinaigrette was a mix of fruity olive oil, fleur de sel, plain apple cider vinegar, some of the mixed poultry stock we had going, finished with crushed capers and green peppercorns. The sauce was light and flavorful at once.


I took the care to send the soup through the chinois and it really made a difference. I do think it's best to strain it when we have guests. It adds a special lightness and creaminess. The faisanne was absolutely delicious, and each part of the bird tasted differently. We don't think about that much when we eat chicken or other farm raised poultry, but it was really pronounced in the wild bird.

Terrine Notes - Terrine de Lapin

My house rabbit terrine, which incorperates a layer of dried prunes for color and flavor. Rolling the flattened haunch with a mixture of carrots and herbs makes a flower design in the middle.

With Thanksgiving coming up, I thought I'd bring out some old notes on the terrine making. Sometimes it helps to visualize some of the steps in my mind. I have done terrines with rabbit, a mix of farm raised rabbit and wild rabbit, and various other poultry. I started terrine-making with Richard Olney's recipe in his book Simple French Food, and have made my own tweaks and changes over time, the main difference being that I include duxelles, which is mushrooms that have been cooked down and combined with cream, in addition to a rabbit demi-glace panade, which is made by crushing old bread and garlic and working the demiglace into it to make a paste. We serve a slice of a house terrine as a first course at the Thanksgiving table. Since we have a large number of French guests every year, we like to start off with simple courses to ease the group into the concept of the big feast. The courses are an interesting and entertaining way to kick off the meal.

A terrine is done completely in advance, and should sit in the fridge after weighing down the top for at least 5 days before cutting. It's perfect for Thanksgiving because you can have it done well in advance and not even worry about it until the day of the meal, yet it is really elegant. I like to cut my terrine slices the morning before the meal, because slicing 16 pretty slices of a terrine takes some attention to detail.

Terrine des deux lapins (a mix of wild and farm raised) from last year's Thanksgiving meal. Instead of prunes, I used dried mirabelles, which tasted great with the wild game and also added to the flower motif in the center. Click the photo for a closer look.

This year I am going to make a two duck terrine, using colvert and farm raised duck, and perhaps dried figs instead of dried mirabelles.

Sunday's Roast

Because I’m working under a deadline, Loïc has been cooking this week. He has been doing the shopping, and sinking large sums of euros into spectacularly expensive things like whole royal sea breams to eat on a weeknight.

Thursday's dinner

He doesn't want me to know what he's cooking until it is served, he is very secretive, and won't let me in the kitchen. I smell something good or maybe something burning and go to see what it is and he comes running at me like a junkyard dog and stops me from entering. In many ways it has been simply a joy to just have to fluff my hair and sit down at the table and be served. So this is what life is like on the other side.

Loïc comes to the table with a nice roast beef for Sunday dinner and I start fiddling. 'Oh la la,' he moans, 'the food is going to get cold!' I struggle with the tripod, and tell him that the beef has to rest before carving anyway. The sun is coming out from behind a cloud and going back behind again, I push back the curtain with the broomstick, and he begins to fume with anger. I am trying to keep a level head, zoning him out. Now how did I have that f-stop set? Do I think bracketing today might be a good idea? The little voices are all chirping around me and flying about like tinkerbell faeries, and I almost forget Loic is there.

"How DARE you ruin my meal! It is going to be a failure because it is cold!" You have got to imagine Loïc saying this with his very sexy French accent, and even sexier when he’s angry. I stop, put the camera back by the fireplace, and pull up a chair to the table. There now. Let's have a nice Sunday dinner. He slices the meat.

I enjoy the beef’s rare, pure delicate expensive essence, heightened by fleur de sel while at the same time wondering if he's going to be upset because I brought the salt to the table. He hasn't salted his at all. He says, "It's missing something. What is it missing?" My mind starts to hum with the various things I might have done with this hunk of beautiful beef. I respond to him honestly. "This is the best roast beef I've had in ages, Lo. It is excellent. You really could not have done it any better." An embarrassed and beautiful smile crosses his face and he serves me some absolutely divine butter glazed carrots with parsley. Mmmm. Sunday roast.

Viennoiserie Intuition

Sometimes you just have to let go of all of your emotions, and just let yourself free float, receptive to a different kind of decision making force. When faced with a complex choice, sometimes the better thing to do is to first listen carefully to all of the voices, then ask yourself, simply, what is the best thing to do? Trust the true response within you, it has a lot more pull than the moment, or the circumstance, your own influence on the world, or what you think others might want. It is based on a full understanding of events that have been boiled down to their essence, an infusion of every part of you that remembers, and is spread thin across a vast conglomeration of possibility. It is spread out so thin that if you don't learn to see it, you might not even notice it. This is your intuition. Today I chose the croissant over the pain au chocolat. I believe that it was the right choice.

Fromage Blanc en Faisselle

Cheese begins like this. It is clean. It is the uncarved block we all aim to remain. This cheese is ready to eat, ready to wait, ready to receive. Just plain cream, or a shower of pure cane sugar sprinkled on top and soaking up the reflections. No reserve. Sauce au caramel, coulis, syrup, or a combination of any with crumbs. Spice cake crumbs. Speculos. Peanut butter cookie crumbs. A flurry of crumbs that lands like snow on a fence post. Or you can just eat it plain.

Monogambutchery. Cheating and the meat man.

Lets see. No I didn't mention how I caught the butcher red handed tilting the scale on Tuesday. He pushed it down while he was weighing a chicken and pressed the button for the ticket while it was on the way back up. The ticket said the weight and I promptly weighed it again when I got home. Just as I suspected. 480 grams of pricey nonexistent farm-raised chicken added to the bill. I had a guest coming for lunch and didn't have time to go back and tell him off, and I was supposed to meet her, and I couldn't find my cell phone, and I had to get the food in the oven, and and ... I cut my losses and didn't feel too sad, you see, he actually made things easy for me. I have been trying to balance a relationship between two butchers for so long, it was all getting to be too much. I was freezing a lot of meat to keep them both satisfied. Sometimes I'd go in to one of their shops or another and buy a little stub of bacon just to mark a visit. By ripping me off right in front of me and then actually looking into my eyes, winking, and saying "a vous de jouer" (the ball's in your court...) when he handed me that chicken, he made my choice rather simple.

I was on the way home going past his shop tonight I decided after all I'd better say something and get it off my chest, because I'd been thinking about it. He didn't apologise or admit to even the possibility of a mistake. He said he removed the head and that counted for the discrepancy. Oh yea. A 480 gram head. "The next time I don't care, I'll just leave the head on!" he said. Ha! I had to laugh when I heard that. Next time. I walked straight to my straight-on butcher, and when I arrived, there wasn't even a line. I stood there and calmed down. Things looked particularly appetizing this evening. The meat seemed to be glistening and sparkling. I asked him if it would be alright to start a weekly account. He doesn't take the carte bleu, see, and I don't always have cash on hand. "But of course madame!" he beamed. "A weekly account would be fine." Very good.

Salon des Vignerons Independents - Lyon

Every year we go to the Salon des Vignerons Independents when it comes through town, and every year we attack it from a different angle. With over 500 wineries offering their up their wines for tastes, you have to have some kind of method. The question about whether to drink our tastes or spit them out is really a question about the reasons for being there. Do you want to just enjoy the camraderie and drink some wine, or are you hoping to take this opportunity for a good comparison between wines and invest in something really good for the cave?

Six years ago we didn't approach this question from a particularly sage point of view, being our first time and all, and we ended up drinking a few tastes, and then getting all romantic and gushy and buying whatever wine we happened to come across, which was not very smart. The second year, we were a bit more structured in our approach, breaking up our tasting to give a comparative vision to what we were doing, only tasting one or two kinds of wine in a day, and doing our best to spit. The fourth year, I got serious and made a database and read up about what the experts had to say in their tasting notes of the wines we'd chosen to seek out, and we completely gave up on all swallowing.

From then on out, we have prepared each year's fair itinerary in advance. It gives us latitude to invest all remaining grey matter into considerations of age, and soil, nose and body, sucking bubbles through the wine through our puckered lips and letting it settle near our jaws as we reflect carefully about the past and future. Most of all, we compare. We listen about the weather and the land, and also take the opportunity to see how some of the wines we've already got tucked away are developing without actually opening them at home. We always reluctantly spit out every single mouthful. In these past few years we've been able to get some really nice wines for the cave. Some of the ones that have just come to open out this year have really exceeded our expectations, and they'll only be getting better. I am only now beginning to understand a little about what makes people so excited about keeping wine.

Last year I was laid up with some kind of illness and could not go, and found that Loic did quite well without me. This year, since I am engaged on a big translation project that I find fulfilling and beautiful, I was able to send Loic off to do some tasting without much thought to what I was missing. I waited until last night's last open hour or two to go, just for a very short time, with a couple of friends, after a long day of slogging through culinary translation.

Loic had made the rounds on the previous three days, and I tasted a few of his favorites before we made a decision about some of our final purchases. The 1976 Muscat being poured above went straight down - forget the bucket! I would never have had a chance to try had it not been for the fair. We now have hundreds of bottles of wine in the cellar. Loic of course remains our house sommelier. My trust in his judgement is implicit, although I do appreciate that he asks me to taste and involves me in the decisions.

One thing I have learned is that you can get lucky with French wine by chance here and there, but with a little effort into research and some simple patience, that cool dirt floored vaulted underground stone room can transform into a veritable gold mine. It is very exciting. There's something of ourselves in the wines we choose for the cave. Opening and serving them to our guests when they're ready is a real pleasure.


They were selling stuffed duck necks at the wine fair. Serious markup!

Sunday's Caille Laqué au Beurre Blanc de Noir, Wild Chickory & Radis Noir Slaw

When the moment came to take out the quails to stuff them, I changed my mind. Stuffing a quail is kind of like playing with your food. Why stuff a little itty bitty bird like this? At most I would get two tablespoons of stuffing into them, and what good would that serve? Better spit roasted and served on a bed of oyster, grey chanterelle, celery root and eggplant dressing, wouldn't you agree?

I decided to use a recipe from my kitchen notebook that I have done on many occasions with excellent results, my spit roasted

Caille Laqué au Beurre Blanc de Noir



Beurre blanc is a sauce made with shallots, butter, and vinegar. When I lived in China, I discovered the magic of a certain fermented black vinegar, called Chinkiang Vinegar, which has a distinctive flavor that when used judiciously, can have a delicious succulent effect in many dishes, and as I have discovered, not just Chinese food. It is a vinegar that is so special and unique that you really have to be careful when you're using it to make sure that it does not assert itself too much.

When roasting delicately flavored birds such as quail, a little goes a long way. The vinegar is made from fermented rice and yeast, and the ingredients on your bottle should reflect nothing else. The fermentation process in this vinegar is what makes it have its special flavor and no amount of sweeteners or salt can recreate it. There are a lot of fakes out there, read your ingredient labels. If you have a choice between one that has salt added and one that doesn't, choose the one without salt.

The goal is to enhance the flavor of the birds and bring out the flavor of the meat with a tangy foil of flavor at the skin, tempered and calmed and lifted by the butter in this classic sauce with a twist. When carefully and repeatedly basted, this sauce can produce a beautiful mysteriously tangy seasoned browned skin that heightens the flavor of the meat. A succesful execution of this recipe means that when you eat this quail, you say: Mmm quail.



For a couple of quails (multiply as necessary), you need:

2 T. Chinkiang Vinegar
6 T. good quality butter
1/2 a shallot
salt and pepper

Puree the shallot and the vinegar and cook it down to about half. Off heat, whisk in the butter in little bits, to create an emulsion. Prepare your quail to roast on the spit, making sure you don't bump them up too close to each other, so that your sauce and the heat can have a chance to reach every part of the bird. Paint the birds with the beurre blanc de noir emulsion, season them with salt and pepper, and set them to roast. Baste them every 3 minutes, 8 times.

What I do is set the timer and execute other tasks in the kitchen in the time between basting. Every time the timer beeps, I quickly drop what I'm doing and give the birds a quick and thorough baste. Careful opening that oven!

I washed, dried, and chopped the wild chickory, minced the onions and apples, sliced the radis noir, and made a salty shallot vinaigrette for the slaw.



I opened the oysters, diced them and added them to yesterday's precooked eggplant, grey chanterelle, champignon de Paris and celery root, and set that in the oven to brown on top while the quails roasted.



When the birds were done, I put them on a warmed serving plate with the dressing all around. I'd say all of the meal from start to finish was on the table within a half an hour (barring the dressing, which was prepared yesterday except for the oysters, which I added at the last minute).





The wild chickory slaw with radis noir was balanced with apple and onion and a salty vinaigrette

I would have been happier with a Condrieu to go with this dish, or even one of the more assertive white Burgundies we see around a lot these days, but we had this leftover Reisling, and it was alright with the quail.


Note: Loic went gaga over the slaw. It's a keeper. I suppose I should think of a better name for it. He was also delighted with the whole idea of oysters in the side to the quail. I think I'll add nuts to the slaw and serve it again soon, perhaps with something like a bacon roasted monk fish.