Dinner a la Tour de Cause

The last week is quickly winding down here in France. The tourists have nearly headed home, the leaves are now rapidly falling, and there is a definite chill in the air. The are two tourists here that have just arrived from my quaint hometown. Neil and Maxine decided to take their vacation to France after I casually mentioned that I was going to be staying and working at the bed & breakfast. For them it has become a great excuse to see a lot of France, and for me, it was very welcome friendly familiar face. It was also an excuse for me to dash into the kitchen to cook a what I hoped to be, delicious meal!

Since being here, I have learned what the French have (amazing cheese, a butcher in every town) and what they do not (chicken broth, lack of microwaves). I have learned where to go to find the best produce, and which supermarket has what (because they do NOT all have the same things, sometimes items aren't there on certain days, etc etc). Most importantly, I think I have expanded my culinary knowledge in flavors and tastes. For my birthday about a month ago, my Grandma sent me a book called Lunch in Paris, by Elizabeth Band . It's a book about a traditional love story of an American girl and a French boy but includes delicious sounding recipes to try. I had just read a chapter that ended with a scrumptious orange and star anise lamb dish and since Neil and Albert (owner of the B&B) had both recently mentioned the loved lamb, it seemed like the perfect dish. A date was set (last night) and we brainstormed how to cook, and more importantly, where to find, lamb shanks.

A trip down to the local butcher in Castelnaud...

And a few laughs trying to tell the butcher what we wanted (because the name for shank is different for lamb, pork, and beef), we finally ordered six to pick up the next day. Since that hurdle was crossed, we went up to see the castle that has been looming in my horizon for the past two months, the Château de Castelnaud.

The castle, on the right, taken from an earlier kayaking river trip

The castle's kitchen

Friday the real preparation for the meal was made. Caitlin and I went to the farm co-operative to pick up as many fresh vegetables as we could...

The lettuces had been picked that day, beautiful in size and color. The potatoes were local and fresh. They are just the type of people you want to support-a full time farmer's market. We  couldn't unfortunately get everything here, so went to the local supermarket (where they were also having a wine fair and wine tasting), to pick up the Comté  cheese and some other items for the B&B.

Even at the supermarket, there is a fantastic cheese selection, with someone who knows a lot about cheese and can give suggestions

We got home and we were off! The lamb dish takes about an hour and a half to cook (slowly in the oven), and between the browning and the dicing of the vegetables for the sauce, I popped it in the over at 6. Dinner was supposed to be at 7, whoops! But, it left more time to eat some foie gras on toast before the meal was served.

Browned Shanks

Sauce ingredients

Smile!

Lamb + Sauce, about to go the oven

We started with a Salade de Betterraves, a beet salad! But not just any beet salad, one with lardon (bacon), the Comté cheese, and walnuts-some of my most favorite things in the world.

We then moved on to the lamb dish, that I took out of the oven just as we were serving the salad. Upon lifting the lid of the pot, I had a feeling it had been a success as the lamb was falling off the bone and a heavenly aroma wafted around the kitchen. Served with a side of boiled potatoes to soak up the sauce, it was tantalizingly good.

Pre-sauce for the potatoes!

For those of you who like lamb, or have a lamb lover in your life, I suggest this recipe to be tried immediately. It was so good and very warm and comforting on the nearly stormy night. Here's the recipe for you who would like to try it out! Adapted from Lunch in Paris

Souris d'Agneau à l’Orange et à la Badiane
6 lamb shanks
Coarse sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1-2 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium red onion, dices
1 head garlic, cloves peeled and left whole
3 whole star anise
1 organic navel orange, cut into six sections but leave the peels on
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup tomato-basil sauce (we use nice tomato sauce with fresh cut basil from the garden)
1 cup chicken broth (made ourselves since they don't sell it)
1 cup white wine

1-Preheat oven to 350
2-Season the lamb generously with salt and pepper and brown in a large Dutch Oven on the stove. When browned, remove and set aside
3-Add in the olive oil, let it get hot, then add the onion, garlic, star anise, and orange. Saute until they are slightly colored (the onions should be translucent) about 5 minutes
4-Add the liquids and the sugar, bring to a boil then add the meat back in, cover and pop in the oven
5-Cook for one and a half to two hours till lamb is tender and almost falling off the bone, the sauce being slightly reduced
6-Let sit 10-15 minutes before serving!

This recipe is fool proof, very easy and very enjoyable. I also found a similar French recipe for a whole roast leg of lamb if that is easier. The flavors and the textures are just simply to die for. And a bonus, if you make your chicken stock like we did, you have a whole boiled chicken and there is loads of sauce leftover, enough for a chicken dinner the next night!

We finished the evening with a lovely Tarte Tatin served with a little Creme de Noix,  essentially a walnut jam, and some Crème fraiche. YUM!

It was nice to be in the kitchen, cooking for a small crowd, and having that small crowd really enjoy their meal. Makes me excited to try out some skills when I get back home in a month.

As the temperature rises...

The weather in France has been quite hot, and when I say hot, I mean HOT. For a girl who has never lived more than 20 miles from the coast and has always had that nice coastal breeze all her life, I am not used to real, sticky, humid heat. It is now almost 8 at night in Saint Cybranet, and it is still 93. I can only hope and pray for that cold weather I was cursing less than a week ago.

Luckily, to take my mind off the sweltering weather, we have eaten two very nice dinners, one at home and another at a marché nocturne.

Our fabulous home meal was on the first day of the heat and I was so unaware of the weather that was to come. One of the local markets has a fresh fish stand set up on certain days so we decided to take a whack at a fish dinner. After Caitlin and I looked at the fish, all lying there literally staring at us, we thought against taking a culinary leap at a new fish and settled on what looked the best-a nice filet of salmon. Simple, not scary, something we knew. To accompany, we found an interesting plant in the market's produce stand, called chou Romanesco, or Romanesco Cauliflower (or Broccoli, just depends).

Bizarre right? But it tasted just like a cooked cauliflower or broccoli as they're all the same family. We separated the heads off the plant, just like a broccoli, and steamed for about 15 minutes on the stove.

We used this amazing butter recipe that I found online, ironically from the LA Times. The recipe calls for Brussels sprouts and cauliflower but we just lessened the butter mixture to add to our Romanesco. We did substitute the marjoram with fresh oregano from the garden but it was delicious!

Also at the supermarket are these fun little radishes, which we purchased to use in some dish for the dinner. Also very ironically, I received an email from Cookstr.com with 10 recipes to do with your excess zucchini, and up pops a recipe for radishes (check!), salmon (double check!) and zucchini (not so much...) but we improvised with cucumbers and avocado, and used the vinaigrette recipe that was with it and MMmmm MMmmm Good!

 You can find the Cookstr recipe here. And, in finding the recipe again for this post I realized there was a lot that we changed, just with the ingredients that we had at the B&B. So, if you are going to try this out, here's what I suggest:

• make the vinaigrette first, then set aside to let it all meld together
• we did not have shallots so instead used a small white onion
• also, we didn't have fresh dill so we used dried instead, and it worked well
• once the vinaigrette was all made and settled a bit, we marinated the salmon in it (just a little spooned out over the top) and then put the salmon on the grill (obviously did not use smoked salmon like the recipe called for)
• once it was off the grill there was plenty of vinaigrette to put over the salmon (or dip your bread into)
• for the salad on the side (we called it a salsa for our desire for something like Mexican food) we sliced the radishes and cucumbers very thin, then cut the avocado into chunks.

So, maybe we didn't use the recipe for more than a very loose guideline, but the end result was très bon. A common theme throughout the meal was lemon, it was in the butter and in the vinaigrette so therefore was in every dish on our plate. So naturally a lovely tarte au citron was necessary!

A perfect meal for a hot summer night!

Last night, we went to another marché nocturne in Audrix. The food was the same as many of these markets, people selling foie gras, escargot, agneau (lamb), pomme frites, and the likes. What is so special about this night market is the baker on spot. In the middle of this old village is a large stone wood oven. The baker brings large tubs of dough, presumably ones that have had the yeast be active and rise all day, and sits there for nearly 10 minutes loading hundreds of loaves of bread into the oven.

Just as people are starting to get really hungry, he starts to take the first, beautifully baked loafs out of the oven. As I ran up to buy our loaf, I could smell the wonderful fresh baked dough, and clearly, so could the rest of the market as the line grew increasingly longer. After handing over the Euro for the loaf, I had to run back to the table, as it was so fresh it nearly burned my hands off being so hot. But it was worth it. There is nothing like slicing into a frshly baked loaf of bread andtaking a big bite out of it, so long as you don't burn the roof of your mouth from the heat. It was wonderful though-very yeasty tasting, chewy and spongy.

looks are always decieving

Break me off a piece of that

Cloud like

And what goes perfect with freshly baked bread? A nice plate of fromage, fresh Europe cheese!!

Down to the last strawberry, there was no better way to end the meal. If only the weather can get as good as the bread! But as I am ending the post, a nice summer rain has started falling. So maybe things are looking out :)