bleudauvergne

Cloth napkins is the rule at our house too, the paper ones just take up way too much space. No paper towles either. We normally use either cloth placemats or a tablecloth on the table. I plate in the kitchen unless serving from the dish is going to add to the experience of eating it. Something that makes me happy is using different sets of dishes for variety. I normally take pictures of everything from prep to plated dish even if I don't plan to share it here. Sometimes nice suprises happen and you must be ready for them. We sit down to eat almost always but sometimes we also have something simple in front of the TV just for a change as Alinka and Busboy say (when I'm pooped). I sometimes eat lunch while doing something else like writing, bad habit.

I just almost bought a macaroon cookbook. This thread definitely put macaroons on the radar for me.

We have a little 'Ethiquable' boutique that just opened up in our neighborhood. So far I have tried the dessert chocolate, all of the juices, the vanilla beans, and so far 5 of the different coffees that they sell by weight. This one also has filled chocolates of which I have fallen in love with the raspberry ganache filled dark. Keeping my eye out for prices around town, I find that their products are very easy on the pocketbook. They actually cost less than big name brands of the same product. The vanilla beans sold by the ampoule of three whole beans at my particular boutique go much more cheaply that I've found anywhere else in town and they are the best I've found here in France, fresh, plump, and full of flavor. The Coffees are wonderful, from Africa and South America, all direct equitable commerce, and I am going through and buying each kind. They're all so good I'm going to have a hard time choosing once I've tried them all, I think. This week we're trying Guatemala. The dessert chocolate 60% (for baking and desserts) is made from pure cocoa butter and trinitario cocoa (no wax, no synthetic fats or other stuff) and has a beautiful taste, much better than the mainstream dessert chocolates you can get from the market shelf. Honestly it is simply the best dessert chocolate I have found for baking. It is so good I have been tempted on several occasions to just eat it plain. I asked the girl how they manage to keep the prices so low and she explained that through a grant program sponsored by the city, they don't pay rent or taxes on the boutique space, which is owned by the city, and this savings is passed to the consumer. The 'Ethiquable' brand products are sold in mainstream shops as well. My recommendation is to check these boutiques out because all of the products I have tried so far are of excellent quality and a great buy. Anyone else seen the 'Ethiquable' shops and tried the goods?

Today the weather turned bad and I got caught in the rain. After sludging through my errands, I came home, and heated up a nice little mug o' vin de noix! With a slice of orange floating in it, served warmish-hot it really hots the spot. Try it!

They have offered a kind of oyster called "papillon" which I think are pretty good. We usually have a nice glass of Macon with ours.

Beef stew is erupting from the pie volcano. I was trying to make a beef tourte of sorts.

When I think about the most romantic times, there's one thing that really stands out. Romance has everything to do with the suprise we feel at being in love, not shock, but a mild kind of nudge that tells us we exist right then at that very moment with the person we love. I have a memory of a picnic in the garden behind the Rodin museum when we were just dating, it was about to rain, but we'd set a date and nothing was going to stop us. My mind goes to the very instant that a breeze took us off guard and we almost lost the napkins and a leaf blew into my hair. Something inside me said - This is the most romantic moment I have ever experienced in my life. So. Now after a few good years of married life, what can I do to create romance? Suprise him. Under normal circumstances when he walks in the door I would not have dinner ready yet, and he would have to come to the kitchen if he want's to see me the minute he comes home. While the comforting smells of dinner are pleasant, they are not suprising anymore. Under normal circumstances the lights are on bright and the news on the radio is going and I haven't bothered to even look in the mirror since I came in from my day's work. Just for suprise - I have planned ahead and already set the table with linens I have ironed instead of a wrinkled old table cloth. I do put a candle on the table and only a couple of lights are on. Dinner, something he especially likes, has been planned ahead and is in its last stages when he arrives. I have also showered and done my hair and look pretty and put on a little perfume. This and his reaction will be enough to suprise us both into the moment, I think.

I can't speak for the vita mix. Someone sent me an immersion blender and since that time I have completely stopped using the blender with the pitcher, in fact I plan to do away with the pitcher blender on my moulinex all together to save counter space when I replace the moulinex. I can say that the hand held immersion type blender has become my blender of choice for several reasons. I keep it always plugged in and tucked within easy reach. The reason why it is so great is that I can blend just about anything in any container I want to, without dealing with the mess of having to put the stuff into the blender pitcher and then scraping it out again, losing valuable ingredients in that area down at the bottom where the blade is. It is perfect for small quantities too. The "common sense instructions" in the user manual say don't use it to puree hot liquids because you risk getting burned. But within the first couple of days I'd mastered how to eliminate splatter. It is now the most useful tool other than the moulinex that I have and I use it for one thing or another during every meal preparation. Get one with high wattage, different speeds and a whisk attachment if you're ready to pay a little more, they all come in handy. Here in Europe the one I got ran about €40. I put it through some pretty hard use and it is no worse for the wear after 6 months.

Sauce. Sauce for pan seared magret de canard. Touch of vin de noix, touch of creme de cassis. Add a cup of white wine and use this mix to deglaze the pan. Reduce to a glaze. Add a cup and a half of some veal or chicken stock and reduce in half again. Whisk in a few Ts of butter at the end and voila there you have a luscious sauce. Also, do what Paula did:

And here we are in the Fall season! Temps dipping down around here and out come the big sweaters to bundle up in! What have you been cooking? I've been fattening up for the winter season with various game tourtes. I have a rabbit in the frigo ready for braising with mustard and creme fraiche, with which I think I will use the leftovers for a nice pie.

Sometimes in the areas that have a lot of vignerons close by, a caviste in town will have samples of the local wines and various vintages to taste and choose from at near the price you can buy them from the vinyard. The benefit of these types of places are that you can taste and compare several different wines from the area without having to get the half day tour of the vinyard and of course there is none of the sales pressure that comes from the producers in their private tasting rooms. We did that in Bordeaux in addition to visiting several vinyards, and we bought some wines at a good price from one of the the cavistes in St Emillion, who makes his profit because he gets a price from the vinyards. Wish I had a recommendation for someone with a wide selection of the better wines in the Rhone Valley, they tend to be very local - we normally stop at the co-op in St. Cecile des Vignes right in centre-ville where they have a tasting room with a bunch of selections. It might be worth a stop. If you're really stuck to the cities you actually might be better off taking a wine guide to the supermarche. In Lyon the cavistes I frequent normally have a variety of wines from all over France and don't particularly specialize in Rhone wines. However as cavistes go there is one in vieux Lyon on Rue de Boeuf who knows his stuff. If you do pass through Lyon you might also try the Saveur Club on Quai St. Antoine, they might open a bottle or two for you. Hope that helps.

The dandilions add a nice touch. Nice pan. OK here's my submission.

I tasted mine too the other night. The flavor has rounded out and it tastes pretty good. I'll try cooking with this as well.

I know that cookbooks in English can be hard to find here in France so I offer up 365 Ways to Cook Chicken to anyone who needs English language cookbooks living here in France. I will even pay postage.

You might consider putting the feathers in a flower arrangement on the table?

Sounds like you guys had a great night. I had a great drink this summer with a cucumber slice floating at the top. It had saki and vodka in it. What do they call the people who design drinks for a living?

My husband and I enjoy cheeses at different stages and appreciate the flavor as it develops. There are definitely limits and the more I learn about French cheese, the more aware I am of the subtleties of different cheeses as they age. There are some, like St. Nectaire, and chevres like the Picodin which definitely tastes better in my opinion when it reaches a certain point of ripeness, a question of the flavors that come out and not bravado or romaticism at all. The more choice we have about what state we eat our cheese, the more we develop our preferences about the perfect point of ripeness one cheese or another is going to have. The cheese purveyors here treat cheeses in a certain way, turning the small flat cheeses like St. Marcellin, St. Felicien to make sure they age evenly. When they sell it, they ask how you like it. St. Marcellin, a cheese local to Lyon, is served in restaurants here to French and foreigners alike, runny. We get it from the shop before it reaches that state. A cheese like that develops quickly and part of the enjoyment of it is to taste it at several stages in its own dish over the course of a week or so. Aged does not mean dead. There is a big difference between a fromage affine and a dead cheese. Just about everyone can tell the difference. One cheese that does not tolerate plastic is Epoisse. It dies quickly when deprived of air. However Epoisse that has been properly aged has much better character in my opinion than the new cheese. When we went to the town of Epoisse, we went to the restaurant attached to the fromagerie Berthelot. The cheese we were served there had obviously spent some time in the cave, but it also had a stripe of firm cream in the center. It should be noted that some raw milk cheeses like Cantal are aged for months and months, and sometimes over a year in a cave before it ever reaches the market.

Bux, that is an excellent summary of what we should all keep in mind when posting here. Your wisdom is priceless. Thank you. We recenly had a nice conversation that included many details about Vacherin Mont d'Or Here.

I use my contemporary lined (I guess tinned?) copper pans daily - mainly because of the ease in temp control. I can brown something just like I like it using these pans, I started using them a lot when I was cooking for a group and had one copper and one "Uginox" (which is an inox with a copper lining built into the bottom) side by side cooking the same thing and the copper pan far outperformed the other one. We are very careful with the cooking surface of our lined copper cookware when we cook and when we wash up, we treat it like a cross between non-stick and cast iron, in that we never scrub it, and rarely use soap on them, just giving them a good rinse and a wipe with the sponge before wiping them dry. Now that I know how dangerous copper poisoning can be, I won't hesitate to have them re-lined as soon as they show signs of heavy wear. As for the old stuff, I guess I should have them re-lined just as soon as I can because it would not be good if they contain lead of any kind. I wonder what that costs?

So if I lined it with parchment paper I won't die of tin poisoning?

It was magic. I'm sure of it. edited to add : Hurry up and go shopping so you can cook nice and calm like!

We used to have this diction exercise - "Are you copper-bottoming 'em my man? No I'm aluminum-ing 'em 'mum! " This was something that we repeated incessantly before going on stage - Um, I'm not sure why. Anyway, this phrase is coming up again as I consider whether to cook in a roughly 100 year old tourtiere I picked up at the flea market last week. It's real pretty. It's made of copper and the inside is lined with some kind of silver looking metal but I'm not sure what kind. This pan is from the late 1800s. What are 100 year old copper pots lined with and can I use it to prepare a tourte without endangering my loved ones lives? It looks similar to the stuff that my contemporary copper pans are lined with - not sure though. Any experts out there?

That's the lucious cake I was talking about! Also, the swirl in your coffee looks like a swan. How did you do that!?

Well, dear mudbug made it to Lyon after all before she headed off to Prague! We really enjoyed having her visit! Here are some highlights of her stay. On her arrival from Geneva on the train, it was late but she hadn't had dinner so she was subjected to one of my experiments, in the form of a mushroom tourte. It was not the best because I made the crust without eggs (I usually add an egg yolk, and since I didn't have one I put in a lump of picodin - goat cheese, which gave it a taste I wasn't thrilled with) and I was a bit embarrased but she said it tasted alright. She had had a very busy couple of days already in Europe, so we sent her off to bed. The next morning, bright and early, she had some tea, and we headed to the market. She had her own camera, but also indicated to me what she wanted me to take pictures of. Here are the market photos taken under her direction. I picked out a nice a line fished sea bass that I indicated to the poissoniere that I wanted to stuff, so he gutted it though the gills instead of the stomach to make sure we could fill it up with nice things and they wouldn't spill out. We moved on down the line and took in the sights. It was All Saints Day, so the church bells were ringing. Many of my usual vendors were not there due to the holiday, but some were. After a nice morning at the market, we headed back to the apartment and I put lunch together while she took a tour of the neighborhood. Lunch was the sea bass which was stuffed with fennel root, onion, chevril, parsley, dill, and sorrel. I sauteed the onion and dill for awhile and added the herbs and seasonings at the last minute as well as a bit more butter. The fish plumped up right nicely. But there willl be pics of that later.

That would be an excellent question to pose directly to Paula during the Spotlight conversation coming up from the 14th ot the 18th of November.