Dave Hatfield

I wasn't getting you wrong, but its a matter of perception. They THINK having cheese will be too much when there's dessert to follow. Wouldn't have been my personal choice, I'd choose cheese every time. One, however, must honor one's guests preferences. I may be a cheesehead, but not all of my friends are. Also, I think they get a bit blase around here as the great cheeses are always available. To make it up I'll do a few cheese posts in the near future. Thanks, I always reckon the the food is merely lubrication for good conversation. That's what happened yesterday. The wines were local. They were from Gaillac which is about half an hour South of us. There are something like 6,000 acres of grapes around Gaillac. Its one of the oldest wine regions in France going back to at least Roman times & probably even earlier. The winery is Domaine de Chanade; its a favorite & we've been going there for the last ten years or so. They're interesting in that they sell over 85% of their wine outside of France. Mainly to the UK (Marks & Spencer, Waitrose), the states (though a distributor), Belgium & Holland. The red was a special that he does and can only be purchased at the winery. Yesterday's was a 2007 just coming into full drink-ability. The white is a light very fruity but dry. (Ideal for the soup) I've been getting a deal from Christian on it as it was mislabeled. 20€ for a case of 6 bottles. Lucky us. See above about the cheese. Around the world? I should be so lucky, but flattery will get you cheese posts. . David - Great question, but a hard one to answer. I'll try. I'll make two major assumptions; first that your Thanksgiving guests are not cheese addicts and secondly that you need to choose cheeses that are obtainable locally. Given those I'd try this: #1 A Cheddar. A nice mature one with a bit of sharpness. It could be one of the better Vermont types or given where you live a Tillamook would be nice if you can find a good one. #2 A brie. Raw milk would be nice if allowed in the states these days. The trick with brie is to let it ripen. Get it out of the cling wrap immediately and let it sit in a cool place (40-50 degrees) for a few days until the center starts to soften. You don't want it runny for guests, but definitely nice & soft. This brings out the flavor. If there's a good cheese shop in Spokane they should be able to sell you some good brie nearly ready to eat. If not buy what you can and ripen it yourself. #3 Stilton. My favorite of all the blues. Its mild enough not to put non-cheese lovers off. Bleu de Auvergne would work as well, but may be hard to find. The other nice thing about Stilton is that you get to serve port with it. Doesn't have to be the very expensive vintage stuff any decent port will do nicely. I'd serve either some good French bread or plain crackers with it plus some cornichons and possibly some grapes as they look nice & taste good with cheese. I'm not a great fan of fruit with cheese, but many people are. My wife loves chutney with her cheddar. The Brie & Stilton only need a vehicle (Bread) to transport the cheese to one's mouth in a reasonably graceful manner. As to your other questions; with a triple cream I'd probably serve a sweet wine. Sauternes or the like, different, but it works. For blue it very much depends upon which one you're eating. See above for milder blues or a robust red.For really sharp blues (Roquefort for instance) nothing much works although, surprisingly, Sauternes can work. Grappa, perhaps? Champagne, of course, goes with almost all cheeses. Hope these answers help. If not or you need more just let me know.

The scoring helps, but the real secret is to position the skin so its as flat as possible then turn the oven grill on for the last couple of minutes. It needs to be watched very carefully to prevent burning. Otherwise nothing but salt as seasoning. I guess it was the promise of tarte tatin that did it. There were five ladies & only three gentlemen to the appetites weren't too large. Maybe I'll have cheese for breakfast just to please you. I'll have a look at what I have.

We were ready for lunch in good time. Rupert was excited as he has a great time when we have guests for lunch. When his favorite friend arrive he went nuts with delight. Our guests arrived at about 1 PM and as the weather was nice we all went out to the patio to have a glass of wine & a few nuts. I did a few last minute chores like opening the wine. We started with the leek & celeriac soup. delicious! The local breads went well with it. The reds are their limited production special from Domaine de Chanade, 2007. The white a light wine from them as well. Here are the roasted roots earlier going into the oven. Here they are coming out The green beans with some lardons, pine nuts , flaked almonds and lot of butter. Finally, a couple of shots of the belly pork after it was cut up. We all had a great time, no culinary disasters. It only took us three hours to have lunch. We skipped the cheese (sorry) as the meal was pretty filling and everyone knew that Tarte Tatin & ice cream was coming. We did stop talking long enough to have our dessert and a small glass of Sauternes to go with it. We then had coffee and more yakking. Here's all that was left. My clever wife held a bit back for us to enjoy later. .

Saturday morning and I'm getting ready to do lunch for eight. The guests are all local friends. Unfortunately no French as they had a prior engagement, but we do have South Africans, English, Welsh, a New Zealander and, of curse, me a Yank. They'll arrive about 1 PM & we'll start eating about 1:30. We'll start with the leek & celeriac soup. Not only is it good, but Linda volunteered to make it. It's going to be served cold this time. Here it is in it's pot ready to go into the fridge. Our main course is going to be slow roasted belly pork. This particular piece had some of the ribs on it as well as the skin. The first task was to cut off the ribs then carefully cut the skin. The cuts are roughly 1/4 inch apart. Doing them makes the pork easy to carve into slices, each with a nice strip of crackling. I then lay the pork on onions that I've peeled and cut in half. This keeps the pork off the bottom of the pan. Plus the onions taste delicious. The pork goes over the top. The pork goes into the oven and roasts at about 140 C for at least 4 hours. Having gotten that started Rupert & I whipped over to Varen, a nearby village. Stupidly I hadn't brought the camera. The views at the top of the hill were tremendous this morning what with the fog still in the valleys and the sun over the countryside. Ah Well! In any case here's the bread we bought. They do special breads everyday. Saturday's is 5 grain with walnuts. Its the sort of 'U' shaped one. The roundish one is called a Viennoise . And, you guessed it, the long one is a bagette. When we got back home I started on the Roast Roots. All the winter vegetables are coming in now so its a good time for this dish. As you can see I had: Shallots, carrots, turnips, rutabaga, parsnips, garlic and sweet peppers. Normally I might add a few potatoes, but this meal doesn't need any more calories. Here are all the vegetables cut up. The idea is to make them roughly the same size so they cook evenly. They'll go on a couple of roasting trays about 45 minutes before serving. I have to admit to a bit of cheating. I'd made dessert, a Tarte Tatin, the night before. Here it is: You can find a pictorial recipe for it at: http://www.frenchfoo...arte tatin.html Linda has set her usual beautiful table so we're all set to go. Time for me to go up and have a shower.

David Ross Yes we do have squirrels. Mostly the little red guys, but not very many of them. I think the foxes must get them. The only thief of our walnuts is Rupert. He's enough! BTW we have a surprising amount of wildlife. Foxes, squirrels, rabbits, hares, lots of deer, hedgehogs, badgers and wild pigs.

Sorry, no. Two reasons. I don't have much of a sweet tooth so am not overly tempted by that sort of thing. Secondly, my will is weak, the Patisserie is so tempting to look at that I find it hard to resist. When I do succumb I usually find that the taste doesn't live up to my expectations of what I hoped it would taste like. Therefore, I've pretty much given up on Patisserie. Now then a good lemon pie or a cheese cake or a carrot cake or a tarte tatin do turn me on. That's why I have a tatre tatin in the oven as I write this. Recipe tomorrow.

This is great country for walnuts. The soil & climate seem to be perfect for them. Thus, walnuts (noix) are used a lot in many local dishes. They also make quite a lot of walnut oil in these parts. Somewhere on my normal blog I have a photo essay about this old boy making walnut oil. Also, I remember going to a local lunch where the main course was Estafinado (Google it!) a component of the dish is to top it with some walnut oil. On our long table we had three different versions done by three different French gentlemen. They were too polite to say, but each was convinced that his was best. All I can say is that all were good & all were different. We're lucky enough to have a lovely mature walnut tree in our garden just below our house. The walnuts are falling as I type this. Our only problem is Rupert. He loves walnuts and is very good at finding & eating them. If we're not careful he gets fat. He's very good at cracking the shells and extracting the meat. So what we do is go out and collect walnuts every morning. Fortunately Rupert finds one then eats it. He hasn't grasped the concept of gathering a pile of them before eating them. That's lucky for us. Here they are on the ground. Drying on a table. Collected in a bowl. Stored in one of Linda's old stockings. They'll just be nice & dry for the holiday season.

Today was simple. We went to the local restaurant with our friend John. You've seen it before, but here it is again. Its called le Seye et Vous and is run by Charlie and his partners. They do both lunch & dinner as well as the cafe side. Lunch is 13€. That for three course & a 1/4 liter of wine & coffee. Today being Friday they were pretty full, probably serving about 30. Charlie manages to serve everybody on time with grace & charm. I had the charcutière starter, John had the salad with gesiers and Linda has a plain green salad. We all had the fish pie main course; this was served with creamy rice and was every bit as good as mine although very different. We also all had the 'pain perdu' desert. Pain Perdu literally means lost bread so its s bread pudding. In this case with a few added raisins and run & caramel sauce to die for. Good local wine & bread played their parts. I normally don't take inside restaurant pictures, but couldn't resist this one taken with our phone. You can see that John had enjoyed his bread pudding and wasn't going to let a drop of sauce escape.

The older people still eat very seasonably. The younger ones not so much. Of course this is one of the best times of the year as we can still get most summer vegetables AND the fall typesw are just starting to come in. Witness the cepes I was able to buy yesterday. Local fruits are also coming in now. Unfortunately we're past the apricot season, but the prunes are starting to appear. The 'gésiers' are mainly chicken gizzards. They must use goose & duck, but I haven't seen them. They are very popular for use in simple salads.

Rotuts - I think I'd give you 3/4 actually. FrogPrincesse - Comforting for sure. The problem was mine. I'm a lousy typist. The question should have read "What do you call an Italian in France". Thus the porcini to Cepe reference. Janeer - Thanks for the kind words. Being a Steinbeck fan I always think of 'The Pastures of Heaven'. This is just a great area. Kent - There are a fair number of English speakers scattered around. Mainly British, but also Dutch & Belgians plus English speaking French. Very few Americans. So for social life there's not a problem; one gradually meets kindred souls who speak English. My wife is President of a local ladies organization (fifi82.org) with over 100 members all of whom speak English. That's the easy part. Getting along in shops, with the government and so forth requires at least some French proficiency. Getting into the medical system, paying taxes and so forth are not too difficult, but again require some French. We have a good friend, Jacques, who helps us with the bureaucratic aspects of living here. . All in all we think it was worth the effort. There's some information on my weblog & you can always PM me and I'll do my best to answer questions.

I thought that surely someone would get at least one of my French ingredients. The closest was goose comfit since I was actually using duck comfit. (Goose is almost impossible to find anymore.) In any case here are the three main ingredients, Duck comfit from a can. We've found that this is the best way to buy comfit. We've tried it from the market, farms & friends and the canned stuff always wins. I used to make comfit when we last lived in the UK & the States, but this stuff is better than I could make. Truffade. This is a classic potato dish from the Auvergne with cantal, cream, lardons, garlic and herbs. I bought this from a stand at the market then only had to reheat it in the oven. Cepes. The first I've seen this season, but then we've had our first decent rains. The stall holder assured me that these were local, she's there every week & knows me by sight so I trusted her. At 25€ per kilo they weren't cheap, but nothings too good for my eG pals. Here's a couple of pieces of comfit in the pan. I've cut off the heads of the cepes then chopped the stems. Here's the comfit about half way through. The capes cap in the pan with butter. I've taken out the caps & put in the chopped stems with garlic & a mix of shallots & gorlic. Here's the truffade just coming out of the oven. Finally everything on the plate. It was really good. With a glass or two of red wine this was a very satisfying dinner and very French. We don't eat this stuff every night nor do the French, too many calories. When they were on the farms all these calories made sense, but they don't today. Hope you enjoyed this post. Tomorrow will be easier as we're going out to lunch.

One of the latest queses is very close to one of the item, not quite there. If combined with another guess it would work. No faux French dishes; these are the real deal. I did think of a hint for #3: Why do you call an Italian in France? And no its not a slur or bad joke.

Lots of great guesses, but no prizes as of yet. A hint. Once you have made foie gras you have a lot left over. What do you do with certain parts of it? Second hint. What sounds like truffle, but isn't the same at all. Can't think of a good hint fpr the third item.

My promised trip to the market today was somewhat fraught, but, I think, turned out OK in the end. The Thursday market at Villefranche de Rouergue is a large regional one. Thus it offers not only food, but most household items. Everything from tools to used clothing to cloth by the yard. As usual parking can be an issue, but I was lucky today and found a legal place quickly and close in. This is a view looking down the street. As you go down this street you get into all the non-food stalls. Needless to say I didn't go that way. Instead I cut over to the main town square where the main action takes place. As you can see the square is completely filled. All food stands. This is my favorite herb & spice stand. Its nearly 50 feet long. Just about any herb or spice you can think of. If she doesn't have it she'll get it. One day we wanted garam masala, but she didn't have any. Out came her little black book with the proportions of the spices to make it up and she then proceeded to mix it up for us on the spot. Dried sausages. I didn't realize that that lady was also taking a picture. I think my angle was better. Just a few cheeses. At this point my camera went dead on me. I'd checked the battery before leaving home and thought it was charged. Either I'm getting senile or the battery is starting to fail to hold a charge. I had planned on taking many more pictures. Its a shame as there were lots of nice things.. Quell dommage, mais c'est la vie! The good news is that I then focused upon buying some food for dinner tonight. I've been putting recipes on this blog that I think are cook-able in the States or the UK. As a result none of them have been particularly French. Tonight I'm going to do a proper French dinner. All three items of our main course will be very typically French. I think you can either get or make all of them outside France, but they're not something you see all that often. You're welcome to guess what they might be in the meantime between now and this evening.

Mary - Welcome to eGullet. I'm flattered that my blog has motivated your first post. I'll look forward to many more. Hope you liked the dressing. I've been making it for so long that I've forgotten where I originally got the recipe. It's my favorite although a really good blue cheese dressing runs it a close second.

I use dried HdeP. I buy them in small quantities at a time from a Lady who comes to the local markets. She has the turnover to insure that they are reasonably fresh. She sells an amazing range of herbs, spices and herbal cures. The garlic granules are also dried. These I buy from the Hypermarket. I use them a lot so my supply never goes stale. How fresh they are from the store is anybody's guess. For the salad dressing you can use fresh garlic if you are making a small quantity and will be using it quickly. It doesn't keep that long. I prefer to make a large batch using the granules as then the dressing will keep longer. I can't tell the difference in taste.

Linda was out to lunch today, but it wasn't very good she said. Rupert & I were home and ate lightly; just some cheese & sausage. Everybody was ready for a substantial dinner, but I didn't have a lot of time. I decided to make a one dish meal. In this case a fish pie. Pretty easy & pretty quick. Here's the full recipe: Ingredients: (this pie fill a 12" shallow round baking tin) 1/2 pound scallops 1 pound white fish (any nice types of fish will do. Or salmon would be nice as well) 1 pound potatoes 2 medium size onions About 1 pint of milk or cream 2-3 tablespoons of flour 2-3 ounces of unsalted butter a good handful of chopped chives about a tablespoon of chopped fresh Thyme or the same of dried Thyme. Salt & Pepper to taste. On sheet of premade flaky pastry Method: Prepare everything. Cut the fish into bite sized pieces; Peel and cut the potatoes into bite sized pieces, chop the onions up finely. chop the chives & thyme. Boil the potatoes until they are just soft. Melt the butter in a large frying pan then gently sauté the onions until they are soft. Add the flour to the pan & stir well until it just starts to color. Add milk or cream, stirring until it thickens. Keep adding & stirring until you have enough thick white sauce to half fill the pan. Add the fish & stir. You may want to add the white fish then wait 2-3 minutes before adding the scallops. Add the drained potatoes & stir. Add salt & pepper to taste. add the chives & stir in. Continue cooking, stirring, until the fish is cooked through. Butter the baking dish then pour in the fish mixture & spread it around evenly. Sprinkle the thyme over the top. Lay the sheet of flaky pastry over the top, trim the edges and pinch the edges to seal. Optionally; brush the pastry with milk or egg yolk & decorate with little fish shapes. Bake in a 375 degree F oven until the crust is nice & golden brown. Its just not that difficult and doesn't take much prep time. Mainly a bit of chopping. BUY the crust! Here are a few pictures: Making the roux is the tricky part, but if you're careful and keep balancing the flour and cream you'll be Ok. Add the peas. Put the crust on I goofed in the the bought pastry had warmed up too much so was sticky. It still looked good coming out of the oven and when I cut it. It tasted great and we both had double portions. Rupert got a small share and wolfed it down. Quick & easy, have a go. Market tomorrow!

Glad you're enjoying it. Don't know about sorrel, but its certainly worth a try. U Iactually used mache (lamb's lettuce) in mine because water cress is hard to find here. Lamb's lettuce probably difficult in the states Busy making a fish pie for dinner. Full report and post later. After we've eaten it that is.

Lindak - Glad you liked the soup. I bet the creme fraiche worked a treat. SylviaLovegren - Thanks for the kind comments. We do do occasional house swaps.

Lunch time. A friend has come over so I'm doing a bit larger portions of our toasted sandwich. We're starting with some leek & celery root soup. Hot this time as the weather has turned. It will go nicely with the simple little open faced sandwiches I'm doing. All you need is bread, garlic sausage, cheese plus some Dijon mustard & herbs de Province. Cut the bread into rounds and very lightly spread it with the mustard. As you can see a baguette is about the right size. Place the garlic sausage slice on top. About 1/4 inch thick is good. Put the cheese on top of the garlic sausage. Here I use Cantal, but a good sharp cheddar would be equally good. Next sprinkle on a good amount of Herbs de Province. If that's not available then use a mixture of thyme & oregano. Place the sandwiches on a baking tray and roast in the oven or under a grill until the cheese melts and bubbles a bit. Remove from heat and serve immediately. Very simple, but delicious. I normally add a few cornichons to the plate as I like them with these little sandwiches. Well, to be honest I like them with most things.

The sausage wasn't burnt. We like the skin to be seared. No cheese tonight as we had cheese for lunch. Cantal, Brique de Brebis and St Félicien with smoked garlic sausage. The salad dressing which I make in my special dressing plastic 'decanter' is: (the decanter is just an ordinary container with a special top which seals closely and also has a flip up spout. Makes for great shaking up..) 3 parts olive oil 1 part white wine vinegar A good dollup of Dijon mustard salt to taste Fresh ground pepper to taste A good dose of herbs de province a good dose of garlic granules. Mix all of this well then add full cream until its amount equals that of the oil & vinegar. Stir &/or shake vigorously until the ingredients fully mix. This dressing will keep in the fridge for about a week if kept tightly sealed.

OK, its dinner time. Since a couple of people sort of drooled over the Toulouse sausage in Monesties yesterday I decided to cook some at home today. Its the heart of a very simple supper for Linda & I. First, however, our pre-dinner wine. with a few peanut to wash it down. . A look at the view while I drank my wine. The second picture is of the church in Ginals across the valley. Next I started the salad The salad ingredients are: Mache & rocette, Tomatoes, onion & cucumber, Blue de Auvergne cheese and my special creamy vinaigrette. I'll mix everything later. As you can see the sausage went onto our gas BBQ which I'd heated up to a high level. As you can see even though the skin is cooked the middle isn't fully cooked. The next thing was to cut the sausage into bite sized chunks & crisp it up a bit. The salad got mixed and the sausages put on the plates and we were off to eat our dinner while watching a BBC program called eggheads. Not sure what I'll be doing tomorrow so I'll have to think about it. I may just try to pull out an old recipe. We'll see.

.Its Tuesday morning and I thought that I'd share a morning routine with you. Lots of pictures, some are extra's to show you places of interest in our village. As Rupert and I go to the garage to get the car its a bit foggy. But by the time we drive up the hill its pretty clear. . The places listed on the sign are farmhouses not hameaux. Since we're at the top we have a nice view of the valley below. Its foggy now, but that will soon burn off. Rupert's anxious to get on with his walk, no time for my picture taking. Although not very clear this picture shows our old village, Parisot, across the valley. If you know where to look one can actually see our old farmhouse. We passed this nice stone wall and looked down at a little hameau. We retraced our steps and headed down the hill for Verfeil. As we entered the village we passed the sign for the 'new' farm shop. Actually the official sign put up by the village is nicer. We walked up to the village square as I wanted to take pictures for you. Here you have the old market (halle), the restaurant, Le Seye et vous, (The old village dog likes to hang out here in hope of a handout) and the now famous farm shop. So much for the scenic tour. There are a lot of interesting old houses & the church is nice as is the marie (town hall) and the Salle des Fetes. Now we're off to the shop. As you can see this is a combination food shop, bakery and tabac. The tabac is a good source of revenue as is the bakery. Its also where all the notices for local events are posted. There's always a lot going on. An array of their breads all freshly baked. I'm refusing to be tempted by the croissants, pain au raisin or the pain au chocolate. Hopefully you can just read the prices. Bread is sold by weight in France. Our favorite bread from this shop is their whole grain loaf, or as its called cereal. The French are great newspaper and magazine readers. There's a magazine for every subject it seems; lots & lots devoted to cooking. Many are very good and I've learned to interpret most of them. What would a French shop be without wine? As we left the shop I took this picture of someone's letter box. Ingenious & effective. As we left for home we passed the poubelles. The yellow tops are for paper & plastic, the grey tops for general household garbage. Not shown is the large bottle bank. This is our road home. The first thing when we got home was to feed Rupert. He likes his routine and didn't want to wait for his chicken and kibble. Hope you've enjoyed this little tour. I'll post more later after I've decided what's for dinner today.

Sigma - I'll send you a PM to start setting up the dinner or lunch. Not next week as I'm off for a golfing holiday. Janeer- A few reasons for two kitchens. Space for storage, as you can see from the pictures the IKEA kitchen is fully loaded with stuff. In addition this gives us a self contained apartment on the ground floor which facilitates house swaps. A third reason is that we mainly use this kitchen during the hot summer months. The BBQ is just outside as is a nice shaded eating area with good views. Very pleasant place to have lunch or dinner. David - Rupert like most dogs is never satisfied. He thinks he's hungry no matter what.

I promised you a dinner dish so Ihope you've bought your chicken thighs, mushrooms, cream & tarragon. Actually this dish arose because we feed our lovely standard Poodle, Rupert, on chicken thighs & dog biscuit. Linda was hungry one day after I'd roasted his chicken so stole a bit and pronounced it delicious. I guess it was the herbs I'd added. In any case I then developed it into a simple, but nice dinner dish. Place your chicken thight into an oven proof container and liberally sprinkle the with: Salt, Pepper, Herbs de Province ans Garlic granules. Meanwhile cut up your mushrooms into slices. Put this into a 200 degree C oven and bake for about 20 minutes. Bring them out of the oven and turn them over. Cook for another 10- 15 minutes until he skin is browned. Then remove from the oven & set the chicken thighs aside. Put the container over high heat on your stove top & add the sliced mushrooms. DO NOT POUR OFF ANY FAT. In fact you may need to add a bit of olive oil. Stir until the mushrooms just start to give off their juices. Add some cream and tarrogon, stir and let reduce a bit. Place 2 or 3 (depending upon how hungry you are) thighs on a place and spoon over some of the mushroom & their sauce. Enjoy! We had ours with a baked potato and some broccoli. A nice, but simple main course. Meanwhile because I'd done a second dish Rupert had chicken thighs ready for his dinner for the next couple of day. Spoiled mutt that he is.