Sep/090
Last of the summer veg
The vegetable garden has been looking a total mess for the past few weeks and I finally sorted it out today.
I've cropped all the rest of the lettuce, onions & potatoes and generally removed a load of the overgrown weeds and overgrown veg.
There was enough produce to make up 3 pretty hefty boxes. One box for me, and 1 each for the other two families who live in my chalet. I left the boxes on their porches for when they get home from work.
Hopefully they'll remember that when I ask them if they would mind if I dig up more garden and do some raised beds next year.
Last of the summer veg
Still left is a row of Berlotti beans at the back, which I'm waiting to crop till my girlfriend's back home.
There's quite a few cabbages which might or might not grow into a solid head (I think they're too close together).
The pak choi has long since bolted, but because it's a variety my Dad brought from the UK and you don't find it here in France, I'm waiting to collect the seeds.
There's also quite a mad looking pumpkin plant with 4 or 5 fruits starting to grow. If they get their arses into gear, they might get quite big in time for halloween. If we don't get a frost which kills them before that.
I've loved growing veg this summer. I've learned a lot of lessons and I can't wait to expand the garden next year and put all those lessons to good use.
Sep/090
Filets de Pangas. A culinary mistake?
Last time I did a big supermarket shop, I bought some fish for the freezer. Bored with the usual farmed salmon, trout & whatnot I came across a packet of 4 fillets of a fish called Panga (Pangasius Hypophalmus). Never heard of it, but it looked like any other white fish, wasn't expensive so I thought I'd give it a try.
Filets De Pagnas, Advertised by French Supermarkets
So yesterday I came to cooking it. As I was defrosting the fillets I thought I'd have a look on t'interweb and find out about the fish & maybe find a recipe.
I immediately found these two pages. Buying Fish in France – A Warning & Don’t Eat this fish: Pangas (Pangasius, Vietnamese River Cobbler, White Catfish, Gray Sole)
Even though I did actually end up cooking the fish (which a few fresh onions and herbs from the garden, a bit of butter & some white wine, by the way), I couldn't really stomach it after what I'd just read, so most of it went into the cat's bowl.
Here's a few of the things which really put me off.
- Pangas are teeming with high levels of poisons and bacteria. (industrial effluents, arsenic, and toxic and hazardous by-products of the growing industrial sector, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT and its metabolites (DDTs), metal contaminants, chlordane-related compounds (CHLs), hexachlorocyclohexane isomers (HCHs), and hexachlorobenzene (HCB)).
- The Carbon Jackboot
Pangas are raised in Vietnam. Pangas are fed food that comes from Peru (more on that below), their hormones (which are injected into the female Pangas) come from China. (More about that below) and finally, they are transported from Vietnam to France. - Disgusting Diet
They’re fed dead fish remnants and bones, dried and ground into a flour, from South America, manioc (cassava) and residue from soy and grains. This kind of nourishment doesn’t even remotely resemble what they eat in nature. But what it does resemble is the method of feeding mad cows - Pangas are Injected with Hormones Derived from Urine
They’ve discovered that if they inject female Pangas with hormones made from the dehydrated urine of pregnant women, the female Pangas grow much quicker and produce eggs faster (one Panga can lay approximately 500,000 eggs at one time)
Who knows if this information is correct? Perhaps a trout farmer disgruntled with the cheap imports from vietnam wrote those pages. What I do know is that I still faintly disgusted to have even tried some pangas, and I certainly won't be buying it again.
I wonder if this is how those rabid, evangelical, hairy toed vegans get started.
Jun/090
Absinthe
Search for Absinth on wikipedia and the the reult: wikipedia
Search in Prague, and you'll find a bottle of a kind of booze which is illegal beacause it's so strong. A bottle which how ever many times you take it out at dinner parties... No one wants to finish with a bottle of this.
But search for it on google video, and get something very different:
Pouring Absinthe French Style - More bloopers are a click away
May/090
A visit from the olds
I had a lovely visit from the olds this week. They were on a road trip, first visiting me here in Le Tour before heading up into Germany to visit my sister who is currently gestating a new member of the Dorward family. I'm very excited about becoming an uncle for the first time this year. I'm hoping she won't mind me mentioning it here, but it seems far enough along in the process to be public broadcast-able?
Anyhoo - the parents and I had a great time this week. It's probably the first time I've been living in a place large enough for us to stay all together without treading on each other's toes too much. I had enough activities planned to cover all weather eventualities but luckily the sun came out for their stay. A round of golf at the Chamonix Golf course kicked things off. Keen golfers, my folks and the pretty setting of the Chamonix course impressed them.
The next day was a really nice walk down to Vallorcine where we detoured off to a waterfall called the Cascade de Bérard which a bloke down the pub had told me about the night before. Well worth the detour it was too.
And lastly a trip down into Switzerland to the outdoor thermal Spa at Les Bains De Lavey which is exactly what I needed after having a cold for a while.
Added to that we all ate well and watched a few good films together, not to mention sharing a bit of gardening knowledge and generally catching up with the family news. It's a shame we didn't get time to go cyclying and that the weather wasn't quite right for my Dad to be able to do a tandem parapente flight, but there's always the next time.
May/090
Summer colds
I always seem to get colds when the seasons change and I've got one right now. It's a real corker too. What interests me is that it can't possibly be the same pathogen which makes me ill each time, but I always seem to get the same symptoms in the same order. The symptoms must be defined by my immune system defending itself, not by the germs themselves?
Either way, here's what generally happens to me. The length of time it takes to go through all the stages changes (depending on the tenacity of the germs perhaps), but it seems to go in this order.
Stage 1: Food starts to taste weird & suddenly I start feeling a bit depressed without knowing why - Usually lasts a day or less. If I were more clever, I'd notice this stage for what it was & not get stressed out bout feeling depressed.
Stage 2: Minging sore throat for a few days.
Stage 3: Couple of days of full blown flu-like symptoms: Tiredness, high body temperature, sleeping a lot, snotty nose, not being able to think clearly generally feeling really crap.
Stage 4: After one night of the sweats, the fever breaks and I feel generally clearer and better in the morning.
Stage 5: Several days of being very snotty, bad tempered, culminating in a nasty cough when the mucus finds it's way down into my lungs and causes an infection which lasts a week or so. Joy.
So normally all this would happen over a few days, but this time round it's been about a week already and I'm only just starting stage 4. The worst bit's over, but I've still got several days of being prodigiously snotty and a nice little cough to look forward to. Rubbish
Apr/092
Getting my veg on
The project I'm planning for this summer that I'm most excited about is the garden. I'm going to grow vegetables. The only problem has been that the chalet I live in is divided into three, with 2 other families sharing the garden. I've got permission from my landlord, so I just have to discuss it with the other families (who happen to be the brothers of my landlord) to make sure I don't dig up the any part of the garden they usually use and I'm ready to go.
Ready except for the snow on the ground, but that's melting so quickly at the moment it will only be a week or so before the ground is fully clear of snow and I can start turning it over. In the meantime I've got got my seedlings going indoors on the window sill. Spinach, leeks, pumpkin, green beans, berlotti, beetroot and 8 different types of herbs and loads more are all starting to sprout ready for planting out in a few weeks.
Jan/090
Preserving Chicken
One of the trains of thought my recent obsession with River Cottage etc has set me on is the massive influence that humankind's ability to preserve and store food has had on the development of society. The ability to store enough food to last the tribe through lean times must have been a vital stage in allowing human populations to grow.
I've been experimenting with an ancient method of preserving meat called confit. It's a french word which means to conserve - think of the word confiture. My plan was was to cook and conserve a big batch of 12 chicken legs so that we could eat them throughout the winter but without using a fridge or freezer.
Here's how it works. First the meat is cured for a few days by rubbing it with a mixture of salt and some aromatics like thyme & bay leaves. Then it's browned in a frying pan and transferred to a big cooking pot (I happened to inherit an enormous fish kettle from Germany this summer - perfect for the job). The chicken is then slowly cooked for a few hours totally submerged in.... well... lard. After a few hours, you simply turn the heat off and let the whole thing cool down.
The meat is completely covered in the solid fat and is therefore not exposed to the air which would otherwise make it rot. The meat can happily sit for several months in a room temperature larder. When you want to eat it, you just dig out a leg, scrape off most of the fat and bung it in the oven for a bit to melt off the rest of the fat and crisp it up a bit. I know that probably sounds like a heart attack on a plate, but I reckon it's still got less fat than a big mac or a tikka masala take away curry.
I made my confit a few weeks ago and the fish kettle has been out on the porch ever since. I decided to give it a try today. Served alongside some spicy noodles and salad for lunch, it was surprisingly delicious. Intensely salty and savory, I reckon the trick is not to eat too much at once.
Next time I dig some of my confit out I'm going to strip the meat off the bone after it's been in the oven and then make those little rolled pancake things you get in Chinese food with hoi-sin sauce & a bit of shredded cucumber & spring onion.
Dec/080
Chris cooks Christmas
Inspired by the boy Hugh F-W, I'm cooking Christmas for 6-8 of my friends this year. An epic shopping trip to Carrefour in Sallanches on one of the busiest days of the year wasn't the most fun, but later in the day I picked up the goose from the artisan butcher in Chamonix. Analltogether more civilised experience. Sitting on my kitchen table, the goose looks like a big bastard and to be honest it scares me a little. It doesn't scare the cat, though. She got so excited I had to lock her in the bedroom while to calm down while I dealt with the goose.
The first job was to take off it's legs and cure them for 24 hours or so in a mixture of salt & pepper, garlic, bay and thyme. Later the legs will be slowly cooked in goose fat to make a traditional French confit.
The crown of the goose is going to be filled with a chestnut stuffing and roasted on Christmas day, along with the potatoes done with goose fat, the usual veg and a proper goose-stock based gravy.
The first course is a soup. Cream of Jerusalem Artichoke with a parsley and chestnut pesto dabbed through it (thanks Hugh). I was a bit worried about finding the Artichoke things here in France. Mostly because I had no idea what I was looking for, never having heard of them before. Turns out it's quite a popular vegetable here in France. They call it topinambour. Who knew?
And for desert it's a poached pear tart with vanilla ice-cream. Washed down with what will probably be a good chunk of the 24 bottles of wine I got from my mate the other day (he runs a chalet and has a nose for putting delicious wine on his punter's table at very little cost to himself), I'm hoping Christmas dinner is going to go down well.
It's certainly the most adventurous meal I've ever attempted. Starting preparing a meal several days before serving feels a little strange, but hopefully everything will come together without stress on Christmas evening and I'll be able to enjoy eating it as much as I'll enjoy making it.
Dec/082
River Cottage HQ
My short trip to River Cottage HQ in Dorset was well worth the effort. Even if the flights and hundreds of miles of driving on either end made my carbon footprint more of a carbon Jackboot over the last 48 hours.
The event was called Hugh Cooks Christmas and was essentially a 2 hour cooking demonstration by Hugh of some of the River Cottage Christmas dishes, followed by a 5 course dinner comprising all the food that had been demoed. Delicious it was too. The demonstration was as fun and instructive as any cooking demonstration I can imagine. But then again, I've never seen a cooking demonstration before.
I met some great people over the course of the evening. A very eclectic bunch of young & old, foodies & gourmets. I was sitting next to pro cricketer Geraint Jones at dinner. Top geezer he is. He keeps pigs & filled me in with a load more detail about the whole process of raising, butchering and making sausages etc.
And the highlight of the whole evening was getting to meet Hugh himself. He's a genuine hero of mine. He and Stephen Fry are right at the top of the list (although for different reasons). I like Hugh's style, his way with his audience and most of all his ethics and the direction that I've seen the River Cottage brand and TV programme develop over the years I've been watching.
So what did I say when I met him face to face? I said....
"Dude. You're totally my hero, man."
It made him chuckle at least & I suppose that was my intention.
Dec/084
Meeting a hero
I'm a bit over excited this morning. I'm on my way to Devon to meet a hero of mine, Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall. I'm going to River Cottage HQ for dinner & a demo of Hugh cooking christmas (a brilliant christmas present from my girlfriend).
Tapping this post into my iphone at Geneva airport isn't ideal so I'm going to leave it here & think about what I'm going to say to the geezer this evening.