Food – Duck and Potato

The French Have Perfected Pickle Technology

Posted on September 26, 2013 by potato

As an eater of large quantities of pickled things, I am frequently frustrated and annoyed by what I call Pickle Juice Fingers™. You want to get the olives out of the jar, but you have to dip your whole god damned hand in the jar to fish them out. You don’t want to dump out all the juice, because you’re not eating all the pickled things, so what are your choices?

1. Dip your whole hand in the jar, fishing around in the juice for pickled treasures and distributing your hand-germs to any other pour soul who also wants to enjoy delicious pickled things, like a BARBARIAN.

2. Use a spoon or something to daintily pick out one pickled thing at a time. This option is too ridiculous to contemplate.

The good news for America is that the French have solved this problem, with technology that is SO SIMPLE AND YET SO BRILLIANT, I cannot believe it has not always been a part of the pickle eating experience.

BEHOLD.

the pickles are CLEARLY too far down in the jar to avoid contracting Pickle Juice Fingers™

BUT OH THERE IS A PLASTIC THING SITTING UNDER THE PICKLES WITH A HANDLE THAT HAS LITTLE HOOKS ON IT THAT HOOK ONTO THE SIDE OF THE JAR TO BRING THE PICKLES TO THE SURFACE

You can bet I’ll be writing a strongly worded letter to the Vlasic company upon my return to the US.

I Ate Tiny Fish Heads

Posted on September 20, 2013 by potato

In this picture, I am sitting next to something beautiful while drinking a glass of rosé. This activity has occupied approximately 70% of my time in France.

You just can’t be a food wuss in France. There’s no room for that shit. I have eaten:

salads with goose gizzards and duck hearts on them (DEEEELICIOUS)
steak tartare
interesting sausages
fois gras (It. Is. The. Finest. Thing. A. Human. Could. Hope. To. Eat.)
so much duck (breast, confit, etc.)
cheese so stinky that you have to not breathe in while you take a bite
chickens that are really scrappy looking, and also are delivered to you intact (head and all), in a clear plastic bag. Oh hai chicken face!
SEA SNAILS (“The tiny fork is to pry the snail out of its shell, it won’t come easy.”)

So as I said, I have no trouble eating all the bits and pieces of land-dwelling creatures. Duck heart? YES! Fois gras? HELL yes. Thing that appeared to be a seared piece of some kind of melty fat on top of a steak I had the other day, also served with a cream sauce made from morels, that may have been seared fois gras, I just don’t know, because sometimes when things are that delicious it doesn’t matter what they are? YEEESSSS.

But then I was confronted with friture. A big plate of tiny, WHOLE, fried fish. Like, you just eat the whole tiny fish. With garlic and lemon on it.

Here’s some bread! Maybe bread will make eating whole fish less terrifying!

Nic’s mom was all “I eat them, heads and all. But you don’t have to.”

Now look. I’m from the midwest. I thought seafood was popcorn shrimp until I was 25.

Once, Nic and I caught crabs in the ocean and he thought I should kill one of them myself, and I was all “Yeah! I’ve read the Omnivore’s Dilemma! I WILL kill that crab!” So Nic says “just whack it with the dull edge of this meat cleaver”, HUGELY overestimating my arm-strength. I hit the thing, it makes a smallish dent in the top of its shell, and the crab proceeds to aggressively throw its claws in the air, plainly yelling “COME AT ME, BRO”, upon which time I ran from the room shrieking and Nic had to kill it himself. I did clean it, though. The inside of a crab looks like a varied selection of things you apply makeup with.

So I ate a few fishes, not the heads. And they were delicious. Salty and garlicky and crunchy and lemony and not at all fishy. And then I hate one of the heads. Same thing! Salty and garlicky and crunchy and lemony and not at all fishy! Joy! I’m not a food wuss after all!! I felt like shouting, to the restaurant full of older French people and one table full of older Americans having an extremely dull conversation about how one lady’s brother is myopic, “I HAVE EATEN A FISH HEAD. ALL SHALL RECOGNIZE AND APPLAUD THIS FEAT.”

I triumphantly select another tiny fish and then notice that it is LOOKING AT ME IN MY EYE WITH ITS EYE WITH AN EXPRESSION I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS MILDLY REPROACHFUL.

you could put that much garlic on a rock and I’d probably eat it

Like “I understand my place in the food chain. Things eat me. I get it. But seriously, you wuss, you can’t eat my head? You’re gonna eat all of me BUT my head? That shit is insulting. You best grow a pair and EAT MY GOD DAMNED HEAD.”

So I ate its head. And it was delicious.

Finally, a Recipe: Poulet Ballotine de la Dordogne

Posted on September 15, 2013 by duck

We were taken to a beautiful store filled with the local fat of the land, where we acquired some sausage and a whole chicken, head and all. We decided to debone and stuff the chicken, a trick I learned much like I’ve learned nearly everything in my life, via internet searches and practice.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/kAekQ5fzfGM?rel=0]

Jacques Pepin on how to debone a chicken

PSA: I’ve deboned half a dozen chickens, and this was my first time doing so with a dull knife. It wasn’t fun. With $20 (a steel and a stone), a little technique, and some elbow grease, you can sharpen all your non-serrated knives easily at home. Once you’re used to using sharp knives you’ll never go back!

Poulet Ballotine de la Dordogne (Chicken stuffed with figs and pork sausage)
Prep time: 30 mins
Cook time: 1 hour

raw chicken, sausage, figs, shallots, and garlic.

The Fat of the Land

Ingredients

One whole chicken with giblets
One pound of bulk sausage
Ten fresh figs
Three shallots
Three cloves of garlic
Salt and Pepper

Deboning the chicken with a very dull knife.

Preheat the oven to 400°F / 200°C.
Roughly chop the figs.
Cook the figs in a small pot over medium high heat until sticky and reduced.
Add diced shallots, garlic, and chicken liver to the fig mixture, stir, and turn off the heat to cool.
Debone the chicken. Reserve the bones for stock.
Liberally salt and pepper the inside of the chicken.
Spread the cooled fig mixture all over the inside of the chicken.
Place the bulk sausage in the middle of the chicken and wrap the chicken around it.
Flip it over, bake in a baking dish for one hour.

This chicken was really delicious. The taste of the terroir really came out in the locally farmed ingredients and in the figs from the garden. Don’t be afraid to try your hand at deboning a chicken, and let your imagination run wild with the fillings!

Our tablescape.

France: Not Gross

Posted on September 5, 2013 by duck

Great news: the nine hours of jet lag have finally subsided! We fell asleep at midnight last night and woke up at 8am. Now that that’s out of the way, we can devote 100% of our energy to the real reasons we’re here: eating food and looking at old stuff.

Yesterday, in an effort to appease Cat and her never-ending quest to not cook and eat every meal at home, we went on a little stroll downtown Toulouse and had lunch outside the marché de Carmes.

Of course we’re having wine with lunch.

On the food front, ingredients here are better. Of course the wine and cheese are cheap, plentiful, and delicious – that’s to be expected. The thing is, everything here tastes better! Soft boiled eggs are eggier. Butter is unpasteurized and delicious. Much like their human counterparts, French chickens are about half the size of American chickens and obviously spend more time outside.

Chicken roasting in a moulinex rotisserie.

I believe this rotisserie belonged to my grandmother.

There’s nothing like the sound of this rotisserie clicking away as it slowly turns, and the smell of the chicken roasting, to bring me back to my childhood. Thanks, Mom, for this most excellent Proustian trigger that puts madeleines and tea to shame! French chickens are a fair bit tougher and less fatty than the caged soulless chickens we’re unfortunately used to, so I brined this one for a day and stuffed it with shallots and a lemon before roasting. It was awesome.

This post is my first effort to make this blog about something other than jokes. I plan on posting a recipe or two soon, so comment with your favorite French dish you’d like to see us make! This weekend we’re heading to the medieval walled city of Carcassonne to get our old stuff fix, so stay tuned.