Cassoulet - a #FlavourfromFrance

Don't get me wrong, I'm still loving the Welsh coast in all its bleak winter majesty - crashing waves, frosty mornings, howling winds, lashing rain - well may be I'm not 'loving' so much as enduring the howling wind and the lashing rain - but it is very COLD, and while I wouldn't say I was a sun worshipper, there comes a point when wearing 6 layers and still having to wrap a blanket round yourself to keep warm gets a bit tiresome. So I was delighted to be offered an opportunity to distract myself and think "France", and particularly all things French cuisine, and cook a French dish as part of Inntravel's #FlavourFromFrance campaign.

I am a huge fan of France, particularly the South West Mediterranean departement of Languedoc Rousillon, and specifically the area around Perpignan where I lived for a year as a student and have spent many happy, sun-drenched, heat-soaked weeks since I was 16, most recently last summer on our fabulous family holiday. 

Only natural, then, that my thoughts would head south west, and with the Welsh weather at its cold, damp grimmest, to that French peasant staple, Cassoulet.

Cassoulet is not for vegetarians, and it's certainly not for the calorie conscious. The whole point of this dish is that it's warming and sustaining. Don't even think about a low fat version or, heaven forbid, some sort of tofu affair...It's not really for anyone who doesn't relish the thought of meat and beans, for that is what it is, but no less delicious for it. This may be peasant food, but to my mind, it just sings (albeit in a rather gitane-infused baritone) of Le Midi - in any weather: we ate a tinned version while we were camping outside Prades last year, and even the tinned 'convenience version' was delicious. I meant to bring some home with me for those evenings when you need a quick fix, but we ended up eating the tins on our way home, so much did we enjoy them... I did, however, come home with some lovely nets of dried haricot beans, packaged in convenient 'family cassoulet' servings.

I started out intending to follow a recipe by Raymond Blanc, but was thwarted by a lack of confit duck legs in my part of west Wales. Luckily, my friends at Llwynhelyg Farm Shop came to my rescue with fresh duck legs, and my Cassoulet journey developed, with reference to various sources, into this magnificent dinner. 

I can't pretend this is truly authentic - apart from anything else, my last minute use of sundried tomato and mascarpone pasta sauce in place of sundried tomato paste (on the basis that the former was available, the latter not!) and good quality pork chipolatas in place of garlicky saucisse de Toulouse (ditto) puts paid to that. You need to start this the day before if you're using dried haricots because they need to be soaked, and you need to devote a good 5 hours to it on the day of cooking and eating. That's not to say you can't do anything else at the same time, but it's more involved than you might think a dish of meat and beans might be. Furthermore, I didn't stir it the requisite 7 times as tradition dictates. But as Felicity Cloake puts it so eloquently, tradition probably had nothing better to do than stand around stirring a pot of cassoulet. For my own part, I prepped a kilo of marmalade oranges, did the ironing and wrote most of this blog post...

So I include the recipe here, and, you'll see that for one lucky reader, I also have a competition to win a voucher for Cafe Rouge. This is my first time using Rafflecopter, so be gentle with me!

Cassoulet

Serves around 10

500g dried haricot beans, soaked for at least 12 hours
1 onion, peeled and whole
1 head of garlic, unpeeled and whole, plus 4 cloves
1 bay leaf
a couple of sprigs of thyme
3 black peppercorns
200g smoked streaky bacon, chopped into small pieces
a pot of duck fat or rapeseed oil
2 duck legs (drumsticks & thighs)
500g belly of pork, derinded and chopped into cubes; if on the bone, take the bone out as part of the cubing process and reserve
300g good quality sausages (garlicky, Toulouse sausages if available)
1 tbsp sundried tomato & mascarpone stir through pasta sauce or sundried tomato paste
120g breadcrumbs

You'll also need a medium sized frying pan and a big casserole with a lid.

Start by draining the beans well, then placing in the casserole with the onion, garlic head (but NOT the 4 additional cloves) the thyme, bay leaf, the peppercorns and the bacon lardons.

Bring to the boil then cover, reduce the heat and simmer for 2 hours.

While the beans are simmering, heat the frying pan and add a tablespoon of duck fat or rapeseed oil. Start by frying off the duck legs - as you do this you'll render out a lot of duck fat which, if you didn't have any duck fat to start with, will add richness when you fry the next bits of meat. When they skin is crispy and golden and the meat is on the way to being cooked, remove from the pan, then fry the sausages and the belly of pork - including any bones you removed during the cubing process. Make sure the meat is all well browned.

Drain any fat from the pan and set aside for part 2.

Once the meat is cool enough to handle, slice up the sausages into chunks.

[At this point, I also started to take the meat off the duck legs but I think this was a mistake. Next time, I'll strip the meat off the duck legs after the dish is finished. If you do stri[ the duck meat at this stage, remember to reserve the bones to pop back in to the casserole for the second half of cooking]

When the beans have finished their simmer, remove the whole onion, the thyme, peppercorns (if you can find them) and bay leaf and discard. 

Set up a colander over a big bowl, then drain the beans and bacon, reserving the liquid, and set aside.

Turn on the oven to 140C.

Finely chop the 4 remaining garlic cloves and crush with a good pinch of sea salt before scraping into a small bowl.

Squeeze the simmered garlic flesh out of their skins and into the bowl with the uncooked, crushed garlic, add the tomato paste plus 2-3 tablespoons of duck fat (or use the fat you set aside from earlier frying - and just don't think about your arteries OK?) and mix it all together to a paste.

Wipe out the casserole if necessary, and smear half the garlicky tomatoey paste over the bottom of the casserole. Add the beans and bacon, then the meat, keeping back half the sausage slices.

Pour the reserved cooking liquid from the beans back over the contents of the casserole till it's all just covered, and bring to the boil.

While the casserole is coming back to the boil, put the frying pan back on the stove with any remain duck fat or a tablespoon of rapeseed oil, and briefly fry the bread crumbs.

When the contents of the  casserole have come to the boil, sprinkle about a quarter of the breadcrumbs over the top, replace the lid and pop into the oven for a couple of hours. Every half hour or so, remove the casserole, stir in the breadcrumbs and add another quarter of crumbs on top. 

Serve in bowls with the rest of the sausage on top - crusty bread perhaps, or a salad of winter leaves would go well. Or in our case, savoy cabbage!

Good luck with the competition too!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Notre Sejour en France

So, yes, sorry, I've been away.

It was lovely. 

For so many years, we've either split our holiday into 2, week long slots, at least some of it on scout camps, and at the end of our time away I've always had a compelling urge to stay away, to turn around and head off elsewhere. I think that the sign of a truly great holiday must be that you feel ready to come home - in a good way: relaxed, replete, and not even 12 hours on the French autoroutes (including the traffic jams around Paris) ruins it.

A campsite nestled in the foothills of the French Pyrenees - close enough to the coast for a day at the beach, but strangely (or perhaps not so strangely as we now have easy access to the sea in our day to day lives) we spent most of our time in the mountains, following rivers either up or down stream, marvelling at waterfalls, swimming in icy cold natural swimming pools of melt water, leaping off rocks into rivers, squeezing through gorges...

We ate, as you'd expect, some great French food. Significant numbers of croissants, pains au chocolat, baguettes, rillettes, fromage, crepes... luscious peaches and apricots from roadside stalls, absolutely ripe, and with not a hint of refrigerated transport about them ...

Thanks to my French friends who live in the area, we also had a couple of delicious, utterly authentic meals. 

On our second night, a family BBQ with Sonia, Laurent, their son, Sonia's parents, sisters, sisters' husbands and kids... It featured a delicious courgette soup (am hoping to get the recipe, all of you who are struggling in the annual "what shall we do with all these courgettes" conundrum) merguez and saucisse, salads, and of course a couple of delicious tartes of the type you only find in France. There are no pics of this gorgeous evening: we were too busy eating, drinking delicious wine from the local vineyards - wine that will never make it to these shores because the locals keep it for themselves! and sharing news in a wierd mixture of Fr-english and We-nch as the non-French (the Husband, Blue & Pink), non-English (my French friend's father, one of her brothers in law etc) and non-Welsh speakers (everyone apart from Blue & Pink) in the company  all tried to make themselves understood...

We also had a wonderful meal with them at a restaurant in Tautavel (home of the oldest European man), 'le Petit Gris', a Catalan restaurant with a menu full of the fish and meat of the region. If you're in the area, I'd really recommend looking it out. Squid, rabbit, mussels, snails all featured heavily, as did goats cheese. It was all utterly delicious, eating on a covered terrace as the sun went down. Again, not many pics of the food, although I did sneak a couple of snaps of my dessert - fresh goats cheese topped with roasted almonds and local honey. Just divine...

And so now we're back home, the scent of Autumn replacing those of wild fennel and the baking Roussillon terre. One of the best holidays we've had.

Hope you've had a good summer too.

Tarragon chicken and a hankering for France

I may have mentioned before once or twice how much I love France.

Indeed there was a time as a post-grad law student when, unsure of my destiny and only certain that I had failed the land law component of the C.P.E. conversion course that non-law graduates had to sit, the only thing I could think of doing was to decamp to France and see what happened.

Fate intervened, I met the Husband and passed land law by the skin of my teeth (events related only by the fact that the Husband was in the same pub that I was celebrating the end - but not the results - of said exams), so my other life as an English woman in France never happened. May be, Sliding Doors-esque, my other self is currently sitting on the terrasse of a sprawling proprietee somewhere in the Midi, a herd of goats and some chickens milling around, while the Husband, assuming a slightly more unreliable "Kevin-Kline-in-French-Kiss" air about him than he currently sports, grows grapes and olives and the children run about tanned and bilingual...

I still have friends in France and we go back occasionally - we haven't been to my preferred corner of Languedoc for a few years, although we had a great holiday in Normandy last summer. I love French towns and cities as much as the countryside: Paris for sure, but also Lyon, Toulouse, Nantes, Aix en Provence, Carcassonne and my favourite of them all, Perpignan. I would gladly go back at any opportunity. May be next summer.

For now, I am compensating by cooking French. Tarragon is one of those classic tastes of France. My mother and I both have tarragon plants parented by a plant belonging to my French exchange's grandpere . Combine that with chicken and creme fraiche, a splash of white wine and some peas, and I could be sitting in a little bistro somewhere, the best memories I have of eating fabulous meals in France washing over me. The feel of the heat that hits you getting off the plane, the wonderful, clear light you get in the mountains, the sunsets over ancient fishing villages, the markets, the pains au chocolat, le Grand Bleu, Jean Reno, the cafe culture - all of it.

Sigh.

Tarragon Chicken
serves 4

8 chicken thighs (bone removed)
salt & pepper
olive oil
2 shallots, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
100ml dry white wine
300ml chicken stock
2 tsp cornflour
fresh peas - a good couple of handfuls
3 tbsp creme fraiche
2 tbsp tarragon leaves, ripped

Season the chicken with salt and pepper and set aside.

Heat a tbsp of olive oil in a large  frying pan and fry the shallots gently until soft - about 5 minutes. Add the garlic at the end of the cooking time for a minute or so.

Add the chicken pieces to the pan and brown for 2-3 minutes, turning once. Increase teh heat, pour in the wine and let it bubble up then add the chicken stock and let everything simmer for 10 minutes.

While the chicken is simmering, mix the cornflour to a paste with 2 tsp water, then stir into the cookking liquid when the 10 minutes is up. Throw in the peas and keep simmering until the sauce thickens at which point stir in the creme fraiche and tarragon and serve with new potatoes.

Best eaten outside as the sun goes down with a glass of crisp white wine...

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This is a sponsored post on behalf of Superbreak

How now, Laughing Cow? a Review

Don't things always seem so much more glamorous in French? 

I was walking up to school the other day behind someone sporting a shopping bag - one of those sturdy, resuable supermarket ones -  with the motif "L'instant fraicheur" inscribed on it. So much better than "the fresh instant". Or "the instant of freshness". My French isn't bad, and in the past, it's been pretty good, and so I still sometimes decide to think in French, or do some idle translation in my head when the English isn't so appealing (I know, I know, the hours just fly by...).

So here's a thing. Whenever someone says The Laughing Cow to me, I hear "La Vache Qui Rit" - which, if you couldn't guess, is the French name for it. Those cheese triangles were present in the fridge of all the French families I have ever stayed with, and last year on our camper van trip to Normandy, in one of those awesome French hypermarkets, we found a pack of La Vache Qui Rit 'Apero-cubes' - individually wrapped 'aperitif' sized cubes of La Vache, with intriguing flavours - paprika, olive, blue cheese...

Frankly, being the huge francophile that I am, if it's good enough for the French...

I must admit that despite all this, I don't buy it (unless it's packaged in lurid yet strangely irresistible aperitif cube type things), but I was approached recently to see if I would like to review a new flavour of The Laughing Cow cheese triangles. La vache qui rit? Mais oui, bien sur...

Doesn't necessarily sit well with the 'cook it from scratch processed food be damned' image I like to portray. But don't judge me too harshly. You see, the other thing that enticed me was the new flavour - emmenthal.

I love a bit of emmenthal.

I was sold.

Sure enough, carefully packaged in a polystyrene box with its own cool pack, not one but 4 packs of La Vache turned up - 2 of emmenthal and 2 of blue cheese flavour.

We tested them extensively - mostly Blue who has a passion for blue cheese, and ate most of it in his sarnies.

Disappointingly, and as may be you'd guessed, though, they don't really taste of either emmenthal or blue cheese (respectively) although the blue cheese one does have a definite and recognisable tang. Pink wasn't keen on either flavour. Blue was positive, although this waned over time, and the Husband and I, well, if I'm honest, it's just not really our thing. They're not particularly unpleasant or anything, I'd rather just eat proper cheese. The real thing. Le vrai...

On the other hand, if you like Laughing Cow generally, you will probably like these. In their favour, they are only 25 calories a triangle, but don't really taste 'diet' so if you're on something like the 5:2 diet, which I am (currently rather half-heartedly) following, they could be a good thing.You know, spread on a tasty Ryvita or something...

So there you have it. Even as La Vache Qui Rit, I can't give them a rave review. But may be you will? And I'm nothing if not open minded (well, sometimes) so if I've judged them too harshly, do try and persuade me otherwise...