In France, people eat a lot of pancakes. They are flat and called “crèpes” and can be sweet of savoury. In Breton pancake eateries they have savoury “sarazin” crèpes that could rival with pizzas. The “crèpes Suzette” is an alcohol soaked sweet desert. In the Netherlands where I grew up, the pancakes are thicker andRead More
My butcher usually keeps two special cuts aside when he gets a new carcass — the poire and the merlan — and I have the right of first refusal. I hardy ever refuse.
These are very fine cuts, one is oblong and looks like a fish (merlan being a whiting) and the poire looks like a big pear. They come from near the topside, in English butchery terms. For French butchers, they are near the tranche. It is lean and delicate meat and not so well known because there is just about a pound of it on an entire cow.
This weekend was the “Foire aux harengs et à la coquille de St Jacques” in the coastal town of Dieppe but we could not go to the Normandy port.
To mark this weekend of herring and scallops and encourage the hard-working small-boat fishermen there, I made a dish with scallops from my local fishmonger.
The butcher had a nice halved rabbit and the neighbours had brought us tomatoes from their harvest, so the combination seemed logic.
A relatively easy recipe for fillet of guinea fowl with cider and apples, cooked in a bag in the oven. It almost cooks itself.
There is free-range and free-range.. The poultry on sale at the butcher’s or in the supermarket may be labelled free-range but that does not mean they could roam about the farm as their ancestors. There are some poultry farmers around here with large barns where the birds can actually move around and are not squeezedRead More
Faced with a plump free-range chicken, I used this delicious recipe for slow poaching in a stock with nettles.
A simple version of a classic French dish with pigeon and peas.
At the fishmongers there was a “Melva”, a sturdy fish that looked like tuna but much smaller. I never saw one before. It is also called “false Bonito” as it is the same family as the Bonito but it bleeds more and has a more pronounced flavour. I took it and ended up with aRead More
A great and easy recipe for a succulent guinea fowl cooked in a bag with garlic and tomatoes.