Spatchcock, or butterflying, is a method in which one cuts the backbone away from the bird and flattens the carcass.
A simple aïoli
For many people aïoli is a garlic sauce that goes over fries, kebab or shawarma. But in the Provence, aïoli is more than that and can be an entire festive meal with fish, snail, squid, artichokes and other vegetables with a dollop of the creamy garlic sauce.
Fried spinach with apple, shallot, sambal and soy sauce
A quick recipe for a healthy vegetable side dish of spinach and apples.
Pancakes!
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
Beef pear with trumpet of the death mushrooms
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.
Pasta with clams, Saint Jacob scallops and squid
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.
Rabbit with tomatoes
The butcher had a nice halved rabbit and the neighbours had brought us tomatoes from their harvest, so the combination seemed logic.
Guinea fowl with apples and cider, in a bag
A relatively easy recipe for fillet of guinea fowl with cider and apples, cooked in a bag in the oven. It almost cooks itself.
Free-range chicken in a casserole
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
Poached free-range chicken with nettles
Faced with a plump free-range chicken, I used this delicious recipe for slow poaching in a stock with nettles.