Poire with trompettes
Beef Main dish Mushrooms Pastry
18th November 2019

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, scallops and squid
Main dish Pasta Seafood
18th November 2019

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.

Main dish rabbit
2nd October 2019

Rabbit with tomatoes

The butcher had a nice halved rabbit and the neighbours had brought us tomatoes from their harvest, so the combination seemed logical.

Poultry
14th September 2019

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 squeezed together in cages. We also know some people that keep […]

Melva
Fish
11th June 2019

Melva with garlic, ginger and soy sauce

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 a good two kilos of fish. I kept the head and […]

Lamb Main dish
24th April 2019

Garlic and pepper sauce for roast lamb

The other day I had ordered a leg of milk-fed young lamb at the butcher’s for Easter, but he provided an older and heavier animal and I ended up with 2,5 kilos of meat.We decided to invite four people over for an impromptu Easter Sunday lunch.