Rester Zen - ou comment ériger le sans-gêne en art de vivre

La Poste rend des services inestimables au français, et ce depuis des générations, mais je ne lui connaissais pas sa mission de zen master.

Avez-vous remarqué les nouveaux autocollants qui ornent l'arrière des camionnettes de la Poste?

 Pour ceux qui ont du mal à en croire leurs yeux, je vous ai fait un détail...

La Poste démontre ici sa volonté manifeste de diversifier ses activités pour maintenir ses marges. Je propose qu'on n'en reste pas là: 

- J'ai pris l'autoroute à contresens juste pendant 2 minutes, profitez-en pour travailler vos réflexes !- J'écrase juste une vieille dame par jour, Lao Tseu l'a dit, il faut trouver la voie !
- Je vide juste mon cendrier sur la plage, souvenez-vous : rien n'est permanent !
- Je ne jette qu'un tout petit sac plastique par la fenêtre de ma voiture, autant en emporte le vent !
- Je ne fume qu'un tout petit joint devant l'école maternelle, ouvrez les chakras !
- Je fait un tout petit pipi (vraiment tout petit!) sur la voie publique, notre corps saura rejeter ce dont il n'a pas besoin !

Cela dit, on pourrait se demander pourquoi les postier ont besoin de se garer où bon leur semble. Peut-être que de devoir marcher un peu les empêcherait de... rester zen.

Herbs

I've been mentioning herbs in my recent posts so I thought I'd be a little more specific. In general, I am a big fan of the 'whatever herbs are available' school of thought. However, that's a bit lazy at times and there are some thing for which you should stop and think.

In breton cooking, there is a lot of bay leaf, because there are huge laurel trees everywhere. I find that it goes well with fish, crabs, and meat alike. It's not too pungent, and so you can use as much as you'd like. Don't break it into pieces, though: you won't get any more out of it and you'll have to fish them out later.

Rosemary is tricky because it will give a strong flavor to your broth. It's possible to make delicious rosemary tea, but you don't want to be drinking it with your meat or fish. Use sparingly in a broth. However, in roasting, use as much as you'd like.

On the photo above, you can see the herbs I put in the baked/grilled duck from the previous post.

On the photo below, you can see my daughter picking fresh cilantro seeds off of a blooming cilantro twig. It's tedious work, but perfect for a 4.5 years old who wants to help. Cilantro is a personal favorite, and I often grind it to rub on meat (when it's dry) together with some pepper, or plunge it whole in a sauce.

Thyme is also a personal favorite. I use it often and grow it on my balcony in Paris when I can. I use lots of it everywhere, though some people think it's overpowering.

Duck! Duck!

On a day when some friends and my parents came to visit (6 adults in all), I decided to make some roast/bbq duck. Why the mixed recipe, you ask? why, it's so that you can have the best of both worlds: the tenderizing and degreasing effect of baking, and the crispy and smoky effect of grilling.

My butcher advised me to get two smaller female ducks (canette) rather than one big male one (canard), seeing how the males tend to be more fat. He went to his neighbor's yard and picked a couple out for me. 

I stuffed them in the over with some herbs in their cavities. I cooked them long and slow (about 2 hours at 170C= 335F), just to get the inside nice and tender. Duck can be chewy and tough if it's not cooked completely through. Fast cooking is something that works well with duck breast (I'll do a post about that, it's one of my wife's favorites), but it's better, in my opinion to cook a whole duck through completely.

After the birds had been in the oven for roughly 2 hours, I attempted to split them in half, thinking it'd be nice to have 4 half birds on the grill. I obviously needed a bigger knife, despite my knife being quite large, thank you very much (you can se it on the right side of the photo). I decided to abort the procedure before destroying my knife or making a mess. Sometimes cooking is about knowing when to say enough is enough.

 Once outside, I basted the ducks in my homemade thyme/rosemary syrup. It worked really well.

On the grill, the birds got nice and crispy, though I think they could have been baked a little longer in preparation.

And they got smoked as well! 

 After taking them off the heat, it's best, as with red meat, to let duck rest under aluminum foil. Of course, you want to actually cover them so that they don't get cold.

After 10 minutes' rest, during which the fibers retighten to prevent the juices from running out of cooking, you can carve the birds. Notice the super-cool circa 1975 platter underneath - it's been in my family since I was born, a true heirloom!

All right, that's all very well, but what to serve with the duck? I made a veggies stew with the following ingredients. Here I made a mistake. I intended to cook everything but the beans (fresh, shucked that morning) for a while and then add the beans. However, this meant cooking the cabbage, turnips, and carrots in too much water, preventing them from getting nice and crispy/caramelized with the onions.

In a future attempt, I will cook the beans separately and mix everything together at the end. Don't forget to put a bit of pork belly and herbs with the veggies, to give the sauce flavor.

For those without a grill, you can achieve the 'grill effect' by raising the temperature your oven to the maximum either at the start or the end of the cooking. Personally, I prefer to do it at the end, when the skin is pearled with greasy drops that will participate in the grilling process. No need to use the broiler unless your oven can't get hot enough.

Fish is meat

I know this has been mostly about meat, but I spent a good amount of time cooking fish during the summer. Technically, fish is meat, so I guess I'm not too far afield.

On these two photos, you can see what happens when you cook a fish on coals. As an aside, I filled the fish cavity with herbs and a couple of slices of lemon. The difficult part is to ensure that the fish isn't overcooked, and also that it doesn't disintegrate when it gets flipped. 

The trick that I learned is to let it grill significantly, until it gets nice and charred, and then flip it. 

On this one, you can see that I left a little too long. It turned out good enough to eat (frankly quite good), but it could probably have been flipped a little sooner. I didn't cook it quite as long on the other side.

You can do the same thing with any whole fish, fresh or saltwater.

Les forces de l'ordre

Sur le site du Figaro (28/08/12):

"Alors qu'il était en vacances à Porquerolles, le préfet du Var a été surpris à plusieurs reprises circulant à scooter sans casque, rapporte France Info. L'histoire est d'autant plus étonnante que Paul Mourier a fait de la sécurité routière son cheval de bataille.

Les habitants de l'île s'en sont plaints à la police, estimant injuste d'être verbalisés alors que le haut-fonctionnaire enfreignait le code de la route en toute impunité, précise de son côté Europe 1.

Conséquence : la police a été contrainte de s'adapter à cette situation peu commune.

Jean-Bernard Soriano, le secrétaire départemental d'Unité police, s'en explique à France Info : "Il est difficile pour un défenseur de l'ordre de verbaliser tout le monde et de fermer les yeux sur un haut-fonctionnaire qui lui-même se soustrait à des règles de simple bon sens."

Les forces de l'ordre sont donc désormais plus clémentes sur l'île de Porquerolles. "Il vaut mieux ne pas verbaliser que de créer une rupture d'égalité entre citoyens", explique Jean-Bernard Soriano. "

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On croit rêver... comme il est impossible de verbaliser le préfet (ah bon? ce n'est pas un citoyen comme les autres à qui s'appliquent les lois?) on ne peut plus du tout appliquer ces lois.

On se demande ce qu'il se passerait si on découvrait un préfet en train de tricher sur ses impôts, faudrait-il amnistier tous les fraudeurs afin de ne pas devoir poursuivre le fonctionnaire en justice?

Et après les gens se demandent pourquoi le citoyen lambda ne se sent pas concerné par le respect des lois...

Summer grilling

This summer, I had a grill, and seafood, and time.

I went to the market and bought some calamari and cuttlefish fished the night before. The calamari was so fresh that it was slightly transluscent. I decided to make ceviche with it, which is to say that I winged a marinade with some lemon, lime, and orange juice, garlic, shallot, herbs, and coriander. I added a touch of sugar to correct for acidity. It was delicious, if a bit goopy.

I then used the same marinade for the cuttlefish, priori to grilling.

I beheaded and gutted some sardines, which come fresh from local Breton waters.

 On some hot coals, I layed out my cuttlefish.

It really doesn't need to cook at all, so you can cook it as little as you want. Personally I like to see some caramelizing of the marinade, but be sure not to overcook, as it gets chewy.

Sardines on a grill.

The trick I learned recently is to way until they no longer stick to the grate to flip them.

All served for a nice and simple lunch with tomatoes and a few pan-fried vegetables.

Adventures with twice-cooked pork

In some Chinese cooking recipes for pork, you're to cook it twice. Once boiled (or some other slow-cooking method) and once grilled. I am not sure about the science behind this, but the taste is really good.

I tried this with pig ears in June, and I'd tried it with some fatback in my wok. This summer, I had access to a barbecue, and so I decided to give it a go with some spare ribs. My butcher likes to cut his spare ribs thick as a brick, including a few healthy layers of meat and fat on top.

To make this, I decided to boil the meat with some random herbs (random because you could use any herbs, really): thyme, laurel, and rosemary, together with some pepper and coriander. Once the meat had been in boiling broth for about 1.5 hours, I took it out, let it cool for a few hours - because I had a few hours, but cool is cool enough - and broiled it on the grill.

While broiling, I covered it with some thyme syrup that I'd made by making thyme tea and adding lots of brown sugar over heat.

I served with home-made chips and grilled eggplant. It was as good as it looks.

Grilled pig ear (BBQ) - and a côte de boeuf

On a recent (and one would say rare) sunny day in Paris, I headed over to a cousin's house to prepare a BBQ. I had decided to make 'côte de boeuf' and pig ear. The beef piece is out of the rib but without bone - though you can buy it with bone as well. In France, it is considered to be the most noble piece of the beef and was a bit of a splurge.

The pig ear, on the other hand, cost less than 2 euros. I boiled it for an hour before letting it cool and marinating it in a mixture of soy sauce, ketchup, and olive oil. Once it had been sitting in the marinade for about 30 minutes, I threw it on the grill until it was nice and grilled all over. 

The rule here is that you can't overcook a piece of cartilage. The longer it's cooked (boiled+grilled), the more tender it will be. In the end, it's crunchy and chewy at the same time, and quite fatty to boot. Delicious, in other words.

The idea of making this came after I made twice-cooked pork for my parents a few weeks earlier. I used pork belly (poitrine). After boiling the the meat for an hour with some star anise, I let it cool overnight and sliced it thinly. I then grilled it in a wok, set it aside, and made stir-fried vegetables to serve with it. It was amazing.

I don't have anything good to report about the beef, which I sadly overcooked. Here's a photo that shows just how nice a piece of meat it was: you can tell from the marbling and the nice color. The butcher also removed a nice layer of fat from the outside, which, along with the marbling, is a good sign that the cow's been outside, eating grass and getting cold - instead of inside, eating god-only-knows-what.

Pink slime - it's the new insult

Paul Krugman compares the latest Republican budget to "pink slime", and finds it wanting.

Good to know that the meat industry's sludge is better than what the people who are elected (and paid) to represent us are doing in Washington.

Eating beef pear - really!

One of the nice things about getting to know your butcher is that he'll sell you the "butcher's pieces" as they are known in France. These are little-known muscles that make great eating. The "pear" (la poire) is one of these muscles. It is a little round muscle, weighing in at a little more than a pound, with short fibers, and shaped like ... a pear! Right, that was tough.

It is very tender and makes great steak or fondue meat. As you can see, the butcher mangled it a bit, but that was on purpose as he removed all of the nerves from it. This makes me think that I should make a post about my butcher - soon.

I just grilled this puppy in a heavy pan, and put some salt and pepper on it when it was done, which is to say nice and rare. Delicious!

The absence of marbling might lead one to expect a dry piece of meat, and you'd be ill advised to overcook it on that account alone. However, if you keep it rare, it is a very delicate and tender piece of steak.

In pink, the part of the beef that "pear" comes from.

I'd be curious to know if it's even possible to get these cuts of meat in the US, where it doesn't seem that anyone goes through the trouble of identifying them, although perhaps it's what's called "round steak". I can remember that when my family first moved to the US in the late 1980s, and for years after that, the lack of correspondence between US and French meat cuts was a topic of conversation among French expats.