Canard braisé aux navets

That means duck (in this case, legs-thighs) with turnips and braised in turnip broth. I first cooked the duck legs in my air fryer at between 170 and 180ºC (about 350ºF) for about 30 minutes). When they were nice and brown, I braised them in a pan on the stove in turnip broth — I had peeled and cut up four fairly big turnips and simmered them in water and white wine for an hour or so. The older the turnip, the longer the cooking time. Poke them with a paring knife or skewer to see if they are tender.

Put the duck legs into the basket of the air fryer (or a convection oven) skin-side up. After 20 minutes or so turn them over and brown the other side. (You could do small turkey legs or large chicken legs the same way.)

These are turnips. If you can get small springtime turnips they'll cook in less time. These were large so I cut them into chunks and put them on to simmer until they were tender. Then I sautéed and browned the turnips chunks lightly with chopped onion and garlic.

After the legs were browned, I put them in a small amount of liquid (vegetable or chicken broth) and let them braise and steam for a half an hour or more until the meat was tender too. Browning the duck first gives it good flavor and makes it look nice. Serve the duck and turnips with the braising liquid as gravy.

Cooking as therapy

Some of you reading this have mentioned that I must be feeling better now because I've started cooking again. A month-long cold had slowed me down quite a bit. From my point of view, the fact that I'm busy in the kitchen is the reason my santé is improving. Cooking keeps me going and the resulting food is nourishing and comforting. Here's a photo of the lasagna I made yesterday, ready for the oven. When it came out of the oven I was too busy eating it to stop and take more photos.

Today's project is a French classic called canard aux navets — duck with turnips. I know there are people who don't like the taste of turnips, but I'm not one of them. I'll cook the duck (cuisses de canard) in the air fryer, and when it's nice and brown I'll braise it with the diced turnips in a pan on the stove.I'm also going to serve it with some cassoulet beans. Pictures tomorrow...

A 'shroomy weekend

It all started when I went to the supermarket late last week. In the produce department, I saw trays of nice mushrooms. I thought, "why not?" and bought one. When I got home with my groceries, I realized we already had a bag full of mushrooms in the refrigerator. I needed to cook mushrooms over the weekend, that was for sure. I didn't want to see them go to waste. (This was about a third of them.)

The first thing I thought of was tomato sauce with pasta. Nothing fancy, just tomato puree from a jar with'shrooms, carrots, onions, ground beef, bay leaves, and red wine. That would make some hearty cold-weather eating, as well as some good leftovers for the freezer. It didn't take long to chop up all the vegetables and to wash and slice a good quantity of mushrooms. I made that on Saturday.

Yesterday, Monday, I still had an abundance of uncooked mushrooms. At the supermarket, I had also picked up a tray of veal stew meat, just because it had caught my eye. In France, that's called blanquette de veau because it's a stew made with crème fraîche (lightly soured cream) along with onions, bay leaves, carrots, mushrooms, veal broth, and white wine.

I just needed to make a white sauce (une béchamel) with butter, flour, water, white wine, cream, and the veal broth I had already made by simmering the veal with the vegetables in a pot on the stove for a couple of hours. Now we have leftovers of both tomato sauce (lasagna today?) and of blanquette for later this week. We're eating it with tiny elbow macaroni instead of rice. These are our idea of wintertime foods.

Recent photos

I don't think I ever showed you how the roasted red bell peppers came out the other day. They aren't the plumpest peppers I've ever found, but they taste good. I saved the liquid they produced and "dressed" the red pepper flesh with it, adding a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Picking all the seeds out didn't take too long.

This is a stir-fry of chicken breast meat, broccoli, red bell pepper, and onion that I made the other day. It was delicious and very colorful. I'll make it again (maybe with shrimp).

Looking west along the road where it passes our house. It's nice having the hedge beautifully trimmed. The south-facing windows you see are glass-block windows that we had solar-powered blinds installed over because in summer, on sunny days, the windows get so hot. We hope the white shutters will reflect some of the sunlight and heat away from the house.

Sunrise yesterday, 15 Feb. 2025, in a view of the neighbors' property taken from our kitchen window. Predictions are for sunny skies all week!

The shutters, the house, the yard, the neighborhood...

We enjoyed a rare sunny day yesterday, with an afternoon high temperature of about 50ºF. As a result, there was no cloud cover overnight, and this morning the temperature outside is just below freezing. The good news is that we're supposed to have another sunny day.

Above are a couple of shots of our house and some of our new shutters. They are solar-powered roll-down shutters. Push-button shutters are great.The black strip on the top left corner of each window is the photovoltaic converter that sends power to the shutters. On the right just above is a shot of our back yard, with its linden tree, two apple trees, and a garden shed that is slowly being taken over by ivy. I took the photo yesterday afternoon. No fog for a change...

Above left is a shot of the north side of our house, with its small window into the loft space over the living room (with the big window) and with, now, a new solar-powered shutter upstairs.

This is a photo of our Blois neighbors' house-in-the-country. It's just across the street from our place. The neighbors are supposed to be here this weekend but so far no sign of them. I hope everything is okay.

Le nouveau volet, et des poivrons rôtis

Here's what the new volet roulant in the kitchen looks like. By the way, un volet roulant (a roll-down shutter) is also called un store. In the first photo, the store is closed but the sheer curtains are open. In the second, the sheer curtains are closed.

While the five new shutters were being installed, I was in the kitchen roasting peppers that I bought at the supermarket the day before. I roasted them in the air fryer. Five of them fit perfectly in the fryer drawer. They came out looking beautiful. Now all I have to do is peel them (in theory, the skin just falls or slips off) and then de-seed them (also a fairly easy job but messy). The roasted flesh of the peppers will be good in salads or eaten on crackers or toast with some goat cheese (fromage de chèvre) or cream cheese (fromage à tartiner) and a little glass of wine.

La fenêtre de la cuisine, et les nouveaux volets

This is the window in our kitchen. It faces east, so it gets morning sun. It's cooler and shadier in the hottest part of the day, which is the afternoon. The window opening measures approximately 50 inches in width and 50 inches in height. It's a sliding, double-glazed PVC window that we had installed when we first came to live here, replacing an old French window that was single glazed.

French windows and doors traditionally open into the room they are installed in. In the case of this kitchen window, and in the case of similar windows in two small bedrooms in the house, that meant that as the the windows opened the glass panels pretty much swept across the entire room. One day, the woman who sold us the house in 2003 told me that one negative feature of the house (which her husband and his first wife had had built in about 1970) was something like les fenêtres sont trop grandes pour les pièces.

It took me a while to figure out what she meant. I think that was it. Sliding glass windows made a lot more sense, given the way the house was built. The window installer who put ours in told me later that he had been skeptical. He was pretty sure that we were going to hate the sliders. We didn't. It's what we had in San Francisco. I think they're great. Only the shutter (le volet roulant) on the kitchen window is a pain. First of all, it seems to take longer and longer to crank it up manually in the morning and down, again manually, at nightfall, as it ages. And it's dark when seen from inside the house as above.

Back in 2004, we had three windows on the back side of the house replaced with sliders. The old ones were leaking not just air but water. They faces west. We kept the old metal shutters for a few years but in 2018 had those windows fitted with roll-down shutters that are electric-powered. All you have to do is press a button and the shutter goes up or down. You can stop it when it's down or up far enough by pressing the button again. These shutters are solar powered, actually. You don't have to worry about power outages. And the sensor that re-charges the battery is powered even by dim daylight, not just sunlight. In other words, if we have a week or two of gray fog and rain, it doesn't matter. The shutters work just fine despite gloomy weather. They've been reliable for 6 or 7 years now. It's nice to be able to open an close the shutters without having to open the windows and let either hot or cold into the house.

Here's what the kitchen window looks like when the glass panels are closed or open and the old crank-operated shutter is closed. The wand and the crank mechanism are on the left. The new shutter that we're having installed today, along with new shutters on four smaller windows in the house, will be made of white PVC (vinyl). Two new shutters will also go on south-facing windows that really heat up when the sun shines brightly in summertime, making the house very hot. Two other new shutters will go on small, old, French-style windows that are single-glazed and drafty. They're up in the loft where we watch TV where we sleep. It will be nice to be able to "black out" the room in the daytime, and to be able to reduce evening and nighttime draftiness and noise.

Here's the kitchen window with the brown shutter and the curtains closed. Too dark, basically.

"The Endive Show"

I'm naming this post after one of Julia Child's many shows about French cooking. I found it in her book titled The French Chef Cookbook (30th aniversary edition). She cooks endives in several different ways, including my favorite way, which she calls Endives et Jambon, Mornay. It required first making Endives Braisées à la Flamande. As you can see in the photo above, I wrapped my braised endives in streaky bacon instead of sandwich ham (jambon de Paris).Here is a link to a video of Mme Child's endive show. The segment about ham-wrapped braised endives starts at minute 21:53.

The smaller pictures just above and below show the endives I made at four stages of cooking, the first three in butter, a squeeze of lemon, a glug of white wine, and four cloves of garlic. The picture on the right below shows the bacon-wrapped braised endives covered in cheese sauce and melted cheese after cooking in the oven.

This last photo shows the leftover endives in that cheese sauce and the boiled potatoes I cooked to accompany them and sauce. I've blogged about gratin d'endives au jambon many times in the past. Type "endives" and hit Enter in the Blogger search field to find the posts.

"Pulled" turkey "barbecue"

This how to make "pulled" turkey "barbecue (you can do the same with pork or chicken). In my case, I bought two leg-and-thigh sections of turkey. I seasoned them with spices including salt, pepper, paprika, etc. (to taste). Then I cooked them for about an hour in the air-fryer at medium temperature.

I took the pieces of turkey out of the fryer and let them cool so I wouldn't burn my fingers.The next step is to pull the cooked skin off the turkey meat and then pull the cooked turkey meat off the bones. Discard the bones. Wash your hands. Brown the chunks of turkey meat a little more in the oven or in a frying pan if you like it with more color and texture.

Take the chunks of meat that fell or got pulled off the bones and pull then into smaller pieces. Taste for seasoning and add what you like (BBG sauce, vinegar, spices, wine, a little duck fat (the turkey meat is very lean), and so on. It's is good on a sandwich bun with cole slaw; wrapped up in a burrito, enchilada, or taco; or in a kind of shepherd's pie (un hachis parmentier) made with mashed potatoes. It's all in how you season things.

Wok de porc aigre-doux

It all started with two ingredient ideas: pineapple and bell peppers. It finished as yesterday's lunch.

It turned out to be Asian sweet-and-sour-pork. You marinate and then stir-fry some small chunks of pork (or chicken) with onions and garlic. You make a sweet-and-sour sauce using tomato paste (or ketchup), some spicy red paprika (or some sriracha pepper sauce), some pineapple juice (out of a can), and then add some cubes of pineapple and strips of bell pepper to the stir-fry pan. Here's a link to a good recipe.

Rah-rah-rah raclette

I went out to the supermarket the other day — it had been a while — and bought quite a few packages of what in the U.S. we call "cold cuts" — salt-cured and smoked pork and poultry. The meats were not for sandwiches, but for the melted cheese dish called raclette. In the photo on the right above, you can see how the raclette cheese gets melted: in little trays that sit under an electric heating element.

We had potatoes we could boil, Brussels sprout we could thaw and sauté, and mushrooms we could cook, along with everything else, on the griddle that sits on top of the raclette appliance so that everything is served hot. Melted cheese went well with all of that.

It's kind of a do-it-yourself lunch or dinner that you make when the weather is cold and you've been out it in. It warms you up.

A dog, a cold, and the flu

On my afternoon walk with Tasha yesterday, I ran into one of our neighbors (Philippe is his name) out at our back gate. He was out walking his tiny dog — a chihuahua, I think. Tasha and Philippe's dog have always gotten along together without any aggression or hostilities.

Philippe had rescued the chihuahua (whose name I don't know) more than a few years ago — I can't remember how long ago it was. One day, I was just getting home from a walk with with Tasha when Philippe pulled up in his car at our front gate and asked me if I recognized the dog that was in the car with him that. No, I told him. Well, I just found him about a mile back, out in the vineyard, and he seemed to be abandoned. I told P. that just the day before a man I didn't recognize had walked by while I was out with Tasha. He was walking with a small dog. I couldn't remember exactly what his dog looked like.

The stranger and I had talked for a few minutes, and he told me he had just moved into a house at the bottom of the hill we live on. It's the first house on the left when you turn left off the main road down the hill, he had said. I told Philippe about that encounter. Well, I'll just ride down and see if he's at home, P. said. A few minutes later P. drove back up the hill and said the man was there, with his dog, out in the yard. His dog wasn't the one that had been abandoned or that had run away.

I think P. asked me if I'd be interested in adopting the unclaimed dog. I said, no I couldn't, I had my hands full dog-wise already. Well, I guess I'll just keep him then, unless somebody shows up to claim him. I'll take him on afternoon walks, P. said. Maybe somebody will see us and recognize him.

As I said above, that was many years ago. Yesterday out at the back gate Philippe asked me how I was doing. I've got a bad cold, I told him. "You too?" was his answer. I said yes, I've been coughing and sneezing for three weeks. Me too, he said. I asked him if he had he been to see a doctor. Yes, he said. The doctor just prescribed some cough medicine which from my point of view is worthless. I told him I had had had the same experience. Have you had a fever, I asked him. No, no fever, P. said, but very achey joints. Me too, I said. We wished each other Meilleure Santé and went on our merry says, him down the hill with his dog and me out into the vineyard with Tasha.

The saddest thing he told me yesterday was that an old friend of his had caught the flu (la grippe), which has also been going around the Saint-Aignan area. My friend came down with flu and a fever last weekend, Philippe said, and he died early this morning.

Beef-barley soup for lunch

Yesterday I made a big batch of beef-and-barley soup for lunch. We had about a cup-and-a-half of organic pearl barley on hand, and there were a couple of small beefsteaks in the freezer. The other ingredients we had on hand were carrots, potatoes, onions, thyme, oregano, white wine, mushrooms, bay leaves, escarole, and beef broth. Such a soup was nourishing, even fortifying, given the cold weather we've been having. Morning temperatures are down around freezing. Afternoon temperatures are milder, and we're getting some sunshine — well, we were until yesterday, when a thick fog lasted all day long.

Une galette bretonne

This is also known as a crêpe au blé noir or au sarrasin. Sarrasin and blé noir are The same thing, and it's what we call buckwheat in English.

The crêpe itself is made with buckwheat, milk or water, an egg, and some salt and pepper. This is not the prettiest one we've ever made, but it tasted good. Inside or on the crêpe is a slice of jambon de Paris, a slice of cheese, some pre-cooked mushrooms, and an egg.

Here, in a photo I took in Feb. 2012, is what we hoped yesterday's crêpe au sarrasin would look like, but you don't succeed every time. At least it tasted good.