Steak au poivre for a birthday

Somehow I've managed to catch a very bad cold. That's un gros rhume in French. Je tousse (I'm coughing), j'ai le nez qui coule (my nose is running), et j'ai mal à la gorge (I have a sore throat). I have no energy and I'm sleeping 15 hours a day. Except for the miserable cold symptoms, maybe that's a good way to get through the winter.

It was a huge steak (565 grams) and we have leftovers for today.

Yesterday was Walt's birthday and we made our “traditional” birthday dinner of steak au poivre (pan-seared steak served rare in a black pepper & cream sauce) with pommes de terre frites and salade verte. It's a dinner Walt had in a restaurant in Antibes, near Nice on the Côte d'Azur (the "French Riviera"), when he turned twenty-something in 1981.

The sauce is also good with the French fried potatoes.

We spent his birthday together in 1982 and I cooked steak au poivre for him — he didn't really think I knew how to make it, but it was a dish I had learned to cook during my time in Paris in the 1970s and early '80s. Unless my arithmetic is off, this is the 30th year in a row that we've enjoyed the birthday steak au poivre together — and the ninth time in France.

Don't forget the French bread (delivered by the village baker)...

The dinner yesterday was excellent, featuring a big, thick slice of what is called rumsteak in France. I think that's a transliteration of the term "rump steak" but I'm not sure it's the same cut of beef. Whatever it is, it's very lean and pretty tender. The sauce made with crushed black peppercorns, cognac (or the Normandy apple brandy called calvados this time) and crème fraîche goes really well with it, compensating for the meat's lack of fat.

...or the red wine, a 2010 Saint-Nicolas de Bourgueil
from the Loire Valley.

Maybe this cold will go away before Christmas Day, but I'm not counting on it.