Christmas Eve activities on a stormy day

This morning I'm seeing stars, and I mean that in the very best way — out the bedroom window, in the sky. One is so bright it might be the legendary star of Bethlehem. I think it's probably Jupiter. Yesterday, after the winds came the rains. The high winds lasted all day. At nightfall the skies opened up and dropped buckets of rain on us all night. I'll be interested to see how much water is in the rain gauge tout à l'heure.

We stayed busy all day yesterday, almost racing to get things done in the kitchen in case our electricity went out because of the strong gusty winds. The first thing I needed to do was wash and trim about 4 pounds (a peck, I think that is) of collard greens. I had picked them out in the garden the day before. I wanted to cut out the stems and just save the nicest leaves to have as a side dish with our Christmas Guinea fowl capon and oven-roasted buttercup squash. It took me less than an hour to pick through the collard greens one leaf at a time and trim them up. Out in the garden, I left the plants in the ground with their newest and smallest leaves still growing, hoping that they will give us new crops January, February, and March.

A 12-liter pot of fresh collard greens, grown in our garden outside Saint-Aignan

At the market on Saturday, I bought a chunk of smoked pork belly, known here as poitrine de porc fumée (smoked breast of pork), from the charcuterie stand where I used to buy things a lot more often than I do nowadays. I don't know why I've sort of stopped going to the open-air market in Saint-Aignan. Maybe it was because nearly every Saturday over the first six months of 2013 was rainy. And then I was in Paris for a few Saturdays in July, just before the vegetable garden harvest kicked in. Anyway I'm glad I got the poitrine fumée this time. You can see how I cooked it with the collard greens. I also had a good chat with the woman I have in past posts called Mme Doudouille.

That's a chunk of smoked bacon about an inch thick. Most of these greens will end up in containers in the freezer.

The next thing to do was to start the process of making the stuffing for the chapon de pintade. I had got a piece of veal (200 grams or about 7 oz.) from the butcher and also used a packet of supermarket lardons fumés of the same weight. Walt ground all that meat using the grinder attachment on our KitchenAid stand mixer. I wanted to lightly cook the meat with some flavor ingredients — a chopped shallot, a pinch or two of dried thyme and ground cloves, a smashed garlic clove, some hot red pepper flakes and black pepper — and let it cool and blend overnight, before it was time to stuff it into the bird.

Pork, veal, and shallots for stuffing

Today, I'll add some chopped, cooked chicken livers to the mix, and a couple of raw, beaten eggs as a binder. Oh, and a handful of shelled and coarsely chopped pistachios (pistaches californiennes, it says on the label). Then I'll stuff the Guinea fowl before putting it on the rotisserie in the oven to cook for a couple of hours.

I'm trying to make a meat stuffing like I remember eating with poultry in restaurants in Paris back in the 1970s and 80s.

Finally, it was time to get the Christmas Eve fondue savoyarde — a cheese fondue — ready. That meant weighing out 200 grams each of Gruyère, Comté, and Emmenthal cheeses, and then grating them. We didn't take any pictures of the fondue as we made and ate it, but I can tell you it was good. Maybe not as good as last year's, when we used a cheese called Beaumont de Savoie instead of Emmenthal.

We couldn't find any Beaumont de Savoie this year. I think it melts more smoothly and liquidly than Emmenthal, and has at least as good a taste. Maybe next year. This morning I have to get to work on finishing the stuffing and getting the bird into the oven. Walt roasted the buttercup squash yesterday, so lunch is almost ready. Oh, he also made a beautiful blueberry tart, using blueberries that he picked at a farm over in the Sologne last July and froze for use in cakes and pies all winter.

Merry Christmas and Bon Appétit...