Poulet Vallée d'Auge

I had a chicken in the freezer, and it was a Label Rouge poulet noir — a black-feathered chicken from Brittany — and a bottle of hard apple cider that had been on a rack in the downstairs pantry for 5 or 6 years. And then I saw a guy on Cuisine TV make a chicken cooked in a sauce of cider and apple brandy. He called it Poulet Vallée d'Auge. There was my idea.

A poulet noir from a farm in Brittany —
the feathers, not the meat, are black

There was no recipe on the Cuisine TV site and I hadn't watched the show that carefully. So I found a recipe here: Normandie-Héritage. Just now I looked and finally did find a recipe (in French) posted by Laurent Mariotte, the chef I saw on Cuisine TV last week. It's here, and it's a little less complicated than the one I made. However, Mariotte's recipe doesn't include any apples, and apples are an essential ingredient in the area known as the Vallée d'Auge.

Cider from Brittany, 2% alcohol content

Of course, both my cider and my chicken came from Brittany, but that didn't stop me. As you might have surmised, the Auge Valley is in Normandy. It is the heart of what is called Lower Normandy, where the largest city is Caen. It is a region of very green hills and valleys, and it's cheese country: Camembert, Livarot, and Pont-l'Evêque, the three most famous cheeses of Normandy, originated there in villages bearing those names. The other essential products of the Auge Valley are apples, cider, and the apple brandy called Calvados, along with — as in all of Normandy — rich, thick cream and unsalted butter.

Cut the chicken into eight serving pieces.

The only thing you might think is complicated about the Normandie-Héritage recipe is that it calls for cutting up the chicken and making stock with the carcass. The parts of the chicken that you serve are the wings, thighs, legs, and boneless breasts. What's left after you cut those away goes into the stock pot with carrots, onions, celery, and herbs. Cover it all with water and simmer it for an hour to make a nice broth. You can make it ahead.

The chicken pieces browning in a pan in butter

You could of course use chicken broth you've already made or bought, and chicken parts that you've bought too. That would simplify things.

The recipe also says to lightly sprinkle or dredge the chicken pieces in flour. I think that's optional, but it's what I did. The flour coating makes the sauce stick to the chicken pieces when you serve it. There is no flour or other starch in the sauce itself.

One thing I really liked about the Normandie-Héritage recipe is that it calls for panning the chicken pieces in butter until they are browned, and then putting the pan in the oven to finish cooking. It doesn't specify a temperature or a cooking time — a lot of French recipes are vague on such details — but leaves it up to the cook.

The chicken before putting the sauce on it — we had it with rice.

The result is chicken that is more roasted than braised. Other recipes say to simmer the chicken in apple cider, which gives a different result entirely. I like the chewier texture of the roasted chicken with the sauce. Again, it's your choice.

The sauce is easy. It's approximately equal amounts of cider and chicken broth, with some shallots and cream.

Okay, here's the recipe — my translation and adaptation.

Poulet Vallée d'Auge

1 free-range chicken (about 3 lbs.)
3 to 4 Tbsp. flour
3 Tbsp. butter
Salt and pepper

The chicken carcass and aromatic vegetables in a stock pot

To make the broth:
1 chicken carcass
2 carrots
1 leek (or 1 medium onion)
1 stalk of celery
1 herb bouquet (bay leaf, parsley, thyme, etc.)
salt and pepper
water

Shallots and diced apple cooking in chicken broth and cider

To make the sauce:
6 or 7 shallots
1 tart apple (Granny Smith, for example)
1 cup chicken broth
¾ cup hard cider
2 Tbsp. Calvados (apple brandy)
¾ cup cream
2 Tbsp. butter

The garnishes:
3 apples
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. butter

¼ lb. pearl onions
1 tsp. sugar
½ Tbsp. butter

1 dozen button mushrooms
1 Tbsp. butter
salt and pepper

Cut the chicken up and set the wings, legs, thighs, and breasts (boneless) aside.

Cut the carcass into two or three pieces and put it in a pot with the other ingredients for the broth. Add enough water just to cover everything and set the pot on high heat. Bring to the boil and then simmer on low heat for 1 hour. Strain and reserve the broth.

When the broth is made, salt and pepper the chicken pieces and sprinkle or lightly dredge them in flour. Cook them in butter in a skillet or sauté pan until they are nice and brown. Set the pan in a 300ºF/150ºC oven for 20 minutes or until you're sure the chicken is done. Then turn off the oven, take the chicken out of the pan, and put it on another dish or pan in the oven to stay warm.

Pour off any extra fat left from cooking the chicken and sauté the shallots in that same pan. Peel, core, and dice the apple. Add the apple and the apple brandy to the pan with the shallots and sauté until the brandy has evaporated. Pour in the broth and the cider and let it all reduce by about a third on high heat. Add the cream and let it reduce again by about a third. When it's done, strain it.

Meanwhile, make the three garnishes (or at least the mushrooms — the pearl onions and apples are optional but delicious).

• Peel the apples and the onions. In a saucepan, glaze the onions with the butter and sugar by cooking them together on medium heat for 5 minutes.
• Core the apples and cut them into slices. Rub them with lemon juice, sprinkle them with sugar, and sauté them in butter in a skillet. Pour a little apple brandy into the pan and flambé it or just let it evaporate.
• In another pan, sauté or "sweat" the mushrooms in butter with some salt and pepper.

Put the chicken pieces and the garnishes on a serving dish and pour some sauce over all. Serve the rest of the sauce at the table.

A lot of recipes like this one instruct you to discard all the vegetables used for flavor — the carrots and leek or onion that cooked in the broth, the shallots and apple that cooked in the sauce. That's restaurant cooking for you. If you are serving the dish to family at home, save the aromatic vegetables and serve them with the sauce. And why not some steamed rice or pasta to go with that sauce and all the rest?

Stop thief!

I was doing some Google research this morning trying to find information about a château that is not far south of where we live. You can see it from the road, but it's privately owned and not open to the public.

One of the Google search results turned up a blog post with a picture of the château in it. I scrolled through it and paused on a couple of the other photos in it. Those look familiar, I thought. And then there was a photo that I knew was mine. This was not a blog I'd ever seen before.

A first glimpse of the Château de l'Estang

It turned out that somebody named Scott S. had republished one my my blog posts and all the pictures. It was not attributed to me at all. Here's a link. And here's a link to my post, the one he lifted. The funny thing is that his post containing my text and photos is back-dated to 2006. My original was posted in January 2008. So far, I haven't found any more of my posts on Scott's blog, but he seems to have lifted posts from other blogs as well.

An unpaved road through the forest near Orbigny

I think I might know who is he is, actually. He lives in North Carolina and used to write a food blog. We were in touch for a while. Then he and his blog disappeared. Scott in Durham, if it's you, can you leave me a comment or send an e-mail? And maybe give me a credit for the post of mine you re-published?

Getting closer now, with a better view

At any rate, I didn't find much information about the château, pictures of which decorate this post. It's called the Château de l'Estang. It dates from the 15th and 16th centuries and it's near the village of Orbigny (pop. 750), on the far eastern edge of the old Touraine province, 10 miles south of Saint-Aignan. There's nothing much else in that area. It's just a fine château sitting out in the middle of the country. People live in it, I think.

The view of the Château de l'Estang
from the paved road outside Orbigny

I wish the owners would open up places like this to the public once in a while. The same applies to the Château de Saint-Aignan, which is also privately owned and never open for public tours of any kind. It's a shame.

A close-up of the Château de l'Estang
that is stitched together from two pictures I took

The more I look at Scott S.'s blog, the more I think it might have been a test site to see how well posts from other blogs would be imported. I don't know. And by the way, all the photos in this post date from January 10, 2006. Be assured that now in January 2010, the Château de l'Estang is still there.

Kimchi — chou fermenté à la façon coréenne

I have now read all 119 comments that David Lebovitz got on his 2008 blog postings about making kimchi. Not to mention his recipes. David gave two recipes, here and here. You might think that would do the topic in, and I'm two years late in discovering all this. Reading it all informed me and entertained me, but didn't discourage me from going ahead and posting the rest of my pictures and text about making Korean-style fermented cabbage — chou fermenté à la façon coréenne. Here's a link to my first topic about kimchi.

One thing I find frustrating about a lot of recipes is that they call for ingredients I just can't get here in Saint-Aignan. Okay, I know I chose to live here. And I'm not talking about David Lebovitz's recipes. I'm talking about ones that say things like "add a jar of bulgogi marinating sauce." Where would I ever find that? Without driving to Paris, I mean. Or taking the train. Don't tell me to buy it — tell me how to make it. [End of rant.]

When I salted it down, the cabbage filled this pot.
A day and a half later, it had wilted down to this level.

Hell, I can't even find fresh coriander (well, only once in a great while) or green onions (a.k.a. scallions, spring onions) here in Saint-Aignan. Guess what — they only have spring onions here in the... spring! What I have to do is grow them, along with fresh coriander/cilantro, and I do, but this is not the gardening season. There's a good inch on snow on the ground, and the temperature hasn't gone above freezing for a week now.

I'm not sure I can even find Chinese or Napa cabbage in area markets and supermarkets. Maybe. Or maybe I'll be able to grow some in the spring. However, none of that makes me give up on the idea of making kimchi, for example, once that idea has taken root in my brain. Adapt, adapt, adapt, as they say in the translation business. You can't translate much if you stick to the word-for-word strategy. Or cook much. That's how I feel about recipes too. Adaptation.

Home-made kimchi, or spicy fermented cabbage

So when I got ready to make kimchi, I went to the supermarket and bought a French cabbage. The texture is entirely different, I know, but the taste is similar, and it's good. Savoy cabbage has crinkly leaves instead of smooth ones. Normally, it benefits from long, slow cooking.

I ended up chopping it up, salting it down, and letting it macerate in the salt for 36 hours. For one big cabbage, at least 5 lbs., I used three-quarters of a cup of coarse salt (gros sel de Guérande sans additif). I tossed the chopped cabbage with it and waited for the leaves to look slightly translucent and limp. That took a while. Then I rinsed the cabbage four times in fresh cold water, including let it soak in fresh water for an hour at one point. I tasted it as I worked. When the salty taste was just right, in my opinion, I stopped.

Rinse and drain the cabbage after salting.

Now I know about the theory that says the saltiness will go away as the cabbage ferments. And I'm sure it happens that way. The same thing applies to confit de canard (duck cooked and preserved in its own fat). You salt the duck pieces heavily. Then you cook them with all that salt on them if you plan to keep the confit for several months before eating it. Over time, the duck and salt will be transformed by a process of osmosis. The salt will meld with the duck and duck fat, and the result will be an incomparable taste that you wouldn't think of as particularly salty.

That's the theory about kimchi too, I think, but then you have to be willing to let it age for a long time if you make it that way. I wasn't sure we would want to wait that long, so I tried to rinse off the salt. We ate some of the kimchi only 24 hours after I put it in jars, which was 96 hours after I first salted it, and it was pretty tasty. And not particularly salty or strong-tasting. Just sweet, tangy, and spicy.

Mix the "dressing" with the wilted cabbage and let it sit
for a day before putting it in jars.

If you want to cook and eat duck confit right away, you rinse the salt off the duck pieces. You do the same thing with the French version of salted, fermented cabbage, which is sauerkraut or choucroute. You rinse it in three or four waters before cooking it in white wine. That is, if you can get sauerkraut that is not pre-cooked. In America, you probably can't. You probably can't get it cooked in wine either. Sometimes I can find it raw here, and it's much better if I cook it myself. In white wine, of course.

What makes my kimchi sweet is... well, at least three things make it sweet. Grated carrots, sugar, and fish sauce. That's Thai fish sauce, and it is one of those ingredients that I can find here in the Loir-et-Cher department of central France. I have to drive an hour to the Asian grocery in Blois to get it, but I make the trip a few times a year so that I can have fish sauce on hand. It keeps indefinitely at room temperature. The ingredients on the label are water, anchovy extract, sugar, and salt.

This is the kimchi we ate about four days after starting
the pickling process. It was crunchy, sweet, and spicy.

I also put vinegar in my kimchi. A lot of people say you shouldn't. The tangy taste should come from fermentation, some say, not vinegar. But a lot of recipes I've found include it. And vinegar, an acid, helps preserve vegetables and keeps bad bacteria from growing in and on them as they age. I feel safer adding vinegar.

It's hot pepper vinegar, by the way, which I made by pouring boiling vinegar over cayenne peppers that I grew and canned to keep for a while. At this point, I've been using the peppers and the vinegar for about five years. We had a good crop of cayenne peppers in 2004, and all subsequent attempts to grow them have been pretty much a failure. Go figure.

Anyway, here's the recipe for the "dressing" I put on the salted, wilted, rinsed cabbage once I decided it was ready to be put into jars as kimchi. It's not original. I got it off this blog written in French by « Madame Choi ». She says it is a kimchi that is slightly toned down for French tastes. French people are notoriously not tempted by overly spicy foods. I added more hot pepper than Madame Choi's recipe called for. I also added some of my hot pepper vinegar, as I said.

The "dressing" is carrot, onion, garlic, ginger, chili paste, and vinegar.

Madame Choi says to leave Napa cabbage in salt for at least 8 hours. As I said, my Savoy cabbage macerated in salt for 36 hours. This is my recipe, adapted and translated from hers, for 5 lbs. of cabbage, salted, then thoroughly rinsed under cold running water, and drained:

4 to 6 oz. coarse salt
1 lb. carrots, coarsely grated
2 onions, thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
1 two-inch piece fresh ginger root, crushed and chopped
4 Tbsp. chili paste
1 Tbsp. sugar
4 Tbsp. Thai fish sauce
½ cup rice vinegar
4 Tbsp. hot pepper vinegar

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. Add to cabbage and toss well. You might want to wear rubber gloves if you decide to use your hands to toss it.

Put the kimchi up in clean, hermetically sealed glass jars. Let it stand and ferment at room temperature for a day or two if you want, and then store the jars in a cold cellar or in the refrigerator.

Freezing fog

Freezing fog is a meteorological phenomenon that I've only ever seen in France. It happens here in Saint-Aignan infrequently, but more often in other places where I've lived and traveled, including Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, and Lorraine.

I don't remember such a thing on the U.S. East Coast or in the Midwest. Maybe I just missed it. We certainly had freezing rain or even ice storms fairly often, and those are really rare in France. This is a different climate.

The result of freezing fog is a thick, crusty frost.

Freezing fog was what we had yesterday morning. It was really cold by Saint-Aignan standards — the low was -7.5ºC, or about +18ºF — and a cold fog had blown over from the north during the night. The trees and grape vines were coated in a thick layer of frost, especially on their north side.

Friday 08 January 2010 in the Renaudière vineyard

Walt laughs when I say this, but I think we had what I'd call "river-effect" fog or frost. The effect of the river on the climate is much more attenuated than the effect of a big lake like Lake Erie or Lake Ontario is in Upstate New York, for example — but I think it's real. The river isn't frozen over, and it's relatively warm waters release just enough humidity into the air to create freezing fog along the south side of the Cher River when there's a frigid went blowing out of the north.

About half a mile out from the house

Next thing you know you'll be seeing pond-effect snow and fog, Walt said to me. Ha ha ha. But often there is fog over the river, down in the river valley, on chilly mornings, while it is bright and clear up here on the highlands where the grapes are planted. And, under similar weather conditions, I've seen it snow on the south side of the Seine, along the Left Bank in Paris, when it was bright an sunny on the Right Bank, to the north. So I'm sticking with my theory.

Click on the pictures with your mouse to enlarge them

Whatever it was, it was pretty. I went out for a walk with the dog early, and it was a veritable fairyland out there. But it was too dark to take pictures. The fog hadn't yet lifted, in other words. Besides, I needed to have gloves on to keep my fingers from freezing, and it's not easy to take pictures with a pocket-size digital camera when you're wearing mittens. Try it sometime.

You see, I did get out of the car to take a few closeups.

Later in the morning, I needed to go to the supermarket to get some things for the weekend. I drove out through the vineyard and took some pictures, basically from the car. The pictures in this post are just a few of the ones I took.

A close-up view of this scene is my current blog banner.

The reason I needed to go to the supermarket yesterday is that snow was being predicted for today. And sure enough, it is snowing this morning. It's supposed to last all day, with temperatures well below freezing.

8:40 a.m. and good news: the bread lady made it
up the hill with our baguettes for the weekend.
I looked out the window and saw her coming.

The icy weather means KP duty for me. I'm making Poulet Vallée d'Auge, a Normandy specialty of chicken cooked in cider and apple brandy (calvados) with mushrooms, shallots, cream, and herbs.