Le Père Noël in Saint-Aignan

Yesterday I did something that I very rarely have to do any more — I got in the Peugeot and drove into Saint-Aignan to buy some bread. We don't have a bread delivery on Mondays, and since we were cooking Walt's special birthday dinner for our noontime meal, I thought we really did need a fresh baguette or two to have with our snails and steak au poivre.

The weather was clear and mild, so I took my camera with me into town, thinking that I might take pictures of some of Saint-Aignan's Christmas decorations. No such luck. I didn't find any interesting decorations that I wanted to photograph.

I had already found the photos here in my archives a day or two earlier. They're from 2005, and the decorations were just at the foot of the bridge over the Cher in Saint-Aignan, at the bottom of the main street leading up to the center of town. I have to go back down there tomorrow, so I'll look around a little more and see what I find.

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P.S. and a funny one at that. I just opened a jar of kimchi (Korean pickled cabbage) that I made nearly 6 years ago and have had stored in our cold pantry (cellier) since then. It looks really good and smells good (if you like the smell of pickled cabbage!) I think I am going to eat it. If I die of food poisoning, you will know why.

Stay tuned. I'm not planning to eat kimchi today but maybe tomorrow. On verra...

Foie gras for Christmas

Here's one way you can buy foie gras — the liver of a fattened duck — for the holidays in France: en bocal. The foie gras is sold in a vacuum-sealed jar that you need to keep in the refrigerator, even before you open it. The use-by date says the unopened jar is good until October 2017, but warns that you must consume the foie gras rapidly once you break the seal. It's perishable.

This foie gras is the whole liver (foie gras entier) of a duck raised and fattened in the Gers (pronounce the S) department in southwestern France, on the southern edge of the old province of Gascony (Gascogne). It will serve eight to ten people and it cost the equivalent of about $15 U.S. at the supermarket. The French eat more foie gras than any other people. It's good served cold, spread on slices of toasted pain de campagne with a garnish of fig preserves, for example, and a vin blanc moelleux or liquoreux like a Sauternes, Monbazillac, or Vouvray. In other words, a fine white "dessert" wine.

The capital of the Gers department in France is the town called Condom. It's a funny bilingual joke to note that the ingredients in the jarred foie gras are the liver of a Gers duck, salt, spice, and a preservative (nitrite de sodium, en l'occurence). Ha ha. I won't explain...

Seriously, foie gras de canard is really delicious. It's a seasonal treat for us. I really don't think that the fattened ducks whose livers go into the jars are necessarily treated any worse than other animals that are raised for human consumption — turkeys, chickens, pigs, cows and steers, fish, oysters, snails...

By the way, today is Walt's birthday. We won't be having foie gras but birthday steak au poivre, our annual tradition.

Rouge

This is a photo that I took 10 years ago. Maybe it's the car that Père Noël (France's Santa Clause) comes to town in. I took the photo on the market square in Saint-Aignan.

And another 2005 photo — a shop in Saint-Aignan that went out of business a few years ago. Last week we noticed that it has been re-opened with a slightly different name: Côté Choco’Thé.

In 2007 on this date, here's what our weather was like. I also see from looking at old pictures that we had snow on the ground on December 20, 2009. Not this year. We're still enjoying our warm spell.

It's almost time to go out with the dog. Bon dimanche.

Louisiana gumbo with shrimp

Louisiana cooking is based on three main flavoring ingredients that they call "the holy trinity" or something like that: onions, celery, and green bell peppers. Along with a roux and some meat, that's the basis for what is called a gumbo. Why gumbo? I'm not sure, but in French — and French is one of the three or four languages that are or used to be spoken in Louisiana — gombo is the name for the vegetable we call okra. Gombo is an African term. Okra can serve as a thickener in stews and soups. Plus, it tastes good.

Yesterday I made a gumbo. It was Walt's idea. We had the vegetables except the okra, a couple of pieces of chicken, and a bag of frozen shrimp, so the ingredients were in the kitchen. We also have plenty of hot red pepper powder and flakes, along with some Louisiana hot sauce that I brought back from the States recently. The ingredients in the hot sauce are not numerous or complicated: hot red pepper, vinegar, and salt.

The first step in making a gumbo is to make the roux (especially if you don't have any okra). It's simple: put 4 or 6 fluid ounces of vegetable oil or melted butter in a big pot. Add an equal amount of flour and whisk it into the oil to make a smooth paste. Cook that paste until the flour turns brown. You can cook it in a medium oven for a long time or you can just cook it (in less time) on top of the stove. Keep an eye on it and don't let it get too dark. The color of peanut butter is what I aim for. A roux, which is also the basis for white sauces like béchamel in France, can be white, red, brown, or black in Louisiana.

While the roux is cooking, dice up the vegetables. Most gumbos have some tomato in them. I decided to use oven-dried tomatoes from this past summer's garden in mine, but if I'd had fresh tomatoes or even tomatoes out of a can, that would have been good too. Another essential ingredient is chopped garlic — say 5 or 6 good-sized cloves. (Not shown in the photo above are the bell peppers — I used frozen ones from Picard.)

Since I didn't have any smoked sausage, which is another Louisiana ingredient — they call it andouille down there, but it's a smoked pork sausage and doesn't resemble French andouille (made with pork intestines) at all — I decided I could use some lardons fumés to give the gumbo a slightly smoky taste. I sauteed the lardons (bacon) first, actually, and used the fat they released as part of the fat to make the roux (for more flavor). I also put a couple of chicken thighs into the pot to brown along with the bacon.

Another flavor ingredient in the gumbo, which is a stew, is broth. In this case, I peeled the 3½ dozen shrimp I had and boiled the shells (not the shrimp themselves!) in a light chicken broth with bay leaves, hot red pepper flakes, black peppercorns, and allspice berries. That cooked while the roux was turning brown.

The next step is to toss all the chopped up vegetables, including the dried tomatoes if that's what you're using, into the hot roux, along with the lardons, and stir all that together over high heat until the vegetables start to look cooked. At that point, add a couple of quarts (liters) of broth to the stock. In other words, strain the shrimp broth into the roux and vegetables (and then discard the shrimp shells, bay leaves, and spices). The roux will thicken the broth nicely. Add as much water as you want to get the desired thickness and consistency. Don't forget to add salt and even some herbs like oregano or thyme.

Voilà ! Let the vegetables cook in the stew for about half an hour. Add the browned chicken thighs (as many as you want, really) at that point, and let them cook in the stew for another 15 or 20 minutes. Then turn the heat down to low, or even completely off, and toss the shrimp (peeled and deveined) into the pot. Let the stew sit for another 10 minutes and the shrimp will be cooked just right. Serve the gumbo with steamed or boiled rice. Don't forget the hot sauce (Tabasco, Texas Pete, Piri-Piri, or whatever you've got).

P.S. I forgot to mention that since I didn't have any okra, I added some green beans to the gumbo — those big wide, flat Romano (Italian) green beans. I put them in the gumbo when I put the chicken in.