Tian de courge, et pintade au tourne-broche

On Saturday, Walt went to the open-air market in "downtown" Saint-Aignan and bought a pintade — a guinea hen — for our Sunday dinner. Yesterday we roasted it in the oven using the stove's rotisserie feature. As a side dish (or maybe it was the main dish) he made a recipe from Richard Olney's Provence: The Beautiful Cookbook — a Tian de courge, or winter squash gratin. The recipe is below.

A tian is a Provençal gratin dish, and I thought this one was amazingly good. It's made with pureed winter squash — ours was a potimarron that grew in our garden, but butternut or even pumpkin pulp would be good — and with leeks cooked in olive oil, eggs, cream, parmesan cheese, and a grating of nutmeg. The leeks especially, but also the parmesan and nutmeg, add a lot of flavor and make the squash puree really delicious. The topping is grated parmesan and panko (Japanese breadcrumbs).

Walt modified the recipe slightly, because he started by roasting the squash in the oven and then mashing and whipping the squash pulp into a smooth puree, instead of cutting the raw squash into chunks and cooking them down in a pan with the leeks. You can do it either way. We had some julienned and steamed collard greens as a garnish.

The pintade came out really good too. I put sage (we have a plant out back), parsley (growing in pots on the terrace), a dried cayenne pepper, some allspice berries and black peppercorns, a shallot, and two garlic cloves in the cavity. The bird cooked on the spit, turning over a pan of water so that it steamed and roasted at the same time, keeping the meat moist. We ate half of it...

Le 11 novembre

Today, November 11, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne that ended the Great War, also known as the First World War. The Allies had managed to outlast Germany. More than 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians were left dead.

Nearly every town and village in France has monuments to the military personnel who died in the Great War. This one is in the little town of Vouvant in the Vendée.

It stands in front of the village hall (la mairie) and across the road from the village church. Nearly 1.5 million members of the French military forces were killed during the war and another 2 million were injured, many gravely.

About 900,000 British military personnel also lost their lives. U.S. losses included nearly 120,000 members of the military. Tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians in many countries, including France and Germany, were killed. It took Europe many decades to recover from such losses. Lest we forget...

La mijoteuse, or "slow cooker"

The first time I ever used a slow cooker, called une mijoteuse (a "simmerer") in French (or, sometimes, un mijoteur), was in 2014. I decided to order one from amazon.fr. It was a Kenwood appliance with a capacity of 6 liters. The porcelain insert or cuve (vat or pot) that you cooked food in was heavy and, as it turned out, fragile. In other words, it was made of crockery (stoneware or earthenware), and that's why slow cookers are sometimes called crock-pots (Crock-Pot is actually a brand name).

After about three years of use, the porcelain cuve developed a hairline crack. I'll never know if the crack was simply caused by temperature changes, or if I cracked it when washing it in our porcelain sink. The vat, while it worked well as a cooking vessel, was simply too big and heavy to be practical. Once the cuve developed its hairline crack, which was basically invisible, it starting leaking cooking liquid into the slow cooker's heating unit (the "housing"), which was messy and dangerous. Prematurely, I had to get rid of the Kenwood cooker. The one in these photos is the one I use now.

So when I ordered a new mijoteuse, I looked for one with a light-weight cuve. On amazon.fr, I found a Russell Hobbs model that has an aluminum cuve with a non-stick cooking surface. It's great. Its capacity is also 6 liters (same as 6 quarts, basically) and a cooking vessel of that size works well for us because we usually make large quantities of simmered or slow-cooked dishes and plan on having leftovers. In addition, the aluminum pot is light-weight and unbreakable, so it's very easy to wash in the sink, despite its size. (I'm not sure if Russell Hobbs slow cookers are sold in North America...)

The other great thing about the aluminum insert is that you can put it on the stove over a gas flame or on an electric burner and cook in it. That's it above, as it looks when you put it on the stove top. In other words, you can brown meats and vegetables in the metal "crock" and then set it, hot, in the slow-cooker's electric heating unit, add just a little bit of liquid, and let everything braise or simmer slowly. You have just one pot to wash when the cooking is done. Besides, it has high sides so fat doesn't spatter all over the stove when you brown ingredients in it. (Reminder: it's made of aluminum so won't work on an induction burner.)

Actually, I find that meats brown in the slow cooker anyway if you don't add too much liquid to the pot. Let the food make its own liquid. For example, the two turkey legs above cooked in the mijoteuse for 8 hours and came out browned. The key is to add very little or no liquid, and in this case the liquid I added was just a splash or two of white wine (Chardonnay) vinegar and a couple of splashes of Worcestershire sauce. I of course put in herbs (thyme, bay leaf) and spices (cumin, cloves, hot red pepper flakes, black pepper, salt...) too. It's easy to take the meat off the bones of slow-cooked turkey legs and thighs and then make it into pulled meat (that's what we call "barbecue" in North Carolina).

Vouvant : l'église (2)

Here are a few more photos of details of the church at Vouvant, en Vendée. Vouvant is only about 15 km (10 mi.) north of where our gîte was located. The first church was built here in the 11th century, but not much remains of that building.

Above is the north portal of the church, which is called L'Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption. The lower, street-level part of the north portal is one of the oldest surviving elements of the building, dating back to the second half of the 12th century.

The Vouvant church was declared a historical monument in 1840, and it was the object of major restorations in the late 1800s. The north portal was restored but it doesn't seem to have been greatly modified, just cleaned up.

The rounded arches of buildings like these signal that the architecture is in the style that has been called Romanesque since about 1820. The style is descended from Roman building traditions and pre-dates the development of the Gothic architectural style of the 13th and 14th centuries.

The upper part of the church's north portal is Gothic. I posted some photos of the whole portal and details of the Gothic portion day before yesterday.

As I've said before, these are crops out of larger photos that I took on Sunday, October 21, 2018, on a bright sunny afternoon in Vouvant. The camera I was using is a Panasonic Lumix ZS40 (TZ60 outside North America). I took the pictures at a resolution of 18 megapixels. As always, you can enlarge the photos to see more detail.