From potée to soupe

The second time we ate some of the potée, 2 days later (see yesterday's post), I decided to transform it into something that didn't much resemble a one-pot boiled dinner. I also decided we didn't need to eat the two sausages (Toulouse and à l'ail) that had cooked along with the vegetables, veal roast, and chunk of pork breast. So I put the sausages in the freezer for later, and I started cutting up some of the vegetables into bite-sized chunks. I sauteed those vegetables in some olive oil, and I heated the meats up in the oven. Then I made gravy — une sauce blanche or veloutée — using flour, butter, some of the potée broth, and cream. It was a different kind of lunch. I still had boiled vegetables, including turnips, leeks, parsnips, carrots, celery, and kale, in the fridge.

The third time we ate potée (again 2 days later), I decided to make soup. I had a lot of highly flavored broth left — maybe 2 liters. — and quite a lot of meat and vegetables. Making all that into soup is a time-consuming process, because everything needs to be finely diced.

Being a retired person who doesn't have any obligations outside of the house helps. And I have nearly infinite patience when it comes to working in the kitchen to prepare good food.  It also helps that I don't like to see anything go to waste. And I really believe in planning and preparing the food you plan to eat over the coming days. If you're not prepared or haven't planned, you end up eating... well, just whatever. At least I would.

P.S. Today is Walt's birthday, so we'll be making the traditional steak au poivre for our dinner at noontime.

So here's the soup. Diced potée vegetables, veal, and pork, to which I added some corn and peas (Walt's idea) for color and flavor. And potée broth plus what remained of the gravy/white sauce from a couple of days early, which enriched and thickened the broth just slightly.

We had one more potée meal ahead of us, because there was too much soup to eat at one sitting... More to come.

Une potée à ma façon

The other day, in writing about oven-roasted magret de canard, I mentioned turnips. They're a classic accompaniment for roast duck. Just look at some of these French recipes for canard aux navets. For our lunch a few days earlier, I had boiled and then sautéed some turnips — both yellow and white — for a dish called a potée, and some of them were still in the frigo.

A potée is a boiled dinner. Every French region has its own style, with different meats and vegetables according to what the local specialties are. Sausages, different cuts of fresh, smoked, or salt-cured pork, and even beef or poultry can go into the pot, with winter vegetables including turnips, parsnips, cabbage, carrots, onions, leeks, potatoes, celery... and even beans.

I put kale from the garden in our potée. I just went out and pulled two dozen pretty leaves off the Tuscan "dinosaur" kale plants growing in the garden and cooked them in the broth with the other vegetables and with the meats you see below. This is my favorite kind of wintertime cooking. I learned about making potées from a woman who ran a charcuterie (pork butcher's shop) in Paris, when I lived there back in the early 1980s. The charcutière liked to explain to her customers how the different cuts of pork she sold should be cooked. It was always good advice.

As usual, again this time I made far too much food for the two of us — too many vegetables and too much meat. Veal shoulder roasts were on sale for a good price, and even though it's unconventional, I decided to include one in the potée. I also put in a smoked garlic sausage (saucisson à l'ail fumé) and a big chunk of lean pork "belly" (poitrine de porc), which was sold already cooked and just needed reheating in the broth (photo above).

Here's how we ate the potée the day I cooked it, with some butter on the veggies and Dijon mustard with the meats. We had a lot of meat left over, including most of the long plain pork sausage (saucisse de Toulouse) you see in the first photo above. I put what was left of both the sausages in the freezer to re-cook during the holidays (we always make a cassoulet on New Year's Day...). I didn't have a firm plan for the bounty of cooked vegetables, but I knew that they wouldn't go to waste. That's how I ended up having those turnips to serve with the pan-roasted duck breast and white beans. To be continued...

My morning view

This is what I'm looking at these days as I sit in the living room in the early morning hours — as I'm working on my laptop, putting together a blog post. It's dark outside.

On the right is a closer view of the tree. Today, several things are on the schedule. We're taking the Citroën in for it's biannual inspection. Then we're going to the supermarket to do some holiday shopping. Not only do we have to think about foods for our Christmas Eve and Christmas dinners, but Walt's birthday is on Friday, so we need to get foods for a birthday dinner as well. This ranks as a busy day in our Saint-Aignan lives.

Magret de canard aux mogettes (et aux navets)

This is a duck breast filet (un magret de canard) that I roasted in a pan in a hot oven. In other seasons, Walt would cook this morsel on the barbecue grill. Whether you plan to roast it in the oven or on the grill, the first thing to do is to score the duck breast's skin and fat using a sharp knife.

The term magret is related to the French word maigre, meaning lean or meager, because the duck breast is less fatty than other parts of the duck. Still, the magret is the breast of a duck that has been fattened to produce foie gras, which is a holiday treat in France.

First I heated up a heavy pan in a very hot oven, and then I put the magret in the pan skin-side down so that the skin would be seared. I slid the pan back into the hot oven. At high heat, the magret cooked in about 10 minutes. Then I took it out of the oven, put the meat on a platter, and covered it with aluminum foil and a kitchen towel to let it rest for 10 to 15 minutes. That way, it continued cooking, but slowly. Magret de canard is good cooked rare or medium-rare.

Letting the meat rest once it comes out of the oven allows residual heat to spread from the outside toward the inside of the roast, so it will be evenly cooked through and the outside won't be burned.

To accompany the magret, I heated up some big white beans called mogettes, which are grown in the coastal Vendée area where we spent a week back in October. The beans were put up in a jar and we bought them at the supermarket here in Saint-Aignan. Beans, water, and some salt — that's all there was in the jar.

Beans, white or green, are a classic accompaniment for duck. I also had a few already-cooked Italian flat green beans in the fridge, so I cut those up and added them to the mix. And I had some left-over sauteed turnips in the fridge too. Turnips are another classic side dish to have with duck, so I added those. As you can see, the duck was cooked fairly rare — medium-rare, anyway — and was very juicy. Searing the skin, which covers a generous layer of fat, produces a lot of melted graisse de canard, which is perfect for seasoning beans and other vegetables (including potatoes). Besides duck fat, all I needed to add was a grinding of black pepper.