Fêtes des Lumières Sunday
Sunday I invited Julien and Jean-Louis over for dinner at my place. Holy crap is it harder hosting guests when it's just you alone doing it. With Christian, one of us would clean while the other cooked, but I had to do everything myself and it took twice as long.
I had finally bought a sabodet from the market to make only the second or third recipe we've made from my Lyonnais specialty cookbook. Sabodet is a coarsely cut pork rind sausage, and the recommended way to cook it is to slow cook it in a bottle of beaujolais wine for three hours. It works pretty well, leaves you with lots of fatty, meaty bouillion and the accompanying potatoes in thickened beaujolais sauce are quite good. Christian had warned me to not take many risks and follow the recipe, because I tend to experiment quite a lot in the kitchen, with a poor track record (25% success, 25% utter failure, 25% near success where I added/screwed up one ingredient and 25% where it's not clear what's mucking up the dish). However, ironically, the highlight of the evening was the soup I made as an entree, a complete experiment. It had a courge (=pumpkin) base, was creamy (something I can't do with Christian) and featured that mystery vegetable crôsne. Even though I hadn't added any coconut milk, it had that kind of exotic, hard to place flavor and was really tasty. I felt bad because Julien had made a courge soup just the night before and Jean-Louis was rather untactfully saying mine blew Julien's out of the water (in all modesty, it did). It feels so good to create something that's such a success. And it's nice being reassured that there's not just one talented cook in this family :-)
I had finally bought a sabodet from the market to make only the second or third recipe we've made from my Lyonnais specialty cookbook. Sabodet is a coarsely cut pork rind sausage, and the recommended way to cook it is to slow cook it in a bottle of beaujolais wine for three hours. It works pretty well, leaves you with lots of fatty, meaty bouillion and the accompanying potatoes in thickened beaujolais sauce are quite good. Christian had warned me to not take many risks and follow the recipe, because I tend to experiment quite a lot in the kitchen, with a poor track record (25% success, 25% utter failure, 25% near success where I added/screwed up one ingredient and 25% where it's not clear what's mucking up the dish). However, ironically, the highlight of the evening was the soup I made as an entree, a complete experiment. It had a courge (=pumpkin) base, was creamy (something I can't do with Christian) and featured that mystery vegetable crôsne. Even though I hadn't added any coconut milk, it had that kind of exotic, hard to place flavor and was really tasty. I felt bad because Julien had made a courge soup just the night before and Jean-Louis was rather untactfully saying mine blew Julien's out of the water (in all modesty, it did). It feels so good to create something that's such a success. And it's nice being reassured that there's not just one talented cook in this family :-)
