I was too busy to check the garden for a few days, and suddenly the zucchini were a foot long. I hope they’ve not turned to seed. The oversize cucumbers are great, though. Some of the zucchini will go into a curry for supper.
Category: Food
Ice cream for Lunch.
By Anivid in the south of France
It was a sunny day in April, a perfect day for trying out an ice cream dessert before the saison of tourists started.
Instead of lunch of course – ice cream desserts being on the rich & heavy side, especially when being enjoyed in the most luxurious place of the town 😉
The one I chose, called Melissa, consisted of vanilla ice cream, drenched with sauce caramel, sprinkled with caramel pieces, nuts, grilled pine kernels, cinnamon (your mouth water starts forming ??) and topped with a lot of chantilly (whipped cream). Finally two sticks of wafers as antennae for decoration.
It was served with the usual tap water carafe.
Need I say it was heavenly ??
Especially the combination of icecream and pine kernels was delicious, pine kernels as a soft chew together with the soft caramel and ice enveloping the toungue.
There was just the correct mix of everything, and it was so sweet & cold as to rise the IQ (my mother always told me to keep my feet warm and head cold 😉 and as the brains preferred energy source is carbohydrates – I thought my choice very wise (and my mother’s maxime satisfied 😉
I sat outside by the little stream led through the city and thoroughly planted with beautiful flowers following the changing seasons.
There might be not so pretty quarters elsewhere in the municipality, but the stream with its flowers & bridges are always kept picturesque – a joy to greet for citizens & visitors.
The pleasure costed app. 14 $ – and my mouth can still remember the feeling of its cornucopia 😉
Signing out Anivid, Southern France, Gastronomy & Culture
Chicken house move-in day
The chickens pose for a picture shortly after moving into their new house, before they had a chance to dirty it up.
The chickens moved into their new house today. They’re now 12 days old. They’ve spent the last week living in a box upstairs in my unfinished house, where they got in the way of all the work that was going on this week. Now that they’re older and the weather is a bit warmer, I’ve moved them into their new chicken house. They still have their heat lamp for cold nights.
My brother built the chicken house. We considered a number of designs for backyard chickenhouses, but we liked the house-on-stilts design the best. It affords some extra protection from predators and easier access for human caretakers. There’s a screen around the bottom, and a door in the floor of the chicken house. There will be ramp stairs between the two levels soon.
I’m still thinking about security from predators. I may put a run of electric-fence wire around the base of the chicken house and have a timer turn it on from dusk until dawn.
The plywood panel in the front is temporary, covering the spot where the nests will be. The nests will extend out from the front of the chicken house, with egg-robbing doors on the outside.
Chickens!
On Friday my mother and sister drove up to Stokes bringing me five baby chickens. The chickens were hatched the previous Monday. There are three barred rock hens and two golden comet hens. No roosters. Roosters cause too much noise and turmoil. I’m trying to learn more about barred rock and golden comet chickens, but they’re supposed to be hardy, friendly, and good layers of big brown eggs.
I have not had chickens since the 1970s. I’ve wanted chickens for a long time, so getting baby chickens is a big deal. My brother has built me a chicken house. A bit of work remains to be done on the chicken house, but as soon as that’s complete I’ll have photos. The chicken house is 4 feet square. It sits high off the ground on legs to help protect the chickens from predators. Right now it’s too cold for baby chickens outdoors anyway, so they’re temporarily housed in a box in the new house, with a heat light.
Neighbors have told me horror stories about the high risks to chickens around here from predators. There are coyotes, foxes, possums, raccoons and owls in the woods and hawks in the sky, not to mention dogs. I am still thinking about my chicken defenses. One neighbor says that defending the chicken house with electrified fence wire is the best solution. I may put up some electric fence and get double duty out of it to keep deer away from my vegetable beds.
Right now, I’m still nailing down my flooring, and that has kept me extremely busy. I’m almost done with the floor. Then I’ll be able to turn my attention to some other things, like chickens and the spring gardening work that needs to be done.
Irish bread
All winter I’ve continued my experiments with bread pones. Though the method I use is like making biscuits, still I think the bread is more like Irish bread than anything else. Irish bread is a quick bread. It’s always brown (at least, all the Irish bread I’ve ever seen is brown). Irish bread can be made with a variety of types of flour. And Irish bread varies from day to day and from cook to cook. One of the interesting things about the food in Ireland, which is very good by the way, is sampling different cooks’ take on Irish bread. It might be served with butter as a starter. Or with soup. Or with a meal. It’s like biscuits in the American South — every cook’s version is different.
I’ve experimented with mixing generous amounts of almond meal into Irish bread, and it works very well. I have a hard time cooking with almonds. They’re hard, and if eaten whole I’m always afraid of breaking a crown or something. But, using something like a coffee grinder, fresh almonds grind into a nice, oily meal. The Irish bread above was made from King Arthur whole wheat flour, almond meal, flaxseed meal, coconut oil for shortening, and soybean milk. That’s a great mix of amino acids for improving the quality of protein — legume, seed, and nuts.
I have no way of measuring it, but I assume bread like this would be pretty low carb, for bread at least. And it’s high protein. Almonds are expensive, and probably not very fresh, if bought in little packages at the grocery store. But bought in bulk from places like Whole Foods, almonds are less expensive than a lot of meat.
The risks of eating meat
Whether meat is good for you has been debated for decades. Now we have a new study, a huge study which included 500,000 adults, and the verdict is clear: Meat is very bad for you if you eat it every day. Eating meat every day increases the chance of early death (from heart disease or cancer) by 30 percent. For women, the statistics were particularly grim. For example, women who ate the most meat every day had a 50 percent higher chance of early death from heart disease.
One of my particular interests, as many of you know, is the analysis of propaganda. The Washington Post’s story on this study (which was on the front page), has a quote from someone at the American Meat Institute:
“Meat products are part of a healthy, balanced diet, and studies show they actually provide a sense of satisfaction and fullness that can help with weight control. Proper body weight contributes to good health overall.”
The fallacy in the first statement is easy enough to unravel: “Meat products are part of a healthy, balanced diet.” That is precisely the point the study addressed. How did the study’s conclusions differ from what the American Meat Institute says?
The second fallacy is more difficult to unravel, because it requires knowledge that many people don’t have. The claim is that science shows that eating meat can actually make you healthier because eating meat contributes to weight control. That is intentionally misleading. It’s actually fat and protein that provide satisfaction and fullness. That fat and protein can just as easily come from vegetable sources, and it will be a whole lot better for you. This is the way most propaganda works. A claim is made that may be sorta kinda obliquely true, but the fallacy can be detected only if one is aware of some other facts.
There are so many benefits beyond health from reduced consumption of meat. Meat farms use huge amounts of water and energy, and they cause nasty pollution, both to air and water. Meats these days are particularly dangerous because they contain hormones and antibiotics that factory farm animals are pumped with. Meat production also is inefficient, because the protein fed to the animal far exceeds the protein derived from its meat.
When you're craving something fried…
Sometimes the craving for something fried is irresistible. It can get bad enough to tempt me to start up the Jeep in the pouring rain and go out and eat something I shouldn’t. Sometimes hot homemade bread and butter will extinguish the fried-food craving, but I’m always looking for alternatives.
I’d rate a pasta and vegetable stir-fry about B- for curing a fried-food craving. But it works.
Start by browning lots of onion. Then throw in the cooked pasta and brown that too. The pasta in the photo, by the way, is whole wheat pasta — it’s not that brown from being fried. Pasta likes to be lightly browned. It gives it a nice chewy texture. Tonight I added some walnuts and let them get nice and hot with the onion and pasta. I used “broccoflower,” which is cheap and good here in the wintertime. To cook the vegetables, I threw in a little white wine and covered the pan until the broccoflower was good and hot. Then remove the lid and make sure all the wine has boiled away.
Browned onions are a great seasoning. It’s easy to forget just how sweet onions are until you’re reminded how nicely they caramelize.
Lunching out in Southern France by Anivid.
In France we still have midi, or siesta – meaning shops and offices closed from noon to e.g. 2 p.m. during workdays.
A lot of people are using the time for having lunch together in a nearby restaurant.
We chose a restaurant which is also a shop, selling bread, wine and specialties.
Every morning when going for the bread, I’m studying the menu cards, observing what’s today’s special in the different places.
Today it was Salmon, delicious cooked in foil with slices of lemon on the top and a couple of clams (cocquille Saint-Jacques) in each end.
Cooking in foil serves the same purpose as cooking in bain-marie, namely to keep the food out of direct contact with the cooking media, whether it be water or oil. When properly wrapped the food tend to keep more of its natural flavors and fragrances during this indirect cooking.
On the side we got a little bowl with chopped haricot vert (green string beans) and leek, and some rice as a mix of wild rice and rice from Camargue, the famous natural region in Southern France (the delta of the river Rhône) where the horses are bread, and where the wild fowls, live in the marsh.
The wild rice is also called water oats, as it botanically is no rice at all, but of a different genus (Zizania) than the white/brown rice (Oryza).
After the sumptuous meal (at $ 15.25) we took a stroll in the lovely spring sun, and soon found an open place where the outdoor cafées flourished.
Here they served us a nice petit café a concept which costs $1.50-1.90 all over France.
Coffee in France is rather on the strong side, hence the glas of water.
As always, the coffee was served with a little sweet on the side, a chocolate covered almond, pure chocolate, or as in this case, a little spiced cookie called Speculaas (originally dutch).
Signing out: Anivid, gastronomy and culture 😉
Local sweets
By far, the most royal of all the local sweets is the sourwood honey from the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a light-colored honey, delicate and floral. There must be rules about what can and cannot be properly called sourwood honey. Though the honey in the photo above is not labeled “sourwood,” the color and flavor are that of sourwood honey, though pure sourwood honey is probably a little lighter in color. A year ago it was selling for about $7.50 a quart. Lately it has been $9.69 at a little market in Walnut Cove.
The market also sells fruit preserves that are made without sugar. The strawberry and blackberry preserves are particularly fine. The ingredients are listed as fruit, grape juice, cider, and spices. The strawberry preserves sell for $5.99 a pint. The blackberry preserves cost about a dollar more.
Sourwood honey is incredibly good with hot buttered biscuits. And it’s great for dulcifying one’s herb tea.
The local sweet potatoes
I can’t rave enough about the local sweet potatoes. They’re cheap, they’re good, and they’re fine winter fare, “Rare ballast for an empty belly,” as Sam Gamgee said. They’re so flavorful that I don’t even bother to season them, not even salt. They’re highly compatible, though, with toasted sesame oil, a compatibility the exploitation of which I must explore.
I’ve got to try growing me some this year.