Beef Bourgignon with a few carrots

FROM MY KITCHEN BLOG, Ian's French Kitchen

The French have a gorgeous traditional beef dish from Burgundy, Boeuf Bourgignon.    I've put my own slant on it here to make it "Traditional English cooking in France".  The wine really should be a bottle of Burgundy red..... but I tend to use any good full bodied red wine.

This recipe is so incredibly easy,  and relies on a slow cooker to gently simmer everything for about 12 hours.

I hope you love it as much as I do

Beef Bourgignon

1 tbsp duck fat (use olive oil if you don't have duck fat)
600g beef shin, cut into large chunks
100g smoked streaky bacon, chopped  (Lardon)
2 onions, peeled and chopped
3 carrots peeled and sliced 
4 garlic cloves crushed, peeled and sliced
2 heaped tablespoons Herbes de Provence
1 small can tomato purée
1 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
750ml bottle red wine, Burgundy is good 
A glass of water

200gms mushrooms, sliced into largish chinks

In the Slow Cooker
Heat the duck fat in a frying pan and brown the beef for about 3 minutes a side.  (cook the beef in batches)  Toss the browned beef in flour then add to slow cooker.   After frying the beef, fry the bacon, onions and garlic in the same pan, adding a little more goose fat if needed.  Add to slow cooker

Reserve out the Mushrooms and put the rest of the ingredients into the slow cooker.  Give everything a good stir

Cook for 4 hours on the high setting and then a further 8 hours on low.

Add the mushrooms 2 or 3 hours before finishing.  (after about 9 hours cooking)

From time to time check the mixture for liquid and give a stir

Another Pech Bessou Gourmet Evening

Saturday night was the date for another gourmet evening at one of our local vineyards.  I wrote about this annual event last year and you can read that post here

For these evenings, which are very popular in this part of France, you wander along, taking your plate, knife and fork with you, and of course, the all important wine glass and then you sit at one of the communal tables and eat what ever produce has caught your eye and you have bought.  The local farmers bring their produce, transformed into delicious dishes....

This year, our local pork farmer brought his mobile barbecue set up and produced delicious escalope of pork, pork chipolatas and Saucisse de Toulouse, a beautiful thick sausage, very similar in texture to a Cumberland Sausage.    Sauscisse de Toulouse is my favourite so that part of the decision making was easy.  The meat, which was cooked simply in its own juices was soooo good and was accompanied by a fried potato and onion dish, pomme sarlataise.

Next came the question of a starter and as many of you will know, when I spied "foie gras de canard", I was sunk.   On this occasion the foie gras was served on a simple slice of bread and accompanied by the most exquisite apple segments, which had been delicately sautéed in white wine. Another tour of the stalls revealed a cheese producer from the Pyrenees with a superb creamy Brebis.

Brebis is the name given to a cheese made from sheep's milk and the Pyrenees are famous in France for this particular type of cheese.

Just desert left to choose and with two excellent choices what could I do but opt for both, sharing them around the other guests at our table.

Some of the tastiest strawberries I have yet eaten this year, and yes, that includes those I pulled from my own garden, had been grown within a few miles of the event and were being sold by the grower, and a tourtiere.  A kind of Apple tart......with attitude....  it's covered in layer after layer of the thinnest crispiest pastry flakes....

Of course, to wash this all down, the hosting vineyard were selling their own wines, by the glass or by the bottle...  I opted for a bottle of Red and a bottle of Rosé to share at the table.

And finally, the entertainment.  My favourite local band. Les Tourist's provided their own brand of music, humour, excellence and just occasionally, total anarchism.  Their rendition of classic French and English songs was wonderful and to hear three French lads playing and singing classic Beatles tracks, to visitors who had just arrived from Liverpool, was something never to be forgotten....  Up on the stage they continued with a fabulous version of the Blues Brothers Everybody needs Somebody.  If ever you are in this part of France. make sure to catch this band.

What an evening, thanks go to Sylvie and Pascal of "Clos du Pech Bessou".  Their web site says that they are concentrating on production of high quality wines....  I believe they have achieved the production of high quality evenings as well.

A Fun Time

I had a fun time the other day. We held a barbecue and invited several of our neighbours.

We barbecued some local pork which I had marinated in Brittany Cider, local onions, garlic and mushrooms. I used “sel de guerrande” which is a sea salt also from Brittany, that seems to go especially well in marinades with cider. The salt is harvested in huge ponds of sea water which are sealed and then left to evaporate in the sun. The resulting salt is exquisite.

Various neighbours brought dishes to share made with produce from their gardens. We had a very nice mixed leaf salad with so many different salad leaves it is impossible to list them all – in fact I’m not even sure what some of them were, but it sure tasted good.

Then another of our neighbours brought the famous Clafoutis. I posted an article about clafoutis recently. Clafoutis is a tart made from cherries and with a sort of custardy base. I don’t know how to make it, and living in this part of the world, I would never dream of trying! However, I do know how to eat it – slowly and savouring every mouthful. She had made it that day with cherries from her garden.

Sadly, I was busy trying to coax a very recalcitrant barbecue to get hot enough to cook pork so I didn’t get any photographs.

The day before the barbecue I had, once again visited my friend Bernard at his vineyard. We had some guests staying with us who wanted to buy some wine to take home and that was quite enough reason for me! We visited with Bernard and enjoyed the tour of his vines and chai before moving into his cave for the tasting. I was not on form on Wednesday so my translation was lees than perfect and on more than one occasion I couldn't find the English words for things like the Vats!

Our guests tried several wines, all from his vines from the light, fruity 2007 rosé through Bergerac Sec, the dry white to the rich ruby red 2004 Bergerac rouge. 2004 and 2005 produced very different reds in Bergerac and it is always interesting to see the look on peoples faces as they taste the two and I explain that both wines have been made by the same man from grapes from the same vines and using the same methods. The only difference is the weather the grapes grew up in!

Towards the end of the tasting I was telling Bernard about the barbecue but, sadly, he was unable to come as he would be leaving very early the following morning for a market several hours drive away. He produced a bottle of his rosé and tipped somewhat less than half a small tasting glass out probably no more than 50ml. He replaced this in the original bottle with a sweet syrup of Peach. Then pushed the cork back in and shook the bottle.

The result was a wonderfully tasty aperitif with the peach adding a very special and pleasant flavour to the rosé. I took the bottle with me and served it, well chilled, as the aperitif at the barbecue the following evening. Everyone really enjoyed it with several of our French neighbours demanding to know what secret recipe I had discovered. I was pretty pleased to be introducing people from this wine growing region to an aperitif with which they were not familiar and which they enjoyed so much.

In the garden here nothing much is happening. The weather remains awful with lots of rain and not much sunshine. Temperatures at this time of year should be up into the 30’s C (upper 80’s into 90’s F) but last week the highest temperature I recorded was 24 C (75 F) with a low of just 10C (50F). However, the weeds are growing prolifically and in most cases are far outstripping the crops. I read on other blogs that this is pretty much the same across France.