I tasted my green cherry tomato-pearl onion pickles recently and I think they turned out very well.  So I am passing on the recipe. Note that this same method could be used for many veggies, such as green beans, cabbage and cauliflower.

On a recent warm evening, a storm passed through Orthez, with wind and beating rain.  We were snug inside but the cherry tomatoes took a hit;  the next morning I discovered a lot of green tomatoes on the ground around the plants.  My mom used to make pickled green tomatoes using the same recipe she used for dill pickles…Why not give it a try?   We have just harvested onions , so the smallest these will make a great addition, along with a few cloves of garlic and a sprig of dill.

Since this is a new process for me, I sought out a recipe in my Grand-mother’s cookbook, The Lily Wallace New American Cookbook, circa 1949.  When I say it was her cookbook, I mean that it was the ONLY cookbook she owned, her go-to for everything about the kitchen, stuffed with more than 3800 recipes and advice on everything from canning pears to pickling tongue to serving an elegant afternoon tea to how to make a Sidecar.  The copy she passed down to me is full of mark-ups and notes in my grandma’s hand and stuffed with other recipes and articles she gathered somewhere along the way.

It selected a recipe for “Mixed Pickles”, recipe 3627, which seemed to be going in the direction I was hoping for.  The only change I made was that I salted the vegetables and left them overnight, rather than leaving them in brine for 16 days as the recipe recommended.  After that, I packed the vegetables into a sterilized jar with spices and dill, then covered with a mix of 50/50 cider vinegar and white vinegar, then sealed the jar. Now I just need to wait for 4 weeks and see how they turn out.  I will provide the complete recipe once I have tasted and made corrections.

In 2018, we planted a little apple tree in a sunny SE corner of our yard.  These days, it has grown to important size and yields a lot more lovely eating apples than we can possibly eat.  So after having given bags to all our friends and neighbors, and eaten apples everyday for a month, it seemed like a good idea to use the remaining box for chutney.

This recipe is based on Indian chutneys that I have enjoyed and copied. It is more in the savory-spice direction than the hot-spicy, so it makes a great accompaniment to grilled or roasted pork or even with broiled fish.

Cafe Presse chef de cuisine James O’Hern unveiled his new menu for Spring 2018 today with the traditional staff tasting.  The staff tasting is sort of a cross between a dinner party and a training class on all the details of the new menu; food, friends and lots of talk about the dishes.

Here are some photos to whet your appetite. Hope you will come by Cafe Presse soon to try the new dishes for yourself.

And watch this space for photos of the new dessert menu coming soon!

Preparations began today for the November Chef’s Dinner at Café Presse with the arrival of an entire half hog from Pure Country Pork in Ephrata.  The dinner, which is on Wednesday November 8, 2017, features a menu that makes use the whole spectrum of pig parts.

This afternoon, artisan butcher Darron Marzolf will be showing the Cafe Presse kitchen crew the finer points of breaking down a carcass, and after that the work of brining, curing, marinating and sausage making will begin.

Dinner by reservation only, call Cafe Presse at 206.709.7674

Here are a few more shots of the start of work…

In anticipation of a number or social engagements at our place in Orthez, I though I would make a little pâté.  A fat terrine full of county-style pâté is the perfect thing to have on hand to go with aperitifs.  It has long shelf life, and in fact gets better with a bit of age (I worked for a chef in Paris who claimed that to reach its peak flavor, a pâté should not be served until 28 days after it is made.  This put him in a bit of a bind, as the Paris health department had just decreed as a measure of hygene, that pâté could not be served if it was more than 30 days old,  a rule that my chef bitterly condemned.  When Paris outlawed beurre noir or black butter, which is the classic sauce with sauteed calves brains, on the basis that blackened butter is carsinogenic, he was ready to take to the barricades).

Pâté is also inexpensive and in theory, at least,  is easy to make, especially if you 1) plan to bake and serve it in a terrine and thus avoid any need for wrapping the forcemeat in caulfat or fatback – check- and 2) you have access to good quality ingredients – check also…or so I thought.  Which is where the above “in theory” comes in.

The problem is that  the ingredients for a country pâté, along with almost all abats or specialty meats as we call them in the U.S., are not available from the boucher, but from the tripier.  And in Orthez, the tripier is only in town on Tuesdays, when the town hosts the largest marché fermier in the area.  The butcher we visited looked very sad to tell me definitively that he could not provide the cuts of pork that I was asking for.

In the French system of butchery, strictly speaking, the job of selling meat is shared by four different professionals:  le boucher, who sells fresh meat and poultry but not pork;  le charcutier, who sells fresh pork as well as charcuterie, meaning cured meats, terrines, pâtés, sausages and the like;  le tripier, who sells tripes, organ meats, feet, ears and other odds and ends, and le boucher chevaline, who sells horse meat (that’s a whole other story).  This division of labor dates back to the old system of guilds, that also regulated what restaurants could sell to the public, for example.

In practice nowdays, there is a lot of ambiguity and overlap among these groups (we are taking about France, right?) as well as with le traiteur, who sells prepared dishes.  You often find bouchers who sell pork, as well as charcutiers who have a fresh chicken and a bit of meat and some prepared dishes all on display.  But for some reasons, organ meats are almost always on their own.  Go figure.

Fortunatly, there is a full-time tripier not far away in Pau.  I include a photo of his wrapping paper which makes it clear what bits of what animal he sells.

Anyway, back to pâté.  A quick conversation with Monsieur le tripier happily confirmed that he could provide everything I needed and that he shared my opinion as to the proper cuts of pork to use for country pâté.  Without a doubt, these are pork liver and pork gorge.  Gorge, which literally translates as “throat”, is a cut that is hard to find in the Seattle and consists of the fatty piece of flesh that covers the throat.  Officially part of the pigs head, from the point of view of a French butcher (see diagram above), gorge is roughly 50/50 lean to fat and has a strong, piggy taste, ideal for pâté.   I suspect that it is because of this strong flavor that it does’nt en up in an American butcher counter.

As I said, the recipe for a good pâté de campagne is pretty straight forward and everyone has their own variations.  Suffice it to say that you want about about one third each liver, fat and lean pork, so using gorge, you would use 1 part liver to 2 parts gorge.  Sounds fatty, but the reality is that you dont want to risk ending up with a dry, over-lean pâté.  If you are avoiding fat (why again?) I recommend smaller portions or choosing another project.

The other ingredients are some wine or brandy to marinate, some aromatics like onion, garlic or shallot, a few herbs, thyme is classic but other choices work as well, salt (figure about 1 oz for every 5# of meat) and spices (follow your own taste) and a few large eggs (I use 2 for every 5# of meat).

I don’t think a more specific recipe is helpful or authentic.  We are, after all, talking about a dish that started as a way to use up the left-over bits when a pig was killed.  Stick to the basic ratios of liver/fat/lean and you will be pleased with the result.

A few other tips:

The pâté will be better if you cut up your ingredients and leave them to marinate overnight with the alcohol (for this batch I used some cognac and some white wine) and aromatics.  Just put it all together in a shallow dish and cover with plastic.

I ground by hand (I love a challenge) but for larger batches, many butchers will grind for you; our friendly tripier in Pau offered.  For a country pate, the grind should not be too fine especially for the liver.  I like to grind the liver with a lean 1/2″ die and fat a bit smaller, say 3/8″.

The aromatics should be ground and sauteed in a bit of oil or fat before adding to the ground meat.  If added raw, they can have a raw, bitter flavor in the finished pâté.

Always fry off and taste a little of the finished pâté mixture before baking and remember that seasoning, including saltiness, is more pronounced in hot preparations than in cold.  Meaning that when you taste the hot sample, it should be on the salty side so that when you serve the pâté cold, it will be properly seasoned.

The pâté is cooked in a waterbath in a medium oven to an internal temperature of about 140 deg F.  It should then be cooled with a moderate weight on top so that the finished pâté is tight and not crumbly like a meatloaf (like my meatloaf anyway…never could make a very good meatloaf).

That’s all there is to it.  The next day the pâté is ready to serve, and will get better with time.  Serve with crusty bread, cornichons, mustards and your apero of choice.  I think that the liver in this pâté is complimented by a sweet wine like Jurancon  but light reds work well also (Beaujolais anyone?).  I have even tried it with a glass of Ricard, and found it pretty good.

It is also a good way to use plain preserved tomatoes in juice when fresh tomatoes are out of season.

We serve this chutney with steak tartare at Café Presse.

Fall in the Béarn is different than any weather I have experienced before.  Sure there is rain, even violent rain,  but there are also interludes of intense golden sunlight and clear blue skies between the towering storm clouds.  And the temperature jumps between 85 and 60 degrees as the fronts pass quickly over in succession.  Its not Seattle, that’s for sure.

The longer hot season here is reflected in the market stalls…tomatoes, peppers, and figs are still  well represented.  But that doesnt mean that fall has not yet arrived.  Grapes, an important crop in the southwest, both for wine and for the table are everywhere, on every farm stand as well as in the the farm trailers pulled behind tractors toward the local wine cooperative.

The table grapes are mostly the white Chasselas or Muscat red and white.  All three are very sweet and eat well, but I prefer the Muscat for its higher acid level, that makes it more lively (“vif”) on the tongue and a better foil with cheese.

Inspired by a dessert I enjoyed in an Orthez restaurant – Mousse au lait et sa confiture de raisins…milk mousse with red grape jam  – I decided to try my hand at grape jam (by the way, if milk mousse with grape jam doesn’t strike you as an appealing dessert, I must beg to differ…this was really good).  Which brings me to a question:  why is it that there is only grape jelly in the U.S. and not grape jam?  Anyone any ideas?  Maybe there is grape jam and I just haven’t seen it.

In any event, my jam making project started a little shaky…when I asked the Madame selling grapes at the Saturday Orthez market which was better for jam, Chasselas or Muscat grapes, she professed to having never heard of grape jam.  However she agreed that the higher acidity of the Muscat made it a more likely choice, and offered a discount on a case (her normal price was  3 euro 80 the kilo….I felt a little bad taking the discount until I realized she had miscalculated the case price… in her favor).

Without my copy of “Confiture” by Christine Ferber, I had to improvise quantities but figured her general method would work:  use about 40-50% the weight of the fruit in sugar, macerate overnight, then bring just to a boil and macerate again, then on the 3rd day, boil to consistency.  With grapes, especially grapes with seeds, I figured I would need to puree and pass the jam through a medium chinois at some point;  I chose to do it after the first boiling which seemed to work well.

The only other concern was whether or not I would need to add pectin or some other sort of gelling agent.  When I make jam from cherries, for example, which have pretty low pectin levels as fruits go, I add a bit of green apple jelly to give the finished jam more body.  Also, I remember my grandma making grape jelly and she always added pectin but then she put pectin in most jams and jellies, preferring a firm, almost slice-able texture.  Me, I prefer a looser jam and don’t like to add anything that might change the flavor of ripe, beautiful fruit unless it is absolutely necessary.  And a also guessed that pureeing the skins and seed in to the jam before the last boil would add a bit of body as well.

Anyway, the jam turned out nice, it needed about 20 minutes of hard boiling to come to consistency but has a very vibrant, fresh grape flavor (that is a great foil for barnyardy goat cheese, I can add from experience).  When I passed the jam though my least fine chinois, I lost about a cup of seeds and skin but the jam is nice and firm without being too bouncy.

Here are some photos of the process…and look for an actual recipe soon.

Thought you might like to see a few photos of the Winter dishes recently added to the Le Piche menu by Chef de Cuisine Jack Spiess.  Enjoy.

This 30 liter oak barrel, which once contained wine for Le Pichet’s annual Fete de Beaujolais Nouveau circa 2003, is now the home of our project to make our own vinegar.

Last week, the project was launched with 2 liters of good quality red wine vinegar, heated to a boil and used to scald out the interior of the barrel.  After that,  5 liters of robust young wine from the Languedoc were added.  The barrel, which had been preliminarily soaked in many changes  of cold water, both to remove any remaining wine from last decade and to cause the dry barrel staves to once again become water-tight, was then tucked into a warm closet.  There it will rest, over the next 2 months, while slowly more wine is added until the barrel is 3/4 full.

The results, to be confirmed by tasting (and PH testing), will hopefully be an ongoing 24 liter supply of oak-aged red wine vinegar.   If the results are good, we hope to start a barrel for white vinegar as well, space allowing.