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Welcome to French Food Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food and because I live in rural France the stress will be upon French food. Not that I will limit myself to food only. There are numerous posts concerning life in France, comments on life in general and, certainly, opinions about anything that strikes my fancy.
I welcome your comments and promise to publish all of them good & bad so long as they're not offensive, pornographic or rude.   A note on why I moved.

This is our village. Our house can be seen to the left of the picture.    

We've decided to downsize. You can go to this website for full details:
www.campdelmas.com.

OR

If you'd like a vacation in France we rent out part of the house as a gite. Have a look here: www.camp-del-mas.com.

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E-mail: yankinparisot@gmail.com
 

A new way with steak

I love a good steak, but they've been hard to find locally. The local beef is very flavorful, pretty tough and too lean. Luckily, one of the local supermarkets has started selling Irish steaks. A consequence of the recession I suppose, but our gain anyway.

This beef is well aged and well marbled. Its what as an American I'd call a bone in rib eye steak. My absolute favorite cut! The question was; how to cook it? Normally I just crank up the BBQ, but its been cold outside so BBQing isn't a lot of fun. On the other hand Linda doesn't much like the fat from frying beef around the kitchen. Add to this the fact that I prefer my beef to be cooked far rarer than she does and you can see that I have a problem.

The solution? First season the steak to your taste. (I like to use Salt & pepper, some garlic granules and crunched up bay leaves.) Heat a good heavy frying pan to a very high heat. Have your over heated to at least 200C. Add a bit of oil (vegetable or olive) to the pan. Put the seasoned steak into the very hot pan and cover it. Brown the steak for only a minute or so then turn it over. Give it another minute. Now put the steak in the hot oven and cook for around five minutes.

Next take the steak out of the oven and let it rest for a minute or two. Now cut the steak into strips of about an inch wide. If they're done your taste fine. If not put the strips back into the hot frying pan, uncooked side down. Cook, turn over to do the other side then test again with a small cut. In this way you should be able to get the exact degree of doneness you want.

This may take a bit of practice, but not a lot. Linda is in heaven because now she gets her bits of steak exactly the way she likes it. I'm happy because mine's just right & we're both happy because the kitchen is still clean. Because the full rib eye cut is so large this works for up to four people.

Try it. It works!

I'm still working on setting up a Podcast for my more political ramblings. Turns out to be more work than I though, but I'm getting there. So far I don't much like the appearance even though it seems to play  without problem. I'm still looking for a better solution.