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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 I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France!
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This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right. |
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Seasonal Lunch
We had friends over for lunch yesterday. There were eight of us which to my mind is about ideal for a lunch or dinner party. Enough people to make conversation flow, but not so many that there can't be a table wide conversation. In any case this group worked well; lots of good conversation in which everyone participated. We started at 12:30 and finished at 5:00 PM. One of the joys of retirement is that four hour lunches on a week day are not an issue. As our weather has turned and its definitely fall now (although yesterday was brilliant) the menu was seasonal and a bit more robust than I've been doing. We had stuffed calamari as a starter followed by slowly roasted belly pork with roast squash, potatoes and Brussels' sprouts, then a bit of cheese (Chaource & St Felician) and an orange cake with ice cream for dessert. A very simple menu, but tasty & filling.
I was particularly pleased with the stuffed
calamari as the recipe was one I made up myself. Since I'm not possessive
about recipes I'll give it to you. I bought pre-prepared then boiled/simmered them for about an hour. Anything much less and they'll be tough. As you can see at the right they're nice big ones. Next you need to prepare the stuffing. In this case I wanted a smoky fishy taste so I used smoked haddock. I could have used any smoked fish; salmon, eel, trout, whatever. In any case you need to flake the smoked fish fairly finely. You can see what I mean below.
Once this is done you need to peel & finely chop
some shallots (or onions if you don't have any shallots) then gently fry
them in some olive oil. Let them cool a bit,
I deliberately haven't given you any measurements as it so much depends upon the size of the calamari & how many you're doing. Here's what my mix looked like:
You can fiddle with the mix consistency by adding cream & bread crumbs alternately until you get a mix you like. Anyway once the mix is done stuff the calamari by just poking the mix down the shell. You want them to be full, but don't stuff so hard that you break the shells. All of this can be done several hours in advance.
Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of the actual cooking, however, its pretty straightforward. In this case I put a bed a Mache (lambs lettuce) on a place & drizzled it with a lemon juice, olive oil & touch of mustard dressing with some sale & pepper in it. I simply fried the calamari in very hot olives oil until they browned, I turned them frequently. I placed the calamari on the Mache bed and put some finely julienned red bell pepper over the top just for looks. The result was great! All the guests and even my best critic, Linda, loved it. Unusual, tasty and pretty easy to prepare. Here are a few pictures of other parts of the meal;
Here's the squash. Cut in half, deseeded then
sprinkled with freshly grated nutmeg with a dab of butter in
The belly pork early in the roasting process on the left and later by 3 plus hours on the right. This was just before I turned on the top grill to crisp up the crackling. Not the onion peeking out. There were 10 half onions underneath the pork.
Squash and potatoes in the other oven. On the right my orange cake. I'm not fancy with my decoration, but the taste was there. We gave all of the uneaten cake to our guests to take home so as to save ourselves. Here's all that was left:
Not much! Which is good. A thoroughly enjoyable lunch. I enjoyed the company and I enjoyed the cooking. I'm very pleased with my new calamari recipe. Try it, you'll like it
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