Has everyone finished off their Christmas and New Year leftovers?
We’re down to a few bits of Bleu de Gex and Comté which we’ve brought in from the balcony cool box to the fridge.
Obviously since it’s only the first week of Jan there’s still a good chunk of fruit cake left [‡‡ see below] – and in the freezer there are
Final 2 portions of Boeuf Bourguignon from Christmas Day [1.5kg of jarret made 6 servings – first 2 for the day, next 2 for a couple of days later and these last will go into a pie in the next week or so.
A few of the readymade canapés from Picard [decent quality frozen food store, if you haven’t got one in your part of France – highly recommended!]
Some frozen asparagus [also from Picard]
Are we typical?
One of my friends back in the UK says her “garage freezer is still packed” [as opposed to the one in the kitchen] but my retired hotelier chum who recently moved to Les Sables d’Olonne reports: “First New Year without leftovers, since our big thrill of living here is to go fresh food shopping almost every day.”
‡‡ My special fruit cake. No icing, no added sugar. Made late November with a mix of dried fruit [mostly raisins and apricots ], diced apples and pears, all marinaded 24hrs in beer. Then ‘fed’ weekly with a measure of Calvados. So we call it Normandy fruit cake.
We ate the last macaron yesterday…nothing left now. I hate wasting food. Although we did have a couple of odd meals of left overs…swedish juniper red cabbage with a spicy venison tagine (for me) and bubble and squeak with crab tamasalata (for him) was a bit weird.
I fully agree with your hotelier friend @Ken_Welsby. It’s a joy being able to get good quality fresh food as easily as we can here. We ate well enough in the UK but here it’s fantastic!
I’ve also found as I get older that the traditional British Christmas fare (with inevitable leftovers) is just too heavy for me to cope with and having good access to lovely fish helps a great deal with that. The only leftover we had was as a result of my decision to try making a Charlotte Russe - it’s quite difficult to make one of those for less than 6 big portions and there’s only 2 of us…
We bought a goose, which might seem a lot for two fairly small people, but we shared one breast on Christmas Day with a ‘stuffing’ made from the liverand bits, froze the other breast and I confited the legs and wings. Had the confited legs on New Year’s Day with Puy lentils cooked in poitrine fumé and cabbage; a simple, but very fine meal, and we still have the pleasure of the rest over the coming weeks.
Thanks, it was! Just wish I could afford to confit goose every week. Instead for the rest of the year, I’ll resume normal routine of confiting six cuisses de canards every third week. I buy them locally and they work out at about 2.50€ each.
