Oh, I’m glad someone else thinks that is weird.
Depends how big your bedroom is, and how big your bathroom is, I suppose. 
Neither here are big enough, though we did have a short bath in the bathroom before a reconstruction in that area. Wish we had it back now, short bath plus shower is better than no bath plus shower.
Mind you, the seemingly redundant small bath is in the garden still. Maybe time for a second reconstruction.
I swear by my Instant Pot electric pressure cooker - nothing like the old stove top versions. Same results as a slow cooker but in minutes rather than hours. It’s magic for things like risotto for example.
There is an extremely friendly and helpful FB group. I gave my slow cooker away and don’t miss it one bit.
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It’s brilliant Dave, we use it all the time. Had it for two years and we use it three or four times week and the food tastes great. We even do mussels most weeks and they taste great.
Gosh yes - I’d forgotten about my lovely (old-fashioned) Prestige pressure cooker. But I don’t think it works very well with french meat - which never seems to become tender (not that I taste it) - but appears to be still gristly and hard to cut.
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Hi - please amend your user registration to show your full real name before posting again. Thanks!
You can make fantastic confit de canard in it too 
I stayed in a hotel in Belgium which had a loo in the bedroom. Just a loo, in the corner of the room, no partition or anything. Very peculiar. Also in Belgium but in a private house, in the kitchen, what looked like a cupboard was in fact a shower. Strange.
That’s very odd. You might need to check that you are buying the right cuts.
How do I confit duck legs in the slow cooker… I’ve got the legs and the cooker… just need a few tips… please 
So you wouldn’t want to lie in bed and enjoy the sight of your wife stepping out of the bath -
As they say in South Africa, “Ach, shame …”
Or maybe I’m the ‘weird’ one!
Vero - I’ve lived here long enough to know that french meat cuts are not the same as UK. I also know enough to read and understand the labels, and I know what the different descriptions mean, and how each cut is supposed to be cooked. A similar, and lengthy conversation, took place on a different forum, some time ago, with many UK ex-Pats making the same comments as I have made here - French meat is tougher than UK because it is not ‘hung’ in the same way; therefore it needs to be cooked differently, but even then it is not as tender as UK produced beef.
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Rub with salt and thyme add a few cloves of garlic, then cure the legs in the fridge for 24-48 hrs. I think the lower time is better as the curing reduces the water content and the meat is less likely to be too dry
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Rinse the meat very well , otherwise it’ll be far too salty, then pat it dry.
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Melt the duck fat (sufficient to cover the legs) and place the duck legs around a bulb of garlic with the top sliced off. I like my confit to be moist and try to keep the cooking very gentle with temp between 80 and 90°C , so you may need a cooking thermometer. Two and a half hours cooking time should be about right.
Afterwards strain and keep the duck fat ( you’ll now have more than you started with) and notice that the last batch of fat that you drain from the bottom of the pan will contain a lot of duck jelly, which is an amazingly rich flavouring to add to anything (except possibly breakfast croissants). Likewise the confited garlic which will have turned into a rich purée.
I make batches of confit de canard about every three weeks and vacuum seal the legs, as they take up much less room in the fridge than the traditional method of storing them under duck fat.
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In many parts of France the local pasture is less rich than in the UK, but we get our beef from the Cantal, which is also a major dairy area and the quality is superb.
However, you may be less fortunate and also many French butchers don’t hang their meat for as long as traditional UK butchers; fortunately there’s several ways around this;-
- Buy your meat regularly from a single butcher rather than a supermarket - he’ll do all sorts of extra things like getting you unusual cuts.
- Ask the butcher where the meat’s from and for how long he hangs it.
- If you’re really into steak learn how to dry age it in your fridge - not difficult.
- Marinate your meat. Brebis yoghurt is a much more effective marinade than traditional European ones based around wine, vinegar, mustard, lemon juice etc. This is because it tenderises the meart without drying it out to the same extent and surprisingly doesn’t automatically make it taste ‘Middle Eastern’. The flavouring can be done by adding herbs or spices to the marinade.
I think you will find that Vero has lived here for quite a long time too.
She’s also quite good at cooking.
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Cat - Stop being so ‘touchy’; I never said anything about how long Vero had been here. I’m damn certain she’s an excellent cook… It was the implication that I didn’t understand what I was buying - OK. I do know - and I’m not the only one who ‘feels’ that french meat is tougher than UK due to various reasons.
Some of which are mentioned by Mark H - who has some interesting thoughts about regional variations. I do know the dairy cows around the V-sur-Lot certainly do look very thin and scrawny compared to UK ones.
Mark H - that’s an interesting suggestion about Brebis yoghurt - and isn’t one I’ve come across - will certainly try it. I’ve also tried soaking cuts of beef in coca-cola for 24 hours. I know it sounds odd, but Nigella Lawson had suggested this to tenderise a hock of ham; I thought - hmmm, if it works on pork maybe it’ll work on beef. It does to a certain extent - seems to soften the meat somewhat before cooking - but have to make sure it’s throughly rinsed away. Sweet cola is not the flavour one wants when eating a beef casserole or even beef bourgignon !!
I did try to ‘dry age’ a nice cut of beef in my fridge - wasn’t very successful - maybe I need to be reminded of the proper way of doing that.
Heat up the slow cooker, give the legs a good wipe all over and then sprinkle them all over with salt and pepper. Add other seasoning if you want, piment d’Espelette etc. Pack them into the slow cooker skin-side towards the pot, bung the lid on, go to bed. In the morning hey presto, confit and a pot full of lovely duck fat! I stick it under the grill for a few minutes to get the skin nice and crisp when we eat it.
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I am exceedingly surprised that it should still be tough and gristly if properly cooked in a pressure cooker, or for that matter a slow cooker or even just a cocotte. Even the frightful old shin I buy at Intermarché comes out falling to bits and velvety and without any hint of gristle (I cannot bear gristle after years of UK boarding school).
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Vero - I tried cooking chunks of casserole beef in my pressure cooker. The meat chunks reduced in size by half. And they weren’t easy to cut into smaller chunks - they were tough. So never tried using pressure cooker after that. My problem is that as a vegetarian I don’t eat this meat - all I can do is go by the way it cuts, the way it looks - and OH who sometimes has a mutter about ‘chewy’.
As a rule of thumb then - if you’re using even the horrible shin stuff - if you’re able to cook it so that it is, as you say, falling to bits - just how long do you have to cook it for - how many hours in an oven ?
And for how long in a slow cooker ?