Tarragon chicken with celeriac mash

One thing that really irritates – OK, there are many things, it’s called getting old – is the price we have to pay in the supermarket for those little packets of forced herbs that taste of practically nothing. But what do you do? You need basel, tarragon, whatever, in January so you stump up the cash and mutter under your breath. The answer, we hear you say, is to be seasonal and not buy them and, of course, you are absolutely right. And we do try to be seasonal but there is something about fresh herbs in cooking for which there is no substitute – even when they are crappy, overpriced packets.

So having choked to buy a packet of tarragon for the rabbit with mustard and bacon we had to have a second dish to make sure we got to use every last sprig. And since they aren’t designed to sit around for many days it had to follow the rabbit tout de suite. So this is what we cooked last night. It ticked the January New Year’s resolution, healthy-eating box too – well it did until we added the butter and cream …

We also added some dried tarragon to give the fresh a bit of a leg-up.

serves 4

• 800g sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 200g celeriac, peeled and chopped
• 4 skinless chicken breasts
• 8 sprigs of tarragon
• dried tarragon
• 8 tbsp white wine
• salt and pepper
• butter
• creme fraiche/ cream cheese
• Dijon/ grain mustard

The recipe, from BBC Good Food, explains that “using creamy sweet potato for mash means you don’t need butter” right, and self-flagellation is good for the soul? Use butter and enjoy life we say.

Preheat oven to 200C/ 180C fan/ gas 6

Cook the sweet potatoes and celeriac together in a large pan of boiling water for about 20 minutes or until tender.

Meanwhile, put the chicken breasts on a large piece of baking parchment or foil. Give a light sprinkling of dried tarragon and add 2 sprigs of fresh tarragon to each, a little salt and pepper, sprinkle each with 2 tbsp of white wine and top with a small piece of butter. Fold the paper to enclose the chicken and place on a roasting tray. Cook the chicken for 25 minutes or until the juices run clear when pierced with a skewer.

Take the chicken from the parcel, cover with foil and keep warm. Pour the juices from the parcel into a small pan and add some creme fraiche (or cream cheese and creme fraiche works well too), about 3 tbsp and a touch of Dijon or grain mustard. Whisk together and reheat until nice and smooth. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

When the potatoes and celeriac are cooked, drain, allow to steam dry for a few minutes then mash together or pass through a potato ricer. Mix in a good knob of butter and some black pepper.

Serve the chicken on top of the mash and pour over some sauce and serve with a green vegetable of your choice.

Hi again

Back home late Friday from our travels in Canada and jet lagged and feeling like ….!! But we had a great time with John’s family and friends, visited some interesting places, got our culture fix in the museums and art galleries and were lucky to have superb weather.

Christian Island, Georgian Bay, Ontario

Our lovely friends here looked after our garden and kept it all alive, mowed the grass and even entertained us to lunch on Saturday – how lucky are we?

Most meals were taken with family and friends and we did some cooking too. The meals we had out were enjoyable without being memorable except for superb sushi and sashimi at a Japanese restaurant in Montreal. But my how expensive it is compared to France and as for wine, wow what a price difference.

Meals since arriving back are a bit hit and miss as we stumble around not being really with it. Sunday we dragged ourselves out of bed just in time to dash to the one supermarket that opens on Sunday morning and grab something before it closed. We roasted a pork tenderloin stuffed with sage leaves and wrapped in Parma ham, baked a couple of potatoes at the same time and sautéed some vegetables from the garden.

Monday we made a sweet potato soup for lunch and for dinner fished out of the freezer the melanzana parmigiana we had made before we went away.

We managed to sleep better last night so hopefully are heading back to normality, thank goodness!

Sweet potato soup

serves 4

• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 eating apple, peeled, cored and chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 medium sweet potato, peeled and chopped
• 60g red lentils
• 750ml vegetable stock
• 100ml milk
• salt and pepper
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• salt and pepper

Begin by heating a large saucepan and then adding the curry powder and stir it around for a minute or two to toast it – make sure that it doesn’t burn. Add the olive oil and stir into the curry powder, then add the onion, apple and garlic, give it all a stir to coat with the oil and spices, put on a lid and let gently sweat for 5 minutes or so until the onion is soft. Add the sweet potato, lentils and the vegetable stock together with some seasoning and bring to a simmer. Cook for 20 minutes until the sweet potato is very soft. Blitz with a hand blender, or use a liquidiser or food processor, until smooth. Dilute with the milk to a soup consistency and reheat gently. Serve with a swirl of cream or creme fraiche.

Leon Gobi

We are  delighted to awake to blue skies and sunshine today – a welcome relief from the rain though showers are forecast the rest of the week. Still a chill breeze out of the sun so we confined ourselves to a little gardening and a trip to the dechetterie to dispose of the things we can’t compost and some rather large cardboard boxes we had accumulated.

We had smoked salmon we bought for yesterday but didn’t eat so we ate it for lunch with a simple salad of young leaves dressed with olive oil and lemon juice and some dill which we also had left over in the fridge. The salmon is from Alaska which has a really lovely dark colour but a mild taste and it is smoked by a producer local to us. Salad is sometimes a problem – we are rather against the bags of overpriced leaves the supermarkets sell but on the other hand if you want a variety of leaves in your salad that would involve buying a lot of lettuce so we swallow our pride from time to time and cough up.

There is an international club in this area and the 3rd Monday of each month they hold an aperitif at the local hotel and we plan to pop along there this evening. It means we are back home a little too late to start cooking so we got ourselves organized (for a change) and made Leon Gobi and some whole grain rice ready for just reheating.

Leon is a restaurant in London and one of the owners, Allegra McEvedy, gave this recipe for a vegetarian curry they make at the restaurant. The Gobi refers to the cauliflower. The ground almonds provide the consistency of the sauce.

If we need ground nuts of any type we tend to grind them ourselves rather than buy them ready ground. We have a little coffee grinder (we never grind coffee) which makes light work of it. It’s also good for grinding spices, etc.

serves 6

• 1 medium onion, halved and thickly sliced
• 1 carrot, thickly sliced
• 2 tbsp sunflower or peanut oil
• 1 or 2 chillis (depending how hot you like it)
• 2 thumb-sized pieces of root ginger, peeled
• 5 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 large tsp Madras curry powder – see note
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp black onion seeds
• 1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cut into 2.5cm dice
• 4 heaped tbsp ground almonds
• A good handful of sultanas
• 1⁄2 a small cauliflower, broken into florets
• 1 x 400ml tin of coconut milk
• 150g frozen peas
• Juice of 1⁄2 a lemon
• A really big handful of coriander, roughly chopped
• Salt
• 2 heaped tbsp desiccated coconut, to serve

In a large saucepan, cook the onion and carrot over a medium to low heat in the oil for 15-20 minutes with the lid on, stirring occasionally.

Meanwhile, blitz the chilli, ginger and garlic to a paste with a stick blender or in a food processor. Stir the paste into the onions once they have begun to soften, along with the spices (including the onion seeds). After another five minutes, season with salt, add the almonds and mix well so that everything is well coated.

Turn the heat up a bit and stir in 500ml of water and the sultanas. Bring to a simmer and leave it to bubble gently for 10-15 minutes with the lid off, stirring occasionally.

Add the cauliflower florets, sweet potato and the coconut milk and simmer for a further 10-15 minutes. Check that the sweet potato and cauliflower are both cooked, turn the heat off and stir in the peas.

It will need more salt, plus the lemon juice and chopped coriander to finish it off . Serve it with a sprinkling of dried coconut on top with rice or nan and your favourite chutney.

Note; the recipe asks for Madras curry powder which we can’t buy here. Also, the commercial curry powders we have come across have an overpowering smell of stale turmeric and not much else. So we have a jar of curry powder we made ourselves and we give you the recipe in the next post.

duck and sweet potato wraps

There was a portion of the duck filling from the pastilla and some  sweet potato salad left over from Sunday so we made them into wraps using up the leftover brik pastry – well there’s a coup using up 3 things at once! We discovered that the duck and sweet potato salad go very well together so a note for future use that you could serve the sweet potato salad as an accompaniment to the pastilla. There was also some leftover couscous from the stuffed peppers so that found its way onto the plate too, Very quick, very tasty and we feel virtuous for using so many leftovers. BUT, isn’t that what good housekeeping is about and what our parents used to do? None of this “oh just chuck it in the bin”. We both come from families where it was unthinkable to waste food and it is very ingrained into us. It’s not about how much money you have or don’t have – waste of food (or anything else) just seems unacceptable and maybe there would be less people in the world with not enough to eat if the rich countries stopped wasting so much. Well, better to have got that off the chest!

sweet potato and corn soup

Since coming to live here 6 years ago we have discovered local producers which are a great source of fresh produce and things you wouldn’t image you could find in this quiet corner of rural France. This is a farming area and one of the main crops is maize – used for animal feeds, oil etc. But we also discovered there is a canning factory nearby for one of the major food brands and they can sweet corn. Of more interest is the fact that you can wander into their yard where there are large mounds of corn just freshly picked and tipped from the trucks and buy as many as you want for 20 cents each. They have a variety called Supersweet which really lives up to its name. Wonderful fresh and cooked on the bbq but we also blanche them and stock the freezer for the rest of the year – they freeze perfectly.

This soup uses the kernels cut from one defrosted cob – make your own guess about how much you need if you are using tinned or frozen – perhaps one small tin or equivalent.

Sweat one finely diced medium onion and a chopped clove of garlic in some olive oil and when nicely soft add some cajun spice blend (we use Seasoned Pioneers) – a heaped teaspoon should be about right, a good pinch of cumin and dried oregano – and let it cook for a minute then add one peeled and diced (chunks or large dice are fine – it’s going to be blended when cooked) medium sized sweet potato and the corn kernels together with about 750 ml of vegetable stock (we use Swiss Marigold) or water and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the potato is soft to the point of a knife. Blend until smooth either with a stick blender (our preferred method) or liquidiser. Blend in a good dollop of creme fraiche or cream and salt and pepper to taste (you may not need the pepper because of the cajun spices). Reheat if necessary and serve with a garnish of frizzled chorizo and a drizzle of the chorizo oil – fry thin slices of chorizo in a dry frying pan until the oil runs out and the meat is crisp and then drain the slices on kitchen paper. Alternatively you can garnish it with some fresh coriander and add a squeeze of lime.