Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

The main task I had today was making a pâté de campagne. But the hardest part was, surprisingly, lining the terrine with bacon! To be fair, the pork and chicken had been pre-minced but I did have to chop and sweat an onion (I’ll come back to this…) and also prepare and marinade some chicken livers. But I didn’t expect much complexity with lining the terrine. More fool me. The first problem was that Rachel had used a Le Creuset casserole last Friday so I took one of the ones we had on the section. Too big, apparently, but both on our section were the same size so we have to find one elsewhere. I start lining that one as Rachel had done last week but Julia (not my teacher this week, but on a with a neighbouring section) didn’t like that approach so I have to start again. Half way through, Fran—who is my teacher this week—came back with a rectangular terrine! bis repetita non placent… And more: halfway through lining that terrine, Fran wants me to lay the strips differently. I point out that his proposed method isn’t necessarily better but by the time I’m finished I’m half an hour behind on my schedule!

Anyway, the final (pre-cooking) result met with Fran’s approval; the (future) bottom of the pâté being neatly covered by bacon strips.

After cooking, of course, the pâté was weighted down whilst cooling and is now (I hope!) in a fridge somewhere for tasting on Thursday. It will be interesting to see the cross-section. We put in strips of boiled ham and the marinaded chicken livers. As the terrine was pretty narrow I tried to make a chessboard style pattern, we’ll see…

Coming back to the topic of sweating onions, I wondered in the blog last Friday why sweated onions need to be so soft when they will be cooked later. For a pâté like here, I think I’d make sure the onions were soft (although the recipe does have chopped raw garlic), but for a stew? So I asked Garry this morning. His answer was that the taste you get from sweating onions is different (and better) to that from stewing them so you want to maximise the sweating taste by making sure they are completely soft. I may just take more care when sweating onions in the future.

And I had to do a fair bit of that today for a) onion marmelade and b) beetroot and ginger relish. Not much to say about these, just a question of turning three large beetroot and this:

into these—which were, unlike the pâté, tasted and, like the pâté, met with Fran’s approval.

There was, of course, more of both, three jam-jars worth of each—of which one of each is now resting in my room along with other pots of jams, chutneys and the like I’ve made in the past few weeks.