Classic French Recipe: Tartiflette {with free printable}

The traditional French Tartiflette is one of those dishes that are pure comfort food. Made with potatoes, lardons, onions, white wine and Reblochon cheese, it just oozes warmth and cold weather comfort. It’s absolute heaven as far as I’m concerned, but then I could live on cheese and potatoes. It is a recipe that originates from the Alps region called Savoie, and I suppose it is the perfect evening meal after a day in the snow. I don’t originate for there, and when I looked for a Tartiflette recipe on the French cookery forums, I couldn’t find two people who agreed with each other on the correct way to cook this dish. So I can’t guarantee this is exactly as your French grandma would cook it, but I’m sure at least one grandma did.

Anyway, the key with this Tartiflette recipe is, as always, to use the right ingredients. Just like a Raclette is nothing without actual Raclette cheese, you can’t call a dish Tartiflette if you’re not going to use Reblochon cheese, which you can find in most supermarkets in the specialist cheese section (and definitely with Ocado).

Classic Tartiflette Recipe {Free recipe printable}

Serves 4; preparation: 20 mins; cooking time: 50 minutes

Ingredients

1 Reblochon cheese
1 kg of waxy potatoes e.g. like Charlotte potatoes
500 g onions, thinly sliced
200 g bacon lardons
150 ml dry white wine
butter
Black pepper

Method

1. Peel the potatoes and par-boil them in salted water for approximately 15 minutes. Take them out and set aside in a colander. Once cool, cut into thin slices.

2. Whilst the potatoes are cooking, melt a knob of butter in a frying pan and add the sliced onions. Fry them on high temperature for a couple of minutes before turning it down to low/medium and cook until softened. Add the white wine and cook until all the wine has reduced and there is no juice left. Set aside.

3. Fry the bacon lardons in a pan. Once they are cooked, remove from the pan and set aside on a plate covered in kitchen roll to soak up the fat.

4. Put half of the onions at the bottom of an oven dish as well as half the lardons. Cover with the sliced potatoes before adding the rest of the onions and lardons.

5. Cut the Reblochon in half, then cut again horizontally to make four parts. Place on top of the onion mix with the rind facing up. Add some black pepper but don’t add any salt.

6. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes at 180C until golden and the cheese has melted. Once it is cooked, you may wish to put it under the grill for a few minutes.

Bon appétit!

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Classic French Recipe: Daube Provençale

 

daube: meat that is braised then stewed in wine (culinary)

Not to be mistaken for

‘C’est de la daube’: is slang for ‘it’s sh*t’, as in ‘it isn’t worth anything’

 I was going through my French cookery books looking for inspiration for a classic French stew recipe and found this one called ‘Daube Provençale’, which sounds promising not least because who doesn’t love Provence, right? It’s The destination of choice for British retirees and I don’t blame them one bit; it is bliss in every way, between the weather, the wine, the pines, the lavender, L’Occitane en Provence and the gorgeous river creeks you can spend days diving into.

The Daube Provençale is a beef stew that is marinated in cognac, olive oil, herbs and white wine for hours before being braised and then stewed in more wine and vegetables, and served with tagliatelle. I made it last May when the weather wasn’t cooperating and it was lovely, warming yet light enough to suit mid-seasons very nicely.

I don’t often think to eat stew with fresh pasta but it totally works, especially as the white wine marinade makes it into a lighter dish than red wine would have done. It is also, as with most stews, a very nice dish to do in the slow cooker.

Daube Provençale {Free Recipe Printable}

Serves 4; preparation: 15 mins; Marinade: 3 hrs; Cooking time: 3 hrs

Ingredients

800g braising beef
2 tomatoes
1 carrot
4 onions
2 garlic cloves
150g unsmoked bacon lardons
3 tbsp olive oil
100g black olives

Marinade

500 ml dry white wine
2 tbsp olive oil
1 small glass of cognac/brandy (liqueur or shot glass)
a handful of parsley, chopped
1 bouquet garni
salt and pepper

Method

1. Prepare the marinade: pour the white wine in a large bowl, add salt and pepper, the cognac, bouquet garni, olive oil and the chopped parsley.

2. Cut the meat into large chunks, place them in the marinade and leave in the fridge for 3 hours

3. Peel the onions and garlic and finely chop; peel the tomatoes and remove the seeds before cutting them into quarters; peel also the carrot and cut it into round slices.

4. In a deep pan, heat the oil and fry the vegetables and lardons for a few minutes before adding the meat and pouring the marinade over it. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and cook on low heat for 3 hours.

5. Add the olives and bring back to the boil for a minute.

6. Serve with tagliatelle.

Bon appétit!

Welcome to my new home!

At last, the blog has moved! I’ve been threatening to do it for months and it has been a challenge to actually get here, but yay, I’m so excited! It’s a completely DIY move, so there are some issues yet to resolve, but I’m learning. If you’re reading this, you have made it to the new home and for that I thank you. And if you are visiting for the first time, welcome!

This may be the first day of afrogatlarge.com but all my past content is here and I haven’t made any drastic changes to the way that posts are categorised; it should all be pretty self-explanatory.

The most significant change as far as you are concerned is that you can’t add the blog to your reading list via WordPress anymore but you can copy/paste the blog URL to add to Feedly, Bloglovin etc, or grab the RSS feed from the top-right corner of the blog header. You can also subscribe to the mailing list (in the sidebar) to receive weekly roundups of posts directly into your inbox and occasional extra stuff/gifts/heads-up announcements and such-like.

Hopefully, you will find the new place easy to navigate, and don’t hesitate to contact me if there is anything I can help you with, whether it is to do with France and expat stuff, or anything else at all.

Are French spelling changes a sign of the apocalypse?

In case you were wondering, a heavy dose of sarcasm was used when deciding on the title for this post… We may have some time to go yet before the apocalypse is upon us, but I think it’s fair to say that almost nobody likes change and that people love to overreact on social media. When a French spelling reform was announced in early February, the reaction to the news that appeared on my social media feeds and elsewhere online kept me entertained for a good few days. No one gets more irate than a French person faced with the suggestion that the French language is less than eternal, timeless and a beacon of light in a world full of savage languages that dare evolve because what is at stake here is the survival of France as we know it, the very foundations of the world. Will no one think of the children?????

The Independent and the Guardian were two among many to publish a nice little report on the scope of the reform and included some of the reactions, which were indeed enlightening, and by enlightening, I mean I rolled my eyes so much I feared I was going to lose my contact lenses inside my brain. It led to an interesting discussion with friends on Facebook, as English people were understandably befuddled by all the fuss (as English is one of those wild languages whose evolution is left at the mercy of the masses) and my attempts at enlightenment less than stellar.

I have always been very good at grammar, spelling and the French language in general, I always did well at dictations, and I can appreciate a nicely put French sentence. I’ve always found a great deal of satisfaction in being able to write properly. So I understand the value of having and following set rules for how language should formerly be written, and I understand the dismay of suddenly being told that your efforts to learn how to put the flipping ‘accent circonflexe’ in the right place was for nowt. I bet there hasn’t been a change in the French spelling curriculum in decades. The Académie Française, that illustrious gathering of old-fashioned French minds that dictates what is and is not acceptably French, is not exactly known for being responsive to change, and yet it is them that pushed these changes forward. It is not like the English language is without rules either. Some are quite convinced that English is very difficult to learn because of the sheer number of irregularities; I mean, do try to pronounce cough, plough and tough without getting a headache.

What I mean to say, is that there is most certainly beauty to be found in complexity, but it is simply wrong to imply that there can be beauty only in complexity, that simplicity cannot be beautiful, or that simplicity is a sign of paucity or ‘dumbing down’. That, is most definitely an overreaction.

French people keep saying that French is a ‘langue vivante’, a language that is alive, whilst all the time looking at every suggestion of its evolution as a sign of, well, the apocalypse. It’s not even as if it hasn’t changed before. The poor accent circonflexe that is being removed from so many words, this little hat sign ˆ that has been put at the forefront of the discussion, wasn’t always in use. It used to be that hôpital was spelled hospital, and château was spelled chasteau, and the sign was added to remove the silent ‘s’. Yet it is possible that some French nationalists would like us to revert to speaking like the playwright Molière did – can you imagine having to go back to speaking Shakespeare’s English? Yeah, me neither.

This said, I know that I am going to struggle mightily with many of the spelling changes when they come into effect in September, not least that of the humble onion. It is going to go from ‘oignon’ to ‘ognon’, and I won’t lie, it looks weird to me, and I doubt that it will ever look anything but weird and misspelled. It may take a generation for the change to embed itself but to say that it dumbs down language? Ridiculous.

Are French spelling changes a sign of the apocalypse?

 

In case you were wondering, a heavy dose of sarcasm was used when deciding on the title for this post… We may have some time to go yet before the apocalypse is upon us, but I think it’s fair to say that almost nobody likes change and that people love to overreact on social media. When a French spelling reform was announced in early February, the reaction to the news that appeared on my social media feeds and elsewhere online kept me entertained for a good few days. No one gets more irate than a French person faced with the suggestion that the French language is less than eternal, timeless and a beacon of light in a world full of savage languages that dare evolve because what is at stake here is the survival of France as we know it, the very foundations of the world. Will no one think of the children?????

The Independent and the Guardian were two among many to publish a nice little report on the scope of the reform and included some of the reactions, which were indeed enlightening, and by enlightening, I mean I rolled my eyes so much I feared I was going to lose my contact lenses inside my brain. It led to an interesting discussion with friends on Facebook, as English people were understandably befuddled by all the fuss (as English is one of those wild languages whose evolution is left at the mercy of the masses) and my attempts at enlightenment less than stellar.

I have always been very good at grammar, spelling and the French language in general, I always did well at dictations, and I can appreciate a nicely put French sentence. I’ve always found a great deal of satisfaction in being able to write properly. So I understand the value of having and following set rules for how language should formerly be written, and I understand the dismay of suddenly being told that your efforts to learn how to put the flipping ‘accent circonflexe’ in the right place was for nowt. I bet there hasn’t been a change in the French spelling curriculum in decades. The Académie Française, that illustrious gathering of old-fashioned French minds that dictates what is and is not acceptably French, is not exactly known for being responsive to change, and yet it is them that pushed these changes forward. It is not like the English language is without rules either. Some are quite convinced that English is very difficult to learn because of the sheer number of irregularities; I mean, do try to pronounce cough, plough and tough without getting a headache.

What I mean to say, is that there is most certainly beauty to be found in complexity, but it is simply wrong to imply that there can be beauty only in complexity, that simplicity cannot be beautiful, or that simplicity is a sign of paucity or ‘dumbing down’. That, is most definitely an overreaction.

French people keep saying that French is a ‘langue vivante’, a language that is alive, whilst all the time looking at every suggestion of its evolution as a sign of, well, the apocalypse. It’s not even as if it hasn’t changed before. The poor accent circonflexe that is being removed from so many words, this little hat sign ˆ that has been put at the forefront of the discussion, wasn’t always in use. It used to be that hôpital was spelled hospital, and château was spelled chasteau, and the sign was added to remove the silent ‘s’. Yet it is possible that some French nationalists would like us to revert to speaking like the playwright Molière did – can you imagine having to go back to speaking Shakespeare’s English? Yeah, me neither.

This said, I know that I am going to struggle mightily with many of the spelling changes when they come into effect in September, not least that of the humble onion. It is going to go from ‘oignon’ to ‘ognon’, and I won’t lie, it looks weird to me, and I doubt that it will ever look anything but weird and misspelled. It may take a generation for the change to embed itself but to say that it dumbs down language? Ridiculous.