Test Kitchen Tuesday: "That's exactly how they make goose liver pate!"

I have been making many a mystery dinner/dessert/snack, but have forgotten to take pictures for a lot of them. :( I decided instead that for my neglected test kitchen I would highlight the four course French meal my family and I enjoyed on our trip to France. It was delightful! The Chateau Brou had a gorgeous and fancy dining area with a more private alcove that was set up just for us.
Our server was a tiny, charming, smartly dressed, young French mademoiselle who was quick to catch a joke and make one too. She recommended that we choose from the ala carte menu so we all chose those things we thought we'd like best. We were first served a tiny dish of cold tomato soup that was delicious, as well as an assortment of bread and toppings. Next came salad for everyone and foie gras for me. I like to be an adventurous eater (within reason) and I have to admit that I was wildly curious about the foie gras. You see it everywhere in France - it is sold in the gourmet food shops in the airport, it is prominently featured in the grocery stores, and in every touristy place you go, someone is selling foie gras. I'm sure you are dying to know what foie gras is by now, so here it is...goose liver. Mostly, foie gras is sold as a pate, but at a resturant you can get your goose liver without the squish. I asked the waitress what her favorite first course was and she promptly declared foie gras so that sealed it - my adventure was about to begin. While everyone else ate salad...
I tucked into this divine looking dish...Isn't the presentation amazing?! More importantly, it was actually really good. And that is a BIG compliment coming from the girl who used to drown her liver dinner in ketchup. The foie gras was served on grapefruit segments, which gave the dish a tangy-sweet undertone and all the sauces were wonderful. I could definintely see why foie gras is so popular in France and why PETA will never succeed in inducing people not to eat it. (The geese are force fed large amounts of feed to make their livers grow larger...it sounds awful but you can watch it on YouTube and see that it takes about five seconds and that the geese just look confused when it is over...yeah, yeah, I'm justifying my delicious meal.)

Main Course:
The main course options were fish, duck, or beef. I chose duck, again - adventurous me - I'd never had duck, and I wasn't disappointed in my choice. It was excellent and served in a broth with vegetables. Yummy!

In what will be a moment of supreme amazement for many, I will confess that I actually opted for the CHEESE COURSE. (I'm so brave.)
Served on a chilly piece of slate, the cheese course included a tangy salad of wild greens and sweet bread topped with goat cheese. I have to admit that I didn't eat all the cheese, but I DID scrape a thin layer over my bread and enjoyed it. I felt very French...eating cheese and all.

Finally, we had dessert. There was chocolate cake, apricot crumble, and rhubarb flambe! Of course, the idea of a flaming dessert had me all excited so I ordered it. It was delicious, but to my disappointment, they lit it on fire in the kitchen. Still, it was good and I loved all the crispy sugar carmalized on top.

We spent about three hours eating and I loved every minute of it. The conversation was excellent, the food was perfect, the setting was lovely, and I felt so lucky. When we were finished we waddled out...
and I spent the rest of the evening here:

What is a chateau??

Did anyone other than me always assume that a chateau was some kind of nice French country manor? A little bit fancy? A little bit quaint? A whole lot charming? Forget that! A chateau is a miniature castle and some of them are full on castles. The places are nutty and enormous. They scream, "I'm the lord of all I see...bow down to me French peasants!" I understand not a few of them were torched during the French Revolution - I wonder why?

The Chateau de la Rochefoucauld is a monster, a beautiful, beautiful monster. It was so easy to stand on the sloping green lawn and imagine begowned (I just made that word up) and bejeweled ladies strolling the grounds in powdered wigs and tiny hats, being attended to by fussy servants, and crushing simmering peasants beneath their heels.

I snapped a picture of everyone (note all the stylish hats) coming through the gate and up the path to the front door. The gate house was part of a much larger building...

the STABLES! Now that is one fancy horse house!! The stable of the Chateau de la Rochefoucauld could have easily held my house, and my sister Heather's house, and my parents house, and half my neighborhood. Good grief!

Here is a side view of the chateau. The ruined part in the center is actually the "keep" and is the oldest part of the building. Our understanding was that they were trying or wanted to rebuild it.

This is as close as we came to going inside. That is my one regret from the trip...I wish we would have toured the chateaus that we stopped to see. If we HAD gone inside, we would have seen a Gothic chapel, a guard's room, furnished bedrooms, a library, and the boudoir of Marguerite de Valois who was Queen of France and Navarre in the 16th century. Okay, so that got me wondering...what exactly is a boudoir? Well, it is a lady's bedroom, sitting room or dressing room and the word is derived from the French bouder, which means "to pout". Do women pout in their bedrooms? What is that all about?

Our next stop was the Chateau de Langeais, another castle/chateau that stood in the heart of Indre-et-Loire. We were walking along cobblestone streets, past charming shops, and then BAM - there it was. (Sorry, I think I just had an Emeril Lagasse moment.) It was originally built as a fortress in the 10th century by Foulques Nerra, the Black Count of Anjou (he was a really bad man - one of those raping, pillaging, burning type guys who also built two abbies and made pilgrimages to the Holy Land - freaky religious zealots are the worst!). The chateau was expanded by Richard I of England (a.k.a. Richard the Lionhearted) and later destroyed in the Hundred Years' War. King Louis XI rebuilt it in 1465, and the wedding of Anne of Brittany and King Charles VIII occurred there on December 6, 1491. I'm not much for wax figures and such but the wedding scene is recreated within the chateau and it would have been neat to see.

These gardens are part of the Chateau de Langeais' grounds...and are all fortified - of course. You never know when someone might try and take you out while you're enjoying an afternoon stroll.

In the background of this picture you can see a wall. The wall is actually part of the ruins of a donjon, or keep, which served as the dungeon. (OHHH! Donjon...Dungeon - wink!) This ruined wall is all that is left of the Black Count of Anjou's original fortress. The chateau's caretakers have set up a wooden walkway behind the wall where you can climb up and look through the windows. Sweet, eh?

Did I say we didn't go into any of the chateaus? I said that, but it's not an entirely true statement because we DID go into one...the Chateau de Brou. We, uh, actually stayed there! OVERNIGHT!! HA! Mom and Dad were really starting to hustle us along as the day stretched on. We ended up driving on all these back roads and through tiny towns that passed in a blink as we rushed by. Finally Dad pulled over to ask directions (all in a very hush-hush manner, but we couldn't have known what they were saying anyway since the entire conversation occurred in rapid-fire French) and this quintessential young French man with a hand rolled cigarette behind his ear hopped into his car and led us to where we needed to be. Dad drove down increasingly narrower roads until we pulled up to a big iron gate. Another indecipherable conversation ensued between dad and the intercom, the only part I caught was "la famille de Metcalfe", and then the gate swung wide and we drove into a forest. I'm not kidding, it was a forest, the woods, whatever you want to call it, complete with wild boar. We crept along the path feeling like we'd stepped back in time, when all of a sudden there was a break in the trees and we saw this:Of course, there was lots of girlie shrieking when we realized this was a super fancy B&B where my parents had rented four rooms and made reservations for a to die for, honest-to-goodness, four-course French dinner (more on that later). We admired the building in the rosy and quickly fading afternoon light...

walked in...and made ourselves at home. I found that my sweet parents, knowing that I am nutty about turrets, had reserved the Joan of Arc turret room for me. Jaime and squish-face Chase were my roomies. Here's mom and Chase hanging out in my room:

And here's me hanging with Joan.I still can't believe we stayed in a chateau and I stayed in the turret room...it was so much fun!

The Nap Time Bandit Strikes Again!

HA HA HA HA HA!!
He was curled up on his seat and snoring so loud I could hear him downstairs.

A Fete

My mother turned soixante-dix recently, so we held a small fete in her honor. It was fun and she is darling. I love you Mom!

Heather and I split the food duties. She made this darling cake (white with a lemon filling) and I made pulled pork sandwiches with coleslaw, tater babies, and a chef salad. We also had sparkling cider. :)

Heather forgot candles and the only one I had was a sparkly red 2 left over from Grant's birthday. We put that on and Dad declared that Mom was celebrating her second childhood. When Grant saw that it was time to blow out the candle, he climbed up on Heather's lap to "help" and spit on the cake with great gusto.

We wore party hats to eat our cake and ice cream in...

and Dad popped into this picture of the kid eating their cake. Chad said, "Poppa is a picture bomb!" which had Merritt giggling and questioning all night. ("Why is Poppa a picture bomb?") Doesn't Dad look like a unicorn or a bull with one horn in his hat? So cute!

Mom opened presents from her darling sister Laraine...

and from us!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!

Back to France...Oradour-sur-Glane

We left Angouleme on Wednesday, November 4, and headed for the Loire valley and the super-impressive chateau country there. On our way we stopped at Oradour-sur-Glane to see the Martyred Village, a World War II memorial site. Like all war crimes, the massacre of 624 men, women and children in the town of Oradour-sur-Glane makes no sense. The six survivors reported that the German Der Führer regiment of the 2nd SS-Panzer Division Das Reich never made any demands of the villagers nor accused them of any crime. They simply surrounded the village and forced the people into the center where they claimed an i.d. check would take place.

"On this place the population was assembled."

The people were then told that a search of their homes would be made for arms and explosives. While this search was being conducted, the women and children would be taken to the church and then men split into six groups and conducted to barns or garages all over the town. Since the villagers had no weapons or explosives, they went to their designated waiting places in relative calm. The German soldiers even encouraged the children to sing on their way to the church.

"Here is a place of torture. A group of men were collected, slaughtered and burned by Nazis."

The men were gunned down by machine gun fire, but the Nazis aimed low - the point was to make it so that none could flee. Wood was piled on their bodies and they were burned alive. Six were able to escape, but one was shot and killed in the attempt.

The Church

A large gas bomb was thrown into the church, it's design was to asphyxiate the women and children It didn't really work, so the Germans used machine guns and hand grenades to kill and maim the church's inhabitants. Then they piled the bodies of the dead as well as the wounded together, added wood, and set them all on fire. There was one survivor...a woman who jumped ten feet from the windows above the altar. She was shot five times but was able to reach a field of peas and bury herself in the dirt until late the following day.

Another sweep of the area was made to look for anyone the Nazis had previously missed. The remaining townspeople were killed where they were found, with some bodies thrown down the local well. One invalid man was burned to death in his bed. A baby was baked to death in an oven. People who came to see what was happening were killed. The only ones who escaped death were a group who rode into Oradour on the tram. For whatever reason, they were allowed to go free. The town was looted and then burned.

You'd think that the people of Oradour-sur-Glane had done something tremendously heinous to justify such a fate, but they were all innocent. The exact reason for the slaughter is not known, but it is speculated that it was all a terrible mistake. The French Resistance had captured a German officer, a man named Helmut Kampfe, from the Der Führer regiment of the 2nd SS-Panzer Division Das Reich. Later, another officer, Karl Gerlach, and his driver were captured. Gerlach escaped. Another man, Adolf Diekmann, was sent to Oradour-sur-Glane with part of the regiment to secure Kampfe's release or take hostages to barter for it, only Kampfe was dead and he had never been in Oradour-sur-Glane. Historians believe that Kampfe was held in Oradour-sur-Vayres, and that Gurlach, who provided the intel, confused the two towns. Historians also believe that Diekmann had become aware of the mix-up but didn't care, since no demands were made on the townspeople and no hostages were taken. It is simply another incident of man's inhumanity to man, a belief that war justifies any and all means. Diekmann was killed later in the month and the massacre at Oradour remains a frustrating mystery. No one was ever brought to justice for the killing of an entire town. Oradour-sur-Glane was rebuilt a distance away from the original, and the burned out shell of the Martyred Village was left as a monument to those who died.

SCENES FROM ORADOUR

Before you enter the ruins of the town, there is a museum dedicated to chronicling the massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944. It also provides World War II history and has a new section in honor of 9/11. Taken together, the two stories are heart-rending, but how touched I was to see a small town in France honor our American dead alongside their own. After walking the silent streets of Oradour, I couldn't emotionally relive that day, but I went to the young woman who was staffing the help desk and, in my broken French, thanked her for the remembrance. We both started to cry the tears of those who share a similar tragedy but who are determined to honor the memory of those who died. "To be ignorant of the past is to forever be a child." - Cicero

A Pink Picture of Christmas

A giant pink rose headband, pink pajamas, a frothy pink tutu, pink snow boots, wrapping paper wreckage, and a chocolate covered mouth...does Christmas get any better than this for a little girl?

French Doors

It is probably weird, but it is true that I have a thing for doors. I love them when they are interesting in color, shape, and design. I always wanted to have doors in my home like those I saw in Carthage Jail - they are plain wood but in the center of the door there is a cross, and the bottom panels represent an open Bible. The doors in the small French communes or towns are wonderful! There is color, color everywhere you look and the doors and shutters always match. I saw brown doors, blue doors, and red doors and they looked so striking against the white washed stone homes. I didn't get pictures of as many doors as I would have liked (I didn't want to drive my family nuts) but here are a few.