TouteFrance

Tomorrow is Halloween - a pagan festival with its roots from celtic Britain. Traditionally, the French celebrate ‘Toussaint‘ instead (All Saints Day) on 1 November, which is a public holiday. However, the commercialisation of Halloween spread to France but more recently the French are starting to shun the event, claiming it to be too commercialised, too American and a marketing gimmick - according to an article on the BBC website.

If, however, you fancy trying out a few French ‘Halloween’ themed recipes, this website has all sorts to try out, including ‘la soupe de la sorcière en bocaux’ (witches’ soup), ‘Guacamole de vampires’ (vampire guacamole), ‘Salade du squelette’ (skeleton salad) and ‘la bave de crapaud pour petits monstres ‘ (toad slime for little monsters!).

Happy Halloween!

It’s that time of year again, Christmas seems to be fast approaching and if you’re planning on visiting a market in France for some festive shopping, then now’s the time to plan your trip. I’ve found what looks like quite a comprehensive list of upcoming Christmas markets in France on FrenchConnections.co.uk. Most markets begin in about one month’s time until either just before Christmas, and some up until the end of December / early January.

The market in Strasbourg is one of the most famous and largest in France but if you’re looking for something a bit closer to home, the market in Arras is a good one to visit.

My husband came home with a hare from the local farmers’ market a couple of weeks ago (thankfully it wasn’t live and had already been skinned etc!), which got put into the freezer while we decided what to do with it. I found a lovely recipe for ‘Civet de Lievre’ in ‘French Regional Cooking’ by Anne Willan of L’Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris. The book is out of print but I recently tracked down a copy on Abebooks and second hand copies are available from Amazon sellers.

You can see what the finished product looked like, I can say it was really tasty and actually quite healthy. There’s practically no fat on game, but the other side of the coin is that it can be a bit dry. Not only did it feed us a really good meal but with all the leftovers, I reckon we could have fed 5 people, and all for not much more than a fiver!

For those of you wanting to try something a bit different, here’s the recipe for you:

2kg hare (with blood)

250g lean bacon cut into lardons

1 tbsp oil

2 onions quartered

45g flour

750ml bottle red wine

600ml broth (I used a beef oxo cube!)

1 clove garlic crushed

bouquet garni

salt & pepper

1/2 tsp ground allspice

45g butter

24 baby onions

250g mushrooms

80ml blood from the hare

1tbsp chopped parsley

12 triangular croutes, fried in oil or butter or toasted

Cut the hare into 12-13 pieces, separate the legs from the loin part and cut each leg diagonally in two. Cut the loin in 4 or 5 pieces. Cut the rib section in 2 pieces and the shoulder section in half with one foreleg in each section (I admit, we just cut it up!)

If you prefer to cook the hare in the oven rather than on top of the stove, set the temperature to 160 centigrate / 320 fahrenheit.

Heat the oil in a large sauté pan and fry the bacon until the fat runs. Add the onion quarters and cook over a low fire until they begin to brown. Remove the bacon and onions and drain off all but 2 tablespoons of the fat. Add the pieces of hare to the pan and cook over a high fire to brown them lightly on all sides (if necessary brown them in 2 batches). Sprinkle the flour over the hare, stir to mix and cook until brown. Add the wine and boil for 2-3 minutes stirring, then add the broth, garlic, bouquet garni, salt, pepper & allspice. Replace the bacon and onions. Cover, bring to a boil and simmer very gently on top of the stove or cook in the oven for 1 hour or until the hare is very tender.

Meanwhile, heat the butter in a frying pan, add the baby onions, season them and sauté for 5-10 mins or until brown and just tender. Remove them, add the mushrooms and sauté also until tender. Combine the mushrooms and onions and reserve.

When the hare is tender, transfer it with the bacon to another pan, add the reserved onions and mushrooms and keep warm while finishing the sauce.

Strain the sauce into a pot and skim off any fat from the surface. To thicken it with blood, bring the sauce to a boil, remove from the heat and whisk it into the blood. Strain the sauce over the hare pieces and heat very gently, shaking the pan constantly until the sauce just thickens slightly; don’t let it boil or the sauce will separate. If not using blood, boil the sauce stirring often until thick enough to coat a spoon and strain it over the hare. Taste the sauce for seasoning. Transfer the hare to a deep serving dish, sprinkle with parsley and arrange the croutes around the edge.

I admit that we didn’t do the blood bit, so rather than being a true ‘civet’, the dish was a simple ‘ragout’!

Here’s the latest news and articles that have caught my eye over the last couple of weeks. You’ll be glad to see that no reference is made to ‘le credit crunch’!

French food: UNESCO World Heritage Worthy? - From Parislogue.som. Sarkozy thinking about making French food a UNESCO world heritage ‘bite’?

Sarkozy plans to shake up France’s ailing newspapers - From Guardian.co.uk. The French press is one of the least profitable in Europe and seems to going from one crisis to another.

Paris Balloon takes visitors up in the air while measuring air quality - from WebinFrance.com. I rather like this, a view of Paris in a hot air balloon while it measures air quality!

Renault to Electrify French Cars by 2011 - from earth2tech.com. Renault and EDF want to build an electric vehicle infrastructure by 2011 in order to make electric cars a viable option.

Profile: Nobel Prize winner Le Clezio - from BBC.co.uk. A profile of Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who has published more than 30 books and lived and taught all over the world.

Is this the worst sporting kit ever? - from Yahoo.co.uk. I would agree, France’s new rugby kit really is pretty awful!

New Sat Nav software provides audio of historical France attractions - from gadgetell.com. New GPS software will provide audio whenever you travel near a historically famous place in France, and will last about two minutes.

France weathers worldwide housing price bust - from WebinFrance.com. It seems that France may not be as badly hit by the falling housing market as other countries as the French haven’t taken the type of risks seen in the US & UK. (OK, a bit about ‘le credit crunch’!)

This year has seen a lot of high profile publicity about the plight of broiler & battery chickens in the UK. I’ve been buying free range chicken & eggs for a few years now, and don’t know a huge amount about the industry other than what I’ve read in the papers. I wanted to find out more about the free range chicken industry in France - and a whole lot more I did find, particularly on free range egg production on the Farming UK website.

One of the first things that came out of the Chicken Out campaign led by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was that the demand for free range chicken in the UK rose considerably - supermarkets couldn’t meet the supply, and Sainsbury’s imported free range chicken from France to keep up with the demand.

The most well known label in France for free range chicken is ‘Label Rouge‘ which you can buy in some British supermarkets. I’m not sure that there’s a British equivalent, perhaps Freedom Food, although Label Rouge has higher standards than the EU stipulates. In terms of egg production according to Farming UK:

“Label Rouge requires a lower external stocking density for hens. For standard Free Range production, producers in France must observe an external stocking density of 4 square metres minimum per hen (i.e. 2,500 hens per hectare) and an internal stocking density of 9 hens per square metre, with 4 levels permitted in multi-tier systems. For Label Rouge producers, the internal stocking level is the same, but the external requirement is 5 square metres minimum per hen. In addition, Label Rouge producers are limited to a maximum of 6,000 birds per house, and a maximum of two houses. For ordinary Free Range, there is no upper limit on the number of birds that a producer can keep.”

also:

“out of all the European countries, the UK has the highest proportion of non-organic Free Range (egg) production and France has the second highest proportion, but the gap is wide: 27% and 12% of national production respectively. Perhaps surprisingly in view of the above, Organic Free Range accounts for the same percentage of total national egg production in both countries, at around 3%.”

I was quite surprised the British figure was higher than the French figure as I believed that free range chicken/egg production was higher in France than in the UK.

I also found out more about the Rolls Royce of French chickens during my research, the ‘Poulet de Bresse‘ (official site in French). These chickens are raised in the Bourg-en-Bresse area and are some of the most expensive chicken you can buy. They are the only chicken that has the AOC certification (Appellation d’Origine Controlée) and you can pay about £3-4 per kilo more than a standard free range chicken. You can read more about these chickens on The Guardian website.

From reading about the free range egg and chicken industry it seems there’s still quite a long way to go to increase the percentages of chickens raised this way, not only in the UK, but things are at least moving in the right direction as consumers become more aware of how these animals are raised.

I’ve been trying to find out more about broiler chickens in France too, rather than just egg-laying chickens, but haven’t found many stats on this yet. Any information would be welcome!

This month’s header image is of the Viaduc de Millau, an amazing feat of engineering. The bridge opened on 14 December 2004, spanning the valley of the River Tarn outside the town of Millau, Aveyron. It’s on the A75 autoroute (which runs from Paris to Béziers) and now saves motorists a lengthy journey down the valley around the town and back up the valley, which caused huge bottlenecks during the holiday season.

The bridge is 1.5 miles long and the road is 280m above the River Tarn. Construction of the bridge started in October 2001, so took about 3 years to build. The best thing though is that the bridge was designed by a British architect, Norman Foster (who also designed the Millennium Bridge in London), along with French structural engineer, Michel Virlogeux.

I’ve yet to drive over the bridge but hope to do so one day, it looks like it’s well worth the visit. I bet the views are amazing!

There’s plenty more information on the web about the bridge which you can find in these links:

Millau Viaduct - Wikipedia

Le Viaduc de Millau - official site (in French)

Structurae - shows hundreds of images of the bridge and in the construction phase