Do the saumonette rock

The Thursday market in Le Grand Pressigny has a new fish stall - infinitely superior to the old one. No mégots behind the counter - "a little fagash with your fish sir?", I don't think so! The fish on the new stall looks very fresh, with bright eyes and a pleasant smell. The stallholders are apparently based in Normandy, but they are running at least four weekly markets in Touraine and Tim thinks they are using local facilities as a pick-up point for freshly-caught fish. Some of the produce that caught my eye were organic salmon, a large monkfish and an even larger whole cod, about a metre long. They had a good queue of customers last Thursday, so we thought "Friday - fish!" and joined the queue.

A popular choice was saumonette, which had a long cylindrical pink-and-white banded body devoid of skin. This was being sliced into steaks rather like salmon, but it was clearly a cartiliginous fish such as dogfish. Rock Salmon! That takes me back to my childhood when the chippie in Yardley served "rock". So rare was the treat of a chippie meal that I have no memory of what rock salmon tasted like, but Tim remembers it as tough. Well, overcooked fish is tough, and frozen fish can be tough too. It looked good, and at €14.95 a kilo was just over half the price of the salmon, so we bought a couple of steaks on the spot.

Once at home we googled our new purchase, and had our ideas confirmed. Wikipedia defines saumonette as the commercial name used in France for a number of small species of shark and dogfish, once anything that might put the prospective purchaser in mind of Jaws, such as the head, tail and skin, has been removed. Because of the size of the 'body' Tim suspects that the fishmongers' specimens may have been of the species known to fishermen in the British isles as "tope".

Google suggested a few recipes, all very simple. As we have a basket of late tomatoes ripening in the kitchen, a simple tomato sauce seemed ideal. I softened a chopped small onion in a little olive oil, then tipped in a small bowl of chopped tomatoes and a couple of garlic cloves, minced. Lid on the pan, cook for about twenty minutes until nicely mushy, then stir vigorously. You could skin the tomatoes, you could blitz the sauce, but I like a chunky sauce, so that I can taste the fish or whatever. Saumonette steaks into pan on top of simmering sauce, lid back on, cook on low with heat diffuser mat to steam for fifteen minutes turning once. I served them with pak choi and plain boiled potatoes. Saumonette has two new fans! Delicately flavoured, meaty, tender flesh and no waste except for the central bone. That's definitely coming again! I suspect it might make good kebabs....

Brioche Osborne

No not a way of cooking the Chancellor, or the budget for that matter, but a variation on Osborne Pudding. [Itself a type of Bread and Butter pudding]
The Good Housekeeping recipe uses brown or wholemeal bread.
But for this version I used a commercial sliced Brioche and NO butter.... except the 9% that was in the loaf... and also no sugar.

Ingredients are as follows:
The better part of a packet of sliced Brioche [all I had left were the crusts and four slices... but it is all down to the size of the dish you filling with the bread.]
A jar of marmalade [to use for spreading on the slices.]
Two eggs and 500ml of full milk [this is 'comfort' food!]
Some Vanilla extract - to taste [NB: not essence]

Method:
Spread one side of each slice with some marmalade [to taste] and arrange it in the dish.
You are trying to get a good amount of the top crust of the loaf in the air when it is cooking.
Once the dish is full [you may have to use some half slices towards the middle... tuck them in so that the middle slices are forced apart, or lifted up.]
Then, using a large bowl, whisk the eggs well and then whisk in the vanilla and milk... try and get a lot of air into the mix and then pour it over the marmaladed brioche in the dish... and leave it to stand. It needs at leaste 10mins to allow the custard to soak into the bread.
Then pre-heat oven to 180C [350F/Gas Mark 4] and once it is up to temperature put the pudding in for 45 minutes [or 40 if the oven is on fan assist.]
Meanwhile make some Bird's Custard!!
When the top is nice and dark and the pudding is well risen remove from the oven and serve up quickly with some custard [or cream or creme fraiche!]

Enjoy....!

Variation: Use Apricot Jam and some chopped moist-dried apricots [the ones that are sold to snack on!] soaked in Apricot brandy [or just use brandy if you don't have the liqueur].

How does our garden grow?

Our potager is now producing healthily. We are experimenting this year with varieties that we know and love, and that have performed well for us on our allotment in the UK, as we still have plenty of unfinished packets. We are also trying French varieties, sometimes alongside British ones. Astonishingly, our stony soil produced insanely long carrots and parsnips (both locally purchased fresh seed), straight as you like with no forking! Beetroot and chard, both sown in trays and transplanted, have done really well. Climbing beans are feeding us nicely, and we may have overdone it with eight cucumber plants. Still, we have some nice pickle recipes, of which more no doubt in a later blog.

A tasty trugful.

One particular thing we noticed is the short harvest period for some crops. This was most true with the Petit Pois variety "Peawee" (available from Marshalls). I could pick a row on the allotment for about three weeks. Here the window between the mange-tout and marrowfat stages was about three days. Once the pods set, there were no more flowers. We picked the peas industrially, by uprooting the plants and stripping them, shelling them on the spot and freezing them.

Scuse the gardener's hands!

Generally, summer brassicas have performed poorly, under attack from battalions of flea beetles and aphids. We know a song about flea beetles, don't we? Back in May I tried red cabbage and tenderstem broccoli, both hopeless!
Disaster area featuring red cabbage and field bindweed.

The kales I planted recently are looking quite strong, and I hope they may do better. Red Russian Kale is a wonderful vegetable, highly decorative as well as excellent to eat, but I had to order it from the UK. Kings came up with the goods, bless them! Black Tuscan kale, by contrast, was on sale among the bedding plants at the Point Vert in Loches.

The dreaded Onion Fly

My poor "Jermor" shallots, planted in November and just about ready to lift, were infested with the grubs of onion fly. The first signs were a yellowing of the leaves, which is also a sign of the shallots being ready, but when I lifted a sample of the yellowest, the bulbs were rotting from the neck downwards. There were signs of little white grubs (mostly dead) and a few pupae.

Grub and pupa of onion fly

According to my gardening books, this little perisher emerges from pupae in the soil in May, but I suspect that it was earlier this year because of the warm weather. The organic treatment is netting to prevent the flies getting to the leaves, and of course growing alliums (onions, garlic, shallots, leeks) in a different place every year, cultivating the soil well so that the birds can get to the pupae.

I'm sure I have had such infestations back on the allotment, but never with the same effect. But then there was so much onion white rot that I often lost 50% or more of the harvest. Some plotholders didn't bother to grow alliums because of the losses. White rot is a fungus, and its spores can remain active in the soil for thirty years. No white rot here! It can only come in on infected sets - moral, don't plant supermarket shallots or garlic!

The grubs have not in themselves done much damage, and most of them are dead, but rot has taken hold where they have been working - just above the neck of the shallot - and unless I cook or freeze the bulbs immediately I will lose the lot. For that reason I'm making some more shallot confiture. I'd have made that anyway, but not with green shallots, so it'll be interesting to see if there's a difference.

The garlic and onions are also affected. I've lifted the garlic ("Germidour") and found tunnels and pupae, but not the rot, as yet. The garlic harvest is magnificent, with large, even-sized heads and decent-sized cloves.

The Germidour haul

The wounds caused by the grubs have scarred over, so I've hung the dried bulbs in bunches in a cool place away from the mice.

A sad day for Leeds

Brewing at the Tetleys Brewery in Leeds ceased last Friday. Tetleys has been on the same site, just across the bridge from the City Centre, since 1822, and 170 workers will lose their jobs. A lot of Tetleys Bitter has flowed under the bridge since then, and Tim and I have had a bit of it, not to mention Tetleys Mild and (while it existed) Imperial. Not among the world's greatest brews in my opinion, but back in the early 80's when we used to collect all the beers for York Beer Festival ourselves (no beer agencies then), we had to ensure that there was a supply of Tetleys Bitter for those punters who insisted on drinking nothing else. For every beer ticker there's a beer conservative, though the latter are now more inclined to stay at home drinking Smoothflow out of cans rather than they are to go to beer festivals, or to pubs for that matter. Thank goodness for the number, quality and success of microbreweries, both in Britain and in France.We had a very pleasant bottle of Turone Blanche yesterday!