Encore français - aligot et bœuf bourguignon for #BloggersAroundTheWorld

The warm up is in the past. Now we are ready for the real thing. 
Some time ago I was invited by a friend, who actually is from France. According to him, a usual meal would consist of apéritif - not necessarily some alcohol to drink, although a pastis would work for me - then a salad or soup, followed by the main course. After that we would be ready for the cheese course and we can close with dessert, of course. Really? Maybe a calvados fits in to round everything up.
I don't need to mention, that baguette and red wine would be part of the deal as well, although the alcohol is not compulsory.
Now I would love to present you such a meal. 
Pastis - no big deal. Well, it doesn't have to be the apéritif, because we have aligot.
Many moons ago ... or month ... I read the book Encore Provence written by Peter Mayle. Maybe you have heard of him, or read something he wrote, or even saw a movie.
Whatsoever, in this very book, he mentioned something called aligot. This originates from the Latin word aliquid, that means something. The story behind it has something to do with monks, but I don't want to bore you with any more details.
This aligot contains two important things: garlic and cheese. In fact a large part in it is cheese. So ... naturellement ... I was destined to try it. In other words, the moment I read about it, I knew I would make it one day. So, apart from the garlic and the cheese you need tomatoes, sour cream or the like, salt and pepper, and patience.

To get a bit more detailed, I used the following:
400 g tinned tomatoes, chopped
250 g cheese (one that is a good melting kind)
100 g créme fraîche
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Salt and pepper

Let's do it, or at least have a try:
Before we start, just a brief note. The cheese that would be used in the original one is tome d'Aubrac, that is fresh cheese from the region where this dish comes from.
First of all cook the tomatoes. If you haven't chopped them properly, you can also puree them afterwards.
Once done, add the remaining ingredients and start stirring ... and keep stirring ... stirring ... stirring ... stirring ... stirring.
Hopefully, it will thicken at one point. However, if it gets so thick, you can't stir anymore or even get out the spoon, things went terribly wrong and according to Peter, you should have a glass of wine and start again.
However, I was on the safe side and ... lost patience ... and consequently had to be satisfied with a slightly thinner version.

That, in no way deminished the joy of this meal. To you give you a fuller picture ...

Already we feel a bit satisfied. Still, we need to think about the main course. That would be bœuf bourguignon.
In fact for that we have to go a few hours back in time, for you have to start this well in advance. At least that is what I heard. Before that day, I didn't cook it yet.
I had to enlist the aid of some cookbooks among which is the well known Mastering the Art of French cooking. I took that as a rough guide, combining it with other information I read. Anyway, I had to adjust to the amount of food I would need in the end or respectively on what I had in stock.
Here we go for the main course ...

Bœuf Bourguignon

• Melt 50 g of butter in a pan at a medium heat.
• Cut 100 g of bacon into stripes and fry them in the butter. 
• After that remove them to a casserole type dish.
• Have 500 g of beef, that is cut into about 2 cm sized chunks. Pat the meat dry with ... something.
• Then fry the meat in the pan, so it gets colour from all sides.
• Pre-heat your oven to 160°C.
• Remove the meat as well and ... have a guess ... yes, put it into the casserole type dish and reduce the heat for the pan
• Now you have two medium sized onions ready, which you more or less have chopped finely ... as fine as you like.
• Soften the onions in the pan.
• While that happens add a few tbs of flour to the casserole type dish to coat the meat and then put the dish into the oven for about ten minutes.

 

• Get the dish out and repeat the flour thingy.
• By now your onions should be ready. You can turn of the heat for the pan.

• The onions go the well known casserole type dish. Together with the onions you add a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme, a bay leaf and two peeled and crushed cloves of garlic.

• Now we top that up with 300 ml of red wine and 300 ml of beef stock.

• Now cover your casserole type dish and put it into the oven for about three hours until the meat is really tender.
• Just before that time is over you could prepare some potatoes to eat together with your bœuf bourguignon.

• When you think your meat is ready ... it is not. Remove the cover from your dish and keep it for another 30 minutes in the oven.
• Then you are ready to plate up and eat the main course.

I hope you enjoy it! I did! It was very delicious. That would bring us then to our next course ...
If you feel you already had enough cheese at the beginning, this must be an illusion. For sure there is a little bit room for some Camembert, brie or another cheese ... Why not!
What's for pudding?
Well, I felt like I should have a chocolate souffle or some crêpes, but honestly? Yes, I didn't feel like preparing them or even eating some more food. I already had quite some share from the bœuf bourguignon. So I have to do a chocolate souffle at some other time.
Still, I hope you enjoyed this small (?) French meal for Bloggers Around the World.

If you haven't done so already, why not join us on this food trip around the world ...

Red wine cake

Why am I doing this? 5:30 in the morning (or shall I say in the night) and I'm busy in the kitchen baking cake. Because I want to have cake, when visitors are coming today? That would be a possible answer. But I could buy a cake. That would be an option. Nevertheless, I'm baking myself. You know what you get! Usually! At least you know what's in it. Homemade you get things you very likely, in fact, for sure will not get in the shop.
Here once again I found myself digging through my old papers and I came across the cookbook: Now I help myself! In fact it's not a cookbook in this kind of sense. It is a collection of recipes from some old friends. Back then, when I left the secure shelter of my family home to go out and have a place on my own, these friends made this collection of recipes to help me survive. Some of these recipes are hand-written, other typed with a typewriter, photocopied, or printed from the computer. Honestly, it was very nice of them to provide me with this, but I haven't been through most of the recipes. Already at that time I had been into cooking and knew a few things, that would already sufficed to aid in my survival.
Now here is the recipe I picked from this collection: Red wine cake.

First of all I like to give you the recipe as it was in there. It was written by typewriter with some hand-written notes ("Super easy!", "Nathan has chosen this as his favourite recipe ..."). I only made slight adjustments in accord with what I had at home.


Ingredients
250 g butter
250 g sugar
4 eggs
4 teaspoons of vanilla sugar

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of cocoa powder

100 g of chocolate cut into small pieces

125 ml red wine

400 g flour

2 teaspoon of baking powder

Instructions
Bake for one hour at 175°C.

That was it. No instructions. As the handwritten note said, this recipe is to be classed as "super easy!", that should be sufficient to get satisfying results.
Right, you could like cream the sugar with the butter, separate the egg white from the yolks, mix in all the ingredients apart from the egg whites, be happy, then continue with beating the egg whites and folding them in, grease a springform tin, put it in the oven and ... here you are. Have I forgotten something? You could put some icing sugar on top later.
Since this recipe was for a poor and helpless let to survive in the great, mean, dangerous world, you should manage to reproduce this cake.
Have fun!

Here are some other cakes I did lately. I would say "cakes around the world", but the number of countries represented by these is quite limited, so not really too much around the world.

Blue berry cake

Berry tart

Caramel apple cake

Chocolate tart

Far Breton

Lemon cake

Pear ricotta cake

Lime cream cheese cake (or maybe Caipirinha cake)

Pistachio cake

So far about baking and cakes. Five more days and it is May the 19th - time for Food Revolution Day. Make sure you enjoy that day with some real food. I will. Later I tell you more about it, afterwards. Only four days, though, and it is time for food travel for me. More about this later as well.
I hope you enjoyed the red wine cake. What, though, you don't have an open bottle of red wine at hand? I guess you need to substitute or open one and enjoy the remaining red wine at another occasion.

French baking - bâtard with red wine and walnuts

The bread baking spree goes on. Or shall I say, time for exercise. Considering the amount of kneading necessary you don't need to go the gym. Well, at the moment I have to, it's prescribed from the doctor. However, I would say: "Baking a bread a day, keeps the gym away!"

Coming back to the baking itself, though, now it's time to use red wine for the bread. Also with this run I reduced the amount of liquid used, that is just 200 ml - half water and half red wine. The result looked nice to me. In the first step the walnuts come to the dough when it starts looking like a dough. The recipe said to use 300 g of walnuts, but I just used the amount I had left at home. To be honest, I would have had a lot of more walnuts at home, even more then 300 g. The only problem, they are all whole nuts, so cracking them open and all the work ... I was a bit too lazy for that today. I can live with it.

Finished product

Again, I used cling film to cover the rising dough, but this time I oiled it lightly as I learned it from the Cardamom Twists from Scandilicious. You see, bit by bit you can learn things and improve.

As you can see on the picture (hopefully you see it), the crust looks quite nice. Today I was not so shy with the knife and cut a bit deeper into the dough before baking.

the first cut is the deepest (I think I remember hearing something like that)

So, if you don't see the crust being crispy on the first picture, you can trust me that it is/was. It worked out really good. The bread tastes really nice. When you cut it open, it looks a bit pinkish - lovely.

If you are not so much into baking your own bread, honestly, you should have a go. This would maybe also a good idea for Food Revolution Day on May 19th: learning, how to bake your own bread.

When you buy your bread in the supermarket you don't know what really is in there. If you always buy your bread at the bakery you cannot be sure with every baker, or it maybe is a bit more costly. Whatsoever, if you do your own bread, you know what is in there, you can have a greater variety, you can have fun, and (look above) you can have exercise for free and don't have to go the gym.