Love through the stomach... » Herbes de Provence

Making sausage

Valerie — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:32:36 +0000

Frying up some home-made sausages.

I decided I needed to try to make my own sausages. My wonderful, wonderful butcher has some great sausages, but really, I wanted to give it a try. To add my own flavors, make my own combinations. It was one of those things I felt the need to try at least once.

Add seasoning before grinding, to make it easier to mix all flavors after grinding

Like many of the foods I feel the need to make, this – yet again – proved to be well worth the little bit of extra work.

The sausage casings needs to be washed before use

It doesn’t mean that I stop buy sausages from my butcher. But it does mean that along with the sausages, I might buy some random, cheaper cuts of meat and some pork intestines as well.

Grind the meat at a setting you like. Do you want chunky sausage, or really fine?

Making sausages is fun. It really is. It’s easy too and the finished product is tasty. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Mix and knead the ground meat to make sure all the flavors are well-distributed

Now the pictures you see here and the recipe that follows are a simple pork sausage with some French herbs. But as with most home-made foods, the key is to use your own imagination. To make combinations you think might be tasty. Have fun with it. I sure did!

The sausage stuffer.

There are a few things to take into consideration when making sausages.

You place the entire length of casing over the stuffer, then pull it off as you fill.

First: Make sure that you have a way to get the meat into the casing. A sausage stuffer attachment for a stand mixer is awesome, but any type of funnel should work.

Pull the casing off the stuffer as it's being filled.

Second: Any good butcher makes some of his own sausages. He’ll be able to sell you some casings.

Keep filling the casing into one giant sausage.

Third: Fat equals flavor and moisture. Completely lean sausage will taste terrible, so don’t shy away from fat.

Twist the casing to create individual sausage links.

Pork sausages with french herbs

Author: Valerie

Prep time: 45 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour

Ingredients

about 350 grams of lean pork
about 150 grams of fatty pork (pork belly)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
a generous amount of herbes de provence
salt and pepper to taste
1 pork intestine (or other type of sausage casing)

Instructions

Cut the pork in 1 inch cubes, dice the onion and cut up the garlic, place all in a bowl with a generous amount of herbes de provence and salt and pepper to taste.
Grind the meat together the herbs in a meat grinder. Knead the ground meat to make sure all seasoning and meats are well combined. Add onions and garlic before or after grinding, depending on whether you like larger pieces of onion in there or not.
Wash the sausage casing and place it on a sausage stuffer. Tie a knot on the end of the casing.
Push the meat mixture down the sausage stuffer while moving the casing along with the meat stuffing to create one long sausage.
Once all the meat is inside the casing, twist the sausage at your preferred length to make individual sausage links, then cut off the excess sausage casing.
Cook the sausage like you would do with a store-bought sausage. You can also freeze them.

Notes

You can vary endlessly with the types of seasoning and filling you use. Just make sure you do use a generous amount of fatty meat, so the sausage doesn’t dry out when you cook it.

A bowl of home-made sausage links.

Onion soup

Valerie — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:18:24 +0000

It looks like I’ve neglected this blog lately. Nothing is less true though. I looked at it at least daily, only to find out that I still couldn’t upload anything. Fortunately last night, as I got cranky about it and was researching other webhosts, Laurens found a way to fix it. Gotta love having your own IT-helpdesk at home!

While I couldn’t post I did cook, and wen’t out to dinner, and did things in the garden. This summer has been exceptionally crappy though, so my usual summer meals have not been all that present, unfortunately.

On one particularly crappy-weahtered late afternoon I decided I wanted soup. And not a nice, cold, summery soup either. I wanted full bodied, warm wintery soup, or at least fall soup if such a thing exists. Not having had onion soup for quite a while I decided to go for that.

Onion soup is one of those marvelous things in life which you can make as easy and as complicated as you want. You can spend hours upon hours caramellizing onions before adding broth or you could throw raw onions in said broth and if you heat it long enough, they’ll soften after all.

My prefferred method is something in between. I don’t fully caramellize the onions, but I do cook them for quite a while until they’re nice and soft and glassy before I add broth. Seasoning whise I can go many ways as well, but this particular time I’d just received that beautiful bag of herbes de provence so that was an obious choice. Depending on my mood I like to add some red or white wine, or some balsamic vinegar. This was a vinegarry day.

The soup cooked for quite a little while and smelled up the entire house. Once dinner time came around I cut up some baguette and grated some cheese and added both atop the soup in my le creuset ramekins. Under the broiler they went, for a couple of minutes, and voila, perfect soup for a cold, dreary ~~winter~~ summer evening.

Onion soup

Recipe Type: soup

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 1 hour 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour 30 mins

Serves: 4-8

Ingredients

5 medium/large onions
butter and olive oil
herbes de provence
2 liters of beef broth
black pepper
a splash of balsamic vinegar
garlic, salt, bread and cheese optional

Instructions

Peel and half the onions, slice thinly, mince garlic.
Add butter and oil to a large pan, enough to generously cover the bottom. Cook onions until they’re nice and very glassy and some of them have browned a bit. Add the garlic and herbes de provence to taste and cook for another few minutes.
Add the broth all at once and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Add a little splash of balsamic vinegar (taste after little splashes, as it can become too sweet) and add fresh cracked black pepper to taste. If your broth wasn’t salty enough, you can add some salt.
Let the soup simmer for at least 30 minutes, then ladle into oven proof soup bowl or ramekins, put a piece of bread and grated cheese on top and broil until the cheese is melted and a little browned.

Notes

The amount of people this soup serves depends on whether you want it as a starter or a main. As a starter you could beed up to 8 people, as a main, 4 is the limit.

Fun things around the kitchen

Valerie — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:27:56 +0000

A little while ago I participated in a gift exchange on a cooking board I frequent. The lovely Jill from jbeancuisine got my name and sent me a lovely package from France. It included fleur de sel (and fleur de sel caramels), some lovely chocolates, a bag of herbes de provence and a can of rillettes au foie gras. Part of the package was wrapped in a lovely cookie tin (with pictures of macarons on there). I was extremely lucky to receive such a very very awesome package (as you can see above).

I have 2 insanely huge tomato plants in my garden. I actually picked 1 large tomato while it was still green, because it had a hole in it (nature, bugs, that sorta stuff). I had Laurens take a picture of it to show how big it was already. As you can see (compared to the 1 euro coin), they are sized nicely already. Just waiting for them to green up.

Now today, while I was weeding and removing some old/dead leaves I suddenly same a glimpse of red. I looked a little better and found 4 ripe tomatoes. Now mind you, our summer has been insanely bad, cold and wet, so everything is very green. Including the massive amounts of tomatoes that are on there. Finding the 4 red tomatoes was a sure treat. I picked them and cleaned them and while I was gardening Laurens took some pictures of the happy red things.

We’re hoping for some nicer weather this coming week, so I’m anticipating more red tomatoes. I’m crossing my fingers, I like tomatoes!

And a last fun thing around this kitchen is quite the surprise! Quotesearcher has been searching for their favorite foodie blogs on the web. They’ve narrowed it down to 32 so far. And guess what?! My little blog is among the nominated. As you can understand, I’m very excited. Not just the fact that I’m nominated, but the other blogs on that list make me all giddy inside. To be on a list with Juls’ Kitchen, Canelle et Vanille, Use real butter and La Tartine Gourmande among others is already an honor to me.

Quotesearcher will poll for the favorite among the nominated until August 22nd. If you visit this blog and like it, please consider voting for me here.

The Amazing Bacon Burger

Valerie — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:11:16 +0000

The Dutch national soccer team had a big welcome party in Amsterdam today. half a million rowdy provincials came to town and yelled and screamed and were drinking beer before noon. The team took a boat tour through the canals, and one of the canals they went through was not even 50 yards from my office. Lots of screaming, yelling and vuvuzela’s were heard. And some nutcase started (and got a whole crowd of people to join in) singing ‘We are the champions of the world’, I’m assuming he hasn’t watched the final OR seen any news in the last few days.

The stupid festivities (which other country throws a humongous party for people who DIDN’T win) caused public transport to quit riding in in the city center. After work this meant I had to walk 35 minutes to the nearest tram stop. It’s usually a half a minute walk.

Next to all the craziness, it was crazy warm in our condo when I got home. Our condo is very well insulated, not only because of the windows and walls, but mostly because there are 8 layers above us. This means that it takes forever for our house to actually get warm in summer. But once it has, there’s no way to get the heat out of the place until the end of summer. Sure, you can get it comfortable as soon as you open windows and/or doors, but it’ll be hot when you enter.

Coming home this way lead me to crave burgers. Don’t ask me why, but it did. I wanted bacon burgers, but I only had cubed bacon. The solution, adding cubed bacon into my burgers.

Yes, these burgers were a little out of the ordinary, but absolutely amazing. With bacon and cream cheese, fresh ground very lean beef, nice seasonings and lettuce, tomatoes and grilled sweet onions on top. You wouldn’t believe how easy they are to make, if you own a meat grinder. And -don’t run away- they are relatively low-fat!**

After eating these burgers, all was better in the world. I didn’t even put ketchup or mustard on them, they didn’t need it, they had all the flavor in the world and then some.

[print_this]Amazing Bacon Burgers (recipe makes 2)

250 grams of cubed beef (I use poulet, which is odd sized leftover steak and top round pieces, usually sold to make soup)

about 20 to 50 grams of uncooked bacon bits

a generous amount of fresh ground pepper

2 pinches of pink himalayan salt

a generous amount of ground dried garlic

a generous amount of dried herbes de provence

a good sprinkle of Pikes Peak Butcher Rub (or your favorite steak seasoning)

1 tbsp (heaping) of cream cheese**

Combine the beef and bacon bits and grind them together coarsely. Add the cream cheese and all the seasonings and mix it very very well unless you have a homogenous mass of meat and cheese (And you don’t see blobs of cheese anymore).
I love the use of the word homogenous… can’t help it!
Form 2 burgers by kneading the meat for a little (it becomes a little stickier that way and stays together even though you’re using amazingly lean beef), the rolling a ball and flattening it. Grill to your desired doneness.
Serve on hamburger buns with lettuce, grilled sweet onions and tomato, or any other veggies you’d like with it.

[/print_this]

This burger has an amazingly distinct, yet subtle (yes that’s possible!) bacon flavor. You don’t really taste the cheese, but it does seem to pull everything together, flavorwise. I can’t really explain it, this just works. It’s just so dang tasty!

**I accidentally only had ‘light’ cream cheese in the fridge, which works fine, so all in all this isn’t high in fat, there’s only a tiny bit of bacon compared to the beef and lettuce and tomatoes aren’t really known for their fat-content either. So you can totally eat this without your conscience playing up!

Chicory (Belgian endive)

Valerie — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:13:39 +0000

The weather has been sucky here the last week. While the last week of April had sunny, warm days, May so far has been dark and dreary. Perfect weather for chicory. Yes, I know, in other parts of the world chicory might not necessarily be a winter vegetable, and is used in salads and such, to me it’s a winter dish. Probably because of the way I prepare it.

The way I prepare chicory is derived from the way my mom does. She’d usually serve it, boiled, then rolled into slices of ham with cheese on top, from the oven. She’d usually serve boiled potatoes and some kind of meat and gravy with it. I’ve served it that way before, but during my single years it’s evolved to an all-in-one oven dish. A casserole without side dishes. I don’t have one fixed recipe for it, but generally it’ll be mashed potatoes, chicory, ham, cheese and egg. Add some herbs and it’s done.

See, winter dish!

So with the crappy weather I figured I could make it at least once more this year. And so I did. I know it doesn’t look all that appetizing, but it really, really is. I dare you to try it!

Chicory casserole

chicory (1 big one per person)

instant mashed potatoes (1 serving per person)

Grated cheese

Cubes or strips of ham (to taste)

eggs (1 per 2 servings)

Herbs to taste (I use herbes de provence)

Water

Boil the chicory for 10 to 15 minutes, drain and cool a bit. In a large bowl add the instant mashed potatoes (powder), a good amount of grated cheese (a half cup per person or so), some dried herbs, some ham (as much as you want, to taste, I don’t serve meat separately, so I use quite a bit of ham) and the eggs. Stir thoroughly, so that everything is coated with the powdered potatoes. Pour in slightly less water than the mashed potatoes ask for (you want it to end up firm, and the egg, ham and cheese provide moisture as well). Stir until all the water is incorporated and you don’t have dry potato powder anymore.
Put the potato, egg, cheese, ham mixture in a casserole dish. Cut the chicory lengthwise. If you have big chicory, quarter it, so the end result isn’t too thick (about 2 fingers thick or so). Place the chicory over the mashed potatoes. Push in a little, so that the potato mixture sits all the way around it. Sprinkle a generous amount of grated cheese on top. Place in the oven for about 30 minutes on 350 degrees Fahrenheit (175 celsius), until everything’s hot, the potatoes have set, and the top has browned to taste. Enjoy!!!