Lockdown Week 8 – Let’s Talk Food!

Before I get to the food, which is my favorite thing to talk about, I want to bring you up to date on what’s been happening. Week 8 was a very good one!

Since we have been in lockdown we have been listening to all the farm animals on the other side of the Vanne River which borders the campground. We hear geese, turkeys, goats, sheep and a host of other animals we can’t identify. Or maybe that’s just garden equipment. We can see families biking and couples walking, so we decided we would do the same. So off we went to find the animals. Even though we can see these farms from Bijou, they are not easy to get to. We eventually had to look it up on Google Maps, but we did find the route and had a lovely walk and visit with the cute farm animals. The distance was much further than we were supposed to go, but we didn’t get caught. We are such rebels!

As we approached the entrance to our campground on our return home, I noticed some activity at the little restaurant across the street. There were tables set up and a huge rotisserie oven with several whole chickens spinning around in different stages of doneness. At first I thought maybe they were cooking food for the healthcare workers, because why else would they be out there? Then I saw people walking up to the table and walking away with white bags and it hit me. TAKE OUT! OMG, they are selling takeout food! Whole roasted chickens!

I knew we hadn’t had much luck with buying roasted chickens in France, our experience so far had mostly been dry and tasteless. I did not care. I would have eaten shoe leather as long as it was prepared by someone other than me! I was positively giddy at the thought of having a meal that I didn’t have to cook. We wanted to go check it out, but our attestation had expired (for exercise, we can go out for one hour) so we headed back to Bijou. I went online and found the restaurant website and sure enough, they were doing a limited menu of takeout foods. I wrote an email, ran it through Google translate and fired it off. Five minutes later I got a reply, in English! We ordered a chicken, which came with frites, for pick up the next day at 1:00 p.m.

We cleaned Bijou, set the table and headed out on a walk before stopping by and picking up our meal. We rushed home and settled in for a feast! It was absolutely delicious! The woman at the restaurant, who speaks English, told us they will prepare anything we want, just shoot them an email the day before. How exciting is that? I know this kind of service is still happening in the States, but for us, it was quite the treat.

Lockdown in France has been quite severe, but as of today, May 11, things are going to start opening up again. Very, very slowly. As I mentioned, we are limited to one hour of exercise each day and within a one kilometer radius from our home. And we have to fill out the attestation on our phones which we timestamp. Starting Monday we will be able to walk, bike or drive without the paperwork as long as we stay within 100 kilometers of home, as the crow flies. That would put us dead in the center of Paris. And OMG, you guys, IKEA is 83 kilometers from here and it’s open! Alas. We have decided that a drive is not in our immediate future – until we need more propane. Yep, we have finally given in and started using our oven!

France is divided into departments and, based on several criteria such as number of cases, available hospital beds and so on, each department is designated green or red. About two-thirds of all the 101 departments are green, but ours, department 89, is red. And we are surrounded by a sea of red to the north and east. We are not chomping to get outside our safe little bubble and are happy enough to just stay put. As we have said before, Steven never gets bored and I never get cabin fever. That said, we do intend to get out on our bikes and go for long rides with picnics so we can enjoy the fabulous weather here in the Yonne Valley. It’s been gorgeous recently with temperatures only recently reaching into the 70s.

Our first ride is going to be in a few days to Saint Julien du Sault, the village where we stayed when we first moved to France. It’ll be around a 60 km round trip ride, which is perfect! The parks in Sens are not opening on the 11th, so there are not a lot of places for us to walk around here. But we are looking forward to getting out on our bikes! Barring some kind of emergent news, the next announcement from the French government regarding the second stage of deconfinement is scheduled for June 2. So we’re not going anywhere soon.

So all-in-all it’s been a pretty good week, but I’ve saved the best for last. Food. And food photos and recipes! And not just any food, but celebration food! Yummy food! Beautiful food! Oh, scratch the beautiful part, we did crank out a fairly ugly cake, but it was still tasty! During week 8 of lockdown, Steven and I celebrated our 22nd wedding anniversary. We decided to do what we always do, celebrate with delicious food and wine. This year it seemed even more important to celebrate under the current circumstances.

You may recall that when we were in Morocco I ordered a whole beef tenderloin. There are two ways I deal with a tenderloin. If I am feeding a group, I prepare it whole. If not, I whack off the fat end to about the size of a small roast, cut the center portion into steaks and chop the tail end to use for things like beef tips and gravy. Since it was only the two of us in Morocco, I cut it up and froze some for later and that’s what we decided to have for our celebration dinner. I thawed the fat end it and then prepared it the way I have been doing for nearly 30 years, I marinated it in my secret sauce and readied it for grilling. Lucky for you I’m not very good at keeping secrets, it’s equal parts melted butter and Worcestershire sauce. Half a cup of each ought to do it. You’ll want a little juice in the bag to massage into the meat over the course of a few hours, so more is fine if you need it. I don’t refrigerate the marinating meat, I leave it at room temperature. Two hours, minimum. I don’t salt it while it’s marinating but do give it a good douse of garlic salt before putting it on the grill. Nothing else.

At this point Steven takes over and he grills it medium rare-ish, which is how we like it. The marinade creates a dark crust that is out of this world. It looks burnt, but it’s not. It’s just damn tasty, unless, of course, you actually burn it. Ugh, don’t do that. I get that a whole tenderloin seems expensive, but when you think about how many servings you get it’s actually not. It is an upfront investment, but a pretty good deal when you portion it out. Also, here’s a tip. Costco sells whole tenderloins two ways, untrimmed and trimmed within an inch of it’s life. Get the untrimmed one. It’s cheaper, it has a ton more flavor and if you want to trim a bit off, you can do it yourself. Tenderloin is not a fatty cut of meat to begin with, so the only thing I trim off is the tough silver skin if it’s still on there when I buy it.

To go with our grilled tenderloin I roasted some veggies, including carrots, mushrooms, onions, and red, yellow and green bell peppers. I put them on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper and tossed them with a few dashes of olive oil and generous sprinkles of the best herby mix on the planet, Penzeys Sunny Paris. Into the oven they went.

And now comes the ugly part, the cake. I could write an entire blog post about this cake. In my last post, reader Lynn T. left a comment and offered up a cake she thought we might like. At first glance, it seemed exactly like a recipe we would really enjoy. It was this recipe that convinced us to fire up our oven, propane usage be damned! The cake has only five ingredients, minus any goodies you choose to adorn its top. To be fair, the recipe warns you upfront that this is an ugly cake. Ours, to be honest, looked like we dropped it.

So, here’s what happened. I mixed all the ingredients as instructed. I generously buttered up an 8″ disposable pan, poured in the batter and put it in the oven. Lynn had warned me that the cooking time was kind of weird, so we were prepared for that. We were supposed to cook it for 20 minutes, then check it every two minutes to see if it was set, or if it was still jiggly. If the latter, we were to cook it for two minutes more.

First off, who opens their oven every two minutes when cooking a cake? We decided to let it cook for 24 minutes. Open. Two minutes more. Open. Two minutes more. Open. Two minutes more. This went on until the cake had been in the oven nearly 40 minutes. Steven and I hovered over this cake like it was a newborn child, checking it for jiggling at each interval until it reached an acceptable level. As per the recipe, we let it rest on a rack for 15 minutes, then turned it out on a plate.

Well, crap! Other than the edges, the bottom was completely jiggly! It looked raw! We gently lifted it, upside down, back into the pan and put it back in the oven for another seven minutes. It was still jiggly when we took it out, but honestly, at this point we had lost interest. It was what it was. We turned it right side up onto the plate and left it to cool while we went about our day. Fast forward three hours and that cake had completely cratered and one side had fallen down. But it had also set up a bit more. We decided it was ugly, but well worth eating. Of course I have to have lemon with chocolate, so I made my easy peasy lemon mascarpone to go on top. (250 grams of mascarpone, zest of one lemon, 3-4 TBLS of sugar, splash of lemon juice. Mix thoroughly.) It was really delicious.

Here’s where I think things went sideways (literally) with this cake. First, a well-written recipe is worth it’s weight in gold. I personally don’t think this is one of those recipes. A well-calibrated oven should not need to be opened every two minutes! Secondly, the author made the comment that she did not want a lava cake, and she’s right. It’s not lava, but it does have a jiggly center that, try as we might, will not cook to a solid state. It would have been great if the recipe had included a description of what to expect. It’s not a normal cake, after all! It has to be allowed to set up after cooking and it will never resemble a proper cake. So our expectations were off from the start. This cake, cooked in my teeny RV oven, is essentially a big batch of ganache surrounded by a delicious, crunchy brownie. So really, holy cow, when you think about it, what’s not to love? If you know what to expect, then like us, you will love this cake!

The recipe is from a book by Molly Wizenberg. Lynn found it on a blog called saltysweetlife.com. What drew me to it in the first place was not only that it required only a few ingredients, but also that the blogger had chosen this cake to make for her own wedding. She said, “This cake, like our relationship, is as perfect as it should be. Sweet like sugar, rich as chocolate and forged with just enough heat to melt our hearts and win our minds.”

Happy Anniversary, indeed. 🙂

NEXT UP: Same thing, only different!

…