The asparagus in the field next to our house is growing nicely (some are around 15cm ) and they have the gear there ready to start harvesting so it won’t be long now.
There used to be strawberry farmer on the right on the road going from frauenfeld to steckborn. Every spring he would let families come and pick strawberries ( pick&eat with one hand, while those in the other hand were pay-by-weight 8) kinda thing. He used to put up a sign by the road 2 weeks in advance. If he still does it, it should be soonish …
Some of his strawberries are the really sweet ones.
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Well, I live right on the Swiss-French border and lamb shanks certainly aren’t cheap on either side!
Meat does tend to be cheaper though, it’s just those pesky shanks.
Not a massive difference for other green groceries, probably as the shops are pricing according to close proximity to a ‘rich’ swiss city. Supermarket carparks are always full at the weekend with Geneva and Vaud number-plates, we never shop on Friday evenings or Saturdays as it’s impossible to park!
Asparagus in Geneva is currently about 9-10 francs a kilo with both colours the same price this year, which is unusual.
Almost ready. Carefully browning the pork shoulder. Meat is swimming in sweet potatoes, carrots, and bunch onions.
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Wanted to attempt this recipe for years and years, more than 15.
This is Marco Pierre White’s “Stuffed trotters Pierre Koffmann”. A dish several famous chefs have said would be their last meal on earth.
Took nearly 6 hours of cooking and prep, special order of kalbsmilken and big, intact pig trotters in the butcher. Dirtying a crapload of pots and pans, shaving the trotters, performing surgery to remove the bone and keep skin intact, washing, chopping vegetables, 3 types of wine to make the sauce, morels, fancy chicken breast mince…
We didn’t like it! The skin was too sweet, it lacked some sharp counter to the richness of the pork, we picked through some of the skin and stuffing (chicken mouse, fried sweetbreads, pearl onions, morel mushrooms, cream) but ended up unceremoniously dumping about 2/3 of the dish.
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I…can’t…write…my…first…thought.
I thought it was somrthing totally.. different.
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Do tell!
@Refugee, What a pity. The list of ingredients sounds wonderful–morels and sweetbreads together–What could go wrong? However, I’ve heard of other home chefs that have tried this with similar results to yours. Maybe this is only a brigade dish after all…
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Oh wow, I don’t know many - or any other than one of my brothers who’s also a UK-educated foodie - who even know this dish. Most people don’t even know, or have ever tasted pig feet. They’re delicious and dirt cheap!
I’d be interested to hear more. The thing is that nothing was bad tasting, it was just a massive let down after the monumental effort to prepare it.
Edit: yes, certainly a brigade type dish. Boning the trotters was a 20-30 min job per trotter, and dirty and disgusting, needed a combination of physical strength and finesse and extremely sharp knives (edit: and boning knife at that, which I don’t have) to peel back the skin, cut ligaments, leave skin intact, soak and scrub hard in salted water multiple times to remove a lot of the stinky piggishness (you see pigs in farms - they walk in their piss and shit…). Then there were vegetables to prepare, stock, onions, the mouse, the sweetbreads needed peeling, frying…
Seems to me there are many dishes that simply need the equipment, ingredients, and techniques that only a top restaurant has. Economies of scale can relate not only to cost, but to results (in terms of effort/benefit). Michel Roux had his Michelin moment at the same time as Koffmann, but it’s the cooking of Michel Roux, Jr. (Michel’s nephew) that I really like–because it’s doable by the home cook.
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Yep, know the Roux family well through TV, remember watching Masterchef: the professionals back in 2010 or so in the UK and noting a recipe for duckling with cherries and fondant potatoes, was indeed very doable at home! Raymond Blanc also has very doable recipes for the home cook.
Ingredients you can get, there’s nothing inherently difficult to get that I couldn’t get either in CH or Greece - you just need to order well ahead of time (2-3 weeks) from a proper butcher and I’ve found most can get more or less anything (wild boar, other game, offal). Economies of scale, for sure - I spent a couple of hours the day before preparing the trotters, however the actual cooking and in parallel cleaning the day of the cooking took me 4 hours of constant work, no exaggeration.
Technique, for sure, a trained cook can deal with it much faster and efficiently, and equipment can also be an issue but again I feel that a person with a reasonable stash of pots and pans can deal with a lot (eg bain-marie, steaming insert, big pot, strainers etc). One can even do sous vide without anything specialised other than food bags and very low heat, in a pot, I’ve done it without even having a food thermometer.
In hindsight it’s deserts that I find to be harder without specialised ingredients/equipment.
The one on the bottom looks like a penis but with a pigs head instead of a bell end.
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Today I was feeling rather Blackburnish and I do have a memory of eating John Bull’s as a kid.
Havnt had one in over half a century.
So here we are:
The magnificent and crunchy and extremely tasty John Bull with chips.
Just like 't chippy op top 'o road.
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Ain’t those supposed to be deep-fried?
Yeah, but it works in a pan too.
My local Migros doesn’t have a butchers counter but today they had a new idea, new to me anyway.
Fresh meat that had reached its “best before” date they froze and sold at half price.
A much better idea than throwing it away, I also thought it was an opportunity to try cuts I don’t usually buy and because of the low price no guilty feelings when I don’t like it and throw it away.
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I noticed this in our coop a few months ago and thought it was a good idea.
I’ve not seen it in Migros though.
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Migros La Combe in Nyon does it, but not Migros Port de Nyon (which has a crap meat counter.)
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