Cooking styles

[chickenfeet]

From time to time I tease the scholarly oursin about the contents of her fridge and her cooking style. A typical oursin meal seems to consist of smoked pheasant breast napped with a sauce périgord and garnished with a few slices of truffle, served with pesto walnut bread and the first dwarf artichokes of the season. I confess, I do stuff like that for high days and holidays but recently around here a combination of the dreaded Atkins diet and dwindling cash resources has led to a significantly more robust style. Add to that the fact that I'm lazy and tend to do big batches of stuff for the freezer rather than cook every night.

Returning from the Saturday market today I realised that by this evening I will have cooked over 20 pounds of meat in the last two days. Yesterday I got the missionary sized stock pot out and cooked up a batch of tagine with a leg of lamb (cheap, frozen, kiwi), a couple of large eggplants, a bunch of zucchini, red peppers, onions and spices. That lot headed freezerwards an hour or two ago. Right now, a large batch of boeuf à la daube is simmering on the stove (6 pounds of shin beef, slab bacon, mushrooms, onions, garlic, wine and herbs) and tonight I have a 10 pound leg of pork to roast. Yes, there are only two of us.

This carnivorous lifestyle is made possible by the fact that meat here is absurdly cheap. The pork was C$1.99/pound (I could have got shoulder for C$1.09), the beef C$3.49/pound and the lamb (boneless) C$4.49/pound. By contrast fish and cheese are equally or more expensive than Europe.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Huh: I think you exaggerate my ability to make poncey sauces!
My last experiment with dwarf artichokes was less than successful: they weren't tiny and tender enough to eat whole, and not big enough to have anything on them worth eating.