A Kitchen Weekend

This weekend, I wanted to delve into a few recipes from a cookbook Jane had gotten me for Christmas, A Year at Les Fougères.  This is a great book full of recipes from one of my favourite local restaurants.  The restaurant emphasizes what's in season, and has great relationships with many local farmers and food suppliers. 

Most of the recipes listed under "January" required the use of Seville Orange Marmalade, since this is made in the restaurant in January (the Seville oranges are only available here for a couple of weeks of January).  I'm not so big on marmalade, but the book really sold it, so what the hey.

Start with 10 oranges, and a whole bunch of time on your hands.  The oranges are simmered for a couple of hours, and then the pulp and seeds are extracted and left to sit overnight.  The orange peel is chopped and left to sit overnight in the cooking water.

With nothing left to do but wait till the next day, I took a shot at making spaetzle.  This has been on my list of things to try making for awhile.  It was not bad, but I clearly have more work to do to get it right.  The spaetzle was not so photogenic, so I won't include it here.

We had Gerald at the house as well.  He came to start building the worktable for Jane's studio.  This is almost done, and will be really great once it is up and going.

Dinner was nothing special, since we'd been eating half the afternoon anyway.

Next morning...back to the marmalade. put the orange pulp through a sieve, and put the liquid back into the big pot with the peels and cooking water.

bring to a boil

reduce, skim, reduce, skim, etc.

etc. etc. etc.

coffee break, but don't go to far from the stove.  There is lots more skimming and testing the temperature to do.

basically done.  Just a bit more reducing, and finish with a wee dram of Macallan's 12 year old scotch whiskey (and some for the marmalade too).

I didn't burn myself once...which given my track record around things like sugar syrups is a minor miracle.

The marmalade itself is pretty intense!  I kinda like it, though it may not be to everyone's tastes.  I should get a jar sometime from Les Fougères to see how well I followed their recipe.

Then it was time to use the stuff in a recipe. I decided to try the homemade gnocchi with rosemary and orange marmalade.  This went a bit better than the spaetzle, but once again a bit of work to do.

Dinner was pickerel fillets, pan-fried with pesto, the gnocchi, and some Swiss Chard, quickly wilted in the pan.  A bit scatter-shot, but some interesting flavours to work on in the future.

The transit strike is over, though it will be at least another week before the buses are on the streets....so from a practical point of view, tomorrow is still a "transit strike" kind of day.  To get ahead of tomorrow's dinner, I roasted some chicken pieces and finished them off with a maple-balsamic glaze that also came from the Les Fougères book.  The chicken was so photogenic, but I was too tired to document it for posterity.

Clear down, wash up, and take out the garbage.

Phew.