On the Menu

So, there's a theme to blogging this month. Any ideas? :)

Another week has flown by, and I can't believe we're seven days closer to Christmas. Seriously, I feel like I need at least another week or two before we head off for the Italian Christmas Fiesta. We finally put up some decorations, (love the gingerbread people, Karina) and bought some lights to hang around our window, so it's beginning to look a bit festive around here.

It was another pretty quiet Saturday for us. We've made the mistake of starting the third season of 24 last weekend, and have thus been glued to the computer all week, trying to get through the season before our houseguest arrives. The oven saga continued with Erik taking a trip out to some electronics store near Nation to pick up the fancy fuses we need to make the darn thing work. And work it does. After our afternoon gym session, we made the oven make up for the two weeks its had off.

On the menu tonight (recipes from the Williams Sonoma Paris cookbook):

Oeufs en cocotte--another stupidly easy French recipe. Take out ramekins (or cute little yogurt pots). Put a bit of butter in the bottom. Crack one or two eggs into the ramekin. Sprinkle chives on the egg. Drizzle cream. Cover with Parmesan and Gruyere. Put into dish filled with boiling water, and cook in the oven until the whites are set. Enjoy.

Roast Pork--the recipe had some name about the 'flavours of the sun' or something cheesy like that. It got off to a bad start at the grocery store, that has been under renovation for the past couple of months. Which usually isn't a problem, but now that it's Christmas there are tons are seasonal products to display, and they're changing things around daily, it's almost impossible to find things. So, I wasn't able to get ANY fresh herbs and had to use pre-chopped parsley, dried sage, and dried rosemary. The other problem is that when I use English recipes I have no idea what the French name is for the cut of meat, so I just bought what looked like a pork roast in the meat section (which had been moved and minimized since I was there last night). In the end I don't think the roast I chose had enough fat, plus it didn't really unroll, so we had to slice it in half a bit to smear the herbs, garlic and oil, before rolling it back up and roasting it. Easy enough, except that we realized once it was done that there was no salt in it, and we cooked it for too long, even though we halved the cooking time. Must get a meat thermometer. Hopefully the leftovers will make good sandwiches.

Flageolets--these are some kind of French bean (the legume, not the green been). Anyway, could only find the canned kind, tossed them with butter, garlic and parsley, and they were delicious.

Dessert--am waiting for Erik to get off the phone with Steve, who arrives at 5:30am Tuesday morning, so that we can go and get crepes.

*Erik has discovered that there are ten flights coming in from Asia between 5:30-5:45 that morning. Thats a lot of tired people looking for a way into the city. Not sure why we found that interesting.