THE ham - its been a long wait

There he is the whole ham. Notice how beautifully he's wrapped? Sort of ugly isn't he, but having waited a year for him he's beautiful to me and to my friend Andrew. The ham is the result of our adventure last year of joining in with French friends to butcher a whole pig. Well, actually it turned out to be two pigs as there were quite a few of us. (I've written up the whole adventure earlier in this blog.).
Because it was the first time for Andrew & I we sort of wimped out and decided that we would share half a pig between us. We had a great time during the whole process and both ended up with lots of several kinds of sausage and several kinds of pate. These were easy to divide up. For the ham we had to wait for it to cure. Local lore says that takes one year; who are we to argue. (The cure by the way is a simple salt cure not much else.) So the ham was finally ready a week or so ago & our friend Jacques brought it over for us. We now had the problem of how to divide the ham in two - equitably!
After considerable thought it was our friend Robert who came to our rescue. Rob is a retired farmer/ jockey/ butcher. He reckoned that he had a way to cut up the ham so the ended up in four pieces that could be equitably shared. This sounded better than sawing it down the middle which was the best the Andrew & I had come up with so we agreed to let Robert have a go.



Rob started by cutting off the hock.

As you can see the ham has a really nice color and is tender & moist. Of course we had a taste. It is great! Wonderful flavor, not too salty. I think our French experts we were working with knew what they were doing. Its for sure we didn't.






Next Rob cut out what he called the 'chine'. It the smaller piece in the middle of the picture. Apparently this is a different set of muscles .


Now came the cut cut where Rob took out the leg bone and then cut the ham into two large pieces. These were the Topside and the Silver side. (if I got it right the Silver side is the inside of the pig's leg and the Topside is the outside of the leg.)



The piece in the center of the picture is the topside (or at least I think it is. We'd been drinking wine as we watched Rob so I wasn't paying as close attention to what he was doing as I should have.)



In any case it was now time to divide up as we had four pieces of ham plus a bone.

I asked Andrew to choose first as I'd dragooned him into the whole thing to begin with.

Here's what he chose. The chine & the Topside.

I got the silver side, the hock and the bone. We're both happy.

The whole thing has been a great experience. We'll probably do it again next month.

The frugal shopper - French style

I recently read about buying foie gras here in France now that its on sale after the holidays. That's good advice because it really is much cheaper than normal. Still foie gras is expensive even at half price. That got me to thinking about frugal shopping for food here. Eat well, but save money. Its possible if one sticks to seasonal items, has a freezer and learns the ropes. In other words learn to food shop the way the French housewives do. They are in a word - frugal.

Now, when it comes to the big holiday meals the French don't count the cost. They buy whatever they want at whatever the cost. Foie gras at full price, oysters, expensive cuts of meat, cheeses, pâtisserie desserts, chocolate, the lot. But in everyday cooking they tend to be frugal. They follow the seasons, they use the markets and they prepare slow cooked meals with inexpensive ingredients.

Here are few of the things I've learned from them:

A freezer is necessary so the one can take full advantage of the sales. Especially the meat sales.

Meats: Follow the sales for sure. Beef & veal is always pretty expensive; even when on sale. Lamb is normally expensive, but does go on sale. For example I'm going to buy a couple of half lambs today at 5.30 euro per KG. (a little under $4.00/lb.). Pork is of very high quality here and is inexpensive. When on sale its really cheap. Belly pork for $1.50/lb for example. The pork sausage (de Toulouse) is both wonderful and moderately priced.
Birds range in price. There is cheap battery chicken, but a proper free range bird is relatively expensive ($7-8.00/lb) When available fresh duck leg/thighs are very cheap. Breasts are normally not cheap at $8-9.00/lb. Turkey breasts & leg/thighs are cheap. Recently our local supermarket has been selling quail from Spain at a very low price.

Vegetables: The first rule is to buy from the market whenever possible. The produce will be cheaper in most cases and fresher. Winter is difficult as the imported stuff is relatively expensive & the quality not that great. Leeks are a real staple here being local. Cauliflower and broccoli are also good. Onions, shallots and potatoes stay inexpensive. Most other veggies start to get expensive.
Given what's available we have adopted the French custom of having lots of soups. A staple here are the various kinds of squash & pumpkin which make for great soups as, of course, do the leeks.

Fruit: Apples are the best bet here as there a lots of local varieties (my favorite stand at Villfranche market always has at least ten types available + great cider!) Oranges & Clementine's come in from Spain with good quality & price. Pears are good. Pretty much everything else suffers.

Cheese: There's not too much seasonal price variation, but there is a lot of 'quality' variation. For example; plain old brie vs. brie de meux vs. raw milk brie. The price difference is about 3X per pound. Or take the range from Cantal to Salers. Here price about doubles from $6.00/lb to about $14.00/lb as you go from Cantal-jeaune to cantal- entre doux to cantal- vieux to Laguiole to Salers. All the same cheese family, but a huge difference in price. There's also a large variation in price amongst the range of blue cheeses. Then there is in addition a huge range of 'manufactured' or 'commercial' cheeses. (sort of the French equivalent of Velveeta) These are cheap & some are actually edible.

Charcuterie: The range is so large that its hard to make comparisons. Certainly the pre-prepared dishes are expensive in general although things like celeris rave & carrot salad are cheap & good. Pates range from very expensive to pretty cheap depending upon ingredients. Rillets tend to be a great buy as are fritons. One could totally eat from the charcuterie, but it would be expensive.

General food stuff: Basics are reasonable and there's not a lot of variation. We find most ready meal type packaged goods in the freezer or on the shelves to be pretty awful. See my comments about the Uk equivalents. Jams, jellies, chocolate, snacks and so forth are abundant & cheap.

We've been out of the states too long to make comparisons, but we do find things cheaper here than in England.

Overall though we find it fun to be frugal. Shopping & eating like the French is no hardship; we enjoy it. We still revert to & enjoy eating occasional American or English meals, but by & large we're becoming more & more 'French"

A better mousetrap?

We've been having a plague of mice this winter. Living in the country as we do we expect to get the occasional mouse in the house especially in the winter. Normally we get two or three between November and March.
This year its been over twenty! I'm catching nearly one a day. Our neighbors all seem to have the same problem. For whatever reason (global warming? Carbon emissions? ) the mouse population seems to have exploded. I'm even catching them in one of the spare bedrooms which isn't used at all and has absolutely no source of food for a mouse. I've been around outside and blocked up every conceivable place where I think a mouse might get in. No luck. The little devils are so small that they can squeeze in just about anywhere.
Up to a few days ago I was using conventional mouse traps. You know, the wooden ones with a spring, a wire arrangement and a little platform for the bait. I was using two, one under the kitchen sink & one over in the spare bedroom. The bait was a bit of cheese or, this being France, a small piece of pate. As mentioned this was working pretty well, but I did have a number of misses where they got the bait, but didn't get trapped and there were days when I forgot to reset that trap(s).
The other day mouse droppings turned up in the linen room so Linda asked if I'd get more traps as it didn't seem that two were enough. So while we were in Villefranche I dropped into Pole Vert. (Now, you have to get you 'Verts' straight in France as there is Pole Vert and there is Point Vert. Both national chains. Pole Vert is a post of farmer's hardware store. An amazing mixture of stuff for the farmer, everything from clothes to machinery to pipes to horsey stuff to mouse traps. Point Vert on the other hand is a combination of garden stuff plus general hardware. Everything from plants to fertilizer to pipe fittings to wine to clothes to, yes, mouse traps. Whatever, both seem to do pretty well & are fun to wander around being pretty good for one's vocabulary of farming & garden items. Not as much fun as the quincaillerie though.)

Sure enough Pole Vert had a stock of the classic mouse traps. So I picked up a couple, but there right next to the checkout counter was a display of SUPER CAT!

I've read a saying somewhere to the effect that "build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door." I don't know who said that, but it has always stuck in my mind. Well It seems that somebody has built a better mouse trap!



Here it is the Super Cat mouse trap. This is the picture of it closed. They come two to the pack and cost about 4 bucks. The promise is that they're easy to use, safe, effective and require no baiting.

Naturally, I had to buy a two pack to try out.

So, when we got home the first thing I did was to read the directions. (being a BSEE I do stupid thing like reading directions)






So simple that even I could understand them. Push down the lever and remove the cap on the bait platform.

Once a mouse is caught just push down the lever again to drop the corpse into the garbage. Your trap is the automatically reset.

Couldn't be simpler.







So I set both traps and placed them. As a test I also set my old conventional trap next to the Super Cat under the kitchen sink.

Super Cat worked! I caught three mice in a row. AND the mice preferred. if that's the word, Super Cat to the old fashioned trap.

In fact after a few days of this I'm not catching mice any more. I think Super Cat has cleaned them all out.

Thus, it looks as if somebody has actually invented a better mouse trap. I was intrigued and noticed that there was an Internet address on the packaging (www.swissinno.com) so I had a look. Turns out that this company makes a number of interesting products including 'humane' version of the mouse trap. They've just introduced a trap for voles & moles which I'm trying to buy as the moles are chewing up our lawn and, so far, traps, noise makers and bombs (yes, really!) haven't done the job.

All I have to do is find somebody in France who stocks the mole trap.