As regular readers will know we ordered a pintade [guinea fowl] for Christmas Day dinner. We finally decided on the following menu:
main:
roasted pintade with a sauce a la Normande
pommes dauphinoise and haricots verts
dessert:
traditional christmas pudding and creme brulé ice cream.
We roasted the pintade in the oven. We put a sliced lemon and a roughly quartered shallot into the bird's cavity. The skin was rubbed with colza oil [in preference to butter] and seasoned with salt and pepper. Then we wrapped the bird in streaky bacon; set it on slices of apple and quartered shallots in the roasting tray and drizzled it with a little more oil. It went into the oven at 180C.
For the Normande sauce we sauteed some shallots, lardons fumé and an apple in butter. We then addded cider and reduced it all down. Next, we warmed and flamed off a generous amount of Calvados and added it to the sauce before letting it reduce again and finishing off with light cream. Finally, we added the apple slices the bird had sat on to the sauce. It went very well with the pintade.The food was all very yummy so we ate a lot and drank quite a bit, including a very nice sparkling Alsace Rosé.
The photos are of two of the lovely Christmas tree arrangements at the Chateau of Chenonceau which we visited last week.
14 comments:
Sounds like a delicious way to eat a pintade. Yum.
We looked at pintade but it was very expensive here and we do not have our own flock! We finally settled for a duck which we found on special it was delicious. All the best for 2012 Diane
@Walt - it worked well and the pintade was nice and moist.
@Diane - And the same to you :-). The pintade [not a pintade capon] was about the same per kg as a duck.
Duck breasts with cranberry & orange compote tonight :-)
A veritable feast!
For lunch we had some vegetable soup and a bar of chocolate on the slopes BUT had fantastic snow, brilliant sunshine in a cloud free sky and near empty slopes in Chatel.
We did have a delicious four bird roast from Aldi in the evening but were almost too tired to eat it and couldn@t manage our pud!!
Best wishes ...
I love the idea of serving the sauce Normande with the guinea fowl. Did you 'set fire' to the Calvados or did you add it as such to the sauce? Martine
That sounds so mouth-wateringly good! And that Christmas tree display at Chenonceau is breathtaking! 'Wow' to all of your post!
@Gaynor - glad the skiing is so good [slightly green with envy :-)] We had our meal as a late lunch -- find it works better than for dinner.
@Martine - we did indeed 'set fire' to the Calvados before adding it to the sauce to get rid of the raw spirit taste you otherwise get.
@Broad - thanks :-) It worked well. First time I cooked guinea fowl I ruined it by overcooking. It ended up dry and tough.
That sounds absolutely delicious! Glad you had such an enjoyable Christmas. The photos are lovely and the blog makeover looks suitably wintry, though I don't find white on black as easy to read with these ageing eyes....
@Perpetua - hope you had a lovely Christmas too!
Wanted to have the bog in the same style but shades of grey-blue, green-grey and with back typeface. BLOGGER would not oblige so 'testing' this. Think that the font on posts needs to be larger but quite like the anthracite grey --we'll see :-)
Blogger can be so disobliging, can't it? One suggestion, I can read the personal introduction bit very well because the text is in bold (as you used to do in your previous format) so perhaps that, rather than bigger text, would help the readability?
@Perpetua -
Indeed it CAN!
We shall give it a go. Everything is in Verdana except for the post text where we've been using Helvetica so we'll change that too.
A bit of trial end error....
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