Epiphany.

My favorite part of the holidays has always been the food. Well, that and sleeping in but since I now have 3 children the only thing left is the food.
And what I love about the epiphany is the galette des rois, the king's galette. The puff pastry drips with butter and the dense filling smells of almonds and orange flower water. And then there is the feve, a little porcelain figurine that is hidden in the filling. It replaced the dried bean of old. The lucky person to find it is crowned king... or queen for the day.
The youngest person hides under the table and designates the person whom each slice is going to. Traditionally there is only one feve in the cake but nowadays a lot of families will put as many feves in the cake as there are children present.

Some people celebrate the epiphany the first Sunday of January like my sister . Others celebrate it on January 6th. And in France at least, numerous others celebrate it all month long. Like me.

Here is a recipe for the galette. Try it, it's very easy.

Galette des rois:

Enough puff pastry to cut 2 circles into
100g sugar
2 egg yolks
125g almond meal
1 tsp almond extract
1 tbsp orange flower water
75g butter

Mix the sugar and egg yolks until the mix is pale and makes a ribbon. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Spread onto one dough circle leaving 1 inch of space all around. Press the feves or a dried kidney beans slightly into the filling. Cover with the other circle of dough and press the edges together with a fork.
I always glaze my dough with cream or milk because our eggs come from our own chickens and they don't lay much in winter.

New Year's Day.

                                                               Frozen Peas in December 2010

The first month of the year is named after Janus, the two-faced roman god. He was the god of doorways, watching the front entrance with one face and the back door with the other.
Very fitting for a first month!
The Dutch once called January, Lauwmaand: the frosty month. And the Saxons called it Wulf-monath because the hungry wolves would be especially troublesome at this time of year.
4000 years ago the Babylonians already celebrated the new year... on March 1st. In 46 B.C. Julius Caesar changed the date to January 1st to reflect the changes the sun went through. The change was followed by the Egyptians and Celtic people.
The Babylonians also started the tradition of good resolutions by returning items they had borrowed during the year.


The image of Father Time is often used to illustrate the old year and the baby usually shown with him depicts the New Year. Father Time is a personification of time. He is an elderly bearded man, dressed in a robe, carrying a scythe and an hourglass or other timekeeping device. He was adapted from Cronus, the father of Zeus, and he belonged to the people known as the Titans in ancient mythology. Cronus existed before the Greek gods far back in the earliest stages of mythology.
The baby usually wears a diaper and a sash telling which year he represents. The depiction of the New Year as a baby started in Greece in 600 BC.

It is often customary to make a lot of noise for New Year to scare away the evil spirits.
And my French grandmother always gave her (numerous) grandchildren a big fat shiny 50 francs silver coin on January 1st so that we would be lucky all year long.

Another tradition that I find very convenient indeed: do not clean or throw trash away lest good fortune be swept away from you. And don't do the laundry or a family member could be washed away.

 I'll be sure to do none of that. I wouldn't want to harm anybody after all!
And it'll free time to pour over seed catalogs. Now that's a good plan.

A happy, healthy and lucky New Year to you and yours :)

New Year's dinner.

                                                   Frost on Brussels Sprouts Leaves, December 2010.


Was very french and very delicious. Like every year we had a pate made by my aunt with foie gras. She lives in the southwest of France and uses a very very old family recipe. It is delicious. We had a green salad with it with a garlic vinaigrette like my father always do. We were going to have salmon but considering the price we had to pay for our plat principal, a goose stuffed with apples, I decided against it. Traditionally the goose is served for Christmas but we had ham for Christmas because there was so much to do and it is so easy. But I really wanted goose fat and goose bouillon so here we are.
I don't like stuffing too much so I decided to pat dry the goose salt and pepper the inside and out and rubbed it with a bit of dark beer. I put peeled and cored whole apples inside and trussed the bird.  Well kind of. I don't know how to do it well so the results looks more like a packaged present than anything. But the point is, it works.

It will be served with potatoes and turnips that will be steamed first and then warmed up in the goose fat. You should get a lot of fat that should be drained from the roasting pan. If you want to make gravy, leave a bit of fat in the pan, deglaze with white wine and add chicken broth. Let it reduce for a few minutes.

Yum. Big time.

Tomorrow, I'll make broth with the trimmings, herbs and spices.