If you aren't interested in food, today's contribution is not for you!
Every year, from early January and depending on prices and what is going on, John buys 100g of black truffle for me to "play" with. He uses Ebay to find a supplier, and if we like their product, we stay faithful for a year or two. The bloke that sent us a photo of the dog that found the truffles was a favourite for about 3 years I think! Generally they come from the south west of France, although there are truffle woods around here and a truffle fair each year at Chinon. This year we were a bit later than usual buying our black gold as I had a trip to the UK earlier in the month, but the parcel arrived on the 23rd of January with these gems.
The first thing I do is set some to infuse in cheese - this year's choice was a quarter of a Brillat Saverin, a mild cheese that we generally find fairly pointless, unless it is to take on truffle aroma. I also mixed some pieces into cream cheese and sealed that in a yoghurt pot for a few days.
The first meal was the classic - scrambled eggs with truffle shards sprinkled over them. The scrambled eggs are a silly colour because our chickens produce dayglo yellow egg yolks.
The second meal was another classic - linguine with a cream sauce infused with cèpe and truffle flakes. I added the smoked salmon as I had a slice that I had got from the fish monger before the truffles arrived and it needed to be used up. Happily, it didn't overwhelm the sauce.
The Wednesday meal was fish based, as I had been to the market that morning - a nice piece of cod filet, pan fried, with a beurre blanc sauce and slices of truffle. There were crudités to provide a hint of healthy bits too.
By the Thursday evening, the truffle infused cream cheese was just right for a dip with aperos before dinner. I then topped up the pot with more cream cheese to get another go at it!
Thursday dinner was a sumptuous roast chicken leg served with truffle mash - one of the very few dishes where the truffle gets cooked as it is so well encased in mashed potato.
Friday we had a day off from truffle, but Saturday night was an interesting one. My brother had given me a couple of merguez crepinettes - for those not in the know, merguez are a beef and/or lamb sausage well spiced with paprika, while a cripinette is a sort of flat sausage encased in crepine, or the membrane of an internal organ of a pig. We had the other half of the truffle mash too, and were worried that the meat would be too strong for the mash, but they made an excellent mix.
Sunday lunch is normally eggs in some form after a morning of labour or leisure at The Shack. For the truffle fest, I did baked eggs with truffle slices hidden under the eggs, so another of the few times the truffle actually gets cooked, but again trying to keep the aromas in with a coating of egg, cream and mild cheese. It worked!
Sunday dinner was another classic - pan fried scallops with truffle. To celebrate scallops, I dug up four leeks from The Garden and cooked them down with stock, before adding a swirl of cream and pepper to the final mix. They made a wonderful bed and foil to the scallops - that was memorable!
On the Monday, as I was in Baugé, I stopped at the market and got a pork loin from the butcher. This enabled me to do slices of pork loin with spaghetti and a cream and truffle sauce which was a particularly lush start to a new week.
The next lunchtime we finished off the truffle infused cheeses as the Brillat Saverin was starting to climb out of the cheese box - not in a smelly way, just getting jolly runny.
The week of truffle greed ended with the second half of the pork loin, cut into medallions and pan fried, and served with a rich mushroom risotto, all liberally festooned with the final slivers of truffle.
So there you have it - 8 days of truffle heaven, which won't be repeated in 2023, so roll on 2024! I should also add that there is a real art to photographing food, which includes the right lighting and the food not being hot. But scrub around that - I remembered to take a snap before wading into dinner and that is the most I can promise!
Next week there should be animal videos.
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