Thursday, December 17, 2009

Haut Koenigsburg

Gabriel and Emmanuelle treated us to a special day out this past Wednesday - we took a little road trip to Haut Koenigsburg - the tallest castle in Alsace. Now, I am not even going to attempt a history lesson. In fact, this is going to be a mostly picturesque post. If you are interested in learning about the 8 centuries-worth of history of the castle, you can get a pretty good idea of it here: http://www.haut-koenigsbourg.fr/en (in English, to boot!)


Ah! Bon! Per our hosts' request, we park the car at the bottom of the hill and trek up a windy, somewhat treacherous route to the castle by foot. Don't my companions have lovely backsides?


View from the (almost) top.











I was quite relieved to reach a real path with a real railing.










Entrance to the castle.











My favorite: Alsace's oldest wine cask, from 1670. Where's my glass?











The Imperial Room where lots of real, real important stuff happened.







Official seals from real, real important people.











Fancy, old furniture. This one's for you, Babyface.










Old & dangerous weapons, cooooool.










Fancy furnace - on the right side is a built-in heated seat. But we weren't allowed to touch anything, so that just seems like a big tease to me.


















































(Feel free to compliment O on his picture-taking abilities - he took all of these.)
































Don't shoot!
















View from the top.










...and that's all for now! We're fast-approaching Christmas, so hopefully we'll have a Holly Jolly post some time soon. Thanks for reading, we miss you guys!


Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Boudin! Boudin! Boudin!

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you should know all about the importance of cooking "head to toe" ... or, in this case - snout to tail. Owen got to witness our little piggies (well... not so little) being slaughtered, bled and butchered last weekend, and then made his first-ever batch of boudin noir (blood sausage) using the fresh blood. So, without further adieu... (and WARNING: this is another gruesome one, folks)

There are our beloved KiKis, spooning and snoozing before the big morning-o-kill.

This little piggy is going to market.



















...but not without a bolt to the head. For those concerned - this was a very quick and painless death. No squealing was involved in the process... in fact, Anthony Bourdain's description in A Cook's Tour proved to not be true in the slightest.












Gabriel woke up at 6am to make sure the fire was going underneath the kettle, plenty of time to get water boiling for the cleaning.



Cleaning le cochon...















The whole crew (even Gabriel's daughter, Melina, on the far right!) helps shave and clean the piggy.








Shaving the pig.
















Most of the hair was taken off by a "cow bell"-esque razor. What they couldn't take off by shaving was done with a blow torch (see here).











Our tractor came in handy when it came time to split the pig in half. Voila!














Bon! Melina surprises the crew with a basket of hot coffee, shot glasses, and Calvados. Let the Celebration of Pig commence!














Cheers to the pig!


Now, it's time to make some boudin noir. After much searching, we found a good recipe online - perfectly simple for first-timers. First, O prepares some diced apples... he then minced about a thousand (we had to multiply the recipe x5) onions (which I unfortunately did not get a picture of... too busy crying).






All the prepped ingredients: onions cooked in pork fat (the tray in the back) - Calvados, blood (obvi!), 4spice in the coffee mug (white pepper, ginger, clove, nutmeg), parsley (the green stuff), minced garlic and fresh ground pepper (to the left of the mug), ground fat back (to the left of the parsley), ground lean pork meat in the foil, diced apples sauteed in pork fat (to the right of the meat), and milk - obviously from our farm, duh!






Everything mixed together. Mmmm.









O had to get a little creating with the stuffing technique: since we didn't have a proper-sized funnel, he cut the bottom off of a plastic bottle... it worked perfectly!












After cooking for about 30 minutes in hot water - voila! Our 5x batch made about 24 links of boudin noir. Bon Appetit!

...and, as always, stay tuned... next up will be our visit to the castle Haut Koenigsbourg!

Monday, December 14, 2009

Jazz & Colmar

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, we've just been chugging along with farm life! But now, Christmas season is upon us and we are going to be posting quite a lot to get you all caught up.


First up, a few pictures from the neighbor's house. They recently cleaned up their cave of a basement - 3 rooms total. Now, don't be hasty and imagine a newly remodeled, new floors, new furniture kind of man cave. They literally only cleaned up - i.e. removed large pieces of debris and cobwebs. They then purchased a lot of old brick-a-brack and twinkly lights to toss around the room. The result? A very hip and cool "speakeasy"-type basement, where they invited us (and a few dozen other) friends over one night for drinks, desserts, and live jazz. The man of the house is a keyboard player and has his own jazz group, so they performed for us down in the basement! It was a fun night, much more laid back than polka-fest.




I apologize for the poor quality - I photo-shopped as much as I could. But, being in a cave and having a digital camera from approximately 8 years ago, I was slightly limited. Here, G waxes philosophical on some important topic like munster.










O steps up to the bar and instantly makes a new friend. While most of the younger guys were very shy to speak English to us, this dude was chatting it up like it was his job. Thanks, dude!





















Click below for a little video!




Now, a few pictures from our trip to Colmar for the Christmas Markets...
We definitely chose a cold day to be walking around for hours on end, but thankfully the sun made a few appearances, the people were a-plenty, and they serve a lovely thing known as VIN CHAUD (hot mulled wine) on every street corner.







A little live entertainment, I do believe here they are playing "Chatanooga Choo Choo" and I am not even kidding.








The look on the man's face to the right leads me to believe that he is enjoying interrupting this picture. Oh well, look at the pretty tree behind me! And I am kind of smiling, even!













Speaking of Chatanooga Choo Choos... (chooes? choose?)... here's one now! The obligatory tourist train, which we definitely did not ride. Sure is cute, though.








Colmar's little neighborhood known as Petite Venise... for obvious reasons.








There's my tall drink of water.











Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
(stay tuned - next up will be a juicy cochon post - from slaughtering the animal all the way to making boudin noir... )