Shopping in Strasbourg - II

A while back, I had the pleasure of spending a day in Strasbourg looking for food. While I find that my local vegetables from my farm guy are better, it's just fun to shop in France. Of course, Germany isn't cut off from the rest of the world and you can get things here, but the variety in France makes things fun. Like chickens with heads & feathers. Fun. A mountain full of avocodoes. Fun. Wine barrels from the 15th century. Fun (although I'll pass on the wine).

Here a few samples of what I saw:

A wine vat dating back to 1472. The wine in it has only been served 3 times - the last time being as General De Gaulle visited Strasbourg, and the city just returned to France immediately after the Second World War. The vat is located in the Cave Historique des Hospices de Strasbourg. That's right - the city hospital has it's own wine cellar. It dates back to 1395 and was an effort for poorer people to have health care. They couldn't pay with money, but they paid with wine. If you can read French and are interested, you can find more info here.

View of the Strasbourg Catherdral on the way to the market. The second tower was never completed.

Fresh chicken at the market. Note the yellow skin. While I didn't buy these birds, the ones I bought were equally yellow (but headless) & absolutely fantastic.

Time for a break with the Salad Gourmande. Shrimp in cocktail sauce, tomato with shallots, an oyster, crudites, a salad of celeriac? in a creamy sauce, a thick slice of bayonne ham, melon, smoked salmon and foie gras. Under all of this, there is in fact lettuce.

The grocery store where I do my shopping. I go there for the food, not for the carousel. Honest.

I heard that there is an avocodo shortage in North America this year. I'm not too sure whether or not this is true, but I didn't see any signs of a shortage in the supermarket.

When I'm driving over the border with a cooler, I always pick up some oysters. Bear in mind that Strasbourg is still 8 hours away from the sea. The 2 hours seems to make all the difference because they have better seafood than we do in Germany.

I'm not too sure if I actually bought any of this wine, but there was something strangely appealing about the mountain of bordeaux. It was so cheap, I should have bought the whole mountain. Or at least a little rock.

So that's a little bit of what I do & what I buy when I go to France. Reason enough, non?

Horse, of Course!

After my trip to Amsterdam, I was seriously let down. The classes weren't what I was expecting, the ladies of the Red Light District looked just like Go-Go girls & the food kinda sucked. Sure there was Indonesian food around, and I will report on that later, I promise. But what I really wanted from the Netherlands was horse.

When I was in university, one of my good friends was of Dutch parentage and we exchanged stories of our childhood. He was forced to eat horsemeat sandwiches, a tribute to his Friesan heritage. He hated this aspect of his heritage. Horses are beautiful animals, why on earth would you pack them in WonderBread & give them to a kid was a mystery to the young adults we were. Well, with this story in mind, I set off to find some horsemeat. Only on my way to class on the very last day, battling traffic, did I see a butcher shop which looked like it sold horsemeat. After trying to get out of the city for 45 minutes, ther was no way we were going to stop the car, look for a spot, buy some meat & let it wait in the car for 6 hours while we were in class, then a further 4 - 8 hours until we were back in Germany. So, no horse for me.

2 days later, I went to Strasbourg & exlpoited my credit card - the poor thing - I think I heard it cry. In the supermarket, I saw horsemeat. South American steaks. In my whirlwind effort to buy groceries in 30 minutes, I threw 2 horse steaks in the cart. When I got home, I tried nearly every excuse to avoid eating them. I saw dancing horses in the Dutch countryside - I didn't want to eat one of their kin! Well, I had already bought the meat, and I know that the stuff is eaten in the Veneto in Italy, as well as other parts of the world (South America, Quebec, Mongolia, even German Sauerbraten was originally made from horse). OK, fine, I'll do it.

I marinated the steaks for about an hour in olive oil, garlic, herbs de provence & a bit of tapenade (my failsafe "safe" marinade) and threw them on the grill. The result - not bad. Leaner than beef, better flavour than ostrich. In short - a decent meal. Am I happy I can check this off of my things to do list? Yes. Do I need to do this again? No.

Shopping in Strasbourg - I

While on a whirlwind shopping tour in Strasbourg this weekend, I managed to swing by the supermarket, and in the 40 minutes before they closed, I got wine, cheese, meat, fish & some veggies. The freezer will be full.

I've eaten baby goat, I've eaten snails, I've had oysters, cockles, lamb, quail, pheasant, ostrich; I'm not afraid of eating animals. Normally the rule is: if I'm not allergic, I'll try it. I know that I'm not allergic to crab; I know that I really like crab meat. As I saw the 3 pre-cooked crabs in the fish section, I selected the one with the least amount of barnacles, with the best colour, in short, the cutest crab available. Tonight, I pulled that crab out of my fridge & prepared to turn him into a seafood quinoa-isotto.

After having done my research on the best way to open a common crab, I set to work. But he looked so darn cute. I like to dive and if I saw this guy underwater, I'd stop for a while and look at him, maybe even have a little chat - he's that cute.Now, I know it's a little silly to be remorseful over the same food I was so excited about while in the supermarket.

1. crab is dead
2. if I didn't buy it, someone else would have - on sale!
3. he's here now and it would be wasteful to not use it

Good. I'll take it apart, make that quinoa-isotto I was planning & be more careful of my purchases in the future.

I took the shell apart, breaking the top off allowing me to get into the inside to pull out the meat & buttery bits. At this point, I realized that I was dealing with a female crab. This is the result of my meticulous meat extraction:

This is the plan for seafood quinoa-isotto:

take 200 g squid & 100g shrimp out of the freezer
sautee 1 onion (chopped) & 2 cloves of garlic (minced) in olive oil over low heat.
Add 1 cup rinsed quinoa & stir around.
Add safron-infused chicken broth (I had some in the fridge) bit by bit, allowing liquid to soak. Maybe about 2 cups.
Throw in cut up squid & allow everything to cook for 30 minutes.
At the last minute add shrimp, & both crab meat & crab red stuff (I think it was roe, but I'm really not sure - I was just squeamish).

The result was decent, my girlfriend came over & said it beat the pants off the salad she was about to make herself.

I still have a bunch of meat (& cheese & wine) from the shopping trip - I'll try to post about that as I slowly extract things from the freezer.