Christmas Day. A very quiet day in our village, although in fact our village is usually pretty quiet. Not quiet because it is Christmas, which is not a public holiday in a mainly Islamic country, but because it also happens to be a Sunday, which is not generally a work day here. Beautiful day. Sunny and warm with a breeze across the deck.
The chicken has been marinating overnight in a bottle of seasoned Merlot and the mushrooms and glazed onions get added to it. Basic coq au vin recipe is from the Two Fat Ladies of previous television fame. All of their recipes are good, with no silly concessions made to economy or nutritional correctness. As someone said of them: “Oh yes, take a pound of butter and a quart of cream”.
The only real concession we make is concerning bacon. We don’t have any nor does our little supermarket. It’s an Islamic culture but not a strictly observant one. So there are no real objections to having pork in the shops and in fact our local grocery store has tinned ham, probably Danish. But people here didn’t grow up eating pork and there’s not much market for it. Larger stores would have bacon in the freezer but ours doesn’t. Too late to look elsewhere by the time we realise so we’ve substituted smoked pork fillet from the Russian shop, which we already had in the fridge. Good, but too little fat for the purpose.
The coq au vin is lovely though. Bulgur pilaf with it. Far too much for two, so good leftovers in the offing. Very peaceful in a world with far too little peace.
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