Jan 22

Tartiflette

Tags: blog, cooking experiments No Comments »

So… unlike in Vietnam, it gets pretty cold in France in the winter, as should by now be evident. For those cold and snowy winter nights (and your yearly cheese overdose), French cooking has precisely the thing: tartiflette!

Tartiflette is basically potatoes with lardons and reblochon (I think of it as a Savoyard dish, but apparently it’s a recent invention, derived from an older dish called péla–though the H also thought it reminded him of provencal dishes. I’m not an expert). Today you’ll find tartiflette on the menus of pretty much every other Savoyard restaurant, and it’s a typical skiing season dish.

Without further ado…

Tartiflette

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Tartiflette
Author: 
Recipe type: Main
Cuisine: French
Prep time: 
Cook time: 
Total time: 

Serves: 4-6
 

A hearty dish for winter.
Ingredients
  • 1kg firm-fleshed potatoes
  • 2 white onions
  • 200g lardons
  • 1 whole reblochon (roughly 500g)
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
  1. Scrub the potatoes and rinse them. Put them into boiling water and leave them 20 minutes, until cooked.
  2. Meanwhile, cut the onions into thin slices.
  3. Pre-heat oven to 200°C (if you have a mode that allows you to turn on only the top heating element and have that temperature, use it).
  4. In a frying pan on high heat, put the onions, fry until fragrant. Add the lardons, and fry until they are cooked. Add a dash of pepper and a generous amount of salt (remember you have 1kg of potatoes which pretty much don’t have taste).
  5. Withdraw the potatoes from the heat. If you don’t like potato skin on, peel them.
  6. In a large baking dish, put the potatoes cut into largish chunks (or roughly 2cm-thin slices). Alternate with adding the onions + lardons, so that everything is well mixed together.
  7. Slice the reblochon sideways in halves, and cut each half into 8 parts. Arrange the reblochon bits atop the mixture potatoes + lardons + onions.
  8. Put in oven, and leave to cook for 15-20 minutes, or until cheese is golden and crispy.
  9. Serve hot with a side dish of salad or other light, fresh greens.

 

Jan 22

Back the World SF Travel Fund

Tags: blog, plugs, , 2 Comments »

Still in the spirit of signal-boosting…

The World SF Travel Fund (whose Board I’m a member of) is seeking funds to send BSFA Award Nominee Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Hungarian-Vietnamese writer Csilla Kleinheincz to World Fantasy 2013 in Brighton. I’m going to keep this brief, but if you read this blog you’re surely aware of how much imbalance there is in the field between Western Anglophone writers and the rest of the world. The World SF Travel Fund aims to bridge some of that gap by enabling more non-Anglo writers to come to major Anglo cons. The first recipient was Charles Tan from the Philippines, who travelled to the US for World Fantasy Con, and in 2012 the Fund helped Swedish authors Nene Ormes and Karin Tidbeck travel to Toronto for the same convention. If you’d like to contribute to this effort, please go donate here.

(if you could signal-boost this as well, this would be much appreciated)