Sunday night dinner

Tonight it was my turn to cook. Actually it probably is my turn to cook quite a lot more often than the number of times I cook. Tonight I actually cooked dinner.

I made a roast ostrich with some olive oil, herbs and mustard. I accompanied this with some steamed potatoes and then some steamed broccoli.

The ostrich was going reasonably well. But when it came to get it out from the roasting pan in to the service dish everything went wrong. I was, stupidly, picking it up with a meat fork and as it stuck a bit to the roasting pan the entire ostrich fell off the fork knocking both the ostrich and the rest of the contents of the pan to the floor. Luckily, thanks to Desney's endless and impeccable cleaning, I had no qualms about picking the ostrich off the floor and serving it as is. However the rest of the oil, herbs and mustard made a huge mess of the floor and I still had to get the potatoes and broccoli out before I ruined them. Desney was therefore cleaning up the floor and I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off...

What else is new?

While I was cooking I had decided it was time to move up to trying red wine. I opened up a half-bottle of Mme Thevenet's Fleurie (Les Déduits --- 2001) which went down quite well along with the standard apéritif fare of crisps, cashews and such. The red wine certainly has a bit more sting to it in the throat. But it is still delicious. As the flavours tend to be a bit stronger in the reds than the whites, certainly amongst those that we have, the tasting was actually more frustrating as the strength of the flavour that I was able to taste was the same. But I knew from the nose that I was actually missing out on more. Along with dinner, once we finally got it on the table, we had a bottle of my favourite Languedoc-Roussilon red (Granoupiac). The strong fruit went quite well with the dinner and it was a great pleasure to be able to eat and drink with my family. The kids seemed to appreciate the meat more than the previous day's fish. However this is probably due more to the fact that the day was much more relaxed and less eventful than the previous.