Christmas meal rehearsal

This weekend, I test-drove the recipe I'll use for the turkey this christmas. I did it with chicken for this attempt and it was simply amazing. So amazing that I'm going to share it :)

Chimay Bleue turkey pot

Ingredients:

• 1 turkey
• 1l of Chimay Bleue
• 250g block of bacon
• 250g button mushrooms (fresh, whole, small)
• 2 big onions
• 15 white pearl onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 big carrots
• 1 celery stick
• 50g butter
• 4 cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
• 1 branch of thyme
• 2 laurel leaves
• salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:
Cut (or ask your butcher to cut for you) the turkey in parts (wings, thigh, breast, ...)
Peel the garlic, carrots and big onions
Cube the carrots and the celery stick, quite small
Mince the big onions and the garlic
Cut the bacon block in slices (you'll cut those slices in match-stick size later on)

Put the turkey in a freezer bag, add the celery, carrots, garlic, onions and bacon
Cover with the beer
Add the laurel leaves, the thyme branch, the cinnamon, the cloves and salt to taste
Close the bag and leave in the fridge for 12 hours

Cooking:
Peel the white pearl onions
Clean the mushrooms, removing the soil without cutting the foot
Remove the turkey from the marinade and drain it
Remove the cloves from the marinade, throw them away
Filter out the marinade to separate the beer and the vegetables. Set both aside

Melt half the butter in a deep pot, on medium heat
Lightly brown the turkey, both sides, for 10 minutes on medium heat
Throw in the white pearl onions, mushrooms, solids from the marinade... let it sweat for 5 minutes
Pour the beer back on and let it cook for 1.5 to 2 hours on medium-low heat

Remove the chicken from the pot and keep it somewhere warm (in the oven, for example)
Fish out the bacon, the pearl onions and the mushrooms, keep aside.
Filter the rest to get rid of the remaining solids, pressing them to remove all the remaining juice, then throw them away.

Cook the juice on high heat until it starts thickening
Add the remaining 25g of butter
Slice bacon into large match-sticks
Throw the mushrooms, tiny onions and bacon back in
Cook one more minute, gently stirring

Serve with chips and either a glass of Chimay Bleue or a wine like "Madiran Château Bouscassé Vieilles Vignes 2000".

If you can't get Chimay Bleue in your shop, any dark strong tasty trappiste beer will do (Westmalle, Rochefort, ...). If you can't get trappiste beer, try a dark strong tasty stout instead.
The recipe won't work with a pils beer.

How I stopped worrying about mechanical problems and fell in love with Audi again :)

I had to make a garage visit earlier than expected, the A3 was booked on Monday for the seasonal tire swap and a quick brake inspection but it became really scary on Friday afternoon. The brake pads on the right side are to be replaced and they are trying to find out what was making the moving part sound in the rear wheel.

So we took a replacement car for the weekend. We started with a 2007 Audi A3 2.0 with manual gearbox, but after a year of automatic transmission it felt wrong. Don't get me wrong, that car was fantastic... smooth handling, very good performance, stunning braking... but it felt like going back a century or two. Unfortunately, the only automatic transmission would only be available from this morning. So we swapped today... for a 2007 A6 Avant V6 3.0 Quattro Tiptronic.

That car is amazing, almost beyond words... it handles like a car half its size, you simply cannot hear its engine (I've yet to push it above 130 Km/h) and the equipment is quite complete and intuitive. If I had 50K to spend on monday, I'd order that exact model.

A fun day

Today, we were invited for lunch by very good friends. They had also invited another friend and her son, who we hadn't seen for 2 years now. It was a fun lunch, followed by a mini pug meeting :)

On this picture, you can see 3 generations of a pug family. In the front, fast asleep, you can see Momo. In the back, with a red harness, you can see her daughter Hanabi (our female pug). The biggest puppy, close to Momo, is Isami (one of our puppies, son of Hanabi and Hanzô) and the small one is one of Momo puppies (also with Hanzo).

Momo was originally bought off a pet shop as an impulse rescue, she was already 6 months old and the owner of the shop would probably have killed her in the following days if she hadn't been sold. She showed sign of bad treatment for months but is a very happy girl now, thanks to our friends. To this day, she gets sick almost every time she is in a moving vehicle and takes a lot of time to trust men.



This picture shows our 3 grown-up pugs: Hanabi, Mame and Hanzô. Hanzô is the first pug we got after getting married, he has the sweetest character you could dream of and we are now trying to find the breeder he came from to see his parents (we already found out he's coming from central Bohemia in Czech Republic). Mame was the weakest puppy of Momo's previous litter. He was tiny, skinny and had to stay at the vet for some time as a baby after respiratory problems. He's now the living proof of that Vet talent, as he is the strongest and liveliest pug ever seen by anyone we know. A normal pug should sleep around 16 hours a day, Mame wants to play 16 hours a day. Mame is also a sort of local star, he got featured in the cultural section of the regional newspaper after playing a role in an opera in 2006.


Here comes the result of Hanzô's first litters, 6 puppies alive out of 9 born from 2 females. 2 of our puppies got a nasty bacterial infection and couldn't be saved, one puppy from the other litter died for unknown reasons. The 4 top puppies are with Momo and the bottom 2 are with Hanabi.

Of those 6 puppies, 4 have already been bought before even being really advertised. We haven't decided yet what to do with our remaining two, as they both have a certain potential. We have already received a lot of interest in the recent visits to the vet, so finding them a good family living close to us shouldn't be too hard. His puppies have so much success that Hanzô has been booked again for next year :)

RIP Gozen

Gozen, our female puppy, died today at one month from kidney failure. She had been staying at the vet clinic for most of the week and was getting weaker by the hour. They decided to operate to check what was wrong and found out that one of her kidneys had been almost totally eaten away by something. The current theory is that her mother might have transmitted her a bacteria, and she couldn't fight it as she was already quite weak. It is also probably what killed her brother Shinkuro on week one. It is most certainly what caused her rapid weight loss and prevented her from gaining much weight to start with.


They took a sample of the damaged kidney and sent it for further analysis. Hanabi, our female pug, is now under antibiotics and intestinal flora supplements.

Pictures of the puppies

The remaining puppies are doing fine, their eyes and ears are already fully opened and they seem to react to movement now.

I finally got around to transferring some pictures to my machine, so here they come :)
From bottom to top, we have Benkei (male, 700g) , Gozen (female, 207g) and Isami (male, 600g). At this point, Benkei isn't doing much apart from sleeping and eating. Isami is already exploring the basket and its surroundings. Gozen doesn't sleep or eat much, but she has already explored a few rooms in the house. She often cries until picked up while the boys are sleeping.

Isami thinks he's John Travolta


Isami still thinking he's John Travolta

As soon as I'm done with the kikkogumi (might take some time as I'm busy preparing the new bedroom), I'll start braiding double-pickup harnesses (with their names) for the puppies.

Hectic weekend

Due to a sick puppy, I didn't get much braiding time this weekend. We had to go to the vet twice on Friday (afternoon and emergency in the middle of the night) and once on Saturday for several injections (glucose solution, electrolyte solution, antibiotics). The puppy will survive but she has lost all the weight she did put on the last 2 weeks. She spent most of the day feeding, we are taking that as a good omen.

The master bedroom has progressed a lot over the last week, the walls are finished, the ceiling fan/lamp is attached and I have started laying down the laminate. I think I will finish the room for next weekend, then we can change bedrooms. I will fix the shower of the en-suite bathroom at some later point.

Puppies

Last night, Hanabi (my female pug) gave birth to 4 puppies... a bit earlier than we expected!

I was watching a very interesting gardening program on BBC2 when I noticed a wet, bloody mess of a bag close to my leg. 2 hours and a half later, we had 4 puppies and we were all exhausted.

Surprisingly enough for a pug, she is taking care of the puppies by herself... she's managing all the cleaning, keeping warm and feeding without our intervention.

Back to puppy watch :)

Bad day

Until this afternoon, I was the "proud" and "happy" owner of an Audi A3 1.8 which I considered a decent small car.

Then the engine broke down while I was coming back from work. Like that, out of the blue, the temperature went from 60C to 120C and I did an emergency stop on the first parking zone I saw. If it had happened just a few minutes earlier, I would still have been on the highway. For reasons unknown, and over a couple hundred meters, it looks like almost all the oil in the engine vanished to another dimension of space and time without leaving any trace. Half the water of the cooling system also vanished for no apparent reason. The bets are currently on a blown head gasket (possibly with a secondary water pump issue and leaky tubes) and we don't have the money to fix it this month.

The car will be checked by the Audi Center on monday, but we've already pretty much concluded we will have to sell it (for junk, if it's too expensive to repair). This will definitely be the last car from VAG we ever have. For not much more than what we paid the A3, we could have had a nice Mazda 2 which drinks less and is usually, unlike my VAG experience, trouble free.

On a limited non-representative sample size of 2 VAG cars, 100% of them died on me from engine-related troubles. Both died while under 100.000km and being less than 8 years old. This, compared to the mileage I got from Toyota and Nissan, is simply unacceptable. My first car was a Toyota possibly as old as I was and had been driven over 300.000km. The panels were eaten through by rust and the direction column gave up, but the engine was still going strong (for a 1l engine, that is).

I'll see the repair quote for the Audi on monday, but from past experience with VAG it will be the kind of money I don't have. The price to fix my Golf G60 was actually higher than the residual value of the car.

From this afternoon, I'm a totally broke and car-less for an unknown duration. I'm still trying to figure out a way to go to work next week.