Weekend of Food, Day 2 dinner: Canapés

Wine pairing: Champagne

For the Weekend of Food 2014, we decided that the crowning glory of the weekend, the Saturday night dinner, would be a French feast. You can find the full menu here. The canapés were the first of many courses, and oh what a way to begin…

My All American flatmate spends a lot of time in South of France, and so she imported the fodder for these canapés. The fodder in this case was rillette d’oie, which is similar to pâté, but meatier and therefore more delicious. This one was made of goose, which may be my favourite meat. Apart from duck, which we did eat later in the evening (take a sneak peek here).

The second spread we used was the more well-known foie gras. For those of you who have never had it before and consider it a snobbish food, to be filed away with caviar and champagne, I proclaim this as folly. The next time somebody you know goes to France, ask them to pick up a tin. That’s right, a tin. Then just toast up some nice bread, spread it on and sprinkle it with fleur de sel. And sit back and sigh in content.

The bread we used was a lovely seeded baguette, kindly provided by La Cave à Fromage, who also gave us the most amazing cheese platter – more on that here! We also bought some small pickled gherkins; the trick is to take a bite of bread smothered in foie gras, and then a bite of gherkin, and then a sip of champagne, and so on and so forth…

Read about the rest of the meal that followed here.

Photo credit: The Baking Medic