Sunday lunch

I woke up around 9 a.m. today (Sunday the 14th), but I lay in bed and blogged for several hours (it's slow going on a tiny cell-phone keyboard) before I was ready to face the world. I'm basically housed in a separate building, and I didn't make it down to the family residence until 12:30, when Dominique texted that it was time for lunch.

Interesting and delicious spread, if a little bit too much on the onion-y side for me. Dom's wife Véronique described the main course with the English word "crumble," which was indeed a recognizable crumble, although Dom let his wife's dish sit under the broiler maybe a minute too long.

The dish tasted great, though: the base was mostly watery squash, with little bits of chorizo scattered inside. The topping was a dry crumble of flour, butter, and maybe some egg. Right underneath it was a layer of that lovely goat's cheese that I had praised earlier in front of Dominique. He and his wife took their cue from my compliment, interpreting it as a signal to feed me even more chèvre.

But before I show you the meal, here's a shot of a few of the gifts I had brought from Korea, now proudly displayed on the family hearth:

And here's your first look at an over-broiled crumble. I should have said something to Dom because I could smell the thing burning as soon as I walked into the kitchen.

That said, it was amazingly delicious, and I served myself two large pieces. The family served two types of rice as well, one being a regular, fluffy, long-grained rice, and the other being the same rice, but cooked with chicken broth to make it stickier.

Here's my plate:

This last shot was of something Véro had made. She modestly called it a gâteau au chocolat, using a super-generic term for her creation ("chocolate cake"), but what it was was nothing short of miraculous. The photo below doesn't do the "cake" justice:

This dessert was closer in spirit to one of those luscious terrines you can find on YouTube. It wasn't at all a cake in the American sense, i.e., a sugary cousin of bread. No: except for an afterthought-like layer of sweet crackers on the bottom, this was all about the chocolate. Of course, I asked Véro to take me through how she made it; there was absolutely no baking involved, but the dessert did need to sit for several hours in the fridge. Glorious. I really wish the photo could have captured just how amazing this was, but the experience was almost entirely tactile and gustatory.