Friday's lunch

As we do every year on my birthday, we made steak au poivre and French fries for lunch on Friday. We started with an appetizer of préfou, a garlic bread specialty of the Vendée region where we stayed back in October, served with sliced smoked filet mignon of pork. I opened a bottle of bubbly to go with it.

The day's libations.

This year's steak was a thick slice of faux-filet (sirloin), smothered in cracked pepper, then seared in a pan on top of the stove. We both like the meat to be relatively rare, so it doesn't take long before it's removed from the pan and covered to rest.

The préfou is basically a loaf of garlic bread that gets heated up in the oven before eating.

The sauce is made by adding cognac, or armagnac in this case, and cream to the pan after the steak comes out. When that's ready, the steak goes back into the sauce to be served. I made a batch of fries to serve along side and, voilà !, it's lunch. After the steak, we ate a green salad with hearts of palm.

Faux-filet before the pepper goes on.

The steak marinates for an hour or two in a coating of freshly cracked black pepper.

The wine was a Juliénas that we brought back from Beaujolais last spring. Everything was delicious, as usual. For dessert, we finished an applesauce cake that I had made earlier in the week. There was some steak left over which will make a nice snack over the weekend.

Lunch is served!

So, now we turn our attention to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day meals. The first will be our traditional cheese fondue on Monday. Ken's going into the market this morning to pick up the guinea fowl capon that we ordered for Christmas Day. More about all of that later.

My first helping. I had two.