back from the dead with bison day and fondue chinoise

As a kid, I often wondered why on earth did Quebequers name Shepherd's Pie, 'Pâté Chinois'. What does China have to do with minced meat topped with corn and potatoes? Whatever the reason, it did no preclude me from having Ketchup with it for my birthday whenever I could. (Lucky me, I didn't "have my birthday in a tent every year"... guess who that quote is from?).
Anyways, so after a very kind sibling gifted us a fondue set for Christmas, 'Fondue Chionoise' was on the menu tonight. Not having eaten this since the Berneval days, I had no idea how to make the broth so I looked it up. I found: Fondue Chinoise au Caribou. How absurd. I'm sure caribou is number one delicacy in China; welcome to Quebecois logic (trust me, there's not much of it around here, starting with the language, health care system.... enough said.)!
So anyways, point two of this blog is that it has been a truly 'bison day' today and I was thinking that Fondue Chinoise au Bison (nooo, tak, ale co to ma byc????), would not be such a bad idea at all on the menu. After Fredrik went beserk over our pets (those silly awful moths that live in the flour - thanks to our sourdough attempts we had tons of organic flour in the kitchen and I guess a moth farm too) and searched every website on how to exterminate them, we ended up buying tea-tree oil at some funky flower power shop where the lady in front of us was buying nothing else than bison meat. I love the way I feel so chuffed when people eat bison, as if I was a bison meat authority....
So yeah, along the way, for some reason we thought we would make fondue tonight, and as we were hunting for the meat, we came across bison meat for fondue. And blah blah blah blah blah I started talking a hole though Fredrik's head on how bison fondue would be the bestest idea in Kurozweki. Anyways, so we bought some sensibly priced beef and made our way home.
We cleaned the flat from top to bottom, washed the whole kitchen with tea-tree oil and Domestos, really making sure to deaded those bugs and started cooking dinner. I always laugh when I hear about tea-tree oil, remembering the massive variety of Malaleuca products we had in the States, they were the best to make magic potion!
So in the end, we sat down to dinner on the couch and watched our precious weekly episode of 'Chopped'. It's a program where four chefs have 20 or 30 minutes to make up a course using 4 'mystery ingredients'. Usually it's nasty stuff like squid, urchins, violet mustard or candy cane. The chefs have to cook an appetiser, entrée and desert within the time limit and as one person is eliminated every round, with the last person winning 10 grand. So anyways, tonight, one of the mystery ingredients was bison, again, officially a bison day!

So, ergo, before I forget, I thought I would share the recipe I used for the fondue tonight. The broth was a little spicy to eat like soup but the meat turned out bestestest and flavourful.

1. Start boiling around a liter of water. Add a couple beef stock cubes to it.
2. Chop up an onion and gently fry it in some vegetable oil.
3. While the onion is sizzling, pound on a few cloves of garlic, chop them up quickly and dump them in with the onions.
4. If you have a few carrots or celery or celery root lying around, peel it/some, cut it into chunks and add it to the onions and stir it all around.
5. Throw in some chili flakes, salt, pepper and some bay leaves.
6. Pour in 1/2 cup red or white wine (I think white is better if it's spicy) and boil it for a couple minutes.
7. Once the alcohol has evaporated, pour in the broth and let it simmer for half an hour or till whenever dinner is ready.
8. I added some spring onion later on, it adds a nice crisp fresh flavour that compliments the white wine.

The beef turned out nice and juicy with a good spicy kick. But then the bestest part were the dipping sauces. I had been planning to make a horseradish sauce but realised that there wasn't any in the fridge, shame on me, I must have had 5 jars of it in the flat in the Krak... so I made the Dijon mustard sauce from this website: http://www.gofondue.com/fondue_dipping_sauces.htm There are tons of good dipping sauce recipes on that page.

Also really tasty was a Curry-Mayo dip: 

• 1/2 c mayo
• 1 1/2 tbsp ketchup
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• garlic and onion powder to taste
• salt and pepper

So, it was definitely a success. We had millionaire shortbread for desert.... will post that restipe tomorrow if I have the time :o).