Cote is a national chain of nearly 90 restaurants, based on the idea of French bistros and brasseries. There’s one in my nearby city but we’ve never fancied trying it. We came across their “at home” meal boxes during the first lockdown but, again, didn’t really fancy it. The dishes were all quite simple, as you might expect – food a decent cook could turn out for themselves at home on a good day. But we were looking for something a bit different for our weekly “restaurant night at home” which has replaced our weekly “restaurant night at the restaurant” until Covid figures are less scary again. And we found they’d introduced a three course “apres ski” mealbox. It’s a courier delivery which was well packaged and very well insulated.
It was all very straightforward with conciser finishing off instructions, which all used the same oven temperature, so no juggling required. It was just a matter of putting things in the oven at the right time. Oh, and it’s very generous portioning. Designed for two, it would have fed three and we couldn’t finish everything
So, there’s a fondue to start. Neither of us recall ever eating fondue before, so this was a fun start. The cheese sauce just needed a couple of minutes in the microwave and was quite tasty in itself. For dunking, there’s new potatoes (tossed in oil and rosemary and needing 30 minutes in the oven), lovely sourdough baguette (warmed through in the oven), salami and cornichons.
Then a main course of pork navarin. Navarin is usually made with lamb - a slow cooked stew but it was nice enough with the pork fillet, with some root vegetables and a wine sauce. There was a little background heat here, almost certainly coming from black pepper. Alongside, a version of tartiflette – the Alpine dish of sliced potato, onion, smoked bacon topped with Reblochon cheese, which melted across everything during its 30 minutes in the oven.
As I say, there was a lot of food here and, with a bit of tweaking, we could easily have had three dinners out of these three dishes.
And, for dessert, it was back to a sort of fondue. A nicely bitter chocolate sauce just needed a couple of minutes in the microwave. And there’s mini meringues for dunking.
This was certainly one of the best home delivery meals we’ve had since the start of the pandemic.
