Lucy's Kitchen Notebook

The Gift: Galette Bressane

2012-01-17T11:12:00.012+01:00

I received a call from someone who was working on a travel itinerary for her employer that included a stop in Lyon. He was a restauranteur taking two of his key people on a discovery tour for inspiration and ideas through France. I figured anyone willing to take his people on a tour like that was someone I'd like to meet. I trotted down to Les Halles to meet them and discovered within the first 10 minutes that these men were extremely interesting people to be around. They focused diligently on things that for many people might just be a detail that fades into a general landscape. They appreciated and wanted to discuss at length the things that interested me the most, and had plenty of great thought provoking questions. They didn't realize it but their devotion to their work lifted my spirits and made me feel less alone. You know how sometimes you put all of your effort into something and then have that hollow "maybe this is crazy" feeling? Our conversations, their questions, remembering what I am doing this for, it all served as a fond benchmark for the creative demands I was presented with in the weeks that followed. I remembered my purpose in the midst of a whole lot of chaos, in other words. I was grateful for their having found me at that particular time, and at the same time could not find words to express this gratitude.

I was recently re-contacted by one of these men, a chef working on a fantastic new project, a restaurant that runs entirely on wood-fired ovens. If you know me and my passion for wood oven cooking, you understand how much I adore this project. He was asking if I could give him a recipe for that Galette Bressane we tasted on the last day of their visit.

There are many places to get a good galette Bressane in Lyon, which is kind of like a sugar and cream topped flattened brioche, light and fluffy but possessing a cake like moistness, deliciously filling that little hole in the belly on cold mornings like these. One is on Wednesday evenings at the market on Place Carnot, and the other is at a bakery on rue St. Jean in the 5th arrondissement.

The cake itself has its beginnings in the flat country north of Lyon where they raise those lovely blue-footed flavorful chickens and are famous for their excellent butter and cream. This is the country where La Mere Brazier spent her childhood working on farms in the countryside in exchange for room and board, as was the custom for children who were a financial burden to struggling widows. I know it sounds terrible but this was the reality for many children not that long ago. She dictated a memoir (she wasn't very good at writing) in the 1970s before she passed away, where she recounts her only food-related childhood memory. She remembered being given a slice of a Galette Bressane coming out of the kitchen of the farm where she was working and most of all, she remembers sitting in a field, eating it, and feeling grateful.

It's my pleasure to share this Galette, I bet it will be delicious coming from a wood fired oven too.

Galette Bressane

Serves 4

Notes: If you're baking in the States, I would recommend cake flour because the texture of the galette strikes a delicate balance, one that will be more easily achieved with a lower gluten flour. If you're cooking this with American flour, you might also consider tweaking the flour weight by reducing it slightly for the same reason, to get your perfect version. For the cream, try and use creme fraiche, it gives a more complex flavor to the galette than regular whipping cream. If I were cooking this in a wood oven, I would salt the cream slightly in order to better bring out the smoky flavors that the galette will take on.

For the brioche (400g):

6 ounces by weight or 170g flour
2 eggs with water added to weigh a total of 130 grams
3/4 cup or 80 grams butter, room temp
2 tablespoons or about 20 grams granulated sugar
10 grams bakers yeast
1 generous pinch salt

La garniture:

1 egg
20 grams or about 3 heaping tablespoons crème fraîche or whipping cream
20 grams or about 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

One day before serving: Sift the flour into a mixing bowl, add the salt, sugar, and yeast, and then incorporate the eggs, beaten, one at a time into the dry ingredients, to create a dough that separates from the edge of the bowl. Add water if your eggs are on the small side.

Add the butter cut into tablespoons and work it in until it is fully incorporated. Knead this dough for another 5 minutes by hand. Leave at room temperature for 45 minutes before covering and refrigerating overnight.

The day of serving, line a baking sheet with parchment. Place the ball of dough into the center and press flat by hand to about 1/4 inch thick. Let rise for 2 hours in a warm place free of drafts.

When the dough has doubled in volume, pinch a border about 1 cm or 1/2 inch high and prick the center at regular intervals with a fork. Lightly beat the egg and paint the surface inside the raised border completely. Avoid letting egg drip outside of the border, because doing so will keep the tarte edges from rising evenly in the oven.

Add salt to the cream and whip it for a minute or two with a whisk, if using whipping cream, beat it until stiff. Spread it evenly over the surface of the tarte and sprinkle the sugar evenly over that. Bake in a hot oven (230C or 450F) 8 to 10 minutes. Verify its doneness by lifting the edge of the tarte with a spatula and checking the color underneath, it should be only slightly browned.

Place the galette on a cooling rack and let cool completely before serving.

Confit de Manchons de Canard

2012-01-15T10:49:00.019+01:00

The reason why I got the two pots of freshly rendered duck fat the other day when I went to see the butter man was because I was there early enough to catch the volailler's duck wings, which usually sell out before 9:00. At less than 3 euros a kilo I was suddenly inspired. She always has her duck broken down into cuts which allows for very good deals on the less popular parts. It is a shame not to think of things to do with them.

I'm ready for slow cooking today, spending some time organizing, preparing for the busy week ahead. Duck confit is very little hands on work. Slow cooking in multiple small terrines allows you to economize on the duck fat. You can also do this recipe with duck legs or using a whole duck, but I find the beauty of the whole thing the fact that it costs me less than 2 euros per serving using wings. I can go all out on some other part of a meal for guests or painlessly serve a group this way. They're delicious, trust me.

Confit de Manchons de Canard (Duck Wing Confit)

(serves 4-6 or a whole lot of little lunches on salad)

5 tablespoons coarse grey sea salt
1 kilo of duck wings, or 8 meaty wing sections
1 pound or 500 grams duck fat
4 bay leaves
4 cloves garlic, whole
1/2 tablespoon whole peppercorns of various flavors
8 grains of whole allspice
4 juniper berries
dried sprigs of herbe de garrigue if you have it

Equipment: 4 porcelain terrines, each holding approximately 1 1/2 cups or 350 ml

Carefully check over the duck wings for leftover quill tips that might have been overlooked, and remove them. Rinse the duck wings, dry them, then salt them thoroughly. Rub it in, coat it on. Place the salted wings in a non-reactive bowl and keep in the refrigerator overnight. You can leave them in the salt for a second day, if you want.

On the day that you will slow cook them, Set the oven to to 120C or 250F. Divide the duck fat into 4 terrines and place it in the oven to melt while the oven heats and you prepare the other ingredients. The duck fat is going to melt down and fill up about 1/3 of the terrine. You don't want more than this because filling it more will result in duck fat spilling over the edge when you add the duck wings.

Rinse the duck wings thoroughly and dry them carefully. Get the bay leaves, peel the garlic, and measure the spices. When the duck fat has reached 80C or 175F, slide the duck wings in with the fat along with the leaves, berries and spices. Cover the terrines and place them back in the oven to slow cook for 2 1/2 hours.

Once the duck wings are done, that is tender, soft, and aromatic, meat retracted down the bone, garlic turned to a pretty caramel brown, remove them from the fat with tongs and place them on a grill to drain. Filter the fat with a screen strainer, and then nestle the wings into a tall jar to re-cover with the filtered fat. If you use a tall jar, the fat you have will cover the duck wings by about an inch. If you place them in a wider receptacle, you may not have enough duck fat to cover them for long term storage. Heat treat according to your jar manufacturer instruction if you want to save these for a long time. Otherwise, you can keep them in the refrigerator to use in the next few weeks. In all likelyhood you'll find yourself devouring the lot in short order either browned with a classic plate of parsleyed potatoes which have been cooked in a bit of of fat from the terrine, or for a low carb alternative, shredded and browned in a flat pan then spread luxuriously on an escarole or winter greens salad served with a garlicky anchovy-salted sherry vinaigrette, the lot sprinkled with grilled pine nuts and walnuts.

La Religieuse

2012-01-14T09:20:00.010+01:00

I made these!

We began first with equipping the kitchen and talking a lot. This week we started the actual preparation of pastries, following technique, learning gestures, positions, economy of movement, doing things in order. We did several wonderful things with the lovely butter but my absolute favorite was this one. In French, it is called La Religieuse, which means "the Nun". I believe this might be a sign that I must look to the nun within and exercise self-restraint in the coming months as we bake together through the program.

But aren't they beautiful? They're choux pastry with a crackly dough on top to make them puff up nice and round, filled with flavored creme patissiere, topped with flavored fondant, stacked, and graced with flavored buttercream. We prepared all of these here in the kitchen. These were coffee flavor.

The Color of Butter

2012-01-13T23:34:00.005+01:00

“Get the cheap kind. We’re going to go through tons.” I nodded when she said it, and calculated briefly. Even if I am going to be baking though an entire textbook lineup of French pastry, I sure as hell am not going to be using low quality butter. I am going to get the very best possible butter available to me, albeit at a reasonable price, which means, periodic Friday mornings at dawn, I will be trotting down to the Quai St. Antoine to find my butter man. Now it is an extra 15 minutes walk, but I don’t care. I have already explained my reasoning for this.

I searched his small cart for the mound of the good stuff. He began with the typical dry Lyonnais greeting. “I’m listening.” Not meeting my gaze or even turning my way. It was early, many of the stands were still setting up. He had money out on the table, a cluster of coins on the mat, something he didn’t seem to plan to move anytime soon. I looked at his back, the slope of his shoulders. I felt a little bit sad.

In a tone that matched his, my simple response was “I am here for your butter”. He froze for a moment and turned around, a huge smile on his face. He came to life. It is this that I miss about Saint Antoine, my market for 10 years. I must come down more often even if it isn't logical for me to carry a market basket so far.

“Hey, I know you,” he joked, his scrubbed clean cheeks pulling taut in the morning wind. I felt a little tear swell and put a check on it immediately. No need to get misty eyed over such a thing.

I made my order (about 5 and a half pounds) and he began to cut off pieces. He always cuts them into smaller chunks because his paper is sized for smaller blocks. I have this game with butter. I like to predict, down to the gram, exactly how much is cut. A little pat, a chunk, irregularly shaped, stacked, in a mixing bowl, cut for a recipe. If it is butter, I guess. Just one of those things. I try to hit down to the gram. Always.

360, I thought. He slowly wrapped the block in a thin sheet of paper that resembles that old onion skin that we used to be able to get and plopped it on the scale. Score! 363.

“You are lucky you didn’t come last week, Madame Vanel. They didn’t malax the butter enough. Terrible, just terrible.”

I pondered this idea and he began on a new subject. “You see that this is still quite yellow in color. Do you know why?” he didn’t wait for my response. “It is because the cows, right now, are still in grazing in the pasture. Can you believe it?”

“This time of year? Bizarre. I doubt that happens very often in January.” I responded. A special butter then. It seemed to fit. A special butter to begin this year’s project. He launched into some other story involving geographical details in the pastureland, I admit I was watching the wire he was using to cut the butter, observing the coil it made, wondering how this affected my perception of the mass and how it could translate in my guess. He cut and wrapped slowly.

An older woman sidled up and he continued his careful cadence, running the kinked wire evenly to slice through the block. She waited patiently but shuffled a bit after a few minutes. “Do you have just a short order, Madame?” he asked.

“Oh yes, just a wedge of Morbier” she said, meekly. He quickly filled her cheese order and sent her on her way. He knew I wouldn’t mind.

I lined the bottom of my sack with butter and then headed back up the riverside. I didn’t want to buy too much because I had another errand to run before returning home. But I did get herbs, a bunch of beautiful rocket, two lettuces that seemed to be glowing in the morning light, 24 fresh eggs, two pounds of meaty duck wings, a couple of pots of freshly rendered duck fat, and a pound of guinea hen necks. I wished I could have bought from all my vendors.

When I got home after my errand, the fireplace man was waiting to be let into the house and the electricians were smoking in the hallway. They all smiled and forgave my being late, thank goodness.

Langouste Tails and Sauce Mireille

2011-12-31T09:36:00.003+01:00

I certainly wouldn't steam or boil langouste tails at these prices. The best way to bring out their best is to split them, season them with a freshly ground house spice mix featuring pink peppercorn, a whisper of sechuan peppercorn, and a juniper berry or two, sear them meat side down in hot butter to create a spicy crust, flambee them off heat with whiskey and bring them flaming to the table just cooked to serve with a caper-heavy Sauce Mireille.

Sauce Mireille

2 egg yolks
1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper
1 tablespoon lemon juice or wine vinegar
1 tablespoon prepared dijon mustard
1/2 cup neutral oil
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon each of parsley, chives, minced capers and pickles to taste

Place the egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, pepper and mustard in a mixing bowl, and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon while adding the oils in a slow thin stream. When all the oil is incorporated, fold in the herbs, capers and pickles. Refrigerate if not serving immediately.

Plum Lyon

2011-12-30T16:11:00.007+01:00

Slowly getting things organized.

Eva Plum would have been her name. It is a name I would have given to a girl, if I ever had one. Eva after my great-aunt, and Plum, meaning... completely. Meaning... fruitful and innocent. Meaning... Fortunate. Plum. So there you have the name. Plum Lyon. It is simply mind blowing to think back one year ago when I first started thinking about this project, creating this kitchen workshop.

In February 2011, I located a property, and within a few weeks we had signed the first batch of papers that would lead to ownership. By mid-May, we were neck deep in a feasibility study with an architect (who would eventually conclude our project was not feasible within our budget), and in June we took possession of the site.

The first week of July, forging on, I had my business plan reviewed by a representative appointed by the mayor's office at the Chamber of Commerce. It might seem strange, but once I finished the business plan, the project had transformed into reality. It was a dream, even if it was a dream coming true, and then finally it was real. Pounding it all out, placing it in its context, plotting it out numerically, made it real.

Not long ago...

Work with a general contractor began to roll out during the month of August. During the time that followed, I got tired, but kept my mind on whatever needed handling at the moment. Due to some timing miscalculations (oh it's such a long story), we ended up homeless for a couple of months, forced to put our things in storage, which was kind of a drag. Still smiling, we packed up a couple of suitcases and moved into a 300 square foot vacation rental, and as autumn rolled in I began walking with the baby down to the site every day.

While at first even the various contractors we invited in for estimates had stood there slack-jawed at the ideas I was throwing at them, I kept at it. I had faith that someone would finally get it. I could tell that friends who came and saw the site at the beginning were a little bit concerned, a little bit skeptical. Strangers and friends kept saying, "you're so brave!" and I could not understand what they meant. Brave? What does that mean?

We have been here in our own place two weeks now. It is heated, we have water, some lights, some plugs, etc. The wood floor is stacked in the corner, the photo studio's roof is scheduled to go up soon, the kitchen's window is still covered with plastic sheeting due to our ineptitude with anchoring systems for the shade. But it is sort of functional, there is counter space, tile and there are ovens and cooktops and hoods. The phone is in. I treated the old pastry marble that the boulanger left to me today. But most of all, she has her name. Plum Lyon.

A mess but slowly getting there.

Short & Sweet: New Neighborhood

2011-11-09T09:29:00.006+01:00

I have a new market to explore. Although I've been here before I never had it to rely on like I do now. We are living in a gite up on the plateau next to the Croix Rousse market and although our little courtyard house is not equipped for the kind of cooking I normally do, I do have a big pot and a burner, which is all we need right now for autumn slow simmers. What's more, one of Lyon's major offal suppliers is present on the market four days a week, and the prices for these special cuts are well below the cost of the more common meats from the butcher. You know what this means. It means an enormous brass key turns in an ancient lock in a huge blue painted door. It means my market basket is switched to my left hand while I use another big key to open another gate and I step out, crunching through leaves across a square into the autumn morning with one mission.

I am marking things down in my notebook and will be sharing everything with you in time. But for the moment I will just try and keep things simple. Prepare an autumn stew, pair it with crusty baguette and a cool Bourgogne Aligote, follow it with a salad and a generous cheese platter, roasted or poached pears, and there you have the gist of the pleasures of our table right now.

Toasted

2011-09-03T15:27:00.013+02:00

Only about a week ago did the boulangerie stop smelling like toast. I was concerned that it would always carry the faint odor that comes from 150 contiguous years of bread baking in one place, a pleasant aroma at first that reminded me of rich history and artisan dedication. But one morning, quite out of the blue, we were seated at the breakfast table, and at what is usually a calm, relaxed meditative moment in my day, I was gripped with a feeling that something was terribly wrong. Why this fear and loathing, I wondered? Have I forgotten something? Loic in his thoughtful way had just brought me a steaming generous slice of toast from a freshly baked loaf of half kamut with that fresh Jura butter and the salt grinder as is my preference, along with my coffee. The warmth of spirit that comes from such olfactory pleasures wafted squarely to my senses and then it hit. "We'll run out of steam" a quiet smug inner voice crooned, and my chest tightened. Going to the site, seeing the dust and piles of rocks and broken things and bundles of wires that aren't moving and breathing the aroma of ancient toast that exudes from the walls and beams over and over again has conditioned me in some way. I feel slightly nauseated at the smell of bread or toast these days. Strange. No better time like the present to switch to fruit and keep climbing stairs, I suppose.

So far in the project there have been times when I could not make decisions because of a missing element, or missing passion. Missing something, anyway. This summer we marched through the cookie cutout kitchen showrooms of all the big manufacturers, and I kept ordering myself to pull myself out of it and make some kind of decision, any decision. I held out for awhile and just at the beginning of this week when I could pinpoint why I can't stand these kitchens, the ideas came easily. I can't stand them because the spirit and chaos of really good cooking straight from living things and the earth is missing from them. The lines are too straight, too many ball bearings, sleek things that match, stainless steel racks and spotlights, and not enough spirit. Even the expensive ones. Like meat in styrofoam and plastic, I don't want them. I don't want ceiling high wood veneered particleboard armoires decked with ball bearing baskets that slide out in ergonomic blissful perfection, I want old oak cabinets that creak a little bit and that came from the back landing of a Savoyard chateau with the direct knowledge that they were used to keep linens until the chateau was sold to someone who didn't want them anymore. Even if I have to bend down to get to the bottom shelf. I don't want marble because it's expensive nor do I worry about stains or etching, I want old marble that has been etched and honed with time and not by machines. A slab that tells a long friendly story to keep me company while I flip and roll pastry and dough. I want my kitchen to welcome like-minded people in this way, to tell a story of Lyonnais and French cooking. I suppose it's the story I'll have to insist on, like I always have. I hope you don't mind me telling it.

During times of waiting, or inactivity on the site, I go up there and do what I can. I occupy myself by measuring things again (my father always said to measure 3 times, I'd never be sorry), or with little tasks like removing layers of old paint from some drawer handles I recuperated from an old counter left behind by the boulanger, or wiping down the marble slabs we have, still not sure if we're going to be able to use them, due to technical questions that came up yesterday.

Summer in a Glass

2011-08-06T19:24:00.015+02:00

About 5 years ago, I took my in-laws on a three week tour of the Northeast. Near the end of our journey, we went to New York City. At the end of one day, we wandered into a cocktail bar where the music was so loud I could not hear anything my father in law was saying. What a relief to get a load off our feet after walking around Manhattan all day! Brigitte and I shared a little grin while we looked at the cocktail menu. All were expensive beyond my wildest dreams, but since it was a special trip, and we'd had a great day, we splurged and each ordered a fancy cocktail.

Mine was a delightfully refreshing gin cocktail involving cucumbers. I wondered how they got this amazing essence of cucumber into the drink, and asked the woman behind the bar how it was done. She smiled and said that that they utilized the services of a mixologist for that cocktail and she was not at liberty to tell me their secret, which cost them a lot of money. I imagined all kinds of special techniques involving scraping the inner side of the skin of the cucumber to spritz precious flavorful oils across the top of the icy glass. A clear taste memory of the drink has come to mind from time to time over these last 5 years. One of those "I must figure out how that's done" kind of thoughts, on hot summer days, mostly.

Fast forward to this summer. We're up in the mountains, where a couple of months ago, I planted cucumbers and we left them to tend to themselves. The two plants have flourished and each time we come up, we're treated to the most delicious cucumbers. When you crunch into a fresh picked home grown cucumber fresh from the vine, you come to understand why people just call them "cukes". The sublimity of the gustatory experience is so jarring, so refreshing, that it simply boils down to a single syllable in your mind.

Oh look what I found! The cocktail! I fixed mine with ordinary gin, good juicy limes, a generous handful of suit shaped sugar cubes I had hanging around from a card playing weekend, fresh cukes, and mint plucked direct from the garden. It's exactly what they were serving in that cocktail bar. It turns out that the original recipe was submitted by a curator (obviously a man of good taste) named Adam Frank who entered a New York Times readers drink contest in 2006. It's too bad that owner of that cocktail bar didn't read the newspaper, he could have saved himself a lot of money. I plan to prepare it for everyone I know. You should too.

The Cuke, Original Recipe here, for which I think I paid something like 11 dollars for one in New York City. Serves 3-4.

3 limes
a huge cucumber from the garden
a generous bouquet of fresh mint
a large handful of sugar cubes
a cup of gin
ice
Perrier

Wash the limes, cucumber, and mint. Slice one and a half of the limes, and put them in a big bowl. Do the same for half the cucumber. Squeeze the rest of the limes and add the juice. Add the sugar cubes and the mint leaves. Take a spoon and crush it all up until it begins to render a good deal of juice. Add the gin to this, stir it up, and then transfer everything into a container you can put into the refrigerator. Chill for 30 to 45 minutes. I suppose you could chill this longer if you're getting ready for a party.

When you're ready to serve the cocktail, fill up tall glasses with ice, a long thin slice of fresh cucumber, and strain the mixture over the ice until it's about on half to two thirds full (depending on your guests). Top with Perrier (or any soda water you have), and serve immediately. Delightful.

Prunes to Pie

2011-07-06T10:18:00.011+02:00

The ones I got on the Marché Saint-Antoine the other day were this year's last. There will be no more Prunes St. Jean this year. Soft and flavorful, they expand like summer days in our mouths. Ian looks doleful and waits sweetly while I pit them for a pie. We're waiting, hoping, fingers crossed for news on our grant application for the teaching kitchen. I toss Ian a pitted plum every now and then and he repeats each time "merci, maman". Wishing I had filmed him, I hear Loic running the bath. The baby trots back, mouth full of plum, to peel off his play clothes and arrange his boats. I head to the kitchen to dump these plums onto some quick finger-spread dough. Look, there are some currants. A little sugar. Fingers crossed, then licked.

*the word for plum in French is prune.

La Boite à Café

2011-06-15T17:54:00.030+02:00

There comes a time in every expat's life when the question of coffee comes up. It does not matter what country you're in or what country you're from. In my first years abroad in Beijing, for example, I harbored a persistent daydream of my country's "bottomless cup". That waitress at Denny's Erie Boulevard Syracuse played a role, the one who was very tan all year round and had beached hair. When we went there to study for exams, she'd come over and purse her shriveled lips voluptuously, her halo of brittle split ends backlit by a sunken spotlight in the ceiling and say "more coffee, hon?" Her wrinkled cleavage always shifted plumply in her polyester uniform and there was that hot pouring sound.

What you think is good at 18 and what you think is good at 28 are completely different. My university days pre-dated any really good coffee in Central New York. But in my expat mind, the dream-coddled cup festered and grew. I remember coming home from one really long stint away, stopping in New York City for shopping on the way home and suddenly being hit at a Manhattan cafe with the reality that all the great service and bounty of unlimited fabulous coffee was indeed a distilled composite. It didn't really exist.

Since that time, however, good coffee actually materialized in the States, in the west. I went back for a couple of years and have very good memories of worshipping one particularly fabulous coffee shop in Santa Monica. They were so mean there! I was pleased as punch to submit to any amount of cult induced scorn to read the paper on a ratty old couch with the west coast sun steaming through abundant windows. Man, did I love that place. And when I became we, and we left the country again, I'd pay for the good coffee that had then made it's way east and drink it down, I'd pack so much of it into my suitcase to return to France that it looked like I was trying to smuggle something. I always distribute it to friends and freeze as much as possible. People ask what to bring and I always say "good coffee". I'll sit at one of the chain shops that have proliferated from time to time and pretend, but it really doesn't amount to anything but suspension of disbelief. Even Illy doesn't do it, although I do like the limited edition tins.

I have taken to walking stairs with a little spitfire of a Korean American who will not accept "my hip hurts" as an excuse not to get out early and go at full speed for an hour or two each day. I love her determined will and knowing ways, she's a very good coach. Some days we conquer stairs until there are none left to conquer, and some days we saunter through neighborhoods and stop in the cafes for a cup of whatever coffee they're serving. We figure if we try a different cafe every morning, in a few years we will have tried every one in the city of Lyon. This old dust pressed through dirty valves ranges from dimly acceptable to abominably bad. One fine morning just a few weeks ago, we happened, on one of our sauntering days, across a brand new cafe, and sat down.

Imagine my surprise to be transported by an initial sip that pierced like a steam engine straight to my longing soul. I am talking years. Maybe even a dream come true. "We are drinking real coffee here, Mimi", I remember saying. We then fell into a conversation with the man who roasts his own beans. He is one dedicated barista and they have their ways of strongly suggesting certain manners that fall in line with the culture of people who really care about coffee, but to my grand pleasure, the cult of scorn has been eliminated from the equation. Their summer menu lists weekly roasted coffees along with their provenance, altitude, estate at which the beans were grown, variety of bean, and any certification the coffee enjoys, as well as ideas about what to expect in the flavor of each kind. They serve their coffee filtered, French pressed, syphoned, brewed by Chemex, and of course regular expresso, with a variety of classic cafe standards on the chalkboard every day. They'll grind you a sack full of whatever is in season to your specifications and send you on your merry way leaving a swirling waft of heaven in your wake. Your neighbors will wonder at the aroma in the hallway when they arrive home hours after you've come home. This couple's work completes something in your life, and in the neighborhood.

Their coffee is so good, they don't need anything but that to keep a steady stream of customers all day long, every day. But they do have Free wifi and a terrace, which basically makes the place perfect.

La Boite à Café
3 rue Abbé Rozier
69001 Lyon, France
04 27 01 48 71

You can read more about this couple and their business on their website.

Slow Feuilletage

2011-04-22T10:15:00.014+02:00

A few days ago, I was planning to have a dinner party and while on the Quai St. Antoine, I saw the man who comes down some days from the Jura mountains. Amid various mountain cheeses, he had a slab of raw butter. After asking his price, which when calculated in my mind cost slightly more than your average supermarket butter, but less than the haut gamme butters in mass distribution, I asked for a taste. Light, unsalted, complex as it flowered on my tongue, it sold itself to me easily. I bought a kilo. While he wedged off two large chunks that miraculously enough came out to weigh about 500 grams each, he told me that the butter he was selling me had been made at the farm just the day before. Walking back home, I wondered at the deliciousness that this raw butter made just the previous day would produce in my home made pastry.

Having my recipe for fast feuilletage already in your notebook, I thought I'd share a few ideas and a reminder that puff pastry rolled out at home tastes far superior to anything you can find in the store and quite possibly better than you can get from the neighborhood bakery. It's all about the butter. When I talk about good butter, I don't mean some technical quality that one or another butter might have, but the flavor of the butter. A butter that tastes good makes excellent puff pastry.

Puff pastry has got such a bad rap. I just don't know what to say when people say they can't bring themselves to do it. After all, I used to be one of those people. Oh the things I never dared to do! But after some risk taking and realization that it isn't nearly as easy to mess up as people say it is, I felt like I was in on a kind of secret. One of the most wonderful things about puff pastry is that it freezes very well. Instead of hours of hard labor, hands-on time is more like 15 minutes, in little pleasurable bursts interspersed over an evening. If you have a kitchen timer and a little counter space or a table, you can easily fit feuilletage between cooking dinner, bathing children, story time, reading a book, catching up on your e-mails, or talking on the phone. It fits into normal family contemporary lifestyles, and can make a huge difference in your inclination to invite people over at a moment's notice, because you'll be able to serve really great tasting and beautiful feuilletage-based creations if you already have the good kind ready in your freezer.

What can you do with feuilletage? For starters, I suggest taking a good look at the many recipes that require pre-fab puff pastry. Next, know that you don't need recipes to have fun with puff pastry. You can roll things up in it and slice them, make matchsticks and spread them with things before baking, use leftovers, cut shapes with cookie cutters, make sweet desserts, tartes, classic millefeuilles, and hundreds of other things just by using your imagination.

Last night I had dinner out, and enjoyed a first course of this season's asparagus, roquefort and thin sliced cured ham layered between two little rectangular wedges of feuilletage. The asparagus had been cooked in advance, and this first course was constructed and placed in the oven just long enough for the cheese to melt and the pastry to puff, crispen and brown on top. It was a delicious combination and will be even better with my own pastry. I plan to do a variation on that very soon as a first course for friends.

In the meantime, I have a freezer full of tapenade rolls ready to bake, and several blank slates ready for just about anything. There are so many things, sweet or savory, that you can do with this pastry dough. Use the kitchen scale for this and weigh the water too.

Recipe: Slow Feuilletage

500 grams flour
12 grams finely ground sea salt
300 grams water
400 grams butter, chilled

Place the flour and salt in a bowl and make a well in the center. Pour the water in and work it into a smooth homogenous dough. Work the dough with your hands to get it nice and smooth, place it in a ziplock or wrap it in plastic wrap and place this dough into the refrigerator to rest for 30 minutes.

Notice the rounded ends are tucked under at first.

You don't have to do this but it makes things roll out more squarely.

Remove the dough from the wrap and lightly flour your counter surface. Roll the dough about 1 inch thick and then with the rolling pin roll out four edges to form flaps that you will fold over the butter. Once you have done that, remove the butter from the refrigerator, and place it on a big sheet of freezer paper or baking parchment, fold the paper over it to protect the rolling pin from getting greasy, and pound the butter with the rolling pin into a flat piece that will fit easily into the center of the dough. Fold the edges you have created over the butter in the center. Now, you are ready to roll it out.

Roll this mound of dough folded over your butter out flat into an oblong rectangle. Now fold this rectangle into thirds, turn it a quarter turn, and roll it out again. Fold and roll once again, then place this into the refrigerator to chill for 40 minutes.

Repeat this folding into thirds process 2 more times, for a total number of folding and rolling of 6 times. From there, you can place it back in the refrigerator to be ready when you plan to use it in the next day or two, or put that into the freezer, where it will keep up to three months.

Thanks go to Chef Sylvain Malland of Cuisine et Dependences Acte II, 68 rue de la Charité, in Lyon's 2nd arrondissement for allowing me to take photos of him rolling and folding puff pastry during a coaching cuisine demonstration at Emile Henry.

This Season's Asparagus

2011-04-10T09:53:00.006+02:00

If you want the ultimate asparagus experience, the time is now. People are talking at the market about this year's unusual weather. Spring officially started 3 weeks ago and the weather's been like we're about to enter the month of June! Aside from an amazingly flush selection of culinary herbs, promising fabulous workshops and inspiring great ideas for how to best put them in the spotlight, we see that the Asparagus is out. This is quite extraordinary, actually. If you cook with the seasons where you live, you might have already observed some things where you live being ahead of schedule. The producer's stands are piled high with crisp fresh spears here in Lyon. This won't last long. As the season evolves, the prices will drop as well as the quality, since the smaller stems are better eating than the larger ones. The producer of the asparagus pictured above confided that the early season is going to leave him in the lurch until his next wave of produce reaches maturity. I think also it was an excuse for charging such high prices for his product. I didn't hesitate to buy from him anyway, since he's got great produce at reasonable prices the rest of the year. We are eating his excellent asparagus either plain or lightly dressed with a lemon boosted green olive oil dressing, and with hollandaise. As the season wears on, soup is on the menu chez Vanel. Here's my sampling of French market menu uses for asparagus, one I refer to often when thinking of great ways to use it. Green asparagus is kind of exotic in France, because traditionally the French only had white. This struck me as strange when I first arrived, having only had the green ones growing up.

Giving it Up

2011-04-09T14:41:00.008+02:00

Many good years in this apartment. We hadn't planned on selling just yet, but when we met that sunny afternoon in the notary's office on the Quai Saint Antoine and each signed our names on every page of a big stack of documents, it was like a hammer slid into the cog of the inner workings of a big ancient clock. The papers were signed and everything got set in motion, to open the next doorway along the passageway to ownership. We must come forth with the full amount for the new site, design work and renovations, and in order for us to get the loan, our lovely apartment must at least be on the market. I am scrambling to get all of my creative clutter under control, mainly planning to sort and pack it up, living in more of a blank slate while we show our home. While I take these little objects and place them into boxes, I am reminded of my stubborn belief in charms. The baby delights in the big open spaces, placing himself in various staging areas to dance and play. I didn't know it was possible to harbor such opposing emotions. We tried to find a way to keep this apartment, guarding it for retirement, maybe renting it out, while at the same time moving into a place that better suits our needs. But sometimes you just have to make that decision to move forward, when the dream comes forth with enough momentum and you remind yourself that you needn't let go of the memories.

Pickled Radis Noir

2011-04-07T13:05:00.005+02:00

A couple of months ago, Hank Shaw was seeking ideas for the use of radis noir, which is ubiquitous on market tables here in Lyon at the end of winter. I immediately suggested pickles, since I had some experience with simple pickled spring radishes and knew that this type of root generally takes kindly to a vinegar pickling method. The next time I was out with my basket, I decided to give pickling them a try with a couple of big ones wedged into chunks. Coriander seeds harvested last autumn from my garden, whole fennel seeds and bay leaves went into the jar, along with a handful of shallots which I simply peeled and left whole. I wasn't very enthusiastic about the results at first, since the roots seeped some of their color and gave a drab tint to the vinegar. I placed the jar alongside many other half done experiments in a cool place and forgot about it for a while.

It's funny what a little time can do. About a week ago, I realized that these pickles had taken on a nice mellow flavor. At the opening of salad season, I was fishing around for additions to my lunch bowls and suddenly I was looking at these now mature pickles in a new light. I have found that slicing them thin and sprinkling them over salads is one delicious way to enjoy them, as well as using them to garnish toasts and canapes with potted meat and slices of dried sausage. They are excellent slivered and folded into Caviar de la Croix Rousse. They add crisp punctuation and look pretty too. This jar is almost halfway gone and I don't suspect they'll last very much longer. They came out tasting so nice, I think I'll do two jars next year.

When you pickle radis noir, be sure to give them a very good scrub with a potato brush and blanch them whole before slicing them into chunks and salting them. Otherwise, the recipe and method are the same as this one here.

Greens for Spring

2011-04-03T21:06:00.010+02:00

At about this time of the year in Lyon, we always see an assortment of various foraged or otherwise uncommon greens making their appearance at the markets, a kind of bridge to the bounty, taking us on a little joyride past the precocious radish. When the weather warms up, people go out searching for a burgeoning explosion of cute little vegetables, and the reality is that yes, while the weather is indeed warming, we can't expect miracles. Things need time to grow.

We saw stinging nettles, bins full of dandilions, aka pissenlit, given this name for their long held reputation as causing children to wet their beds, and some scraggly turnip greens lopped from last year's plants. While they looked a bit ragged around the edges and gone to seed, I had a hankering for some. When did you last have a nice plate of fresh turnip greens? People were asking how to cook them. The lady was telling them they should put them into soup. I could already taste them tossed with the bacon I had, the good bacon that I buy from the girl who smokes it herself.

That night after a good washing, they went into the pressure cooker to steam, which is what I do with old greens like this that might need a head start cooking before I toss them in the hot pan. I steamed them with slices of this wonderful bacon and a few tendrils of fresh young thyme. After steaming them under pressure for 5 minutes, they still had a their body but it was easy to pick through them quickly to pull out any hard stems that might not be good to eat. The leaves and soft stems came off cleanly. They were ready to be chopped and transferred into a pan of sizzling onions I'd gotten started on the side. I tossed them over high heat for a bit to get a little sizzle along the edges of the steamed bacon, then since we had a little time, I added a teacup full of that veal stock that I had recuperated from the pot on Saturday morning (always a habit to set a little aside for opportunities such as this) and put that on low to simmer and mingle while the baby got his bath. When things settled down, chopped spring chervil went in at the last minute and we ate simply with pasta, enjoying the haze of the heavy spring evening outside the window, thinking of the season, waiting for the rain to begin.

How I See the Floors

2011-03-15T16:06:00.013+01:00

Inspiring things I've seen around lately

My father and I went to the early morning flea markets right up until I left my home town in my early 20s. I searched for history. We had something we called our history, we had our odd traditions, we had our generations of cousins far far away and all of the family stories, we had this rather large rambling family home, we shared this penchant for going to the flea market together, searching. It was always about finding something valuable. You know, things possibly worth money. Digging, scanning every table, every little case, searching. "Come and see what I've found."

There were a few things that gave something value. One, being a collectible or well crafted. The other, the thing being old. Really old meant really valuable in my mind. Like this object had tendrils that extended and intertwined with something completely inaccessible to us now. Holding secrets in the present tense, while having mingled with emotions and harbored the collective thoughts and sighs that changed and swerved and as a whole became self aware. Things that spanned farther than any human life were valuable beyond belief in my child's mind, something with a story that could be legend for all the lack of proof, except for this object. These old objects we rifled through at the flea markets held different degrees of connectedness. It was our pastime to work together on developing that eye to see and discuss their placement within the framework of time.

Years ago, less than a year after my father died, only about 3 months new into my marriage and having just arrived to the city of Lyon, I was standing in front of a church built on original early Christian temple foundations that dated back to the Roman era. That warm afternoon, a buried passion for the lifelong project I had shared with my newly lost father was staring me in the face. This passion we had shared, and this place, one he never had the chance to see, this ancient place, took me and held fast, cemented me, shook the foundations of my grief almost violently. With that, like any slap to the face, I felt hurled back into a pre-loss-of-my-father frame of mind. That moment, my connection with Lyon the place grew. Not just a flash or a feeling. I believe Lyon has great value not only because it is old, but because it is thriving and old, and sprite and lanky, mean. But most of all, determined to survive and remain its very old self.

I was standing in the "laboratory" of the Boulangerie that will become my teaching kitchen on my first visit and the floors caught my interest. They're a hodgepodge of various dated working class tiles, patched together. The shard like mosaic type floor is typical from about 80 years ago. There are plenty of things we could do with the floors, lay down hardwood, etc. There are bare areas as well, tamped bare earth where the oven has always been, for example. My plan is to find materials that harmonize with this rather random splash of tiling styles and hopefully to find a way to bring them all together, in my father's way. Uncovering and buffing out the little details, to hold in hand a bit of the existing patina, and pull out as much of this place's original story as I can.

Changing Focus

2011-03-11T09:19:00.017+01:00

We are not moving far, I would say about 5 blocks away from where we live now. When you walk the streets of most of centre-ville in Lyon, pretty grey stone Haussmann style buildings that are relatively new to the architectural cityscape line the avenues, each building featuring its own signature details, sculptural elements at the main doorways, big varnished wooden doors with brass knobs, and mosaic tiled hallways with marble staircases. This sumptuous entry and housing style is what the French call "Grand Standing". The apartments in these buildings, which originally took one entire or even several floors of a building, were built as dwellings from the beginning and have been slowly transformed and divided over about 120 years and generations into the apartments we know now.

Our building is one of the many of this sort on the frontier of a sort of bourgeois enclave, the Martiniere neighborhood. There's a little footpath of an alleyway that communicates the Halle de la Martiniere to Place Sathonay, and there you step out onto cobblestone, and look up and begin to see a remarkable shift in building style, to a different type of architecture that has a very interesting and colorful story. These buildings, much more modest in structure and finishing, were created as workshops in Lyon's silk production. Single exterior doors open into tight hallways, tunnels, and interesting labyrinth type passages and stairwells that cut through and make footpath shortcuts between the winding roads that climb this hill. These are called traboules, and there are hundreds to tell you about. But back to the buildings: These workshops were not finished with plasterwork, moulding, and wood paneling, but followed their function with enormous bare beams that floated above cavernous spaces holding the enormous looms employed in the weaving of Lyon's world renowned silk. The whole mass of this district was built rather quickly in the mid 1800s, in a grand re-organization of Lyon's silk industry by Napoleon III, with the goal of consolidating production into one area of the city, since it was previously scattered between various districts: The docks just south of Vieux Lyon, warehouses in the 8th arrondissement, and trading and shipping consignment houses located on the presqu'ile. These workshops were built over this hill that in pre-revolutionary days had been church owned gardens, orchards and vineyards.

This is from a finished apartment we looked at one street over (too expensive).

Our ceilings will be lower but feature this kind of wood and stone.

When we started looking at property on the Croix Rousse hill, the exposed ceiling beams and the warm stone became the predominant architectural detail that gave the spaces their flavor. Since the ceilings of the majority of these workshops were originally built high enough to accommodate the loom works, the thing you notice immediately in the renovated spaces we were looking at were their sweeping volumes and warehouse-like loft style spaces. This is a very seductive but also troubling aspect of the architecture here, if you have ever tried to furnish a room with 20 foot ceilings on a budget. While the space seems enormous which can sometimes seem cold, at the same time, the earth and wood elements bring at the same time a unique and architecturally indigenous warmth that achieves a balance. We looked at a handful of apartments that had been previously renovated, some very well done, others DIY projects gone awry when people built shoddy looking platforms with cheap stained plywood (think frathouse) and called them "lofts". They all had one thing in common: EXPENSIVE. The average price per square meter for the most polished places was way beyond our means for the floor space we needed. We comforted ourselves with the thought that they would cost a fortune to heat.

The boulangerie has what is called a "floor and a half", meaning that we have the ground floor and an originally conceived second floor with lower ceiling heights, yet with their old beams and stone original to the structure.The boulanger tells us that it has "always been a boulangerie", but I am not sure about that. The notaire's job is to do the research on the history of the building, and we have a first appointment with him in a couple of weeks.

When we first moved into our current apartment, I had problems with the ballroom-like ceiling height, feeling like all of our belongings had sunk to the bottom of a fish tank. You don't think about these things when you're falling in love with empty space and sweeping windows, and it takes some finesse to try and draw the gaze up from the floor with artwork and furniture arrangement to visually dwell in the whole space rather than just what's settled at the bottom.

So that will be the first main difference in considering the organization of the space in the boulangerie. It is going to be much more down to earth in its volumes. I think this is a good thing, because the predominant warmth of the wood and stone elements are naturally adapted, in my opinion, to surrounding people in an intimate way.

The Boulangerie

2011-03-09T11:00:00.022+01:00

Now that Ian is two, we're beginning to really feel the need for a little more space. It's a buyer's market, but when you've got such a wonderful place to come home to, nothing seems like an improvement. We calculated many scenarios. We dropped our weekend plans to check out neighborhoods and argue the ins and outs of every detail in a series of imagined housing situations. We got into spats about toilets in bathrooms and toilets outside of bathrooms. We drove across vast expanses covering every single road, zigzagging for hours through neighborhoods near and far. We frustrated many real estate agents. In the midst of all of this, I was taking my winter morning walks up Lyon's various long ancient urban stairwells. Looking over the city, I was silently saying my goodbyes while I watched the sun rise over fog softened rooftop silhouettes. Staying in the choice neighborhoods would have to entail a stroke of luck.

The lock tumbles, the wood creaks and settles under your feet, the light plays just so. We have allowed ourselves to be pulled into the fold of this family heirloom-like bijou of an apartment, magically placed on a square nestled into the curve of the Saone, river on one side, hill on the other, every day for the last eight years. At first, the 14 foot high ceilings, glistening polished marble fireplaces, the beautiful carved panels and 19th century woodwork didn't seem possible. The soft light, branches of the trees swaying in the breeze, birds singing on the square, too luxurious to be true but somehow happening. We painted the walls grey and kept the wood and marble buffed and polished.

Looking for an apartment has been a very invigorating project. The stories I could tell you! Once we had seen everything on the market in the neighborhoods we wanted, it became a mad scramble to get in and see everything the day it was put up for sale. All the best apartments usually got offers the first day they were on the market. One day, between appointments to look, I stopped into a real estate office with the idea of asking a few questions about possibly finding a combination shop front and living space, just an idea for my teaching kitchen. A charming man named M. Bernard, an expert in his field, received me in his office and listened to my dream. His eyes lit up immediately. He had a place in mind. It is an old boulangerie, smack in the middle of the perfect neighborhood. It needs more than a little work, more than a renovation. It needs a complete strip down to the bones and a rebuild. Before he saw it, Loic thought I had gone off the deep end. I told him, in preparation for our first visit together, that this world was created by people who were brave enough to imagine possibilities and make them happen. I reminded him of projects I have handled in the past. With this in mind, we examined the old boulangerie, we held hands, and we dared to fall in love with what was underneath.

You know, I have been giving my classes for awhile now. This was initially a series of talks for Dartmouth College students here on exchange in Lyon. When I got started at Emile Henry, the clientele changed but the material remained as dense as it was in the beginning. The context of Lyon as a city and the love of cooking from the market basket help people to remember and learn better, feel like they’re taking home something more than a recipe. I have garnered much encouragement and support from my students, while I give them encouragement to go ahead and build on their repertoire.

Just the other day, the owners accepted our offer on the boulangerie. We’re going for it. I am going to build my teaching kitchen.

One day you go from "wouldn't that be nice" to "now is the perfect time" And when that happens, if you've been taking yourself seriously and really asking this question in earnest, your dream, the one you have explored over and over again in your mind for years, so much so that it seems like already a done deal in your mind, might actually fit into your life plans.

Salade d'endives aux noix et bleu

2011-02-08T08:46:00.018+01:00

The tight fresh endives look like early spring magnolia buds right now, and I cannot get enough of them. They are always cradled in purple paper on the market tables, clean and white. Today, I chop them in staggering diagonals like my Ayi once showed me, just holding on to her in this way. There's no other reason. The angle of a knife. It's funny how a simple gesture can bring so many thoughts about a person to mind.

A raw endive salad with walnuts and blue cheese is a French classic. Sometimes I wonder if I crave this during winter months just for the blue cheese. But when the endives are just right like they are now, I feel the sweet crunch that flirts with bitter in my mouth, punctuated with chunks of salty bleu d'auvergne, the whole tied together with the astringent warmth of the walnuts. The completeness of the trinity is distilled to one note. It cannot be broken down to its elements.

Recipe: Salade d'Endives aux noix et bleu
Serves 2.

1 recipe walnut oil vinaigrette
2 whole endives
1/2 cup freshly cracked walnuts
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese of your choice
Optional: Two handfuls of seasonal greens of choice
salt and pepper to season

Prepare the walnut oil vinaigrette and put it into the bottom of a salad bowl. Clean the greens and place them in the bowl over the dressing. Remove the outer leaves from the endives if necessary, and chop them, transferring them to a colander and rinse. Taste a wedge with core, and decide whether to use them in the salad or not. (Endives these days have been bred of most of their core's bitterness, but freshness will also affect the flavor, verify and eliminate the cores if they seem too bitter.) Spin or pat them dry with a clean cloth before transferring them to a salad bowl over the greens. Layer the walnuts and blue cheese on top. Toss with the walnut vinaigrette and a generous grind of pepper at the table before serving.

Scallops and Endives

2011-01-14T09:45:00.002+01:00

Briny fresh scallops paired with with the cool closed buds of winter's light-sheltered bitter greens. Now that we are in the height of the season for both endives and scallops, why not consider a tarte?

Scallop and Endive Tarte

1 recipe of your favorite pâte brisée
2 tablespoons duck fat
1 onion
1 cup cleaned and shredded mild mushrooms like oyster mushrooms or white button mushrooms
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup shredded leftover cooked chicken meat (poulet au vinaigre today, 2 drumsticks worth)
1/2 a bunch of chives, minced
the leaves from 1/2 a bunch of chervil, minced
8 scallops, shelled
3 endives
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground fennel seeds
1 Tablespoon butter
1/4 cup chicken broth
salt and pepper

- Prepare the pastry and set it to chill.
- Slice the onion thin.
- Melt the duck fat in a saute pan, and add the onions and garlic, let them sizzle for 10 minutes over medium heat, tossing frequently, making sure that if they begin to turn brown, you lower the heat, avoiding them turning brown as much as possible.
- Add the shredded mushrooms and chicken, turn up the heat and toss and cook until the mushrooms release their liquid and things begin to take on a crispy browned edge.
- Toss the herbs in, and toss over the heat for another 3 minutes.
- Add 1/4 cup white wine and cook until the mixture is soft and glistening, the liquid reduced. Season with salt, pepper, and ground fennel.
- Wash the outside of the endives. Cut off the base end, and then slice them into wedges approximately the thickness of your scallops. Tip: Vary the thickness of the endives slightly to allow their differences in height to add to the visual impact of the tarte.
- Roll out the pastry, and lay it into to a baking dish.
- Spread the onion/mushroom/chicken mixture around the base of the pie shell.
- Arrange the sliced endives and scallops over the onion mixture, thinking about slices, to make sure each of 8 slices will give your guests at least one scallop.
- Sprinkle sugar over the scallops and endives.
- Slice the butter thin and scatter it over, making sure to get some butter on the scallops (see photo).
- Bake in a hot oven (400F/200C) for 25 minutes, allowing the endives and scallops to begin to brown.
- Remove the tarte from the oven, and lower the heat to 350F/180C. Drizzle the chicken stock over the tarte, cover tightly with foil, and return to the oven for another 15 minutes.

Martin Sec

2010-12-22T15:49:00.006+01:00

Do winter pears ever make an appearance at your house during the holidays? A crinkly brown sack of full of Martin Sec pears always finds its way into our kitchen this time of year. A winter variety that has been common here in France since the 16th century, this type of pear is available through January. Small and matte golden yellow in color, they sometimes take on a pinkish hue on the shaded side of the fruit. These are always delicious cooked in syrup or wine. The intimate size and poetic form of this fruit is so perfect, however, you might also want to employ them as punctuation marks in a fruit or flower arrangement.

Maison en Pain d'Epices

2010-12-20T18:06:00.010+01:00

It is simply wonderful to be Aunt Lucy to French children. They'd never even heard of or imagined a gingerbread house. Can you imagine such a thing? To get them in the mood, I told them the story of Hansel and Gretel, again which no one had ever told them, drawing out the delicious discovery of the candy house in the forest. You should have seen their eyes light up. We found an inspiration picture from Ian's favorite children's book, and the project began to take shape in their minds. I took a trip to the grocery store for an array of luscious puffy colorful common French candies and put it in the cupboard for just the right moment. In the afternoon before nap time, when the kitchen was quiet, we draped aprons on and mixed the honey spiced dough. While the children slept, the dough chilled.

This house has only 10 pieces, very easy to manage. After they went to bed, I put the house together with royal icing. I used this pattern for the house pieces. It is best to trace these pieces onto cardboard, and use each of the walls twice. Cutting grids of windows freehand into soft dough is not my thing, so I used cookie cutters for the windows and doors. Children prefer heart and flower shaped windows anyway. Since the pattern is missing the roof, I just estimated it based on the dimensions of the other pieces. It turned out fine, and even if it hadn't I don't think the children would have noticed!

Recipe: Maison en Pain d'Épices

This makes plenty of dough with some leftover. You can freeze this dough into a log and slice them off to make little biscuits to enjoy with tea.

3 cups (scoop and level) cake flour or type 45 French
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup butter (185 g.), room temperature
1/2 cup brown sugar (100 grams)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon ground dried ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon Épice à pain d’épices
1 egg
1/2 cup honey (170 g miel d'acacia if you have any)
1-2 tablespoons of milk (if necessary)

- Measure out the flour, salt, powder, and spices into a one quart bowl or food storage container and mix them to combine well. Set aside.
- Cream the butter and add the sugar, egg, and honey, mix until well combined and homogeneous, no need to beat or whip for any length of time.
- Incorporate the dry ingredients by 1/2 cup (having a mixer with the paddle attachment comes in handy for this).
- Mix this batter until it comes together into a ball of dough. If the dough is not coming together, add a tablespoon or two of milk.
- Divide this dough into 3 or four parts, and roll each part out immediately about 1/4 of an inch thick onto baking parchment, topping each rolled out piece with another sheet of parchment. Stack these and chill them for minimum 1 hour, overnight, or a day or two.
- When you are ready to bake, heat the oven to 300C/170F, and remove the first batch of dough from the refrigerator. Let it warm up briefly to make it easier to remove the top sheet of parchment.
- Smooth the dough by rolling the pin over the surface, slightly thinning the layer of dough. Place the template pieces down, cutting along their edges with a knife. Remove the dough around the cut pieces, reserving the scraps to roll out again. Use cookie cutters to cut out the windows and doors as desired, and remove the insides.
- You can cut the paper around the cut out pieces in order to more economically arrange them on cookie sheets.
- Bake for 10 minutes, and transfer the pieces to trays to cool flat.
- Once cool, you can begin to assemble the house with royal icing.

Royal icing:

2 egg whites or 6 tablespoons prepared dried whites
1 pound confectioners sugar (500 grams)
2 teaspoons kirsch or lemon juice

Simply place the egg whites in a medium sized mixing bowl and whisk briefly with the kirsch or lemon juice. Add the sugar, not worrying too much about lumps, and stir it well, until all the lumps have been worked out and it is a smooth, homogeneous paste. Transfer 4-6 tablespoons into individual zip-lock type sandwich bags, zip closed, and reserve these in the refrigerator until it is time to use them. You can use this as glue for the house, to pipe decorative lines or polka dots on the house, or to glue candy all over the house and the house's garden by clipping off only a very small bit from the corner of the sack and using it like a pastry bag.

In my opinion, this was a lot more fun than doing cookies, because the children will stay interested much longer in this project than decorating cookies. Here are the children working on the house. They loved it. I think they will love it next year too.

Postcard Lyon

2010-12-16T23:04:00.001+01:00

Les Châtaignes

2010-11-03T08:51:00.018+01:00

When a journalist called me a couple of weeks ago asking me about chestnuts in my kitchen notebook, I was up to my elbows in them. Last night I saw that I was featured along with a recipe for my favorite way to serve chestnuts at the holiday table in the Washington Post! Thank you so much!

This year we collected a lot of wild chestnuts during our walks in the woods. I prepared my puree from the raw chestnuts by slow simmering them in my regular mixed duck and guinea hen stock. This goes into the freezer after a cream enrichment, and when the time comes, it will be mixed with the best smoked bacon we know and brown in a gratin dish as a Thanksgiving side. Heaven knows that these little nuggets embody all that I am thankful for.

When I look back at the ideas I've already gathered on the plethora of things to do with chestnuts and expand to consider all of the mentions of chestnuts in my kitchen notebook, I am reminded of their ever present quality in Lyonnais cooking. It would be a shame not to incorporate them somehow in my class about Cooking in Burgundy Clay this winter. Along with pumpkin, chestnuts definitely are one of my favorite elements in Lyonnais cold weather dishes.

It would be so nice to have some of those luscious gold wrapped slow sugar confit chestnuts for the holidays, but of my own making. This year my personal project is to perfect my own documentation of this city's special sugar confit method to include on the 13 desserts table at the holidays.

Will chestnuts make an appearance at your table this winter? How do you like to use them?

Five Trees Make an Orchard

2010-10-11T10:26:00.024+02:00

Reading a country guide, I learned that five trees make an orchard. This came as a shock to me. Only five trees? It challenged the image in my mind from a visit to an apple orchard in Cortland when I was a kid: straight lines of fruit laden production fading on a diagonal into the horizon to infinity. Now I see a gaggle of fruit trees here or there splotched into these raggedly divided patches of family land on the French countryside and realize there's something great in the whole idea of a five tree orchard, the smallest possible, but an orchard nonetheless.

I am now standing in the autumn of my fifth year on the blog. I am looking back at the archives at what I have to show for it. What do I see? My orchard.

First, I see improvement. Sharing through this blog has improved my photography and writing. When I look back on how this all began, I see that I have come a long way. The first fleeting images, labored assemblage, pushing hard to get on top of the code learning curve, these struggles seem so far from where I am now. Without the structure of the blog to keep me practicing all the time, I doubt I would have been able to make the kind of progress I have in the last five years. For that I am thankful.

Second, I see friendship. Over the years, through the blog, I have reached out to a world that reaches back to me. I have had so many great exchanges and friendships come from the blog. Kind words of encouragement from afar, people who saw my blog, contacted me, and are now steadfast everyday friends, and professional mentors have all come to me this way. I am so thankful for you all.

Third, I see a body of work. It's like I have been working on a quilt. Piecing it together, the seasons like pinwheels, stars, themes emerging. As the years go by, they are placed in particular order year after year. Getting the archive organized into seasons like chapters and the recipes organized into categories has helped immensely.

Fourth, I see a new cycle, something new that only recently has revealed itself to me. You see, all that I have written falls within a framework. Throughout the last five years, I have worked on distilling images and ideas that were collected throughout my life. But at the same time, there were projects, hopes, ideas and events that were not complete yet, because I was in the process of living them, hashing them out, being disappointed by them, rushing headlong into them. When I sat in one late afternoon's last golden rays and I dove in head first to write about one simple moment with a man and a fruit that happened years ago in Beijing, all of these other things in my life were still going on full blast, tearing by at full speed. So now, when I scroll through the titles of my entries in the archive, I see in their titles little anchors in my mind to new stories, ones that have rested and had a chance to clarify, the stories I'm working on now. I am so thankful for these markers.

The fifth but maybe the most important thing I see is regular meditation. Five years of quietly turning my attention to what is good in my life has been good for my soul. Even when things got hectic and tasks like changing diapers and singing lullabies have interfered with blogging, this meditation continues. Five years of finding ways to celebrate with traditions, honor the beauty around me, and to show my love has improved my relationships with the people I care about the most.

Lets lift a glass to Autumn! To the orchard! It's harvest time.

Harvest and Replanting

2010-09-03T09:20:00.010+02:00

It seems like a lifetime ago that I first began to write to you about the garden's progress. Little sprouts peeking through the soil in rows, everything lined up just so. After harvesting carrots and shallots, we combined two beds and have already re-planted them with winter greens. The garden has already given us so much, I don't know where to start. I guess I could tell you where to start. Start here. Start now.

Start to think about what you would like in next years vegetable garden now. Why not take advantage of the energy surge that comes with these first days of autumn by ordering your seed catalogs? Get the paper kind, at least this first year. They're good to have around. Our experience has been that many catalogs, in addition to supplying us with seeds for heirloom varieties we don't normally find at the nursery, also provide useful information about planting schedules, preferred types of soil, companion planting, and ways to keep them healthy. I found myself referring to my seed catalogs just as often as the books we'd checked out of the library. Familiarizing yourself with how things grow and thinking about placement now will just make things easier when you start digging next Spring.

This summer, especially now that things are ripening, I am so thankful for the spark of inspiration that gave way to our potager, our vegetable garden. Last spring, when our plants were nothing but seedlings grown on our city window sill, I wrote to my friend Lizbth, asking her what vegetables her children liked. They were coming to visit this summer, and I figured I could plant them and they'd be ready just in time for their visit in August. The only thing she could definitely say about that was that they both had a thing for carrots. So we planted them.

The carrots grew in neat little rows. Only later did I realize what a miracle this was, in my conversations with the two experienced gardeners in the village. "Carrots don't grow here", they said. But our little raised bed into which we layered loose worked native soil and haphazardly folded a good dose of our rich black compost before planting somehow coaxed them out. The wild boars didn't come digging either, which was a blessing in itself. When Lizbth's children came, I gave them free rein in the carrot patch throughout their stay, sending them out with baskets and gloves. Such rich pickings, and all for just a very little bit of work and care. They came back with marvelous harvests, mostly to be crunched down straight after washing. Have you ever soaked up the pure joy that emanates from a little girl perched on a stool at the kitchen sink, washing the carrots she just picked and placing them neatly in a colander? Have you ever let the perfume and sweetness wash over your senses while crunching a freshly pulled carrot? We made a carrot cake, too.

There's more to say about the garden. But I am in the city now, and there are new restaurants to try, calls to make, and errands to run. It's September in Lyon!

Les Coulemelles : Parasol Mushrooms

2010-08-30T14:45:00.012+02:00

After some cool weather and rain, I slipped out one morning when the sun was shining, carrying a little basket with the intent to go and check the chanterelle patch we found last year. I decided on a detour at first, down to the river. There on a shelf of the old wall that sections the forest from the meadow, under an ash tree, I saw two fresh looking parasols. I scrambled up to gather them, and although they weren’t as big as the one Loic found the day before, I decided to take them. On the way back, I ran into a couple from Paris that owns the house ‘La Marjolaine’ and the lady looked in my basket. “Oh look, you’ve found some coulemelles (that's the French word for parasol mushrooms). But they look a little small.” I remembered the three criteria that Loic had been using to identify these mushrooms. One was the nipple on top, the second the easily movable upward oriented skirt, and third was the fact that the bulb-like bottoms were not nestled into any kind of volva. I was sure about it, but when she said that they seemed small, I paused.

When I returned home, Loic was still in the kitchen by the warm stove with a cup of coffee, surrounded by the stacks of mushroom atlases. I showed him my pickings and he immediately said we would have to check them more carefully. What? He was so sure the day before when we'd found an old one behind the house. I told him to come out of the dark and we sat down at the picnic table with the books. Now how is it that you were so sure yesterday and today you’re not sure about these ones I have found? He opened up one of the guides and showed me a photo of some mushrooms that looked almost identical to the ones I had found, and next to it was written “mortel” with a skull and crossed bones. The only difference between the parasol and this mortally poisonous mushroom is the size.

That was enough for me. We have a little baby who needs us to stay alive. There’s no way, especially after the woman in the hamlet below had remarked on their size, that we were going to touch them. I picked them, I could decide. But Loic had begun to cross reference the other books and atlases, still examining them. He was hemming and hawing over them, and I began to lose my patience. I'd left curiosity behind and sensed the rush of adrenaline that comes with a brush with mortally poisonous mushrooms.

He was approaching the issue with a detached scientific curiosity. Nothing could hurt in continuing to examine them, right? Then, he changed his mind. “Yes, it’s sure. Let’s eat them.” He turned to another guide and then said, “no, wait a minute” and read silently for a while. He was going back and forth like that and there I was staring at these mushrooms in front of me at the table. Finally I just lost it. I don’t really know what got into me. I picked them up and crushed them in my hands like they were pieces of corn bread while he made a guttural "ack, ack" sort of noise. Done. I tossed them over the electric fence into the neighboring pasture. He was stunned at first, then he got mad.

I stood my ground. We should not even consider the prospect of eating a mushroom if there is any possible chance it could be confused with a mortally poisonous one. He says that the guides give a limit of 6 cms, and these measured 8.3. A wide margin in a scientist's mind, especially for one who measures in nanometers for a living. For me, that means about an inch from a blind precipice. Gustatory pleasure, or death? What will it be? Sorry. I will not go that close. I got the impression that he was trying to convince himself to eat them. He was picking and choosing supporting reasons, and completely ignoring the one aspect that could make the difference. He gets mad every time I bring it up. He won’t back down. He says that they were edible.

It won’t destroy our marriage although it stung for a few minutes. I told him that in retrospect it reveals one thing: we have different thresholds for excitement. There is a margin, albeit small, within which he is invigorated, he considers it exciting to explore. At the same time that same margin for me is a danger zone. Flirting with disaster, even rhetorically, is inviting it as far as I can see. This did not make him happy. He quickly retorted that it wasn’t excitement that made him declare them edible, it was just the facts. For me, there is a point at which my motherly instinct kicks in and I will strike. There’s a point where things turn to black and white, yes or no, and I won’t even entertain a maybe. This was one of those cases. I’m a little superstitious. I don’t feel comfortable tempting the gods, or witches, or hobgoblins, testosterone, anything that could inject that little nudge to go ahead when it could go either way. We were very close. In fact I was convinced it was fine to eat them for a little while.

We went out as a family that afternoon for a walk. We decided to take a country road that goes up to a pretty pasture with a view of the valley. The baby loved it. We've found that the jogging stroller is really great on rural paths with its dirt bike wheels and huge shocks. The people of the hamlets we passed through all made a big hullabaloo about it because they don’t sell these kinds of strollers in France.

On the route home by chance, the baby and I were walking ahead while Loic trailed behind identifying trees. Some happily large parasol mushrooms towered majestically at the edge of the field in the sun. I could not believe my eyes. I didn't make a move. I looked back at Loic who was staring intently at a rotting log.

"I love the way the sun falls across this field at this time of day." I said, and turned to walk towards the woods we'd have to cross to get home. Behind me, a couple of minutes later, I heard Loic's "Ho ho!" and for some reason I felt the spirit of my father at that moment. If he is out there, up there, he put those good mushrooms out for us, for Loic to gather. They patched things over. They took the regret out of losing the others, made us forget our disagreement. John Sellers was standing right there with me, in any case, while Loic tended to a hickory log fire in the fire pit outside and I prepared them for grilling.

I brushed the caps off carefully, all very fresh clean specimens. Gills up, I drizzled them with my best green olive oil and seasoned them lightly with salt, pepper, and just a touch of very good fresh chopped garlic. Roasted over mature hot hickory coals, they were flipped only after about 45 seconds on each side, enough to get them sizzling and start to brown. I wedged the grilled caps into four, and served them to an invited guest from our hamlet and Loic on toasted country bread. Flavorful, tender, juicy, a buoyant surprise of excellent flavor, in fact I can easily say it was the best mushroom eating experience I have had so far in my life.

Up High - Les Myrtilles Sauvages

2010-08-26T10:45:00.034+02:00

A retreat. Long slow walks disconnected from the hum of anything. Cool air punctuating grey-blue stone and moving the greenery, we stand still in the Alps. A great way to allow things to gel and mix in the mind. Old fashioned pages coming out double spaced and indented, spending time allowing the mind's eye to wander instead of shining like a spot on what comes next. Edits, reflection on how to improve, work on technical issues I have been saving for a rainy day, these things all come into play during a retreat. That, and I read four books.

Last year, when the baby was about 6 months old, we packed him into the backpack carrier, and headed out for a promenade. On the trail that day, I wanted to take the hard slope. Something inside me yearned to climb something steep. I had some things to think about. One was this fear, fear about motherhood I could not seem to shake. It made me feel like an ingrate. I had lost this fleeting dream over years with many losses. Then we quietly plodded through nearly 5 years of files and scrutiny and dreams of being adoptive parents, and now we had our perfect beautiful son, and here it came, this crazy fear of being a mother. What was wrong with me?

It took hours, but we made it. When we finally broke through the tree line, we turned by a kind of accident and found ourselves circling the edge of a sunny shelf. It began with summer yellowed knee-high grass that quickly turned into a forest of low bushes, a thick wild blueberry patch positioned just so under the sun.

We'd spent a long time climbing already and it was time to feed the baby. We needed a place to sit. The wild blueberries growing in this patch were the plumpest and darkest I had ever seen, though. They left stains on my legs. They hung like grapes from the vine they were so thickly covering each bush. Squeezing one, it spurted startling blood red juice. I had never tasted a more flavorful berry. We had to turn away from this place, but I made an inner vow to myself to return.

Throughout the coming seasons, I anticipated going back. A lush wild blueberry patch borne of inspired labor took mythical proportions in my mind. It slowly transformed into a mission. One whole year went by, one year to ripen. While we planned for our mountain guests this summer, I was transfixed by the idea of these blueberries. I wondered how to convince my visiting friends and their children to take that hard uphill trail. If we took little steps, walking ever so slow to reach the top? If we stopped for dozens of water breaks? If I told a long story along the way? How long would it take with children? I wanted so badly to tackle it again. But no matter how I turned it around in my mind, I knew that it was just not a good idea to spring such a hard walk on unsuspecting guests.

Our first guests came and we headed out on an easy excursion to give them a sweet taste of Alpine promenades. We had chosen one that began high and wrapped along the edges and twisted around corners to reveal panoramic vistas, where every footstep counts. One where we could start out at a good altitude to give them a sample of the unique flora and open sky that higher hiking can provide without too much of the hardship of constant climbing. The kind of well worn paths that entice at every turn. At one point, we ran into a couple that was bent down gathering something. The woman had a pail and a curious contraption, a little rake. Were there blueberries? You betcha! Not so plentiful, not so plump, but blueberries nonetheless.

The next time we took that hike with my old childhood friend and her two girls, the children were equipped with pails and a rake of their own. After a picnic lunch, they went off the path, scrambling up the sunny side with their extraordinary energy, up perilously steep inclines to reach yet another blueberry bush. We called after them to slow down, to be careful, but they wouldn't listen, and we eventually all followed them.

We reached a grassy plateau. I let the baby walk, a corner of my scarf tied around his chest to make sure he didn't dash off in the wrong direction. He toddled on the flat ground, laughing along the way, proud of himself for hiking. I found myself turning, searching the horizon. Looking along the crests, naming them by their village nicknames, looking for the crook along jagged cat's tooth where I knew the berries I'd been dreaming of grew.

We had a game. "One, two, three... Fly!" I lifted him up above my head and he spread his arms wide and arched his back, seemingly above the mountain horizon. I made the low whistle of a high wind while he floated in my hands, and he reached out to the sky. My heart whisked us together to the mythical blueberry patch. There we were on top of the world. I laughed when I realized it, the fear is gone.

The children and my friend had made good progress. One pail was nearly half way full. This is plenty. We will make a tarte aux myrtilles, I tell them.

Recipe: Kitchen Table Tarte aux Myrtilles

1 batch of your favorite pâte brisée
Enough wild blueberries to cover the bottom or as much to fill a pie tin
3/4 to 1 1/2 cups white sugar
a medium to hot oven

A French kitchen table tarte is one that has no precise measurements. You can make this kind of tarte with any berry or fruit you have. It consists of fruit, sugar, and pie crust, very simple.

Sort the wild blueberries, to remove any sticks or twigs or unripe berries. Wash the good ones thoroughly and let them dry. Taste the berries to see how much they need to be sweetened. Roll the prepared dough out to cover the bottom and sides of the pie tin and pierce the bottom with a fork. Fill it with fruit, even a thin layer will do. Sprinkle the sugar evenly over the top and bake it for 20-30 minutes, until the sugar and berries bubble, and the pastry is golden brown. If you've got a lot of blueberries and want make a thicker deeper tarte, you can use the kind of sugar that has apple pectin added, the kind they sell to make jams with. That way, when the tarte cools down the filling is less runny. Cook it in a cooler oven, for twice the time, the first 45 minutes covered with tin foil to keep the crust from burning. When it's bubbling all the way to the middle, take the foil off and raise the temperature in the oven to brown it.

Côte d'Azur: Piccata de Veau à la Poutargue

2010-08-10T10:06:00.003+02:00

On the Côte d'Azur, we escape to our secret beach before the cicadas begin to hum. Morning shadows still long, cedars on the hill protect the little harbor from the sun. The sun is piercing through in spots along the shore and we settle down. The water is so crystal clear we can see the fish swimming among the rocks.

Back at the house, Brigitte is rolling out veal escalopes in her cool Mediterranean tiled kitchen, lights off, shade down. She’s got some poutargue. She’s working her way along each flattened escalope with a sharp knife, slicing each one into smaller strips, getting ready to sear them.

“Elle est bonne” we hear, from the early morning regulars, arriving with their papers, their bamboo mats, silently moving their summer browned bodies into the flat sea, sliding gently in until their heads are the only thing left on the surface of the water. They hover and meditate, some swim to the buoy. There is no further discussion. “Elle est bonne”.

She’s begun mincing shallots on her mother Mamy Durandeau’s old wood board, the one she salvaged when the house was put up for sale. So many memories sliced and minced into an old wood board. We look up to the hill, shading our eyes, and see Mamy’s empty house hovering in a perfumed cloud of sun toasted cedars and flowering trees. In her kitchen, Brigitte simmers the minced shallots with sour things, reducing it down, tossing the pan now and then, humming something.

The first sound of the cicadas strikes like a lullaby in full swing, tempering the sharp joyous cries of the first arriving children. The baby rests his head on my salty chest, nestling his goose pimpled legs into the crook of my arm. It is time to go. He floated on his back today, he dunked under. The waves make a rhythm, the cicadas call in harmony with the rising temperature, their fervor beginning a story of a marathon day to come. Loic closes the parasol.

The shallots are sizzling now. The liquid has reduced. Brigitte has scraped the zest from a lemon, she has curled the clean leaves of a bouquet of basil and sliced it into fine chiffonade. Tart simmered shallots, slivered lemon zest, basil, and plump raisins are tossed together in a bowl and she puts it away. She unwraps the hard waxed poutargue to let it breathe. She will use it all. A breeze enters the kitchen. We are soothed by the cool tile in the house again when we leave our shoes at the door. Barefoot, we join the group that has assembled at the table, glasses of local rosé all around.

Recipe: A Cool Piccata de Veau à la Poutargue.

For 4 people. This recipe can be fully prepared in advance as its three elements and assembled quickly for guests. It is delicious as a summer cold dish. Prepare each element separately and refrigerate until your guests arrive, then let it warm up slightly to allow the flavors to all come through before assembling the plates or the whole on a pretty platter.

4 veal escalopes, sliced thin.
50 grams of poutargue, aka bottargo or bottarga
1 organic lemon
50 grams yellow raisins
2 good sized shallots
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/4 cup rosé wine
1 small bouquet of basil, about 15 large leaves
1 tablespoon olive oil
white pepper

For the sauce:

2 tablespoons of walnut oil
¼ cup beef stock, reduced to 1 tablespoon
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
Salt and white pepper
200 grams of arugula, washed and dried for final serving

What is poutargue, bottargo, bottarga? It is salt preserved roe of mullet or tuna, a Mediterranean specialty. It is produced from the bluefin tuna or grey mullet in Italy, France, North African countries, Turkey, Spain and Greece. The swollen orange egg sacs are removed in-tact from the fish, and conditioned for long conservation in sea salt. Poutargue is traditionally enveloped in wax, but also can be found packed shrink wrapped (sous-vide). It is ready to eat and doesn’t need cooking.

- Pound the veal escalopes thin. Cut them across the grain into strips, about 1 ½ inches by 3 inches. Reserve in the refrigerator.

- Peel and mince the shallots, and heat them in a pan with the white wine vinegar and wine, bringing to a boil. Reduce slowly over medium heat until the liquid is fully reduced. Reserve.

- Remove the lemon zest and sliver it into thin strips with a sharp knife. Remove the basil leaves from the plant, wash them, roll them into a cigar shape and slice crosswise very thinly, to produce a thin chiffonade. Mix the cooked shallots, lemon zest, basil, yellow raisins, and white pepper together in a bowl. Remove the wax from the outside of the part of the poutargue you plan to use. Slice thinly.

- Prepare the sauce: in a bowl, whisk the sherry vinegar, walnut oil, reduced veal or beef stock, and season with salt and white pepper. (this dish can be prepared in advance to this point, and cooked and assembled 5 minutes before serving.)

- Heat up a cast iron grill or a plancha. Brush the veal pieces with olive oil, and season lightly with salt. Grill quickly on the hot grill, turning the piccatas after a few seconds to brown each side. Plate them directly on the serving plates on a bed of fresh arugula, sprinkling the shallot basil raisin and lemon condiment, a generous topping of slices of poutargue, and finally the sauce.

The wine you choose for this dish should not only go well with the warm meaty flavor of the veal, but also stand up to the counterpoint from the acidic condiment and briny poutargue. A fruity Chenin blanc or a red wine dominated more by its vivacity rather than tannins would do nicely.

This post originally published at Apartment Therapy, a guest post for their 2010 Summer Escapes series.

Poutargue, Bottargo, Bottarga?

2010-07-20T16:49:00.013+02:00

Bottarga in Palermo, Sicily and French Poutargue from the coastal region near Marseille

What is poutargue, aka bottargo or bottarga? It is salt preserved roe of mullet or tuna, a Mediterranean specialty, of which variations exist in Italy, France, North African countries, Turkey, Spain and Greece. The swollen egg sacs are removed in-tact from the fish, and conditioned for long conservation in salt, pressed between wood planks. Poutargue is traditionally enveloped in wax, but also can be found shrink wrapped.

In Sicily, at the salt flats in Trapani and in the city of Palermo, tuna bottarga comes from the bluefin. It is enormous, dried hard, and sold in slices by weight. Mullet poutargue from near Marseille is such a moist delicious marvel we buy it to make our Piccata de Veau à la Poutargue.

While the Italian connection is strong in our minds, a little research tells me that in France, poutargue goes way back, and because it travels well, it found its way up the Rhone to Lyon in the early 17th century. It is mentioned in Lyonnais literature (Huguetan, 1607) as a product from Provence that creates a healthy thirst called "Botarges". Its provenance is further clarified in the late 1700s, in the Dictionnaire portatif de commerce, which lists 8 Marseilles producers, in an area called "Martegue".

Shaved in thin slices and sprinkled with olive oil, it is delicious on salads, the salty flavor marrying beautifully with the bitter herbs and greens like arugula, wild chicory, frisee, and endives when they are in season. The trinity of poutargue, potatoes and green olive oil is sublime. Use your poutargue little by little, in shavings, slices, crumbled, anywhere you might envision the use of anchovies as well. The flavor goes a long way, so don't worry about the expense. You can make it last.

Postcard Côte d'Azur

2010-07-15T12:15:00.001+02:00

Tata Nanou Came to Lunch

2010-06-21T22:25:00.010+02:00

Ian loves his tata Nanou. She kisses his hands just so and he wouldn't dare scratch or gouge her face the way he does to maman. He is always on his best behavior with tata Nanou. She and I get together when we can. We took up a good habit of going out to little tea houses and back room places that contain a majorité des femmes some time back. Now that getting out isn't as easy, she comes to our house for lunch. On those days, I tell him that she's coming the moment he wakes up, and morning long he's all smiles, waiting for her to come.

We went down to the market on St. Antoine as is our regular habit, and found many delicious things. Brigitte taught me to walk the market to the end, and buy on the way back. At the very end of the market, in the space usually delegated to newcomers and temporary stands, there was a very nice fromagerie, gleaming and new, who has not been on St. Antoine for very long. His selection struck me immediately because not only did his cheese look to be in excellent condition, but he carried the genre of cheeses that are generally not available anywhere but the best fromagers at Les Halles. Some cheese needs special handling to be at its best.

Usually when I have a dinner party and have to put together a very good plate, the kind of plate that people really remember for being perfect examples of cheese they know and love, I always go to Les Halles to visit certain fromagers. It's not just rare cheeses, in fact many of these cheeses you can get at the grocery store, or buy just about anywhere in Lyon. But the way it's handled and season makes all the difference in the world in the flavor. There are cheeses that just could not keep their unique qualities without special care, which are the ones I was seeing here.

I told him I was happy to see his selection, and after quizzing me rat tat tat about who I thought was worth visiting at Les Halles, I met his approval and we talked about his activity as one of only 12 certified trained fromagers that circulate Lyon's forty outdoor markets. These are the fromagers that keep a local cave, first of all, and keep their cheese in ideal conditions before it comes to market, and not the vendors that circulate a dizzying array of over aged, past its prime or otherwise derailed milk products. His home base is located in Lyon's 6th arrondissement, just near Le Petit Vatel on rue de Seze.

The wild asparagus is out and I snatched up a big handful. I knew that Nanou would appreciate it. I decided to do salad with a blanched snowpea chiffonade and wrap the steamed asparagus around a pile of it, layering it with a simmered brunoise of fresh spring turnips and young carrots that I cooled under water after cooking. I topped that with marinated oyster mushrooms and drizzled the lot with a soy, walnut oil and sesame vinaigrette.

Nanou appreciates the simple things in life, and this particular lunch we were both highly satisfied to end with a sackful of sour cherries called griottes here. They glow brightly in the sun at the market for a very short time, no more than a week or two in June. I brought out vintage teacups with soft white cheese, and we chatted about her upcoming wedding plans while we pulled cherries out of their rinse in a bowl of water between us, pitting them before composing each our own topping with a sprinkling of sugar.

The Garden's Progress

2010-06-15T15:36:00.019+02:00

I like to drink a glass of wine in my garden at the end of a fruitful day, the setting sun outlining forms in golden silhouette. I can stare at my plants, contemplate their progress, the miracle of their colors and forms. My garden is a place of magic and hope, a place to dwell, a place of quiet affirmation.

Wind blows across the pasture bringing seeds from unruly weeds. During the week they begin to creep in. When we arrive on Friday night the feeling is usually a little bit like facing the sink full of dirty dishes after a raucous dinner party. Will the weeding ever end? Then we set to work, and in short time, tugging up this and that, prying the spiraling fingers of savage wild growth away, we get it back to where we like it.

Since it is our first year, Loïc and I decided to go with a number of small beds, cloistered areas to tend to a smaller number of plants, like a botanical garden or experimental laboratory plot. This way we can lavish each plant with attention, keep up with the learning curve, and not have to spend too much time and money getting the bed's soil just right. We're in it for the joy it brings, and anything we get to eat is a bonus. We can get bigger later if we want, by moving the borders of the beds. Speaking of borders, our first concern was finding proper ones. We found non-toxic linseed oil autoclaved borders made for potagers and they were our only expense aside from seeds, costing about €80 ($120) for the whole garden. The stones are original from our Savoyard chalet roof, replaced last year.

arugula flower and a delicious mouthful from the task of thinning the carrots

When I first planned the garden, I didn't know how easy it would be to move plants around. I realize now that planning a garden is a tentative task, even planting is never set in stone. We discovered, for instance, that some of our kohlrabi seemed to be flourishing way ahead of the ones we'd planted elsewhere in the garden. Then we realized they had been placed next to tomatoes. This juxtaposition is noted in many of our references as a problem, since kohlrabi saps the life from tomatoes. If they grow too fast, they won't taste good, either. I moved the kohlrabi to another bed and grouped the tomatoes all together. They complained at first, but were bright and happy with the rhubarb chard the next weekend.

Taking a walk through the beds, we have: Eggplant, green beans, peppers, brussels sprouts, a watermelon plant, nasturtiums which in French are called capucine, cilantro, chervil, garlic, yellow onions, chives, carrots, lettuce, parsley, red onions, shallots, arugula, a bed of mixed greens, rhubarb chard, leeks, kohlrabi, a permanent bed of Mara des Bois strawberries, tomatoes, basil, sucrine lettuce and round red radishes. Outside the beds along corners in the wide pathways, I have planted oregano, sage, rosemary, lemon verbena, tarragon, dill, and extra dwarf nasturtiums. At the end of each path on the high side near the sunflowers and dahlias, I have put a cardoon plant at the end of each path. They are very popular in Lyon, and I look forward to preparing them the Lyonnais way.

The gourd hill had a rough start, because I changed my mind at the last minute and decided it should go on a slope located by the compost. We put out our tender pattypan, butternut, delicious pumpkin plants that in French are called potimarron, zucchinis, widely spaced with room to grow. They were all promptly eaten by snails, of which there are a profusion in the compost heap. We started again but had little hope. One difference was the use of some organic pellets to make the snails and slugs lose their appetite. We had just about given up on the lot, when all of the seeds we planted sprouted and grew fast. Now we're faced with this business of thinning. Never easy. Another factor is that one of us poked about 20 kohlrabi seeds into the ground all over the slope when we'd lost hope and they've all exploded into healthy plants too. My neighbor thinks it's cabbage. "Handsome cabbage patch you have there!" he says. I correct him but he doesn't hear it. "Yep, that's some nice looking cabbage." Sometimes I wonder if he planted it. Neither Loïc nor I remember planting it. I might have thrown some seeds down in frustration...

dahlias

The dahlias were a windfall, from the "magic flower lady" at the St. Antoine market of Lyon, where I shop during the week. We always go to this woman, who sings "did you know that flowers are magic?" over and over, in rhythm and harmony with the church bells that ring from time to time in the mornings. One morning she was offering a huge clump of dahlia tubers for €2 for the lot. I asked her what color they were, as if I cared. "Surprise!" she beamed. The clump filled a huge grocery store shopping bag. We tossed it in the trunk and dragged it out into the garden that evening. I spent a good hour wedging the vast knot of tubers apart with the old Parmesan knife I'd bought from a man on the street in Sicily, and burying them, one by one. It was good work. With each one that went into the ground, my little troubles melted away. Even if they don't come up for some reason like poor soil chemistry or slugs or something, I know I will have gotten my €2 worth. The hope for flowers is one of my most delectable painful pleasures. For me it sometimes ranks above the flowers themselves.

tomato flowers and our first haricots.

We're cutting herbs and greens already. Last weekend we enjoyed some flavorful young chard and arugula. I also prepared a dish using les fines herbes from my garden, which made it that much more satisfying. I am allowing some coriander to go to seed, but trying to keep the chervil from bolting by razing the lot every week. I get big bunches every weekend. The arugula made several delicious salads and went into a savory bread, and this weekend we found that it had bloomed. It's interesting to see the pretty flowers that these greens and herbs can produce.

French Market Menu Ideas for Blueberries

2010-06-08T11:10:00.015+02:00

Different berries come out at different parts of the season. One precocious delightful berry I had the pleasure of tasting the other day is this what my neighbor is calling the "Siberian Blueberry" which from my research seems like a European cousin of the honeyberry. She gave me a big sack of them. Judging from taste, I imagine that if they were to appear on a producer's stand in Lyon they'd go for a pretty price. Her family grows and sells vegetables at a local market in her home town. I asked her if they ever put out baskets of these berries. "No, because they're mine" she responded.

Two small bushes were given to her 20 years ago by a man who appreciated her interest while she was on a horticultural themed school field trip to Poland. She explains that she put them in the garden of her childhood home, a ski station in the Haute Savoie, and they came to grow quite tall and produce amazingly huge crops of very small, intensely flavored berries that grow in clumps - ready to pick in late spring. Not your average blueberry.

While we wait for the higher altitude blueberry fields to ripen, I am happy for this exotic gift. She said that she has more than she knows what to do with. She normally freezes them, but thought I might appreciate a sack full. Do I! I went through my country notes for some examples of what the restauranteurs do with regular and wild blueberries across the country and provide you this list, while I decide what to do with these.

To begin:

A marbled foie gras terrine seasoned with blueberry infused Marc.
pan seared foie gras served simply with blueberries.
minced duck magret with Mont Lozère blueberries
a duck foie gras terrine with bonbons de myrtilles.

As part of a main dish:

Lamb chops served with a blueberry infused reduction sauce
duck breast with honey and blueberries
farm raised pigeon with a pink peppercorn and blueberry sauce
magret de canard with «blueberry blood»
filet de boeuf à la myrtille sauvage
veal loin with a blueberry seasoned jus

Or as part of a dessert:

The classic blueberry tart
blueberry crème brûlée
blueberries with licorice flavors in an entremet with a dollop of fresh young farmer's cheese sorbet
chocolate cake with a soft center of wild blueberry preserves
blueberry crumble
blueberries tucked into an almond sablé crust and crème patissière, served warm with vanilla ice cream
clafoutis aux myrtilles
matafan aux myrtilles
a fried blueberry flavored boule de crème brûlée refreshed with frozen yogurt
simple house made blueberry ice cream
wild blueberries served covered in a flurry of crushed meringue
fromage blanc with blueberries
thin crêpes with a wild blueberry sauce
a blueberry tartelette with its pistachio crème légère
thin waffles served with a lime seasoned blueberry confiture
vanilla seasoned fresh farmer's cheese mousse drizzled with a warm blueberry compote, topped with a thin sablé
a Bugundy sparkling wine sabayon with wild blueberries
thick soft pistachio and blueberry swirled cookies
white peach panna cotta drizzled with blueberry sauce
a Genepi seasoned blackberry and blueberry gratin
charlotte aux myrtilles
a blueberry tartelette served with white farmer's cheese ice cream.

In hopes that this list inspires you to expand your blueberry repertoire.

Mother's Day and His Lovely Pancakes

2010-06-01T23:28:00.017+02:00

We celebrate Mother's Day later in France than we do in the States. It was this past weekend. It was my first Mother's Day! We had Alpine lake trout on the grill, stuffed with the proliferation of chervil that has to be cut back every week now to keep it from forming flowers and a good dose of dill weed, leftover from one of my herb ateliers with the Dartmouth College students.

Loic made good tasting pancakes with the levain we keep in the mountain kitchen, which seems to be doing well with some coddling every weekend. It still smells clean so we'll keep it going as long as it wants to keep playing house with us, it's been about a month now. It sits in one of the Russian soup pots I bought near that pickle market in St. Petersburg during our early years of marriage, by the stove. Once we get there and I get the fire going, it gets a good stir and a nice feeding and then warms up nice and toasty by the fire. It stays comfortably warm all weekend. When we leave for the week, the house cools down considerably, so it takes a nap for awhile. The kitchen is half underground, having been built into the mountain slope with 2 foot thick stone walls, so once it cools down it stays cool until we come back and pump up the fire again.

We just feed it on arrival (I toss in a sugar cube as a kind of repentance for nearly starving it to death and a couple of tablespoons of flour) and cover it loosely with foil. It gets fed flour again the next two days. Then we see how it looks the next weekend. So far so good, and the nice flavor reminds us both of the bread Loic used to make in Los Angeles when we were newlyweds, albeit much less scientifically recorded and monitored. I suspect that when the weather gets warm we might lose our levain, since it will most likely take on a sour aspect when the yeast population does begin to starve during the week. I'm just happy for the time we'll have with it. I won't worry about how long it's going to last. We like the bread we can buy up there just as much. But I like the kneading, and rising and all that. I like to plop a round loaf on the sheet, clip the top with scissors, and spray it with water every few minutes after it goes into the hot oven. The satisfying thing is that it comes out tasting like real bread each time, the kind we seek out, and the holes don't get too big.

I woke up on the morning of, and waited. I heard the baby making all kinds of conversation that eventually evolved to complaints. No coffee. I turned on my bedside light and broke out the almanac. Pages later, the morning birds started to change their song, baby continued to get into trouble, the sunshine began to creak and make sounds on the roof. I decided that it must be getting well into brunch time and made my way downstairs and he was still working on those lovely pancakes. They tasted very nice.

Here's a little film of our weekend levain.

Ramsons and Ribeye

2010-05-26T13:40:00.008+02:00

While on a walk through the forest, I kept smelling garlic but could not place it exactly in my mind. It was not something I was expecting. "I smell something good, like an herb", I said to Brigitte. "Smells like a shish kebab roasting over a wood fire" she said. We laughed and took one anothers' arms and walked ahead of the men. After a while, the source of our amusement became clear and something different altogether. We were standing in a patch of ramsons in bloom. Ramsons are a European cousin to the ramp, a wild garlicky chive, called ail des ours in French because bears will dig up the ground to get to the roots. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but a little research upon return to the grid tells me wild boars also go crazy over ramsons. With the way they have been completely destroying the field behind the house in the mountains, I think now that maybe I shouldn't have transplanted a few of these into my shade garden.

We've seen the boars' damage over the last few months. Thankfully it stops at the electric fence put up by a farmer in the village. It wasn't until last week, now that sunset isn't until well after 9 pm, that I saw the whole clan.

I will describe the 10 second encounter as briefly as I can. I was in the garden at dusk, giving a few last admiring glances to the pampered residents of our potager, now at home in their beds, beginning to spread their wings. I clipped a bunch of herbs and headed back in. I heard some grunting but thought it was the Tarine cows that have been set regularly in the pasture these past few weeks. They call to one another at the end of the day.

There was a bit more grunting than usual, and it was bordering on a kind of growling, but I didn't pay it much mind. There are some young males in the herd that have begun to act up. So I went to the kitchen to continue my preparations for dinner, to stoke the fire in Bernadette, washing what I'd picked in the garden. Loic took his turn outside and while he was out waging war on slugs, I heard a particular sound that resembled an enormous cow loudly belching, and looked out to the field through the window of the kitchen door.

There, centered perfectly in the frame of the door at some distance, stood a magnificent specimen, jet black, silhouetted with a golden hue from the last vestiges of the setting sun. Large forward set ears perked high, she must have been about the size of one of these young cows, but with the classic beautiful heft that we know to be the wild boar. The light was magical, and my camera was just there, not far. I tried to move slowly and opened the door to compose my shot. She stood perfectly still, looking in my direction and suddenly let out a startling cross between a scream and a groan a nanosecond before bolting in the direction for the woods. At that moment I realized that there were two others, big fat teens about half her size but still fully grown, who had responded to the call and were galloping fast, their fat rumps jiggling, straight for cover. Gone.

I was reeling in the moment of having finally seen these creatures. I started to leave the house to ask Loic if he had seen them, and then I saw, on the hill from the woods, the big one galloping fast again back towards the house. There is a good distance between the kitchen door and the copse of trees where they sought cover, but I wondered why she was running with such purpose, and stepped back into the kitchen, ready to slam the door if necessary.

In quick movements, she performed what I can only describe as a 3 point turn in less than a second, gesturing with her entire body. It was almost human, like a toss of the head followed by a nimble, almost impossible turn for her sheer heft that said "this way!" Then, from under an apple tree quite close to the kitchen indeed, trotted seven sangliettes, in pairs at first and then a group of three, the size of large tom cats, all fawn colored and striped down their backs, flipping their tails and briskly trotting in single file to follow their mother back into the woods.

We only gathered a little of this wild garlic because I assumed the bounty was never ending from the heady scent we bathed in while we walked arm and arm in the woods. I'd said, "Come on, let's get it from the next patch.", only there wasn't a next patch. By the time we realized it, we were too far into our forest loop to turn back and still have time to get the fire started for dinner.

Flowers, stem and root are all edible and delicious, you can use it all. Since we had only collected a little bit, I carefully washed them while admiring the details of this plant. In retrospect, I valued its scarcity that night, it took on a special value in my mind, like a rare specimen. When you only have a little, your only solution is to be the minimalist and use it in as simple a way as possible. No real advice at my disposal, I followed my instinct, and sliced what we had on the diagonal and put it on the hothouse tomato halves they'd brought from down south, with some coarse sea salt. I wrapped each half in double foil to make sure the herb stayed moist and not too hot, to very lightly steam and soften at the edge of the hickory fire while the cote du boeuf roasted that evening in the garden. I kept reminding my guests to keep their eyes peeled for the sangliers, which I have not seen since our encounter. Add this to my list of foraged herbs in my mountain notebook. It was delicious. We did not need a bushel of ramsons, just a few. Best left in the wild, I think. I know where the patch is.

Infusing Herbs and Flowers: Acacia Flower Syrup

2010-05-20T14:01:00.006+02:00

Edible flowers can have an allure that extends beyond their perfume. If only I could capture the pleasure somehow to enjoy beyond the short window in which they bloom. Acacia is out in the Lyonnais region at the moment, and we're seeing their delicate cascading blooms in bundles on market tables.

I have been doing a series of workshops on herbs in French cooking, and one of the things we do is a simple herb infused syrup to use in your house kir. A kir is Champagne or white wine with a bit of a flavored syrup or a liqueur like crème de cassis, a typical apéritif served in many French homes. Making your own herb infused syrup can lift a very common French before-dinner drink to something memorable for your guests. What they don't know is that it takes no more than five minutes of hands on work to create your own quick syrups in advance. What they will remember is that you turned an old classic standby into something creative and unusual.

The main idea about infusing herbs is to know what part of the plant contains the oils that give them their flavor, and at what point in the plant's development these oils are most concentrated in the plant. I love to use verbena leaves in this type of syrup infusion, and we do this before it blooms. But yesterday at the market the little baskets of acacia flowers' beautiful aroma drew me in even before I saw them. It's the blooms of this plant that harbor the flavor and aroma. I'd bought a bundle of them for a euro before even thinking about what to do with them.

Just in the way things meld together from my various projects, I knew what I wanted to do with these flowers. I coaxed the beautiful perfume out into a syrup, which I served simply over fromage blanc en faiselle after dinner last night. Magic. When my guests had been fed breakfast and sent to the Musée des Beaux Arts this morning, out came the syrup again for me to enjoy with breakfast. Here is the recipe.

Acacia Flower Syrup

1 cup water
1 cup plain table sugar
6 stems of faux acacia flowers

Bring the sugar and water to a full rolling boil, and let it boil, without stirring, for 5 minutes. While the sugar boils, inspect the flowers to insure they are clean and free of any wind blown debris or critters. Remove the flowers from the stems by simply plucking them off with your fingers. Put the flowers into the hot sugar syrup. Stir lightly to saturate the flowers. Let them infuse in the syrup until it cools to room temperature. Strain and transfer the syrup to a jar or bottle, and chill. It will keep several weeks. Serve over fromage blanc en faiselle or yogurt, or make a kir with a couple of tablespoons of this syrup in a flute of Champagne or white wine. Float a flower or two in the glass, or put it on the dessert. You can eat the flowers.

The Poet's Fennel and Smoked Fish Salad

2010-05-18T10:32:00.009+02:00

Despite the last week being cold and dreary, we are ahead of season in the Rhone Valley this year. The plump little baby fennel bulbs are no longer coming to Lyon's markets, the window only having lasted a few days here. No matter, since fennel, no matter what the size, in addition to being braised or steamed and served with any number of sauces, is wonderful raw in salads. I love the crunch of it raw and the way the hint of anise flavor harmonizes with smoked fish of any kind, be it smoked trout, salmon, or herring.

This salad was inspired by a poet friend of mine, created one early spring morning while she sat upstairs in the mountain house shuffling cards. I put it together thinking of her courage to pass wholeheartedly through the door into being the artist she is. I respect that. Instead of trying to find something otherwise busy or acceptably useful to distract herself from the constant pull that would eventually win anyway, she ducked her head, went through that door, and embraced her vocation with humility and grace. Whenever I make this salad now, I think of her.

The Poet's Fennel and Smoked Fish Salad

The ingredients listed here are suggestions for the salad - apart from the fennel bulbs, smoked fish, chervil and capers, you can mix or match according to what you've got at any given time. If you do use kippers (smoked herring), be sure to soak them in milk first before rinsing and slicing them, to remove as much salt as you can.

1/4 pound (250 grams) smoked salmon, trout, or herring, sliced
a pound (500 grams) of small spring fennel bulbs, the younger and smaller the better
the leaves and soft young stems from a bunch of fresh chervil
a half head of crisp lettuce, shredded
2 tablespoons pickled capers
3 white spring onions, sliced into thin rings plus their greens, chopped
1 shallot, sliced into thin rings
6 plump red radishes or radis noir if they have them where you live, sliced thin
1 small red bell pepper, slivered
8 small french cornichons, cut into little pieces
1 bunch flat-leafed parsley, washed, rolled and sliced into fine chiffonade
cracked walnuts or toasted pine nuts as desired
a nice idea: a handful of fiddle heads, if you have them, or edible flowers in season
you can also add rice or cold pasta.

Sauce vinaigrette:
1 shallot, minced
1/3 cup good olive oil
a generous pinch of ground sea salt
1 teaspoon Burgundy mustard or Dijon if you don't have that kind
1 tablespoon walnut oil
1 teaspoon brined green peppercorns, finely minced
2 tablespoons wine vinegar (not balsamic) or lemon juice, your choice

Put the ingredients for the sauce in a small bowl and, whisk them until milky, or give them a blast with the stick blender. Layer the rest of the ingredients in the bowl, composing it as you would like it to be presented, and toss the lot with a pair of salad tongs once the bowl is presented at the table. You can serve with with garlic toast or make croutons as well, or simply make composed individual salads on single plates, on a day that you're serving this as part of a sit down lunch with guests. This salad goes very well with a crisp Apremont from the Savoie.

This with Morning Coffee

2010-05-05T00:21:00.003+02:00

Just to let you know that having the man from the forestry service come and remove the old apple tree's mistletoe this winter did very good things. She bloomed all over last weekend, not just a spray of flowers like last year. Now we know we'll get a whole lot more apples this year. The sound of the bees swarming all over her was a joyous sound indeed.

Your Way With Pâte

2010-04-30T13:44:00.009+02:00

Little tartelettes don't have to be an exercise in logistics. In fact, they're the easiest things in the world once you have laid claim to your crust. I don't mean once you have decided on a recipe, I mean once you have pinched together cold butter and flour enough times that it is one of the tasks you consider as basic as chopping a couple of onions. Part of your way in the kitchen.

A couple of years ago, I found a little book on one of the riverside booksellers' tables. It was from the 1960s, full of your average French housewife's recipes for basic tarte crusts, cakes and home made creations. I wanted a glimpse into what the average French person 50 years ago put together on their kitchen tables. These recipes were not the ones that we have gotten used to these days, you know, the ones that strutt their stuff, expanding the technique and ingredient list to include every possible variation, noting every movement of the cook, adding skimming and sifting and doing things in clockwork fashion, not to clarify or instruct, but to stress, in a kind of patronizing way that yes, you really do need this recipe, you need to buy this book. I admit I never had much patience for these enormously self important kinds of recipes.

This little paperback handbook claiming on the back to have "really, we mean really, every pastry recipe you will ever need" that cost me a 50 centime piece was in my hands, and I was flipping through it, looking at a different kind of recipe style. A nice easy fast feulletage came out of that one, and a wealth of knowledge. First of all, something that struck me, while I read through these very simple recipes, was that for the crusts, they were all variations on one basic formula: flour, butter, salt, water. Second, the ratios were quite varied. You mean, there isn't just one way to make a tarte crust?

Here is the method that is currently my way in the kitchen for making a shell for a tarte, quiche, tartelette, etc. Start with impeccably clean hands and take a smallish piece of good butter from the refrigerator and weigh it, put it into a bowl. Add twice the butter's weight amount in flour and a sprinkling of salt. Use a fork to mash it together until you have little lumps. Get an ice cube and hold it in your hands, until it starts to melt. Then work the melting cold water lightly into the dough with your fingers just until you can pat it into a rough ball. Little lumps of butter are ok. If you're making more than you can comfortably melt ice in your hand for, go ahead and use ice water. Let your ball of dough rest in the refrigerator. Don't ever knead it, it will get tough that way. When you're ready, you can roll it out and use it. Voila. 1:2 butter:flour, plus a pinch of salt, add cold water. Once you have that down, you have just added a lot of options for apero, appetizer at the table, main course, and dessert. Especially useful when you haven't planned anything in particular and you have bits and scraps of vegetables, meats, cheeses, and fruits you need to use up.

Jean-Jacques Bernachon

2010-04-23T14:32:00.018+02:00

With great sadness I open the kitchen notebook today to tell you that Jean-Jacques Bernachon passed away during early morning hours yesterday. It is no secret in the kitchens of Bernachon that he was not just the patron, but a father figure to each and every one of the staff there. He was well loved and maintained a presence in the kitchens and chocolate works until illness took him. He was 65.

Jean-Jacques is the a second generation of his family to be in the family business. At the age of 17, it was clear that he wanted to go into chocolate, like his father, Maurice. His father had started the business in the family name at their current site in Lyon's 6th arrondissement when Jean-Jacques was five years old. Maurice insisted that his teenage son Jean-Jacques learn the grueling work of producing chocolate from someone else, in order to develop a true appreciation for this often difficult trade before coming home to work in the family business. Maurice sent him to work for an old colleague in Bourgoin, and it was there that he cut his teeth, working 14 hour days. After a stage in Amsterdam, Jean-Jacques joined his father at Bernachon. After decades of working for his father, he took full leadership over the operation in 1998, when his father Maurice passed away.

Jean-Jacques Bernachon was married to Paul Bocuse's daughter Françoise in 1969, and is survived by her and their 3 children. He oversaw the artisanal torrefaction and chocolate and pastry making activities, and Françoise continues management of the tea room attached to the chocolate shop. Two of their children are involved with the family business. His son Phillipe plays a role in the artisan chocolate production, and daughter Stephanie runs the chocolate boutique.

Our deep and heartfelt condolences to the Bernachon family, including every member of their staff. Thank you, Jean-Jacques, for your kindness in allowing us in to catch a glimpse of the passion that is Bernachon. I maintain my fond memories and have implicit trust in your wife and children to carry on in the family name.

Other posts about Bernachon in Lucy's Kitchen Notebook:

Bernachon - Chocolatier Extraordinaire

Backstage at Bernachon

How Chocolate Came to Save Fran

Le Potager: Chervil

2010-04-20T10:32:00.026+02:00

A good way to remember the French term le jardin potager is to think of it as a garden that grows everything a good French cook will want to throw into the soup pot. A potager always has space reserved for herbs and aromatics. The seeds we started in the window sill in Lyon have been transplanted to the beds we made in our garden in the mountains. There are sunny beds, and beds that get partial shade. One of my goals is for my guests to have salads from my garden as a special memory of their visit with us, and the shade beds will be devoted to the typical salad greens and herbs that thrive when protected from the sun.

Chervil, known in French as cerfeuille, is an important herb in French cooking. One of the fines herbes, it is readily available at French markets in thick handfuls ranging in price by vendor. Taste the chervil from several of the vendors you have identified as producers, and decide which you like best. They all taste different because they each use their own seed. When I first started market shopping in Lyon, I was drawn to chervil beccause of the beautiful dainty leaf that seems to glow in almost any light. It quickly became a regular addition to my basket. I use it fresh in salads, chopped into vinaigrettes, in fish fumet and to season seafood, eggs, and any dish that won't hide this herb's interesting flavor.

Rub it between your fingers, and take in the aroma. It has a fresh slightly licorice scent, one that will quickly fade when cooked. Chervil is best used at the very end of your cooking process or kept raw in cold dishes, because the flavor comes through the best that way.

The photo above is from our garden's first batch of chervil. It is growing in one of the shade beds. The oblong leaves are the first ones to come out when it sprouts, long and slender to take in as much of the sun's nutrients as possible. After about 10 days, the true chervil leaves began to come out. The sprout leaves will die off when the plant doesn't need them anymore. I will also scatter seeds in a space I have reserved for that, to keep chervil going in our garden as long as I can in the season. One advantage to planting chervil in your garden is that you can also use the roots, which I look forward to doing this summer.

Some recipes in Lucy's Kitchen Notebook using chervil:

Petite Tarte aux Poireaux
Bouquet Breadsticks
Soupe au Fenouil avec sa Truit de Petit Pecheur
Saint Antoine Market
Fleurs de Courgette Farcies
Greens and Game
Cold Cucumber Velouté
Fumet de Sparassis

Congee

2010-04-19T14:08:00.015+02:00

In the middle of last week, my husband, who is generally the kind of person who will work whenever he has a chance, changed his tune and came home early. I was surprised to see him sitting in the dim quiet living room when the baby and I got home, with a plastic sack in his hand. He was waiting for us to come in on him, sitting in the dark. He does things like this from time to time. It's part of living with a scientist. Although he communicates in very direct and explicit language to convey the results of his research, his regular communication to me is less direct. On rare occasions, he does things like sit in the dark, signals that I have come to understand like a code over the years of our marriage. The baby was caught up in the moment of seeing papa unexpectedly and threw himself onto his lap. "It's a stomach virus." he said, and handed me the sack, full of medicine fresh from the pharmacy. I knew that his waiting for us like that meant that he needed to be babied himself. After settling him on the sofa with a blanket and fixing him a cup of herbal tea, I went to the kitchen to get supper on.

Congee came to mind as the best choice for him. It is one of those dishes I have carried to France with me, collected during my years in China. It always brings up complex emotions, because it is a kind of genre food, one of those things that in the lives of the people in China I knew and loved, carried symbol and meaning. You know, it's typically a breakfast food in that country. But beyond that, when you start delving into soul searching with a Chinese person, you'll probably find congee there in very tender places. In a very intense time in my life, congee sprang up a lot. The little pickles and preserves people add to the savory ones came in different shapes and consistencies. I am not Chinese, but my senses awakened in China. I speak Mandarin Chinese. I fell in love in Beijing, a story that's still simmering, trying to find a way to organize itself. That story did not have a happy ending, and I am not sure that there was a life lesson. I should not be afraid of congee, although, like I said, when it pops into my head in this innocent way, something mild and nourishing to soothe the love of my life, I can't help but take a breath, with a start.

On the way to a distant poor province to visit Haibo's parents, we shared an old sedan from a place near Shanghai, rented by his sister and her Hong Kong sugar daddy. The sedan bounced like a boat above the pitted road. The landscape was empty.

They are in the front seat. She reaches up, pretending to adjust the rear view mirror, and turns her hand to and fro to make her diamond sparkle. Hai Bo receives this like a signal. He and I had a quarrel the night before. We will never know each others' secret codes. He has bought a can of congee to eat for breakfast and he offers me a taste. We are bouncing against light blue velour, my sight is drawn to the blemishes, a couple of gum stains and the occasional cigarette burn. I can feel the springs. I take a sip from the can. It is sweet, light, and silky. Nothing like this moment, but very much like it too. He smiles.

I prefer my congee on the savory side. This recipe is the congee Ayi used to prepare for me from time to time in Beijing. There is no secret or technique. It just takes awhile. It is very soothing and filling, but easy on the stomach, so if you're feeling a little under the weather, it can be just the thing.

Basic Congee

2 tablespoons plump white rice
4 cups of water
2 1/2 teaspoons light soy sauce
1 thin slice of ginger
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tree ear mushroom, soaked and cut into slivers
3 scallions, chopped
Pickles of choice for garnish

Rinse the rice until the water flows clean. Soak it in enough warm water to cover it for awhile, 15 to 20 minutes. Add the rice and its soaking liquid to the 4 cups water that you've brought to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer it for an hour or two, until the grains dissolve completely. Stir every 10 to 15 minutes to keep it circulating. It should form a gruel. At this point, add the remaining ingredients except for the scallions and pickles, which you can add to the individual bowls just before serving. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for another 20 minutes.

A more rich variation on this recipe is to use unsalted chicken stock in place of the water and add lean chicken meat cut with the grain into very thin slivers at the very end of cooking.

Apéro Season Opens in Lyon - Seared Foie de Volaille

2010-04-16T15:38:00.001+02:00

The sun's come out after work in Lyon and the whole city collectively sighs "Et si on allait prendre un verre?" Place Sathonay and Place de Terreaux are crowded with gones basking in the evening sun. The cherries are in full bloom in front of Café des Negotiants and Café Perl. Every bar in between with a square foot of sidewalk has set up their own personal street-side terrace. You can find a spot if you just keep walking. We open the windows and let the early evening in. This time of year we always keep a cool bottle of something in the frigo to have ready when friends stop by.

Isn't it better to have a warm little mouthful or two to savor instead of the typical potato chips with apéro? Chicken livers, when prepared just so, are a surprisingly delicious way to start an evening. Even though les foies de volailles are about as cheap as you can get, running at about 50 cents a pound in these parts, these little morsels always make people feel special.

Simple Seared Foie de Volaille

250 grams or a half pound of fresh chicken livers
3 tablespoons butter
a heaping 1/2 teaspoon each of coriander seed, cayenne, dried garlic, anise seed, black peppercorns, pink peppercorns, and juniper berries
2 teaspoons of paprika
2 teaspoons coarse sea salt (I use sel de Guerlande but you can just use what you have on hand)

*about mixing the seasonings: My "dirty coffee grinder" is one I use to grind spices just before cooking with them. I have found that using the whole spices instead of buying pre-ground powders really adds something to the flavors. It has become a habit in my kitchen. Sometimes I toast the grains in a dry hot pan just before grinding, sometimes not. It depends on my mood. After each use, I wash the cap, take a stiff brush to the blade and bowl, and put it away for next time. Inevitably, there's always some residue around the blade, so it's kind of a work in progress at all times. I use my dirty coffee grinder for grinding vanilla beans with sugar from time to time for sweets, and I've never had my sweet cookies, bars, cakes or ice creams come out corrupted in any bad way by whispers of savory spices past.

- Mix the seasonings: The coriander seed, anise seed, juniper berries, the paprika and cayenne, dried garlic, mixed peppercorns, (black and pink) go into the grinder with the spoonful of coarse sel de Guérande. Blitz until it turns to powder. If you don't have a coffee grinder devoted to spices and you don't see doing it just now, know that you can do this in a mortar & pestle easily enough. Just a dusting is sufficient for the livers before they hit the hot pan, so you might have some leftover.

- Remove the fibrous strands that connect the lobes of the chicken livers together by holding them in your fingers at the center part where they come together, pinching them gently with your fingers, and pulling out, sliding the tender meaty parts off the strands.

- Dust the prepared livers on all sides with your freshly ground seasoning powder.

- Heat a shallow frying pan and add 1/2 the butter, letting it spread across the pan and foam.

- When the foam subsides, spread the seasoned chicken livers around the pan, giving them plenty of room. The pan should be hot. If you crowd too many in the pan, they'll steam and you won't get the crispy brown crust.

- Gently nudge them to see when they release from the pan. They'll release when they're done on that side.

- Flip them over and sear them on the other side. Serve the first batch right away and put the other ones on to sear. Let them cook just until crispy on the outside, and they begin to seep their juices.

Serve these babies hot on a pretty plate with toothpicks or little forks. They go very well with most apéretifs: Pineau des Charantes, Muscat, a splash of Lillet, a house kir (for example with your verbena syrup), or even just a naked sparkling wine like Crémant de Bourgogne or Clairette de Die.

Lyonnais Producer: Black Pigs from the Bugey

2010-03-30T13:11:00.016+02:00

Here in Lyon on the St. Antoine Market on Sundays and at the Producer's Market on Place Carnot on Wednesday evenings, there is a pork producer who sells his version of a figatelli and various sausages ranging from a saucisse à cuire to exquisitely à point saucisson sec for slicing thin and enjoying with l'apéro.

In addition to charcuterie, they supply us with quality pork and lamb at reasonable prices. This meat is so much better than anything you can get from the butcher who sells meat from the wholesale markets, and the price is equivalent. The secret to their success is that these farmers raise their animals traditionally and make their living direct from their product, selling retail only. The quality really comes through.

On their farm, apart from traditionally raised pigs, they have Iberian type black pigs that they allow to roam free in herds. These pigs are nourished by feed but foraging behaviors that are natural to this breed's tradition are honored as well. They munch on wild acorns and chestnuts and roots of various kinds to fatten up for winter in the forest and pasture on the farm, and since they are constantly moving animals, their meat is a deep dark red color, certainly not "the other white meat". Availability of this special type of pork is limited, since they follow traditional cyclical breeding and slaughter practices. We won't see these succulent pork cuts again until late next fall. Sigh. Remind me to show you this meat stand when you come to visit.

Companionship and Capucine

2010-03-27T15:28:00.012+01:00

Our fourth grade teacher, that would be when we were nine years old, instructed us each to stand up tell the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. I had absolutely no idea and was panicked at the thought that I would have to just choose something off the cuff like that when there was so little I knew about being a grownup. I was completely at a loss. My turn was coming up. I reached down within, the kind of reaching I used to do when I had to read sheet music to play the viola (which I wasn't very good at), and sought a word, a sign, anything from me to tell me what I was going to be. "A Botanist", I stated, surprising myself.

What was a botanist? I had absolutely no idea. "Very good, Lucy." I was off the hook. "A botanist is a scientist that studies plants." She moved on to the next person, and I pondered that thought. My mother always claimed to have a black thumb. Most plants died at our house, although there was a tangle of greens sprouting from dry prickly clumps of dead things in a perpetual state of thin survival on the second floor landing.

At recess, some different girls invited me to play with them, and one of them confided to me that she also wanted to be a botanist. She was new at the school, and I was happy to be her friend. In the years that followed, we ended up starting a secret picnic group together. This entailed getting permission from our parents to eat at each others' houses for lunch (for which you had to bring a note to school) and then taking off hand in hand into the woods near the watertower by the school, to eat a picnic we'd stashed there and look at plants. We felt so free and rebellious, sprawled on the blanket, sipping alternately from the jug of kool-aid and eating our bagged lunches, magnifying glasses tucked in our pockets.

The garden has still got me fascinated. Bed by bed, I put the plants in varying configurations. I don't like rows. Will this get me into trouble? I will plant groups of things. There is so much to learn. As always, when I am not there, I think about what I'm going to do when I get there. The seeds have all sprouted and it's interesting to see what baby this and baby that look like. The little rhubarb chard sprouts are bright fuchsia, the lettuce sprouts look like ethereal leaflets and the aromatics all look like little white worms squirming their way up into the light. The kohlrabi looked like a four leaf clover for awhile, then stretched out to more of an elongated shape. The beans, coriander and chervil were the last to make their appearance, each seed taking its own allotted time to open and for the shoots to push forth. The vegetable seeds, protected and warm in their little plugs in the city apartment window, have all taken much less time to sprout than the seeds we spread directly on the ground in the mountains last year.

I am focused on companionship. Garlic is something I should plant around the base of the apple tree, a good place too because it can also protect the picnic table from ants. Plants in useful places. I am putting an herb and salad clippings bed on top of a stacked flagstone platform in an awkward place for nibblers. I hope we'll get a chance to have at least a few fresh clipped salads. Herbs in the garden beds help the vegetables to grow and develop their best flavor. I plan to do some triangular beds and some kind of paddy like beds that will make use of a hill. That's where the cucurbits (my gourds and cucumbers) will hopefully cascade down from one platform to the next. There's a pretty flower called Capucine in French, Nasturtium in English, that when planted with my squash plants, will protect them from bugs that eat their stems. It doesn't hurt that the colorful red flowers and beautiful flat round eight segmented leaves are just my style. They'll also be a good addition to summer salads, a spicy cress. A pretty, lucky, spicy cress.

The Growing Season

2010-03-23T13:40:00.013+01:00

The ground up there was ready to turn this weekend. I say this like I know what I’m doing. There are some things you simply cannot assimilate from books. I delve into a garden book and there’s so much jargon I can’t last very long before my eyes glaze over. So many questions, so many terms to set aside in my mind if I plan to slog on through and get to the meat of the subject. This rides on that, that depends on something else, another factor to consider is this, and that all depends on where you are in relation to the sun, stars and moon. I'm feeling like it is going to take forever to do anything more than scratch the surface. Time in the garden changes this idea. I just have to get started and do it and learn. We learned some things from our neighbor last year, mainly that if you put plants in the ground, they might produce very nice tasting vegetables and fruit. And that if you give said fruit to your neighbors, it is good. It is a beginning.

Such luxury to sit and plot out how the garden will grow. I learned last year that things don’t sprout and bloom faster if you stare at them, so while my seeds are tucked and sprinkled appropriately into little starter plugs, I am free to dream a little bit. Like most of my projects, the story begins with my ultimate fantasy. I spend pleasurable hours working on drawings and imagining scenarios, working out my little garden wonderland down to the very last butterfly and chirping cricket, stories unwinding about what could happen as a matter of course if we planted things this way or that way, if we got the correct nutrients, companion plants balanced just so, etc. What I love about this part is the empty page of it, the infinite possibilities.

My dream was cut down to size this past weekend, with cold hard budgetary restraints, lack of physical resources, and lack of stock in the gardening shops. But seeds came from all directions. I took them last summer from things I loved and tucked them dried into envelopes along the way. It seems everyone in the town has seeds for this and that. Mme Martinet sends cuttings from a bush I admired last spring, delivered by her son. We have tons of these stone tiles we can use for paths and borders. From this we have plenty to do.

We are in this together. I hope Mother Nature shows us clemency. I feel that our garden is taking on more meaning with each wedge of earth I loosen, and each clod of roots that he shakes out, one step behind me, back and forth, as we remove last year’s field of flowers, remembering. The baby sleeps in the warmth of the pine paneled room at the top of the house while we work. We are preparing the land for the growing season.

Cooking with Verjus, I

2010-03-18T13:31:00.013+01:00

Growing up, I had neighbors with a grape arbor in their back yard, and I tasted the grapes at every conceivable stage of their development, from the time they were just little green suggestions to the point where they were pendulous bulbs of heady delicious juice swaying in the August breeze. I remember the fresh tart flavor of the green grapes just as well as when they were ripe, with equal delight, which was why, the first time I tasted verjus, I was transported barefoot to one of those dew drenched summer mornings when Clare and I wandered back through the gate to take an early taste from the vines.

When considering your seasonings, you might consider adding a bottle of verjus to your cooking rack. In just about every wine producing region in the world, vineyards are now producing their versions of it. Verjus is the juice of green grapes that are harvested and pressed before they are fully ripe. It has a nice tart flavor and can be used like vinegar or lemon juice in sauces and reductions, to add an element of clarity to your soups, in salad dressings or even stirred into a glass of iced water for a refreshing pick me up. Verjus was historically an important element in the production of mustard in Burgundy, so if you are cooking with mustard, you also might consider verjus to add a certain depth of flavor. It is not as acidic as vinegar or lemon juice, and tastes just like what it is, a mid-July grape.

If you haven't cooked with verjus before, the first thing to do is acquaint yourself with the flavor. Open the bottle and familiarize yourself with it before even thinking about recipes. Put a spoonful in a glass of plain water and enjoy its tonic, astringent qualities while you think of uses for it. Note the way it feels going down, and any memories it might invoke. Anyone who as a child foraged berries and fruits knows this flavor.

Historically, verjus was common in France up until in the 19th century, the phylloxera epidemic killed off the variety of grape that was used to produce it. Recently, a mustard producer in Beaune concerned with the authentic production of the historic sauces and condiments of Burgundy has re-introduced a variety of grape similar to the original for the purpose of producing verjus, and have returned the product to the market in this region. You can find it at the grocery store here in Lyon.

For the expats or visitors looking for verjus in the shops: In Lyon, I have found verjus at the LeaderPrice on the presque’ile in the 2nd arrondissment, But like brown sugar or certain kinds of flour, it’s a kind of hit or miss thing. They run out of stock from time to time. You might go one day and find that any particular store no longer stocks it, which is why I always grab a bottle of verjus whenever I see it.

One nice use of verjus from my kitchen notebook is to prepare a shallot sauce a little bit like a beurre blanc, but using a combination of verjus and stock.

A Simple Shallot Butter Sauce au Verjus

In my kitchen notebook, this sauce finishes a lovely 3 flavor combination with smoked bacon and fish. Both the classic monkfish wrapped in smoked poitrine or something more sustainable like cod and crispy speck for example make a nice combination with it. Then again, if you've braised chicken for example and you would like a tangy buttery sauce to go with it, you can use the de-greased cooking juices from that too. Made with your house stock, this also goes very well with sausage - like a simmered Diot de Savoie.

3 medium sized shallots, peeled and finely minced
5 tablespoons verjus
10 tablespoons poultry stock or cooking juice from your dish
5 tablespoons good butter

Melt 1/2 tablespoon of the butter in a saucepan. When it begins to sizzle, add the minced shallots and reduce the heat. Keep the shallots moving in the pan with a spatula, slowly sweating them without browning. After about 2 minutes, add the verjus, raise the heat enough for it to boil gently and reduce the liquid down to half, which should not take long. Add the stock or cooking juice, and let it cook down until the liquid is again reduced by half. Incorporate the remaining butter, little by little, whisking it into an emulsion. At this stage you can also use the hand blender to whip it into a smooth sauce or leave the shallots to add texture to your presentation. Season the sauce to taste with salt and drizzle it onto your fish or meat.

Mugs and Apples

2010-03-16T10:24:00.011+01:00

It must have been years ago because we were still living in the 3rd arrondissement in a wonderful top floor duplex in a neighborhood that I didn't appreciate. I wanted to be plop down in the middle of things. As it was we were pretty close, and to get to the Rhone riverside I only had to go down to the street, turn right, and walk about a quarter of a block. I decided one morning, feeling inspired, to take my coffee down to the riverside, sit on a bench, and watch the city wake up.

Everything began well enough. I got downstairs with my mug in hand, full of hot steaming coffee, and proceeded to the street. There, a woman was walking by, and she slowed at the sight of me. She pursed her lips and made a sidestep to distance herself as if I was infected with something. She gave me a good hard look from head to toe before quickening her pace and passing by. Same or similar incidents occurred, a man who kept his eyes on me as if to keep me at a distance, a woman who pulled her dog away. I was beginning to feel terribly self conscious. I raised the mug to my mouth for a sip of coffee while waiting for a light and it seemed even the cars driving by slowed down so the people could stare. Quel horreur, look at that woman raising a mug to her mouth! A mug! On the street! I proceeded toward the avenue that ran along the river. I was ready to cross, when I just changed my mind. I realized that if I tried to cross the road with a coffee mug in my hands and people driving fast caught a sight of it, we might have a spectacular car flipping accident. Tail between my legs, I returned to my apartment, a bit harried, and had my coffee looking out the tiny window of in my little kitchen.

I thought about that day the first time we saw the apple tree in fruit. The notaire's office had proposed a ridiculously early appointment time for us to go and finalize the purchase of the house in the mountains. That morning we had to leave while it was still dark out to drive up into the Alps to make this early appointment. I had pushed things to the last minute, trying to get every moment of sleep I could, and had been rushed to get dressed before we left. I didn't have time for coffee, even though there was a fresh pot on the stove. I decided to take it with me. I brought the mug with me in the car, and took great pleasure in sipping it while we were in the traffic. Ahhh. Coffee. I couldn't help but glance from side to side to see if the people in cars around us were surprised. They weren't. It is only when you are a pedestrian that mug holding is inappropriate.

Once out of the notaire's office with keys in hand, we flew up to the mountains. We'd bought that house not even knowing what kinds of trees there were, so imagine the joy when we saw that the old tree near the house was positively loaded with crisp tart cooking apples. We were very involved with getting things operational during those first weekends before winter closed in, getting the stove refurbished, the kitchen painted, the pine floors sanded and refinished, so there was barely any time to think much about cooking the apples when we were up there. There would be the next year. A couple of crisps and that was it.

I was saddened to see that this past fall, the tree barely produced any fruits at all. She didn't even bloom last spring except for a little spray of blossoms on a branch within reach that turned to fruit. We cherished every single fruit she gave us. Coffee mug in hand, I decided to have a little pow wow with the tree. I went out and opened my mind to her spirit. Here, she said, I'll give you these this year, this is my offering. But please understand that I am cold and tired and there's this mistletoe that's been a bit taxing. I arranged quickly for a man from the forestry service come and do what he had to in order to remove the mistletoe this winter while she was asleep. Maybe next year she'll be feeling back to her old self.

In any case, our neighbor who has a little orchard of 9 trees of different varieties, picked and picked all season long, and still didn't get all the apples from his trees. His compost pile had a pyramid of rotting apples that turned brown, then white, then collapsed into the heap. He gave us free reign and also this winter he began dropping off boxes of apples he'd stored in his cellar. That was what we found on our kitchen doorstep a couple of weekends ago and those were the apples that went into Friday's chutney.

I am sitting inside on this late winter morning with my coffee, thinking of that and the fruit bowl. I better do something with the rest of these apples. I think I will dry some for sprinkling into oatmeal, and make some spicy apple cake.

Chutney aux Fruits Secs et aux Épices

2010-03-12T20:07:00.014+01:00

Chutney chutney chutney. Sometimes I just think people like the way this word rolls off the tongue here, you see it so often in the restaurants. I can tell you one thing, the French are NOT chutney purists, which is good news for me because I won't turn away anything that heightens the flavor of my meal the way that many French-styled chutneys do, even if many DO contain raisins. (Apparently raisins are some cardinal abomination never to be ever used in chutney, a rule set by the Anonymous Chutney Authority that oversees chutney's Wikipedia entry.) This Christine Ferber recipe, from her Leçons de confitures, puts raisins to excellent use. The result is simply sublime. It came together in a snap this morning and I plan to serve this tantalizing sauce at my table with my mixed pepper and spice marinated magret de canard.

Chutney aux Fruits Secs et aux Épices (dried fruit and spice chutney)

Note: About measures, I translated these measures from weight to volume based on the recipe which was given in gram weights. That means you can do this recipe if you don't have a kitchen scale.

6 dried figs (100 g.)

12 dried apricots (100 g.)

12 prunes with the pits (100 g. yield)

3 small fresh tart cooking apples (300 g. yield)

2 medium white onions (200 gram yield)

2 cups white wine vinegar (50cl)

1 tsp coarse sea salt (3 g.)

1/2 cup brown sugar (50 g.)

1/3 cup honey (preferably alpine but any forest and flower honey will do) (50 g.)

3 tablespoons candied ginger (50 g.)

50 g. Smyrna raisins (yellow raisins)

1/3 cup pine nuts (50 g.)

1/4 teaspoon of cayenne (1 point de couteau)

1 1/2 tsp épice à pain d’épices (3 g.)

- Slice the figs, apricots and prunes into fine strips (about 2mm).

- Peel, core, and finely dice the apples.

- Peel and mince the onions.

- Roughly chop your raisins and set them aside.

- Put the figs, apricot, prunes, apples, onions, vinegar and salt in a thick bottomed stainless steel soup pot.

- folding carefully with a spatula, bring the mixture to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes, until the fruits are tender.

- Incorporate the sugar, honey, candied ginger and raisins.

- Continue at a low simmer for about 25 minutes, folding and running the spatula along the bottom of the pan, careful not to let it caramelize or burn. The liquid will evaporate and the chutney will thicken.

- Add the cayenne, the épice à pain d’épice, and the pine nuts and simmer for 10 minutes more.

- Remove from heat, fill your pots, and put a lid on them. Cool to room temperature and refrigerate.

Enjoy this chutney with potted or slow braised meats, potatoes cooked with goose or duck fat, game or poultry. (I guess that covers about everything). This batch makes enough for a jar to keep in your fridge for a couple of weeks, plus a jar to give to the good neighbor who left a box of apples at your doorstep.

Épice à pain d’épices

2010-03-11T10:35:00.009+01:00

Whenever I get organic oranges, I always remove the zest and keep it to dry. You never know when it might come in handy, in a cup of tea, grated and sprinkled in fruit salad, in a cake, mulled with wine. With winter wrapping up, a new found interest in my spice drawers along with a Christine Ferber compendium from the library on my knee, I have been thinking chutney. It's a good thing I saved those orange peels. There's a quick way to dry them, if you're thinking chutney too and don't have any dried orange zest on hand. Just pare the zest off a well scrubbed orange and place it on a cookie sheet in your oven at the coolest temp setting for an hour or so.

Once particularly delicious looking recipe for chutney calls for the ingredient épice à pain d’épices. There are so many varieties and recipes all over France, it would be impossible to give a definitive formula for the mix of spices that make French spice bread. It really differs by the household. But since I have re-done the spice rack and am prepared to start with my own mixes à measure for my recipes instead of buying mystery jars with formulas meant to maximize commercial return to someone else, I want to hone down the possibilities on a house version.

Why all the hullabaloo about pain d’épices? Although certain regional specialty pain d’épices appear around the Christmas holiday in France, this type of spice bread isn't typecast to that role the way you'd think it would be. It is quite at home in this country all year round as an element in everyday French cafe and restaurant meals. For example, imagine ordering these dishes I've gathered from various French restaurant menus:

Pain d’épices encrusted Atlantic sea bass with pan tossed chanterelle mushrooms

A vegetable selection served with pain d’épices breaded foie gras

Duck breast with sliced pain d’épices

Pain d’épices breaded lamb napped with a flavorful reduction sauce

Pain d’épices breaded halibut fillet

Oven crisped pain d’épices breaded rabbit served with a slowly caramelized sour glazed carrot dish

Scallops seasoned with pain d’épices spices

Foie gras escalope with flavors of pain d’épices

Pain d’épices breaded veal kidneys

Veal glazed with a pain d’épices and sesame sauce

A pain d’épices tartine topped with foie gras and green apple chutney

Roasted Mediterranean fish with a pain d’épices seasoned glaze

Foie gras served two ways, one in a Cognac based marinade, the other poached and served with pain épices

A fanned duck breast with pain d’épices seasoned sauce

The rack of lamb in a pain d'épices crust

The foie gras terrine with toasted pain d’épices and tender roasted fruits

Duck foie gras and mango compressed terrine served with wedges of pain d’épices.

Enough to get you licking your chops yet?

For dessert:

A pain d’épices seasoned ile flottante in almond milk custard

Pain d’épices flan with goat cheese and pears

Apple tart served with pain d’épices ice cream

Frozen pain d’épices parfait

Armagnac seasoned apple prune crumble with pain d'épices ice cream

Frozen pain d’épices, orange marmelade and Macvin soufflé

Pear tarte Tatin with pain d’épices ice cream

A pressed Tatin style apple and pain d’épices terrine served with cinnamon ice cream

Pain d’épices crème brûlée served with a fresh fruit salad

A chicorée parfait with Djion-style pain d’epices layered meringue cream dessert

Anjou pears, poached then caramelized with a pain d’épices glaze

Alsatian-style Pinot Noir plum flan paired with a pain d’épices ice cream

Pain d’épices tiramisu with salted-butter caramel ice cream

A charlotte made with pain d’épices

The apple and orange confit tart served with pain d'épices

The mix of spices for pain d’épices can have a lot of uses outside of making the spice bread itself. For her chutney aux fruits secs, Christine Ferber gives us a quick formula for the coffee grinder from spices on your rack:

Épice à pain d’épices

1 part (gram weight) each:

cinnamon

cardamom

star anise

clove

black pepper

dried (organic) lemon zest (optional)

dried (organic) orange zest.

Remove the seeds from the cardamom pods. Place the spices and dried orange zest in your grinder and give them a whirl, or crush with a mortar and pestle. Use in your chutney aux fruits secs or pain d’épices.

Culling

2010-03-09T13:50:00.023+01:00

In the winter, I find myself in a state of retreat, like a tree, in an inert state of waiting. Watching. The sun ekes through the windows at the most pitiful angle. I push my writing desk right up against the window to try and absorb whatever light is going to be doled out. Inspiration trickles in droplets one by one. Inertia wanes. Daily business unfurls at its slow French city pace across my square. It is tempting to passively watch. In past years, I have always done what it takes to shake things up, to keep things from freezing over, but it's true. Winter has always been hard for me.

This is my first winter with the baby. While I still won't say everything changed, something very big has shifted. A lot of time goes into animating, teaching, comforting and reassuring my little boy. I am blowing on coals. New coals. Hot coals. I am constantly moving to stay one step ahead. I must explain to him what we plan to do. The spontaneity that I used to rely on to shake things up during the winter has been transformed into my breath on these hot coals.

This week in the kitchen cure, I am thinking about optimization, which translates to freedom. I'll take it wherever I can get it. I am culling equipment from the kitchen, and most of all, moving things around. I have a couple of shelves full of things I rarely use, so I am moving these things out and creating new space for the things I should have close by.

Do you have any equipment on your counter that just takes up real estate? I have very little counter space. In fact, when you count that which is taken up by the grinder, the mixer, and the kettle, I don't have any at all. I have become adept at using cork mats as anchors for cutting boards along the edge of things. When I am cooking things that involve more mise en place than simple slicing and chopping on little boards along the way, my kitchen moves out to one of the two work tables outside the kitchen.

Now that the sun is finally beginning to fill the house again, It's time to put the pastry table back by the window, and move my writing desk to a quiet place in the house. This is a very good time for my kitchen cure. I need to optimize my kitchen, to do away with unnecessary steps. Time is more precious now than ever.

Foraging: Thoughts on a Monday

2010-03-08T14:48:00.003+01:00

This talk about the people on the market who sell their foraged wild herbs got me thinking this weekend. It was cold up there and the ground is still frozen solid. I spent some cozy time indoors with a piece of tracing paper over a map of the land, dreaming about what we might try to accomplish this year in the garden. Last year we simply cleared the field by hand and spread mixed wild flower seed, and it was very nice. We also randomly planted some vegetables around here and there, and we were rewarded with some very nice zucchini, potatoes and beans.

While I am thinking about dried herbs and seeds and the ones I loved the most as I replenish my spice drawer, I realize that it's the wild ones that get me so excited at the market here in the city. One very useful task this summer will be to learn to see more wild herbs and edible plants all around us on country walks and out in the field outside the kitchen door. I often catch sight of old women out on steady and slow early morning walks in the hills when it is warm out, carrying small baskets. This I suppose is the bucolic image that causes the tourists to come and clear everything from sides of the well worn hiking trails. But in the little homey places away from the stations, the farmland and grazing paths, where we can walk all day barely seeing anybody, it can't hurt to cut a sprig here or there.

Foraging anything takes a bit of method in thoughtfulness. For example, when out picking herbs, have the sense enough to use a field knife and cut them, leaving the base in tact. Leave the roots, and cut only what you need. There's no need to rip any plant whole from the ground, effectively exterminating it. Give it a chance to grow back. Last year I did transplant some wild strawberries that spread and grew from their little sheltered spot under the cherry tree. But I was careful about it, and did it with respect for the path I was walking on. Mindful of my intention to nurture this plant as a special project, I took the whole plant from a place where thousands more were growing.

Paprika

2010-03-05T18:10:00.002+01:00

At first, I just bought packets of whatever was cheapest, but then discovered especially as the years went by that quality really has begun to vary a great deal with paprika. In my project to replenish my spice cabinet, one goal is to find the best quality paprika I can on my budget, a few different heat levels. With my budget that means I won't be able to go to Hungary, to a place like Szeged, where in the autumn they harvest the highly valued peppers that became famous the world over for making the best paprika in the world. The peppers are strung to dry and a whole spectrum of paprika strengths are produced, ranging from very mild to hot hot hot. One of these days I'll go there. It's on my list of things to do. In the meantime, I can dream. Most of the Hungarian tourist sites have articles on paprika, complete with photos of the famous peppers strung to dry. Wouldn't it be lovely to go there with a guide at harvest time?

My source in Lyon this time is Cap Epices, near Ampere Victor Hugo in Lyon's 2eme arrondissement. I like that I can buy very small amounts, and I like that they have a steady stream of clients plus they do the markets on weekends - that makes it so that their inventory is always on the move. I like that I can get small amounts of 9 different spices plus a little can of pickled green peppercorns and it costs me less than €10.

Cap Epices
39 rue Charité
69002 LYON
04.78.39.34.49

The Spice Rack

2010-03-04T13:21:00.006+01:00

Some people collect spices as souvenirs of their travels, with exotic specimens indexed and stored in pristine condition like inventories from archeological digs. Others deck out their kitchens like pharmacological laboratories, with powders, plants, and roots displayed in glass jars. Some tuck theirs into a special box and dig through when they need them. Some people like mixes and rubs, and fix up a big batch every now and then. Many fabulous cooks I know keep a special coffee grinder reserved for spices. Every cook's spice collection reflects their favorite kind of cooking. Food enthusiasts can compile enormous collections that can go stale if they're not careful. How's your spice rack doing, by the way?

Spices don't last forever. They should be purchased in reasonable amounts and replenished often. In taking my kitchen cure, I am replacing old with fresh. Since we're not millionaires, I have to approach this with reason and a dose of parsimony. But that does not stop me from feeling great about the possibilities for my spice rack at the moment.

The first task is to take out my kitchen notebook and list the spices in my favorite recipes. Repeat appearances will make the list, and if I am planning a dish anytime in the future, I'll mark whatever I need as well.

Second, browse through the cookbooks for the international cooking I love most. I think the best thing, in building my spice rack up again, will be the opportunity to make a list of new recipes to try and take on some that I realistically would like to add to my cooking repertoire.

Third, rely on my friends. My friend Francine, for instance, comes from the West Indies and has a stash of freshly dried mace, collected from the nutmeg tree of her aunt, and cinnamon local to her home. I will give her a call and hit her up for some of that!

There are also some spices that I have to wait to collect. For example, the anise seed. There is a producer down at the Wednesday night market that harvests wild anise and during a certain window of the year, you can get branches of it laden with the seed. I bought some last year and it was heavenly. The taste was so much better than what you could buy in a shop. So I am going to wait for that.

Some spices just have to come from far away places, but many herbs can be grown. I am not very big on store bought dried herbs, and don't keep them much because I don't think the ones that have been ground to a powder, stored, shipped and traded by the metric ton taste as good as the ones you can get fresh from the market or garden and dry or freeze yourself.

Which brings me to another project altogether: An herb drying rack - one made specifically for that, which can put an end to my having to fight my way through a tangle of twigs and brambles to get to a spoon to stir my soup with.

The Kitchen Cure

2010-03-03T22:30:00.011+01:00

A couple of years ago, my husband and I received a trip to a spa as an anniversary gift. This is not the kind of place where you lie a reclining chair and get a gentle massage, a pedicure and a facial. We arrived at this place at 7 o'clock in the morning and became inmates. They locked up our things. We each talked to a medical doctor. After we received a personalized schedule of treatments, we were nudged into the labyrinth. The inmates, stripped of our belongings, were shuffling around in matching slippers and white bathrobes. No one spoke. It was Fellini-esque. The experience was jarring and liberating at the same time, since we were subjected to being pummeled with streaming jets of water at fire-hose velocity, dipped in vats of bubbling clay, massaged with compounds, stretched with weird machines, closed up in rooms of various degrees of heat and coldness, scraped, kneaded, and otherwise indelicately handled. Loic and I were separated at arrival and raised our eyebrows at each other in passing down the halls throughout the day. We were then left to silently bake together in a cloistered courtyard, exhausted, draped over reclining chairs overlooking the Mediterranean sea, drinking cups of healing water that were refilled by nurses. It was all we could do to make our hands touch each other across the great divide between our wooden recliners while we watched the sun set. We left that place completely drained of all energy but in the weeks to come, wow! The difference was amazing.

Fast forward to today. Since we bought the country place a bit over a year ago, our apartment in Lyon has entered a sort of Feng Shui limbo. Especially the kitchen. We didn't put much thought into how to establish the new kitchen in the mountains, nor did we give furnishing it a line in the household budget. Instead, we shuffled and shuttled things from one place to another in boxes and bags for awhile, then hit the brocantes and doubled certain small things like corkscrews, knife sharpeners and silverware. But since this wasn't thought out or planned in any way, things settled the way they fell. Add to that the arrival of our son, Ian, last spring, adding baby accoutrements and products that never found their places and a vast cut in spare time even to consider the issue, and we've got ourselves a nice big mess. I've been trailing along behind in the wake of all of this. I haven't had the courage to even address the general dysfunction, I just feel more and more like I need a helping hand. This was why, when I came across the 2010 Kitchen Cure at Apartment Therapy, I took the plunge.

They told me I had to dispose of my lovely olives.

Our kitchen is extremely small, and I like it that way. For years, it was a very efficient one. But now it feels like an abandoned rats nest, for all the things I've stolen from it to nourish the kitchen in the mountains. All the bits and scraps of useless junk that remain tucked into every corner have lost their meaning. In addition to problems with clogged energy, I really am going to have to replenish the spirit of my kitchen. I want it to be a place that nourishes my creativity again.

The first assignment at the Kitchen Cure is to tackle the refrigerator and the pantry, removing everything that's expired, inedible, or no longer useful. One shelf at a time, we purge things that no longer belong there, and brush the dust off of that which we will keep. We have a week to do this. This is a task that just takes time. In my house, the kitchen and pantry have begun to spill out into our living space. This first step will make space and find places for the many things that seem to never have had a place to begin with. It will give me a chance also to replenish the essentials.

Wonderland Hat Trick

2010-02-24T23:08:00.021+01:00

Something simple to strive for: live a year where you never let a birthday slip by without a celebration. You already know I am not much of a cake person, but somehow I have become the birthday cake baker of my French family. It originates from a lack of what I used to call "real birthday cakes" in French bakeries. You know, a simple layered and frosted sponge cake. You can't find them here. I resorted to doing them at home for Loic's sisters at first, and then everyone wanted one. This year, the opportunity came to make special cakes for my son's first birthday and his two cousins aged 2 and 4, all having birthdays in February. I took it as a chance to learn something new.

After ruling out the idea of a communal cake for the children, I decided that what I wanted for each child were the little cakes that Alice bumped into after being trapped by that magic potion in the long hallway. The cake that injected magic into her world, the one she ate trying to get into the beautiful garden. Smooth looking, colorful, silky, simple cool cakes that call out: EAT ME, and promise adventure.

I have always loved the clean simple visual effect of fondant on a cake. I had no idea what kind of work it would entail. First you roll up your sleeves. Then do a little research. The more I saw, the less sure I was going to be capable of pulling it off. Fondant is sugar cooked without burning to certain candy stage, then cooled on marble, worked and stretched and kneaded to puff it up with air, stretch it, and form a kind of white paste, which is then deftly rolled out on a large greased work surface and applied with finesse (at least from what I could see in the videos addressing this technique) to a buttercream iced cake. Voila. For fondant making, you must have a slab of marble, know how not to get burned, possess all kinds of professional know how, a scraping raclette, and wear a large white toque, I think. While we do have my great grandmother’s marble top dresser, that is covered with books. And I don't have much work surface to speak of in my little city apartment. I like candymaking well enough, but I wasn’t sure I could rise to the task.

The sighs and oh-wells had begun to well up and I began shooting thoughts to other ideas when I ran across an ingenious recipe created and distributed widely by industrious American moms and used to scrap together homespun “whimsy cakes” across the country to varying degrees of success. It is called MM fondant. Sounds technical, doesn’t it? It is really a very simple and delicious idea, using microwave melted Marshmallows into which you simply knead flavors, colors, and sugar to get a this silky matte dough. You can cover cakes with it, sculpt figurines or flowers, just about anything. This video had me sure I would be able to do it, and this recipe had me on my way. Why not? I decided to give it a try without Crisco which we do not have in France, and if it turned out to be horrendous, I could just toss it and stick with the buttercream.

I have a special memory of my niece Awen sitting primly at the age of one and a half on a bench under the chateau’s rear portico near the kitchen door. She was in the shade from the summer sun. Her father presented her with a paper plate scattered with morsels of the summer’s best strawberries, her first taste ever. The moment engaged me quite firmly because her love for this berry was so sincere and innocent. For Awen, now that she is four, it would be a Fraise Tagada cake with vanilla Italian buttercream and strawberry scented fondant.

For Emilie, my God-daughter, not long ago, there was an incident where she was given some cubes of pineapple, and she loved it so much that she began to call out for it over and over, turning it into a song about more, more “ananas” (pineapple in French). If you have ever listened to a two year old child murmuring a three syllable word like a mantra and turning it into a song, you will understand that for her, the cake would have to be pineapple. To go with salted butter caramel buttercream and pineapple scented fondant.

For Ian's first birthday, he got Banana cake with chocolate buttercream. Mom's choice.

For the cake, I saw a simple looking recipe called "Sponge Cake" in David Lebovitz’ Room for Dessert. It contains no butter. This seemed strange to me, but in the end it was the perfect cake, so perfect that there was no hesitation to put it right into my kitchen notebook for frequent future use. It sliced cleanly and evenly, stayed moist, didn’t shed crumbs, took to the flavors I’d added, and had a beautiful soft texture. I was very happy with it and the way it was a good foil to the buttercream.

During the baby’s nap times during the week preceding the party, I took time to reflect and plan and dream about my fanciful cakes, confections that would seem to come from Wonderland. I made caramel syrup here, a batch of MM fondant with Haribo marshmallows there (which tasted pretty darn good). Two days before the party I prepared the buttercream flavors. The day before the party I rolled out the fondant and applied it to my iced cakes in very little time. When I finished the cakes, each to be sliced into twelve kid-sized dreamy cubes, I did feel like writing “EAT ME” on each one. I hid them away on a shelf in the linen closet and didn't bring them out until we sang the birthday song for each child. They were a great success with the children and adults alike.

For the MM fondant, you can refer to this recipe (note I used my own flavorings instead of butter flavoring and used neutral cooking oil instead of Crisco to grease the equipment.)

For the Buttercream, I prepared this recipe (it's big for a KitchenAid Artisan, I suggest you halve it unless you have an industrial sized mixer).

To flavor the buttercream, I made a simple Caramel Syrup:

450g sugar

100g water

plus 120g water after cooking

- Pour sugar in a small saucepan and add the water without stirring (stirring will make it grainy). Cover and cook over high heat until sugar is boiling. (the steam will run down the sides of the pan to clean the spatters without causing graininess by covering it).

- Remove cover and cook over high heat to a dark caramel (in my kitchen it timed out to about 12 minutes)

- Turn off heat, and add 120g water just a little at a time an wait for the volcano action to subside after each addition. Stir and let cool, refrigerate until used.

For the sponge cake, I used David Lebovitz's recipe:

Sponge Cake

(as appropriated from the basics section of his Room for Dessert book)

5 eggs, room temp, separated

1/2 cup cold water

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or your flavoring of choice - L)

1 1/2 cups cake flour (I used French organic t65 which is closer to AP and it worked fine)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

*note this recipe contains no butter. It has a light and airy consistency and is a lovely cake for birthday cakes. It is easier to slice to size for icing layers if you bake it the day before and let it sit lightly covered at room temperature overnight.

- Preheat the oven to 350F/175C and position the rack to the center. Lightly butter the bottom of two 6"x9" pans. (you can bake this in one sheet if you like, or bake it in a 9" round pan too if you like). Dust the bottom of the pans with flour.

- Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt.

- In a rather large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed (I did this with the hand blender's whip), whip the egg yolks and water for 1 minute. Lower the mixer speed and add the sugar and vanilla (flavorings can wait if you are dividing this recipe for different cakes), then increase the mixer speed to high and continue beating for 5 minutes, until a ribbon forms when you lift the whip.

- Once the egg yolks form a ribbon, beat the eggwhites in the mixer bowl, until they form soft drooping peaks when you life the beater.

- Place the yolk mixture bowl over a damp towel on the counter to hold it in place. Incorporate the flour mixture by sifting the dry ingredients over the yolks with one hand and folding gently in with the other hand. When the flour is completely incorporated, use a rubber spatula to fold the beaten eggwhites into the flour yolk mixture.

- If you are dividing this recipe in two, remove 5 cups of batter to another bowl and carefully fold in your flavorings to each part. Transfer the batter to the pans and spread it into an even layer.

- Bake 15-18 minutes (for this sheet pan adaptation) or about 45 minutes if you are using a single layered 9", 3" deep cake pan.

Le Matafan: A French Savoyard Staple

2010-02-04T12:21:00.020+01:00

Loic came back to the mountains from his trip to Italy. We’d just managed without him, keeping the house warm and the firewood stocked and the daily hot water rationed just so. I felt like a frontier woman, but we managed through it without major incident. The day he was supposed to be coming back, the anticipation, you know, the kind that you have when your lover is on his way, set in. By mid-afternoon, we were just dying to see him. Ennui hit us both. I made the mistake of telling the baby that when he woke up from his afternoon nap, he’d see his papa again. It was a trick to ply him and I didn’t think he would remember. When he woke up, he still had over an hour to wait. As we all know, to a baby, an hour is an eternity. He loves his papa so.

It had been snowing pretty heavily and I did not realize how much had fallen. Night fell. He was late. We can get a phone signal if we stand at one window. Indeed he had left a message, precisely four minutes before. “Lucy, I am stuck in the snow down by the Martinet house. I’ll be there when I can.” My first question was “which Martinet?” There are four families called Martinet in the village, and at first they claimed that they weren’t the least related. Then we found out that one young fellow is indeed somehow related to the woodsman who supplies us our firewood. Then we found out that he is also a some kind of cousin to one M. Martinet up in the neighboring hamlet who is trying to sell a barn near our house. We still haven’t figured out their ways in naming relations.

I deduced that where he might be stuck in the snow and bundled up the baby, put on a hat and gloves, grabbed the flashlight, and went out into a blizzard, headed in that direction. Imagine one of those films where a blizzard hits and the trail from the house to the barn is kept by pulling oneself through snowdrifts, along a knotted rope. Then know it wasn’t that bad. There was no way we could get lost. In fact, it was quite charming. I knew the car would be warm and that the baby would find this little journey a better distraction than anything else.

The wind wasn’t blowing at all. The snow was crisp, powdery and deep, reminding me of my winters as a child. My boots were crunching delightfully into every step, snow falling in a lacy shroud around us, illuminated by the flashlight. The baby’s hat was covered with a thick layer of snow by the time we saw the headlights shining in the forest. Loic had just succeeded in getting the chains on the front tires of the car. There we enjoyed the perfect climax to our little journey: Running through the snow filled forest (remembered in slow motion), calling out, Loic opening his arms wide and swinging the baby in a big circle through the snow which swirled around them both. The baby was enchanted. It was the biggest adventure he’s ever had.

He saw how things looked down in the valley, and my husband being the smart one he is stopped off and picked up some of the kind of provisions we like to keep when we’re snowed in. Raclette, Savoyard ham, bacon, a slab of Tomme, a big loaf of that delicious local bread, plus lettuce, endives and frozen green beans to keep us virtuous. I put on the potatoes while Loic got reacquainted with his baby boy, and we enjoyed a lovely raclette supper just the two of us that evening. The next morning, we woke up full of the anticipation that comes when you’ve just been granted the gift of two feet of fresh white snow, a wood stove, and the man you love after a week apart. There were two potatoes left, and we had nothing to do but stoke the fire up hot. I decided to prepare potato matafans.

I have been collecting recipes for matafans for some time now, because they’re emblematic of le Pays de Savoie, my respite from the city. There are a whole lot of recipes, because everyone does them differently. Families all through this stretch of the French Alps do their own variations on the pancake but different, some serving them with toppings to be eaten with knife and fork, some slapping local cheese between two of them to make a delicious fluffy warm sandwich to eat with your hands. These are great prepared in advance of a good uphill hike and taken out of the sack to serve as a fortifying lunch. Indeed, for what’s in them, you can estimate that a couple of matafans will be the equivalent of a small 2 egg breakfast with hash browns and bacon, so plan some extra activity to burn them off.

Savoyard is its own language, and in Savoyard, the word Matafan means to calm hunger. A directly translated French name for these cakes are matefaims, and you’ll see the two names interchanged throughout the Savoie region. Traditionally, they were consumed hot in the morning by mountain peasants before embarking on their daily work. Before I ever prepared these in my own Savoyard kitchen, I imagined that they would be heavy things that would sit like rocks in our stomachs. Indeed historically they were made purely with potatoes. They certainly are caloric, but the best thing about them is that the best ones are so light and fluffy they don’t slow us down a bit. A little like savory genoise if you can imagine such a thing, and a little like soufflé, but they don’t deflate and they don’t lose their fluffiness. They are better than pancakes by far.

This particular recipe comes from Madeleine Kamman, in her treatise on the Savoie, which is so chock full of historical and ethnographic detail in addition to her childhood memories of summers here that I never get tired of reading it. I use bacon fat when I have it instead of butter, but for the most part it is true to her ratio and method.

Potato Matafans

½ cup AP flour (I use bio type 65 in my kitchen here which is a rough equivalent to American AP)

2 cold potatoes which have been steamed or boiled in their skins

6 eggs, separated

½ tsp. salt

2 Tbs. bacon fat or melted butter

½ cup warm water

Mme Kamman’s recipe calls for a half-cup of leftover mashed potatoes but since I usually don’t prepare mashed potatoes up here in the mountains, I just start with the plain boiled potato. I usually throw a sprig of rosemary into the pressure cooker when steaming potatoes for raclette, so this is also the treatment my potatoes have for my matafans. I think it adds a little something.

About the warm water: Mme Kamman says that the use of warm water is a Savoyard grandmother’s trick to make the matafans fluffier. I take her word for it since these do come out luxuriously fluffy. There’s never been any need for me to even test how this comes out with cold water.

Put your flour in a rather large mixing bowl and peel the skins off of the potatoes. Mash the potatoes roughly with a fork, turn them into the bowl with the flour, and work the chunks of potatoes into the flour with your fingers. Don’t worry if you leave a few potato lumps here and there.

Dissolve the salt into the warm water. Add the salted water, the 6 egg yolks, and the bacon fat to the flour potato mixture. Mix it well into a batter with a spoon or a whisk.

Beat the 6 egg whites until stiff peaks form. Fold the egg whites into the initial batter, lightly turning it together just until incorporated, don’t stir too much or the egg whites will deflate and you will defeat the purpose of having whipped them.

Put a cast iron crepe pan or griddle onto a hot stove and melt a couple of teaspoons of butter on it. Cook the matafans on the stovetop as you would a pancake, flipping them over with a spatula once the underside turns brown. Transfer them onto a plate which you keep in the cool corner of the oven (oh I’d say about 300F or 180C) and one by one, add to the stack, sort of baking them along the way. This treatment makes the edges take on a delightful crisp texture.

I serve my matafans with an array of savory things to tuck into them, folded over, for brunch on mountain Sundays we plan to go out walking. Today it was bacon and some of the dent du chat Swiss gruyere, cut in wedges. You can do what you like, they’d even be good with jelly or maple syrup if that floats your boat.

Sustenance Through Winter: Clementines Confites

2010-02-01T17:47:00.034+01:00

Twelve years ago, when being in love had just set in, everything at the time seemed to have taken on a more colorful rich hue. Perhaps it was the rain in Paris where we were both studying or the vibrant colors of the south that emerged when at around this time of year we went to see his parents for a visit. The trip had been a success, and we were getting ready to return to Paris. I decided to prepare the picnic lunch for the train.

Brigitte, my future mother-in-law, told me that there were some clementines confites in the kitchen, that I should take some since Loic loved them. I got the impression that even though she said "take some", that she meant "take them all". I don't really know how it happened.

There we were on the train. I brought out all of the delicious things I had gathered. We'd enjoyed brined olives as only they can do them in Provence, country pâté on crusty bread, a kind of slaw I made with things I found around Brigitte's kitchen, chunks of sheep's cheese I'd found at a market there, and then, finally, I brought out two of the clementines.

Oh my, they were rich and sweet beyond my wildest imagination. I was lost in the haze of sweet love for them, and for Loic. I asked him if he would like another, and he said yes. We ate the second two staring deeply into each other's eyes. He stopped eating them after that. But I had to have a third. You could suck the juice right out of their centers, where their pulp had completely turned to a fabulously intense thick clementine flavored goo, sectioned vaguely into cells... absolute divinity. It was like admiring a master's work and then remembering that indeed these were natural fruits, taking you that much closer to the great master himself. Definitely a glimpse of the divine. I think I ate a few more but I can't tell you how many.

I came back from my clementine haze feeling slightly ill and found that he was staring at me. I had brought out the box. "Did you take them all?" he asked. "But of course!" I retorted... "She said you liked them!" But my face turned bright red. He looked annoyed, maybe even a little angry. He'd never been angry with me before.

I had stepped over an invisible line. My lover was going to scorn me for gourmandise.

We spent some time silently riding next to each other on the train. I bounced between shame and defensiveness, which eventually just melted to sadness. The rain was streaming down the window of the train. I actually quietly began to cry. What was Brigitte going to think? How were they going to take this? The culture was new to me so I could not fathom the damage I might have done. Would I be able to face his parents again? A tear ran down my cheek while I gazed out onto the gloomy countryside.

The shock of that uncomfortable ride in the train in which I thought I was going to lose my lover, coupled with the intensity of my first brush with clementines confites had me sworn off them for several years. I just kind of felt sad every time I had one.

He forgave me, and so did Brigitte. There was really no need to worry. I explained to her that I just wanted to please him (I did not mention my own enthusiasm, but I suspect Loic passed the word). Now, after 10 years of marriage to Loic, every year, Brigitte still gives me a big jar of clementines confites every winter. Since she gives them to me, now Loic must ask me if he wants one.

Choose a pound of firm, ripe clementines, in season this time of year. Scrub them clean, and pierce them deeply with a thin needle, everywhere. Put them into a saucepan, and cover the pierced fruits by 2 cms (an inch) with water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes. Remove the fruit with a pair of tongs or slotted spoon to a deep sided non-reactive bowl or a jar. Add 500 grams sugar, and 200 grams glucose syrup or honey (which will alter the flavor somewhat but still achieve the goal of avoiding the sugar going grainy) to the cooking juice. Bring the syrup to a boil and remove from heat promptly when it reaches a good rolling boil. Pour the syrup over the clementines, weigh the top down with a plate to avoid the fruits from floating to the top, and let it sit loosely covered with a clean dishcloth for 2 days. After 2 days have passed, remove the fruit from the bowl, transfer the juice to a saucepan, and add 100 grams of sugar to the juice. Bring the juice and sugar to a rolling boil, remove from heat, then pour over the clementines and let sit for another 2 days. Follow this process every 2 days, every 2 days adding 100 grams of sugar to the mix, until you reach the 14th day. At this time, transfer them to a jar, and keep, covered in their syrup, in a cool dry place. They will keep for as long as a year, getting better with age, but at 2 weeks they're still pretty darn good.

Simple Potato Gnocchi

2010-01-22T15:02:00.014+01:00

This year my kitchen has been running in a little bit of a different way. Partly because we've been focusing on the household budget, something that has curtailed my game, boutique grain and exotic heirloom vegetable habit, and partly because I am devoting a good deal of my daily energy to the nurturing of my son's self-sufficiency while he steps out of the cocoon of his babyhood. He is walking now. Can you believe that? He astounds me with his capacity to learn and his sense of humor. When you have to manage your time and thoughts around a bundle of energy and love for the world that has, in the blink of an eye, developed a will of his own, you must prioritize differently. This has manifested in our kitchen with a lot of what you might call mama's cooking.

I have begun to rely on the simple dishes, and Gnocchi falls in that category. This goes very nicely with any ragout or winter stew, in soups, or with a dollop of that delicious nettle pesto that was put up last spring. Try your gnocchi in oxtail soup if you find the meat on sale. The baby can eat them one by one, and husbands appreciate them too. I don't buy gnocchi anymore because they are so cheap to make. Homemade tastes better anyway.

Simple Gnocchi di Patate - Judy's recipe

This is originally a Judy Witts Francini recipe, from her book, with my notes from the margin. One of the great things about this gnocchi is that you can prepare this in advance and refrigerate it. You can have it ready to plunge into a pot of boiling salted water when it's time for dinner. Once you've prepared it a couple of times you will know by feel if you have enough flour.

2 lbs baking potatoes (the floury kind)

2 1/2 cups flour

4 Tablespoons grated Parmesan

salt for the dough (about a teaspoon) and for the water

*about the potatoes: if you care enough to get the right kind of potato, this can make a world of difference in your gnocchi. Make sure you get the most flavorful, floury kind you can.

*about the flour: We all know it varies from country to country. I have been preparing this with French flour type 65 which can be rather soft in comparison to many flours, requiring me to up the flour ratio a bit. Experiment, do the drop test, and find a good ratio for the flour you use at home. Don't feel like you have to go out and buy any special flour.

- Boil unpeeled potatoes in salted water until tender and remove the skins once cooked. Rice or mash them. Let them cool slightly and add the rest of the ingredients, stir. When stirring becomes difficult, knead the dough lightly by hand.

- Bring the salted water to a boil and lower the heat to a simmer. Take a pinch of the gnocchi and do a drop test, it should sink to the bottom initially, then rise to the top when done. If the gnocchi is disintegrating, add more flour to the dough.

- On a lightly floured board, roll out into cigar-like ropes, no thicker than a finger. Cut into pieces and roll on fork prongs to form ridges and poke your finger lightly into one side to form an impression.

- Poach the gnocchi and remove from the simmering water after 20-30 seconds with a slotted spoon into the serving dish. From this point you can layer it with your favorite sauce, or save it for reheating later.

Postcard: Lyon

2010-01-12T00:05:00.000+01:00

Mamy Durandeau

2010-01-06T15:35:00.013+01:00

Mamy Durandeau with my God daughter, Emilie

"She was a wonderful cook", said Jacques. He was misty eyed, sipping his water with a drop of Pastis. "She prepared the most remarkable dishes out of nothing." He was talking about Mamy Durandeau. "Out of nothing", he repeated. "Did you hear me? Even a plain macaroni gratin was special coming from her kitchen." Brigitte's brothers had been arriving in town one by one. We were there to gather as a family to honor her.

After dinner, Brigitte had taken Mamy home, helped her into her bedclothes, and tucked her comfortably into bed. Brigitte, in her constant loving way, folded her blanket back just so. Mamy said to Brigitte "Thankfully, I have you." and smiled. Brigitte made her way home as always.

We were down south for the New Year. Loic came upstairs to deliver my coffee to me in bed and pick up the baby. I have two things to tell you, "...and Mamy passed away". I don't remember what the first thing was. Mamy passed away. His news dropped and everything before and afterward was erased. Mamy Durandeau ... So many memories.

My mother-in-law shared Mamy's recipe with me for Vin d'Orange, among many others. Yesterday when we were all packed up and rolling out of town, after the funeral in a little church near her old home in Mourillon and a gathering of the surviving generations, I saw a Seville orange tree laden with fruits. It stood in the old dirt courtyard of a house by the road. Cars were filing by and this tree stood gleaming in the dust. My heart caught in my throat. The color was so hot and alive and the air, the day, the sadness, so cold. I asked Loic if I was imagining it or was the whole Cote d'Azur covered with fog that afternoon. It was difficult to appreciate the remarkable color from the tree with how I felt yesterday, but this morning I thought about it again and they came back like a vivid dream in my mind's eye. We are going to do a batch of vin d'orange in honor of Mamy Durandeau this week.

Living It

2009-12-23T23:21:00.000+01:00

Our Own Christmas Bricelets

2009-12-16T21:01:00.017+01:00

Last year I began sorting things out so that we could celebrate Christmas at home. This may seem strange, but in our many years here in France, we've always packed our bags, closed the door on our home, void of holiday cheer save a rather chintzy fake tree that got a little more dog-eared every year, and spent Christmas with my husband's parents. Last year's knowledge of the coming baby, however, had me reminiscing about the Christmas of my childhood, and it was what set things in motion.

Over the years, I'd swept out of my mind how much the little things meant. Picking out the tree, hauling it home, breaking out the lights and the old dusty carton of ornaments wrapped in crinkly tissue was never on the agenda. Putting on an extra sweater, playing the music, making wreaths (or getting one from the Hosmers), tromping through the snow, baking, planning, reading Christmas stories, ice skating, all a distant memory which had retreated to the shadows cast by the light of the Cote d'Azur. The thing I missed most of all was the feeling of really being at home. The house in the Alps has slowly been transformed from an old house that needed a new roof to our little cozy place away from the city, our refuge, the place where we unhook and breathe. I often catch my spirit there even when I am walking the alleys and stairwells of this ancient city. We decided to have Christmas there this year, Ian's first, and our first there as well. I am cherishing every moment.

I don't think I mentioned this, but last spring, we went to a garage sale in an Alpine village and I happened across an antique bricelet iron. Luckily I knew exactly what it was since I had seen and been intrigued by a brush with the bricelet in Switzerland on a recent visit. The old woman who passed the iron to me told me that her mother and grandmother had made these thin waffle cookies at Christmas time. The iron had clearly fallen out of use. She seemed happy enough to let me take it off her hands, but I still wondered what had made her quit using it. Had she gotten an electric press, the kind that most people use now? This iron had developed a thin layer of rust, but I knew it would be easy to take up the task to scrub and season it. I am so happy to have it now especially since all of our cooking up in the Alps is in the wood fired stove. The kitchen ceiling's beams display quite a collection of cast-iron accouterments for country cooking these days.

A similar thin waffle is called the pizzelle in Italy. The difference is that in France and Switzerland the cookies are thinner. It will be good fun to toast these over healthy glowing coals from a long lit hickory fire on Christmas eve. Since this is our first year, and we want to make sure we've got it absolutely right, I'm going to share recipes I have gathered after more testing. Italian, Swiss, and French Alpine recipes for both sweet and savory biscuits are in the works. Stay tuned!

A Bernachon Chocolate Bar Each Month - Menu for Hope 6

2009-12-14T09:58:00.013+01:00

Bid Item Code EU37
A Bernachon Chocolate Bar Delivered to you Each Month

Hey friends, it's that time of the year again, time to give, and to win! For the Menu for Hope fundraiser, this year I have decided to donate a bid item that I know many of my readers will find enticing. Welcome to the Bernachon bar of the month club. This bid item will be sent ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. That's right folks, anyone can bid on this item.

EU37

Bernachon Chocolate for a YEAR

Imagine a different Bernachon Bar every month for one year. I will send the lucky winner, anywhere in the world, one fresh unctuous artisan crafted Bernachon chocolate bar straight from the shop in Lyon, France, each month, for a year, starting in March 2010. Every month a different chocolate bar from Bernachon with a whole range of house-made fillings to unwrap and enjoy. The bar will include a handwritten note explaining the makeup of that month's bar. Special requests honored!

Read about UN Purchase for Progress, the project that this years' funds raised will go to.

To Donate and Enter the Menu for Hope Raffle:

1. Choose a bid item or bid items of your choice from our Menu for Hope main bid item list. (choosing mine would be best, but considering that there are many other great bid items out there to win, you might want to check them out.) You can also see the Europe and UK list here.

2. Go to the donation site at Firstgiving and make a donation.

3. Please specify which bid item you'd like in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per bid item, and please use the bid item code.

Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a bid item of your choice. Example: a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU37 (the Bernachon bars for a year) and 3 tickets for EU55 - 3xEU37, 2xEU55. But you really don't have to bid for some other item. JUST EU37 to win this fabulous bid item.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so they can claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Wishing everyone luck as you bid on your favorite items, and a very happy holiday season 2009.

The Bouchon Lyonnais

2009-12-01T17:28:00.022+01:00

On a visit to Lyon, you can have one great meal in a bouchon, and this can be a definitive event. Your first meal in a bouchon tends to form an imprint. The dining experience is so unique and your gustatory pleasure has been so aroused that it extends down to the place in your mind for memories that will eventually become life stories. The next place simply can't measure up.

You might sink your spoon delicately into the majestic communal creme caramel at Chez Paul and from then on out, any bouchon that doesn't have it, isn't... perfect. You might feel enveloped in good cheer at Le Garet and then never feel that satisfaction the same way anywhere else. You might get that tangy delicious poulet au vinaigre that seems to set off a delicate counterpoint with the austere flourescent-lit hole-in-the-wall atmosphere at Cafe des Federations. After that, nothing can compete.

Legends are born from these gustatory milestones in the mind of a food enthusiast well after they've had a chance to simmer and mijote, mixed with the delight and relish in telling the story again. In my opinion, every single one of Lyon's official bouchons, the ones bearing the Authentique Bouchon Lyonnais label, are going to build personal rich gustatory memories, but most of all, each bouchon remains unique.

The best way for me to explain the authentique Bouchon Lyonnais is to explore what it is as a genre, then get into the nitty gritty of what makes a number of these individual restaurants worth your while.

Since this subject is too vast for one post, I am devoting many more to the Lyonnais Bouchon, making it a label. Look forward to the restaurants' stories, their quirks, visual details, menu items, news worth noting, what a Lyonnais bouchon was, is, and what it's not.

A Chalet Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T21:42:00.014+01:00

Thanksgiving, which is distinguished among my French friends and family as falling the week after the Beaujolais Nouveau arrives, means takeout for us. I know, how terrible! But it's not what it seems. Thanksgiving is not a national holiday here, so we hold off and invite people to come feast and celebrate a good old full style Thanksgiving two days later, on the weekend. That way those who have to travel to get to the party can come.

Many of you know already that I refurbished a wood burning fourneau that was in our little place in the Alps. This year, after having learned to cook in it, we have decided to do Thanksgiving in the mountains and cook everything by wood fire. The following day, I plan to stuff a Savoy cabbage in this way with the leftovers, a great way, being in the Savoie where this cabbage grows in just about every garden, to express how thankful we are for chalet and wood fired cooking.

We got a little video camera for sharing special moments in the baby's life with relatives at home, and I started a youtube account yesterday. With that, I leave you a video of the window at La Minaudiere, one of my favorite takeout places in Lyon. In addition to being grateful for the abundance we have found in this wonderful city, I'm giving thanks for you tonight, and hoping that those of you that celebrate Thanksgiving have a fabulous holiday.

My Boy and his Boudoirs

2009-11-03T17:41:00.020+01:00

In the afternoon, one of my baby’s pleasures is a boudoir, which is a light, melt-in-your-mouth eggwhite-leavened sugar-dusted biscuit. This is after he’s had his petit suisse, a soft white cheese a little bit like Philly. Before you stamp your foot in indignation that I give my baby something dusted with sugar after all the agony of deciding how to feed him, I will let you know his pediatrician put it in his recommended diet! My boy is expending a whole lot of energy these days. He’s going full steam learning, moving, practicing, playing and thinking very hard about the world around him from the minute he wakes up until he drops from exhaustion again, on and off like a lightswitch, all day long. If he doesn't get a boudoir, he gets a crust of baguette. I think he likes them both equally.

I started making boudoirs at home out of curiosity. I wondered about them when the baby first started eating them. They are ubiquitous at the grocery stores here in France, and marketed not only for consumption by babies, but also for making that decidedly adult dessert called a charlotte, which is often lined with boudoirs soaked in various alcohols. The thing was, when I got down to it and began digging around for information, I noticed that these days nobody ever bothers to make their own boudoirs. Like other pastries, these are left to the professionals in this country. But you can find recipes in the older cookbooks sometimes under other names, depending on the region.

I checked out a couple of pretty picture cookbooks in the French style devoted to the charlotte from the library, thinking that at the very least these books would feature a a recipe or a little bit of lore about this famous cookie and found, much to my surprise, that they don't even bother to put the recipe for the boudoirs into either book. Tucked neither into the front nor the back, boudoirs were simply an ingredient, one that busy French cooks buy ready-made in plastic sachets at the store. I did find a few recipes in my old cookbooks and scaled them down to a manageable size. This means something I can handle without baking all day. I wanted to make sure I could get these done without feeling I was going into industrial production mode. If you have a big American oven, you might even be able to get these all baked in one batch.

The recipe for boudoirs aka biscuits à la cuillère is quite straightforward and simple. It requires no special equipment other than a plastic food storage bag or if you’re equipped, a pastry sack with a 1 cm circular nozzle to pipe the batter. Once they've cooled off, you can store them in a tin. If there are any left after a few days, they’ll hold up quite well to soaking in liqueurs and syrups for many kinds of charlottes.

Boudoirs (about 30 biscuits)

1/2 cup or 115 grams granulated sugar plus a few tablespoons for sprinkling
3 eggs
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 tsp vanilla extract
a pinch of finely ground table salt
2/3 cup or 85 grams sifted flour, AP (or type 65 if you are in France)

*Note about the cream of tartar: It is optional. I have just found that the cookies hold their shape better if you do. I have done these cookies with and without it and the taste is the same. It's just a matter of preference.

*Note about the bowl size: I use the standard bowl that goes with my mixer for the egg whites, and I use a smaller bowl (the one I use to melt chocolate over a saucepan) for the egg yolks. The small bowl eventually takes the rest of the ingredients for the batter. The good thing about it is that the smaller bowl fits into a 12 inch square plastic bag, and it makes transfer of the batter into the bag quick, clean, and painless. Keep that in mind when organizing your tools to make these!

- Separate the eggs, yolks into the smaller bowl, whites into the bowl that comes with your mixer.
- Beat the 1/2 cup granulated sugar and egg yolks together until pale yellow and fluffy.
- In a separate bowl, mount the egg whites with the vanilla extract and 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar until stiff peaks form.
- Stir the salt into the flour.
- Incorporate the egg whites and sift in the flour and salt little by little into the egg yolks and sugar mixture, alternating flour and whites, ending with the whites. Make sure you fold it in gently and carefully and don’t stir it too much to avoid deflating the batter.
- When it it just incorporated, transfer it into the bag for forming the boudoirs.
- Cut off a corner of the bag to make a hole about a half inch wide or one cm. You can make a wider cut, but it will make flatter, wider, biscuits. I cut the hole about the width of my thumb nail for the thinner biscuits.
- On a parchment lined cookie sheet, form the boudoirs. Pipe the fluffy batter onto parchment in straight lines, 2-3 inches or 4-6 cm long, with about an inch or 2 cms between each one.
- Sprinkle sugar over the top, and lightly shake off the sugar from the parchment. The biscuits will stick to the paper, so you can pour the sugar off being careful.
- Bake at 300F or 145C for 18-20 minutes, until they are a toasty pale brown under their sugar coating.
- Remove them from the baking paper right after removing them from the oven.
- After cooling, store in a tin for up to a week. If you plan to use these biscuits for a charlotte, keep them in the tin for a few days. They hold together better when soaked in liqueurs that way.

121 French Market Menu Ideas for your Apples

2009-10-14T12:52:00.011+02:00

Apples from our tree at the house in the country and my current favorite apple pie, recipe below.

In addition to the yield from our apple tree this year, neighbors came bearing baskets full of apples. Time to take out my country notes and get the creative juices flowing. Forthwith one hundred and twenty one ideas from French market menus, followed by my current favorite apple pie recipe. We've got guests coming this weekend. Lets roll up our sleeves and get to peeling apples!

Field rabbit sausage served with apples
Shortbread in the style of Brittany with sautéed apples and caramel cream
Poultry liver and apple terrine
An apple pastilla seasoned with Armagnac
Duck foie gras with tart cider vinegar apple chutney
A ginger-seasoned apple turnover served with shaved manzana verde ice and honey jelly
Pont-l’évêque cheese presented with yellow apples and pepper seasoned cider caramel
The apple croustillant with Calvados
Apple tart served with pain d’épice (a spice bread specialty from the north) flavored ice cream
Deep dish apple tourte served warm
Apple bettelman (a traditional Alsacian bread pudding)
French grandmother-style apple caramel cake
Pan seared foie gras with an apple and sweet potato chutney
The apple croustade, a Gascon tart made with many layers of thin pastry
Honey roasted duckling with apples in the style of Brittany
A scallop salad seasoned with apples and Guillevic cider
Flat oysters and roasted green apples served in a fish broth
A composed dessert of frozen green apple parfait, lemon jelly, Manzana apple liqueur over shaved ice, featuring a slice of caramelized apple
Apple pastis (see croustade above!)
Caramelized apples paired with creamed chestnuts and served in a chocolate shell
A simple thin caramelized apple tart
The caramelized apple douillon (a specialty of the Normandy region- stuffed fruit enveloped in pastry), served with a Calvados sauce
A vanilla seasoned apple mille-feuille
The duck foie gras terrine with a spoon of lightly spiced apple chutney
Tatin style roasted apples (or a crustless tarte Tatin, if you will)
A deep dish apple, prune, and Armagnac pie
Thin apple tart with cinnamon ice cream and caramel sauce
Duck breast served with roasted apples
Pigeon in a dried porchini crust with garlic and green apple seasoned pan drippings
The hazelnut and caramelized apple financier with green apple sorbet
A hot apple and ginger tart
An apple prune crumble with Armagnac and pain d'épice ice cream
Caramelized apple charlotte
Foie gras in puff pastry with apples
A flambéed apple tart
An apple and pear tarte Tatin
Shortbread cookies in the style of Brittany presented with a layer of butter simmered apples
An apple and pear crisp
Blood sausage with apples
A roasted slice of avocado served with green apple & whisper of wasabi ice cream
Apple marguerite (pudding baked in a decorative mould) topped with cinnamon seasoned puff pastry
Baked apples presented in a pyramid with calvados sauce
Apple nougat glacé
Pain d’épice tartined with a foie gras and green apple chutney topping
Apple fondant with Cavados caramel sauce
Apple and berry crumble
Lobster seasoned with sherry and cocoa, served with an apple raisin "afterthought"
Simple warm brioche with caramelized apples
Rice pudding with an apple and pear marmalade
A apple cake served flambéed
A salad garnished with slices of warm veal sausage, golden apples and a Gascony mustard sauce
A foie gras terrine with apples and cinnamon
Scallops with celery juice and green apples
Almond croquant with Tatin-style baked apples
Slow cooked apple with pralines and farm milk ice cream
The thin hot apple tart with caramel curd
Pommeau seasoned foie gras, served with an apple compote
Blood sausage and apple Tatin, served with crique, an Ardeche style grated potato cake
Pan seared foie gras, seasoned with Granny Smith apples and hibiscus
Apple stuffed brioche perdu with maple syrup
The apple and blood sausage in puff pastry with a chive speckled beurre blanc sauce
Gâteau lyonnais with apples and pralines
Calvados flambeed apple chaud-froid
The green apple spring rolls
Apple meringue pie
An apple verrine presented with berries
An apple strudel served with cinnamon ice cream
Duck breast with apples and pine honey
A sweet tarte flambée (Alsacian specialty) with thick cream, apples, and Calvados
Apple and pear mille-feuille with salted butter caramel
An apricot and caramelized apple tart with light almond cream
Thin bacon wrapped langoustines on a bed of grated green apples
An apple duo served with with honeyed drizzled foie gras
Buckwheat blinis served with warm apples
Tarte fine aux pommes
Apple and Mascarpone kouign-amann bathed in Calvados
Thick wedges of toasted pain d’épice served with pots of apple and orange marmalade
Foie gras in puff pastry with Granny Smith apples
Golden apple tart topped with caramel cream, sprinkled with fleur de sel de Guerlande
A mille-feuille layered with pan tossed apples, drizzled with salted butter caramel sauce
A carpaccio of fresh chevre sprinkled with walnuts and grated apples
Cider simmered pollock presented with pan softened apples
Roasted apple rum-raisin brioche
Apple streussel
Warm apple and raisin spring rolls served with caramel ice cream
Wild sea bass fricasee with cider and acidulated apples
Apple tiramisu with Calvados and pain d’épice
Kouign-amann wedge on a bed of caramelized apples
Coconut and apple mille-feuille with saffronned sauce
An apple and orange tarte
Apple caramel mousse
Duck breast with apples and honey
Foie gras terrine with apple jelly
Millassou, a cake specialty of the Landes region cooked old style with rum and roasted apples
A pear and apple clafoutis
Reinette apple shortbread
Lambic caramelized apples served with a cider sabayon
Crispy duck breast served with thyme seasoned caramelized apples
Haddock pastilla with apples, figs, and saffron jus
Warm oysters with lettuce sauce, and foie gras in apple jelly and peppered oil
Hot apple soufflé with Calvados
Calvados flambeed apple crepes
An apple and Camembert charlotte topped with a glaze of glistening cider jelly
John Dory with thin sliced chorizo, swiss chard, and apple jus
Strips of duck breast drizzled with reduced sour apple sauce and served with puréed sweet potatoes
Apple marinated salmon
Seared duck foie gras "exalted" by saffron seasoned sautéed apples
Sweet take on a baeckeoffe (alsacian specialty) using apples, pears, and raisins
Suckling pig with adiculated apple compote
Pan simmered quince and apples with salted butter caramel
Sesame and coriander seasoned caramelized apple served with a mini crème brûlée
Catfish fillet cooked in cider
Baked apples with raisins
A tarte Tatin served with coriander seasoned caramel sauce
An apple and almond tart
Caramelized waffles dressed with a ladle of slow cooked apples then topped with a Mascarpone ice cream
Apple pastilla with crème pâtissière
Saint-Romain blood sausage presented with its butter rich apple compote

Now. Did that give you some ideas?

Lucy's Favorite Apple Pie (pictured above)

About a pound of fresh tart cooking apples
1/4 cup (50 grams) granulated sugar
1/4 cup (50 grams) brown sugar
1 level teaspoon ground cinnamon

For the crust:
8 tablespoons (100 g) butter
1 3/4 cup (200 g)organic whole wheat flour
1/2 cup (100 g) granulated sugar
1/4 cup (50 g) brown sugar
1/2 - 1 teaspoon fleur de sel or sea salt (to your taste)
1 petit suisse or 2 tablespoons cream cheese
2 tablespoons virgin walnut oil

-Peel, core and cut your tart cooking apples into chunks.
-Take a generous handful of the chunks of apple and toss them in a saucepan with about a 1/4 cup of water. Set them over medium heat to soften.
-Combine the rest of the apple chunks with 50 grams white, 50 grams brown sugar and the cinnamon in a bowl and set aside.
-Once the apples cooking in water have softened (about 5 minutes), give them a blitz with a blender to turn them into a puree.
- In a separate mixing bowl, Combine the butter and flour with your fingers in a large bowl until it resembles breadcrumbs.
-Add the sugars, and work them in.
-Finally work in the cheese and the walnut oil and press it together into a dough.
-Remove approximately 1/4 of the dough, form it into a ball, flatten it, and place it in the refrigerator.
-Press the rest of the dough with your fingers rather thickly in an even layer into the bottom of an ungreased pie tin. Don't press it too high along the sides, just a flat layer at the bottom,a little thicker around the edges. Pre-bake the shell at 400F/200C for 10-15 minutes, or until the dough begins to turn a golden brown.
-Slather the bottom of the pre-baked shell with the apple puree.
-Top with the apple sugar cinnamon mix, mounding it up in a nice thick layer.
-Remove the chilling dough from the refrigerator, and roll out a circle shape about 2 inches smaller than the pie shell. No need to get too fastidious about the shape. Turn the thin layer of raw dough onto the center of the mound of apples. When you bake it, it will kind of melt into the apples before hardening into a cookie crust on top.
- Cover the pie with foil, and bake in the hot oven for about 40 minutes, until the apples get nice and soft.
- Remove the foil and return it to the oven to brown and crispen on top.

The Hunt

2009-10-06T10:41:00.010+02:00

It has gotten to be somewhat of a passion. Creeping slowly through the forest, calling softly to one another, "Look!" "That one!" Then I rush up and take a picture. Some people like bird watching, some identify wild herbs, species of ferns, animal tracks and trailings, rock formations, moss species, fishes in the streams or flowers. While it all fascinates me, we've both been curiously drawn to the wild mushrooms of Autumn.

In our way and at our pace, we've been learning about them little by little. I think the best part of hunting for mushrooms is tuning your vision to find them. It takes a lot of concentration. Look right under your feet and at the same time, learn to get a feel for the conditions that different mushrooms thrive in. You might walk along saying to yourself, "oh how pretty, the first fallen oak leaves of autumn" but when you're out looking for mushrooms, you'll see those leaves on the ground and look up to locate the tree, then go find what might be growing in fairy rings at the bottom.

Water rushes around moss covered rocks. Birds and chattering little creatures make up a kind of murmuring melody against the water sounds. But this is still punctuated by the pop and sharp echo of rifles firing in the distance, it being hunting season. The sound pulls us back, pushes back the temptation to believe that we are in a wonderland all to ourselves. We stick to the loggers trails and don't venture too far into communal forests, especially if we haven't checked at the Mairie to see if a group has registered to hunt that day. It is not a free for all, you know. Hunting is highly regulated here. All the same, this is the time of year when early in the morning groups of men with serious looks on their faces can be seen along the roads near the small villages holding rifles, their silhouettes stirring up images from long past, echoes of another time. I expect game hunting must be great fun. But I've never seen a smiling hunter along the road. Perhaps this comes from what they've learned about handling rifles.

We could not help ourselves and we picked a bunch of mushrooms based on a hunch that they might be good to eat. Alas, the guide book we have warns of one mortally poisonous mushroom that mimics another perfectly delectable one that's good to eat, so what's regular amateur to do? In the end we didn't eat them. There were plenty of other foraged things to eat, like the chestnuts and walnuts that right now are falling from the sky. Who knows, maybe the mushrooms were edible, but you know, since we now have certain responsibilities, we don't dare. I would not say that is a complete change from the past, just an extra little nod, of thanks even, a chance to expand our souls for an instant and remind ourselves just how lucky we are.

Recipe: Chanterelles on Toast

1 handful of Chanterelles
2 tsp to 2 tablespoons butter, depending on the size of your handful
3 sprigs of flat leafed Parsley
1 small shallot
fleur de sel or salt to taste

Chanterelles, a wild mushroom that is found in October, are plentiful in some forests. If you can't find any, definitely do not pass these up at the market when they are fresh and clean. Inspect them carefully. Pass over any with dark patches indicating they are saturated with water, mushrooms that are smeared with mud, or have excessive dirt and grime. Seek out the mushrooms that are in tact over fragments and pieces, which are more difficult to clean.

They are best cleaned with a paring knife and a brush, (a stiff watercolor brush works well for me) carefully removing stray dirt from the gills along the bottom with the brush and paring off the base and any hopelessly muddy spots at the top. You can dampen a paper towel and wipe the tops as well if needed. Soaking or rinsing these mushrooms in water is not a good idea since the chanterelle is spongy, unlike the black trumpet, which can be cleaned by a series of rinses. Trying to clean chanterelles with water furthermore turns whatever soil might be on them to mud that gets trapped in the gills. Try your best to avoid using water when washing your chanterelles.

Once your mushrooms are clean, pull them apart into uniform sized strips, and sautee them until golden in hot butter that has been graced with a sprinkling of fresh minced shallots. Add the parsley during the last few seconds in the pan, and transfer them directly to toast. Enjoy while hot! You might try these with a little glass of muscatel, good music, and some friends to get your evening started.

The Quiet Man on Saint Antoine

2009-10-02T15:20:00.006+02:00

When you stroll the market in the city, look for bunches of crisp tender greens attached to the Autumn roots for sale. They are the mark of the freshest produce. There's one man along the riverside who places things thoughtfully down on his table, as if he wants to stay in harmony with that which nature has given him. Amongst the burgeoning splendor of crops on the move at this market, this zen kind of presentation can hit you quite squarely. He does not impose strict order on his table, nor does he make his activity seem like a daily grind of repetitive stacking and selling. He does not shout, pile things up or line up splendorous rows of the same thing over and over. He does not shine his goods with colored lights or erect red umbrellas to cast a rosy glow on everything. He lets the natural beauty of what comes from his garden speak like quiet poetry on an Autumn morning. A bunch of this, a group of that, a flourish, a swirl. Some wild things, some which he's planted in rows. Fifty-fifty him and nature. No matter what the pace we choose to profit from this labor, or how we present the fruit, it will continue to grow. I find that heartening.

It's Home Cooking, Baby!

2009-09-17T10:21:00.024+02:00

Ian got so lucky to be born in the winter, because Autumn is just the best season ever for a person to taste food for the first time. People ask me when the perfect time of the year is to come to Lyon to visit, and hands down I always say Autumn. The vegetables we get at the end of summer are still out in their glory and even better, then come the big pumpkin-like squash varieties sold in thick wedges. Wild and cultivated herbs are burgeoning from the stands in huge bouquets, the onions are still fresh and green, there are leeks of every shape and size, peas, beans of all kinds, shell beans, green beans, butter beans and fresh little green peas that are such a pleasure to break out of their little shells. Fruits of all hues are laid out in their pretty little flats - Mirabelle, apricot, reine claude, quetsch, along with all manner of berries. The stone fruits are great for compote, and of course apples of every variety sold straight from the orchard along with their juice in bottles. We see things gearing up in the spirit of the season's game at the poultry vendor. An expanded variety of fowl becomes available to mimic the hunting season even if a great deal of what we get here in the city is raised on nearby farms. Yes, it is the perfect time for introducing Baby Ian to the concept of flavor. There's only one first time, and the stars aligned and shined down upon us just so to make this first eating season the best it can be.

I admit that although a baby-led schedule is the thing these days, I must have my daily rituals. The faster I've been able to guide his schedule into something predictable and regular, the better. What we've gotten in the habit of doing is getting up bright and early, heading to the market together. When we arrive home, he's had a ton of new experiences. Every week brings something new to look at, feel the texture of, listen to, or smell. Every day his depth of vision changes, one day he's staring at the jagged symmetrical patchwork of pastel coated cityscape shapes and forms, the next he's fixed on a stack of fruit or trying to make eye contact with the people talking along the rows of the market stands. In any case, He's always ready to happily snuggle into his little sleep sack and go straight to bed to dream of what he's just seen once we've climbed the marble stairs with our market pickings, and it's then that I get a little work done.

Ian eats something different for lunch every day. At first I was flopping back and forth about going ahead and just buying the little jars. It really wasn't what was in them, but what they were empty. I could hoard them and clean them and paint the caps, stack them and use them for everything from stray buttons to paprika, nail their tops onto boards and keep tacks and buttons and little pebbles from the sea organized neatly in rows that hang suspended this way and that. I could use them for my own house compote, jellies and jams. Make dollhouse guppy aquariums. I stacked these little jars up in beautiful symmetrical pyramids in my mind, built a little castle of sparkling glass baby food jars.

I finally made it to the store and began to investigate the pots of baby food, thinking that here in France, where so much attention is paid to fresh and unadulterated in what we eat, picking out baby food would be easy. I went down the aisle, trying to imagine the home-style French recipes touted on the labeling, "ideas from mothers" and the likes. Oh how lovely. Pot au Feu, Couscous, Simmered Rabbit, Blanquette de Veau, Classic Auvergnat Potato and Leek Puree, etc. I picked up the lovely little glass jars and turned them around, to read these ancestral recipes.

Slap, slap! Whoa! Jar after jar of delectably named pastel colored purees in their cute little glass pots down the aisle kept jabbing me with lists of cheap fillers, and the mysterious E# additives. Why have 7 ingredients when the label says "Haricots Verts"? Oh I know, logistics, distribution, storage, shelf time and whatnot. The need for a jar of baby food to sit unrefrigerated in a crate under varying environmental conditions for 2 or 3 years at a time.

Conversation with self:

"Lucy, for goodness' sake, people are raising perfectly healthy babies on these pots of baby food. You have work to do. Trust these reputable companies, they have done extensive research, they are the ultimate authority on what is truly good for your baby. And you get to collect the cute glass jars with lids."

"Yea, like I trusted Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines as the ultimate authorities on cake baking until the day I discovered butter sugar eggs and flour?"

I was failing to make the leap of faith with these foods despite the promise of baby food jars, and even the organic ones that tout no additives, no freaky ultra-refined starches and sugars, nothing - but a whole lot of money. Blame it on my knowing just how hard it is to steam a green bean.

The decision was made to just go ahead and instill some habits - I mean that's really all it takes, to cook for him like any other normal human being. A little research was all it took. At the beginning I felt a little beaten down by the sensational stories of danger. The risk of acute allergies, intolerances and hazards of all kinds lurked in the shadows. Feeling a bit overwhelmed I let myself feel a resistance to what I thought might turn into a dreaded chore. It's one thing to cook for the love of it, but another to be slave to a baby who believe me, will scream bloody murder if lunch is five minutes late. To have to cook things a certain way, in certain quantities, with certain ingredients, ho hum. My last bit of resistance was kind of a devil sitting on my shoulder giving his last ditch effort, coming out of that knee jerk "if the government hasn't banned it then it can't be that bad". But every time I went back to the grocery store aisle, I found myself reading one label after another and firmly putting them back on the shelf with a bad gut feeling. How can I feed this to my baby when we have such great fresh food available to us, especially at this time of year? It basically would be the equivalent of me subsisting on canned food throughout the harvest. Sure, I should probably carefully pick a few of those expensive pots of prepared food and tuck them in the car, in the cupboard, and in the pantry at the country house to use in case of a snafu. For example not being able to get Bernadette going (our wood stove in the country house) or a traffic jam, or some otherwise unplanned event that prevents me from cooking lunch in advance. But for the most part, it's home cooking, baby!

It was a big relief when Ian's doctor, obviously having been bombarded with questions from mothers like me, handed me a full style sort-of-personalized home cooking regime for him -- instructions on how to get him started. While the detailed rundown did not contain recipes, it did list the doctor's knowledgeable guidelines. He is an advocate of home cooked purees (whew), adding various fats, meats in age specific quantities, and sometimes fresh potato as a neutral textural liaison. He included a list of fruits and meats to avoid in his first 6 months of eating, and a nice little section on oils, the ones I should be adding for my baby's brain growth, some raw, some able to be cooked. It was a great help for me, a metaphorical springboard from which I could feel confident as I began to create.

Don't get me wrong. Baby food is as simple as simple can get. The formulas and ratios are all straightforward and pretty much common sense. It isn't salted or seasoned because baby can't metabolize salt and spices are for later. Keeping things simple, controlling texture and temperature, and easing new flavors in is the key. My doctor stressed variety and respect for the baby's taste and appetite to launch him into good French habits. Instead of the old adage that any new food should be fed to baby for 5 days straight, the doctor simply said no more than one new vegetable or meat a day. Ian has never had the same combination twice, except for a few things that he simply adores and it would be cruel to deprive him of, for example turkey and butter beans.

I have taken a great interest in the printed literature on offer here in France on the topic. That, with our having been on the grand tour to meet the whole family both in the States and in France has taken up all of my time these past few weeks, I hope my regular readers will forgive me. Things promise to settle down and get more productive promptly. Now that we're back into the rhythm of the rentree, I am finding nooks and crannies of time to concentrate.

Ian contemplates the merits of maman sticking a camera in his face when he's busy eating.

Plaice et ses petits pois (one serving, multiply as desired)

My fishmonger says that plaice is a great first fish for baby, along with sole and halibut, because the fillet doesn't have any bones. One small fillet of plaice (125 grams) will make 5-6 meals for your baby. Once you've got it home, cut it into 20-25 gram portions, wrap each piece in parchment, and store it in the freezer. That way, whenever you want to serve fish, you have it available.

Sunflower or Colza oil (trace amount)

20 grams plaice, halibut or sole fillet

40 grams ratte, fingerling, or new potatoes

120 grams fresh peas, shelled (about 300 grams shell on)

1/3 cup or 60ml of low mineral spring water or filtered water
1 level teaspoon fresh fruity olive oil

* About oils in baby's food: Young babies need them for brain growth, and choosing a variety of oils is a good thing. My doctor recommends incorporating oils one at a time, but alternating them constantly: butter, duck fat, olive oil, sunflower, colza, walnut, sesame. He says to avoid peanut, palm and coconut oils. Olive, Walnut, and Sesame oils should be added after cooking because of their low smoke point.

* About potatoes: Reccomended by the doctor as a liaison for consistency, I arrived at my measurements for potatoes in accordance with my baby's body and tastes. I try to use only just enough to give my puree a satisfying mouth feel, and barely ever exceed 40 grams in a recipe. I have tried the various varieties and find that a waxy more flavorful potato appeals to my baby more than the powdery varieties. Your baby might have a different idea, however! Follow his tastes and watch his diaper for signs that your baby could cut down on potato, you'll know it right away.

* About cooking water for baby: We had our tap water tested before Ian came home, and found that since we live in a building built in the 1800s, indeed the water is not safe for baby to drink (trace amounts of lead from water that's been sitting in the pipes, we didn't want to take any chances!) Ian's pediatrician recommends spring water that has low mineral content for the baby's bottles since young babies don't metabolize minerals well, so we cook with it too. From what I understand, filtering the water is just fine too.

Shell your peas and weigh them. You will be surprised at how many peas you'll shell to get 120 grams. Peel the potato and cut off as much as you'll need, using the scale to measure. Bring out your little portioned fish fillet. Heat saucepan over medium heat, and spread a thin layer of colza or sunflower oil over the bottom of the pan (you may choose cooking spray for this). Sprinkle the potatoes around it. Keeping the heat at medium, let the meat and potatoes sizzle until just browned on the bottom, then add the water. Stir the liquid around, scraping up any bits along the way. Add the freshly shelled peas, add the cooking liquid, toss to coat, and turn up the heat until the water at the bottom boils fast. Immediately reduce the heat to low, tightly cover, and let the peas smother in the steaming cooking juices until both peas and potato are good and soft, about 12 minutes. Make sure the vegetables are fully cooked to soft, because this makes a better mouth feel and easier digestibility for baby. Put the mixture in your blender or grinder, add the olive oil, and puree to smooth. Let cool to warm, attach the bib around your baby's neck, and serve it up!

Ian's Favorite Etouffe of Turkey and Haricots Beurre

1 teaspoon duck fat

20 grams raw turkey breast

30 grams ratte, fingerling or new potatoes

120 grams fresh haricots beurre or wax beans

1/3 cup or 60ml of low mineral spring water or filtered water

Wash, peel and dice the potatoes, and dice the turkey. Wash and remove the rough ends from the haricots beurre, and then slice them into 1/2" lengths. Melt the duck fat over medium heat in a 1 quart sauce pan with lid, and spread the turkey and potatoes over the bottom. Keeping the heat at medium, let the meat and potatoes sizzle until just browned, then add the water. Stir the liquid around, scraping up any bits along the way. Add the beans, toss to coat with the cooking liquid, and turn up the heat until the water at the bottom boils fast. Immediately reduce the heat to low, tightly cover, and let the beans smother in the steaming cooking juices until both beans and potato are soft, about 12 minutes. Make sure the vegetables are fully cooked to soft, because this makes a better mouth feel and easier digestibility for baby. Puree to smooth in your blender or grinder, let cool to warm, and serve!

The Little Blue Bag and Salt Potatoes

2009-07-27T09:45:00.022+02:00

It has been two summers since my last trip to Chaumont. Pending a passport for baby Ian, it was all up in the air until the last minute, but we did end up boarding a plane at the beginning of July to cross the Atlantic. I spent my childhood summers in that little town, and when my father built the house there, it graduated from the place where my heart remained over icy winters to the place I now call home.

My mother embroidered each of our names on individual blue drawstring bags when I was a kid, to keep 5 children somewhat organized when we traveled. These bags, packed full, with their drawstrings pulled tight, were piled into the back of the car when we went to Nashville, and also when it was time to go up to the lake. Every summer, soon after school let out in June, we used to pack whatever personal belongings we thought we might need for a summer and head to Chaumont. It was a simple time, and looking back I realize we didn't need much. A little blue bag was really enough.

Our time was organized for the most part around work on the boat my father built. It always began with the children being charged with the big job of scrubbing the teak decks of Cambyration from stern to bowsprit with wire brushes before my father would oil them. Nearly every surface in and on the boat was oiled teak, so there was a lot of scrubbing to do. After that, my mother would do her work cleaning and organizing summer provisions down below, and we would carve out our territory for the summer. We each had our bunk which would change from year to year, depending on which straws were drawn and the varying negotiations that took place. The best spot to have was the v-berth. It was most like a regular cabin. It had a door that could close, and I could open the forward hatch and listen to the water lap against the hull while I watched the stars.

At the beginning of the summer when we were on deck scrubbing away, there was special kind of joy that came with that initial hard work. It was all in the idea that the whole summer was ahead of us. Sailing camp, always some time spent cruising lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, and time spent with our summer friends. Every nook and cranny of the small town of Chaumont, New York was there to amble over and through, from the graveyard where I used to ponder the pretty old bottles left on the graves despite the sign forbidding them, to the quiet side roads off main street, where we learned the shortcuts and paths cut by generations of children before us.

Arrival in Chaumont meant getting used to the feel of the smooth quarried limestone at lake's edge on my bare feet. We relearned all the best paths during those first few weeks while our feet were still tender. Although the boat house and ship yards were full of sharp stones and surfaces, we still spent a significant amount of our time in bare feet. It was a matter of pride, after all. There were always smooth and rough places, as well as a perpetual puddle that was home to a gang of wasps that used to hang out in the same corner by the club, year after year. We stubbed our toes, stepped on bees and sometimes walked through places we shouldn't have, but that never stopped us going barefooted.

The limestone cliffs and stones had a way of retaining the sun's warmth in the evenings. Sometimes I think I can still feel their heat in my bones. Up through my teen years, nights meant stretching out on certain stones to stare at the night sky. There was one behind the pavilion, tilted just so at the water's edge that always was a favorite of mine. I will never forget the complex geography of the cliffs in the quarry. I had every single one memorized, and the first weeks at the lake, I would retrace my favorite paths, taking note in what the elements might have changed over that year's icy winter. The texture, the places where a child could climb, the footholds, the caves, the marshland, the fields and woods beyond down Independence Point, all like a map with endless detail. I had my favorite ledges to sit and survey the landscape once I got tired of climbing. My heart was full and soul replete revisiting these points one by one every summer.

A close friend of mine and I were corresponding recently, and she brought up the importance of having a place called home to return to, you know, after the childhood home is gone. A place apart from where our adult lives unfold. Her place is in Michigan, where she spent her childhood summers. She and her family drive out there from the East coast every summer now. They spend a couple of weeks in the log cabin that her great grandfather built, just as her mother, and her mother before her did.

This year, although I was thinking of summers past in Chaumont, I also found myself placing the details of these memories at a safe distance. It is hard to say why. In my mind's eye, it was like my childhood's delectable memories were like my little blue bag packed full, with the white string pulled tight. I was afraid to open it. It's almost as if I was saving myself a certain remorse. Now that I'm back home at my desk in France, I realize that going home with baby Ian brought out that blue bag, and it hovered there like an elephant in the room the whole trip. Opening up and delving into all those memories would remind me how far away France really is, I realize. I know that the little house we now go to in the Alps is most likely going to become the place my son Ian knows by heart. I experienced a vicarious joy watching my brother's children in Chaumont this year. Their relationship to the place is so similar to my own when I was their age. I hope their children will also know the beauty of the home my father built.

With that, I leave you with a simple recipe for Salt Potatoes, something I always fix right away when I get to Chaumont these days. I buy the bag with the salt even though I know it's not really necessary, mainly because there's a certain nostalgia in it. Salt potatoes originate in Syracuse, New York, the place I grew up. Syracuse was called the Salt City, because of the trade from the salt marshes there that was done on the Erie Canal. Laborers boiled potatoes in the salty brine from the marsh, creating what we now know as Salt Potatoes. I suppose the contemporary version is a bit sterile in comparison to what they enjoyed, but we love it nonetheless.

Salt Potatoes

5 pounds of new potatoes
1 cup salt
butter for dipping

Scrub the potatoes with a brush, but don't remove the skin. Dissolve the salt in a large pot of water, and add the potatoes. Bring this to a rolling boil, and continue to boil them in the brine until cooked through, 15 to 20 minutes. Check to see if they are done by pricking with a fork. Melt the butter and serve it in a little bowl alongside the potatoes. Salt Potatoes are served plain, part of simple family summer meals. Dressing them up in any way would spoil them.

(Photo from a previous trip to Chaumont)

Postcard: Le Temps des Cerises

2009-06-26T10:39:00.004+02:00

The cherries were unexpectedly sweet. One of the neighbors in the village said that the tree produced sour cherries, and there I was plotting out all the great things to do with them. Sour cherries are a treat indeed. I think he was imagining things, raided his neighbor's tree before they were ready, or in the end was just just trying to come across like he knew everything about everyone's gardens. These cherries are juicy and sweet. The skin is red, but inside the fruit pulp is clear, like a plum. I don't know what kind they are. The best way to find out is to take some to the market and ask the cherry vendors. Loic spent some time on a ladder over the weekend and could only pick from the lowest branches, this tree towers up about 50 feet high. It is an old tree and that's probably why it produced so much fruit. No wonder the birds aren't much interested in what I have been putting in the feeder lately! Nothing better to do with these cherries but to eat them straight up. Next year we will be better equipped for the harvest and I will cook and put them up.

Postcard: Our Field of Flowers

2009-06-21T09:26:00.007+02:00

We planted this packet of seeds and this is the first wave of blossoms. It took awhile, I'd say between spreading the seeds and the first blooming, 2 months. They should really get colorful at the end of July, early August. I also put a bunch of bulbs out but not sure which plants they are, everything is growing in one big tangle. I have completely forgotten even what the bulb flowers are supposed to look like. I do remember I thought they were pretty, and that they grow tall. During the planting, I had this packet of seeds for edible sprouts from the health food store, which contained all kinds of funky grasses, and sunflower seeds, removed from their hard shells. We have a few sunflowers towering up thanks to that mix. They say on the website for the field of flowers that you should cut as many as you can if you want to see them bloom longer. I dutifully took to the garden with my basket and a pair of scissors. It was the first time I have ever done something like that, although for some reason I felt like I'd done it forever. There's nothing like it, clipping the flowers you've grown from seeds yourself. I can tell you that the hardest part was pulling out all those nettles before planting the seeds. I am happy with the result so far.

Super Mini Best of: Fraises des Bois

2009-06-15T16:59:00.032+02:00

Walking up a forest path that wound its way up from a gorge and quickly enough arriving at some sunny open pasture land got me to thinking, during that week alone. Something about the way the land opens up above the tree line just sucks out the trivial thoughts and allows my mind to breathe. The incline, the one you work on before you arrive at the top is actually quite steep, but the path has been beaten in such a way that any reasonable person can handle it if they aren't in a hurry. One side of the path (the sunny side in the morning) runs along on your right side, sort of like one of those walls full of plants we see designed by artists in the city. The downhill side gives you the feeling you're surveying a kingdom of sorts. A dark deep world that plunges into the gorge to the river below, a chance to see the straight uprightness of the trees and contemplate their numbers. I have always been the sort to zoom in and find little microcosms along my way, when drawing, when writing, when observing. I think it comes from my love of miniatures. I love to study the varying flora, bathed in sun early in the morning.

The first time I climbed this hill, it was when we had some interesting early spring flowers. The fiddleheads were still tight little fists ready to either pinch off and pop into that day's salad or be left to unfurl like green versions of the lace panels you find dangling like icicles in the windows of Alpine chalets. There was a glorious mess of vines, pretty exotic looking yellow and blue spritzes of mountain blossoms of many kinds, lizards, and freshly melted source water babbling down the layers of folded crushed slate deposits. One pretty little flower that was easy to identify and seemed prolific was the wild strawberry, the fraise des bois.

I took out Loic's trusty Opinel and a little plastic sack that I had so level-headedly prepared in my pre-parental clarity for occasions such as these, and dug out two fraise des bois plants, which I transplanted directly into the crook underneath the cherry tree in the garden when I got back to the house. Over the weeks, I checked and weeded around them, hoping they would get enough sun. Lo and behold, last weekend, there were several ripe berries ready to be eaten.

I was terrible about it. It was late afternoon. I had been busy and unable to take a moment to myself for many days. Loic had brought some work home and wasn't able to help, and I was juggling the brave task of keeping the stove going and also working out the logistics of getting the baby's system perfected at the country house. I hadn't even had a moment to bathe. He decided to take a break to play with the baby - my chance to get some air! I headed straight out to the far end of the garden before either of them could call my name.

I looked, quickly gathered that these juicy buttons were prime for a harvest, and plucked off the ripe berries. I popped them down like they were magic pills and crushed them with my tongue. In that instant I finally was transported back to that frumpy bed in St. Petersburg, hit with a wave of exquisite memory from the exact beautiful flavor. Hey Loic! No on second thought, I better not say anything, because I didn't save any. Any at all.

Jump to this weekend when finally he was freed from the clutches of the national concours and we were able to go out walking as a family. We chose that particular forest walk because it is easy, and I also was pushing for it because of that lingering burst of flavor that kept springing up in my mind. I remembered thousands, but memories can be deceiving. At the bridge over the place where two streams meet, he first pointed to a bunch of ripe fraises des bois, and I brought out the sack. We worked our way up the hill. I am not exaggerating when I say we were both completely astounded at the harvest before us, it was like a wall of wild strawberries. We gathered and gathered, and with every few steps up, it was like we'd not even seen that the best was yet to come. By the time we got to the top of the hill, the sack was full.

Loic told me I was being unreasonable when I dug my hand in, slightly crushing some of the berries, to bring out a handful for each of the two horses that had been set in their pasture there at the top. I don't know. I think they enjoyed them, although now that I have tried to tame a baby, and thinking of their relative minds in my imagination, I cannot imagine that these horses will ever tell family stories about the silly lady with hair like straw who came and opened her palm full of fraise des bois that day. I think they forgot me about 5 minutes after we were gone.

We did two things with them. We put them in yogurt, and we made a coulis.

Collector and Caviste

2009-06-04T07:46:00.009+02:00

George dos Santos of Antic Wine, in Vieux Lyon

A set of skeleton keys on a ring hangs by the door, and we take them to go downstairs. A series of doors are unlocked. Footsteps sound gently down a steep stairwell made of old chiseled stone. It is time to get a bottle. Loic keeps a list with details on when any bottle might be best to open. Our cave is rather rudimentary. We have to bring out an extension chord and plug it in outside in the pathway (I hesitate to call it a hallway), just to get light in there. We can't store anything but wine either, since the humidity level is too high. Cardboard boxes disintegrate in that kind of environment, furniture would be ruined. Ikea shelves line with bottle racks and crates that age rather quickly, along with some styrofoam bottle nooks line the walls. We keep other things, like that big ladder we use a couple of times a year, and some other junk. The wine in our cave is really nothing special when you think about what a wine can promise, however. For about 9 years we've been building up our little collection of wines we taste at the vineyards and buy by the case, but we have never really had the means to build a real discriminating collection.

For all of the wonderful ways to get good wine in this country, sometimes going to a caviste is the best way to go. For one thing, visiting the vineyards takes a lot of time. When we went to the Bordeaux region and only had 10 days, we had a hard time choosing what vineyards to visit, and scheduling took some finesse. When you take the time to visit a producer, you are pretty much locked into at least an hour of listening, learning, touring, tasting. You really have to budget your time, plan very carefully, and be very choosy about which doors to knock on. There's no way to fit your hopes and dreams into into one visit, or into the trunk of your car. You get tied up in the stories. It's very hard to cover a whole lot of ground in these circumstances. For this reason, when we go to specific regions, one thing we always do in addition to visiting the vineyards is to find a reputable caviste there, and see what he might have for tasting.

This is not my cave - it is the 16th century cellar at Antic Wine, Vieux Lyon

A caviste is a person with a passion for collecting wine that has translated into a life calling. Every caviste has his way of filling out his cave, and his way of relating to his clients. In St. Emilion, we visited one who specialized in wines local to the region. Each day he had a different set of a dozen bottles open to taste, compare, discuss and buy. He did very good business there. The main benefit of going to a caviste is that you are profiting from this person's expertise when you enter the shop. The price stays reasonable, on the whole, for the product. Being a caviste is an honest business. You're paying them for the research they have already done - their education, their experience, knowledge of their collection, and their ability to obtain certain vintages that the average vinyard tour customer on a road trip would never have. An independent caviste's collection can be truly exceptional, so keep your eye out for them, wherever you go in France.

One truly exceptional independent caviste I know in Lyon is George dos Santos, working out of Vieux Lyon, from his shop called Antic Wine. He is a collector. He has nurtured and grown, in his way, and on his terms, traveling the world, a simply amazing collection of those rare wines you might find at auction, in addition to just plain hard to find French and international bottles and vintages. At the same time, wine is in the end for drinking, n'est-ce pas? While collecting the wine is fine, we also like to taste and understand what makes these wines fun to seek out and such a thrill to share.

George regularly holds tastings at his wine bar two doors down, Le George Five. Featuring 2800 bottles on the menu and 120 bottles open for drinking by the glass per week, you've got a great opportunity to taste and learn. They serve small plates of the best kind of finger food - Buffalo Mozzarella, Sardines, truffles in Brie and Saint Felicien cheese, dried sausage from Ardeche, Corsican pâtés, Parma ham, Pata Negra cut from the bone from it's throne of honor on the bar. Le George Five has quickly become a wine bar of choice for enthusiasts and gourmandes alike.

George dos Santos' regular organized wine tasting soirees have proven so popular that they now have to turn a lot of people away. They are always booked well in advance. He also holds private tastings of special bottles by invitation only. George regularly teams up with Lyon's top chefs to prepare accompanying dishes at these private soirées. If you are visiting Lyon it's through your concierge that you are most likely to get access to these types of events, although purchasing from his shop during the day might allow you to broach the subject with him or a member of his staff.

For a wine enthusiast, going into George dos Santos' shop is a cathartic experience. This year there has been quite a buzz about his imports in the international press. I was there a couple of weeks ago to take his portrait for a wine magazine recently. I got the sense that for George, there is a certain spirituality in his activity as collector and caviste that I feel privileged to be near. Perhaps it is the collector in me. He hits the right note. I certainly can trust him with my wine selections. When I have a very special bottle to buy, George dos Santos is the man.

Antic Wine
18 rue de Boeuf
69005 LYON
04.78.37.08.96

Le George Five
32 rue de Boeuf
69005 LYON
04.72.40.23.30

Walnut Oil Vinaigrette

2009-05-28T08:42:00.025+02:00

You know those things people say. Like "nice weather we're having" when you see them on the street. Coming up on the adoption, people would rather offhandedly say "Your life is going to change completely!" This, I must say, was most disconcerting. What can you say except, "oh yes, change completely..." while wondering what is in store?

As the time got closer and closer, and the change completely banter reached a feverish pitch among our acquaintances and loved ones, I began to have doubts in myself. More than once, I had been in a situation where I had tried, really tried to completely change and it didn't work. Like that time I tried to get my house organized. Or even worse, maybe I would be forced to let go of some really important part of me, bid the old Lucy Vanel adieu, leaving her at the shore of a long lost deserted island, and usher in the changed completely Lucy Vanel, now a mother. Would the former me exist only as a kind of supernatural apparition? I feared the worst.

Baby Ian came home. I watched and waited anxiously for Mr Hyde to kick in. When would metamorphosis into a tired old bottle-washing diaper-scrubbing wench take place? Then I realized that we had made most of this famous life change over the course of years, long before I held Ian in my arms. I made a space inside, a very special space. Yes, falling in love with this baby has been exhilarating and a little scary (because you know, you worry about the little one), but nothing I can't handle. Yes, the bottles and the changings take place, but they're kind of nice. The schedule has been pretty easy to adjust to.

I think the biggest change so far has been - that which was empty is now full. I had carved it all out, you know. That empty space. A bulldozing machine came in years ago and dug out a nice deep hole (now that, my friends was life changing), and like other parts of me, I tended to it. At first it was gaping and empty. Then one day I took a good look around, dusted myself off, and we decided to decorate it like a nursery. On the practical side, we tended to the dossier over the years. We reserved this place for someone, and now he is here.

Maybe people come forth with these warnings just to get that one last chance to scare the bejeesums out of new parents. A kind of good natured hazing. Having a little chuckle, you know? It has been a relief to note that I am still the same old me, 100%. The house is a little fuller, the heart is pumping gladly with essence of maman caused by some enzyme created by contact with a baby's smile, MY baby's smile, my husband is proving to pull his weight, and here I am. I can count and see and look around at all the things that remain the same, and be thankful for all of that too.

Walnut Oil Vinaigrette

My walnut oil still comes from a charming old bee keeper on the quai who sells it in individual Perrier bottles, pressed from his own nut production. Walnut oil is one of my favorites of all to use in the kitchen. Nutty and delicate, fragrant and fragile, it has to be used quickly. Once I get mine, I use it up, lickety split. It took me a while to find this particular oil from this particular man, the kind that you taste and a little spot in your mind brightens and says - Oh THIS is walnut oil! In that way, it changes your life. I suggest you make a little place in your heart for walnut oil, then find just the right one where you live.

I use this precious oil fresh in pancakes, any and all kinds of baked breads, wherever you might use a nice green olive oil. In pizza dough, drizzled on pasta, on grated carrots, on a salad graced with blue cheese. It can be used in place of sesame oil in your favorite sauce for Beijing cold noodles, and on the season's very last sigh of endives chopped raw with cracked walnuts. Walnut oil is good even just for dipping fresh bread with some sea salt. A vinaigrette seasoned with virgin walnut oil is one of the very best ways to heighten the delicate flavors of spring and add a touch of something new.

- For one salad for two. Double or triple this recipe as necessary for larger salads.

1 tablespoon of fresh first pressed walnut oil.
2 tablespoons of neutral oil (whatever is your favorite, but make sure it is neutral so it won't compete with the fresh nutty taste of the walnut oil)
1/2 teaspoon strong prepared dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon Banyuls vinegar
1/2 teaspoon pepper or 6 salt-brined green peppercorns

Mix the oils together in a small bowl, and whisk in the salt and Dijon mustard. Add the vinegar, and then the pepper, whisking to make a salad dressing that slightly thickens. If you're using the green peppercorns, mince them small or put them whole in the dressing and then give it a quick pulse with the stick blender. You can also just add them whole if you like pepper. I enjoyed this sauce today on a spinach salad, sprinkled with a few toasted sesame seeds. If you only use a little, know that it keeps for a few days in a tighly fitted jar in the refrigerator.

Baby Ian is Home.

2009-05-25T10:52:00.003+02:00

Many thanks for the kind messages of support and congratulations while we've been going through the final steps to adopt our son. We finally made it home with Ian. We are now a family of 3. Thanks for keeping us in your thoughts and we hope you don't mind us cocooning like this for a few more days. I won't get into Ian's adoption story here but if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments section - It will be a pleasure to answer them in these next few days.

Baby...

2009-05-18T11:24:00.005+02:00

The day has come, after years of waiting, to see our little baby boy. We have picked some names but won't announce anything until we have seen him. Kisses from Lyon, lots to do.

The Garden

2009-05-14T09:06:00.019+02:00

Our neighbor up there was working in his garden a few weeks ago at the same time we were, and he came to the fence and handed me a sprinkling of seeds. They looked a bit like poppy seeds. I planted them in a circle. I don't know, it seemed like the thing to do at the time. A little wreath of goodwill sprouted up shortly thereafter.

They were radishes, and I was told that I would have to cull out some to make sure the best ones got big. I couldn't bear to thin them out, I guess because I liked looking at that perfect ring. So we got all sizes of radishes. I like them that way.

We planted a whole bunch of stuff, but not in rows, so now I don't know what anything is now. I figured at the time that if an animal saw nice neat rows of things growing, they might come on up and start munching. But if I kind of planted stuff all willy nilly, keeping some loose rules in mind about what likes to be next to what, we might be able to slip some by the deer and rabbits. I even went so far as to toss a whole sack of bulbs into the air and plant them where they landed. Our gardening technique is a source of great amusement to our neighbor. He is an encyclopedia of rules and parables about how a garden works. I gave him a handful of Soissons, big white beans I bought from a producer, at the market. They were dried eating beans, and I was hoping they would sprout. We both planted some, and my neighbor's are growing much more handsomely. I still have faith that one day this summer we'll shell some beans.

There are millions of wildflowers, everywhere. Looking out over the pasture that goes down into the valley from out the kitchen door, you can stop there for a minute and try and take it in. Keep still except maybe drying your hands in a dish towel, and watch for a bird at the feeder. Wait for every part of you to come outside into the sun. Start thinking about just what the field looks like. You'll see that the pasture is actually a palette of hundreds of colors, a sea of color, not just green. These colors are in so many gradations, and dabbed all about. The spots are literally thousands of wild blossoms splayed out in natural patches. That's when you'll take notice of the hum of the bees like they've just started, even though they've been out there all along. Stroll on out into it, go around plucking wild flowers, and have a pitcher full in a matter of 5 minutes. The reason why it will take so long is that nine times out of ten you have to wait for a bee to finish a particularly pretty flower you've chosen before you can pick it. Of course you want to be choosy, the pitcher is a small one.

Canelés

2009-05-05T10:41:00.006+02:00

This is a lovely spongy cake originating in Bordeaux, but it has won hearts across the country and can be found in bake shops almost anywhere in France. They are normally baked in copper molds, but you can also find a silicone version of the canelé mold that can turn out a still delicious product, even if the surface is not as caramelized as with the copper mold. This recipe takes two days of rest in the refrigerator, but from what I have learned, patience is a virtue.

For a dozen copper canelé molds:

2 cups whole milk
40 grams or 4 tablespoons butter
2 large eggs plus 2 large yolks
150 grams of flour
250 grams white granulated sugar
1/2 vanilla bean
2 tablespoons aged rum

- In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until they lighten in color and turn fluffy.
- Split the vanilla bean and scrape the inner seeds out with a knife. Put the seeds and the scraped pod with the milk in a saucepan and bring it to a simmer.
- Remove the milk from the heat and let it cool slightly, remove the pod, then add the vanilla seasoned milk slowly to the egg and sugar mixture.
- Cut the butter into little cubes and add it to the batter. Beat until fully incorporated.
- Add the flour in batches until it is fully incorporated.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator, leaving it alone for 2 full days. When you are ready to bake the cakes, generously butter the insides of the molds with a brush (do not butter silicone molds if you are using them), and fill them about 2/3 of the way full (slightly fuller for silicone). Heat your oven as hot as it will go for 10 minutes, place the cakes on a sheet in the hot oven, and reduce the heat to about 175C/300F, continuing to bake for 40-45 minutes. Turn out from the molds immediately while hot.

Calice Artichokes

2009-05-04T07:59:00.019+02:00

Since Friday was Labor Day in France, my market was full and doing brisk business. On Fridays it is usually just a little cluster of the regular stands.

"This is my mother," I said to my market peeps, as Mama nodded and diligently focused in on baskets of this and that, cropping close with her new camera set on "flower setting". They all responded "Yes, I see that."

Lyon is a city that gets goodness fresh from many directions, and on Friday, I saw that the ladies coming up from Provence have begun selling what in France we call the Calice artichoke. Calice translates in English to calyx, and in Italian to wineglass, you choose. Perhaps the gardeners will chime in and tell me what this young artichoke is generally called in English. These are the first cuttings from the plant, young underdeveloped artichokes. They are removed from the plant early in the season to allow the plant the resources to render more healthy artichokes later on, having fewer blossoms to nourish. Calice artichokes' market season endures only the blink of an eye. Hesitate, and you might miss them.

I asked my friend Judy Witts Francini about them, and she told me that in Italy, this petite tender spring vegetable's short market season creates a buying frenzy because they are very popular for pickling and preserving in oil. She recommended a recipe from her cookbook, which I plan to prepare for dinner guests at the country house this weekend.

In the meantime, I simply steamed my first batch and we enjoyed them cradled in a bowl with other goodies as a warm composed spring salad.

Late Bloomer

2009-04-29T15:42:00.015+02:00

Every garden is basically its own micro-climate. In our little crook of mountain, the season seems to run a couple of weeks behind many others we see along the route as we climb in altitude. I waited the longest time for the cherry tree to bloom. I went out every day and examined the swelling buds, hoping for something to happen when I spent my time there. It was kind of like I was hoping for a sign of some kind. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if the tree would bloom while I am here. It would be like a word, a promise.

Waiting is numbing, and it is like a hand across my mouth. I wait for the cherry blooms to fold out. A flash of fear while I pitch my will like a stone and wait for a return. Maybe, somehow, I have made bad choices, done something wrong, never giving the seeds I put in the ground a chance. Maybe something happened and somehow also the tree in the garden has died.

I finally had to go back down to the city, sending my will over my shoulder one last time, to see if the blossoms would spring open before turning my back on the dark barren branches. In the city, friends are gathering, shaking off the winter chill, meeting outdoors, and visitors stream through. Cousins, sisters, relatives near and far call and we meet. We sit in the square in front of Cafe Perl, sipping red wine under a fragile shower of rich pink petals floating down on the breeze.

Daily work takes on an urgency again, discussions resume, calls are returned, notes are sent. Lists begin to fill out. The rhythm of the season is pulsing in the city, the river valley churns through its blooming process. I am still waiting inside.

Back up there, with wisps of chimney smoke and cool breezes cutting through a new frank strong sun, stronger than before, blooming was like a fan had been snapped open at the opera. We arrived and there she was, the diva, tall and fluffy, booming, there in her position of power. She speaks. See? You could have waited. It would not have killed you to wait.

The tree was full of big balls of fluffy pale flowers. I thought the blooms would be more pink, but I am happy, wondering what the apple blossoms will look like. One by one, things will fall into place.

Easter Dinner

2009-04-16T12:13:00.004+02:00

Easter Dinner is usually at our house, since Aude's husband's grandmother lives in Lyon and they like to visit at that time with the kids. Count my youngest sister-in-law who is a hat maker here, and that's all it takes to get my in-laws all to convene at our house for Sunday dinner on Easter.

I was explaining to Loic that ham is a classic where I come from, and we'd been looking around for one we could roast at home. Sometimes you see them around the holidays in grocery stores in the rural areas. The ham you get here usually is only sold by the slice at the butcher. The idea of presenting a whole ham at the table is a bit odd to my French family, and they weren't buying it, but I knew that they would love a honey roasted ham pierced with cloves if they saw one coming to the table.

We decided to get up early and get to the market where we know a farmer who raises pigs and also lamb and mutton in the Bugey. His meat is really the very best, and I usually order my lamb shanks from him. We headed down the market straight to his stall and there was already a line. He could not help me with a ham, so we decided on lamb, which is a classic for Easter in France. Since I was expecting 10 at the table, I decided to get 2 racks of chops and to tie them into crowns and roast them simply, with fresh rosemary and bay tucked into the tie and garlic pierced between each bone in the fleshy part of the chops.

As the main vegetable, I served young tender spring asparagus and steamed cauliflower, both steamed and then finished in the oven with a touch of butter. We followed the main course with a salad and cheese, then a cognac spiked apple crisp with Chantilly.

In France, something that always delights me is the "friture", little fish made of chocolate. The children were very well behaved about their chocolate, obediently taking only a little bit while their mother and grandmother tucked the rest back into the package and put it away.

We got into a discussion about chocolate, and I mentioned that it was not something we normally had when I was growing up, except at certain holidays, so Easter was like a chocolate feeding frenzy for us kids. We wouldn't let anyone touch our candy. My father-in-law told us how he had chocolate milk every morning during the second world war, because it was meant to fortify and nourish the children, and that they also got a piece of bread with chocolate tucked into it at snack time in the afternoon. I joked that it must have seemed rather ho hum when the American soldiers rode into town tossing chocolate bars from their tanks at the end of the war! Yves looked at me with a blank stare and then Brigitte explained that since his father was a dentist, they often got many things like chocolate and meat throughout the war because much of his work was done on a bartering basis. He said that when chocolate was passed out as a rare treat at school, he would give his chocolate to another child because he already got it at home. I asked if he told them it was because his father was a dentist, alluding to the idea that chocolate is bad for your teeth. He just looked at me again with a poker face. He takes his chocolate very seriously indeed.