An Autumn Wild Mushroom Tourte

Coulemelles (Parasols) at the St. Antoine Market, Lyon France

Wild mushrooms are basically my favorite thing about early autumn in Lyon. We hunt them ourselves in the Alps, but when in town, they come to us. All kinds.  At the early cusp of any mushroom's season, when it is just about to go into full swing, you will see mushrooms coming in from Russia and Sweden from the vegetable resellers, but once the local season gets going, many many mushrooms come straight from the fields and forests within a couple of hours from Lyon.
 

chanterelles grises

When I look for mushrooms at the market, I always walk the entire market to see what people are offering, and their prices. The best mushrooms are on the producers stands. Having been picked recently and changed hands only once, they are often in much better condition than the ones that get stacked and traded by the crateful in warehouses. One thing I like to do is ask the provenance of the mushrooms I see. If I get a straight answer, it's a good sign.
 

Chanterelles, cepes, & mousserons

There are so many kinds of wild mushrooms to choose from right now at Lyon's outdoor markets.  I look for whole unbruised clean specimens, and check them carefully for signs of insect damage. I always ask myself how easily I can clean a mushroom before I buy it. If it's a kind of mushroom that does not take kindly to a water bath, I try and avoid specimens that are covered with dirt or mud. I know from experience that many mushrooms, when gathered carefully, can be gathered in tact and clean. If mushrooms are bruised, waterlogged, or muddy, they get a pass from me.  


When I prepare my autumn tourtes, depending on prices and good specimens available, I always get some cultivated mushrooms to round out my selection. A few shitake are always good, and the brown button mushrooms, but also just average champignon de Paris is a very good compliment to wild mushrooms like chanterelles or girolles.
 

An Autumn Wild Mushrooms Tourte 

Ingredients 

400 g pumpkin or autumn squash 
1 large onion 
1-2 shallots 
3 mild red peppers 
80 g unsalted butter 
300 g sausage meat, this should be your favorite fresh sausage 
150 ml creme fraiche salt and pepper, to season 
250-800 g mushrooms, mix of wild and cultivated 
parsley and chives, to season 
300 g puff pastry 
egg glaze, 1 egg, beaten 

Method 

Slice the squash into 1cm or 1/2 inch cubes, and mince the onions and shallots. Sauté them in 20 grams of butter, along with the sausage which has been removed from its casing, for 15 minutes, until the onions soften, the squash gets soft, and the sausage is cooks through and browns. Set aside. 

Clean the wild mushrooms and cut the button mushrooms into quarters. Sauté the button mushrooms first, then add the wild mushrooms, seasoning with salt and pepper. Cook until they release their juice and the juice then reduces again. Add cream and toss, allowing that too to evaporate. Add the herbs last, and cook until they are just wilted. 

Roll out the puff pastry to a size slightly larger than your buttered tourte pan or pastry ring. You can roll it into a circular shape or a square shape, either way. Drape the dough over the pan or ring, fitting it carefully inside without stretching it, and then spread the butternut mixture over the bottom. Heap the top with the mushrooms in cream and then fold the excess dough over the top, leaving a hole in the middle to allow for evaporation during cooking. 

Brush egg wash over the entire upper surface.  Bake at 200C/400F for 35 to 40 minutes. Remove the tourte from the pan or ring and slice into wedges to serve, hot or after cooling.

Plum Lyon

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

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

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.

Giving it Up

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.

How I See the Floors

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

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

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.