The farmers where we buy vegetables had returned from a short week off to visit their family and when they re-opened there were a lot of fresh new products among which several kinds of beans. Borlotti beans look nice with their purple etchings on a white background. Hariciot coco Borlotti in French, they can be … Read more
Jean-Baptiste Reboul wrote “la cuisinière provençale” in 1897 and it is still a standard-bearer. I recently bought fish at Port la Nouvelle with the aim of making a Bouillabaisse.
This fish soup with chunks of fish has become a famous Marseille dish of broth, lots of fish and sea food, served with a garlicky and peppery rouille and even some grated cheese.
Spatchcock, or butterflying, is a method in which one cuts the backbone away from the bird and flattens the carcass.
For many people aïoli is a garlic sauce that goes over fries, kebab or shawarma. But in the Provence, aïoli is more than that and can be an entire festive meal with fish, snail, squid, artichokes and other vegetables with a dollop of the creamy garlic sauce.
A quick recipe for a healthy vegetable side dish of spinach and apples.
In France, people eat a lot of pancakes. They are flat and called “crèpes” and can be sweet of savoury. In Breton pancake eateries they have savoury “sarazin” crèpes that could rival with pizzas. The “crèpes Suzette” is an alcohol soaked sweet desert. In the Netherlands where I grew up, the pancakes are thicker and … Read more
My butcher usually keeps two special cuts aside when he gets a new carcass — the poire and the merlan — and I have the right of first refusal. I hardy ever refuse.
These are very fine cuts, one is oblong and looks like a fish (merlan being a whiting) and the poire looks like a big pear. They come from near the topside, in English butchery terms. For French butchers, they are near the tranche. It is lean and delicate meat and not so well known because there is just about a pound of it on an entire cow.
This weekend was the “Foire aux harengs et à la coquille de St Jacques” in the coastal town of Dieppe but we could not go to the Normandy port.
To mark this weekend of herring and scallops and encourage the hard-working small-boat fishermen there, I made a dish with scallops from my local fishmonger.
The butcher had a nice halved rabbit and the neighbours had brought us tomatoes from their harvest, so the combination seemed logic.
A relatively easy recipe for fillet of guinea fowl with cider and apples, cooked in a bag in the oven. It almost cooks itself.