A simple and straightforward Summer dish. We buy fresh green beans (haricots verts) at a grower nearby, and I just blanch them for later use in salads or other.
Lately I have been trying to change the rhythm of meals during the day towards a more southern regime – a full lunch and a light dinner. When both my wife and I had full-time office jobs, we would take a quick lunch – sometimes prepared at home and kept in a plastic container – and enjoy a good dinner at the table with the […]
When I was young there was a best-selling book called ‘Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” about macho prejudice. Well, I am not a real man then. Quiche, the name, comes from the local dialect in Lorraine that has German influences and sounds a bit like “Kuche” for pie. The Quiche Lorraine is the most famous version, first recorded in the accounts of the Nancy hospital […]
I often buy a small chicken called poussin on the market because it is sufficient for two people. Here I first braised the chicken in butter and oil and then completed the cooking in the oven with tomatoes and sesame seed. I served it with peas and turnips cooked in a chicken stock and some green salad in a reference to the classic French pea recipe […]
There are plenty of culinary things that I do not know about. We recently had a dinner with a good friend from Argentina in a restaurant with my name (Marcel, 15 rue de Babylone) with which I have absolutely no relation. She opted for a dish because it had “Burrata” in it and I must confess I expected some TexMex ingredient that she, as from […]
In France you can buy and eat many things, but for foreigners there is always some speciality that is difficult to find. Like Maatjes herring (or Matjes herring); fresh young herring that has only been treated with a light saline solution shortly after it has been taken out of the nets. There are pots of herring in brine, sweet and sour, but that is not […]
A tariflette is a potato, onion and cheese dish usually made in the mountains of the Savoie, during winter. We were at Maligny in a holiday home for a short stay in the Chablis area to taste and buy wines and eat some local delicacies such as snails, chitterling with Chablis wine and cheeses such as époises, Brillat Savarin and Chaource.
The other day I was on the market a bunch of raw beetroots. Normally they are sold individually in large bulbs, sometimes cooked. The bunch had nice leaves which the greengrocer cut off, but I later learned that those leaves are an excellent source of vitamin A, and you can eat them raw or cooked. The problem with beetroot is that it colours purple your […]
When I was young, carrots were orange. Standardised orange. I did not even imagine it could be different. But the wild carrots that grew in the area of Afghanistan, some five thousand years ago, had various colours. According to the carrot museum (yes, there is one, be it virtual only) it is due to Dutch growers (oh no, not again) that carrots became widely used in […]