An easy and juicy dish using fresh clams and squid, and left-over ratatouille as vegetables like eggplant and zucchini are in season.
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.
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.
Now that it is getting rather hot here in France, it is time to turn to light meals. I used to make Japanese-style soups with miso and seaweed, sometimes also dashi, and while the taste is great, it adds up to a rather salty combination. So, I improvised. I bought some clams and raw langoustines at the fishmonger and some shiitake mushrooms at the greengrocer. […]
We are moving from the Paris region to the Pyrenees where I have a larger kitchen to play with. The change in area also entails a different origin of products. Last week we were in Dieppe but while we ate well at a favourite restaurant, we did not manage to have any mussels. So when I saw mussels on the market in Mirepoix, I bought […]
I returned from the market with some clams as I planned to make spaghetti but once back home there were some items missing in the larder, like spaghetti, and I was not sure about the caloric boost by the cream. But there were other things on the shelves, in the fridge and in the windowsills so I made a simple dish with penne.
Beef and oyster pie is an old English recipe that stems from the times that oysters were so plentiful that they were cheap enough for the poor to eat. Beef was not cheap but the meat used was not a prime cut. Many recipes use a pint of British ale in the broth. Beef and oyster sauce is a common dish in Asia, and almost […]
I usually stick to one style or one cuisine when I make or change dishes but here the Italian and Japanese traditions where so close that I could not resist to mix and match. So instead of using white wine, olive oil and parsley for spaghetti alle vongole, I used a soybean paste, coriander and some seaweed powder. The result was excellent.
From time to time, I go to a Japanese shop in the area around the rue Sainte Anne in Paris, where there are many Japanese restaurants and travel agents. I stock up on some instant soups, seaweed, sesame, yuzu and dashi – a yellow soy paste. On the outdoor market in our village, the fishmonger had cockles, live prawns and cheek of cod. I combined […]