In the past I did not like to eat green beans in restaurants and certainly not in canteens as the green vegetable bomb was usually cooked to death with no vitamins left, a darkish colour and as bonus sometimes a string that got caught between you teeth.
Mirepoix is a city in the southwest of France, in the Ariège region. It is also the name given to a certain style of finely chopping vegetables and herbs to go into a soup or stew. I have an old aunt living near that city and when I visit her I usually cook a dish she can keep in her freezer and use for several […]
Veal is a tasty and lean cut of meat. As I wrote before, the problem is to find a good supplier of meat from an animal that has not been mistreated. Once that step is taken, and in France the meat is generally of good origin, you have a fine ingredient. You can eat it hot on the first day and serve cold slices later. […]
I have often wondered about the name “Dutch oven”. I first encountered it during my maiden foreign posting in London, where we lived for several years. As a Dutchman, I had never encountered the name in the Netherlands. There we prepared slow-cooking food in either a “stoofpot” casserole or an oven dish. Just as Brussels sprouts are not called that way in Belgium, nobody takes […]
Yes, the winter seems to have released its grip on France and we even had a good week of sunshine before the sky turned greyish again. The result was noticeable on the town market as fresh seasonal vegetables appeared on the stalls, from French regions and not from Africa or Spain. I had bought lamb chops from a farmer/butcher near Neufchatel-en-Bray in Normandy and combined […]
I am very happy to be living in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but there are of course fewer restaurants than in Paris and the choice of styles is limited. While there are a several sushi-like motorbike delivery services, you cannot get a nice noodle soup like in Tokyo or in the area around the rue Saint Anne in Paris. So I made my own. This time I had […]
Truffle has become a rather expensive treat as the production of the tubers is dwindling – because there are fewer oak and hazelnut trees and less favourable soil conditions – and the world-wide demand by wealthy gastronomes is rising exponentially. In the 1925 book of Tante Marie, for traditional family cooking, you can find recipes that call for “several truffles of a good size” to […]
There was some left-over cabbage and there were two quail in the freezer as I had bought six in one go one day in a sale. With a strip of smoked ham I turned it into a nice meal which we ate just as the television news had an item about the large quantities of food people throw away as they buy more than they […]
Sauerkraut, fermented cabbage, is part of the Germanic diet and eaten from the Netherlands to Poland, with Germany and the Alsace region in France being the standard bearers. In the times before refrigeration, the fermentation process allowed people to have access to vitamins and nutrients in winter when other vegetables were scarce. Sauerkraut still has many vitamins, such as vitamin C, lactibacili and other nutrients […]
I am not a vegetarian but it is good not to always eat meat, poultry or fish. So when I found some left-over vegetables in the larder, remains of an enthusiastic shopping spree on the Sunday market, it was not too hard to decide what to do. I had a head of cauliflower and a quarter of red cabbage. The head was not very big […]