Quick Fixes

I'd been warned. Owning a house in Provence is akin to running the shabby chiciest, most disorganized bed and breakfast on the planet. On the 4th of February, friends and relations began calling, with an eye toward booking their train tickets for the end of June. I silently thanked my mother for the 3 extra sets of matching sheets I told her not to bring from NJ. I posted a calendar on the kitchen wall. There was a brief, guilty rush of relief when someone cancelled at the last minute (48 hours to hang my underwear on the line without anyone seeing!).

I genuinely love entertaining, but now I know why the locals savor the long, lonely winters. With Parisians in their white linen trousers and expensive sunglasses parking every which where, it is easy to get curmudgeon-y (and easy to forget that a mere 12 months a go, we were those Parisians). We MUST get rid of our Paris license plates. We are still getting honked at.

I love cooking for guests, and there are a few culinary tricks I've learned a few tricks to make sure I still love them at end of their stay. With Labor Day weekend suddenly upon us (and if you're not expecting a hurriance, earthquake or other apocalyptic weather), I thought I'd share:

Let the ingredients do the work: Find an ingredient that shows off the best the season has to offer. I've had a plain tomato salad drizzled with olive oil and sea salt on the table at every meal for a month. Slice and serve. Melon with jambon cru is another trick. If you start with good things, dinner often makes itself.

Whole grains out of the bag: Even the French don't make everything from scratch. For light summer meals I'll often serve a relatively plain piece of protien: chicken breast, salmon, or lamb on the grill, with a whole grain salad. My new favorite is a quinoa, barley and kamut combo that I dress up with chickpeas, fresh parsley, olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. Here in France, I've found a brilliant brand (Bio Express) of organic pre-cooked whole grains. The packages are the perfect size for making salad for 4, and the extra 10 or 15 mintues it saves me makes a huge difference in my home-cooking motivation levels. Even Minute Rice and Uncle Ben's offer a product like this now.

Go-to veggie: Everyone should have one dish that is good hot or cold, day or night, grill or picnic. The ingredients should be easy to find. Easier to prepare. And of course, it should be utterly, knock-out delicious. The stuff the makes you believe in vegetables again. To meet those K2-like criteria, I always go back to haricots verts (thin green beans) in walnut oil. You can always find green beans, but the walnut oil makes it special enough for company. Take a 1.5 pounds of thin green beans, add 1 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp walnut oil, saute the beans uncovered for 3 minutes, moving them around, add a good sprinkle of sea salt, stir and cover for 5 more minutes, stirring every two minutes. If you are using large American style green beans instead of smaller, slimmer haricot vert, you might want to blanche the beans in boiling water for 30 seconds before you begin.

Tip: Don't be afraid to let your beans wilt and get a bit brown and burnt looking. We Americans have this chronic fear of overcooking our grean beans. You can add some toasted walnuts on top of the finished dish to dress things up a bit...

Chickpea and Whole Grain Salad with Parsley and Preserved Lemon Zest

1 can of chickpeas, well rinsed
2 cups of pre-cooked mixed whole grains
olive oil to taste
juice of one lemon
large handful of flatleaf parsley, chopped
sea salt
black pepper
1 tablespoon of diced preserved lemon rind. Look for preserved (pickled) lemons at a Middle Eastern grocery.

Rinse the chickpeas under hot water. Rub off the waxy skins outer skins and discard. Combine chickpeas, parsley, olive oil, lemon juice and a generous pinch of salt and pepper. If you can find preserved lemons, slice off the rind from roughly half the lemon. Unlike cutting off normal lemon zest, you can go a bit deeper into the lemon -about 1/4 inch - because the pickling process takes away the bitterness in the white pith just underneath the yellow skin. Dice the lemon rind and add to the warm mix at the same time as the grains.

Prpare the whole grains according to package directions. While still warm, combine the whole grains with other ingredients.

Serves 4-6 as a side dish.

Tomato Porn

It's a slippery slope. In the pulpy afterglow of fresh tomato everything, comes (what's a girl to do) roasted tomato everything. I'm helpless. Give an inch, my grandmother would say, and you'll find yourself with a face full of seeds and olive oil dripping down your elbow.

Roasted tomatoes are inherently greedy. Slick with olive oil and mellowed with garlic, they are my attempt at pleasure hoarding, not unlike R's father's Playboy collection stashed in the attic (my mother never liked that girl). I want to be able to peek into the freezer in December and know I can use this spark of sunshine to light up a winter pasta sauce, or guarantee a sensational base for braised veal shank or white beans. Of course, the nature of greed means that I couldn't wait until December to explore my pasta fantasies. As it's bikini season, I've been doing my best to limit carbs, measuring out proper, back-of-the-box portions of whole wheat spaghetti (85 grams). I'm not one to deprive myself, so a moderate dose of pasta means lots of sexy topping to fill up my favorite shallow white bowls from Habitat.

The right dish is the oldest diet trick in the book. I recently bought a whole service of Limoge dishes at a local flea market. Guess what, my French dinner plates (like French baby clothes) are a good inch smaller in circumference than the set of American plates my mother brought over.

There's only so many times a week a girl can make ratatouille, so I used part of this week's eggplant allotment to make my pasta sauce. I used a tablespoon or two of the roasted tomato oil to sauté the eggplant until tender, then added shrimp, the roasted tomatoes, a splash of white wine and a pinch of cayenne pepper at the end.

I've never been sure if the realization of a fantasy is meant to satiate passion, or to fuel it. I suspect it's the later. Which, if my freezer holds out, is fine with me.

Roasted Tomatoes

4 lbs of perfect heirloom tomatoes, sliced approx. 1 inch thick
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 head of garlic - wet (i.e. fresh) garlic is ideal
Sea salt to taste

Heat the oven to 325F.

Line your largest baking sheet with aluminum foil. Arrange the sliced tomatoes in a single layer, tuck the cloves of garlic (unpeeled) between them, pour over the olive oil. Sprinkle with a pinch or two sea salt. Leave for 1 1/2 to 2 hours in the oven, until the garlic is tender and the tomatoes are soft and a bit wrinkly. Make sure you save all the liquid along with the garlic and tomatoes.

Store in the fridge (cover with additional olive oil to keep longer) or freeze for a snowy day.

Roasted Tomato Pasta with Shrimp and Eggplant

This is an approximation - who takes notes during a fantasy? Oh. Well, I don't.

2-3 tbsp of your tomato olive oil liquid
2 smallish eggplant, slim and dark
1 pound raw frozen shrimp (I don't ever recommend using frozen cooked shrimp - in my experience they are limp and watery)
2 cups roasted tomatoes (give or take), with a bit of the liquid
A pinch or two of cayenne pepper
A splash of white wine
1/2 tsp sugar (optional)
Small handful of basil leaves, ripped by hand

Slice the eggplant in thinnish strips (about 1/4 inch thick by 2 inches long), you want it to cook through in a reasonable amount of time. In a large sauté pan, heat 2-3 tablespoons of your tomato olive oil liquid. over medium heat, sauté your eggplant until really tender (nothing worse than eggplant that bites back. Add frozen shrimp, tomatoes, cayenne, wine and sugar. Cook until shrimp turn pink, about 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, stir in the basil, leaving aside a few leaves for garnish.

Serve over whole wheat spaghetti.

Serves 4

Golden Days

I love my summer refrigerator. That said, I love my refrigerator most times of year, but I get a particular kick out inspecting the contents of my summer fridge, especially after a hefty trip to the market. Summer guests and my husband (aka the fruit monster) make sure that we go through at least 2 cagettes of peaches and nectarines a week. Tomatoes are neatly stacked next to the rare sight of French corn on the cob (the French feed corn to animals, not people) and a pot of almond pesto made by a German woman in Reillanne. The jar in the back right is Mr. C's homemade pieds pacquets, stuffed tripe, which has been there for several months, and will probably be there for several months more, until the first frost brings out the offal eater in me.

The overflow makes its way down to the wine cellar. This cellar is the reason we found the house - the French poet and Resistance leader Rene Char buried the manuscript of his most famous work underneath the dirt floor (for the full date with destiny click here).

It is also a very fine wine cellar (14C all year round), where the previous owners left us a dusty (but perfectly serviceable) garde-manger – a screen front cabinet for storing food.

The golden days of summer find me obsessed with the local saffron. Provence is turning out to be the source of some surprising staples in my kitchen. I knew the tomatoes would be great – but who knew that I would living smack in the middle of spelt (Épeautre), saffron (safran) and chickpea (pois chiche) country. There is a couple at our Sunday market who grow their own saffron (I’ve been invited to see the harvest Sept/Oct – stay tuned). And I recently tasted a little saffron hazelnut carrot muffin at the market. It was a tiny bit dry (by and large, Europe sucks at muffins - I find it comforting to know that there are some things where European cuisine simply fails), but it got me thinking about the possibilities. Perhaps a version of my carrot cake with ground hazelnuts instead of walnuts, the egg and sugar mixture infused with saffron. This is what happens, my cooking brain gets ahead of my cooking hands. There’s a limited number of recipes I can make in one day, unless I want to serve nothing but carrot muffins for dinner. No one would mind, I’m sure, but hey, it’s bikini season…

My saffron success story for the moment is the simplest of dishes: a peach, nectarine and apricot compote, which I’ve been eating every morning with yogurt and muesli. The trick to getting slightly overripe fruit is to go at the end of the market, when vendors are trying to get rid of product that won’t last another day. I’m such a good customer with my local peach man, he usually throws in a kilo or two of fast ripening fruit for free – piling them on top of the 2 or 3 cartons of perfect table peaches I’ve chosen by hand.

Saffron is more of a smell than a taste – my local variety gives off dried peaches and sandalwood. Unfortunately, cheap (or old) saffron will often do nothing but turn your meal a charming (actually quite Provencal) shade of yellow. Good saffron will give your dish a undertone, not exactly spice, but some distant glimpse of the spice caravan, almost out of sight over the next sand dune. I think works perfectly with the sweet/tart flavor of peaches.

When I get my canning act together, this is what I’m going to make, jars and jars of golden days to last me through the chill of winter.

2 pounds of slightly overripe fruit (a mix of peaches, nectarines and apricots)
1 tablepsoon of turbinado sugar
2 good pinches of saffron

Cut the fruit into 1 inch cubes. I don’t especially feel the need to peel. In a heavy bottomed saucepan, combine the fruit and sugar. Bring to a boil, stir in the saffron, let simmer over low heat until thickened and slightly reduced, mine took about 40 minutes. Serve hot or cold, over yogurt or pound cake – I was even thinking it might make a superb substitute filling for my grandmother’s apple cake. Bon appétit!