Cuisine Quotidienne -- Everyday French Food

Paring down... to one blog

2009-09-06T18:45:00.003+02:00

I can make this wordy, or I can make it to the point.

Since I have felt detached from this blog for months now, I think I'll be straightforward.

I've decided to stop writing Cuisine Quotidienne. The site will stay up, but -- at least for the coming year -- I'll be blogging only on La France Profonde. And I may work in some food-oriented posts there.

Thanks to those of you who commented here frequently, or even infrequently, and I hope to get individual comments out to some of you eventually!

In honor of the 4th of July

2009-07-04T09:49:00.005+02:00

I do not post to this blog anymore and, to tell you the truth, I have plans to "put it down" io the near future. But I don't want to do that without a certain amount of pomp and circumstance, and at the moment, I don't have enough time to develop an appropriate farewell to Cuisine Quotidienne, which I imagine will take me several posts. It will have to wait until I get to the USA in four days!

For now, here's a little clin d'oeil to the 4th of July. I happen to quite like hot dogs, and think they're a nice occasional school night meal -- as long as they're served with a salad or two, or some veggies. And pains spéciaux pour hot dogs have finally arrived in my region of France!

I know it's culinarily incorrect, but I was happy to find them at my local EcoMarché...

Happy Easter -- and yes, I still do cook

2009-04-11T18:27:00.003+02:00

I just downloaded some photos from a recent trip and, to my surprise, found some photos of food in the camera!

Just for your information -- I do still cook. I'm just not blogging about it and, if truth be told, I've been in something of a slump as far as creativity and trying new recipes go.

But this is the (school) year where I have really learned to appreciate everything I've already mastered about cooking in France: throwing together quiches, soups, salads, and all sorts of other simple fare without ever really looking at a recipe.

Anyway, I'm not sure where, if anywhere, this blog is going but I did want to "chime" in and wish a Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it.

On the back burner

2009-02-28T18:24:00.006+01:00

With a month gone by since my last post, I'm making a formal decision to put Cuisine Quotidienne on the back burner.

Those of you who have followed this blog probably know that it has been something of a struggle. I have plenty of ideas for a blog about everyday French cooking -- in other words, this blog -- but the labor-intensive aspect of food blogging has definitely gotten the best of my good intentions.

I'll try to drop in here once a month or so, just to keep the place alive.

And remember, I do have two other Blogger blogs: La France Profonde, where I may end up posting a few food-oriented articles, as well as And So Forth, a catch-all blog which is becoming more important to me.

Until then -- bon appétit!

Bleh

2009-02-01T10:08:00.003+01:00

I don't want to make any big pronouncements about the demise of Cuisine Quotidienne, but suffice to say that winter is taking its usual toll on me.

I think I may be taking a month or two off from posting here. Winter is by far my busiest time workwise, and with no vacation in sight -- no, I don't get the upcoming two weeks of vacances scolaires -- I think I'll just be keeping my head above water until March or maybe even April.

Take care all, and I promise I'll be back.

Pantry Peek

2009-01-18T13:36:00.005+01:00

I know there's a cooking blog out there somewhere that features peeks into different food bloggers' pantries. I keep waiting until at least part of my pantry looks really spiffy to send a post to it, but of course the "spiffy-looking pantry" part is never going to happen...

In the meantime, here is a small portion of my pantry. You can see quite a few French elements here, and a few American touches.

I'll be happy to take any questions.

The ABCs of Everyday French Cuisine 3: C for carottes

2009-01-11T13:56:00.005+01:00

(Flickr photo courtesy of Maxime LeDuc)

Carrots are a reliable vegetable. They keep well, are easy to cut up and please everybody in my family. I virtually always have them on hand and, as in American cooking, they are one of the staple vegetables of everyday French cuisine.

When I was a student in Tours in the 1980s, we frequently ate at a restaurant that served plain, home-style French food. We had a food allowance and could just afford the three-course evening meal, which, if my memory serves me correctly, cost 5 francs. (Is this possible?) One of their recurring starters was carottes râpées, and my fellow students and I all felt these grated carrots with a simple vinaigrette were somehow extraordinary.

I suppose I have become blasé, but plain grated carrots with vinaigrette rather bore me now. I usually perk up the salad with another fruit or vegetable, especially apples and/or zucchini. Sometimes I add a lot of herbs, especially coriander when I have it, or make some fancy sauce with yogurt or orange juice. I'm not sure how French all of this is, but variety is the spice of cooking life. And speaking of spices, cumin is pretty delicious with grated carrots.

One supermarket item that saddens me is ready-made carottes râpées. They just seem like a very depressing thing to buy:

In France, raw carrots are generally eaten in this grated form. When I serve carrot sticks with a dip, whether to my family or friends, the former wolf them down and the latter consider the presentation original and exotic.

Carrots enter into many other French recipes, of course. They are a frequent ingredient in traditional French blended soup, and carottes Vichy, originally made with Vichy mineral water, are a well-known French classic.

Personally, I often toss carrots in with a roasted chicken, include them in about every mixed vegetable dish I make, and occasionally concoct something elegant from them, such as this carrot flan:

However, unlike many of my American expat friends, I have never attempted to make a carrot cake in my French kitchen. But I think if I wanted to get comments about "original" and "exotic" cooking, that would definitely beat carrot sticks!

It's all over now

2009-01-04T17:23:00.009+01:00

Oh my, the holidays were lovely.

I often spend a lot of time cooking over Christmas vacation, but this year I really took it easy -- for the entire week and a half I had off, including Christmas. So you won't be seeing a lot of fancy-dancy "look at all of these new recipes I tried on my vacation" photos here.

We enjoyed a simple but festive Christmas Eve meal, or réveillon du 24, featuring boudin blanc cooked with potatoes and sautéed apples.

We savored an even simpler late lunch on Christmas day. Before the meal, we nibbled on foie gras that was given to my husband by one of his clients:

Of course we didn't eat it right out of the jar, but by that time champagne was flowing and somehow I didn't get a good photo of the foie gras on its serving platter.

For the main course, I roasted a locally-raised chicken -- a turkey would have been a bit much for the three of us -- and served some lovely, wintery mix of root vegetables and chestnuts with it:

Cheese, of course, followed, then the traditional French bûche de Noël, which I always buy from local pastry shops. This year's flavor was chocolate-pear:

Tomorrow it's back to work, and the Christmas holidays will quickly fade into a distant memory -- except for the fact that we keep our (artificial) tree up until the end of January!

Wishing all of you the happiest of new years. Bonne année 2009!

Happy Third Anniversary to Cuisine Quotidienne

2008-12-26T18:42:00.003+01:00

My, this is not a very French-looking cake! But it is what I came across to celebrate this blog's three-year anniversary.

I'm actually a little late on this: my first post was on December 23rd, 2005. And I have to admit I have struggled with this blog.

I think I have a good concept: writing about the reality of French cooking, shopping, and the everyday struggles of being a working mom who likes all types of food, and French food in particular.

I had hoped to be prolific with Cuisine Quotidienne. After all, that's what the name implies: everyday cooking, so everyday blogging. And at one point I was churning out quite a few posts -- in March 2006, I posted 18 times! Short posts they were, and I was happy with any comment that came in.

Now I am taking the opposite approach. Maybe only a post a week, but one I take a little time with. I like my "ABCs of everyday French cooking" concept too.

As I celebrate three years of Cuisine Quotidienne, I still feel hopeful that someday, I will find my pace with this blog.

Bon appétit!

Merry Christmas Guessing Game

2008-12-25T14:39:00.004+01:00

First, happy holidays to all of my readers!

So what is this rather mysterious looking dish? A few hints, because this is a tough one:

It has something to do with my heritage
It's what my daughter who is spending the year in the USA ate for Christmas Eve; I don't think it exists here in France
It tastes a lot better than it looks

Happy guessing!

The ABCs of Everyday French Cuisine 2: B for betterave

2008-12-14T13:41:00.009+01:00

I bet you never thought of beets as a dangerous vegetable. But they can be treacherous indeed, as I learned when I was studying for my French driver's license test. In Northern France where they are cultivated, apparently they somehow (I've often wondered how) get squished on the road and can make driving a slippery affair.

This latent risk put aside, French beets are quite user-friendly. Unless, of course, you want to buy them raw and cook them yourself.

I've only done this once, to make a borscht that I thought would be extra-fantastic because I had spent hours boiling beets before actually making the dish. The results were inconclusive: sure, the borscht was yummy but I have made equally yummy borscht with beets sold in this format:

As far as I know, this is the most popular way to buy beets in France: pre-cooked and vacuum-packed. The "cook" just has to open the package-- very carefully unless she or he wants bright pink beet juice all over the kitchen -- and then cut the beets up for their most frequent use: in a salad as a starter:

(Flickr photo courtesy of bloggyboulga)

I don't happen to have any photos of my takes on the ever-popular betteraves vinaigrette, but the salad above, featuring pine nuts, capers and parmesan, looks like something I might try.

By now you've picked up on the basic idea: beets are generally served cold in France.

Other nice things to perk up a beet salad are:

walnuts
raisins
Roquefort cheese
lots of fresh parsley
crumbled hard-boiled eggs (oeufs mimosa)
fromage blanc or yogurt to replace the usual vinaigrette

The above explains just about everything I've ever done with beets in France, except for the apotheosis of my beet-preparing experience: betteraves marbrées.

I must admit I had never been prouder of what I had done to a beet:

I can't find the recipe anymore, but know it was taken from an issue of Régal magazine, which apparently doesn't have a website. It involved slicing the whole cooked beets -- very carefully -- and layering them with a ricotta-based filling, then topping them with pesto and finishing off with a drizzle of olive oil.

I haven't repeated this beet tour de force since September 2006.

It's just so darn easy to open those packets, hack up the beets, and toss them with vinaigrette and whatever else is on hand.

The simple things: compote de pommes -- and a few questions about applesauce

2008-12-07T17:34:00.007+01:00

BEFORE

Simple ingredients.

Simple recipe.

Simple post.

AFTER

Not so simple questions:

Why is this called "applesauce" in English?

Why is "applesauce" just one word?

Are you familiar with the secondary definition of the word applesauce? It's "nonsense; bunk."

The ABCs of Everyday French Cuisine 1: A for artichaut

2008-11-29T10:15:00.015+01:00

(Photo courtesy of Franck Chicot
member of the Flickr Fruit and Veg Group)

Artichokes are one of those vegetables I always feel like I should be serving more frequently. Everybody in the family likes them; they're easy to cook (albeit a bit long, but now I have this to help me,) and they're a lot of fun to eat.

Also, my husband does an excellent job of meticulously cutting out the chokes so we can all eat the "bottoms" (les fonds d'artichaut) under the best conditions -- so I figure this is one food item that could help increase his rather slim participation in our everyday cooking.

But, alas, artichokes don't appear on our table that often. And my French-inspired cooking repertoire doesn't include many exciting ways to cook or serve them.

I do have the following observations to make about artichokes/artichauts in France and in our home:

An alarming number of French people, including fruit and vegetable vendors, do not know how to spell artichaut. I find it most annoying to see artichauds for sale. Artichaud even seems to enjoy some popular acceptance, as a Google search for the term turned up an alarming 113,000 references -- enough to send me flying to my Larousse. Ouf! Artichaud isn't listed, but the frequency of this error makes me wonder if it could be a spelling in regional languages.

I have rarely been served artichokes at dinner parties, but when I have, they have played the role of a quick, "I didn't really have a lot of time to cook today," starter and are usually served with melted butter or homemade (somehow French cooks always have time to make that) mayonnaise.

My husband concocts a yummy sauce for artichoke dipping by mixing together homemade vinaigrette with some store-bought (because I don't have time to...) mayonnaise. Try it sometime.

We're lucky here in France to have access to some excellent Italian foodstuffs like Sacla products, and their artichoke hearts sold in jars are quite divine. In fact some of them went into what I just made for lunch:

BEFORE

AFTER

Call it seven-ingredient, Franco-Italian-Blogger improvised inspiration!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-27T20:03:00.001+01:00

I don't do Thanksgiving in France, so no food news to report.

But if you're interested, you can find my Thanksgiving post here.

Joël Robuchon and American cooking gadgets

2008-11-23T09:59:00.004+01:00

I don't have many "written by famous chef" cookbooks, but I was intrigued by an interview on Zagat with Joël Robuchon about the above book, which looks like this in its UK edition:

The first thing that piqued my curiousity is that I can see from the description that the book is translated, but I can't quite figure out from which work in French.

I was also interested in your reactions to what Robuchon says in the interview about the difference between the number of kitchen gadgets in American and French homes:

"One thing I have always noticed throughout my years is that Americans always have so much more equipment in the home than the French do. Even now. You walk into an American home kitchen and they have a garlic peeler, an egg cracker and all sorts of gadgets. The average French home cook has a pan, a knife and a whisk."

Do you agree with him?

Lazy mosaic

2008-11-20T19:44:00.004+01:00

I got this great photo mosaic idea from Croque-Camille, and it is absolutely on my NaBloPoMo schedule for tonight.

But after seven hours of classes, I am just too dog-tired to do the whole nine-question, nine- photo activity.

So how about a four-by-four?

Here is the "tag," not that I was tagged for it officially or anything. It just looked fun.

Anyway, as I read on a comment somewhere in the blogosphere, "tagging is just so pre-Obama."

"Just as a reminder, the rules are as follows (of course, if you’re anything like me, you’ll keep typing in different answers until you find a photo that grabs you):

Type your answer to the questions into Flickr search
Using only the first page of results, pick an image
Copy and paste each of the URLs in the Mosaic Maker

The Questions:

What is your favorite restaurant?
What is your favorite type of cuisine?
What is your favorite comfort food?
What is your favorite childhood food?
What is your favorite dish to prepare for company?
What is your favorite wine?
Who is your favorite chef?
What is your least favorite food?
What is the most adventurous food you’ve eaten?"

Except I'm just going to choose the four questions I like the most. So there!

1. What is your favorite type of cuisine?
2. What is your favorite dish to prepare for company?
3. What is your favorite wine?
4. What is your least favorite food? (the answer to which englobes "What is the most adventurous food you've eaten.)

So here we go.....

Well, that's one photo effort I'm glad to put at the bottom of the post! But I didn't cheat by looking for the most pleasing photos that would look spiffy with the other ones.

Here are the links to the photos used:

1. IDA's Italian Cuisine (Boston MA), 2. Tajine on the table, 3. Viognier & Cheese, 4. tripoux

Feel free to try it yourself. I'm sure some of you will come up with gorgeous mosaics.

Dinner Party!

2008-11-15T18:25:00.010+01:00

When our kids were younger, we were always having dinner parties. It seemed like the easiest -- read the only -- way to get together with our friends, who also had little ones who prevented Saturday evenings at home from being relaxing occasions.

Since the girls became teenagers, I have gotten out of the dinner party habit. Saturday evening at home with a take-out pizza, a glass of wine, and a DVD, book, or my computer sounds just heavenly after a long week at work.

But last weekend was un pont -- a long weekend, and a four-day one at that. So I finally got it together enough to have a real dinner party: three other couples, new recipes, plenty of champagne to celebrate Obama's victory -- the whole nine yards.

As a bonus, I picked up a few new ideas along the way.

The dish in the top photo is a fairly simple rice, corn and black bean salad with a mild homemade salsa. I got the recipe -- and the presentation idea -- from here:

I had bought this book for myself about a year ago, and yet had never gotten around to using it.

I like Deseine's idea of presenting a salad in mugs, mainly because the ingredients don't have to be arranged as artfully as in the now omnipresent verrines. And the visual effect was still much nicer and less picnic-like than just plopping a big salad bowl in the middle of the table.

For the main dish, I also tried a new recipe from this book:

Crumbles are oh-so-fashionable in France; I often wonder if there are now more French recipes for crumbles than British ones.

The recipe I started with was called "Crumble Nordique," which consisted primarily of seasoned salmon over a bed of onions, with a savoury crumble topping.

I decided to go green with a bed of onions and zucchini, and at one point early on in the preparation, the dish looked like this:

Of course, later it got crumbled and baked. But by that time, I was having such a good time I forgot the camera for the rest of the evening!

Six random food-related facts about me

2008-11-11T15:56:00.014+01:00

Either it's NaBloPoMo, or my readers, like me, just don't know quite what to do with themselves now that the election is over.

Whatever the reason, I've been tagged not once, not twice, but three times on the same subject, or variant, of "six random facts about myself."

I almost didn't go for it, since I had already written a magnum opus "TEN random things about myself" tag post last November for La France Profonde.

But I couldn't refuse three blogosphere friends: Meredith from Poppy Fields,
Alisa and Bruce from Notre Vie Juteuse (whom I just had the immense pleasure of meeting in Rodez,) and the writer of Discover the French Riviera.

So here we go:

1. The only drinks I really like are coffee, water and wine. I used to like beer, but seem to be growing disenchanted with it. I also used to be addicted to afternoon tea, but got turned off of it when I drank it every afternoon during a one-month hospitalisation.

2. I absolutely cannot bear to eat in what the French call "cafettes" or cafeterias, for example Flunch. They seem to enjoy a certain popularity here, but seeing all that hot food floating around in serving vats makes my stomach turn. I'd honestly prefer to eat at "McDo's."

3. I hardly ever use recipes anymore.

4. I have never had a dinner party culinary disaster take place in my kitchen.

5. I've eaten here four times, but before it became a Michelin three-star restaurant.

6. I've made homemade aligot once, and I don't particularly recommend the gruelling experience.

As for who to tag, I thought just for fun I'd start with The Foodie Blogroll and go from there to find some nice, unfamiliar food blog(gers) :

10thirty

A Bon Vivant's Chow Chronicles

The Kitchen Canister

An Italian in the US

Cream Puffs in Venice

A Veggie Venture

I think I about broke my own personal link record with this one!

Good old guessing game -- answer included

2008-11-08T11:36:00.004+01:00

It's been a long time since I spiced up Cuisine Quotidienne with a guessing game.

A few of the ones I have run have been a little too simple for your clever minds and eyes, but this one might stump a few.

One comment -- it didn't turn out to be quite what I had meant it to be.

Update: I've already received quite a few guesses on this one, and spacedlaw hit the nail on the head; it's a flan au potiron, or a pumpkin flan.

I'm not sure if spaced had a savoury or sweet version in mind, but this one was not a dessert!

I had meant to make a clafouti au potiron, which is one of my daughter's favorite supper dishes. But somehow I forgot the flour, which gives the clafouti a thicker consistency than a flan.

The lesson learned: both are delicious.

This is one of my improvised recipes, but find any savoury clafouti recipe and replace the main ingredient by chunks of steamed pumpking. Then forget the flour if you want a flan!

Speeding up school night dinners

2008-11-01T10:45:00.004+01:00

I don't know if it's a European thing, but the French are big on pressure cookers, or "cocottes-minute." I was surprised and even alarmed to find this utensile among my husband's rather limited cooking equipment when I first moved to France. To me, pressure cookers had always represented a mysterious, antiquated and vaguely dangerous way of cooking.

My grandmother (in the USA) has one, but I think it has mainly been used for canning or sterilizing -- I'm not really sure. I do know that actual meals never seem to come out of it. But in France, cooks make plenty of things with them, especially stews and soups.

I have gone through a few cocottes-minute (I'm not sure of the correct plural form, so corrections are welcome) in my years here. The one I had used for about ten years came to a sad end, as pressure cookers can, when I didn't put enough liquid in it. But ten years is enough time for technology to change, and I took it as an opportunity to finally buy the famous SEB Clipso model, which is easier to close than the traditional cookers.

As you can see if you click on the link, these are not cheap pots, but they do allow one to reduce cooking time on many recipes by about two-thirds. I have lived without one for about a year now, but am glad to get back to 10-minute soups and one-hour stews!

Foodbuzz Publisher Community Launches

2008-10-21T18:54:00.004+02:00

As a blogger, I have been invited to take part in many communities, and I have joined a few.

But once I have created a profile, I seldom go back to these sites.

Foodbuzz, which celebrated its official launch last week, is different. I am proud to be one of its featured publishers, and I hope I can pay back the venture's generosity (Free gifts! Free blogger cards! Money to upgrade my blog!) by becoming more active on the colorful, light-hearted community site.

At launch, the Foodbuzz community ranks as one of the top ten Internet destinations for food and dining (according to Quantcast), with bloggers based in 45 countries and 863 cities serving up daily food content.

Foodbuzz is the only online community with content created exclusively by food bloggers and rated by foodies. The site offers more than 20,000 pieces (wow!) of new food and dining content weekly, including recipes, photos, blog posts, videos and restaurant reviews. Members decide the “tastiness” of each piece of content by voting and “buzzing” the most popular posts to the top of the daily menu of submissions.

Foodbuzz currently logs over 13 million monthly page views and over three million monthly unique visitors.

I'm a part of it all -- and I just received a great Foodbuzz apron and a spiffy green spatula to prove it.

A few of my favorite things: foie gras

2008-10-13T20:03:00.002+02:00

I am such a sucker for foie gras. I buy it more than is reasonable. I know how to make a mean terrine. And, when I go out to eat, I have a hard time passing it up -- even though I often think I should try something more original.

My most recent foie gras binge was at a tiny hotel restaurant, called Le Vieux Four, in a non-descript village that does carry an original name: Les Quatre Routes du Lot.

My daughter, a friend and I had a lovely Sunday lunch there -- talk about off the beaten track! Despite its rather unlikely location, the restaurant was full, perhaps bucking the trend I reported on a few weeks ago...

I'm not going to post it three times, so...

2008-10-11T10:44:00.002+02:00

Everything I have to say this weekend is over on And So Forth.

And no matter how good the polls look, writing that post took away my appetite.

CQ HQ October 2008

2008-10-04T11:33:00.003+02:00

I was thinking of feigning a splashy "relaunch" effect for Cuisine Quotidienne's new design by Made by Madeline, and financed by Foodbuzz.

And of course, I wanted to pontificate about how the blog is going to change, what new features you will find, and some -- any -- changes in its focus.

Phooey. The fact is, my whole life feels on hold until the election.

Time that could be used blogging, cooking, reading and writing is going to watching YouTube videos of interviews and the debates, reading political commentary, and keeping up with a great political poll tracking site: FiveThirtyEight.

My appetite has been a little off lately too. My friend Steve in Eugene, Oregon came up with a diagnosis for me, and I'm sure he's hit the nail on the head.

In the meantime, what does one eat when one is feeling sick half the time and giddy the rest about an upcoming election?

I guess I could take a cue from Randal and just drink...until November the 4th?

Five reasons French restaurants are suffering

2008-09-27T15:09:00.003+02:00

When I started working in France, most of my colleagues ate lunch out every day, and the others went home for lunch. I was literally the only person who ever brought her lunch from home and ate it at work, and my American habit was considered strange and depressing.

Today, our staff room is packed every lunch hour with employees enjoying their version of "brown-bagging" it -- and this is one of the reasons French restaurants are suffering as never before.

According to Le Télégramme, over 3,000 French eateries shut down in the first half of 2008. This is sad to see, but the reasons are clear enough to me. And as I wrote the five below, I thought of even more -- but maybe my commenters will come up with them!

1. The crackdown on drinking and driving: Everybody knows that restaurants make a big profit margin off drinks, and the French government's justifiable campaign against "l'alcool au volant" and the subsequent increase in random breathalyzer testing (which is legal in France) have made customers edgy about drinking at all when out.

"The designated driver" approach may be working for young people who really want to party it up, but among adults, drinking is so linked to socializing that it is considered a bit tacky to guzzle down four or five glasses of wine while others at your table limit themselves to just one. My experience among adults in restaurants has been that if some people limit their drinking because they're driving, the other members of the party follow suit - -which is not good news for restaurant owners.

2. The tobacco ban: It is now illegal to smoke in bars and restaurants in France. Although the effect on restaurants would seem debatable -- personally I'm eating out more now that I don't have to inhale second-hand smoke -- eatery owners generally feel that the ban has reduced their clientele, with cafés and bars especially hard hit.

3. Plunging purchasing power: When I first arrived in France in 1990, going out to eat was almost always a full-board extravaganza -- an apéritif, wine, mineral water, desserts and coffee for all. Of course all of those extras add up, and restaurant owners are starting to notice new dining styles that bring tabs way, way down. Ordering tap water has become de rigueur, and it is no longer unheard of to ask for "un dessert pour deux" -- or even to share a main dish, which would have been considered shameful just a few years back.

4. Changing work habits: It may be the land of the two-hour lunch, but a lot of people I know have figured out that as long as their office stays open at lunchtime and their professional activity allows for it, they would rather eat in just an hour -- or even half an hour -- and get off work earlier. Personally, I can't blame them there.

5. Fuel prices and ecological concerns: Taking a picturesque drive to a country auberge is a pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but with the price of gas higher than ever and green guilt lurking in all of our souls, this sort of outing may be falling out of fashion.

As for me, a proud carrier of tickets-restaurant, I am actually going out more, not less. But I'm obviously bucking the general trend.

If you live in France -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- have you noticed changes in habits involving eating out?

Out and About 1

2008-09-15T20:04:00.002+02:00

Okay, salaries are not very high in France but certain employees (such as my happy little self) have some amazing perks.

Consider the ticket-restaurant. For every day I work, my employer finances half of one of these vouchers, good in restaurants, butcher's and some food markets. I pay the other half, and my lunches -- either out or take-away -- end up costing me half as much as they would if I had to pay the normal price.

I know some companies worldwide feature low-cost cafeterias or company restaurants, but I wonder if businesses in any country other than France subsidize their employees' lunches out?

Vive le ticket-restaurant!

A Tale of Two Tomato Tarts

2008-09-06T10:31:00.011+02:00

It's funny how I sometimes find myself making the same dishes at the same time as another fellow food blogger.

Last April, both Ken of Living the life in Saint-Aignan and I were trying out different blanquettes: his with veal, mine with lamb.

Now, right as I'm starting to get back into the swing of cooking, I recently made a tarte à la tomate, only to find that my friend who writes Chez Loulou had just blogged about one herself.

Hers, inspired by the French Farmhouse Cookbook by Susan Herrmann Loomis, started with the same base: a thin layer of Dijon mustard, then the tomatoes.

But whereas the Loomis version features garlic and gruyère cheese, my improvised version skipped the garlic, used crumbled feta cheese, and was covered with fresh parsley as soon as I took it out of the oven.

I would love to show you the end result, but the photos didn't turn out that well -- most unfortunately, because it was a great-looking, not to mention great-tasting, tart.

But take inspiration from the base -- mustard really peps up tomato tarts.

Desperately seeking systems

2008-08-31T12:13:00.006+02:00

I had really hoped to come back to this blog with a splash after my long summer break.

In other words, I was thinking my redesign would be ready, but it's not quite there yet.

In the meantime, I do want to get back in the habit of posting to CQ, so I'll just have to continue with the dark green borders and the layout that I loved at first, but have grown weary of.

Bear with me.

Anyway, I am back in France, minus one daughter for the year, and feeling set to cook up a storm.

It's la rentrée here, back-to-school and back-to-work, which is the time for plenty of good intentions about doing it all in a seamlessly organized fashion.

I suppose it's the same all over the world!

My personal cooking challenge this year is to organize the upside of things: shopping and recipe planning.

Once I've got the goods, I can cook with the best of them -- but my problem is how to NOT end up with a fridge full of nothing but cheese, mustard, yoghurt and a few wilted vegetables.

So, to all of you organized (or somewhat organized) cooks out there, what are your systems for having ingredients on hand and recipe ideas ready?

CQ HQ July 2008: En vacances

2008-07-10T18:09:00.004+02:00

With over a month gone by since my last post, I probably don't have to tell my readers that Cuisine Quotidienne is on hiatus for the summer!

I am in my hometown of Olympia, Washington until late August, enjoying cookies, bagels and seafood rather than foie gras, cheese and crusty bread.

I'm looking forward to catching up with your blogs this summer on a "read and comment" basis, without the pressure of trying to post myself.

I will, however, be blogging about this and that on And So Forth
and making an occasional post to La France Profonde.

I also have a redesign plan in the works for Cuisine Quotidienne, so I hope to see you in the fall with a new look!

Happy cooking and eating this summer.

La fête des mères: I did it my way

2008-06-07T21:26:00.010+02:00

Mother's Day, or la Fête des Mères, was a few weeks back in France.

Wouldn't it be fun to have a family who plotted and actually cooked a special Mother's Day meal?

Or one that made secret reservations for some great restaurant?

Are any of you so lucky? I'm not, but I can't complain. My family always treats me to some nice gifts for Mother's Day, and the holiday is certainly never forgotten. But the food is up to me.

This year I really did it my way: yummy stuff with as little preparation and complicated cooking as possible.

A nice jar of foie gras:

Simple seared salmon:

Some vegetables and cheese that didn't make the photo ops, and whatever was in the freezer for dessert -- in this case, a selection of mini-desserts from Géant:

I'm not a big dessert eater -- nor maker -- so a Mother's Day dessert with instructions limited to "Thaw in the refrigerator for three hours" was just dandy in my book.

A lovely meal indeed -- because I did it my way. Comme d'habitude.

French home cooking: old meets new

2008-06-01T13:07:00.007+02:00

Over the weekend de Pentecôte a few weeks back, we took a trip to see long-standing friends in Pamiers in the Ariège department, and then stopped in Dourgne in the Montagne Noire area of the Tarn department to see other long-standing friends.

Both treated us to delicious meals, but there was a clear generational difference. The Pamiers pals, of our generation, naturally have taken on the current French cooking style: lighter starters, an emphasis on presentation rather than quantity, individual servings.

The above scallop carpaccio served with artichoke hearts, lettuce, herbs and edible flowers was a work of art and a treat for the palate.

Our friends in Dourgne are in their eighties. Formerly charcutiers, or pork butchers who also specialized in pâtés, sausages and ready-made dishes, they carry on a rapidly-dying tradition of huge Sunday lunches abounding with simple but entirely homemade dishes.

A meal with them is an experience in abundance, generosity, and the culinary habits of a bygone area. Whenever we eat there, my daughters start counting. "There are five starters! Four desserts!"

These were the starters they served this time -- and it was a relatively modest spread compared to some meals we have enjoyed with them:

This time we feasted on three main starters, not counting the olives thrown in for good measure: cold beet salad, a delicious pâté, and this tray of macédoine de légumes, hard-boiled eggs, and cold ham stuffed with the macédoine:

Now remember, I'm talking starters here. A meal with these friends is an experience in pacing oneself -- and of course, they feel we never really eat enough.

Two different French culinary worlds -- and one that will certainly disappear with time.

My blogs runneth over

2008-05-25T10:46:00.006+02:00

The "Arte y Pico" award

Just after receiving my first blogging award ever, for La France Profonde, another nice surprise came through my mailbox.

The Phantom Chef of The Belly Rules the Mind selected Cuisine Quotidienne for the above "Arte y Pico award." I appreciate the honor, especially when reading the rather stringent list of conditions for it:

"The terms of the award are:

1. You pick five blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contribute to the blogging community, no matter what language.

2.Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.

3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and the link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.

4. Award-winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of Arte y Pico blog, so everyone will know the origin of the award.

When thinking about my choices, I realized that although Phantom had chosen cooking blogs, there was no stipulation about that; just "creativity, design, interesting material" and contribution to the blogging community.

To that end, I've cooked up an eclectic list of five winners, some from the culinary blogosphere and others from places far beyond:

Tongue in Cheek

The expat blog to end all expat blogs. Actually it's much more than that: lessons about love, life, and death against a backdrop of French antiques and memorabilia.

Chez Loulou

Food, fresh takes on the French countryside, and La Fête du Fromage. Also an inordinate fascination with abandoned buildings, which is right up my alley.

Siouxwire

For interesting content, you can't do much better than Siouxfire's "journey through art spanning both high and low brow across disciplines." I could spend days there.

A Title? What's in a Title?

Spacedlaw writes her primary blog, Spaced Out Ramblings, on Livejournal, but keeps this little jewel of a blog here on Blogger. Charming photos and music to go with them; nothing more.

L'ennui mélodieux

I'm glad I got this award so I could pass it on to Randal, because I can't quite imagine giving him the cute one with a red heart on it. L'ennui mélodieux's topics range and derange from poetry to politics, classical music to craziness, hockey to hard rock...and please forgive him for the ones (which I won't mention but in my case start with "h") that don't ring your bell because the rest is so damn brilliant.

The winners have been duly notified, and will certainly come up with some great choices of their own!

Of close-ups and cameras

2008-05-18T10:19:00.011+02:00

(Photo NOT courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau)

Thank heavens my husband is a shopper, or I would never even have evolved into the digital camera age. He is always keeping his eye out for the latest practical photography equipment, and manages to get good deals on it to boot.

He bought me my Canon PowerShot S45, which I like for its simplicity of use and the fact that it's easy to carry without being tiny -- I never feel like I'm really taking pictures with those extra-small cameras. I've used it for most of my photos on La France Profonde and have been quite satisfied.

On the other end of the spectrum, Thierry has a huge Pentax whose model number I won't mention because I'm afraid to take it out of its case to check.

He takes a lot of great shots with it, some of which I have featured on FP -- perhaps not enough to his liking, but I suppose he could start his own blog, right?

The problems with the Pentax are 1.) I don't know how to use it and 2.) afore-mentioned husband is never around when it is time to take food shots.

Yet, my Canon just didn't cut it for food close-ups.

Well, to make a long story not quite so long, Thierry recently got a great deal on a SONY Cyber-shot 1080 that I am capable of using AND takes great close-ups.

So now I can take credit for shots like the asparagus above, and this Greek-style feta chicken...

... all with a reasonably lightweight, easy-to-use camera.

I took it with me on my recent day trip to Albi with Loulou of Chez Loulou. I'm not sure it was vastly superior to my Canon for normal town photos, but it definitely did better with food, as witnesses this dessert pic from our meal at Restaurant Stéphane Laurens:

(Nems à la banane et au gingembre, ananas, chocolat chaud et glace au nougat)

And I'm definitely pleased with how it rendered this gorgeous cheese from Albi's covered market:

So to sum it up, my Canon is still going to be living in my purse, but the Sony will be lurking around the kitchen and accompanying me on food-related outings.

Here's to a new world of better food photos!

Bon dimanche!

Lurking on my bookshelves: La Bonne Cuisine Pour Tous

2008-05-09T13:55:00.011+02:00

Rather than buying more cookbooks, I have thought about (not necessarily decided, that might be going a bit too far) taking the time to get to know the books that are already occupying our bookshelves. Over the recent long weekends, I started out this vaguest of resolutions by perusing the above volume, which was part of my husband's meager prenuptial cookbook collection.

Unlike Les Recettes Faciles de François Bernard, which has taught me much of what I know about basic French cooking, La Bonne Cuisine Pour Tous had lurked on my bookshelf for years without ever being used, getting no more than a quick glance once or twice.

I expected to find a lot of information on Internet about this book, as it seems to be a definitive opus about French cooking of days gone by. But just about all I discovered in my Internet search were links to vendors selling used copies of the book, which is apparently out of print.

I did learn that my version, a reprint from 1979, is a virtually exact copy of the original work which appeared in 1908.

So, exactly 100 years after its original publication, I have finally plunged into this fascinating volume -- and it gives a clear picture of how sharply different French cooking was a century ago.

I read the entire chapter on soups and was amazed by some of the cooking times: two hours for a basic potato and leek soup, for example. Other than that, the recipe was about the same as the potato and leek soup I make.

Other soups, though, definitely didn't tickle my modern appetite. How about a potage fécule au lait tonight? Ingredients: milk and potato starch.

The 496-page cookbook includes advice about "what is eaten" every month. So what should be on the menu for May?

Have things changed that much? The above are lunch menus, and there are some intriguing combinations:

Menu two: A real protein festival: plaice, tripes and Bayonne ham? Plus a few eggs in the salad for good measure!

Menu three: Mutton brains with black butter AND cold veal? I'm not sure I'd eat mutton brains any month of the year, even if somehow May is the perfect time to enjoy them...

But I can see plenty of dishes we do eat: macaroni, cold asparagus, cucumber salad...

The book offers up four pages of menu suggestions per month, and dessert is usually just called "dessert."

What's interesting is that even when a specific dessert is suggested, it was apparently de bon ton to add the omnipresent dessert nonetheless:

"Crème au café; dessert"

"Crème glacée; dessert"

I could go on, but I think I'll go whip up a kidney omelette. It's that time of year...

CQ HQ May 2008

2008-05-01T11:27:00.003+02:00

I didn't even get around to writing CQ HQ for April, but I have really enjoyed writing my CQ posts lately, after February's period of soul-searching and doubt.

As I look back over the last few months, I have some positive points to report:

1. Readership -- or at least page viewing -- is way up on CQ. In fact, it has surpassed my truest blog love, La France Profonde. Someone pointed out that this is normal, because there is a lot more interest in French cooking than in the Aveyron department! Oh well...

I'm not a big stat-follower, but it is still encouraging to see an upswing of interest in this site -- and it has led to more enthusiasm for the posts I write. So if FP comes from my soul, CQ is finally starting to come from the heart.

2. I joined a bloggers' network, Foodbuzz, a while back. I honestly don't go to it enough or use its social networking function, but it is a perky food site and I recommend you take a look. They have come through with an early promise to fund some redesign on my cooking blog, and that will be taking place over the summer. And I have just taken in FOUR BIG DOLLARS of advertising income from them for January. Hey, that's a Starbucks coffee this summer in the USA, right? (Although not in France where I recently learned on a trip to Paris that Starbucks drinks run at almost 5 euros -- I can imagine the chagrin of American tourists paying for their Starbucks fix under the current exchange rate!)

3. I have let go of the pressure to post often to CQ, having decided that a well-developed post once a week may be all I can handle for the moment, and is more pleasant to write than "posts just to post."

So basically, I'm looking forward to cooking since spring has finally sprung here, I'm planning on posting perhaps less often but well, and I can't wait for Madeline's redesign over the summer!

Cheers!

A Tale of Two Blanquettes

2008-04-27T11:25:00.016+02:00

One of the inspiring aspects of food blogging is getting cooking ideas from other bloggers. It's one thing to go to a recipe mega-site and pick up an idea for Sunday lunch; it's another to glean inspiration from a fellow cook with whom I've been in blogosphere contact.

Spacedlaw wondered about the identity of the yellowish main dish in the black pot on my last Sunday Stovetop post. It was a bit strange-looking, but absolutely delicious, and had been inspired by a post by Ken from St. Aignan about Blanquette de veau.

The first weekend of April was indeed stewy weather, but to be honest, as nice as Ken's recipe looked, I'm not a big fan of blanquette de veau, which I often find a bit bland. So I decided it was time to try a local specialty of the southern Aveyron -- blanquette d'agneau.

Comparing Ken's veal recipe and my lamb recipe, we can see that they are similar in their cooking method. But Ken's blanquette de veau includes several vegetables that are lovely in this stew but did not appear in my recipe: carrots, mushrooms and baby onions.

I found "my" version of the dish from the cookbook Recettes en Aveyron which abounds in simple, authentic recipes -- simple if you can read French, that is.

Aveyronnais cooking tends to be rather meat and dairy-oriented, and the farming in the area doesn't include a huge amount of vegetable-growing. So perhaps the fact that carrots, mushrooms and baby onions don't appear in the recipe reflects a lack of availability of those ingredients among sheep-raising farmers on the rocky plateaus of the Southern Aveyron.

Blanquettes can actually be made with veal, poultry, rabbit, lamb and even fish, although blanquette de veau is definitely the most famous version. As the name implies, they are white stews, often prepared in a roux-based white sauce.

Lamb blanquette is very tasty, and in fact the only blanquette in my Larousse Gastronomique is a lamb version by Roger Vergé. His recipe seems to take about a day to make and incldes white beans, carrots, mustard (?) and 3 lambs' feet rubbed with lemon juice.

I'm sure it's delicious, but I think I'll stick with my simple peasants' dish!

Sunday Stovetop April 6

2008-04-12T14:08:00.003+02:00

This meal was a bit on the beige side, but then again last Sunday was a beige day. Saturday was gloriously sunny, and Sunday started to veer to grey...and somehow, that made for beige weather.

I actually have quite a bit to say about this meal, but am feeling too lazy to write it -- so it may come in installments.

I do want to thank Loulou for her fabulous baked asparagus risotto recipe, which you can see on the right. There's a little too much hazy sunlight on it to get the full picture, but the principle of baked risotto may have changed my life.

(Sure, my life has really been transformed by learning to simmer my risotto in the oven rather than stirring it on the stovetop.)

How trite. It is truly time for a vacation.

Caught in my own trap

2008-04-10T20:51:00.003+02:00

Once I told you all that last week's "mystery dish" was actually a classic dish and that the recipe was from a famous cookbook, a lot more guesses came in -- all wrong, of course, but who can blame the guessers?

My version of osso bucco from The New Basics Cookbook was hardly respectful of the Rosso and Lukins recipe, nor of osso bucco recipes in general.

Where are the round veal shanks generally associated with the dish?

Well, my butcher didn't really have the proper cut on hand, so I improvised by slicing the veal meat off the end of a shank that he had sold me for a good price...

Why so many vegetables, especially zucchini, when the recipe usually only calls for onions?

Because I had them on hand...and vegetables are good for you, right? In France, we're being overrun with posters telling us to eat at least five fruits and vegetables a day, so my osso bucco modification was a healthy one!

But I can definitely see why no one got the right call on the recipe! It simply looks nothing like the usual photos of the dish, and probably didn't really deserve to bear its name.

Thanks for trying...

The Mystery Dish

2008-04-03T20:37:00.005+02:00

This looks quite tasty, and I'm sure it was -- in February when I cooked it.

The problem is, I truly have no idea what it was, nor when exactly I made it...

Why the hell don't I label my food photos the moment I upload them?

Postscript on Saturday April 5th: for those of you who suggested "pork and vegetables over orzo," I have news for you: I managed to find out what this was by looking in my meal diary, and actually it's a real dish with a real name, and from a famous cookbook to boot!

So the original point of my post was just to moan about how I don't label my food photos, not to turn this into another guessing game. But now that I know what it was, you can guess away!

Creative Publicity

2008-03-28T20:28:00.003+01:00

How I wish I had thought of this sure-fire way to advertise to a large proportion of the French population!

Great Recipes in Strange Places

2008-03-22T11:36:00.009+01:00

In addition to a fairly hefty collection of legitimate cookbooks, I have also accumulated -- often for free -- a number of small recipe brochures and mini-cookbooks. And sometimes they are of surprisingly high quality.

Take this little "carnet" that I think I picked up for free with a Sunday edition of the Midi Libre newspaper.

It's a tiny volume, about the size of a diary, and contains just 45 recipes from the Languedoc-Roussillon and Aveyron areas.

Each recipe is accompanied by a cheery photo, and the dishes I have concocted from it have been universally excellent.

For example, last Sunday I went back to a "Tarte aux pommes de terre et aux pélardons" that I had tried out some time back. A pélardon is a small goat's cheese which is not necessarily available where I live -- but any nice goat's cheese, such as Rocamadour, will do. It certainly did for me.

This is an eggless savory tart, and takes a little more effort to put together than a quiche, mainly because you have to precook the potatoes, then peel and slice them. You then put them on the base of your pastry crust and distribute the goat's cheese over them. (I upped the number from three to four and sliced them down the middle for a total of eight pieces, about one per slice of tart.) After that, you spread some crème fraîche over it all -- a fun step -- and top it with grated gruyère and some suitable herb or herbs.

Yes, this was something of a dairyrama, but a delicious one.

Here is the Sunday Stovetop before...

And after, complete with my now signature non-hidden papier de cuisson. Even French readers have commented that they didn't know it could be put in the oven with the ready-made pastry crust.

Hmmm, I didn't do a very good job cutting the paper this time, though. Must have been that nice glass of white wine in the "before" photo.

I also just realized this is the third quiche or tart I've posted about in the past few months. I promise a change for my next post.

In the meantime, Happy Easter to all of you who celebrate it!

Every Picture Tells a Story

2008-03-16T12:54:00.007+01:00

I've been having a lot of fun with my CQ posts lately, which is a nice contrast to the angst I was experiencing in early February.

For example, when I posted my last "Tasty Tidbit" post, I had totally forgotten that the mystery photo was a recipe from one of my favorite bloggers, SpacedLaw. So it gave me a chuckle when she was the first to comment, saying "Quiche Lorraine? This one looks like a version with zucchini inside."

Actually, SpacedLaw, it was your own tempting recipe for "Torta Rustica." I more or less followed the instructions, although I didn't have ham on hand, so I used lardons instead.

Alisa from Los Angeles, who will soon be living in Aveyron for a year (!) definitely wanted the recipe. So, Alisa, you can find it now -- but feel free to modify! I don't think I ever follow a recipe to the letter.

That's the way I like to see my cooking and this blog -- not a big, organized extravaganza, but rather throwing ideas together depending on ingredients on hand and recipes that have caught my eye.

Making and reinforcing connections with people through the process is the icing on the cake.

Tasty Tidbit

2008-03-12T20:20:00.002+01:00

This is one of the many versions of a French dish that I often make.

Last weekend, my daughters were put out because I hadn't made a much simpler version of the recipe in a long time. They missed the basics!

I thought I was being creative; my family was longing for the simple things...

What do you see above? And what did I make on Sunday to satisfy my children's desires?

Spicy Sunday Chicken

2008-03-08T17:58:00.006+01:00

I have much to say about roast chicken in general, and the above roast chicken in particular.

First, I have an absolutely groovy Pyrex chicken roaster. It's one of those things I picked up at the hypermarché years ago, wondering if I'd really use it. Well do I ever! It is a simple affair -- the bottom part is what you see above and it has a similar-looking but shallower lid.

It makes roast chicken even more of a breeze than it already is. You just drop in your veggies, pour some liquid over them, plop your chicken on the top, close it all up with the lid, and bake it for the appropriate time depending on the weight of the chicken.

The Pyrex roaster keeps everything nice and moist, and you can see it sizzling along. The only delicate part of the procedure is taking the lid off -- watch out for steam burns.

Last Sunday I used my great roaster to make Poulet rôti aux épices et légumes racines from the January-February issue of Elle à table.

I simplified the recipe to the extreme. The chicken was supposed to be cut up, but mine was whole and stayed that way. The recipe called for several root vegetables, but I only had carrots on hand, so carrots it was -- with a few potatoes and a little celery thrown in because that's what else was in the fridge.

I followed the honey-spice mixture to the letter, though: the chicken was drizzled with a mixture of three tablespoons of honey, three tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon total of cinnamon, ground cloves, coriander, nutmeg and pepper. Served with fluffy white rice and a bit of fresh cilantro, it made for great Sunday fare and provided some tasty leftovers for the coming busy week.

Now for those of you who liked the concept two weeks ago, here was the "Sunday Stovetop" for this meal:

Bon dimanche!

CQ HQ March 2008

2008-03-01T14:38:00.004+01:00

Last month's cry from the depths of my blogger's soul brought in a load of comments, support and suggestions about the future of Cuisine Quotidienne.

I think some of what was communicated could be of interest to all food bloggers, especially those who went through a period of February flailing.

The biggest help probably came from my friend Steve in Eugene, Oregon, who contributed a sweeping and cogent analysis of my situation:

"'Ask not what you can do for your blog; ask what your blog can do for
you.'

At first, it may seem like I'm suggesting you just forget about what
everyone else thinks, and write about what you want to write about. Though
admittedly that was sort of my initial gut reaction, I think your response to
the question can lead you down several routes.

'Ask what your blog can do for you' -- what are you primarily trying to
accomplish?

I could imagine that your main goal is self-motivation.
That is, by having a food blog, you are hoping it will encourage you to be more
passionate about the food you prepare and/or consume.

I could imagine that your primary goal is to inspire
others. That is, by having a food blog, you are wanting to share your
love of and appreciation for (certain aspects of) French cooking.

I could imagine that your main goal is one of professional
advancement. That is, by having a food blog, you are hoping to build a
name for yourself in the "food blog" community thereby conferring some future
opportunities.

In reality -- and based on your own comments -- it's probably a little of
all three, isn't it?"

Steve had even more to say -- it was perhaps the longest comment I've ever received -- and I think he astutely identified my motivations for writing this blog, and in the right order:

Self-motivation? Heck, yeah! A lot of self-motivation comes from being part of the food blogging community, despite its sometimes frustrating vastness.

Lately I have tried a couple recipes from fellow bloggers' sites and written about them. Rather than feeling a little lame about this blogging approach, this has been a very satisfying experience. It was just plain fun to make Loulou's Roquefort Onion Tart, and even more fun when a fellow blogger tried it herself -- after finding it on my blog -- and posted about it from California. This sort of turn of events motivates me to cook and to find inspiration from other bloggers.

Inspire others? Maybe not inspire, but at least inform...

I do enjoy sharing the reality of cooking in France, but since sometimes this very reality prevents me from cooking, I have made a minor change in my blog title: "Everyday French Cooking" has been changed to "Everyday French Food." Both can be proper translations of Cuisine Quotidienne, and this modification has freed me up mentally to write more about what's in the shops, what others are eating and serving in France, and restaurant food -- because hey, I do get out once in a while!

Professional advancement? Well, food writing is perhaps one of my long-term professional writing goals -- but it is not in the short-term goal department. And writing this blog has helped me make that decision.

So for the moment, Cuisine Quotidienne will simmer along. Some changes may be on the way -- but I'll keep you in suspense about that.

Thanks again for all of your comments and support!

Stew Sleuthing

2008-02-28T12:04:00.002+01:00

My last Tasty Tidbit led to a lot of guessing about the chicken dish I made a few weeks back.

Was it coq au vin, maybe coq au Riesling?

And, as spacedlaw put it: "Not too sure about what the purply-pink things are supposed to be..."

Well, they were not only "supposed to be" but actually were chicken gizzards, inspired by a chicken, turnip and gizzard stew first presented by Ken of Living the life in Saint Aignan.

I really hoped Ken might recognize the dish, although I didn't have turnips and our final results do look pretty different. The funny thing is that one of his faithful readers, who occasionally drops by my blog but had never commented, made the connection from Canada.

Whatever the story, the stew was delicious, and finally gave me something to do with a packet of frozen chicken gizzards that had been languishing in the freezer for a few months.

Sunday Stovetop

2008-02-24T15:00:00.003+01:00

Or a touch of cuisine vérité.

One of the minor dramas of my life in France is that I have never had a spacious kitchen. Somehow, even though we've always lived in small-to-medium-sized towns, I've always ended up with a Parisian-sized cooking space.

This is partly my own fault. Because of my total lack of interest in the plans for the house we had built here in Aveyron, I lost out on a few square meters of kitchen. I do have a nice deep-blue stove, but things get a little crowded on it.

The photo above shows you a simple Sunday lunch being put together. The oranges have nothing to do with the meal, but I didn't have anywhere else to put them!

Tasty Tidbit

2008-02-20T07:02:00.003+01:00

Our Sunday lunch a few weeks back was particularly inspired -- thanks to a fellow blogger who is one of my faithful readers (hint, hint...).

Any guesses as to what this dish is? And does its original creator recognize my version of it?

Indulging

2008-02-16T10:00:00.004+01:00

I'm going to make a shocking revelation: I'm not much into desserts in general, and French pastries in particular.

When I lived in the States, I had a pretty sharp sweet tooth, which I carried with me to France. But during my two pregnancies I craved salt -- no strawberries or ice cream for me. While I was expecting my second daughter, I used to heat up obscenely large quantities of already-very-salty frozen pommes dauphines -- a kind of potato puff -- and SALT them more for good measure before scarfing them down at 10 in the morning.

I never really lost that desire for salt -- I still sometimes salt things that don't really need it -- and I never got my sweet tooth back. I do enjoy simple, homemade French desserts like clafoutis, but have never gone in for the traditional pastries. I'm sure not going to make them myself, and I've often been disappointed with ones I've bought in bakeries.

That's probably because a lot of bakeries around here are just that -- bakeries and not pâtisseries with a trained pâtissier making his or her own pastries. And when I go to a "real" pâtisserie in Rodez, I'm usually attracted to the most imaginative creations. So I've hardly ever even tasted the basics of French pastries -- until now.

A small bakery in the nearby suburb of Sébazac has recently been taken over by a trained boulanger-pâtissier -- and we have started to indulge in his creations. He sticks to the basics, such as the pastries you see above (clockwise from top):

Chou au caramel

Mille-feuille

Moka

Eclair au chocolat

JM Pâtisseries et Pains (no link available) has definitely changed the way our family deals with Sunday dessert. I don't feel guilty about not making it anymore -- I just buy it!

Fun, not food...

2008-02-12T20:55:00.005+01:00

Back in November, I was tagged quite a few times. My theory was that NaBloPoMo was leading to the increasing quantity of these little games bloggers play...and I still have not responded to a tag from Kate Hill that dates back to about that time. (Kate, I still haven't forgotten about it!)

This time, though, I'm going to get onto the latest tag right away: one from the charming Eleonora at Au fil de mes rêves d'amour. It's in French, though, so what to do?
Just for fun, I'll keep the topics in French but put my answers in English. Then if you really want to find out what the question was...I mean, I'm sure you'll just be dying to know...à vos dictionnaires!

I think the name of the meme is Les César du bonheur -- Les César are the French equivalent of the Oscars.

1 ) Le dernier livre que j’ai savouré :

Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson. I love Bryson but didn't get into this one as much as the last book of his I read: Notes From a Small Island. Parts of Neither...rang a little dated, but I still enjoyed it.

2 ) Le film qui m’a le plus transportée :

Singin' in the Rain, especially the dance number "Moses Supposes."So silly but so brilliant.

3 ) Le plat que je mets au dessus de tout :
Scallops, cooked just about any way.

4 ) Mon plus beau souvenir des 10 dernières années :
Seeing one of my daughters play little Cosette in the Capital Playhouse "Kids at Play" production of Les Misérables in 2004...and seeing the other one play the role for the Sunday afternoon "understudy show." They've both had other roles since, but that was their first significant one. It was really exciting to see them play in this greatest of musicals -- and a French-American one at that!

5 ) L’instant beauté que je préfère :

The what? Hmmm...that implies that there could be more than one...or that there could even be one...I think something is missing in my life here. Maybe I need to pick up more inspiration from My Inner French Girl.

6 ) L’endroit où je me sens le plus moi-même :
My parents' house. Still.

7 ) Mes petits moments de bonheur :
-Leaving the house to go to work when the sun is just coming up...
-Seeing both of my daughters happy after a day at school, or anytime really...
-My first cup of coffee in the morning...
-Catching up with a friend over lunch out...
-Coming out of class and feeling really good about what went on there...

Well, there's not much food in that post, but it sure gave me some good exercise -- all that linking! I'm positively exhausted.

To carry on, I think I'll just tag a few French-speaking food bloggers: Cassoulet Café, Emily and Mimi.

My Post Runneth Over

2008-02-10T20:16:00.000+01:00

My last post sure got the comments coming -- and my mind racing.

Thank you for analyzing, supporting, and suggesting. Besides the many cogent comments, I have also received several emails and even a phone call.

Please excuse me for not responding to them individually or immediately -- they represent a lot to reflect upon.

Interestingly, Mimi of French Kitchen in America wrote a similar post within a few days of mine, and received an outpouring of ideas too.

All of this is a lot to think about...so I may not report back directly on your comments until the next CQ HQ in March. In the meantime, I plan to write some posts!

Thanks for your support.

CQ HQ February 2008

2008-02-06T08:52:00.000+01:00

As I write my monthly round-up of what's going on in my kitchen and on this blog, I am more than ever wondering where I'm headed with Cuisine Quotidienne.

Some of you have read my musings on the subject before, so feel free to zap this post. Or at least bear with me. Or even better, leave a comment because if you've made it this far, you're one of the people I would most like to hear from.

So why all of this soul-searching over this blog, whereas I'm totally content with La France Profonde and And So Forth?

A few facts:

1. I love to cook. I love to eat. But life is very busy and although I do find time to eat, I don't always find time for cooking -- especially cooking of the bloggable variety.

2. I never really feel up to snuff with Cuisine Quotidienne. Food blogging appears to be a particular variety of the blogging genre -- a lot of unspoken rules: plenty of bloggers who seem to have nothing else to do in life but keep up their food blog; a discouraging number of incredibly gifted food photographers.

3. Sometimes the food blog world feels a bit pretentious to me, like what people are writing isn't really coming from the heart. Yet I find myself playing the game, too.

4. Here's the kicker: despite my worst efforts, clicks on Cuisine Quotidienne have tripled since June 2007! So I feel like someone's out there and I should be reaching out to that audience. But I don't really know who it is, because I don't spend hours poring over my stats. I prefer to get at least SOME form of dinner on the table.

5. To sum it all up: as I write, I'm torn between putting the whole blog on a break or trying to go whole-hog, and possibly commercial (on CQ only -- NEVER on my other two babies.)

Any thoughts on the matter?

And the answer is: Gâteau de Pommes de Terre

2008-01-29T06:19:00.000+01:00

Some of you participated in my latest guessing game, but no one got the answer exactly right.

Spacedlaw came pretty close, though, with the suggestion that it looked like a soufflé but could be hachis parmentier, which is similar to the British specialty shepherd's pie. And I'm blogging this at 6:15 am, so you're not going to get any American equivalents of the dish -- this is all I know.

As you can see from the extract above from Les Recettes Faciles de Françoise Bernard -- my precious copy of the book, with the little plus mark at the bottom to indicate "this was good" -- the recipe's name is "Gâteau de pommes de terre."

Since this is not exactly a famous French classic, and no one would look under "gâteau" for a potato recipe, the book cleverly files the recipe under "Pommes de terre (gâteau de)" -- which I somehow find quite charming.

Although it seems like an oxymoron, I'd describe the dish as a potato soufflé -- I'm not sure where the idea of "gâteau" came from as there's nothing cake-like about it.

Rather than start with a bechamel sauce, the base of the dish is mashed potatoes, to which you add 2 egg yolks, two beaten egg whites, and grated cheese.

I usually bake it a little longer than the suggested 25 to 30 minutes to get a cheesy, golden crust over the top. And while separating the eggs and beating the whites sounds like kind of a pain for an everyday dish, I highly suggest keeping this step. I skipped it once and the result was, umm, very compact.

If you can't decipher the recipe above, this version of "Potato soufflé" looks similar and maybe even better. Cream instead of milk! Chives added! I'll have to check it out...

Tasty Tidbits 1

2008-01-24T20:01:00.000+01:00

For my 200th post to Cuisine Quotidienne, I'm starting a new idea: Tasty Tidbits.

Lately I have enjoyed participating in Wordless Wednesday, which seems to be one of the many weekly blogging events out there -- albeit a very loosely formed one.

My idea for "Tasty Tidbits" is to push myself to make a short post to CQ once a week or so in a addition to my usual, longer posts.

The best thing about my little concept is that I can post under the category whenever. I resisted the temptation to call it "Tasty Tidbit Tuesday," which would have been oh-so-clever, but obviously limiting.

So for today, a little guessing game -- it's been a long time!

What is the dish above?

Hints: it's not exactly a French classic, although it is typically French, and the recipe comes from this cookbook.

Loulou's Onion Roquefort Tart

2008-01-20T12:38:00.000+01:00

After my plea for ideas for what to do with Roquefort cheese, Loulou of Chez Loulou (logical enough) was kind enough to clue me in to her recipe for Caramelized Onion, Roquefort and Parmesan Tart.

You can see the result above.

So what the heck is that papery substance doing around this lovely tart, especially on a cooking blog?

Well, truth be told, I never make my own crusts. I know this is very wrong. Yet in France you can buy perfectly edible pâtes brisées -- much better than their American counterparts -- and I buy them all the time. They look like this when you put them in your quiche dish:

The paper the crusts come rolled up in is called papier de cuisson; think of it as waxed paper without the wax. It's a very practical thing, because your crust never sticks when you use it, and you hardly need to wash the dish afterwards.

So to get back to the tart, I caramelized my onions, which meant almost burning them but not quite -- a delicate operation:

Then I got my Roquefort out of the fridge. Here is the horrible truth. My Roquefort did not look like this; it looked like what you see below, and had been languishing in the fridge for weeks, if not months:

But once I opened it up, it appeared pretty peppy: proof that some things, like wine and expatriates, improve with age:

Taking care not to crumble aluminum foil into my tart, I sprinkled bits of elderly Roquefort over the onions:

A little blurry, true, but I have given up any pretenses of being a food photographer.

I do consider myself a photographer of sorts -- but not the culinary sort.

And that's the way it's going to be on Cuisine Quotidienne in 2008; so if you don't care for that approach, click here.

So back to the tart. I kind of, sort of, used Loulou's recipe, but I make no guarantees about the exact proportion of eggs and various creams that went into it. And I definitely didn't have any Parmesan, so Gruyère had to do. But this is how it looked when it went into the oven:

As for when it came out, go back to the top of the post.

How delicious do you think that was?

Merci Loulou!

My French Cooking Bible

2008-01-13T15:55:00.000+01:00

She's like Betty Crocker except better, because she's real and she's French.

Her name is Françoise Bernard, and she taught me how to cook here in the land where every woman seems to naturally know how to. (I am achingly aware of how sexist that sentence is, and also achingly aware of how "everyone" would be factually incorrect.)

My French husband, who doesn't really know how to, was the proud owner of this very volume when I moved to France to be with him in 1990. I don't think he had opened the book up very often, but 18 years later, it is falling apart from use.

New editions are available, of course, with a fresh pink and green cover:

Someday I may invest in the updated version of this bible of French cooking...someday..

Roquefort: So Much of a Good Thing!

2008-01-09T15:57:00.000+01:00

Aveyron is the land of Roquefort cheese, and it often surprises me that so many Americans have heard of Roquefort, but so few have heard of the area it comes from.

Since my husband gets gifts of food from the farmers he advises, such as the free foie gras I blogged about a few posts back, our larder is usually brimming with Roquefort. Seldom used in salad dressings in France, Roquefort is more likely to make its way into egg dishes and sauces, as well as starring on the cheese platter.

I often have more of it around than I know what to do with, especially since I am plagued by a problem of family tastes: one of my daughters does not like it. And when people don't like Roquefort, they usually have a true aversion to it...which is the case with my eldest.

But when I have a plan B for the non-Roquefort-loving child, the other members of my family savor all types of Roquefort-filled recipes:

Roquefort quiche,

Roquefort and ham clafoutis from Les Clafoutis de Christophe,

Feuilletés au Roquefort,

Roquefort mashed potatoes,

and my personal favorite: pasta with Roquefort sauce.

We also enjoy it sprinkled over Belgian endive or beet salad.

But we are truly ALWAYS looking for new ideas for using Roquefort. Of course I discovered dozens of recipes while looking for the above links -- which are approximate versions of my own dishes -- but it's always more fun to hear suggestions from fellow bloggers!

So, imagine I send you a big hunk of our excess Roquefort. What would you do with it?

(Photo courtesy of Xavier Fromage, Toulouse's finest purveyor of cheeses. Click here to visit the shop's site in English.)

CQ HQ January 2008

2008-01-05T09:57:00.000+01:00

The holidays are over. No more foie gras and champagne -- all right, they're not to be ruled out! But they won't be sliced and poured as freely as they were over the last few weeks. Sigh.

So much for endings. Now for beginnings: Cuisine Quotidienne is off to a new start. I'm planning to change its format a bit, focusing more on ingredients and what becomes of them in everyday French cooking rather than taking the "this is what I made today" approach.

I also hope to get back to more coverage of French cooking magazines and cookbooks. This was part of my original plan for CQ, but it somehow got buried among all the photos of "great stuff I had cooked and just had to blog about."

Also, you may notice on the sidebar that I have joined a new blogging network as a featured publisher: Foodbuzz. I don't know a lot yet about what this will entail, but I like the feel of the site -- for example, I think my profile looks pretty spiffy. I'm hoping this affiliation will boost me to post more often.

Blogging aside, my cooking goals for January are simply to get back into a more regular routine. Between a very busy first few weeks of December and the holidays, the kitchen is definitely out of kilter!

Celebrate...

2008-01-02T18:34:00.000+01:00

...is what I've been doing the past few days -- and I hope you have been too!

Happy New Year from Cuisine Quotidienne!

Free foie gras

2007-12-28T09:21:00.001+01:00

I know how to make a traditional terrine de foie gras, and you can too. This recipe from Epicurious closely resembles the terrine I used to lovingly prepare every Christmas, and it is truly simple to make.

But do you know what? Delicious as that home-made terrine is, I won't look my nose down on a jar of foie gras fresh from the farm -- especially if it's free.

Call it one of the few perks of my husband's job as an agricultural management consultant: we get some tasty gifts from local farmers, like this unassuming tin of foie gras. It definitely simplified my Christmas cooking, and I thought you might like to take a look at what was inside.

Getting the goods out of these cans is a little tricky. You have to open both ends, then push the foie out, being careful not to cut yourself along the way. Here I'm almost halfway through that perilous step of the process:

The foie comes out looking, well, a lot more gras (fat) than foie (liver.) But that nice covering of fat is what's keeping the liver inside moist and rich:

I hacked away the fat and kept some of it, thinking I might fry potatoes in it. But that probably won't happen. There's only so much duck fat one can take -- even at Christmas, even in Southwest France:

Finally what you're really interested in -- the foie gras itself. I sliced it into unreasonably thick slabs and served it on toasted apricot-fig bread special-ordered from our local grocery store:

I'm glad we had a big jar, because my daughters have been known to eat it for breakfast!

Noël off

2007-12-26T09:30:00.000+01:00

On December 23rd, I thought I was just having friends over for a Sunday lunch -- a traditional French event that I rarely have time to host.

But thanks to up-and-coming chef, famous Aveyronnais, and all-round cutie Cyril Lignac,

I realized my company meal could be so much more. It could be a Noël off!

Now I know I have already gently castigated Cyril's magazine, cuisine by, for its oh-so-chic use of English to pepper up its articles:

"Then there is the rather liberal use of English in "cuisine by Cyril Lignac" -- I guess we could start with the magazine's title. I'm no staunch defender of "French-only" policies, but when Cyril's mag features "un people," Olivia Ruiz, I have to cringe. Also I have to admit that I didn't even know who ce? cette? people was until I read about the good fun the singer had making her favorite profiteroles with Cyril.

But I'll forgive him."

And I've fogiven him again for "Noël off," which really rings cutting-edge, and turned my pre-Christmas Sunday lunch into an elegant, almost Parisian happening -- at least in my mind.

The concept -- a pre-Christmas meal among friends before the family festivities begin -- does help to make the season bright, especially for those of us who live far away from home.

So, my Noël off was quite the success -- at least in my mind -- as was my Noël on, partly thanks to new recipes I tried out from both Elle à table and cuisine by Cyril Lignac. The latter doesn't seem to have its own Internet site yet, though. I guess Cyril can only be on so many media fronts at once: TV, magazines, Cuisine Quotidienne...

Joyeux Noël de Cuisine Quotidienne

2007-12-24T18:17:00.001+01:00

Before starting to cook Christmas Eve dinner, I want to wish a very Merry Christmas to all of my gourmet and "gourmand" readers. Enjoy the holidays, however you celebrate them!

Seasoned Eatings!

2007-12-22T13:08:00.000+01:00

Somehow in the busy craziness of December, I managed to participate in a nice blogging event organized by Katie at Thyme for Cooking and Lindsay of Country Girl City Living.

Before thanking my Secret Spice Santa, I'd like to say chef's hats off to the organizers of "Seasoned Eatings!"

How anyone can keep a blog event like this straight is beyond me. I somehow managed to mess up even my modest end of the affair: sending my package a day late, not understanding the exact feedback requested, missing the deadline for the round-up, and so forth.

But it was still fun, and I want to thank the person behind Mele Cotte -- I have her name, but she seems to be quite anonymous on her blog, so I'll leave it at that -- for the lovely package sent from Marietta, Georgia. I couldn't have been more spoiled: not only some great herbs and spices, but also all sorts of fun Christmas treats!

Thanks to this package, I will finally learn what exactly Old Bay seasoning is and how to use it! I've heard of it but don't think it's that well known in the Pacific Northwest, and certainly unheard of here in France.

And someday, I will make the fantastic jambalaya recipe that my pal included in the package. But maybe not right away, and certainly not in time to write it up anywhere near the deadline that I'm already late for....

You see, this weekend I'm busy using the special Christmas Post-it shopping list that I got in my package to finally to get organized for my Christmas meals -- which start tomorrow with a special "Christmas off" meal with friends.

Cheers to all the participants and happy holiday cooking!

Happy Holiday Preparation!

2007-12-09T10:31:00.000+01:00

I am frantically trying to get our Christmas preparations together, all the while working over full-time and going to different holiday functions in the evening. It's a busy time, even in the French countryside!

I think I'm going to put Cuisine Quotidienne on hold for about two weeks as I get ready for the end-of-the-year festivities.

I definitely want to update my Christmas menus this year by trying out some new recipes. My last few Christmas meals have been full of easily-prepared, traditional dishes that I can practically cook up with my eyes closed -- so it's definitely time for a change.

What are your Christmas cooking plans?

(Photo courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau)

CQ HQ December 2007

2007-12-01T11:13:00.000+01:00

The weeks are getting busier and busier, and I haven't found much time for cooking original dishes, much less blogging about them. But I am happy to report that I am managing to respect some of the objectives I set for this school year's culinary organization.

For example, I have managed to eliminate a lot of ready-made foods from our menus. Don't get me wrong -- I like to cook and do not rely on packages and packets. But when things get hectic, last year I found myself turning a little too often to frozen dishes from Picard.

The problem with Picard is that every time I go there, I get tempted by products like this:

Wouldn't you want to taste a fig, mozzarella and smoked-ham pizza? I know I would..and did.

But this school year, I'm trying to cut that out for a variety of reasons. When I really don't have the energy to cook, rather than taking the frozen food route, I have turned more to locally-produced ready-made products, put up in jars or vacuum-packed by local farmers. This is a growing agrifood sector, and I feel better about eating farm foods from the area than buying overly-packaged frozen products from a big chain.

This is one of the directions I'm hoping to take CQ in 2008: a little more about the products available in France, from supermarket choices to locally-produced dishes. Because I just don't always find the time or the energy to cook...even here in the French countryside.

A Surprising Encounter

2007-11-25T13:00:00.001+01:00

I hadn't seen you since last summer at my parents' house, and I must admit I was taken aback to run into you in the aisles of a Rodez supermarket.

Don't get me wrong -- I like you fine.

To tell the horrifying truth, I prefer your syrup to the pure Canadian version that I have been able to buy for years here in La France Profonde. And I fully realize that this is a culinarily incorrect thing to admit to on a food blog.

Yet there is something vaguely disturbing about your smiling presence here in the French heartlands.

Will there soon be no food products that I can look forward to eating every summer in the USA?

The Simple Things: Sausage and Cabbage

2007-11-20T06:15:00.000+01:00

I am going through my food photo archives, and this is one of my earliest, non-blurry food shots.

It dates from December 2006 and carries absolutely no written details.

I do believe you're looking at saucisse de Montbéliard on the left, steamed or boiled cabbage in the middle, and saucisse de Morteau on the right. It all makes for a kind of pared down, fresh-cabbage-based choucroute.

Definitely a simple dish for a windy, wintery day; put lots of fancy mustards on the table, and it will be even better.

Beaujolais Nouveau ou Non?

2007-11-16T19:05:00.001+01:00

Yesterday was the evening of Beaujolais nouveau's "arrival" all over France.

As I wrote last year at this time, local vins primeurs are making significant inroads in the festivities. Around here, that means drinking new wines from the Gaillac wine-producing area.

This year, we missed the "official" Beaujolais kick-off, but tonight we are celebrating...with a Gaillac primeur.

If you live in France, are you enjoying Beaujolais nouveau or a local wine this weekend?

Si vous habitez en France, profitez-vous d'un Beaujolais nouveau ce weekend, ou bien un vin primeur de votre propre région?

Wordless Wednesday

2007-11-14T19:54:00.000+01:00

Cuisine Quotidienne Clips

2007-11-11T10:31:00.000+01:00

As if anyone floating around the blogosphere on a Sunday morning could lack reading material...here are five interesting places to wander off to if you're into French cooking:

1. Should France's culinary heritage be recognized by UNESCO?

2. Today's Chicago Tribune features a recipe for Rosemary and Thyme cookies. I suppose the word "cookies" precludes this from being a truly French recipe, but I often add small amounts of those herbs to desserts, especially to apple-based ones.

3. My favorite French recipe site, Marmiton.org, does have an English-speaking version, letscookfrench.com. But with only 292 recipes compared to Marmiton's 37,979 and counting, I'm not sure Let's Cook French is getting off the ground.

4. I've eaten here four times, but haven't "gone up" since he got his third Michelin star. Just an idea for anyone coming through Aveyron who wants to take me out to lunch...

5. There must be a thousand links to pantry lists out there, but I quite liked this one from greatfood.ie. All right, I know it's not a French site! Do you have a favorite online pantry list?

Has France out-crumbled Great Britain?

2007-11-05T19:08:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening I concocted a delicious zucchini and goat cheese crumble, inspired partly by this recipe on Marmiton and partly by the lovely little volume on the right.

I guess I'm in a cross-cultural mood these days, so I started to wonder: has France out-crumbled Great Britain?

It does seem that every French cooking magazine I've read for the past few...years...presents a new version of "le crumble."

Well, I'm happy to inform British cooks that you are still crumble champions, at least according to my highly scientific study:

Google.com references for "crumble + recipe" = about 1,760,000

Google.fr references for "crumble + recette" = about 1,360,000

Yet it looks like the French could catch up...

Question pour les lecteurs et lectrices francophones: que penser de cet engouement pour "les crumbles?"

(P.S. Just in case the person who left the slightly snide anonymous comment on my "Halloween in France" post on La France Profonde is reading:

No, I don't "expect" the French to start baking crumbles and crisps like crazy. It just seems to have happened that way...)

Everyday French Cuisine?

2007-11-04T09:30:00.000+01:00

If you think it's all foie gras, coq au vin, and mousse au chocolat -- think again.

This is one of the oh-so-many "kit" dishes that can be easily found in larger French supermarkets.

Last year I tried this tandoori chicken out, and I hate to tell my British readers out there (I won't even mention Indian readers, for whom this product is likely an unspeakable abomination) that we all thought it was pretty lousy. The meat came out a strange shade of purple, and the dish certainly didn't give us the sort of quick spicy-food fix we were looking for.

But then again, perhaps I had made the equivalent of a canned cassoulet -- in that case, why should it have been any good?

CQ HQ November 2007

2007-11-02T08:33:00.001+01:00

November is finding me a bit more positive about CQ than I was a few days back. I'm still mulling over new ideas to make this blog more manageable in 2008, but at the same time, some positive points have come to my attention.

I'm not a stat maniac, but I do consult my Statcounter account from time to time, and over the past few months the number of hits for CQ has gone way up. CQ used to lag significantly behind La France Profonde; all of a sudden the situation is reversed and I'm getting almost twice as many page views for CQ as for FP. So maybe I'm doing something right!

I also got a nice mention on a clever blog, Serge the Concièrge. Serge is a prolific blogger: six posts on Halloween alone! He does seem to be trying to make some money off his blog, and I wish him luck.

Then I found a whole post about my blogs on C'est la Vie. Adele wrote: "Betty's blogs are all so beautiful, especially her cooking blog!" Now that's food for thought to any discouraged food blogger...

I have also been visiting and leaving comments on more French cooking blogs written en français, but since my blog is written in English I don't often get comments in return. There seems to be quite a tightly-knit community of French food bloggers out there, whereas English-speaking cooking blogs are very numerous and far-flung geographically.

So I 'm trying to reach out to French readers by asking a question in French on each post, since part of what I want to do with CQ is report on how and what real French women are cooking -- especially working women.

Affaire à suivre...

Pour mes lecteurs et lectrices francophones: Qui êtes-vous? Laissez-moi un petit commentaire, je parle français et j'accepte volontiers des coms dans cette langue que j'adore!

And don't forget my leitmotif for the rest of 2007:

Readers, friends, gawkers and lurkers -- your suggestions about the future of Cuisine Quotidienne are welcome. And hey, I know you're out there! Statcounter told me so!

Happy Halloween!

2007-10-31T06:26:00.000+01:00

Boo!

Enough breathtakingly gorgeous photos of pumpkins and orange squash! For Halloween, I'm posting one of my family's favorite vegetable dishes: carottes à la crème.

I usually use Roger Vergé's recipe from his vegetable cookbook -- it has a few nice added touches -- but simpler versions will do the trick quite nicely too.

By the way, after my last post about "comfort food,"an anonymous commenter did give me an idea on a translation for the term: "une nourriture réconfortante."

I agree it translates the idea, and yes I did ask for inventions, so thank you to anonymous!

But just out of curiosity, has anybody actually heard that expression used in French?

Question à mes lecteurs et lectrices francophones: avez-vous entendu utiliser l'expression "une nourriture réconfortante." Ou peut-on estimer qu'elle a été créée pour un commentaire de Cuisine Quotidienne?

French Comfort Food: Jardinière de légumes

2007-10-28T10:19:00.000+01:00

With heure d'hiver starting and temperatures dropping, it's time to think about heart (and stomach) warming dishes.

I don't know if there is a French translation for "comfort food," but one of my family's favorites in the "what-to-eat-on-a-cold-Sunday" category is a jardinière de légumes.

This basic vegetable stew can be cooked up in a winter version, with regular vegetables, or in a spring edition, with légumes nouveaux, or baby vegetables.

I usually use Françoise Bernard's recipe -- a basic formula for a simple dish.

Here are two online recipes: one for fall and winter, and one for spring. Sorry I couldn't come up with one in English! Maybe a reader can...

Question du jour pour les lecteurs et lectrices francophones:

Connaissez-vous une traduction pour l'expression "comfort food?" Ou bien pourriez-vous en créer?

Searching for a new direction

2007-10-20T10:59:00.001+02:00

Apparently last May I was cooking dishes that looked like this.

I think I've even already blogged about this lovely navarin de poisson, but I'm not going to link back to it. So there!

This week, I tossed frozen quiche lorraine into the oven, made a pasta gratin, a très basique soup, and risotto, each served with either pâté or the very simplest of salads.

All right, it tasted pretty good. But it's not quite up to my culinary objectives for this school year.

The problem is, this school year is looking to be pretty busy.

I think 2008 will have to ring in a new direction for CQ. I'm not quite sure where I'll go, but the "peruse cookbooks, decide what to cook, shop, cook, take photos, then blog -- preferably including the recipe -- about that delicious dish" format is proving a tad bit unwieldy for me.

In addition, it's not quite what I originally intended CQ to be.

Now mind you, I do have a few visitors out there -- 21,173 hits as I write.

Readers, friends, gawkers and lurkers -- your suggestions about the future of Cuisine Quotidienne are welcome.

In the meantime, I'm planning to spend the rest of 2007 going through my archived CQ photos and posting the most interesting ones that have never been used --and maybe a few that have been!

Sweets for the sweet...or de bons bonbons

2007-10-13T11:27:00.000+02:00

I don't have much of a sweet tooth, but I do give into temptation when it comes to French candies.

When I went to a local trade fair last week, my daughters insisted I pick up some of the bulk candy usually sold at these events. It cost a fortune -- I paid almost seven euros for a modest handful of colorful treats -- but I must admit the goodies were better than the supermarket or grocery store variety.

My favorites were the soft caramels....although the pink-filled licorice that the French call bonbons anglais tasted pretty sweet too.

French cooking fans unite; help solve a mystery!

2007-10-06T09:55:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago, I bought a 1971 issue of an old French cooking magazine called France à Table. I was intrigued by its special issue about the Aveyron department, where I live. Little did I know I would become fascinated -- no, obsessed -- by the periodical's advertising strategy.

In a magazine that obviously targeted the gourmet set, wouldn't you expect ads for modern fridges and toasters, new-fangled ready-made foods, or at least some of France's glorious cheeses?

Instead, the pages are filled with scary-looking people suffering from all sorts of maladies, such as the woman above who needs "injectable brain oxygenisation" to get her through middle age.

Read and see more here.

CQ HQ October 2007

2007-10-02T18:35:00.001+02:00

October finds me comfortably settling -- all right, settled --into the fall routine.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been trying to make an effort to put blogging into a manageable perspective. So far I have been successful, and in the process have found more time to cook as well.

September saw me trying out new starters, testing local products, and also getting my family involved in cooking: once a week, either one of my daughters or my husband must get a meal on the table.

It has been fun, although it does still require some involvment on my part. In fact, I think I need to end this post and help my youngest make her flammeküche!

Katie's Colors

2007-09-27T19:14:00.000+02:00

I must admit I have less "thyme" for food blogging these days...but I have been doing plenty of cooking!

This is partly due to my subscription to Thyme for Cooking, the excellent menu planning service offered by fellow food AND expat blogger Katie...

Here's to you, Katie -- and your great zucchini gratin above!

La France à Table?

2007-09-22T10:14:00.000+02:00

If the photo to the right intrigues you, check out my latest post on La France Profonde. And if you have any information about, or memories of, the magazine La France à Table, I would be most interested in your comments.

Si la photo à droite vous intrigue, lisez mon dernier billet de La France Profonde. Et si vous avez des informations ou des souvenirs concernant la revue La France à Table, cela m'intéresserait -- laissez-moi un commentaire...

Bad photo, great food...

2007-09-16T12:42:00.000+02:00

I have become way too picky about my blog photos, especially on Cuisine Quotidienne.

I mean, if it's all about everyday cooking, I shouldn't get hung up on how clear my food photos are, should I?

Take this filet mignon de porc aux petits légumes. The photo is blurry, but the taste wasn't!

I got this recipe from the Nestle website. I don't often go to corporate recipe sites, but this is the version of the dish that most fit in with the ingredients I had on hand. And I can't complain about the result.

The Simple Things

2007-09-12T14:28:00.000+02:00

I live in a gorgeous agricultural region where the markets abound with local food products. So it really is a pity that my quick, school-night meals sometimes revolve around frozen foods from the Picard chain.

This school year, I have decided to try out more of the ready-made food products available from local farmers. Sausage and pâtés are stars of Aveyron's farm food show, and are traditionally served as a starter he in the French countryside.

My family has a little trouble swallowing protein upon protein, though, so if we indulge in a local meat treat, it usually becomes part of our main course.

Saturday we tried out some locally-made fritons de porc.

I must admit that I have generally avoided fritons de porc, which somehow translated in my mind to "fat and more fat."

How wrong I was! The above fritons were smooth, creamy and contained just enough fat to keep them moist.

Spread onto fresh bread, they made a perfect pair with steamed red potatoes...and that main course duo gave me time to experiment with a new starter.

Great Green Gaspacho

2007-09-08T20:14:00.001+02:00

Cooking is off to a good start this fall -- thank you for asking!

I haven't gotten back to blogging that much yet, but I have been doing a lot of cooking. I have also been going the extra kilometer to get colorful, fresh ingredients into my kitchen...and that is at least half the battle.

Today I brought starters back to our Saturday afternoon lunch table. They had been absent for many a year...which is a pity. They are my favorite meal course, and I think we don't get enough of them in this household.

Enough introduction. This afternoon, I tried out "Gaspacho Vert" from the August 2007 issue of Elle à Table. This recipe is so simple it's almost ridiculous: two avocadoes, two cucumbers, two limes, a bit of garlic...and blend it all up.

I added a tiny bit of cream because I think it takes the acidity out of this type of soup, and served it just barely cold...a few sprigs of parsley on the top...delicious.

CQ HQ: September 2007

2007-08-31T11:48:00.000+02:00

Isn't it nice to take a break? At first, I felt a little guilty about my month off from Cuisine Quotidienne; now I realize how much I needed a little time to just THINK about blogging!

I am back from seven weeks in the USA, and my head is full of plenty of ideas for the coming months.

A little reorganization of my personal blogosphere may be in order. Some of you know that I write three other blogs: La France Profonde, And So Forth, plus a new effort on Typepad called My European Scrapblog.

I also have an almost-full-time teaching job and do a little bit of professional writing on the side...and oh yes, there's my family! You can see that my life can get awfully busy. So with a new school year on the horizon, I always try to faire le ménage, or do a little clean-up...literally and figuratively.

I am definitely going to continue with FP, which is by far my most popular blog. ASF will stay open as a catch-all when I want to play Sunday Scribblings or Ten on Tuesday, but I'm not sure how much effort I will put into it this school year.

As for My European Scrapblog, I am torn -- the few posts I have written have been very interesting to do, and I think it could fit into a nice niche. But I'm not getting used to Typepad that quickly and, of course, I'm wondering if I will really have time to keep it up...and pay for it to boot.

Shouldn't I be cooking instead?

CQ HQ August 2007

2007-08-01T20:11:00.000+02:00

A guessing game,

a revelation,

and a vacation...

that's what you'll find in this month's CQ HQ.

First, the guessing game.

What's this quick and easy dish on the right?

Hint: it was obscenely easy, and used only two ingredients.

Second, the revelation.

I have figured out why food blogging is somewhat more challenging than many other types of blogging...and why my food blog all too often falls by the wayside.

To create other blogs, you just have to blog. But to write a food blog (drum roll) -- in most cases, you have to cook first! And next, you have to come up with a nice photo of what you made. Then, and then only, do you get to the blogging part. It's actually quite a complicated process.

These are definite barriers to my making Cuisine Quotidienne what I wanted it to be when I started it. The truth is, I don't cook enough because I am overwhelmed by work, home, family...and blogging!

Hmm. I think I need to take a little time to think about what I'm doing with this blog, which leads to...

A vacation!

Is it my imagination, or are a lot of food bloggers more or less on vacation this summer? It seems that I've been dropping by some of my favorite food blogs and finding major lulls in the most unlikely places.

Personally, I'm not doing any cooking right now. I don't have that much to write about here, although I'm having a lot of fun here, here and over there.

So, it's official. Cuisine Quotidienne is going to take the month of August off.

What could be more French, after all?

Organizational Issues

2007-07-23T16:39:00.001+02:00

After over a week of steady rain here in the Pacific Northwest, I just went through some cooking photos from France and realized this is the type of dish I was cooking in June! We didn't have much of a summer then either, which explains why I was baking potato gratin dishes at a time when we are usually living off salads.

These were excellent: individual servings of mashed potatoes, covered with a little cheese and cream and baked for...who knows? And from what cookbook?

I don't remember.

Organization is generally one of my strong points, but I have to admit that I don't have my cookbook-to-table-to-blog act together.

Fellow food bloggers, what are your tricks for organizing your cooking, recipes, food shopping and blogging?

Mid-Month Meal Inspiration:July 2007

2007-07-17T20:09:00.003+02:00

Summertime, and the cooking is easy...very easy for me, since I am spending my vacation with my parents and enjoying my mother's delicious home cooking!

I have made a few recipes from my brand new cookbook, but some technical photo problems are preventing me from sharing them for the moment. I hope I can get that worked out by August!

Thank heavens I can count on Katie, who provided me with most of the links for this month's MMMI. In fact, I really can't say enough about Katie and her fantastic blog Thyme for Cooking. She is one of the most devoted food bloggers out there, and her food actually looks like it comes from a mortal's kitchen.

She also provides a recipe service that I am tempted to try out next school year.

Carry on, Katie, and thanks for your links!

This month, I'm just providing a few simple ideas for your mid-month inspiration:

THREE SIMPLE SUPPERS:

1. Sandwiches are great summer fare, and I must admit I'm enjoying the many scrumptious varieties dished up here in the States. How about trying one without bread? -- Eggplant and Goat Cheese Sandwiches with Tomato Tarragon Sauce from Sher of What Did You Eat?

2. Katie at Thyme for Cooking is great at getting double mileage, or kilometrage, out of her meals. Her Brown Rice Pilaf and Salad starts off as "just" Brown Rice Pilaf, giving you two dinners from one.

3. In the "it came out of a real kitchen" department, I liked the looks of Gnocchi with Zucchini and Prosciutto from A Taste of Tina.

SUMMERY SWEET:

For me, nothing beats clafouti. I make all types from the cookbook Les Clafoutis de Christophe. Plum Clafouti from Ceres and Bacchus sounds especially pleasing for a summer sweet.

SUMMER SIPPING:

If the heat is on, cool down with Lemon Mint Iced Tea from Coffee and Cornbread.

Enjoy summer and all the good food that comes with it!

July Mid-Month Meal Inspiration: Last Call

2007-07-15T16:47:00.001+02:00

Summertime and the living is easy...and you have certainly found a few great recipes floating around the blogosphere. I know I have.

Make sure to send links to them to me, right here on this post, for the July 2007 version of Mid-month Meal Inspiration.

Remember, you don't have to have actually tried the recipe. It's even better if you've just bookmarked it!

For an idea of what MMMI is all about, take a look at last month's edition.

Fiches de cuisine des USA: "Le potato salad"

2007-07-12T17:16:00.001+02:00

French friends and acquaintances often ask me if I "cook French" or "American," as if the former would be unlikely and the latter would be unfortunate.

I answer, quite airily, that I do all sorts of cooking...French, American, Italian, Indian, Chinese, Mexican. That usually shuts them up.

To be honest, though, at least half of my cooking falls into the traditional French category. There's so much to master in one cuisine alone that I don't really want to flitter and flutter all over the world's cooking. I would also lose the thematic unity of my blog, which is, after all, about everyday French cooking.

We are in the USA now, and are enjoying some excellent dishes prepared by my mother and best friend. Every summer I promise to make a mental note of which recipes are big hits in order to make them back in France, but I'm not very good about reading mental notes. So this year, I'll try to blog about a few great American dishes that I can later work into my half-French, half-international kitchen.

The first, and the one my daughters clamor for most, is "le potato salad." Now don't tell me that pomme de terre, patate, and salade are all feminine words -- in my family's French-American vernacular, the above treat is somehow masculine.

Inspired by my grandmother, I make a simple combination of potatoes, bacon, green onions, hard-boiled eggs and pickles with a fairly light coating of mayonnaise. I do add a little "French touch": fresh herbs.

It's a nice change from the ever-present rice salads served all over France all summer.

Call for Links: Mid-month Meal Inspiration July 2007

2007-07-08T17:02:00.001+02:00

I am just emerging from endless preparation for my summer in the USA and a two-day trip here.

Yes, I did say two days! I need to inform my travel agent that a one-hour layover to catch an international flight is not quite sufficient. That said, the Boston Airport Hilton is a lovely place.

I am a little disconnected from the blogging world, but do plan to get back into the swing of things and even do some cooking here at my parents' house.

In the meantime, the best I can do for a post is to remind you to send in promising recipe links found on your favorite cooking blogs from July 1st to July 15th . The July 2007 "Mid-month Meal Inspiration" will be published on July 16th.

Any news about your summer cooking and blogging plans would also be welcome!

CQ HQ July 2007

2007-07-01T12:35:00.000+02:00

June flitted away too fast, and my cooking plans too often went by the wayside in a flurry of dance recitals, birthday celebrations, and professional changes.

Now I am practically on vacation, and will be flying off to spend the summer in the USA from July 5th until August 29th.

My parents now have a PC, and I plan to continue CQ, La France Profonde and And So Forth from Olympia, Washington.

I haven't told my parents, but I even have cooking plans for the holidays. As soon as I get back to the States, I'm going to buy Patricia Wells' new cookbook, Vegetable Harvest, and try out some of her recipes with produce from the Olympia Farmers' Market.

I'll definitely be hosting "Mid-Month Meal Inspiration" again too, so start bookmarking promising recipes published from July 1st-July 15th on your favorite blogs.

Finally, if you look at my sidebar, you'll see a new feature: The Foodie Blogroll. Even though this is a huge list, it has brought in a few more visitors and is a fun way to quickly and randomly check out a variety of food blogs.

As you can see, I have lots of projects in store for Cuisine Quotidienne despite my lack of blogging and cooking activity in June.

What are your summer plans -- cooking, blogging or other?

New shapes for simple classics

2007-06-28T10:50:00.000+02:00

Writing Cuisine Quotidienne has led me to think a bit more about how to present dishes. My small kitchen is in no way an artist's or photographer's studio, yet I do experiment with different forms and shapes.

Tomates-mozzarelle have become an extremely popular starter in France over the past ten years or so. I don't remember eating them at all in the early 1990s and am not sure I could even find mozzarella cheese in France at that point, when the even simpler "tomates-vinaigrette" dominated the summer salad scene.

Now tomates-mozzarelle are standard fare, so standard that we tire of them by late May -- except perhaps this year, as rain and cold have prevented us from moving into our usual summer culinary mode!

The usual presentation of this salad consists in alternating the tomatoes and the cheese on a large serving platter. Or when people are feeling really lazy, they just toss everthing together in a bowl.

To vary the dish's appearance, I sometimes present the whole tomatoes and cheese slices in "fans" as above, or serve the salad in individual glasses. Appearance does count for something, after all!

Do you have any variations on the tomato and cheese salad theme? Share them here...

Food Blog? Do I Write a Food Blog?

2007-06-22T11:12:00.000+02:00

I have officially succumbed to France's joyful June madness.

My family and I are like these birds, barely finding the time to scratch about for food as we flit around.

Food blog? Do I write a food blog?

(Thank you to Terre Adélie: Le carnet for the artwork: "Les oiseaux de juin")

Mid-month Meal Inspiration: June 2007

2007-06-17T10:45:00.000+02:00

Mission accomplished: this month's version of "Mid-month Meal Inspiration" will include links from two other bloggers. I guess that isn't so bad considering I haven't publicized this new "event" anywhere except here.

Personally, I'm on end-of-the-school-year activity overload, so cooking is going by the wayside too many evenings and even weekends. But hopefully I'll try at least one of these dishes before the end of the month:

A Simple Starter: I've wanted to make something similar to Tasty Zucchini Carpaccio Salad from Je Mange la Ville for about two months now. There was a recipe for it in one of Cyril Lignac's magazines, and I had even bought the parmesan and everything...but ended up using it for pasta.

A Major Main Dish: Ken from Living the Life in St-Aignan sent in the link for "Canard aux griottes," or duck with sour cherries. He has tried it out and translated it and I'm sure it's as good as he says. The recipe comes from "The Garden Kitchen" section of Lugar do Olhar Feliz, who apparently has time to write nine gorgeous blogs within a blog..but I digress. I was happy to discover this colorful site.

Suitable for Barbecue: Katie from the ever-excellent Thyme for Cooking contributed a link for Grilled Pork Chops with Lemon, Garlic and Sage. I've visited the source blog, Kalyn's Kitchen, a few times before and she presents plenty of easy and healthy recipes.

Zucchini Solutions: Who doesn't love Zucchini Fritters? With a green salad, this is a great idea for a simple summer supper. Thanks again to Katie for the link from What's Cooking in Carolina.

Salad Days: From Katie herself this time: try out Tuna Salad -- Not My Mother's. I certainly will if the weather ever gets nice enough!

Don't Forget Dessert: Chez Mégane's recipe for Lemon Tart with Cocunut Crust caught my eye.

Please leave a message here if you try any of these recipes...and happy cooking!

Fun Fish

2007-06-16T10:29:00.000+02:00

Lemon juice, olive oil, basil, saffron, white wine, fresh tomatoes -- I love splashing and sprinkling ingredients over fish with nary a recipe in sight.

After twenty or so minutes in the oven, my fish improvisations generally come out divinely.

Call for links: Mid-month Meal Inspiration June 2007

2007-06-10T12:47:00.000+02:00

Have you bookmarked or written a recipe post this month that seems especially inspirational for busy, time-deprived cooks?

Share the link with me here for June's edition of "Mid-month Meal Inspiration."

The deadline for sending me the links is Friday June 15th.

For more information about how "Mid-month Meal Inspiration" works, click here.

You can also take a look at the glorious first edition of this blogging event, in which I was the sole participant.

I'm hoping for at least one outside contribution this time around!

CQ HQ June 2007

2007-06-03T18:01:00.000+02:00

In May, my workload generally lightens up, and lately I've had a little more time to deal with my blogs. You may have noticed a few changes on CQ, and I thought I'd give you a little news of where the blog is going and what I've been up to in the kitchen and in cyberspace.

1.) Some of you were kind enough to leave comments about my new blog design, so it's time to give credit where credit is due. CQ and La France Profonde's new templates were designed by Madeline Miller of Made by Madeline, and I know that one of my sidebar pals, Jann of Traveling Food Lady has also treated herself to a Madeline makeover. It is definitely fun to get away from the Blogger template rut. Thanks for a great job, Madeline!

2. May also saw me try my hand at starting a blogging event. My announcement of it on Food Blog S'cool was unceremoniously booted off the site -- I know, I now know, that's not where one announces food blogging events but somehow in my enthusiasm I missed reading that!

The event took place nonetheless. I was the only participant, and I managed to make just one of the five recipes I chose for the first edition of "Mid-month Meal Inspiration."

Other than that, I think we can say the event was a rousing success and I WILL be launching the June version in a few days.

3. I have also decided to give CQ a tad bit of star quality by introducing you all -- at least my readers who don't live in France -- to Cyril Lignac, an up-and-coming young French chef and food show star. His web presence is fairly low-key for the moment, but he just started a cooking magazine -- clearly aimed at a much younger demographic than the one I belong to, ahem -- that I think is great fun. It could even help me get my daughters more interested in cooking, which would be smashing for June because the eldest finishes school next week, so wouldn't making dinners with Cyril's help be a great idea to keep her busy?

I also have another reason to take a special interest in Cyril's career -- can anyone guess?

Cyril Lignac en ligne

2007-05-31T14:29:00.000+02:00

You know what you are, you're gonna be a star...

and I'm gonna be a fan.

Cyril Lignac is becoming the French Jamie Oliver , and Cuisine Quotidienne might come along for the ride.

I must admit I've never watched Cyril's TV show Chef, La Recette! But now that "Chef" has launched a magazine, this blogger is getting interested.

When I brought home the very first issue of "cuisine by Cyril Lignac" and my 16-year-old daughter said she loved it "trop," I knew I was onto something.

Mind you, I do have a few issues, so to speak, with Cyril. He bluntly informed me in his first magazine that my Belgian endive salad needed un relooking. And there it was -- a dish that could have been my own beloved Belgian endive, Roquefort and walnut salad sadly sidebarred in a black and white photo marked "Avant."

But I'll forgive him.

Then there is the rather liberal use of English in "cuisine by Cyril Lignac" -- I guess we could start with the magazine's title. I'm no staunch defender of "French-only" policies, but when Cyril's mag features "un people," Olivia Ruiz, I have to cringe. Also I have to admit that I didn't even know who ce? cette? people was until I read about the good fun the singer had making her favorite profiteroles with Cyril.

But I'll forgive him.

I'm not so sure I'll forgive him, though, for the recipe "Tiramisu d'avocat aux framboises" -- raspberry and avocado tiramisu -- on page 59 of the March-April "cuisine by." But Chef tells me that it's all part of "la funky attitude" -- and "la funky attitude se travaille."

Sorry, Cyril, but I haven't worked on ma funky attitude the past few months.

I hope you'll forgive me...

But I have bought your second magazine, and I can't wait to read it -- if I can get it away from my daughter, that is!

cyril lignac

The Simple Things

2007-05-26T09:52:00.001+02:00

It's not very literary, but when I think of the word "simple," I immediately associate it with cooking.

If only every day I could turn out a beautiful, delicious, yet very simple dish!

Yesterday I succeeded. What were my ingredients?

A fresh, seasonal vegetable (or fruit?) that I already had on hand; "running to the store" is not simple...

A few staples that I always have in stock...

A half-eaten package of something...

No cookbooks, just putting the pieces together...

...and it all came together in less than ten minutes to make a lovely dish.

Simple.

This post was inspired by the Sunday Scribblings writing prompt for the week: "simple." I usually post my Sunday Scribblings on And So Forth, but this one obviously belonged on Cuisine Quotidienne.

For more posts on "simple," click here.