Je n’ai pas envie de cuisiner

10 novembre 2016

Vraiment, je ne veux que pleurer. Le temps fait beau, la vie quotidienne roule, comme toujours, autour de moi et en moi, et rien n’a changé, et tout a changé. Que Dieu nous protège! Il faut ne pas pleurer. Je ne veux que pleurer.

Because Winter Is Coming Again

For the second year in a row, the countryside failed to yield up much in the way of wild grapes. Grapevines, yes. Everywhere! But grapes? One measly cluster along a road where I've gathered grapes by the bagful in past years. 

The usual berry-picking spots around our farmyard held back fruits, too. And so – no 'blackstraw' (my blend of strawberry, black raspberry and wild blackberry) or mixed fruit jam this year. In fact, no jam at all.

But it’s been a plentiful apple season, I’m happy to say, and I’ve gotten in a good couple sessions of peeling, slicing and drying apples for the winter. 

My son visited, and we harvested apples together

Five such layers deep

Without sulphur, they brown slightly. Fine with me!

Applesauce, too, has appeared regularly on the farmhouse table. Purée de pomme, the French would say, but I generally leave mine chunkier, in keeping with its rustic origin: wild apples or those from my farmyard trees, gathered in a basket or string bag, and brought back to my tiny country Paris kitchen. Nothing fancy.

Friends of mine have recently returned from a trip to France, and I am eager to hear their stories and see their vacation photos. They visited many bookstores, I’m happy to say, and brought back treasures in book form. While they were in the capital, I’m sure they noticed that French provincial cuisine is as common as the haute variety. The population of Paris, like that of New York, has always drawn from throughout the country and around the world, so Paris restaurants and Paris kitchens are often not fancy at all. Not big, either. Modest, like mine.

Bookshop my friends visited in Paris, France

Leaving the Kitchen Behind

Balmy air and soft breezes pull me outdoors on summer evenings. They inspire me to pile charcoal briquets on the grill, if only for a couple of pork chops or a small cluster of burgers. On tired and/or hot evenings, however, a skillet in the kitchen and dinner on the porch work out fine, too, as did salmon cooked in a pan, accompanied by yellow rice (courtesy of a friend), and chopped fresh salsa over all.

The rice and salsa worked with chicken thighs and curried yogurt the following evening. That was easy.

And yet sometimes the most dedicated Parisian cook (and we established long ago that I am not that dedicated) wants to do nothing more than sit outside in the fresh air at a cafe table. That's how David and I spent part of Wednesday afternoon in Traverse City while Bruce manned the bookshop counter back in Northport. 

Table in the shade by the side of the Boardman River

Iced peach tea, coffee, and chocolate and lavender "morsels"

View across the Boardman and highway to Grand Traverse Bay

Leaving the kitchen behind does not always demand leaving town. On Thursday, in Northport, at midday, a friend stopped in on her way to the Garage Bar & Grill, right next to Dog Ears Books, and she did not have to twist my arm at all to persuade me to put a sign on the door and lock up for half an hour. We were in heaven! Stella! That took me back to Paris!

Susan had a burger; I had roasted sweet potato. We both had sunshine!

The last day of August, the first day of September: perfect days to relax outdoors, in the shade or in the sun, and let someone else do the kitchen work for a change!

Forager eager for leftovers

How to Scramble an Egg (or Two)

Blank, eggy stare

I owe today's hot tip not to my French cookbook but to my sister Deborah. We were having breakfast at a local restaurant, and I asked her how it was that restaurant scrambled eggs come out so soft and creamy, so unlike mine at home. She told me the eggs are only briefly and gently beaten, so that not a lot of air is incorporated. That made sense, so I decided to try it myself. I had inadvertently left my camera at the bookstore overnight so couldn’t document the attempt, but here’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

(1)        I chose a small pan and limited the trial to two eggs.

(2)        Before-pan scrambling – in a bowl – was accomplished with a fork.

(3)        When butter in the pan was melted, I turned down the heat and slid the eggs in.

(4)        I did not stir but watched the edges and gently folded the eggs over from outside to center when it was obvious that the edges were cooking.

(5)        Watching and folding were repeated until the eggs were no longer runny.

The result was pronounced, by He-Who-Adores-Being-Served, “Perfect eggs!”

A few days later (I kept forgetting), I looked in my French cookbook, fully prepared not to be surprised if there were no directions in there at all for scrambling eggs. The morning meal in Paris is generally café au lait and croissant, and I’ve seen French men and women add cigarettes to the classic Continental breakfast, never did I see anyone in France starting the day with eggs. When eggs are cooked in a French kitchen, they are generally baked or poached or hard-cooked or incorporated into a quiche, but none of these methods is applied to the breakfast table.

Surprise! I Know How to Cook, the English translation of Je sais cuisiner, does present a recipe for scrambled eggs. Sadly, however, I cannot recommend it. I don’t object to the addition of milk (and maybe I added a smidgen of milk to my eggs before they went in the pan; truly, I do not remember), but beating butter into them seems entirely unnecessary, and “stirring constantly for 12 minutes” sounds like terrible advice. Twelve minutes would cook eggs to death!

French cuisine holds pride of place in the world of cooking, but there are some things Americans do better: fresh, green spring asparagus are immeasurable more delicious than the fat, anemic white Continental objects, and while the French know sorbet, no one can argue that sorbet takes the place of real, creamy ice cream. Scrambled eggs? Faites vos oeufs, comme je les ai fait moi, à l’américaine.

Recreated for illustration

Rhubarb-Strawberry Pie with French Lesson

(Front porch light) 

Out on the front porch this morning, using my two-knives method to cut lard into flour to make piecrust, I started thinking about the two French words pâte and paté. The first, pâte, is pronounced close to the English word pot and is used for both pastry and pasta. (The little accent circonflex – that little pointed cap over the letter ‘a’ – is your clue. That particular accent is a historical trace; it tells you that in Old French there was once an ‘s’ following the vowel, an ‘s’ that has been retained in English and Italian.) Paté, pronounced as two syllables, with stress on the second, is a “paste” of ground meat and fat, served spread on toast rounds or crackers.

Ready to roll

Whenever I think of either of these two words, I remember that I used to pronounce them the same way, using the meat pronunciation erroneously for the piecrust term. I’ve got them straight now and have given you the clue.

But once I start thinking about the accent circonflex it’s hard to stop, and the next word I always think of is théâtre, but today I had a new thought about that word. French, Italian, Spanish – all are Romance languages, i.e., rooted in Latin. So I begin to think of God and the stars. Is that possible? Nope, guess not. Too bad. I like my etymological origins story better....

Some people like a flaky piecrust, while others prefer crumbly. A famous piemaker of my acquaintance thinks crust is secondary, pretty much just a container for the filling. Really???

My switch to lard is still recent, but I’m happy with the results.

I’m also very pleased with this little pie safe my sister found for me. I’ve been needing something like this for a long time.

Domestic and Wild Peppery Foraging

Wild mustard

The little farmhouse kitchen, redolent in winter of soup and fresh-baked bread, lively with stirring and bubbling, falls still as summer comes on, with bookstore and yard and garden demanding unceasing attention.

Few Parisians can afford the space for private gardens. For outdoor relaxation they depend instead on large public green spaces, such as, near my old friend Hélène’s apartment, the Luxembourg Gardens. (A world in itself, that!) But even without a burgeoning potager (kitchen garden, as the English call it), Hélène cultivated pots of herbs in a sunny window. And by the way, it’s smart to restrain perennial herbs in pots, no matter how much ground you have available, as some of them, given garden room, will develop Napoleonic ambitions and try to take over your entire world, making much more otherwise unnecessary work.

Taking a leaf from Hélène’s book, then, and because time and energy allowed me to reclaim only about half of my former vegetable garden, neglected for the past two years, I have done some of my food planting in containers this year – tomatoes, radishes, even collards (I have my doubts about the collards in a container, given the size of a full-grown plant, but if we eat away at the outer leaves fast enough, perhaps they can be kept in check) – as well as, among the flowers, nasturtiums, a colorful edible addition to summer salads.

Tomato plant and radish seedlings

Radish thinnings

Our first summer salad supper was Thursday evening. The radishes needed thinning, and the young sprouts were far too tasty to throw in the compost pile. Since the thinning task coincided with the last blooming of a local wild mustard – another delicate, edible, peppery cruciform, much like the spring’s toothwort in flavor – radish sprouts and pepper blossoms made a nice addition to the green salad, strewn atop after Greek dressing had been drizzled over lettuce and tomatoes.

Ah, summer! Supper on the porch! Flowers on the table and on our plates! Now, if ever, come perfect days....

From Spring Woods to Farm Kitchen

You’re probably expecting, from my subject heading, either morels or wild leeks, but I want to introduce you to a less well-known Up North spring delicacy. It is the humble cutleaf (or cut-leaved) toothwort (also known as crow’s toes or pepper root), found from eastern Canada to Florida.

You can walk in the woods for years without noticing it, as I did. Then one day you make the identification, and from then on you watch for it eagerly every spring. Here is a site that keys it as a Brassica, i.e., a member of the mustard family. Its name has apparently been changed, just like my old childhood friend Brontosaurus, whose new name will never be lodged in my long-term memory. -- Whoa! Here’s good news for my generation: Brontosaurus is Back!!! Well, I'm glad I looked that up!

Anyway, toothwort. I am bound and determined to keep in the mustard family. Look at the four-petaled flower, and try to deny the family relationship.

My point – and I realize I’m taking forever to come to it – is that the peppery leaves and flowers of toothwort are a welcome change from the store-bought lettuce (and even kale) we’ve lived on all winter. I went to the woods on Friday afternoon and picked me a nice mess.

I chose the bland smoothness of tofu to offset the peppery greens. (If you don’t make your own tofu but live in the Grand Traverse area, the best available can be found at the Oryana Food Co-op in Traverse City.)

I dressed my salad with a little olive oil and very small dash of balsamic vinegar, whisked together with a smidgeon of Grey Poupon. And that was that, except for a sprinkling of hard-cooked egg yolk on top. If you don’t care for tofu, you might substitute the white from the hard-cooked egg – an easy exchange.

We seem to have strayed far from Paris today, but it’s that time of year – time to get out into the northern Michigan woods. Although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that toothwort or something like it can be found in the forests of Europe. We are, after all, at about the same latitude, and many of our plants are common to both continents. And who knows better than the French about foraging in the woods for kitchen treasures?