A new restaurant discovery in Carcassonne

    Back sometime in December. Rainy, slate-grey skies, bitingly cold...why would I take my camera on a day-trip toCarcassonne when the plans were just to have lunch, shop and drop a friend off at the airport?
    We did squeeze in some browsing later that afternoon, trawling Sephora and Monoprix and dismayed to find that Maisons du Monde had closed. (Not that I ever seriously wanted a chest-of-drawers emblazoned with Marilyn Monroe but it was nice to know where to find one if I did.)
    Lunch first. The Carcassonne you think of when you hear the name is the ancient walled Cité. It may be riddled with tourists most of the time, but it's surprisingly full of decent, affordable places to eat. Unless you're in the market for plastic swords and helmets, you're better off shopping in the lower town, sometimes called the "new" town because it only dates back to the 13th century.
    Place Carnot is its centre. A square that's just the right convivial size, it was currently being made ready for Christmas festivities with chalets and an ice rink.

    Fake icicles hung around the fountain in the middle (this shot was obviously taken earlier in the year).
    At some time or another, we've eaten our way through most of the cafés and restaurants around it but this was our first venture into Le Saint Roch. What sucked us in was the menu posted outside.
    It was a chilly day so we were ready for the full three courses. My entrée was a miniature paella pan--about the size of a tea-plate--holding an egg "Catalan style" on a base of cooked tomato, peppers and onion. Two orders of gesiers salad, prepared a little differently "very, very tasty," (I'm transcribing as he speaks). Samosa filled with spice-inflected tuna (and that side salad) were described as "the best samosas in France." Not sure if that's damning with faint praise though for someone who just arrived from Asia.
     On to the mains. I'm obsessed with seiches at the moment. Two fat ones, perfectly cooked a la plancha, came with roasted potatoes and a scoop of sweet potato purée. Those who had ordered the steak and duck confit got the same veg. A commendable pear-and-chocolate crumble to finish with rather too much whipped cream drizzled with chocolate sauce at its side.
     Three course lunch menu, 14.50 euros. Details: Restaurant Le Saint Roch, 15 place Carnot, Carcassonne, 04-68-71-62-43
  

Happy 2013--and a catch-up

   So what happened was this...Kate flew in for Christmas, there were meals and parties galore and--probably the biggest contributing factor to the recent paucity of posts: I couldn't find my camera. How it came to be in the cupboard where vases and candles live is still a total mystery....
   A quick catch-up starting with a look at a long lunch on December 13 with a bunch of friends in the village of Espazel.

    A cold and snowy day in the lee of the Pyrenees...

    This restaurant doesn't look like much from the outside but wait till you see the menu.

    "I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille."

  This is the entry level menu for 22 euros (tax, tip, all included). Pay more and you get two further courses of foie gras and ceps. This was plenty for us.
   Like the wine, the aperitif came to the table in unmarked bottles. I think it was the deceptively powerful vin de noix, made from walnuts.

   Here's one of the charcuterie platters. Colossal sausages, high-intensity ham, pâté--and remember that, at this point, we were still in the preliminary stages...

    Everything was served family-style, including this gésiers salad (and a reminder: gésiers are duck gizzards), accompanied, as was the entire meal, by baskets of chewy bread.

    Some went for steak as their main course, others for duck or venison. We had one of the tastiest beefc daubes that I've ever eaten, wine-dark, huge in flavour and tender as anything.

     All the while, we'd been wondering about these large jars of preserves on a tray on the bar. After the cheese course, those of us who went for crèpes for dessert were given the tray, as well as an enormous bowl of whipped cream to add.
      I don't think any of us ate dinner that night.

An unexpectedly good lunch in Foix

   A week or so back, we needed to buy art and crafts supplies in Foix, which called for a trip to Majuscule, my favourite stationery shop in this part of France. We also had to be somewhere near Foix at 2:15 p.m., so doing the math meant there were two hours to occupy in the middle of the day because, around here, almost all shops close at noon.  (On the bright side, parking is almost always free between noon and 2 p.m. and you generally get 15 minutes thrown in free as well.)

   Sooooo.... what you do is have lunch. Not a swift trip into the sandwich shop for a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato on wholewheat but a proper sit-down meal in like-minded company.

   It's a while since we last ate at Le Jeu de l'Oie (named after a kids' game) but I think they've changed ownership. Where meals here were always reliable, they weren't especially surprising. You did sort of know that the entrée would always be pâté or something else, and I could recite the dessert choice from memory.
  When I say this was "unexpectedly good"(see title of this post) I don't just mean for what we paid. Not that entrée and plat du jour or plat du jour and dessert with a glass of wine or a coffee, and the usual basket of bread, all for 9.80 euros isn't a bargain--and that's including taxes and tip.
   What was unusual was the care and thought that had gone into it.

   In the open kitchen, we could see two young guys working seamlessly and at ferocious speed, with the occasional blaze of flame from the stove. It was incredible teamwork that was a joy to watch. 

   Medals all round too for the wisely-chosen menu du jour. They served a single entrée--potage Crécy--vegetable soup, which was clever. You could make it ahead, reheat it, and garnish, as needed.

    Two plats to choose from, one of them tartiflette with a little salad. The ingredients in tartiflette are Reblochon cheese, bacon, potatoes and onions. Does that sound good? It is. Delicious, satisfying, tummy-comforting and available everywhere, including at local markets where you can buy it dolloped into take-away containers. 

   So you could pick familiar comfort food, or...

    I'm a huge fan of squid and its relatives. On the menu today were tiny seiches, cooked for just the right amount of time so that they cut like butter. These were seriously good, and topped with what the menu said was "persillade". Normally this translates as a mixture of garlic, parsley and olive oil. This version was several rungs up the culinary ladder with the addition of tiny cubes of courgette and red pepper. Linguini dressed with pesto on the side. All in all, very satisfying.

 

    For dessert, there was familiar tarte tatin or a milles feuilles, the pastry topped with a commendably crackly caramel, and sandwiching a mousse combining whipped cream and puréed starfruit. We could see the one serveuse pause briefly between kitchen and table to scribble some raspberry coulis on the plate. She was also taking care of tables one floor above too, racing up the stairs with three plates balanced on her arm.
    Meanwhile, the little room hummed happily with people eating, drinking and talking. Judging from all the bisou-ing going on, all are regulars. You can see why.
  
  

Comfort Food Sunday Lunch

   It was cold enough to light the fire last night and, again, this morning. So obviously a salad, however large, wasn't going to hit the spot. Something cosy was called for, for lunch.
    Winging it, I sliced a container of brown mushrooms, and put some dried ceps to soak in warm water. Next, I melted a large lump of butter in a frying pan, and threw in the fresh mushrooms and a chopped green onion. Lid on, maybe 20 minutes over very low heat.
    Saving the juice, I drained the ceps (through a fine-mesh tea strainer--those little fungi can be gritty), chopped them coarsely and added them to the mushroom mixture along with their juice. In went a squishy clove of roasted garlic--a fridge staple now I've discovered that, wrapped in foil, a head will keep for several weeks. In fact, I bake three or four at a time, usually throwing them in the oven together with the same number of foil-wrapped beetroot. No need to wash them as you're going to slide their skins off anyway.
     Cooked it down a little at the end so there was just enough juice to soak up. And that's what we ate: mushroom ragout, sliced tomato from the garden, toasted baguette. Sunday lunch taken care of.

Easy Side Dishes to Serve with Roast Chicken

     Pasta tossed with olive oil and parsley, steamed potatoes, couscous, polenta, a baguette...just about any starch you can think of goes with roast chicken. In my book, it's even better if you tart up the starch component so you get your vegetables at the same time. 

     You can take the parsley approach or mix chopped fresh tomatoes and torn basil leaves into pasta instead. Potatoes taste much better (and look far prettier) sprinkled with scissored chives. Couscous becomes tabbouleh when you add handfuls of red or green pepper, cucumber, tomato, mint, and cartloads of parsley, all chopped. Polenta is lovely when you throw in fine snippings of rosemary and/or shredded sun-dried tomatoes as you cook it.   

 All these additions work with rice too but what I've been making a lot over the past incredibly hot month is rice salad. I can't give you a firm recipe because it's never the same twice, depending on what I've got in the fridge.
    Once the rice was cooked, today's chicken-accompanying version began with the bird's juices, which I degreased first. Then I sloshed in some olive oil. As soon as the rice had cooled to room temp, in went chopped red pepper, red onion, parsley and--the secret ingredient--finely chopped preserved lemon, which adds a deliciously citric edge to the dish.

   Last Friday I bought a kilo of haricots verts at Lavelanet market for all of two euros. One handful per person, topped and tailed (scissors are the swiftest way to go about this), went into a pan of boiling water for five minutes. While they were cooking, I fried a finely chopped large clove of garlic in about three tablespoons of olive oil, just until it turned golden. Beans drained and put in a dish, garlic-y oil poured over. Done. Nice cold too and keeps for several days in the fridge, as does the rice salad, so make lots.
    Vinaigrette-d lettuce leaves. Tomatoes from the garden, still warm when we ate them. Bread (not a baguette but the rustic couronne with holes the size of centimes that we buy at the market). Cold rosé from Provence.
    And suddenly it was four in the afternoon.

Two New Restaurants in Mirepoix

    Apart from vide greniers, there's not much to do in the way of shopping in our part of France on Sundays. Granted, you can pick up your crusty bread, tarte au citron, roast chicken or newspaper--and even a handful of supermarkets throw open their doors--but, soon after noon, everything shuts tight. Simple reason. Sunday lunch is one of the, if not the, most important meal of the week. Boulangerie and patisserie queues are common, everyone departing with baguettes under their arm or swinging a small square tarte-holding box from the hand. The butcher is usually sold out of rotisserie chicken by noon. Then, silence falls as families gather at maman or grandmaman's house and everyone sits down around the table.

     Last Sunday, we thought we'd go out to lunch. Not a full-on three courses because temperatures have been in the mid to high thirties all this week. All we wanted was something light in the shade of a parasol at one of the new-ish restaurants we wanted to try in Mirepoix. 

         

 Vegetarian Indian food. We didn't eat here as, coincidentally, we'd had a curry dinner just a couple of nights previously. What we did have, which was utterly delicious, was chilled ginger-and-lemon juice.

La Niña is the only place I know that serves duck fajitas!

The yellow-ish cast to these food photos comes from the parasol.  Excellent pizzas here with a crust as thin as a supermodel. Tomatoes, aubergines, asparagus, peppers and just enough cheese. Delish.

     

    

                            
     One of the salades composées on the menu. This one was loaded with chunks of Roquefort and walnuts. Too hot for wine so we drank eau de robinet (tap water).

Three bottles of olive oil, three variations on salt and "where do you think they keep the non-stick spatula?"....

     Renting an apartment instead of staying in a hotel has lots and lots of advantages. If you've walked your feet off, you don't have to go out to dinner. If you've had an enormous three-hour lunch, same thing. If you find yourself sighing whenever you pass a market, you can go in and buy that hunk of duck pâté, or gloriously mature cheese, then pop in the next boulangerie you see for a fresh baguette, and take it all to your temporary home. So far, so good but more complicated if you want something other than takeout. You may have to stock up on the basics before you can start cooking--or even making a simple vinaigrette. Obviously, everyone who has stayed in the apartment we're in now has mixed their own salad dressing. Including the one we brought with us, we can choose from three different olive oils. For salt, there's sel de Guerande, sel de Camargue and the sel de mer you see everywhere in the blue container with the whale on it. We have three sources of pepper.
    In rented apartments, cooking is always an adventure as you discover what your kitchen is equipped with. Or not. Lateral thinking becomes the norm. No water pitcher? Use the thermos jug. No carafe for the coffee machine? Balance filter-lined funnel on the top of the thermos jug. And so on.
    A typical Parisian kitchen is so tiny that you can basically stand in one spot and reach fridge, sink and stove without moving. When I say stove, I mean two electric hot-plates and a microwave (the microwave, in our case, is outside the kitchen area, beside the piano). Where we're staying now is typical. The cooktop segues seamlessly into the draining board, and the only other work surface is the top of the waist-high fridge. But, while I wouldn't scream with joy at having to cook a traditional Christmas dinner here, I can produce a decent four-course lunch, as we proved today.
   Minuscule kitchens and tiny fridges mean that Parisians eat out a lot, and shop more often too. One lemon, not a bag of four. Six eggs not a dozen. Back and forth they trundle, towing their purchases in shopping bags on wheels. There's one here in the apartment but I left it behind this morning believing, foolishly, that a carrybag would be enough. Which is how I came back balancing one bulging carrybag, a bag holding a rotisserie chicken, another bag containing a big bunch of parsley, and two baguettes.
   Most of it was bought just up the street at the Marché des Enfants Rouges. Quite small and packed with unutterably tempting foods, it's the city's oldest market, built in 1615. To put it in perspective, this place had already been going for well over a century when the French revolution took place.

Off with their heads, or rather the ends of their stalks. Prep work in process. Here's a look at the main, what am I saying? the only work surface.

 Lardons crisped and draining (those little thingies at bottom right). Mushrooms, onions and garlic cooking in much too much butter.

  A dish towel doubles as table cloth. Parsley instead of flowers... Are we chic or what?

   The finished plate. The warm mushroom mixture piled on two slices of toasted baguette. A little salad on the side.
    And then we had the roasted chicken, accompanied by basmati rice and ratatouille. Impressed? I've got to be honest here. Both were frozen and came from an incredible French store called Picard that's so highly respected that the BBC recently devoted an entire half-hour Food Programme to it. There's one three streets away. I'd never been in Picard before so I had a quick look round there yesterday and was amazed, amazed, by the choice. (If you can read French, have a roam around www.picard.fr ). Enough to say that Picard saved the day when we got to the main course.
    From then on it was easy-cheesy. A lovely, ripe, heart-shaped raw milk Neufchatel, followed by sections of pomegranate and "wife cookies," both of which I picked up yesterday at Tang Frères.

Eating locally...

     Here's a peek at last Friday's lunch, some of it sourced from the market we'd just been to in Lavelanet, some of it from our, and our neighbour's, garden. 

     Starting at 12 noon and going round the clock, the hunk of bread is off the half a couronne we bought. This is real gutsy peasant stuff, crusty, chewy, and meant to last a week. If we ever do have leftovers, they make terrific croutons All that arugula/rocket/roquette comes from the garden. It self-seeded itself to make a small forest that grows about two metres from where we were eating it. The more I cut it, the more it grows.  I love its pepperiness and often team it with walnuts, and a dressing of lemon juice and walnut oil. I picked those sweet little yellow cherry tomatoes, and the green one further down the garden. The red ones are from next-door. My neighbour has been away for a few weeks and gave me free run of her vegetable patch. 

     Finally, the protein element. We bought two roasted quail from the rotisserie van at the market. Still warm when we ate them, they only cost 2.50 euros each, and we nibbled every last little bit of meat off them. The rotisserie man also sells whole chickens, chicken legs, chicken thighs, roasted pork, big fat sausages, and potatoes that sit in a trough at the bottom of the rotisserie and catch all the juices that drip from the various meats.

     Finally, a pot of redcurrant relish made by a friend--and very delicious it is. Last, but not least, the little blue-handled spoon was made by our neighbour, David Hilton, maker of beautiful tableware. Go and have a browse around his on-line shop. http://www.davidhiltontableware.co.uk/
  

The Mainstays of Summer

   Summertime and the living should be as easy as you can make it. All the more time to spend out in the garden. Who wants to slave away for hours in the kitchen on a hot day?  Me neither.
   By mainstays, I mean dead-simple, tasty dishes that get along comfortably with others, or exist happily on their own. Like the best kind of people, in fact.
   Stop reading here if I've written about the tortilla before. My mind is foggy partly because of the gorgeous 27 degree heat out there and partly due to the glass of chilled muscadet I'm rapidly downing.
   When I say "tortilla," don't even think of the Mexican variety. This is the Spanish version, more of a hefty fat omelette like the one I first tasted getting off a train in Barcelona, starving, and finding tortilla served in a split baguette (or whatever the Spanish is for baguette). Crusty bread full of golden-y goodness. I've made tortilla so often now that I can do it from memory. It's definitely not fancy but it has two enormous things in its favour:
  Firstly, you don't need to make a special trip to the shops. You've almost certainly got all the ingredients on hand (which makes it useful when aperos turn into supper, or someone shows up unexpectedly).
  Secondly, it's good straight from the pan, at room temperature, or the next day. Even, as we discovered this lunchtime, sliced and jammed in a split baguette along with grainy mustard, ham, lettuce and tomato.
   You start by slicing one pound of potatoes about 1 cm thick (and I know I'm mixing weights and measures. Sooooorry). Boil them for five minutes and drain.
    During that five minutes, gently soften a sliced onion and several cloves of sliced garlic in a quarter cup of olive oil, in a non-stick frying pan over medium heat.
    Add your potatoes, as well as a generous handful of chopped parsley. Press everything down with a spatula.
    Finally add six eggs beaten together with a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of pepper.
    Cover the pan, turn the heat to medium-low and let the tortilla cook for 20 minutes.
    Serve it in wedges with salads and bread, or cut in cubes, a tooth-pick in each, for an apero snack. This is the tortilla at its most basic. Little cubes of ham or chorizo, chopped green onion, snippets of sun-dried tomato, feel free to improvise.
    I love my tortillas. One of those around and pulling drinks, supper or a light dinner together takes minutes. (Real minutes too, not the TV food show ten-minions-have-been-chopping-away-for-half-an-hour-kind-of-"quick-dish"). As you can see from the photo below, it's not really a "wow" visual moment although it does have an honest, rustic look that I rather like.

    On to the next mainstay.
    You can buy black, pungent tapenade everywhere in France but personally I find it far more satisfying to go through all the little plastic containers in the fridge containing a dozen olives each, and the one with the few remaining anchovies in it, and make something that--like the tortilla--equals more than the sum of its parts.
    Recipes are everywhere. Just Google. But basically olives, anchovies (or not, if you're vegetarian), capers, garlic and olive oil get whizzed together in a food processor, and that's it.  One night recently, we'd run out of fresh bread and the boulangerie was inexplicably shut, so I sliced stale baguette, brushed it lightly with olive oil, toasted it under the grill, turned it, added more olive oil and repeated the process. Then I spread the wee toasts with tapenade. Delish. We had it with grilled something or other.

All the tapenade ingredients together at last. 

    Third and last mainstay. Well, last one for today.  For this, you just have to have ripe tomatoes, fresh basil and a fresh mozzarella around. Slice tomatoes and cheese, arrange in a pretty circle, one red, one white, one red, one white, drizzle with olive oil, and tear up basil leaves to sprinkle over the top.
    Bon appétit. And do let me know if you'd like me to blog more ways to make your summer eating easy.

Presentation is Everything.

   The other day, we had to make routine trips to the bank, the insurance agent and the optician. Lots of fun... What kept us sane was the prospect of lunch outdoors in Mirepoix. Don't you love reading menus? We wandered around the square seeing what was on the various menus du jour. A starter of duck rillettes and then a plat of beef with prunes, would have left us lying flat for days. Lunch looked lighter (or at least the start of it did) at  Saveurs de Couvert in the corner of the main square.
 

Can you make out the old houses in all the reflections? 

Anyway, this was the starter. When I saw tomato and mozzarella salad listed on the menu, I thought "same old" but this was much more imaginative than the usual discs-of-tomato-fresh-cheese-and-a sprinkle-of-torn-basil. Someone out back in the kitchen had peeled the tomato, halved and seeded it, then scooped out the inside and mixed it with little cubes of fresh cheese and a garlic-y basil vinaigrette. Those artistic smears are finely chopped tomato mixed with finely chopped almonds. But here's the inventive thing...

The tomato skin had been dried till it was crisp and used as decoration. Isn't that an idea worth stealing?

   

Back in Léran and a clean-up around the lake.

   I've written before about how a group of volunteers occasionally gets together to hack back an overgrown hiking trail or free up the tiny canal that once irrigated the chateau's vegetable garden. This time, the morning after we got back from Paris, we met up at 8:30 for coffee and croissants, and the distribution of black and yellow garbage bags.
   Maps were handed out and carloads of us set off to pick up any rubbish that had been left over the summer. Misty and golden, it was the most glorious of autumn mornings. Once we'd arrived at our designated area, we set off.

The water level is low at this time of year so you can see the stumps of the tress that were cut when this valley was deliberately flooded.

Finds included a tire, a wheel, two bras, one pair of knickers, a washing line (which suggested that the lingerie was less the product of lakeside orgies and more likely due to a gust or two), numerous bottle caps--Heineken mostly--wine bottles, beer bottles, and lots of paper towel and tissue half-buried in the woods. We didn't want to think about that too closely but were glad we'd all worn work gloves. But, given the hundreds and hundreds who come here each summer to camp or picnic, there was surprisingly little rubbish to get rid of.
   Back in Léran, we all met up at 12:30 for an apero, followed by a long lunch, the traditional conclusion to a clean-up operation--except that this time we shared a found bottle of wine, which we named "Chateau du Lac".

Our Anniversary Lunch

     It was one of the major ones--anniversaries that is--but, instead of a long dinner out, we decided to follow the French tradition and have a long Sunday lunch instead. Besides, very few good restaurants in France stay open for dinner on Sundays--possibly because people are still recovering from Sunday lunch.

     Our friend Bob had told us about Le Reminet, www.lereminet.com, a tiny place on the Left Bank. We dropped in the day before, really liked the look of it, made a reservation and made our way over there at 1 p.m. on Sunday. 

    Maybe 34 seats, gold-framed mirrors that let you sneak looks at your neighbours, twinkling chandeliers, it's a pleasant room to spend several hours in. Every other day of the week, this tiny place offers a staggeringly inexpensive three-course lunch for 13.50 euros. Those of you who aren't in France, do the maths, and then know that that sum  includes all taxes and the tip (although it's good manners to leave small change behind when you pay the bill). Bargain? I'll say. 

    Later that week, we returned there for lunch (see menu) but Sunday was a very special occasion so we stayed on the carte side. First to arrive were little amuses of chickpea purée topped with a wee slice of toasted baguette topped with diced vegetables. That eaten, we made our way through foie gras, grilled salmon trout on a bed of tiny fresh peas and feves (surely the most labour-intensive vegetable anywhere--I mean first you pod them and then, once they're cooked, you pop each tiny bean out of its shell. This is definitely the kind of dish that, as the immortal Julia Child once said, had people's fingers all over it. But, at that point, honestly, who cared? We ended up with lavish desserts involving chocolate, and the kind of mousses that were so sticky you just knew they were heart-stoppingly rich in egg yolks and cream. Kirs to start, glasses of white Sancerre, and then a bottle of red Sancerre (which I didn't even know existed). 

     So what do you do for an encore? Well, I don't know about you but we walked across the little park to Shakespeare & Company and had the mother of all book-buying binges.

The definition of take-out food in Paris.

   A five-hour lunch today with friends who fly back to Canada tomorrow. This meant that, as well as sending us away with a bag full of cheeses, we had to help them finish up all their wine buys. Like us, they had rented a little apartment but, even though we all love to eat, we don't want to spend valuable Paris time cooking.

   What they had done was raid a traiteur for such treats as eggs wrapped in ham and smoked salmon, a glorious crab and grapefruit salad, a pâté seamed with foie gras and other totally delicious things. We cut the pastries into four so each of us could try them all.

Another post-walk lunch at the café

   Walking however many clicks it was gives you a serious case of the growlies. We descended on the village café intent on ravaging and pillaging. Marek the owner was there, waiting with jugs of mulled wine. Shirley, his wife, was invisible until the end of lunch when she emerged from the kitchen. Over 30 of us sat down at one long table. 

    First up were bowls of mushroom soup passed from hand to hand. Next came lamb braised for five hours, with roasted vegetables, brussels sprouts, mint sauce, gravy--and lots of all of it. Pichets of rouge and rosé were emptied replenished. A chocolate roulade was dessert, then came mince-pies, coffee and digestifs. And games of cats' cradle with the ribbons that decorated the table.

    We left late in the afternoon, came home, napped and emerged for a very light supper around eight before collapsing into bed not long after. A day of huge, enormous fun.