Two recipes that taught me to love endives.

    For as far back as I can remember, I've been ambivalent about endives. Chicory, witloof, those little pale green torpedos that come at you under various names. On the one hand, unlike loose floppy lettuce leaves, they don't need much hands-on work, if any. On the other, they can be unappealingly bitter.
    The most I can say on their behalf is that they can survive in the fridge, unloved and unused, for a long time before turning slimy. The other thing is that, this time of year, they're cheap. And my OH is a huge fan of them.
     Endives do occasionally find their way into a salad but mostly all I've done is wrap them in ham. bathe them in a mustard-zapped cheese sauce, and top the dish with grated cheese--usually Cantal--before bunging it in the oven.
     Then, about a week ago, one of the Sunday papers published a piece by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on how to use up your Christmas leftovers--and he wasn't talking about turkey. What appealed to me was a pasta dish. Any dish I can make from memory after a trial run is a keeper--and this one definitely is.

    So here you go:

    Endive Recipe Number One:

    For two people, you need two endives plus about 50 grams of pitted black olives. Chop both of these roughly.
    Once you've put your pasta into merrily boiling water, heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, and throw in a finely chopped clove of garlic. Give it a couple of minutes, then add the endives and olives. Stir it around until the endives have wilted but still have some crunch. Mix in two or three tablespoons of crème fraîche (sour cream would do, I reckon, or even ordinary whipping cream, just something naughty).
   Toss pasta with sauce, strew with plenty of grated Parmesan. I know this sounds easy but it's honestly  far better than the sum of its parts.

   Endive Recipe Number Two

   Next up, a terrific salad from Thomasina Miers. This looked so scrumptious when I watched her make it on Food Network UK, that I tried it a few days later. The original calls for large, costly scallops. I've since tried it with prawns and it works. I think monkfish would be fine too, and probably skate, each cut into scallop-sized chunks. I've even made it without fish and it's still good (if you take this route, halve the marinade quantities).

 
      Here's my version of her recipe. This makes a lunch or light supper for two, though you might want to add a baguette. 

Marinade/dressing
       1 tsp cumin seeds
       1 tsp coriander seeds
       1/4 tsp chili flakes
       1 large clove of garlic
       1/4 tsp salt
       2 Tbsp or more olive oil

       A dozen or more large prawns (uncooked and shelled) or 6 to 8 large scallops (or monkfish or even squid, I'm still experimenting)
       2 heads of endive
       2 avocados, peeled and cut into chunks (sprinkle with lemon juice to stop them going brown if      
          you're not going to use them immediately)
       1 large orange
       Fresh coriander/cilantro leaves to taste
   
In a small frying pan, dry roast the cumin, coriander and chili flakes till fragrant. Mash the garlic clove in a mortar, and pound in the roasted spices. Add 2 tsp of the olive oil, and the salt, and keep pounding till you have a thick, smooth-ish paste.

Toss the prawns in half this marinade and leave them for a couple of hours if you can. If you can't, let them sit while you get the rest of the ingredients ready.

Cut the skin off the orange, and remove the flesh in tidy sections. Squeeze the remains of the orange into a bowl. Whisk in 1 Tbsp olive oil, and the other half of the marinade.

Break the endives into separate leaves, add the orange, toss with the dressing, and divide into two bowls.

Heat a frying pan, and add what's left of the olive oil. Stir fry the prawns just until pink. Divide them between the salads, along with the avocado chunks. Sprinkle with coriander leaves.

This really hits the spot: the sweet spiciness of the prawns, the fleshy avocado, crunchy endive, and tangy orange. Try to get some of each in each bite.  Get all your prep work done beforehand and it comes together in minutes.

Excuses, excuses...and a look at salades composées.

   Over a month of blog-silence needs explaining so here goes. First, I twisted my ankle. Okay, I don't write with my foot but it slowed me down so that everything took longer and blogging took longer. Then, a head cold. Same reason. Then family and friends staying with us, which was all huge fun but, in the midst of all the days out, lengthy and wonderful dinners, and many, many bottles of wine, something had to give--and that was blogging time.
   Now, we're in Paris for a couple of weeks and, before I get into the heart-stopping delights of being here, I'm determined to finish off a number of partially written posts and write on a few topics that have been kicking around at the back of my  brain.
    Have I ever written about French salads? At length? A simple salade verte is just that, often just lettuce (by the way, lettuce here is called "salade"). Once you get into salade composée country, anything goes. A "composed salade"-- literal translation--sounds like a prim and proper dish, something out of the French equivalent of Jane Austen. Au contraire, these are often lusty Rabelaisian assemblages that fling together vegetables, meats, and even fruits.
   We often order them if we go out for lunch. The usual basket of bread, a jug of water, a pichet of rosé, and a big healthy-looking plateful of salad. What else do you want when the temperature is in the high twenties?
   At home, especially in the summer, we eat the following at least once a month:
   1) Salade Lyonnaise. Salad greens, preferably frisée, sometimes dandelion greens from the garden, crisped warm lardons, tomato wedges, chopped onion, chopped chives sometimes, a mustard-y dressing and, added at the last moment, to sit shakily on top, ready to burst and lavish its warm yolk over everything else, a just-poached egg. God, the poetry. I mustn't forget to tell you that I also ring the salad bowls with croutons and warm cooked cubes of potato to turn it into a meal.
   2) Salade Niçoise, and you know what goes into that. Tuna, hard-boiled egg criss-crossed with anchovies and decorated with a blob of mayonnaise, black olives, scarlet rings of red pepper, cold potatoes, haricots verts, wedges of tomato, sliced green or red onion, all on a bed of whatever lettuce takes your fancy.

For the life of me, I can't remember what this particular salad was called. Place: a little outdoor restaurant in Minerve. Accompaniment: a pizza garnished with chorizo, anchovies, peppers... But to return to the salad. Talk about an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza. What you see here are only some of the components. What the menu described as "lardons" were in fact entire slices of bacon (or smoked pork belly as it's known here). A hard-boiled egg, tomato wedges, lettuce, so far, so normale...Black olives, marinated green and red peppers...now we were moving into uncharted seas. In there too was a little savoury dollop of onion confit and and entire fruit section consisting of grapes, a cantaloupe slice, and a few slices of kiwi fruit.

A slice of creamy, funky goat cheese on a slice of baguette, popped in the oven long enough for the cheese to soften, warm and take on a golden crust.  Elsewhere, you can see a slice of mountain ham, garnet-coloured and chewy, and a heap of lardons.

Lardons, cubes of Roquefort, walnuts, hard-boiled egg, tomato and lettuce. 

No unrecognizable ingredients here apart from those deep pink thingies at three o'clock.  They're called gésiers, which is French for "gizzards," either chicken or, more likely in this part of the world, duck. Don't knock them till you've tried them. Utterly delicious, as is anything confit-ed in duck fat. I buy confited gésiers in tins from SuperU or Intermarché.

   

Terrine de Boeuf en Gelée: Part Deux

   Thought you might like to see some "before" and "after" shots of last Sunday's supper. Here are all the all the ingredients I used in the beef terrine (I hadn't noticed till now that the veg look like a fat little stomach with orange legs).

And, ta-da!-- here it is, all cooked in its tin. I didn't even try to turn it out. Just as well as the end result was a little "looser" than I wanted. Next time, I'll use all the couennes (or a calf's foot). I'd also add more seasoning. It was tasty but could have used a bit more flavour. Wandering off, the cold remains were delicious, and the very last bits and pieces, and all the leftover stock have now been simmered and simmered with a tin of tomatoes to make what should be a damn delicious pasta sauce.
   Back to the beef in its first appearance. I cooked fried potatoes to go with it, boiled earlier so it was simply a matter of heating some olive oil and popping them in the pan. Salad of course and this one came completely from the garden. The mustardy zip of the nasturtium and roquette leaves worked well with the beef.

Another "before" shot. Here's what those nasturtium and borage plants looked like not that long ago.

Greed Times Two.

   I usually hate coming up with titles for these posts but this one was a simple case of every-picture-tells-a-story. 

Spotted outside a restaurant in Foix. I think, I think that "gourmand" was mis-translated as "greedy".
But, so help me, I still can't work out what a "muffe" is. Feel free to contribute ideas in your comments. Oh, and I should point out that "gizzards"--usually from a duck, and confited--are really tasty. (Finally, "day dessert" is probably "dessert du jour")

The tenuous link between this and the first shot is that both feature duck. These were magrets that we bought at Lavelanet market and put on the barbecue that evening. Rosy and succulent, they're better than the best steak. Rounding out the plate: new potatoes with parsley, and salad elements. Increasingly lazy, I arrange radishes, lettuce leaves, sliced green onion etc on a large platter and let everyone assemble their own.

  

Thoughts on Salade Niçoise

    Does your mind drift off when you're in the kitchen? Mine does. Usually what goes through my head has something to do with what I'm making. So, a few thoughts that came up recently while I was putting together a salade Niçoise.
    1. None of us eats enough parsley. I say this because, now that the plants in the potager have run to seed, I have to buy bunches at the market--and rarely do I use up the whole bunch before it turns yellow. Chopped parsley (you know the trick: leaves stripped into a coffee mug, a bit of fast work with scissors) enhances just about any savoury dish. This was the first time I'd strewn it over salade Niçoise but it won't be the last.
    2. This salad is a doddle once you've made it a few times and know to put the chunked potatoes into cold water first. Once they come to the boil, stick the timer on for ten minutes and add one egg per person. A few minutes later, throw in the haricots verts if you're using them. Everything's ready at once.
    3. How annoyed I get at cookbook writers who list "best quality olive oil" when they simply mean "olive oil." By now, we all know that cheap olive oil isn't worth the price. Anyone who cooks buys the best their budget will stretch to--and if their budget won't stretch that far, they don't need reminding of that.
    4. And while on the topic, references to "fresh-ground black pepper" and "sea salt" are also starting to make me cross.

    5. Smile back on my face. Black olives and scarlet tomatoes are a stunning colour combination. Ditto black olives and lemons. And, if either of those doesn't transform a pork chop or fish fillet into a photo op, there's always chopped parsley.
  

 

Thanks, Jamie...

    Apart from one recent cloudy day, our spell of summer heat and sunniness just keeps going and going. From about 10 a.m. on, it's too hot to garden, too hot to do anything much outside beyond find a patch of shade, settle into one of our growing collection of vintage deckchairs and read or snooze or watch the butterflies and honeybees hovering around the lavender. I love thinking that the end result of a bee on an oregano flower will eventually find its way into a jar of honey. Worker bees indeed. 

    What we're eating are mostly salads. Salade Niçoise shows up about once every ten days.Also salade Lyonnaise--that's the one made with frisée, lardons, croutons and a poached egg. Adding cubes of potato or, even yummier, tiny new potatoes (or, as I'm doing today, haricots verts) makes it more of a meal. 

   Backtracking: a couple of years ago, I watched Jamie Oliver put together a summer dish of new potatoes, smoked salmon and horseradish cream that looked so incredible I knew I'd be making it someday. That day came last week. 

    I've got most of Oliver's books but my favourite, by far, is Jamie at Home which combines gardening, harvesting and cooking. This particular salad calls for new potatoes, smoked salmon, capers, dill or fennel fronds, crème fraîche and horseradish. I could probably find jars of horseradish in the "English aisle" at various local supermarkets but I didn't have any on hand so I simply left it out--and it was still brilliant. 

    Here's my adaptation with notes for future riffs. This is enough for two as a main course on a hot summer night. Maybe fresh drippy peaches afterwards. 

 Smoked Salmon and Potato Salad

1/2 pound new potatoes, all the same size or cut into same-sized chunks

2 tsp fresh lemon zest

2 Tbsps fresh lemon juice

2 tsp red wine vinegar

olive oil

1 Tbsp capers, drained

3 Tbsp crème fraîche (store-bought or home-made)

6 oz smoked salmom

1/4 cup snipped dill or fennel tops

Steam the potatoes and, while still warm, toss with a dressing you've made from the lemon zest, 1 Tbsp lemon juice, 3-4 Tbsp olive oil and the capers. Season to taste.

Mix the rest of the lemon juice with the crème fraîche. 

Arrange the slices of smoked salmon on a plate. Top with potatoes. Spoon the crème fraîche over the salmon and sprinkle the whole plate with chopped dill or fennel.

Salad riffs:

Add one or more of the following:

- Fine, thin haricots verts

- Just-cooked fresh peas

- Rings of thinly sliced red onion

As Julia would say: "Bon appétit!"

Mon Potager

   First of all, I've been a bad blogger recently. Sorry, really. One excuse is that I've been trying to get the garden in shape for the winter. Some days ago that meant spending hours and hours hacking away at the bamboo patch with a pair of secateurs (borrowed from a neighbour) that were powerful enough to chop through canes as thick as your thumb, sometimes thicker. You think I'm exaggerating. Some of these are massive, I'm guessing seven metres high at their tallest. Once they've crashed to the ground, or on to the arbour or into the nettles, each one has to be chopped into small sections, then bundled and tied with string. I've called the office in Mirepoix and the nice people at the Communauté des Communes will add us to their list on October 26 when they send their colossal fork-lift truck around. 

    Also on the "to do" list is moving plants around. Sometimes I do stupid things. One, earlier this year, was to plant herbs midway down the garden instead of close to the kitchen door--and to plant the vegetable plot even further. Fine in mid-Summer. Not so good on a rainy day in March. 

    Our friend Dave who built our spiffy new terrace--two in fact plus a small semi-circular one custom-made for drinking Pimms under the arbour--suggested a potager at the rear of the main terrace. It's not huge but it's surprising how much it holds, and how well it feeds us.

    The verveine, thymes, rosemary, sage and oregano have all found new homes there. In front, I'm growing chives, Bright Lights chard (that's the kind with the almost fluorescent pink, yellow and orange stems)and roquette/rocket/arugula. The front row is made up of frisée plants interspersed with red-leaved lettuce with little patches of mâche tucked here and there. I buy the plants at the market, 80 centimes for six (although you often get seven or eight).    Everything is deliberately crammed together to allow scant room for weeds. When the frisée or lettuce gets so big that it threatens to leave the mâche in the shade, I simply break off the offending leaves for the salad bowl.

    Another day in the garden is earmarked for the planting of 80 narcissus and 60 crocus bulbs. A friend gave us a package as a housewarming gift which inspired me to buy more. On top of that, there are ten Hidcote lavender plants still in the car.  I'd been looking for this variety for some time and there they were in Bricomarché this morning when we drove over to buy screw to hold the new handles on the kitchen cabinets--so I grabbed all they had. 

     And then there's garlic to plant.

   

    

Opportunistic Salads

Here's how today's lunch came together (tinned mackerel, cheese and a drippy melon played roles too). 

   The yellow courgette plant produced another fat one, seemingly overnight. The roquette plants are still pushing up leaves. A couple of days ago, one of the UK papers that I read on-line inspired me with a whole hundred yummy-sounding, simple and seasonal recipes, the kind that assume that what you'd rather be doing is lying in a hammock. Read them all at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/19/easy-quick-recipes and you'll come upon one for a courgette salad which adds up to greatly more than the sum of its parts. I tinkered with it a bit. No Parmesan around so I ignored that and I also used lemon juice instead of vinegar in the dressing but, honestly, what a bright, little dish--especially served on a bottle-green plate.

   Next up is ye olde cooked peppers and garlic cloves in olive oil. No recipe for this. Just cut neatish strips of as many red and yellow peppers as you have. Add more garlic cloves than you think decent and simmer the lot until tender in plenty of olive oil. Eat at room temperature. Keep leftovers to top pasta or toasted baguette. Speaking of which... 

    Odd lengths of loaf have been accumulating in the corner of the counter where I keep bread. Using the olive oil left from the peppers, I made croutons. About half an hour before lunch, I chopped four tomatoes, threw in slightly less than that amount of croutons, chopped a couple of anchovies quite finely, threw in some basil and dressed the lot with oil and balsamic. 

   I love, love sparky, colourful food like this on a summer day when--pause to check the thermometer--it's 29 degrees outside.

Tonight's harvest

A few thoughts on vegetable gardening as this year's small plot starts to produce. 

1) Nobody needs more than one cucumber plant.

2) Everyone needs lots and lots of tomato plants.

3) Roquette (arugula) produces and produces and produces. 

4) Everything that say about squash plants is true.

A few things I've learned that I'll put into practice next year beginning with cucumbers. These grow brilliantly up vertical supports. I have one plant growing up a tripod and another that has reached the top of its support and is now starting to wind its way along a wire to another support. 

Next year, I really must remember to label my heirloom tomato plants. Cherry tomatoes are easy to identify but I can't be sure if the other four (of a total of six) are meant to be green, yellow or dark crimson.

I solemnly swear to plant more roquette as soon as the temperature cools a little--maybe in September. 

I wish I'd planted more cougette varieties. All we seem to have are long yellow ones.

This little dish of goodies in the photo will make a salad together with lardons, croutons, little steamed potatoes and a poached egg. Right now, melons are so lusciously ripe that the juice trickles down over your hands and on to your wrists. We have just such a melon for dessert.

Choir Practice Pasta

Every Wednesday at 8 p.m., sopranos, altos, tenors and basses meet up for an hour and a half. Do the math and you realize this means an early supper. In this house, it's usually last-minute too. Sometimes we hastily put together bread, cheese and a tomato. Once in a rare while, I'm organized enough to bake a quiche or tarte in the afternoon. 

    This dish is a godsend because (as I proved last night) I can transform myself from garden slot to choral goddess and have supper on the table in a bit over half an hour. 

    All you need is spaghetti, or whatever ever smallish or narrowish pasta you have, and the classic salad called insalata Caprese--salad Capri-style. This Italian flag-coloured combination of ripe tomatoes, fresh basil and fresh mozzarella is ridiculously easy to make--and, I've found, doubles as a lovely, light and summery sauce for pasta. 

   Instead of slicing the tomatoes and fresh cheese, cut them in small cubes, then throw in lots of torn basil and a slosh of olive oil. Maybe a grind or three of black pepper? I assemble the lot in a big serving bowl to cut down on dishes. You can do all this while the pasta is cooking. Then, simply drain the pasta and toss it with the tomato-etc. mix. It's also tasty at room temperature and leftovers work as salad the next day.

   Just remember to put a big pot of water on to boil before you climb in the shower.

First 2009 appearance of a summer stand-by

On average, we probably eat salade Niçoise once every ten days once the warm weather sets in.. Yesterday and today, it's been 26 degrees. Today was another day at Brico Depot. Those who really want to know the gory details, skip to the end of this post. 

   We left well before 9 a.m. for the drive to Carcassonne (which I'll rhapsodize about at some other time. Let's just say that today the vines are in new green leaf, savage yellow mustard is blooming in the fields and by the roadside and the first scarlet poppies are in flower).   

   Tonight's supper was salade niçoise. Put a pot of water on to boil. Add some quartered potatoes, red, white, doesn't matter. When the water comes to a simmer, throw in one egg per person, piercing the shell with a needle so it doesn't send out wisps of white. Add green beans if you have them. Or asparagus. Drain everything once it's cooked and let it cool. 

   Make a bed of lettuce. Upend a can of drained tuna at stage centre. Slice some red pepper, green onions and tomatoes. Those go on too. Shell and halve the eggs and splosh some mayonnaise on them topped with anchovy fillets. Strew everything else around the perimeter. Garnish photogenically with black olives. I always serve the vinaigrette on the side but it's up to you. Anyway, enjoy. All you need otherwise is bread, and maybe fruit and cheese for afters. 

   For those of you who hung in for the Brico Depot segment. We spent almost two hours there this week. I'd worked out that we needed two 10-litre cans of blanc cassé paint for my office, the landing, our bedroom and divers other places. Only problem: blanc cassé doesn't come in anything larger than a 2.5 litre can and a number of cans this small would be excruciatingly expensive. Together the paint-mixer lady and I figured that there was a custom colour that was pretty damned close (although we did only buy one ten-litre can to be on the safe side). Meanwhile Peter worked out which custom colour he wanted mixed for his studio walls. 

    And then the lights all went out which meant, of course, that the paint mixing machine wasn't working. 

   Eventually it did. Eventually we left with that colour, plus a terra cotta colour for the downstairs bathroom, and only had a minor glitch at the checkout when they refused to believe that we actually owned the Brico Depot carrybag we bought last week for 95 centimes... We also bought a new shower fitting for the downstairs bathroom, putty for the many windows that need replacing and a couple of paint rollers. And you thought it was all sitting in the sun sipping rosé. 

More dandelions for supper.

I've been a little remiss in posting recently mainly because we are deep, deep in house renovations and, in my case, gardening. Meteo France has forecast that the warm, sunny weather will have turned grey, rainy and chilly by Thursday and Friday.

  The war on the dandelions continues. I savagely lop off each yellow head as it appears before it has a chance to turn to fluff and send its virulent thistledown far and wide. The new roots are terrific in, or as, salad. Because they're so fresh, once washed and cleaned, they keep for a good few days in the fridge. 

  I've also picked a bag of the new nettle shoots which are destined for soup or a quiche.

Another Use for Duck Fat

Everywhere is swimming in duck at the moment. This is the big foie gras season. Fat livers make fat ducks which means lots of duck fat. This is one of my favourite ways to get my daily allowance. You find these confited chicken livers in the cooler at the supermarket. Usually, I make a big salad of frisée and chopped onion with a fairly acerbic dressing, then crisp and warm the chicken livers in the fry pan to put on top of the salad at the last moment. Nice with fried potatoes too and I'm playing around with the idea of cooking them with chopped onion, garlic and herbs and whizzing them into a paté