The Biggest Tomato I've Ever Seen.

  No hidden thumbs on the scales. Honest. Weighing in at a whopping 690 g (roughly one-and-a-half pounds if you don't do metric) is this colossal tomate that I bought at Friday's market. That photogenic drop of tomato "blood"? That's because I sliced off the bottom of the tomato before I remembered I hadn't weighed it.

  Sliced, dripped with olive oil, and with a sprig of basil on top: this was the salad we had with today's lunch of baguette and pâté.

Mirepoix's Monday Market

   You have to love alliteration, don't you....Mirepoix's marvellous Monday market is maddening at the moment mainly because of its summer visitors. Glad as I am that they're enjoying our part of the country, it can be frustrating elbowing my way through the camera-wielders. House rule at the moment is that if we're not there before 9 a.m., forget it.
   Some random notes, with prices left on so you can see how they compare with what you're paying if you live in North America.

 Organic heirloom tomatoes. Red, orange, yellow, green, striped, blushing, juicy, sweet... serve yourself, mix and match. Slice on a plate, strew with torn basil, sprinkle with olive oil. There's the entrée taken care of. That price of 2.50 euros a kilo translates to about $1.42 a pound.

 One 500 g portion of paella costs $5.50. Get to the market early enough and you can watch it being made.

Cornus and miches are big crusty, hole-y loaves weighing 750 - 800 g. They're meant to last a week, from one market day to the next. These cost $3.37 each.

    You'll pay $1.70 a pound for the main ingredient for your moules marinières. At some point during the past ten years, the price of mussels rocketed from 2.80 euros to 3 euros. It's been 3 euros now for at least three years. This producer farms his moules in Sète on the Mediterranean coast, not far from Montpellier. He gets up at 3 a.m., leaves his house an hour later and eventually parks his van at Mirepoix on Mondays and Lavelanet on Fridays. Other days he goes to other markets. He told me that he's being doing this for 30 years.
    Behind the shellfish, you can make out the doorway of a smart little boutique. If you leave your moules with the moules man (a few kilos can be a few too many to lug round the market) and you haven't arrived by the time he's on the road home, he will leave your purchase inside the boutique

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.

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 Harvest

Arriving here the second week of July meant that the first few days were devoted to weeding rather than planting. My good friend Lee-anne, a long-time Léran resident, had planted tomatoes and basil for me. Tomato, basil and fresh mozzarella salad have been a default lunch on several occasions recently. 

A few weeks ago, I bought a six-pack of oak leaf lettuce plants at Mirepoix market and stuck them in at the end of the garden between the hollyhocks and the lavender. (I also have frisée growing but I'm guessing it won't be ready for about a month). 

Tonight, we were off to dinner with friends and I'd volunteered to provide the first course, a tomato, thyme and goat cheese tart.  Here's how that salad basket of garden produce ended up a few hours later. Now all I need is a goat.

Platters for the Barbecue

It's good to know exactly where your meat comes from. This sign stands outside a butcher's shop in a shopping mall in Pamiers. It tells potential customers that the steaks, chops and roasts are all from local animals. Here are their photos and their owners' names--Mr. Fauré and Mr. Soula--to prove it. 

Some of the cuts sold here will be ideal à griller. French people are as nuts about cooking hunks of protein over charcoal as any other culture. It took Peter a while to get the knack of using French charcoal which he now uses along with vine clippings, either bought or from our own vine. 

Tonight, a friend who lives near Beziers is staying with us. Earlier today, we bought a "plateau" of meats: a mix of merguez, Toulouse sausage, pre-impaled pork kebabs and slices of pork belly. Included with the meat was a little sachet of mixed herbs to sprinkle over the meats before they went on the grill. 

Timings were detailed on the label. A little longer for the kebabs, a little less for the pork belly, the sausages somewhere in the middle. While Peter was grilling, I heated up some duck fat, chopped a garlic clove into it and browned some potatoes I'd steamed this afternoon. For a salad, I sliced the last of the heirloom tomatoes. Dark crimson inside, this one was big enough to do the three of us. 

Heirloom Tomatoes, Peaches and Nectarines

If ever there was proof that buying the best ingredients makes cooking easy, here's the first course I made for supper tonight. Don't the colours of these heirloom tomatoes knock your socks off? Bought on Friday at the market and probably picked that morning, at most, the night before, so even days after I bought them, they're still in prime shape.  

Friends over for the evening. She's vegetarian but eats fish so I pan-fried cod fillets in olive oil, piled them on a plate and sprinkled fresh rosemary over the top. 

That afternoon, I'd made polenta and poured it into a round dish. Neat quarter-circles for browning and crisping in more olive oil. Leftover peperonata from the other day provided vivid colour and good flavours.

Right, the peaches and nectarines. Now in drippy, juicy, messy abundance at the markets. Following a recipe in Georgeanne Brennan's The Food and Flavors of Haute Provence, I made a gratin. Peeled, stoned and quartered fruit, a batter poured over, a "crumble" of chopped almonds, sugar and dried lavender on top. Fifteen minutes in the oven. The batter doesn't seem to add much so, next time, I'll skip it.

Lavelanet's Friday Market

About a ten-minute drive away, Lavelanet is not an especially beautiful town which means it doesn't get the attention that glamorous medieval Mirepoix does (ten minutes in the other direction). But perhaps because of this, I think its market is better in terms of choice, and it's definitely less geared to tourists. You don't, for instance, find anyone here selling garlic graters shaped like sunflowers. Once, according to local legend, a man did show up with a truckload of yellow jugs, pots and bowls emblazoned with olives and sprigs of lavender but he was never seen again. At least not in Lavelanet.

The town lacks a market square but it does have a small triangle near the church, an indoor halles across the road from it (that also functions as concert hall and indoor games stadium) and a long, skinny car park. All are called into use for the Friday market. 

We usually end up parking at the northern end of the market, making our way down past the cinema through a throng of clothing stalls. You want a tangerine coloured bra size 44D? It's here. Underwear, sparkly tops and combat pants eventually give way to the food stalls. At least three sell paella. You can also buy roasted chickens and quail, moules, Chinese food like nems (egg rolls) and dishes that take well to reheating like chicken basquaise and Hungarian goulash spooned out from large simmering cast iron pans. 

This is a mixed market with French, Spanish and North African people all shopping together. You might hear the occasional word of English at this time of year but it's rare. 

My favourite area, the halles houses local producers. Here's where you find folk selling glass jars of foie gras and slices of dried duck breast made, literally, within a couple of kilometres. Lately, I've been buying my lettuces (called salades) from the old lady whose table is beside the old man whose vegetables are already always sold by the time we get there.

Outside, on the triangle near the church, the longest queue is at one of the bio (organic) stalls run by a man who farms up the hill from Camon. This week we couldn't resist his heirloom tomatoes: mixed baskets at a reasonable 2.50 euros a kilo.