Bonjour!
Whether you’re a longstanding subscriber or a new reader, thank you for your patience while I was away from my desk this summer. Now it’s la rentrée, or back to school – and work!
Below you’ll find the regular sections of my free twice-monthly newsletter (always on a Friday):
News from Eastern Paris
On the Table This Weekend
Once a month, I publish an original story about life in Paris for my paid subscribers,and they also have access to my full archive of posts, including helpful cooking tips.
The monthly price for the subscription is about what you’d spend on a cup of fine coffee!
And for this rentrée, there’s something NEW for all subscribers! Starting on September 13th, you’ll get a restaurant recommendation in This Month’s Restaurant Pick.
Merci – thank you so much for being here and spending some of your very valuable time reading my words. If you like what you’re reading, please hit that “Like” button at the bottom of the page!
Here’s to a new (school) year and plenty of good reading and great eating!
News from Eastern Paris The French Riviera!
Farniente. The Italian word translates to French as faire néant or literally “do nothing.”
While I like to think that leaving Paris on vacation for a whole summer means that I’m pretty good at doing nothing – or that I’m inordinately wealthy (mais non…) – my French friends would beg to differ. They’re unconvinced that this américaine is capable of doing nothing.
My kids certainly learned a thing or two about oisiveté, or idleness, this summer. My Frenchman and I believe that our kids need to learn to deal with a bit of boredom, that it stimulates the imagination.
And in between snorkeling, reading, le foot (soccer) or blowing bubbles in the yard, and truly omnipresent Legos – they’re even washing up on beaches – frankly, I’m not worried about their degree of boredom.
(Okay, maybe I wonder about it when I look at the selfies that were taken with my phone, during a nap.)
But me? Idle? No way.
French people call me hyper-active. Chalk it up to an American sense of industriousness and a feeling that even down time should have goals, like:
- reading Ruth Reichl’s memoirs,
- restoring a 1950s bookshelf at our Burgundy house,
- taking road trips to find Art Deco dishes at a yard sale in the French countryside,
- chipping away at a story about life in Paris,
- enjoying family singalongs to old-fashioned tunes. (This song’s story is darkly, hilariously French.)
These all constitute vacation-time activities in my world. So I won’t lie – on ne va pas se mentir – “The Art of Doing Nothing” is quite possibly a disingenuous title for this post.
Leaving Paris for this long happens for us….never. But this summer, Olympic games oblige.
It’s not that I’m an Olympic Grinch – we did watch the drenched opening ceremony and some of the events on TV – but my Frenchman rightly claims that I have about as much competitive spirit as Mahatma Gandhi.
While Olympic competitors were swimming in the Seine, our summering meant finding relief from the sweltering heat in lakes. One of them was in southern Burgundy’s Morvan national park, which I refer to as The Shire, for its rolling hills and bucolic fields divided quite neatly by borders of a hedge called charme – or European hornbeam.
Another lake, whose waters are so frigid that only die-hards enjoy them, sits along the route Napoleon in Laffrey. Even our cat, Boubou, surely felt the vacation vibe as she luxuriated on the bed of our hotel room, admiring the swimming ducks beyond the balcony’s edge.
Lakes are lovely, but the Mediterranean holds my heart tightly in its salty grip, even more so than the tentacles of the micro-octopus our snorkeler friend decided to “pet.”
And the salt in the Med is a thing. At 40 grams per liter, or about 7 teaspoons of salt per quart of water, the sea buoys us naturally: the work of staying afloat is irrelevant. Our kids aren’t yet strong swimmers, and the sea’s density meant they could concentrate their efforts on spotting fish with mask and snorkel.
At the end of the day, we’d pull on our t-shirts and bid goodbye to the waves of azure surf lapping onto the hot red rocks of the Esterel. Our backs always tingled in a not unpleasant way from the all-day marinade of sunblock, salt, and sweat on our skin. We savored every moment, and it felt very far from Doing Nothing. -AZ
On the Table This Weekend…
Indissociable from the resinous odors of the Provençal pinède (pine forests) and the enchanting backdrop of buzzing cicadas are the glorious foods we eat in the south of France every summer.
Unfortunately for Bret’s, our favorite glorious foods do not include pastis-flavored potato chips! Beurk.
And just as visitors to France try to reproduce the same lifestyle when they return home, we also attempt to eat provençal-style foods when we get back to Paris. Somehow, it’s never quite the same, but cooking the dishes we love in the south helps us feel a little like we’re still on vacation.
The best way I’ve found to recreate the flavors of Provence is Rosa Jackson’s cookbook, Niçoise: Market-Inspired Cooking from France's Sunniest City. Her recipes are the fruit of long years of experience as a cooking instructor at her workshop in the old city of Nice, Les Petits Farcis. Rosa is a patient teacher, guiding her guests through the steps of making Niçoise salad or le grand aïoli.
Just look at those vegetables! Her green beans are especially gorgeous.
For years, our go-to vegetable cooking technique consisted of simply steaming. In more recent times, oven-roasting has been our family’s favorite for cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower – that caramelized sweetness is such a hit with our kids, whose tastes are ever-changing at the moment.
But sometimes, especially with this summer’s bounty of fresh green beans from the market, I want just-cooked (a whisp beyond blanched) vegetables to use later in a salad. Vegetables that taste like a heightened version of themselves, that sing with flavor. (Basically, I want green beans on steroids.)
In that case, I cook them à l’anglaise: in very well-salted, well-boiling water, in the most enormous pot I own.
When I taught cooking to young delinquents Parisians at a French tech school, we used this technique, and if you happen to own a copy of Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook, you’ll find the same technique on p. 58.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Start with the biggest pot you own, fill it with water, cover, and bring to the boil.
2. Salt the water well, with about 1 cup of sea salt per gallon of water. Please (blow on and then) taste this water: it should taste like the ocean, the Atlantic, but not the Mediterranean Sea.
3. Carefully drop in your vegetables. If you have a lot of them, cook in two batches. The higher the water-to-vegetable ratio, the faster your vegetables will cook, and the better they’ll taste.
4. Cook for… as long as it takes! Taste one: your mouth will tell you when they’re done.
5. Drain well. If you aren’t eating the vegetables right away, plunge them into a bath of ice water. Drain again, very well, and reserve in the refrigerator or eat immediately.
Bon app’! Et à la semaine prochaine.