Smitten with a French Chef

I confess: I'm in love with Julia Child (1912-2004). I had read Julie and Julia by Julie Powell last year, but I wasn't really in love with her then. I did put the DVD series The French Chef on my Netflix cue, but I didn't start watching them until this year.

A week or so ago, I pulled My Life in France by Julia Child from the bookshelf and started reading, and it is this book that made me fall in love with this larger than life woman. Her memoir focuses mainly on her time in France, chronicling the discovery of her passion for food, her lessons at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and her collaboration with two Frenchwomen on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 and 2. She also writes about the beginning and rise of her television show The French Chef and concludes with her writing From Julia Child's Kitchen (which I'm currently following in eBay), which has recipes and stories.

At first, I was disappointed that the book didn't include a variety of recipes. That disappointment didn't last long because it's a truly fun read. Yes, there is a lot of writing about cooking and food, but it is also a love story. There are pictures of Julia and her husband Paul; the book is about life with Paul nearly as much as it is about her life as a chef and writer. In reading the book, you get a sense of her passion for life and how she completely threw herself into every aspect of food and cooking. She writes of how she meticulously researched ingredients and techniques and how she tried recipes out sometimes 15 times before she was satisfied they were good enough to include in Masting the Art of French Cooking, which is why I had to order it. I have purchased volume 1, and I'm watching volume 2 on eBay, hoping to find a copy at a good price. Because of her meticulous nature, the books are not only about recipes but also about the how and why of a recipe: how ingredients work together, why some techniques are used in some recipes and other techniques are used in other recipes. I get the sense she might have been an early Alton Brown.

Once I acquire both volumes, I'm throwing away The Joy of Cooking. I've never really liked it, and I have found the text rather boring. If Julia's cookbooks are written in the style and voice of her memoir, I expect them to be engaging, entertaining, and informative.

If you're curious about her television show, visit the Julia Child section of the PBS videos where several of her shows can be viewed (all are under 30 minutes in length). The video "Spinach Twins" has footage of Simone Beck, a co-author of the Mastering the Art of French Cooking books, and there is footage of Julia and Paul's home in Provence. If you love cooking, food, France, or a good love story featuring a strong heroine, I encourage you to read My Life in France.

I feel a rant coming on in a future post (I can't be completely rant-free). I invite all readers to comment on this and all posts, as well as also suggest topics you would like to read about.

As always, bon appetit!

Summer Hibernation

A few people will notice that I've been away awhile. I wish I could say that I was busy driving along the winding roads of the Luberon in the South of France all summer (where this photo was taken a few years ago), but such is not the case. Chalk it up to apathy. My ambition fades like a flower when summer temperatures soar, burning the garden to a crisp and drying up any impulse to wander outside to take photos or lovingly tend the garden. My inspiration for writing withered like the plants in the garden.

As the temperatures cooled this past week or two, I began to toy with the idea of writing again but found myself uncharacteristically sick with a fever and hacking cough that lasted nearly a week (the week isn't up, yet I'm still hacking). But, like the garden, I've begun to produce again. We may yet squeeze out a few more tomatoes, an eggplant or two, and some poblano peppers. I'm ready to begin the fall garden and to re-begin my writing.

Since it's obvious I haven't been writing, what have I been doing? True to my obsession with food, I've been reading about food, watching The French Chef with Julia Child, cooking, and eating with friends and family. For fun, I read The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn. Flinn talks about losing her job and then deciding to fulfill her dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu in France--not just attending, but earning a certificate and the title of chef from the famed cooking school. I loved revisiting Paris as I read her book, and I've tried a few of the recipes she's included. I believe I'm going to have to eat my way through each one as the first two were delicious!

Flinn inspired me to learn more about technique, so I ordered Professional Cooking by Wayne Gisslen, a culinary school text, and LaRousse Gastronomique, an evidently famous culinary encyclopedia. I'm into the fifth chapter of Gisslen's book; and I'm working through "A" entries in LaRousse.

Still hungering for more of food and France, I started reading My Life in France by Julia Child, who also attended Le Cordon Bleu in the forties. It was interesting to compare the experiences of Child and Flinn at the school, which began as a perk for subscribers of French cooking magazine, the name of which escapes me. By the time Flinn attended in the late 1990's, it seems the school had become much more prestigious. I'm still reading Child's book, which has prompted me to search eBay for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes 1 and 2, co-authored by Child. I'm watching a couple of auctions now, but each has exceeded my $10 self-imposed limit. I may have to make an exception for Julia!

There will be more about food, cooking, and gardening later. Until then, bon appetit!

Summer Salad

I cannot believe that I've let a month go by without posting--it will not happen again. Though I've not been writing, I have still been gardening, learning, reading, and cooking. I also helped a friend of mine with her Young Writers program and traveled to a bluegrass festival. But enough of that, let's talk food.

The photo you see is from a recent lunch with my friend Glenna, which was inspired by watching an old DVD of Julia Child making Salade Nicoise on the French Chef.

This beautiful salad deserved a photo of its own, but I couldn't help posting our little table in the corner of the kitchen with the beautiful napkins we bought while in Apt, France, two glasses of my favorite Sancerre, fresh cut flowers, and crusty French bread. Bon Appetit!

There was a bit of timing involved with this as I had a few potatoes left in the garden to harvest, and I wanted to use those potatoes for our lunch. Only one tomato was ripe from the garden, so I used that in our salad as well; and the eggs and cucumber came from Randle Farms. I wish I could say everything was local, but I cannot.

The potatoes have definitely been a learning experience, but that's what this year's garden is all about--learning so that we can be more productive next year. You can see the potatoes poking through the soil. This plant was fairly typical of what was produced this first season in the garden; each plant had two to three small red potatoes with lots of tiny spud babies (you can see one at the top center of the photograph).

The harvest at the left was what remained of the three last plants in the garden. With twelve plants, we did have a few meals with our own potatoes, but this was disappointing. What did I learn? A number of things. Potatoes are soooo easy to grow. I let a few potatoes from Earth Fare sprout eyes, and then I cut them into one-inch pieces and threw them into the ground, and covered them with straw after the plant appeared. Then I just waited. Even though I planted them during the window of opportunity suggested by Farmer's Almanac, it was too late in the season for this part of Alabama, I think. One of the causes of a small crop is hot temperatures, and we had plenty of that beginning the last week of May with temperatures consistently 90 and above. Potatoes also take up a good bit of room in the garden, and they take a lot of nutrients from the soil, so when I plant another crop in the fall, I'm going to plant them in a huge container. We'll see what happens.

Like a summer salad, this post will be several things tossed together in order to catch up.

In March and April, I wrote about Meatless Mondays, which was started by the Johns Hopkins Bloomburg School of Public Health. Today is Monday, and I wondered what might be floating out there on the internet from recipe sites, so I went to two sites with which I'm familiar. Apparently Meatless Mondays was not on either site's radar this week.

Yahoo has a weekly feature called "What's for Dinner This Week," and this week is mainly about meat. Five of the seven days feature pork, beef, or chicken; one day is vegetarian with a Mediterranean pizza; and one day features a fish recipe. Epicurious.com also has a section called Everyday Cooking that features menus for weeknight suppers, and meat is definitely on their menus this week with four out of five offerings made with poultry, beef, or salami. The remaining weeknight features fish. As for me and mine, we're having a summer squash and mozzarella tart for supper tonight. Father's Day weekend (yes, weekend at our house!) was filled with meat, and I'm ready to get back to vegetables.

Speaking of meatless meals, I did finish Diet for A Small Planet by Frances Lappe, which was listed as one of the top 10 sustainable food books by the Audobon Magazine website. While I enjoyed much of what the book had to say, especially Lappe's emphasis on connecting food to values, I was a little unsure of the recipes offered. I will try some of them, though I don't think she will replace Deborah Madison as my go-to cookbook guru for vegetarian fare. It is a good read, though, and may give you pause in considering US farm policy, hunger, and eating. Lappe looks at the "values" associated with policies that promote boundless growth in grain production and how that grain is exported not to hungry people around the world but to ranchers who feed that grain to animals who will then nourish anyone with the financial means to put meat on the table, which, incidentally, doesn't include any of the world's starving people. I agree with one of her concluding statements saying that turning everyone vegetarian isn't the answer to feeding the world's hungry, and while she seems to think it is a good place to start, I realized after reading her book and other food-related news, hunger is a much more complicated issue with no one solution. I do think a good place for everyone to begin is to look at their own set of values and bring their eating habits in line with those values. That's my family's focus this year.

J'ai besoin de la France

Today's blog is a little self-indulgent--that's what happens when one has too much time on one's hands.

I am patiently waiting for the phase of the moon to change so that I can plant more beets and transplant flowers, more broccoli seedlings, and sage cuttings. In my idle hours, I went to the grocery store and found these beautiful sunflowers marked down. Rambling around the yard, I picked a few things that were blooming, which included Spanish bluebells and vinca major, dogwood, azaleas, a Gerber daisy, and a rosebud.

After arranging them, I noticed I had paired the sunflowers with bluebells and vinca, and this reminded me of traveling to Provence in the south of France where sunflowers adorned linens and lavender bloomed profusely along the roads, especially going into the Luberon out of Apt. I smiled.

And I remembered what I tell my traveling friend Glenna: bring a little of France into your everyday life. So I did. I reveled in my flowers, and tonight I will enjoy a leisurely meal with my husband and a glass (or two) of good wine as I wait for the moon to cooperate with my itchy green thumb!

For the other arrangement, I used the flowers I had enjoyed last week to fill my teapot. I use this teapot only in the spring for the azaleas and dogwoods, daffodils and Spanish bluebells. I waited too late for the daffodils. As I was arranging last week's sunflowers, the petals began to fall off. I ripped them off two of the flower heads and noticed something: They reminded me of Van Gogh's sunflowers. My memory may be poor, but I believe some of the flowers may have been painted without the yellow petals. Either way, they are beautiful.

Well, this is a food blog, so I suppose I should end on a food note! In the garden, I have five potato plants sprouting leaves and two rows of beet seedlings have pushed their way through the soil. I've never grown either before, and I'm so excited to see them growing.

Leave me a comment. Tell me what you're doing to bring a special memory into your home. Or, maybe you're planting something new in the garden. I'd like to hear about it.

C'est tout!