Tomato Kumato

July 27, 2009

Cargolade

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — emiglia @ 12:53 pm

One of the ados (teenagers) from the first session (you know who you are…) made fun of me once for writing the phrase “I used to think I was a city girl…” on this very blog. At the time, I agreed that it may have been overkill for the subject I was writing about, but today, I have to readdress it.

Yes: last time I was being overly poetic just for the sake of it. You got me. But this time, I’m serious: I think I’ve become a true bumpkin.

Alex and I were talking on the phone recently: we haven’t had time to talk at all for the past two weeks, and so we were catching up, when slowly, I started to realize that all of my stories were starting to sound the same…

“Les manouches went fishing and caught a fish. I gutted it on the kitchen table… it bled everywhere. We barbecued it and ate it for dinner. It was awesome!”

“Did you know that manouche #1’s family kills a pig every year and butchers it together? Isn’t that awesome?”

“We found wild mint growing at the fontaine des eaux… I think I’m gonna cook with it. How awesome is that?”

“We caught a snail and named him Phillippe. We’re keeping him in a box on the terrace and feeding him salad. I think we’re gonna eat him with the neighbors. Isn’t that awesome?”

I’m not ready to go back to Paris… not even close. I find myself hanging on to every day we still have here, trying to slow everything down, which, as we all know, is impossible.

Instead, I find myself standing somewhere I never could have imagined, wondering how all the choices I made, all my years of being a city girl, could have led to this.

We did end up grilling and eating escargots with the neighbors, although Phillippe–le petit malin–managed to escape just before we headed next door for the 100-odd Catalan snails they were preparing.

It was the girls’ last night before heading home, and nothing could have prepared them for what they would witness and eventually taste–nothing like escargots bourguignons, the ones dripping in a buttery, herby sauce that you sop up with baguette. These snails were tiny and grey and prepared before our eyes on a grill that is purchased–or made by hand, as this one was–only in the region.

The escargots had the membrane that covers the meat deftly removed by our neighbor, and were then seasoned (alive) with a mixture of salt, pepper and piment (hot pepper) that caused them to mousse before our very eyes.

How awesome is that?

We next watched as our other neighbor prepared them à l’ancienne, grilling them over an open fire and drizzling them with flaming lard.

For those of you who didn’t catch that… I’m going to reiterate: flaming. Lard.

Awesome.

A third neighbor taught us the proper way to eat cargolade, as the dish is called: prepare a piece of bread slathered generously with aoli, and then use a small fork to remove the snail from its shell. To be enjoyed with friends as close as family, homemade Muscat, jokes, stories of pig butchering complete with demonstrative hand gestures and colorful adjectives, and quiet epiphanies when you realize that the place you thought was your home is now the place furthest from it.

July 22, 2009

Crepes

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — emiglia @ 6:39 pm

I was walking to the post office this morning when I realized it.

I listened to my flip-flops flip-flopping on the tarmac. I relished the fact that I could stroll straight down the middle of the street, and I completely avoided the sidewalks. I was glad to be first in line (the only person in line) once I reached the familiar yellow-and-blue building, and I didn’t mind having to wait while the woman working chatted on the phone before selling me my stamps.

The girls left yesterday, piled into the cars at four in the morning–that surreal time of day where nothing seems alive. We rode and rode and rode–the route familiar but the light making it all seem wrong and strange, which it was: saying goodbye after three short weeks left a knot in everyone’s stomach and tears on the faces of a few.

Too quickly, we ushered the girls through the airport, ate one last sandwich together and collected the tinfoil wrappers, wiped away the last few tears, and we led them through to the gate. With hardly a fanfare, they were gone, heading one by one up the escalators, one last joke as they waved like old-fashioned ladies on trains pulling out of the station.

For them, the journey continued: lasted hours as they waited excitedly to reach home. But for us, that was the end. We had more people to pick up, a drive back home to make, the next session to consider.

It’s strange to be here without them… strange to think that it was just a few days ago that we were all sitting here and laughing and talking together. Strange to think that we’ll never all be here together again in the same way: these three weeks will never be recreated again.

I thought that this would make Paziols a hard place to be. I thought that without the spirit of the girls, without the constant chatter, it would fade away and no longer be a home for me.

It’s different: that much is sure. But I feel a kinship with the people of this town that it’s taken me three years to find. They may still not know me by name, but I know that they know who I am: they recognize me as what I have recognized being: some odd combination of French and American–not one of the screaming teenagers who invades every year, but definitely not one of the locals or even one of the French counselors.

I realized it today as I walked down the street, as I smelled corks and wine wafting out of the local winery–a heady scent in the humidity of the morning without wind. I want to live here all the time.

I want to live here as more than just a tourist. I want to see the vendonges in the fall and the winters I hear rumors of–the Tramontagne wind confining everyone indoors in front of bowls of cassoulet–but have never witnessed myself. I want to become part of the life here, and not just a part of the summers.

Summers will always be something special here in Paziols: barbecues and grillades under the stars, afternoons spent outside the café or walking to the Prade. Summer will always be the Saturday pizza truck, evenings spent sitting out on the terrace. Summer will always be soirée crêpes, where everyone gets a turn to faire sauter une crêpe, even if half of them end up on the floor.

Summers will always be about Americans in Paziols: we’ve invaded and they’ve welcomed us, and we’re not going anywhere. But now, between sessions, I’ve caught a glimpse of what life would be like here all the time, and all I can think of is how much I’d like to live here always… with maybe a jaunt to Spain every once in awhile if the wind gets too chilly.

Crêpes (makes 20 crêpes)

4 eggs
1.5 cups milk
2 cups flour
2 Tbsp. melted butter
1 tsp. salt
sunflower oil


Mix all ingredients except the sunflower oil in a bowl. Whisk for 10 minutes. Cover and allow to rest for at least an hour.

Remove the batter from the fridge. Heat a crêpe pan or shallow nonstick skillet and use paper towel to apply a thin layer of oil. Pour a ladleful of batter into the pan and turn the pan to spread. Flip the crêpe when golden and allow to brown on the other side.

Taste the first crêpe: this is traditionally for the cook and helps to gauge whether you need to adjust your batter measurements.



July 19, 2009

Normal

Filed under: Pie, Salad, Side Dishes — Tags: , , , , , — emiglia @ 11:59 am

It’s incredible how quickly something that was foreign and bizarre can become a natural and normal part of your daily life. It’s even more strange how quickly something that used to be normal can seem so far away.

I live in Paris: I’m used to it by now, used to saying it, used to going about my daily life with La Poste and Champion and the Paris métro as frequent players in my day to day. But when I first moved to Paris, everything seemed new and exciting and shiny. I craved the days where I would get to say to someone, nonchalantly, of course, though I was jumping with excitement on the inside, “I live in Paris.”

After three months back in the South, Paris–and everything that goes along with it–seems so far away. Gone are days filled with minutes that were just for me. Gone are afternoons of walking around and discovering new things. Gone are early evenings of apéro and Le Grand Journal–the news program I slowly became addicted to over the last few months of being in Paris.

Normal, now, is dinner at nine on the terrace. Normal is buying enough potatoes to feed an army without blinking an eye. Normal is throwing ten or so packs of jambon cuit into the caddy at the supermarket–it doesn’t matter if we don’t have sandwiches planned on the menu… they’ll get eaten by someone eventually.

Normal is translating every five seconds what someone around me is saying into another language. Normal is trying to find ways to reword the French jeux de mots printed on the inside of Carambar wrappers, that French candy that gets devoured the minute I walk into the house with a pack.

Normal is running into the woman who runs a program for French teenagers in our tiny town while in line at the tinier supermarket. Normal is upping the count for dinner from 17 to 25 when we decide to have these guests over just a few hours before we plan to sit down to eat.

Normal is throwing several dozen sausages on the grill and preparing a few pounds of tomatoes for a salad.

Normal is selecting about seven cheeses for a cheese board, knowing everything would be gone by the end of the night.

I’m aware, somehow, that soon this will all seem faraway and hazy, in the same way that Paris has become. I know that once I’m back home in the States this August, Westhampton and driving everywhere and taking the New York City subway will be my new normal, and I know that that too will fade when I leave after just one short month for Spain. I know that this is the essence of the life that I have made for myself, and I know that normal, for me, will never be just one thing.

But for just a few weeks, I like to pretend that this is the way that my normal life will always be, that mornings of making French toast in bulk and evenings of serving up tart tarte au citron will always be a part of my day-to-day. I know that it’s a lie, but even for me–”tell me like it is, even if it hurts”–I’m going to tune out the whisper that tells me that I’m just kidding myself, have another glass of Muscat de Rivesaltes and hide behind the chirp of the cicadas for just a little longer.

Tomato Salad

6-8 on-the-vine tomatoes in various colors, vines reserved
1 spring onion, minced
2 cloves of garlic, pressed
3-4 Tbsp. olive oil
salt
1 tsp. dried basil

Cut the tomatoes into chunks and mix in a glass bowl with the onion, garlic, olive oil, a generous amount of salt and the basil. Add the vines and allow to marinate at least one hour outside the fridge. Remove the vines and toss before serving.


Tarte au Citron

4 large eggs, cold
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup fresh lemon juice
1 Tbps. fresh lemon zest
12 Tbsp. butter, cold
2 refrigerated pâtes brisée

Prebake the pie crusts in a 350 degree oven until just crisp, 5 minutes.

Whisk the eggs, sugar and zest together. Heat in a double boiler until the eggs begin to foam. Add the lemon juice, bit by bit, whisking constantly. When the mixture has the consistency of loose lemon curd, remove from the heat and mix in the butter.

Pour the filling into the crusts and heat under the broiler until just set. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

July 12, 2009

C’est pas évident

Filed under: Pie — Tags: , , , , — emiglia @ 5:00 am

One of my favorite expressions in French is “ce n’est pas évident,” something that is almost exclusively used in spoken French, and so it almost always comes out as “c’est pas evident.”

Evident means obvious in French, but when used in the negative, like many of my favorite expressions in French, it can take on a myriad of definitions, none of which is easy to categorically translate. (C’est pas évident… it’s not straightforward.)

C’est pas évident, in general, to find something that a large group of teenage girls will all be interested in.

C’est pas évident to find 12 jobs so that all of them can help in the kitchen when you realize that all it took was making Tarte Tatin.

C’est pas évident that, when making said Tarte Tatin, a store-bought puff pastry crust would work just as well as a homemade one.

C’est pas évident to flip the finished Tarte Tatin when all of the plates in the house are smaller than the tart pans you used.

C’est pas évident that the grown man you ask to help you will scream like a little girl when flipping the Tarte Tatin onto a glass cake plate you finally found that is, in fact, big enough to hold the final tart.

C’est pas évident, when you see 12 skinny little girls get off a plane, that they will each be able to put away more than the four growing boys you had last year combined.

Tarte Tatin


2 refrigerated puff pastries
14 granny smith apples
lemon juice
1 cup butter
3 cups sugar
2 sachets vanilla sugar or 2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Core and peel the apples and slice them. Use a little bit of lemon juice to keep them from browning as you slice.

Heat the butter and sugar in two tarte tatin pans or in two skillets if you don’t have them over medium heat. Add the vanilla sugar.

When the butter and sugar are melted together, add the apple slices in swirls from the inside out. You will not use all the apples. Turn the heat down to low and cook.

As the apples begin to cook, squeeze more and more apples into the spaces that will appear between apple slices. Continue cooking until the sugar is a deep brown and all the apples have been used.

Flip the pans so that the apples are upside down into tarte pans (if you are using tarte tatin pans, skip this step).

Unroll the pastries onto the apples, pressing the sides down so that they stick. Place in the oven and cook for half an hour, or until the pastry is golden on top. Serve with crème fraîche.

July 7, 2009

Cabillaud en Papillote with Roasted Lemon Potatoes

Filed under: Fish, potatoes — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 5:15 pm

My love of cooking stems–as I assume most people’s does–from a love of food. I started cooking when I was 18 because I had just been granted my own kitchen after three years of cafeteria food, three meals a day, seven days a week, supplemented by an occasional trip to Fuddruckers. When I was given my own kitchen in the first dorm I lived in in Toronto, it was like handing a kid a jar of Nutella and a spoon and saying, “Go nuts!”

And for a long time, that’s what it was: I was entranced by new ingredients, and I spent hours reading recipes online (OK, nevermind, I still do that). But it’s about something else now–at first, I was cooking for one person: myself. My love of cooking was fueled only by my personal enjoyment of good food, and I was afraid to cook for anyone else, because I was afraid that they wouldn’t like what I made.

Since then, of course, things have changed. Four years have elapsed, and not only have I moved out of that tiny first kitchen, where my tools were a set of nonstick pans from the discount store and I set off the smoke alarm every night to a giant kitchen in the South of France, but I’m no longer cooking for just myself. Yes, in my “normal” life (although the girls here have reminded me, as they stare, wide-eyed and slack-jawed as I explain my plans for the next few months–Paziols, New York, San Sebastian, Paris–that my life is anything but normal), I cook for two, and any stragglers who happen by my house to find a pan of lasagna or a stack of cookies. But here, it’s moved to a different level–I’m cooking every meal for 17 people, many more mouths than most people have to feed in a lifetime… and I’m loving it.

I love going to the grocery store with the girls, who spend whole minutes just staring at the giant pots of Nutella. I love watching them choke out the words, uncertain, asking the fishmonger for enough fish to feed a small army and nodding to the woman, who looks at me to make sure that the girls haven’t just confused their numbers.

I love the pantry, filled to the brim with potatoes and onions and garlic and boxes of milk and jars of jam that we make ourselves (all in good time, my friends, all in good time). I love knowing, as I fill up two caddies and drag them towards the checkout that I’m going to be making all of this food and sharing it with these kids who have come to France, not just for French, but for culture.

In the end, my personal meals are often eaten after everyone else has finished, sometimes cold, but I don’t mind one bit. I pull the fish out of the oven at the perfect temperature and watch as 17 faces who had looked at the board where we write the menu du jour with skepticism when they had seen poisson en papillotte written there swoop as I unwrap the filets and the scents of garlic and tomatoes waft out. “But I don’t like fish!” They had said, wrinkling their noses as they wandered in and stared at the bag that held the offending item.

Then why was there none left?

Cabillaud en Papillote

2 kilos cabillaud, or other white fish
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 Tbsp. sunflower oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
6 tomatoes, chopped
2 lemons
1 tsp. herbes de provence
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Heat the oil over a low flame and add the garlic. Sauté for 1-2 minutes, until fragrant, and add the tomatoes. Cook for 10 minutes, or until the tomatoes have softened slightly.

Meanwhile, thinly slice a lemon into rounds.

Line a baking pan with aluminum foil so that the foil hangs over the sides of the pan. Lay the lemon slices over the bottom in an even strip. Place the fish fillets on top of the lemon slices in one layer (I do this in two pans). Spoon the tomato mixture over the top, and season with herbes de provence, salt and pepper.

Bake at 450 degrees until the fish is just cooked through, about half an hour. Serve immediately.

Roasted Lemon Potatoes
20-25 small/medium potatoes, cut into chunks
3 Tbsp. olive oil
salt and pepper
juice of one lemon
2 tsp. herbes de provence

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Toss all ingredients together and roast, tossing once or twice, for 30 minutes, or until potatoes are crisp on the outside.

July 4, 2009

Poulet Rôti

Filed under: Chicken — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 12:39 pm

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by everything that went on in the kitchen.

I hovered at my mother’s elbow, trying to get a better look. I asked every two seconds for a “job,” something she would gladly give–as long as it wasn’t something she wanted to do. Cooking with my mother wasn’t about learning: she called us her sous-chefs, but really, she just wanted us out of the way, mixing together ketchup and horseradish to make cocktail sauce or adding oil and eggs to ready-to-bake boxed cornbread mix.

I always assumed I would be like that: after all, I relish every step of the cooking process… why should I share? When I found out I would be cooking for the group in Paziols, I often imagined it as just that: me in my usual place in front of the stove, except stirring sauce for 17 people instead of two. How nice it is to be wrong sometimes.

I never thought I would find more happiness in the kitchen as I do when I’m cooking, but I’ve learned that it’s even better to watch someone else, someone who’s just finding their footing, start to put things together.

Some of the kids here couldn’t be less interested in cooking, and that’s fine. Sure, they’ll all have their turn rotating into the fold anyway, putting on a toque du chef and washing salad greens and chopping tomatoes. They’ll all make confiture à l’ancienne, jam made the old-fashioned way and ladled into glass jars to take home as a souvenir. They’ll all copy the recipes into their notebooks and have them years later in French, which some of them may have forgotten how to understand.

But some of the kids–one girl in particular, this year–are enchanted by cooking. The younger girls turn at my elbows the way I did with my mother, and I search for tasks to give them that aren’t too hard or too dangerous, but one of the older girls has become my sous-chef–my real sous-chef–and it was she who ended up blending together the beurre composé that made up the flavoring for the roasted chicken last night.

She has found a happy place in the kitchen, a place where she is totally at ease. I ask her to do something, in French, of course, and she completes each task–from zesting lemons and chopping potatoes to seasoning salad dressing to taste without me standing over her shoulder–with the same enthusiasm.

She’s nothing like me, moving a mile a minute, running around the kitchen to stop things from boiling over and ensuring that no one is touching my knives. She has such a complete sense of relaxation in the kitchen that I’ve found nowhere except swimming, holding my breath as long as I can and letting the world turn around me while I exist below the surface. She has found perfect zen behind the stove: I envy her it, but I don’t begrudge her one second. I love to watch as she learns, as she watches me and copies what I do, something that is essential when learning to cook in another language. I’m sure that some day she will, like me, find her place behind a stove of her own.

Poulet Rôti

4 yellow chickens
20 potatoes
2 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. herbes de provence
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1 lemon, zested and cut in eighths
6 cloves garlic

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Wash the chickens and pat them dry. Wash the potatoes and cut into cubes with the skin on. Divide them evenly between two roasting pans. Season with salt.

In a bowl, combine the butter, herbes de provence, pepper, lemon zest and some salt. Add one of the cloves of garlic, minced. Rub the herbed butter over the chickens, including on the breast underneath the skin. Stuff the lemon eighths into the cavity of the chicken, and place them in the roasting pans on top of the potatoes. Add the other cloves of garlic, unpeeled, to the baking pans amongst the potatoes.

Season the outside of the chicken generously with salt.

Roast at 450 degrees for an hour and a half, tossing the potatoes occasionally in the fat that the chicken will render. Serve with spicy French mustard and crusty French bread, and be sure to thank your sous-chef profusely.

July 3, 2009

A la bolognaise

Filed under: Beef, Carnivorous Main Dishes, Pasta — Tags: , , — emiglia @ 2:06 am

It’s incredible what a difference a year makes.

A year ago, I was in Paziols, but the similarities end there.

A year ago, Alex and I weren’t together. A year ago, I was still in school. A year ago, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

Well… I guess I still don’t. But I’m working on it. I’m not in a hurry.

That’s what the South does to you: something I had forgotten since I knew it so well a year ago, when so much of my time was still spent back and forth on the train to Cannes for weekends at the beach and nights out in my favorite Irish pub–a pub so incredible with staff that were such good friends that I thought nothing of riding the train five hours just to be able to sit at the bar and have a pint.

But I’m not in Cannes, or even in Provence. I am in the South–in Paziols. Third time’s the charm, or so they say, but everything about my life in Paziols–the three summers I’ve spent living in this old house and watching it change and evolve before my eyes–has been charming: the third year is just that… one more year of being here, in what Anne-Marie has always told us to call our “home” in France.

And it does feel like a home–after so long of not having one, I had forgotten what it feels like to be so completely right in a place: not just in an apartment, like in Paris, or in a town you know like the back of your hand, like our summer house in Westhampton, but a place that has everything: a town, a house, a built-in family.

I do the cooking here now that Patricia is gone, and that makes this feel even more like my house, as I put together menus and call on the kids as though they were my own siblings to help me wash vegetables and chop tomatoes and carry platters laden with salads and potatoes and meat to the table where the rest of them sit waiting. It’s nothing like any camp experience I had when growing up: they all know, even after having been here for less than 48 hours, that we’re a family, that this is their home too.

A year ago, it wasn’t like this–not really. It may have been because it was still so new for all of us, even the staff. It may have been because the group we have this year is chomping at the bit to be let out into the green pastures of vines that sprawl on all sides, to ask constantly, “Comment dit-on…” How do you say…

How do you say what it is I want to say? Even I don’t know, and I’ve been mulling it over for days as I sleep beneath an opened window and listen to crickets chirp and wait for the midnight crow of the rooster who’s either confused or running on his own schedule, as the South tends to do.

They love it. I can tell they do. I could tell from the moment I listened in on their conversation at the airport–three girls who had never met before, talking about how great it would be when they were fluent. They reminded me of myself, and that, in and of itself, made me smile.

I don’t know why this is so different from what it was a year ago. A year ago, none of this was real for me, but this year, it couldn’t be more real.

Spaghetti à la bolognaise (serves 20)

2 Tbsp. butter
2 Tbsp. olive oil
2 onions
2 carrots
2 stalks of celery
200 g. lardons
1.8 kilo ground beef
430 g. tomato coulis
765 g. canned whole tomatoes
1 glass wine
2 cups milk

Mince the carrots, onion and celery. Melt the oil and butter together in a skillet and slowly cook the vegetables over medium heat until tender. Season generously with salt.

Push the vegetables to the side and add the lardons. Cook until golden.

Pull the vegetables back into the middle of the skillet and mix with the lardons. Push the mixture back to the sides of the slillet and add the meat in small amounts, browning well before pushing it to the side as well.

Prepare a large stock pot with a lid. When the skillet grows too full, scoop the vegetables and meat out with a slotted spoon and keep warm in the stock pot. Continue frying the meat in the skillet and transferring it, as need be, to the pot. When all the meat is cooked, remove the skillet from the heat and place the stock pot over a low flame.

Add the wine and the milk, and bring to a boil. Add the tomatoes and mix to combine. Reduce the flame back to low and cover. Cook for 2-4 hours, stirring occasionally. Season with more salt as needed and serve with spaghetti. Keeps well in the fridge to serve hungry campers for lunch.


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