Tomatoes Provençale

Tomatoes Provençale by beFOODled on Flickr.

Here's a closer look at the tomatoes Provençale that we made in Calgary. I love tomatoes, but in Canada the stuff we import in winter doesn't compare in flavour to the fresh local toms grown by our own farmers in the summer. Once again, I bow to the superior expertise of the French in matters of elevating humble ingredients to new heights (the secret is grated cheese)!

Tomatoes Provençale
serves six

3 big tomatoes
salt
pepper
fresh chopped parsley
dried basil
dried thyme
diced garlic
grated parmesan cheese
olive oil

Cut three tomatoes in half. Cut a little bit off the bottom of each half so the tomatoes sit up straight and don't roll away.

Sprinkle small amounts of each ingredient over the top of each tomato half. Drizzle over a little olive oil.

Bake at 375 degrees in the oven for half an hour, then check them and if needed, bake for another 15 minutes.


Tomatoes Provençale in the convection oven by beFOODled on Flickr.

Three-pepper soup

On our last night in Provence we made a spectacular soup. It looks like a lot of work, but appearances are deceiving. You just make three purees and swirl them together. We personalized them with different designs for the guests at Les Tuillières. The meal that followed was a turkey fricassee with olives, and for dessert, lavender crème brûlée. It was a beautiful finish to a wonderful experience, made even better by the company — Susan and Hermann, the other cooking students and their partners, and also a tableful of Welsh, English and French people. We were the loudest table having the most fun singing all of our national anthems during dinner :)

Three-pepper soup
serves six

Bell peppers — three red, two yellow, 1 green
500 mL vegetable stock
1 Tbsp pine nuts
1 tsp curry powder
125 g natural yogurt
250 mL milk
salt and pepper to taste
2 circles of pineapple, diced finely
pineapple juice
chives, chopped finely

Deseed the peppers and cut into a large dice. Fry the pine nuts over medium heat in a dry frying pan ... only for a few minutes until just browning. Pour onto a cutting board or a room temperature bowl to stop the cooking process.

Divide the stock and curry powder among three separate pots in proportion to the number of peppers. Bring to a boil. Add the diced peppers, each colour to its appropriate pot. Simmer until soft.

Puree each pepper mixture with a stab blender. Add the yogurt and milk to each puree and mix well. Correct the seasoning with salt and pepper and a bit of pineapple juice. Let each soup cool for at least 30 minutes.

Place each soup with care in a bowl in a creative design, making sure the colours don't mix, and garnish with the roasted pine nuts, chives and pineapple pieces.

Creamed mushrooms

On Friday we made another delicious French lunch of creamed mushrooms in the kitchen at Les Tuillières. Hermann says that you can make extra of these mushrooms and freeze them for when unexpected guests drop by. We served them inside puff pastry shells and topped with a little puffed pastry hat, but you could also serve them on toast.

Creamed mushrooms

1 kg (2 lb) sliced button mushrooms
1 onion, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp flour
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup cream
1/3 C white wine
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 Tbsp herbes de Provence
one chicken bouillon cube, crushed
nutmeg to taste
salt and pepper
fresh parsley to garnish

Fry the onions and garlic in butter and oil until softened. Add the white wine and stir. Add the mushrooms and herbes de Provence and mix together. Fry the mushrooms until they start to release water. Cover and continue to cook for three minutes, stirring occasionally.

Uncover, add flour and stir. Cook for a few minutes.

Add cream, salt, pepper and nutmeg, or reduce the salt and add a bouillon cube. Stir in the lemon juice. Adjust the consistency by adding milk.

Serve on toast or puff pastry shells made in the oven. Decorate with fresh parsley.

La Bouquinerie - saladerie et salon du thé en Provence

After our visit to the Nyons market, Susan treated all of the cooking students to lunch at La Bouquinerie, a wonderful second-hand bookstore and tea room that elevates the humble salad to a work of art :)


There are hot and cold salads inspired by various locales: the Provençale, the Asian with spring rolls, the cold Italian, the hot Italian that S and I ordered pictured above, and several other varieties. There's also a small dessert menu of interesting tarts, tortes and cakes baked in-house.

La Bouquinerie is in Le Poët-Laval, a very old and beautiful walled medieval village built during the 12th century. The tea room is actually located in a very steep, unevenly cobbled lane in the old castle in the centre of the village. Back in the day, the castle was also a refuge for crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. The monks offered shelter to the tired and treated the sick pilgrims passing through.

We ate inside, surrounded by old books on bookshelves built into the castle walls. However there's also a very romantic patio where you can sit and eat under a ceiling of grapes! It was raining when we were there, but I still got this wonderful shot of that patio and the view beyond it.

The open market in Nyons

On Thursday morning we got up early again. The power was back on after an amazing lightning storm that knocked out the neighbourhood's transformer the night before. We drove with Susan and the other cooking students to go to the market in Nyons. It was again pouring buckets, but one third of the vendors were there.

Nyons is a town in the southern part of the Drôme that hosts the largest open market of the region. On Thursdays, vendors take over the whole town square and trickle down the alleyways, laying out a feast for the senses. The usual food stalls of bread, meat, cheese, and fruit and veg are just the beginning. Even on a rainy Thursday there was a great variety of other things for sale, too: scarves, soaps, essential oils, plants, fabrics and lavender sachets. I took this photo at the stall belonging to Susan's favourite spice lady.

Since it's surrounded by silvery olive groves, Nyons is also famous for its locally made olive oils and wines. Susan took S and I and the other cooking students to the olive oil co-operative, where there were wines to be tasted free of charge, confits and tapenades lining the walls and olive products galore. I even found some olive oil bubble bath to take home :)

Goat Cheese and Herb Dip

On Wednesday we assembled once more at 4 p.m. in the kitchen at Les Tuillières to make a four-course meal for the guests. In France, entrée means first course instead of main, and tonight it was a lovely eggplant gratin. Our plat principale was a lamb and artichoke stew and for dessert, we made a chocolate almond cake.

Our appetizer was a goat cheese and herb dip. It's delicious and fresh-tasting. I've since brought this little bit of Provence to a few parties where it has passed many a taste test.

Goat Cheese and Herb Dip

4 oz soft fresh goat cheese (pure white and not encrusted with anything)
1 1/2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp plain thin yogurt
1 Tbsp each of finely chopped fresh herbs, whatever you have on hand: chives, parsley, rosemary, thyme, mint or coriander
salt and pepper to taste

(optional) 1 Tbsp fresh edible flowers, hand torn: violets, primroses, sage blossoms, nasturtiums, pot marigolds, young rose petals, fragrant geraniums or poppies with the black part of the petals removed.

Blend the goat cheese, olive oil and yogurt. Add the fresh herbs and flowers, if using. Season with salt and pepper. Cover and refrigerate until dip is cold and the flavours have had a chance to meld, about two hours.

Once the dip I made turned out too hard. If that happens, mix in a tablespoon of warm water or add more yogurt.

A Côtes du Rhône wine tasting

S and I joined Susan and the other cooking students after lunch on Wednesday for a Côtes du Rhône wine tasting. Susan introduced us to three whites, three rosés and three reds, and I took away three things — even with a spitting bucket you can get quite tipsy, I should no longer ignore rosés and most importantly, I have expensive tastes. (My favourites were the Domaine Font de Michelle 2004 Chateauneuf du Pape red and the Saint Péray Terres Boisées white ;)


The Côtes du Rhône region makes approximately 420 million bottles of wine a year, and about eight million of those are exported to Canada (2005/2006 statistics). Wines must be made from several grape varieties to get appellation status. Another requirement is that yields must be small to keep the grapes of good quality, so the winegrowers cut back their vines every fall.


From the car, I saw many vineyards with rosebushes growing in front of each row of vines. Susan told me roses fall prey to the same insect pests as grapevines, but show disease earlier, so the roses are a sort of early detection system by which the farmers gauge the health of their vines. The thicker the trunks, the older the vines and the finer the wine.

Picodon cheese and Madame Jullian's goat farm

On our fifth day in Provence, Susan took all of the cooking students to the village of Truinas to visit Madame Fabienne Jullian's goat cheese farm, which is high up in the mountains. We took home six packages of one-day old goat cheeses and had them for lunch with a smooth raspberry coulis dribbled over. It was delicious! At this stage, the cheese is almost like cottage cheese, but with a much milder flavour.

There are 60 nannies and two billies at Mme Jullian's farm. The nannies were overjoyed to receive visitors. If you move your hands over their heads to pet them, they think you're offering food and try to eat it, but if you pet under the chin, they know you are giving affection. At six months old, they start visiting the billy. We saw the billies too, but they were too tired to come say hello.

Mme Jullian makes a fresh raw milk goat cheese that's locally known as Picodon cheese. It's one of many agricultural products that have AOC (appellation d’origine contrôlée) status.

She pours the milk into these small moulds that have tiny holes and adds a little bit of rennet and salt. Then the little rounds dry in her fridge for two to four weeks.

Some goats in the region live even higher in the mountains and graze on the wild mountain thyme that grows at those altitudes, which gives their milk and its cheeses a special flavour.

I don't think these cheeses make it to Canada, and that's too bad because they are delicious! Susan says that cheeses cured over 60 days are allowed into the United States, but the fresher raw milk cheese like the ones chez Mme Jullian are all too young to make it over.

We saw Picodon cheese everywhere in the supermarkets. Young cheeses, like the day-olds we ate for lunch, can lose a lot of weight during the aging process and develop a rind and a hardened centre. The flavour is so concentrated that it "piques at your dents" (teeth). I preferred the younger versions, but I can see how the aged Picodon could become an aquired taste.

Les Aubergistes in Marsanne

On the way home from Mirmande, S and I stopped for dinner at Les Aubergistes, a hotel restaurant in Marsanne. S had the poulet fermier laqué au miel et lavande, and I had the noix de veau rôtie et son jus aux pleurottes. Those loosely translate to chicken with lavender honey and round fillet of veal with mushrooms.

I noticed that certain French phrases here were very different from the Canadian French we have absorbed living so close to Quebec. Maybe it's just the way of the service industry, but French French seems more formal and emphatic. For example, instead of de rien or bienvenue for your welcome, the servers here say je vous en prie. Draft beer on tap here is bière en pression, not bière en fut, and we also heard la facture more often than l'addition when we asked to pay our bill.

One of the guests at Les Tuillières told us that the French think Canadian French is quaint, and gave us the example of how the Québécois say char for car. To the French, char is an old-fashioned word for a cart or wagon. Another instance happened when I told a bartender in Paris that we were going to faire du magasinage demain, he didn't seem to understand and then chuckled with an ahh, oui! Later, I looked it up and in France they say faire les courses or quite simply le shopping. So ours must be an older French and the language is obviously not evolving the same way in Quebec. But no matter what Canadian French we mustered up, we were always understood, and in most cases even my rusty French was better than their English. Hourra! All those years of public school French have not been in vain!

Fruit recipes from Mirmande

On Tuesday afternoon we went to Mirmande, another medieval village perché that is almost 1,000 years old and has received many national accolades. It's a maze of narrow, twisting alleyways, and houses with ancient stonework and beautiful wooden doors. At the very top is a very pretty church, St. Foy, with amazing views of the countryside.

Mirmande is nested among orchards and has a thriving fruit industry. The office of tourism's website has a link to the recipes of one of its employees. Click on Recettes de Marinette for some authentic, handwritten Provençale fruit recipes, in French of course ;) like sorbet à la pêche, clafouti de cerises and tarte aux figues fraiches.

Mirmande is on France's official list of most beautiful villages. It has also won awards for its rooftops. At one point, there was a law exempting houses without roofs from taxes, which led to many homeowners dismantling them. After this, the price of buying a house was based on the number of roof tiles still on it!

In the thirties, an artist named André Lhote moved to Mirmande and decided to save it from ruin. He encouraged other artists to move to the village and bring it back to life with their trade. Lhote's own art became part of the cubist movement. By the seventies, Mirmande had became known for its modern but traditional terracotta tiles in beautiful colours of red, straw and pink. The inhabitants had roofs over their heads once more!

Mirmande has also gotten national recognition for its gardens and plants, which are selected for their ability to grow in dry, stony ground by a group called "Les Rocailles Botaniques” (Botanic Pebbles).

Mirmande overlooks the Rhone valley and the Massif Central. Its name has gone through many incarnations, but it originates from combining the Latin mirus, which means admirable, and mandare, which means to dominate.


As we made our way to the top, I couldn't believe that such a place existed and that the 520 or so people who live here are able to make a living in a remote medieval village. I asked Susan about it later at Les Tuillières and she said that people have artisanal lives here — some have an orchard and grow apples, others have goats and make goats' cheese. They do one thing and they do it well.

And just when I was starting to get carried away with how old and romantic things were, S and I heard two little boys playing in the streets, humming the theme to Star Wars.

Cheese and Rosemary Heaven

Today, our fourth in France, was another full day of tooling around the countryside. It was market day in La Bégude de Mazenc, so we went there first and bought bread and two wedges of these cheeses, pictured above, for more baguette sandwiches. The cheese vendor was very friendly and when she found out we were from Canada, naturally the conversation turned to the weather. In this part of France, she said, it snows very rarely and mostly in the mountains, and the temperature never really gets colder than minus five. Reason number 8394 why I love Provence.

We also bought some beautiful Teflon-coated tablecloth fabric in purple, olive and yellow, which will look great under the French dinners we'll be cooking for our friends soon. Provence is famous for its bright and colourful fabrics.

In the afternoon we set off for Grignan, one of the many fortified villages perched above valleys in Provence. It has a well-preserved Renaissance château, built in the mid 1500s. The château owes its celebrity to the French writer Madame de Sévigné, who visited and died here in 1696.


Along the footpaths were huge bushes of lavender and rosemary like the one pictured above. I couldn't believe how big they were, in fact, almost as big as me! It was so nice to see them in their native habitat growing to their full potential. I kept running my hands through them and sticking my nose in them. I thought of my own little rosemary plant, entrusted to Squeaky's dubious care while we were away, and I wished it were like this one. (The last plant that I had entrusted to Squeaky, a lavender plant, was put on her roof and forgotten about. But I'm happy to say that she took great care of my rosemary and African violet, albeit to the detriment of her other houseplants that I noticed were wilting when I went to pick mine up.)

This next picture on the right really shows how neat these fortified villages are. The ramparts, wash houses and earthworks surrounding the castle are so well preserved that they have become people's homes with the addition of openings for doors and windows. You can see that this is someone's backyard and in their garden the lovely rosemary and lavender plants are flourishing :)

The regional Provençale dish of magret de canard

Our first night in the kitchen! I was so excited :) Our teacher was Hermann Jenny, in the middle in the photo below. He and his wife Susan own Les Tuillères. He is a trained professional chef who has managed several luxury restaurants in Europe and Asia. I knew that S and I were going to learn a lot, and over the next week we did — not just about cooking and eating, but also techniques, the agricultural roots of Provence, and the philosophical side of food and wine appreciation.

Finding out that we were going to make magret de canard in our first class was a very nice surprise. We had only been in Provence two nights and had already seen this dish on two different menus, stuffed with chèvre at La Fontaine Minérale, and with honey, peaches and pears at Les Voyageurs.

Hermann's is a tender, pan-roasted version marinated in red wine, soy sauce and Dijon mustard. He showed us how to trim the excess duck fat and score what remained. We also learned that if you double a quantity of meat, you only need to increase the marinade by 50 per cent. The final dish is served with a creamy mashed potato and drizzled over with a rich, flavoursome sauce that looks like purple velvet. So beautifully unctuous, as Nigella Lawson might say ;)

There were four people taking cooking classes, S and I and two French people. We were all raised our eyebrows when Hermann told us we would be cooking for 18 that night — I thought we'd just cook for ourselves, but no, you cook for every guest paying for the table d'hôte!

We made a five-course meal, and ate it outside on a big, long table in Les Tuillères' beautiful courtyard. On the menu was aioli, a garlicky mayonnaise that the Provençales use as a dipping sauce with blanched vegetables, an eggplant risotto as an entrée (the first course), magret de canard and mashed potato, a plate full of local cheeses, and dessert, a fig and apple crumble that we made with fresh fruit from the garden.


Hermann and Susan are kindly letting me publish a few recipes to share with beFOODled readers, so without further ado, here is how to make magret de canard à la Les Tuillières (already taste-tested and heartily approved of by some discerning girlfriends in Ottawa).

Duck breast (magret de canard) with herbs
serves four

2 duck breasts, 12 oz. each
1/2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp butter
salt and pepper

Marinade
2/3 cup red wine
3 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1 shallot, roughly sliced
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, roughly sliced
1 Tbsp herbes de Provence
freshly ground pepper

Prepare the marinade and trim the duck breasts of excess fat. Marinate the duck for one to two hours in the fridge.

Set the duck aside and reduce the marinade by half in a saucepan. Brown the duck breasts in a separate sauce pan — about seven minutes with the fat side down, and three on the meat side.

Remove the duck and keep it warm on a covered plate.

Return the pan to the heat and add the reduced and strained marinade. Simmer for a couple of minutes. Season, take of the heat and add the butter cubes.

Serve alongside mashed potatoes with sauce drizzled over. You will love this!

Lunch at the Château

S and I roamed the countryside on our third day in Provence, stopping in random towns and wild corners, wherever looked interesting or like it had secrets to give up. We had rented a car in Valence for the week, so the world of Provence was ours for the exploration. We started what was to become a habit during our free time: Pack a lunch, look at the map, plot a random winding course and go.

My favourite part of this particular ramble was our discovery of the little vieux village of Soyans. As we were rounding one of the scary blind corners that seem more common in Provence that straight roads, I saw an old crumbling château on top of a small mountain in the distance. "Let's go there," I shouted. Yippee — I had found a castle, one of my favourite things!
We parked as close as we could, and walked through an ancient little village — can you imagine owning the view from this little backyard on the right? Then we walked past a sign that we couldn't completely translate but which was some official notice from the mayor saying Interdit (forbidden), and up an ancient-looking, sunken stone staircase already half reclaimed by the soil.

Many stairs later, we came across this crumbling church, and just behind it to the north, some castle ruins where men were busy doing restoration work (hence the interdit signage). There was a sign identifying the church as Église St. Marcel. It was built in the 12th century and is dedicated to St. Marcellus, the 5th century bishop of a nearby town called Die.

The church dominates the valley of the River Roubion to the east and the village to the west. The view, as you can see from my photo, is breathtaking.


We ate lunch here while enjoying the scenery. We had done some grocery shopping the previous day, so I had packed baguettes. Here's the recipe for our French lunch at the château:

Take one-half of a baguette from the boulangerie, generously slather on some Dijon mustard, fill with strips of local picodon goats' cheese and prosciutto slices, and enjoy on top of a French mountain with eroding medieval ruins in the background!

Les Voyageurs — an eclectic French restaurant in Charols

On our second night in Provence, after a full day in Avignon, S and I went to Les Voyageurs, a little restaurant in Charols attached to a hotel. I loved the fun-loving decor. The owner Alexandre decorated it, and both him and the other server, his mother, were both really nice to us. They gave us the blue wine bottle that held our drinking water, and I'm happy that it made it home in one piece! Alexandre's sister also runs a museum dedicated to the locally famous Montélimar nougat, also in the same decor his mother told us, but unfortunately we were not able to make it this time (I'm saving a few things for the next trip :).

In the restaurants in this area, the menus are always on a blackboard, which the servers move around from table to table, so you can make your selection at leisure. All of the restaurants encourage a "formule" for ordering, where if you combine an entrée and a plat principale with or without fromage and/or dessert, you get a discount.

My entree was Carpaccio de boeuf au parmesan, which was very nice, like a pâté.



S tried Millefeuille de tomate et mozza, which had layers of incredible tasting tomatoes, both fresh and sundried. I think you have to have lots of sunshine on your tomatoes for them to taste this fantastic. (Reason number 7645 why I love Provence!)



For my plat principale, I ordered Filet de rouget sauce vierge. Sauce vierge (virgin sauce) is a popular French sauce made with tomato, basil, olive oil and lemon juice, and rouget is a red Mediterranean fish also known as red mullet.



S was an adventurer and ordered Tartare de boeuf a votre façon, and ate the whole thing :)

Chateauneuf-du-Pape and the popes in Avignon

On our second day in Provence, we went to Avignon to see the Palace of the popes. This is where the popes and papal legates lived for over 400 years, starting with Pope Clement V. He moved to papacy to Avignon in 1309 to escape political unrest in Rome.

They didn't allow us to take photos inside, so instead I've posted some of my favourites from outside the palace and in the courtyard.

One of my favourite rooms is called La Grand Tinel, an enormous hall once adorned with frescoes and where banquets were held on feast days. The pope would sit and eat on a raised platform at one end of the room. There was even a heirarchy in the cutlery; the best flatware was reserved for the pope.

At the other end of the room, a partition hid a preparation area with a massive fireplace. This was where food brought from the kitchen was plated and kept warm.

Inventories at the time record that thousands of sheep, eggs, chickens, geese, pigs and cows were consumed in one sitting. These popes really knew how to throw a dinner party!

They also knew their wine, and this is where the Popes and I have something - perhaps our only thing - in common. We both love Chateauneuf-du-Pape :)

Chateauneuf du Pape, literally translated as "the new house of the pope," is a village just north of Avignon. The chateau here was once a summer retreat for the popes, who were among the first wine producers in the village. The wine they cultivated here regularly made it to the tables in their palace in Avignon. How I wish my house wine could be Chateauneuf-du-Pape!

La Fontaine Minérale — a French restaurant in the Drôme provençale

Our first night in Provence, S and I ate at La Fontaine Minérale, formerly an old mineral water spring where people used to go to "take the waters" in the late 1800s. You can still sample the water from the spring — it's fizzy and slightly sweet. We ate outside in a long, pebbled courtyard flanked by mountains and a big stone wall, and sheltered under a row of plane trees. It was in the tiny village of Pont-de-Barret, which is very close to Les Tuillères, the B&B where we stayed and took cooking classes.

We thought the food was fantastic. This was my favourite restaurant during our time in the south of France. The above photo shows my chèvre (goat cheese) salad, which had the best olive tapenade that I have ever had. S ordered the magret de canard, pictured below, a very common Provençale dish as we discovered. Magret is the breast meat of a duck that has been fattened for the production of foie gras. There are many variations of magret de canard; La Fontaine Minérale's was stuffed with chèvre.

Seven Days in Provence!

Oh la la. Provence is so beautiful. I'll try to find the words to describe how picturesque it is with the help of some of our photos. I can only say that S and I finally found the summer that we had been waiting for. Everything is infused with sunshine, from the people to the landscape to the food.

The Provençales are a warm-hearted people. Susan and Hermann, our hosts at Les Tuillières, the bed-and-breakfast where we stayed and took cooking classes, were especially welcoming and were very generous. Their classes were incredible and I will tell you more about them soon.

We were lucky in weather during our first few days because the whole landscape was drenched in hot summer sunshine. When you drive from village to village there's field upon field of sunflowers, grape vines, corn and herbs. The country air smells of lavender and rosemary, both of which feature prominently in Provençale cooking.

The villages are so charming and quaint, and the buildings are in some of my favourite architectural styles — stone and stucco, sun-bleached shades of peach, yellow and white, and cerulean blue, that classic Provencale blue that is the most preferred colour for shutters and doors.

The pottery is also the most cheerful and bright that I have ever seen. Suffice it to say that everywhere I looked, I wanted to take a photograph to capture the moment. In fact, S and I took hundreds during the seven days we were in Provence, and these are some of my favourites.