Tag: Provence

Special guest: La bouillabaisse

Monk fish in the bouillon
Monk fish in the bouillon

For this second special guest, we have picked our mother with a very traditional dish in our family: La bouillabaisse, or Bouillante. This typical Provence dish is a grand summer tradition in our family. Our great grand father used to go fishing near La Ciotat every Sunday and bring back the fishes, our great grand mother prepared it, our grand mother fished too and took over to prepare it , and now our mother prepares it too. 

No one fishes anymore in our family and what was a  fisherman’s hot pot to use all the small fishes and less noble fishes has now turned into a very high end and not so easy to eat/find dish. Of course a lot of restaurants in the south of France serve something they call bouillabaisse but nothing compares with our traditional and familial preparation. Bouillabaisse in our family consists in 3 separate dishes: the fish soup with bread, saffron potatoes and rouille; the fishes cooked in bouillon; the “ramichelle” with rouille. The first thing is to find the proper ingredients and even when living in the south of France it is not that easy! The rock fishes for the soup: wrasses and combers, the white fishes for serving in second: large red mullet, john dory, monk fish.

Soup with the saffron potatoes and bread and rouille
Soup with the saffron potatoes and bread and rouille

Once that is secured it is rather straightforward to prepare. The fish soup must be a clear bouillon. In our family that’s the way it is made and eaten. We use only fishes (no crab…) and don’t keep any flesh to obtain a brown golden bouillon. It is all hand made, no machine here.
Large soft potatoes are sliced roughly and sickly and boiled in saffron water. 
The rouille is a kind of mayonnaise with saffron, paprika, red pepper and additionally garlic if you like it.
The ramichelle are simply vermicelli boiled in the fish soup (not on the pictures because honestly not very photogenic!) eaten with rouille so delicious!

Thanks Mum for this amazing dinner and this familial recipe!

Bouillabaisse family table with croutons, saffron potatoes croutons again, fish soup and rouille
Bouillabaisse family table with croutons, saffron potatoes croutons again, fish soup and rouille

Sable-navette

Guests for dinner at home twice in a raw and working each day until late, I needed something delicious, simple to accomodate with fruits… and that can be prepared in advance.

I invented this recipe of little bites sable with neroli, that feels like eating navettes marseillaises. Just flour, butter, egg, brown sugar and plenty of neroli. 

Brandade

This recipe is one of our mother recipe and is a traditional Provencal recipe using the leftovers of salted cod . After the cod has been unsalted and washed, just boiled it, then add milk and stir until the milk has been all absorbed by the fish. Add pepper and olive oil, stir again.  This mixture, called “brandade” is delicious on toasted bread, with boiled potatoes, as a spread or to stuff veggies. It’s good eaten either warm or cold. Here is a preparation of stuffed cherry tomatoes, perfect for a buffet or finger food.

Pompe à l’huile

We are weeks before Christmas and this year again I plan to bake the traditional pompe à l’huile for everyone. So right now once in a while I bake one just to polish my recipe. And I think I got it right this time! The pompe à l’huile is a traditional Christmas dessert in Provence. It is often mistaken with Gibassier. Pretty much every family has a recipe or a preference. Pompe brioche, with orange, with neroli, with anise… In our family we like a thin rather dry one, with neroli and a bit of orange peels.

Since it is an olive oil base dough it is extremely easy to knead and with the neroli it smells extremely good. A real pleasure to prepare!

For a 30cm pompe à l’huile I used: 180g of flour (regular flour not the strong one), 6g of dry yeast, 3g of salt, 35g of brown caster sugar, 60g of water, 75g of olive oil, 1 table spoon of neroli, a few candied orange peels, or a zest of orange.

I mix all the ingredients and add the orange peels in the last few minutes of kneading. I knead until the dough is smooth and soft as usual. Then I wait for 2 to 4 hours depending on the room temperature before shaping it. I roll the dough in a circle, cut and if you want you can strech the dough so that the cuts open loose for 1 cm. Then wait for a few hours before baking at 180deg until it goldens. While still hot with a cooking brush apply a thin layer of olive oil.

Eggplant week

Let’s reiterate a vegetable week! I could have chosen grean beans, but I realize I’ve already posted many recipes involving green beans, so I’ve opted for one other summer star: the eggplant. Funilly eggplants are as much used in Japanese cuisine than in Provence cuisine, though in Japan the eggplant species are slightly different, smaller or thin and long. 

They are also used in summer together with cucumber to make horses and oxes than the spirit of dead people ride to come back to the human world during the Obon period, which is either July 15th or August 15th depending whether one follows the new solar calendar or the old lunar calendar.

So, this week let’s celebrate eggplants!

Vegetarian stuffed zucchini

Here is an other recipe of stuffed zucchini, but vegetarian this time. For me it’s a classic because my mother has been preparing it for decades and I find this recipe perfect for hot summer days. In her original recipe my mother was using “brousse” or “bruccio” a white fresh cheese from the south of France or from Corsica, since I cannot find easily this cheese in Japan I replaced It by ricotta and it works very well. This recipe is lovely also in small round zucchini, but I couldn’t find any today.

The stuffing is really simple: it’s a mix of ricotta cheese, egg, fresh mint, salt and pepper. Stir the ricotta with an egg, chop the mint and add it to the mixture, season with salt and pepper, stir well. Cut the zucchini, remove a little of the seeds, stuff with the mixture. Line the zucchini in an oven dish and bake at 180deg untill the top is golden. Eat warm or cold. 

It is perfect as starter or to accompany a main dish. Here I served it for dinner in a one-plate with a little omelet, home-made pancakes and greens. 

My grand-mother stuffed zucchini’s recipe

My grand mother had this wonderful way of making “farcis provencaux” or Provence style stuffed vegetables. This is a traditional summer preparation using the best of summer vegetables, stuffed with meat. Among the vegetables is the zucchini of course, and with it my grand mother would prepare tomatoes, potatoes and onions. What made hers special is the stuffing. Where a lot of people use sausage meat or just plain minced pork meat, my grand mother used a lot of more delicious things, and always non fatty meat: her stuffing is composed of grilled pork filet left over, ham, boneless pork cutlet… all minced together, and then she would add greens (see on the picture how green is the stuffing): tons of fresh parsley, the big green leaves of a lettuce, and finish with one egg, a bit of gratted gruyere, salt and pepper. Actually this base can also be used for cannelloni and hachis parmentier, two other preparations she was masterizing. I’ve seen her preparing that many times, she tought me and I’ve helped her many times too, but I can never reach that taste her stuffing for farcis had. But I keep trying. So this time I prepared stuffed zucchini, actually, usually she would use long zucchini, but I found these lovely round zucchini anc decided to try again, this won’t affect much the taste of the stuffing. So once the suffing is ready you just need to remove the seeds of the zucchini and stuff them, bake them in the oven for at least 90min. Farcis can be eaten hot or cold, you can keep them about 2 or 3 days in the fridge, and are always better the days after being cooked! Enjoy!

Just out the oven
Just out the oven

La “soupe au pistou” reinterpreted

“La soupe au pistou”, pronounce  ” la souuuupopiiiiistuu” (or pesto soup) is a traditional summer preparation in Provence. Like any traditional food each family has her secret recipe and variations are quite Infinite. Shall it include small pasta or king of cut spaghetti, or none; shall it be served with grated Parmigiano or grated Gruyere; how many types of bean should be used etc… Honestly I would say that each version tastes different but cannot be bad.
For me this soup is synonymous of summer, holidays, family gatherings… I can’t even recall when I first it it, probably at an age whe it is not possible to recall. The recipe comes from my grand mother that probably came from her mother and so on, my mother is using the recipe. For us the pesto is made of fresh basil leaves, pine nuts, gratted garlic, grated Parmigiano and ollive oil, a lot of olive oil. The soup consists in tomatoes (big, red ripe summer tomatoes), green beans, broad beans, zucchini, white beans and marbled beans. The beans are inserted by cooking time and it’s cooked during a long time at low eat, and it is served with grated gruyere. No pasta… Though I recall some argument about that!

Reinvention of the soupe au pistou in the making
Reinvention of the soupe au pistou in the making

I’ve been preparing a lot of this soup even in Japan, though I can’t find fresh marble beans and white beans, it is easy to have some dry, and broad beans are really easy to find, fresh and delicious. I adapt the recipe to circumstances and when I serve it as a single dish I usually add a few little pasta. I never use garlic, fresh or dry, so I took it off the recipe, and my husband doesn’t like pine nuts nor cheese so usually I take them off as well… hum… well my pesto is just basil and olive oil and just as good!  This time I was about to prepare one when I realized I had no white beans nor marble beans and I was not really in the mood to eat soup on my own, since my husband was out for dinner for work. So I decided to treat myself with a recipe that I just invented on the spot (missing ingredients are the best inspiration!) and went for a dry soupe au pistou. In a pan I diced a tomato and cooked it with olive oil, then added the green beans and the braod beans, finally I added the chopped basil leaves, salt pepper and olive oil and cooked under cover 15min. The served it with pine nuts, and finally topped with Parmigiano (which is totally optional). Perfectly delicious though a bit far from the original recipe but that is evolution!

And ready to eat (I spare you the Parmigiano topping!) 
And ready to eat (I spare you the Parmigiano topping!) 

Navettes

We spent part of the holiday season in Aix-en-Provence, France, my home town and we went visiting some places I like and used to often when I was a kid. One of these places is the cathedral Saint Sauveur. Not that I visited this place as part of my religious up-bringing, but I spent a lot of time in the beautiful Roman cloister (freely accessible at that time) with my mother, every Wednesday morning after my dance classes until my sister would finish school and we would go home. Since at that time I couldn’t eat a single thing for breakfast, we would often stop by a baker that made some

navettes

(not the dry one from Marseille). Visiting that place again I wanted some navettes and tried to bake some since no-one seems to make any anymore.

I found some recipes on the net and adjusted them to fit my distant memory. The shape, the color and the smell were perfect, but honestly the taste I couldn’t say. It was good, but not to my expectations… I need some more adjustments before releasing any receipe…

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