Photo du Jour

The sunset was brilliant the night before last. Why do my photos never seem to capture their beauty?

Smoked salmon tart or quiche?

Pat, a lifelong New Yorker loves to learn new things. She sees life as a wonderful adventure - and feels we're lucky that we can boast about it? A recent post shows us her smoked salmon tart, and as I had done one, which I call quiche because this is France, I thought it would be a good idea do share it here. My last post was about left overs, and this quiche started with that. I had cooked salmon the day before, and you know I do not like to eat the same thing twice. So I had two slices of smoked salmon and made a quiche. Ingredients:
2 Tbs. butter
1 shallot
some ginger root
Crust pastry (see recipe)
½ lb. Salmon fillet (left over)
2 slices of smoked salmon
2 eggs
1/3 cup heavy cream
salt
pepper

Steps
Peel the shallot and the ginger root and cut in slices. Heat the butter in the skillet over medium heat, cook the shallot and ginger in the butter over low-medium heat till soft, remove and leave aside. eat the eggs in the bowl with a whisker.
Make a crust pastry and line in the pie pan.
Cut the salmon in thin slices and put in the pie shell in two layers. Topple with the smoked salmon.
Beat the cream with the eggs. Add the cooked shallots.
Add salt, pepper to taste, and the ginger.
Pour the eggs mixture over the slices of salmon and bake in the oven for 30 minutes, remove from the oven, let cool off for 10 minutes and serve with a salad.

Photo du Jour

Ripening purple plums.

Pears and more pears

I love pears and for lunch, I am making a "white lunch". Endives salad with pine nuts as a starter, mashed potatoes and braised cod fillets, and for desert, and all pear fruit salad with pear sherbet. These were my market choices yesterday (Chinese pear, "conference" pear, and Anjou pear - in French called red comice).

Bon weekend!

Photo du Jour - Pain au Levain

Pain au Levain - Sourdough bread.

Not as strong as the famous sourdough bread in San Francisco. This is made from organic flour and sold by the kilo at the local weekly morning market.
Nice and crunchy crust and a robust, chewy texture.

I Think Our Cat Has a Lingerie Fetish

Domino likes to help me do the laundry.
And by "help" I mean he likes to pull various pieces of my clothing off the drying rack and drag them around the house. I've found t-shirts, socks, and once a cardigan scattered about.

But his big thrill are my panties. Which I find really annoying because I keep finding my clean knickers either on the stairs or on the landing, crumpled up and covered in cat hair.

I suspect that our cat has a lingerie fetish.

Now one of my bras has gone missing and I can't find it even though I have searched for it everywhere.
I think I know who to blame.

Feuillettes aux asperges

We invited very good friends for dinner last night. They were in Paris only a few days and both love cooking. I went to the market in the morning and saw asparagus. The first of the season (from the Gard, in Southern France - though my favorite are from Saumur). As a starter, I made individual feuillettes with a creamy sauce using the water were the asparagus had been cooked. I spinkled Sumak on top, this acid spice a friend brought me from Turkey last month. We had them with a Pouilly Fume. I served lamb in garlic sauce as a main course, with a green beans garnish, a cheese platt er, and Chocolate Fondant for dessert. All recipes are available at A World in a PAN