Fig and frangipane tart and a long weekend in Paris

Last weekend, we went to Paris. This is a Big Deal. I know people in the UK are supposed to be completely blasé about jaunts to the continent, but a combination of the global economic crisis, Paul not having a sensible (or valid) passport and not having a reliable cat sitter has meant that we hadn't been away together in seven years. Seven. Years.

Fête des Vendanges Montmartre - pic by Paul Fourie

But we've found a cat sitter who Urchin seemed to accept and we both now have EU passports, so it seemed like a good idea to take advantage of open borders while we still can. Found a pretty good deal on lastminute.com and prepared ourselves in our own ways. Paul's way is to charge batteries and organise electronics, mine is to read blogs for restaurant recommendations and worry about what to wear.

Fête des Vendanges Montmartre - pic by Paul Fourie

We decided to book restaurants for the three nights we were away, and just wing other meals. And chose restaurants fairly close to where we were staying, for ease of staggering home afterwards. Unfortunately, choosing from restaurants that have a good website, online booking and an English translation does rather mean you end up in pretty touristy places. But that's OK - we were tourists, we don't speak French and we quite liked the idea of eating onion soup at every meal as long as the hotel room had openable windows.

Fête des Vendanges Montmartre - pic by Paul Fourie

Unfortunately our dinner reservation on the first night hit a serious snag. We wandered (OK, puffed and wheezed) towards Sacré-Cœur, and found ourselves in the middle of a food festival, part of the Fête des Vendanges Montmartre. We should have popped in to La Mere Catherine and cancelled our reservation and just eaten ourselves senseless, but instead we restricted ourselves to a modest cornet of charcuterie and a couple of glasses of wine so as not to spoil our dinner.

Fête des Vendanges Montmartre - pic by Paul Fourie

Part of the attraction of La Mere Catherine, as well as the old-school brasserie menu, was the age. Established 1793. There can't be many restaurants in the world with that kind of history - Rules in London is almost as old, but that's going back to the very beginning of what we think of as restaurants. I had a good goats cheese salad, a rubbery steak with excellent potatoes, tried to explain steak haché to an over-tired American tween who was deeply sceptical (although she did try her mother's snails) and a potent rum baba. It was entirely expected and fine for what it was. But my heart was 2 streets over eating foie gras inna bun, wooden boxes of grilled cheese and long glasses of Planteur.

Goats cheese salad

We wandered back through the festival after dinner for a glass of Monbazillac and for Paul to take more photos before calling it a night.

Next morning we had quite a late start. And then we walked. And walked and walked. Had a restorative croque madame and a couple of cups of coffee and walked some more. I've decided that I don't really love a croque madame. As much as a fried ham & cheese sandwich, topped with bechamel and a fried egg sounds like it should be bliss it's all oddly subtle for my taste. It'd be better with sharp cheddar, a good spoonful of mustard and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. If it was, in fact, Welsh rarebit.

Croque madame - that egg is undercooked even for my taste

After loads more walking and a couple of stops for fortifying glasses of Kir we went back to the hotel room to change for dinner. The restaurant, Sacrée Fleur, was only a 5 minute walk away but they'd sort of put the fear of God in me with repeated warnings that they only hold bookings for 15 minutes. We were on time... and given that during our meal we saw several people turned away I can definitely see why they enforce the policy. It's a tiny space and I can imagine that a single table not showing could kill their profits for the whole day. The staff were utterly charming (that reputation for rude French waiters? Everyone we encountered, bar a waitress in the Café des Marronniers, was delightful and incredibly patient with us) and the food was excellent - really simple but very good beef, with nice chunky chips and a selection of sauces. And the best bread we had in Paris, with a properly good crackly crust. Then Paul had tarte tatin and I had a crepe flambeed in Grand Marnier which was lovely. We went back up to Sacré-Cœur but the Fête des Vendanges was bonkers - unpleasantly, claustrophobically packed with a lot more broken glass around than I thought my thin sneakers could tolerate - so we went back to the hotel. Late mornings and early nights were pretty much a feature of the weekend.

Beef at Sacree Fleur. Awful picture, good food.

On the Sunday morning we headed straight to the Latin Quarter for breakfast and a good poke about. We'd thought we'd had a good lie in but the streets were post-Apocalyptically quiet. Which was nice really. Coffee and a ham & cheese crepe set us up for the rest of the day. I wish I could say we spent all weekend eating rare and beautiful pastries and six course dégustation but we really didn't. We spotted a shop selling bite-size versions of Kouign Amann, which we meant to go back to but... didn't happen.

More walking... and it was an absolutely beautiful day so there were more drinks breaks. We ended up going straight to dinner at La Strasbourgeoise. It's opposite a major railway station and it's absolutely huge but if you like a vast plate of choucroute - and I do - it's completely fine. Smokey, salty pig bits, tangy cabbage and a few boiled potatoes if you really can't deal with unremitting pork and cabbage.

We walked off the meal with another schlep up to Sacré-Cœur - which made me extremely crabby because Paul insisted that the food festival would still be on when I knew it wouldn't be that late on the last day. And I was right which made him extremely crabby. But we'd walked past a couple of likely looking places on Rue Paul Albert, so we went back down, grabbed a table and shared a very good apple tart and a couple of glasses of cognac.

Rue Paul Albert - pic by Paul Fourie

Our last day started with coffee (of course! - Paul really struggled to get a decaf Americano, and I stuck to iced coffees after the first day because I found the café crème to be unpleasantly bloating and espresso is too intense). I'd been pretty keen for a decent croissant but we never found a place that looked like it had both good pastry and a place to sit and eat it. We really should have done a bit more research, I think. So I had an omelette, full of ham and chunks of potato.

Our last meal in Paris was more of a snack as far as I was concerned. Paul had a steak, but that omelette had been plenty for me, so I just had another iced coffee and then we shared a fabulous fig frangipane tart. When we sat down, the table behind the counter contained a whole apple tart and a whole fig tart but by the time we ordered there was just the one slice of fig tart left. So we knew it was good and it had to be ours. Just wonderful - biscuity crust, thin, well-flavoured frangipane and loads of fat, ripe figs. A very appropriate meal before we pootled off home.

One friend said it looked like tentacles. I can see that. But delicious.

The tart was so good I made my own version this weekend.

Fig & Frangipane Tart

Shortcrust pastry (your favourite - I bought pastry)
100g butter
25g well-flavoured honey
75g golden caster sugar
100g ground almonds
2 eggs
2tbs amaretto liqueur (optional)
1/2tsp ground cinnamon
8 figs

Preheat oven to 180C

Line tart tin with pastry. Cream together butter, honey and sugar until fluffy, then add the almonds and eggs, amaretto and cinnamon and pour into the pastry shell. Cut the woody stems off the figs and cut almost into quarters, and wodge into the frangipane.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until nicely risen and browned but still with a hint of wobble.  Eat warm or cooled.

Three ways with cockerel

Last Easter we bought a cockerel for the first time - we had it roasted and did a couple of things with the leftovers and it was delicious. Unfortunately they only seem to be available at Christmas and Easter, so we had a long wait for another.

We had other plans for our big Christmas meal, and a 4kg chook isn't really the most practical thing for a family of two, so I split it into a crown, leg and thigh joints and wings, freezing the pieces separately, along with a bag containing the giblets, back and wingtips, which will eventually become stock.

The first meal we had from it was Simon Hopkinson's recipe for coq au vin. Which was, of course, as a Simon Hopkinson recipe much more involved than you would think a chicken stew needs to be, but the fiddle pays off. It was definitely the nicest coq au vin I've ever made.

A couple of days after that, we had the crown, simply roasted. It was big enough that we only ate one of the breasts (with pigs in blankets, because one of Paul's colleagues was pitying him that he hadn't had any over the Christmas period).

The leftover coq au vin and roast breast meat became a pretty amazing chicken pie, with a bit of proscuitto added for extra oomph.

I kept aside some of the coq au vin gravy to make a dish Hopkinson recommends, of poached eggs in the gravy. Which was nice but not that special and extremely unphotogenic. So let's just finish with a slice of pie.

Le Deux Salons

This is my thousandth published post. I can't help but think that with a bit of planning I could have published my thousandth post the other week on my eighth blogoversary. That would have been good. But that kind of strategy isn't really how I roll...

When I last went to Le Deux Salons, in 2011, I was a bit concerned that I was the last person to go and everyone else had moved on. Well, it wasn't as bad as that, but rumour has it that by the time it was sold to Prescott & Conran last year it was looking a bit wilted.

Reserve de Gassac Rosé

Then, suddenly, a couple of months ago I started to be bombarded by emails from Le Deux Salons and the other Prescott & Conran properties. I have to say things must have got pretty dire if my details from one lunchtime meal deal all those years ago were considered part of the goodwill of the business. I was on the point of getting really annoyed when one email caught my attention - a "Best of the French Riviera" menu, of a starter, bouillabaise, dessert and a half bottle of Rosé for £32. Not quite the three courses for £15.50 of my last visit but it still sounded like good value. And fortunately my lunch partner of the last visit was on her long school holidays, so we made a date for a holiday treat.

Crudités, fromage blanc

I don't remember an enormous amount about the décor from the last visit, but it's now looking just how you want a French restaurant to look. We were seated upstairs in the more formal restauranty bit where the tables are capacious and the tablecloths are crisply white. Lovely. Jude had the crudités with a herbed fromage blanc dip, which looked incredibly pretty. I had a platter of lovely jambon Noir de Bigorre, which I think is the French equivalent of Spanish pata negra. It was simply and generously served with some little cornichons. I do think the Spanish version, with the acorn sweetness of the fat is slightly better though.

Jambon Noir de Bigorre

I wasn't sure what to expect from the bouillabaisse. Most articles I've read about it make it sound quite rustic - Elizabeth David includes an account of an enormous cauldron boiling on a wood fire on the beach, full of a broth yellow from saffron and all the fish they could catch. What we got was not that. But was refined and delicious.

Three types of fish, fennel and potato

I do love a dish in multiple parts, so the sight of waiters coming towards us with many different dishes was very pleasing. We each got a copper dish with three types of fish (red mullet was one, not sure of the others), fennel and potato, a plate of toasted bread slices with a pot of aioli (I don't think it was red, spicy or saffrony enough to be the traditional rouille) and grated parmesan. The waiter then ladelled a couple of dainty spoonfuls of rich seafood broth over the fish and left each of us with a little tureen of the remaining broth.

Bread, aioli and parmesan

We ate the succulent, delicate fish with a little more of the broth, then I made a big delicious mess with the rest of the broth, thickening and seasoning it with the aioli and dunking in the toasted bread. Just wonderful. The white tshirt I was wearing was very much an error.

The waiter ladled on broth

For dessert we both had Brillat-Savarin cheesecake. The cheesecake I had back in 2011 was one of the finest I've ever had, and this was equally as good. The raspberries on the side weren't the best-flavoured fruit I've ever had, but they were just right to punctuate the rich, smooth cheese. All in all, it was an excellent lunch and I think well worth going back for. And it's very conveniently located right near Charing Cross station, so I might have to drag Paul in for a date night some time.

French Patisserie for Tea Time Treats

I haven't participated in Tea Time Treats before. The blog event hosted by Karen from Lavender and Lovage and Kate from What Kate Baked has been on my radar for ages (Suelle is a frequent participant) but somehow I've never got around to it myself. I either haven't been doing a lot of tea time-appropriate baking, or I don't think of the theme in time to get a post up, or I just can't think of anything I want to bake.

But this month I saw Karen's announcement that the theme was French bakes with plenty of time to think about what to make. Somehow I still couldn't narrow it down and made two, a sweet and a savoury, just to hedge my bets.

My savoury treat was a saucisson brioché - the fanciest possible sausage roll. This is a dish that has intrigued me for years, but I have always been deterred by Elizabeth David's extremely long recipe and warnings that "One should not perhaps expect this dish to come exactly right the first time".

Saucisson brioché having a second rise

I decided that, as I am now a reasonably experienced baker of yeasted breads, I could have a go. I didn't follow Mrs David's recipe. Converting from imperial measurements just seemed like taking too much of a risk. So I used the Hairy Bikers' recipe with references back to French Provincial Cooking for method. Mrs David's advice that the sausage should be warm but not hot when wrapped to prevent a gap opening up around the sausage seemed like a good tip. And I saw a tip somewhere else that brushing the sausage with egg before wrapping it would also prevent the sausage splitting away from the dough.

Just out of the oven

I did both, just to be on the safe side.

I felt that the Hairy Bikers' recipe ended up with a very low sausage to brioche ratio, and I knew that Paul would definitely prefer more sausage. So I used two large Montbéliard sausages and left them as free-form loaves rather than putting them in a loaf tin.

And I have to say I was delighted by how they turned out. The brioche dough turned two sausages into a meal for four, and as part of a tea time spread or picnic could easily serve six. And it wasn't nearly as difficult as Elizabeth David said it was.

The sausage clung beautifully to the brioche. A sharply dressed salad is a good accompaniment

My sweet French patisserie treat took rather more twists and turns before it came into being.

I knew I wanted to make choux pastry. I haven't made it in years (um, possibly 20 years? I think I was a teenager last time...) and I thought it was about time I had another bash. But aside from that I was undecided - eclairs? Religieuse? A Gâteau St Honoré? Eventually I decided that the easiest thing to do would be a sort of Paris-Brest.

That terrible moment when choux looks like shit before it all comes together

The flavouring also took a bit of thought. A traditional Paris-Brest is filled with praline-flavoured crème pâtissière but I didn't want to go down that route. My favourite filling for eclairs and religieuse is coffee but inexplicably not everyone likes coffee.

Piped and ready to bake

In the end, Ocado had a "free breakfast offer" which included a large punnet of strawberries and a "bundle offer" on butter, cream and cheese, so I chose to fill my choux with strawberries and cream. And then gave it a little almondy kick to both the pastry and the filling.

After baking I split it in half and returned it to the oven to dry out a bit more

Strawberry and Amaretto Paris-Brest (serves 4-6)

Choux Paste (n.b I use metric cups - so 250ml)

1/2 cup water
30g butter
pinch salt
1/2 cup plain flour
25g almond meal
1tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs

Filling

300g strawberries, hulled
juice of half a lemon
4 sheets of gelatine
1/4 cup icing sugar
200ml double cream
1tbs amaretto
100g strawberries, extra

Decoration

1/4 cup caster sugar
1tbs water

Bring the water, butter and salt to the boil in a medium-sized saucepan, then tip in the sifted flour all in one go. Beat like a madwoman with a wooden spoon (still on the heat) until it comes together in a smooth ball. Remove from the heat and add the almond meal and vanilla extract, then flatten out in the pan and leave to cool for 10 minutes.

At this point it will be looking lovely and you will be feeling quite smug. All that is about to change and you need to ride it out. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. It will curdle and look dreadful. It will. But continue to beat like a madwoman and it will all come together and be smooth and glossy and perfect.

Pipe a circle onto a baking paper lined tray and bake at 200C for 10 minutes, then lower heat to 180C and bake another 15-20 minutes or until well-risen, lightly browned and quite dry.

Cut in half horizontally and return to the oven for a few more minutes to dry out properly and leave a good sized cavity for filling.

Puree the 300g strawberries (I used a stick blender in a tall measuring cup) and strain. I didn't use a really fine sieve so there were still a few seeds in it. Soak the gelatine sheets in water for a few minutes. Bring the strawberry puree and lemon juice just to a simmer, then add the squeezed-out gelatine sheets and stir until the gelatine has completely dissolved. Add the sifted icing sugar and amaretto and taste for sweetness (I left it quite unsweet, you may want more sugar and a little more booze) and allow to cool and thicken. When cool but not completely set, fold into the whipped double cream and refrigerate for half an hour.

Either pipe or spoon mounds of mousse around the base of the choux ring (I had quite a bit leftover because I didn't want to over-fill it to the point where I couldn't slice it to serve) and top with the remaining strawberries, sliced. Top with the other half of the ring.

At this point you could just dust it with a bit of icing sugar but I decided to give it a bit of a croquembouche-y flourish with some toffee. I almost added some sparkly sugar pearls too but decided that was a step too far. But suit yourself.

Dissolve the caster sugar in the water over a low heat and gently bring to the boil, swirling the pan rather than stirring it. Boil until it turns a lovely golden colour, then dribble over the top of the paris-brest. As you dribble the toffee will start to harden and pull into threads, which is very pretty and if I was better at that sort of thing I would have made more of a feature of it.

Serve reasonably promptly - if you refrigerate the toffee will deliquesce, but it can sit happily in a cool place for a couple of hours.

Pig's cheek two ways

Have you ever noticed that the names for meat change? So you have veal scallopini and calf's liver. Beef steak and ox tail. Pork loin and pig's cheek. It's veal, beef & pork because after the conquest, the Norman ruling class of England still spoke French, and would order veau, boeuf & porc which their English-speaking farmers produced from prime cuts of calf, cow and pig. But I reckon the other bits, the less-desirable bits, kept their English names because those were the parts, if anything, that were left over for the peasants.

As it happens, the less-desirable bits with the English names are actually very, very desirable. They tend to need a bit more care in the cooking, but then reward you with delicious flavour and melting texture.


Pig's cheeks are a new-ish discovery for me. We've had quite a lot of ox cheek and loved it, but the pig's cheeks have been harder to come by. Then I saw that ELSCo were stocking them and grabbed a kilo or so to experiment with.

Now, the thing to remember about pig's cheek, if you are used to cooking ox cheek, is that pigs aren't ruminants. Cattle are ruminants, so are goats, sheep and camels. Pigs aren't. So instead of getting all that work chewing the cud, a pig's cheek is not that tough a muscle. Which means that instead of having to slowly braise it for hours and hours to tenderness, about an hour of gentle cooking will reduce pig's cheek to gelatinous shreds. Very rewarding, not to mention more economical with the fuel.

My first pack of cheeks I did in a sort of Chinese braise, with yellow bean paste, ginger, garlic, shaoxing wine and soy. I left the cheeks whole and then sliced them when they were cooked to give more of a contrast between the outside and inside textures. Baby bok choi, halved and sauteed with garlic and a drip of sesame oil, rice and a garnish of spring onions finished the plate. It was delicious. The meat was so tender it was almost impossible to pick up with chopsticks.

Chinese-ish braised pig's cheeks with rice and baby bok choi

The second pack of cheeks I had more elaborate plans for. Since the Soho Food Feast, where I had a delicious crumbed pig's cheek bun from St John, I have been wondering how to make something similar.

What I ended up doing was browning the cheeks with a little mirepoix and just covering them with stock and a splash of sherry, and cooking them until they fell apart at the touch of a fork. I shredded the meat, added a little gelatine to the remaining cooking liquid and poured it over the meat in a plastic box, which I then put in the fridge over night. I remember seeing somewhere - can't remember where - a woman adding gelatine to her croquettes to make them more stable when you are cooking them, but then when they are hot you have a lovely runny filling.

So then I cut the firmly-set shredded meat in jelly into pieces, rolled each piece in flour, then did a triple coating of egg and breadcrumbs, letting it sit in the fridge to set for about an hour between coats. Time consuming, and a fiddle (and takes more eggs than you would imagine), but because of the liquid filling I wanted a really firm coating.

In between crumb coats, I made an apple and celeriac remoulade to go with the croquettes.

Then I deepfried the croquettes until a deep golden brown and drained them well on kitchen paper. They certainly couldn't have been sandwiched in a bun the way the St John ones were - as soon as the crust on these was broached the deliquesced juices ran out to form a delicious gravy.

The leftover croquettes, reheated in the oven the following day for lunch, were almost as good as the first time around.

The croquettes oozed gravy when they were sliced

Brasserie Zedel

I sort of expected Tin Tin to jump out of that train

I'm not an early adopter. I can't be bothered rushing to get ahead of the pack or queuing to get into the latest restaurant or bar. I'd rather sit back and wait until a place is a bit more established and the hordes have moved on to the next big thing. But I do read restaurant reviews eagerly and make a mental note of places to try at some point. 

Lovely woven napkins

There have been a lot of reviews of Brasserie Zedel lately. They've generally been favourable if a bit lukewarm - "really very good for what it was", "the menu reads like a 1950s cookbook", "at these prices it's churlish to complain", "a soapy wallow in all the things we adore about French bourgeois ideals" - but the descriptions of lavish decor and cheap, classic French food was enough to intrigue me. When a friend said she was going to be in London one Saturday and could we have lunch, it seemed like a good place to head for even though it is new and shiny and being talked about a lot.

Steak haché - that's a hamburger to you & me

I had an appointment with my hairdresser which made me very, very late for lunch. Very late. So late that they had to leave the bar they were waiting for me in and get a snack of soup dumplings to tide them over. It was about 4pm when we eventually walked into the mammoth marble and brass hall that is the main part of Brasserie Zedel. And obviously most people have finished lunch and aren't thinking about dinner at that sort of time, so there were very few other people eating.

Since my friends had just been eating xiao long bao, they weren't ravenous. I was hungry, but also aware that Paul was at home and expecting me to have dinner with him in not-many-hours. We skipped starters and went straight to mains. Very boringly, we all ordered the steak haché - a patty of minced steak, with a peppercorn sauce and French fries. When it came out I had a moment of confusion, wondering why they'd garnished with a scattering of lentils. But of course they aren't, they are green peppercorns. It was very good, somehow managing to taste steakier than an average minced meat burger.

I don't understand why a place like Zedel can offer the steak haché cooked rare or medium, and so many other places will only serve a burger well-done "because of health and safety". I think it just means those other places are lazy and their meat isn't fresh. Anyway - mine was medium rare and delicious and did me no harm.

The fries were thin, crisp, greaseless and perfect. They came in a paper cone, standing in a silver torch-shaped arrangement.

Loved the silver fries holder.

The restaurant was actually quite brightly lit, but a diffuse light, which totally freaked out my camera, hence the yellow cast to all the pictures.

For dessert, I ordered the Peach Melba. The waiter said something about it being a good choice because it's a classic dessert, which struck me as odd when the menu also contained Ile flottante, Savarin aux fruits et rhum and Gâteau Opéra. All the desserts, in fact, are classics. This wasn't the best peach melba I have had. The whole dish was too cold, the icecream was a bit crystalline and I have the faintest suspicion that it was a tinned peach. Still, it wasn't the worst I have had either.

All the reviews were right about the prices - 2 courses each, and a bottle of wine shared between 4 of us, and it came to £18 a head. That really is very good for central London. We weren't deliberately choosing the cheap stuff either, we could have got it lower than that if we tried.

Peach Melba

I think pretty soon Brasserie Zedel will be established as a reliable place to take the family when you are having a day out in London. And I think it'll do very well for business lunches. It's definitely one to keep in mind if you are in the area - partly because it has the nicest loos I've seen in a London restaurant, and access to decent loos is priceless, in my opinion.

Charcuterie de canard AKA Duckapalooza

I think Raymond Blanc is my very favourite Frenchman. He comes across on TV as charming, funny and quite cuddly and adorable. I have been lucky enough to eat at his restaurant Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons a couple of times and the extraordinarily detailed, precise yet clean-flavoured dishes they serve do nothing to reduce my Raymond-love.

Naturally, therefore, I have been hanging on his every word in the latest season of Kitchen Secrets.

Raymond says duck ham is easy, so I make duck ham. My fridge doesn't have nifty little hanging bars, so I put the muslin-wrapped bundle on a cake rack over a plate. Very interesting tip about the fresh thyme inhibiting microbial growth.

From the ham (which turned out to be lovely and supple; perfectly flavoured), my ideas spiralled a bit out of control.

I knew I wanted to serve the ham with the spiced orange slices I made a few weeks ago (a nod to the classic duck a l'orange - and Australians know I am doing the Bundy Bear pronunciation) so that got me thinking of a duck-based charcuterie platter.

A duck liver parfait, based on Raymond's chicken liver parfait, seemed like a good idea. I used dry amontillado sherry instead of madeira and ruby port, and reduced the amount of egg and butter, because I wasn't planning to turn it out. And I just topped it with melted butter, instead of a mixture of butter and lard.

I also made a dish of duck and cognac rillettes. If I had used a bit of foresight, I would have bought a whole duck and butchered it for the ham and rillettes, but I wasn't that organised - I bought a pack of duck legs.

A freshly baked baguette and some crunchy cornichons (the only element I didn't make myself, as it happens) and we had a meal fit for royalty. Or for any French chefs who happen to be passing.

Cook the Books - French Lessons

This month's selection for Cook the Books is Peter Mayle's French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork and Corkscrew. It's a series of short pieces on his gastronomic adventures around France and I have to say I was a bit bored by it. I loved his books A Year in Provence and Toujours, Provence so I'd been really looking forward to this one, but I just found it all a bit same-y. He goes somewhere for a festival celebrating a food that people in Britain don't usually eat, discovers it is delicious and that the locals are passionate about it and then he drinks too much. Rinse and repeat.

I wasn't particularly moved to eat any of the things he talked about. I wasn't even particularly moved to visit France and attend any of these festivals myself. I was a bit at a loss. And then I was watching Eating in the Sun on iPlayer and Nadia's challenge was to recreate a meal at Alain Ducasse's restaurant La Bastide de Moustiers. This was what I was looking for! All the countryside they showed in the episode was the Provencal landscape Mayle describes so lovingly in his other books and the care and attention the chefs at La Bastide de Moustiers put into their dishes was exactly what I wanted to convey about French food.

One of the dishes Nadia was challenged to cook was a sort of spelt risotto, with several different squash preparations and black truffles. I thought that tied in nicely with the truffle mass that Mayle attends in French Lessons.

I didn't follow the recipe exactly. For some reason every time I tried to read the recipe I went cross-eyed and got really confused, so I got the ingredients and then pretty much made it up. I softened chopped onion and garlic in some butter and olive oil, then added the pearled spelt and some finely chopped butternut. I added a splash of cava (because it was what I was drinking and I didn't want to open another bottle of white wine) and when it was absorbed I proceeded with hot vegetable stock, as if I was making a risotto. Towards the end of the cooking I stirred through half a jar of sliced truffles. These weren't the brand I have had before and unfortunately they were almost entirely lacking in flavour and aroma. Then I stirred through the shredded flesh of half a baked spaghetti squash and served the risotto topped with caramelly roast slices of butternut, some mustard cress and shaved pecorino pepato.

Aside from the disappointment of the truffles, it was a truly delicious autumn dish. I've never cooked with spelt before and while it didn't give the creamy starchiness that rice gives a risotto, it had a lovely nutty texture and I think it'd be a lot more forgiving of being cooked in advance and reheated. The different flavours and textures of the squash were really lovely. I served it to a largely vegetarian friend and he was either extremely polite or pretty impressed too. I will definitely make this again - but I'll probably skip the truffle and the first squash bit and just add the spaghetti squash at the end with cubes of roasted butternut stirred through.

And now I am saving for a weekend at La Bastide De Moustiers. Maybe 2012.