A Summer Solstice Among the Herbs

Although I have a few herbs in the perennial garden south of the horse barn, I also grow herbs in pots on my deck. It is a sunny but private spot. It draws sun from the south and west but is shielded by a line a maple trees and a thicket of juniper. Virgina creeper clinging to the lattice work adds to the sense of privacy.

It is the perfect place to enjoy a summer evening. I head out there around 7 p.m., with a stack of garden or cookbooks. I light punk sticks, which keep bugs at bay and fill the air with woodsmoke. I might read, but I mostly dream and give thanks that the world is so beautiful.

If the day is warm, I'll bring an iced green tea with lemon and perhaps a sprig of lemon basil or mint.

I love to hear the nightjars and robins as dusk falls. Often a bird will find a perch at the crest of the old horse barn. The sight of one of these lovely creatures silhouetted against the robin's egg blue of the sky enchants me. Sometimes a heron will fly overhead or an egret or a skein of Canada geese.

Because of the herbs, the deck looks and smells wonderful. The green foliage in terra cotta pots against the deeper redwood stain on the deck is lovely to look at. I also keep herbs on my side porch where they can catch the morning sun and complement the red geraniums, but the deck is my real herb garden. I can step outside in the morning and snip fresh chives for my eggs and find fresh basil for my tomatoes in the evening.

Crushing a sprig of lavendar or rosemary in my fingers, I am reminded of the descriptions of herbs in "The Country of the Pointed Firs," by Sarah Orne Jewett. It is not French, but it is perfect reading for a summer night.

Decluttering for France - and for a Good Cause

If you have a small kitchen but lots of utensils, pots, pans and dishes, you also have an inefficient kitchen. To cook, you need space.

Paris kitchens are infamous for their puniness. And so is mine!

So I've found a solution. I am inventorying everything in my kitchen, and giving what I do not need or use away. Or, I'm planning to sell it at an upcoming flea market. Everything that does not fit in with my notion of French cooking and dining is going. I'll use the profits to help finance my next trip to France.

But first, I donated four boxes of items to a local rummage sale that benefits the American Cancer Society. I can't think of a better cause. Not only did I donate the items — which included glass cannisters, a tea kettle, a set of mixing bowls, three sets of measuring cups, cutlery, a bread pan and more — I spent four hours helping set up and work the sale. What I got in return was far more satisfaction than serving on a committee or board has even given me.

People I care about have died of cancer. This is my way of giving back. Please do the same.

If you are like me, you will have plenty more items for that flea market or yard sale of your own.

Food: Now that is about satisfaction!

Everything Tastes Better in France

This may be a myth or a figment of my imagination.

But consider this: A small coffee and a pain au chocolate purchased at a kiosk in a Paris gare for a couple of Euros seemed wonderful to me. The chocolate inside the flaky dough was just right and the coffee tasted vaguely of cinnamon. You can recreate these goodies at home: Buy cinnamon coffee and practice your pain au chocolate. It will be fun!

The croque madame I'd ordered the night before was heavenly. The waiter was a bit snooty, but we figured he was acting out a role for the crazy Americans who ordered what a friend calls the "French equivalent of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich" at a neighborhood bistro.

(Really, we had no bad meals. It's part hunger, part being in a country where food is expected to be good.)

A word on waiters: We've found them to be mostly pleasant, including one who cobbled together a Salade Niçoise for us at closing time on a holiday. We've eaten at cafés across the Left Bank and encountered kindness everywhere. A young woman at Café Campo on Rue de l'Hopital in the 13th struggled to translate an unfamiliar dish for us. A young waiter in the 7th was charming as he took our orders. Our next stay will be within feet of his café and we hope to find the same friendly service next time we eat there.

Next trip: We brave the Right Bank.

Eating in France

If you are trying to experience France on a budget, eating well can be a challenge.

It’s not that food is so terribly expensive, at least not in supermarkets. We have found prices in rural France to be comparable to prices at home, perhaps even a little lower.

The problem is that the choices are so vast. There were so many different things we wanted to sample! Among our favorite finds were olive-flavored potato chips, which sold for less than a Euro. The same bag would have cost at least $2 at home.

Plain old chocolate bars were richer and vanilla yogurt was creamier. There were an endless variety of imported coffees: We tried Italian and Kenyon and they were deep and robust, not flat like the coffee back home. (We were spoiled and have since switched to a heartier blend back home. Or, we grind our own just before brewing.)

Our hostess had a set of bright yellow pottery cups with the famous “Y’a bon!” Banania logo. These deep cheery cups made for a festive breakfast.

(Banania, I knew, was a drink made with cocoa and bananas, but the cups work nicely when you need as much coffee as we do in the morning.)

In France, we are tempted by many other exotic offerings and splurging is what vacations are for, anyway. We spent an average of 50 Euros a day at the market.

Paris is a different story. Although we booked a junior suite at the hotel, we had no coffee making facilities. The hotel breakfast at 17 Euros was great — once. But a 34 Euro breakfast is far too pricy.

So each day, we stocked up on yogurt, cheese, fruit and chocolate at places like Monoprix or the many small markets that are as plentiful in Paris as pharmacies, floral shops and bakeries. We crammed these snacks into the tiny refrigerator in our suite, and ate at most two meals a day in bistros or cafés.

For our next visit, we have booked an apartment that will allow us to cook our own meals much of the time. A sink, refrigerator, coffee maker, microwave and hot plate ought to suffice for modest meals.

The French don’t need vast and well-equipped kitchens to produce delectable meals. Or so they say.

I’m hoping this ability is genetic.

Bringing France Home

When we are in France, we like to explore different food venues.

The open-air market tops the list. It is absolutely true — as many food blogs and guidebooks note — that you can smell fresh strawberries there. The Saturday market at Place Maubert in Paris is fragrant with berries in the springtime. There are other markets, of course, and they sell more than food.

The market in Cahors, held Saturdays and Wednesdays in the shadow of the 12th century cathedral of St. Etienne, shown above, is also a wonderful place to shop — and sniff.

We’ve shopped at artisan bakeries and those small fruit-markets that are so plentiful in Paris and found none of the snobbiness some people say they encounter.

The super-marchés are fun, too. Really. My husband commented that finding me was difficult, once we became separated.

“Back home, you are the only one wearing black, but here everyone seems to wear black,” he pointed out.

I lingered for hours over the cheese and yogurt selections. I was captivated by the many, many types of spreads for bread and bought a half dozen to experiment with. I toted home a heavy bag filled with jars of grainy country mustard, aioli, apricot jam and tapenade along with a package of white Camargue rice and some olives (which caused a bit of delay at the customs desk in Detroit.)

What better way to bring more French into my kitchen?

LeClerc has its own line of regional specialties, “Nos Régions Ont du Talent,” which were affordable and to my American palate, high quality.

Once home, I carefully meted out my stash of French products, opening the jam first. (The tapenade and tomato sauce were inhaled immediately.) I stretched the rice out for months. The mustard is still good and the aioli was not opened until Christmas. Both go into egg and tuna salad, deviled eggs and sandwich spreads.

It as, I found, an inexpensive and tasty way to bring more French home with me.

A Good Read: “The Markets of Provence: A Culinary Tour of Southern France,” by Ruthanne Long.

A Sunny Kitchen in France

Recently I had the pleasure of cooking in what must be one of the cheeriest kitchens in France.

Located in a nearly-300-year-old villa in the Midi-Pyrenees region of France, the room is yellow and white with blue accents and terra cotta floors.

The villa’s owner is a woman of great style and charm who created a vacation feel in every room. The kitchen was no exception.

Working here — even cleaning up — was more like play than a chore. Why do we enjoy working in other people’s kitchens so much?

My husband and I shopped for staples upon our arrival and then daily for produce and meat. Everything, even the produce in super-marchés like the LeClerc chain, seemed much fresher than in American grocery stores.

I made ratatouille with a sun-dried tomato infused rice I cannot find in the U.S. My husband used a Moulinex “Robot Marie” hand mixer to make a rich spaghetti sauce with whole cherry tomatoes and green and black olives. At LeClerc he found a sausage unlike anything I’ve tasted at home.

Of course, I could not leave without making vegetable soup to eat with my daily baguette.

The kitchen was always sunny and from it we could hear church bells every hour.

Mornings from across the valley we would hear the calls of roosters and cuckoos and an early breeze would carry in the scent of lilacs and juniper.

At night, the faint aroma of wood smoke would waft in from a home in the village. Doves cooed and nightingales sang.

Surely this was heaven in a kitchen.

One warmer night toward the end of our stay I made an apple tart. I worked slowly and deliberately, cutting my apple into thin, even slices, and savoring every task.

I was content. The kitchen was my favorite room in the house.

My Kitchen — and my Grandmother's

What makes my kitchen French?

I did not set out to create a French country kitchen, not the kind featured in home-decorating magazines. Too contrived for my tastes.

Still, my kitchen has a few of the accouterments of what is thought to be a typical French kitchen, including a ceramic rooster and a wire wine rack, the latter tucked away in a cool corner.

But I have no blue-and-white tiles, no copper pots — only one piece of pottery I purchased in France, a colorful serving tray.

A French kitchen is all about food anyway, and the spirit in which it is prepared and consumed. Forget carved cabinet doors and racks of gleaming pots.

If you like to cook, and you like French food, your kitchen can be as French as the most over-decorated room in Architectural Digest (which regrettably really isn’t all that much about architecture).

In my kitchen, bottles of olive oil and spices are within easy reach. A jar of herbes de Provençe is always nearby. A bowl of tomatoes sits on the counter. Every scrap of food is used, and if it cannot be used, it is carried out to the compost pile.

I think of my grandmother often when I cook. Her kitchen was always tidy, and it was important for her to keep everything in its place. (Not so in my kitchen.)

Grandma Annie lived in Frenchtown in the small Michigan town where her parents settled in the 1880s. The neighborhood included a meat packing plant, an ironworks and a small retail area. Small grocery stores abounded and farmers often came to town peddling eggs and vegetables. Annie’s home, purchased by her father in 1883, once included a small grocery store on its ground floor.

Annie bought her eggs from a German farmer. Neighbors traded produce from their gardens: Green beans, carrots, tomatoes, zucchini and potatoes. Mid-morning or in the early evenings, she would set out, basket on her arm, for the home of a neighbor who had fresh produce to share.

Annie’s kitchen had only one west-facing window, but it was never dark. It was a cheerful red-and-white, very much in the style called “retro” in today’s shelter magazines.

What made Annie’s kitchen French? Her love of food and cooking. It was a love that extended throughout the home, a home the family owned for 125 years.

My memories of Annie include sunny summer mornings when she would sit on her back step and shell peas, or cooler days in late summer when she would bake a cake or a blueberry pudding and her kitchen would be redolent of vanilla and almond.

These are simple activities I have tried to make a part of my own culinary life. Come high summer, I clean corn and shell peas on my deck, within yards of my compost pile. In cool weather or when storm clouds gather, I, too, gravitate to my kitchen to bake an apple crisp with cinnamon. The aroma and the activity provide comfort.

What makes your kitchen French? How does it comfort you?

Welcome to my French Kitchen in America

Bienvenue!

My kitchen is smaller than those found in rural France but larger than that found in a typical Paris apartment. One window overlooks an ancient horse barn and a grove of cedar trees. The other looks down a hill.

Lack of space is a frustration, but I am currently going through all my pots and pans and utensils and saving only what is essential.

My cabinets are warm brown and worn from years of use. Appliances are stainless steel and black. Countertops are black, too, and a bit scuffed. Nothing terribly fancy or upscale here.

But, the food is good, mostly. We'll talk more about that later.

Bon appetit!

Mimi