Dave Hatfield

If you are willing to go somewhat out of your way there are a number of marked restaurants on the interactive map. Failing that I will await as we all will for your discovery's so I can add them to the map.

Try this on the BBQ. Buy green Anaheim peppers. (choose the straightest ones you can find. Cut them in half lengthwise. Scrape out seeds. Cut Brie cheese into long strips. Cook peppers cut side down until they soften & brown a bit. Flip over & lay a strip of Brie into the cavity of the pepper Continue cooking until the Brie melts. (this takes just a couple of minutes. Serve immediately. The sharp pepper with the sweet Brie is delicious.

Yes, but even the revered Lucy doesn't actually name them; the little 'corks' that is. As I recall the very nice guy on the stand told me that he didn't think they had a name in French, but only in Occitan. I'll ask him again next time I go to Villefranche market. All of his cheeses come from their farm just North of Villeneuve. These are the only 'bite sized' cheeses that I see. The cabecou's and crottins are quite a bit larger. It was a bit of a mixed bag on new vs. old types. The Gaperon, the 'corks' the Preferance (bottom right side) and the rouelle de Brebis (Top) are all known to me & have been eaten before. The Blue de Montagne (upper Right side) is new to me. Have never seen it before & think it may be a new variety. The label just says made from "Mountain Milk" not which kind & not exactly where. It was nice, reasonably pungent. I'll try it again & try to get more information. The blossoms were strictly decorative. I'm not a great fan of 'flavoured' cheeses. In our part of France its still a bit early for lavender blossom. Our lavender is growing like mad, but is a few weeks away from bursting out.

Correct. Family lore has it that the wine was named for (rather than by) John Talbot who reconquered Bordeaux in 1452.Robert Talbott wines of Monterey, CA, however, is owned by a Talbott. ← Yes, and pretty good wines they are. We used to buy quite a lot of them when we lived in Carmel Valley. Their tasting room is in 'The Village' which is just below where we used to live. Many a sip has been had.

YES! Right on. Good job Carlux. I'm really happy to see somebody else stick up for the real France. I love Paris, but in the same way I love my home town of San Francisco or London or Sydney or.... Nice places to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. On the other hand I really love France.

Thank you all.... . The wine was a decent Cote du Rhone, but the nice gentlemen at the table next to mine also shared their wine with me, the name was Chateau Talbot. Besides the very appropo name (though ahem ... mispelled), THAT wine was very, very good. ← Wow! Lucky you! a terrific wine. Add a zero to you price guide. No, not that pricey really, but depending upon the year 100 Euros on a restaurant wine list would not surprise me. There is an interesting story about how the chateau came to be named as apparently it never has been owned by anybody name Talbot.

Abra Two suggestions for you. Neither particularly involves cooking them, but both have advantages. 1) Take a market stall. Uzes has a terrific market & I'm sure you would sell all of your cherries. You wouldn't make much money, but the point is that its a lot of fun & you meet all kinds of interesting people. We take a stand at a vide grenier every so often just for the fun of it. Its good for our everyday French as well. 2) Give your cherries away to friends, neighbors & acquaintances. Be a bit choosy and give them to those who have other types of fruit trees and/or those who have nice potagers and are cherry treeless. This is as you will surmised not entirely altruistic. Given French generosity your gift of cherries will be repaid many times over by fruit & vegetables as the season progresses. If you really want to cook your cherries you could make cherry pies & jams to sell on your market stall. Either way you'll have some fun.

No,you're right. The one on the left is a Gaperon. As a hint I will say that both of those on the right are blue cheeses. The one at the top does get runny. (In fact it was nice & runny & is no more because it all got eaten) It not any of those you've mentioned. Care to guess the type of milk? As far as I know the little pellets at the bottom don't have a proper name.

Hah! I got nothin' on the cheese, but the herbs look like sage (long stalks of purple flowers), chives (single whispy lighter-purple flowers), and maybe thyme (I can't see that one as well, but thyme has tiny white flowers). ← Brilliant Chris! Three out of three!

Hardly any cheese posts lately so I thought that I'd see if I can drum up a bit of traffic. Here's a picture of the cheese platter we had yesterday. The quiz is to try to name them. It will be tough as the picture doesn't show their texture all that well, but have a go anyway. Bonus quiz! Name the three types of flower that decorate the cheese platter. (Hint! They are all from edible herbs.)

It depends. Goumard Prunier used to include wine, bottled water and coffee in their "menu." And here I thought it was Chateau Delanoye. ← Gee & I thought it was d'eau robinet. Or just plain robinet for short.

Here's a technique that we used some time ago when living in England to raise money for a cancer charity. It works like this: 1) You invite 2 or 3 couples to dinner making it clear that the dinner is for charity and that they will pay $XX for it. All the money goes to the charity. 2) You also get them to agree in advance that they will give a similar dinner to the same number of people under the same conditions. 3) This just keeps going until eventually enough people do not honor their commitment and the sequence dies out. If there are several people working on raising money who cook then you can start with several dinners. You can do singles dinners as well. The only costs to the "hosts" is that of attending the first dinner and the cost of the food & wine when they give their dinner. Thus no one is asked to spend a lot of money. We raised a lot of money for the Cancer charities project of a new hospital wing in this way. Although we kept the price of the dinner low, then then equivalent of $20.00 per person, the money quickly mounted up due to the multiplication factor.

Not that I'm anti- Paris or anything, but my advice is to: GET OUT OF TOWN! Big city, big city prices pretty much inevitable. The overheads are high. Avoid all of the large cities & spend you time in the towns & villages. Obviously, this won't work when you're in France for business, but then you'll probably be on an expense account anyway. If on vacation ignore Paris in so far as possible. Save lots of money & see lots of beautiful places. Go back to Paris when the exchange rate shifts back as it will - eventually. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself. (having income in dollars & pounds, but living in a Euro economy hasn't been much financial fun over the last year or so.) Come down our way & I'll give you list of under 15 Euro (including wine) places for lunch & another for under 20 Euro dinners. (no wine included.)

See my post about Summer Menus from yesterday in this forum. A good handful of tarragon in the fish stew really goes well. Another good use is in a chicken dish. Brown some chicken pieces (leg, thigh, breast) then add S&P plus herbs de province. Bake until just cooked through. Take them out of the oven & pour off most of the fat from the roasting pan. Now add lots of chopped mushrooms (I prefer a mix of wild & white) to the pan & fry until just softened, then add lots of cream. Reduce just a bit then add lots of chopped tarragon. Serve immediately as a sauce over the chicken pieces. Did this recently at a dinner party & got 14 rave reviews. People loved the tarragon although many couldn't figure out what it was that gave the sauce that terrific flavor.

I take your point, but: Here in Europe Rhubarb is definitely a late Spring/ early summer thing. Just becoming available in the markets. Admittedly the apples are the last of last fall's crop. ( I don't think of Peaches as an early summer fruit delicious though they are.) Garlic soup is light and takes advantage of the new crop of garlic which, again, is just coming into the markets. I did say "sort of" on the fish stew. Using spring run wild salmon and a few calamari make this dish pretty light. Choux pastry gnocchi again are very light compared to their potato counter parts. Overall I think a menu for early summer. Not, certainly, a menu for the height of summer, but something to get started with. I'd be delighted to see the detail of one of your summer menus.

Everybody seems to be trying to make potato gnocchi. Hard work & tricky. Try gnocchi Parisian a la Keller. Here's a link to the recipe. There's also a video of him making them as well, but I can't find it at the moment. I did these recently & they are both easy & delicious. Hard to go wrong when making pate a choux. See blog below for details.

We had our first meal outside on the veranda late last week. It was comfortable that evening, but it has cooled off a bit since. Summer? Maybe not quite yet. But, I don't think its too early to be thinking about & developing summer menus. Since we had friends scheduled for dinner in any case I used the other evening as my first summer 'practice'. Here's what I cooked: Starter: Cream of garlic soup with croûtons. Main: "sort of" Fish stew with gnocchi ( a la Thomas Keller) Cheese: Well we do live in France. Lait cru Camembert, Chevre, Cantal entre-deux and St Augur. Dessert: Rhubarb & Apple pie with a crumble topping & vanilla ice cream. Full description here on my blog. Now the question is? What are you cooking? Planning? Getting desperate for? In the way of summer meals, dishes & menus?

Just to clarify, the write up was from somebody else not me. I was merely quoting. I've never had this cheese so I'm not qualified to judge it. Wonder when they added all the 'other stuff"?

Struck out on potato cheese in Germany. Tried kartoffel kase and came up with all kinds of potato dishes with cheese, but no potato cheese. Had more luck with Abra's Dorothea. Here's a write up: Potato Chip Cheese by Dorothea $11.99 lb. at Central Market. This cheese was created in 1993 by the Van Dijk family. Dorothea cheese is named after the Van Dijk's daughter. The famous chef Cas Spijkars wanted to win the annual Dutch award for Most Unusual Food, so he invented a flavored goat cheese and had this company make it. They used potato skins as the secret ingredient since the potato is an important food in Dutch culinary tradition. Cas didn't like the combo at first, so they tweaked the recipe by adding basil oil, coriander oil, and chopped onion. They won the award. Only 4,000 of this cheese is made per year. The humidity and temperature are adjusted every few days to assure proper maturation. It is made from pasteurized milk. It is aged for more than 60 days to develop a full, nutty flavor and a body that is firm, but not hard enough to grate. I liked this cheese. It is light cream-colored, semi-hard, and the rind is brown wax like a smoked Gouda. On the label, it says that it contains potato chips, garlic, coriander, basil, and essential oils. When I think about it, I do taste the potato, and I also taste the onions mentioned in another description. It's really tangy and salty. I get a mustard flavor and feel, like how mustard tastes salty, but really isn't. One of my friends said it tasted like salad dressing. Most people liked it. I like it, but I don't know quite what to make of it. It is a little fruity and nutty. This seems a modern version compared to your lovely old recipes. Don't think this really answers your question, but maybe it gets us a bit closer.

Ho hum & so what? There's nothing new in this article. Yes, there's more food science available to the home cook. Good! But, when did McGee first publish? I know I've had his books for well over 10 years. Blumenthal in the Uk & Adrian in Spain have led us all into the 'secrets' of many dishes. I'm still somewhat suspicious of some new equipment, i.e. induction rings, which are efficient but require a whole new set of pots & pans & in my experience still aren't as good as good old gas. But I'm willing to listen & try as soon as reasonable given budgetary constraints. Good standard potboiler article full of standard BS in my opinion. Time is certainly NOT where I'd go to get the latest on culinary technique. edited for typos.

I originally asked & answered this question over on the French forum. Here's the link. One of my answers is in the forum, another on my blog, link below. The answers that everyone have come up with are just great. Very personal and very varied. Really really interesting and in some cases touching. In the French forum I limited the responses to meals in France. Here I'd like to broaden the question. So, lets hear about your most memorable/ exceptional meals anywhere at any time. Restaurant meals? At a friends house? Your Mom (or Pop's)? Ad hoc? Cooked it yourself? Anything or where goes. Let's hear yours!

John, Yes you are cheating, but you're forgiven. As host I guess you can get away with it; I on the other hand wanted to make sure I stayed sort of within the rules. If not then Girardet would have been at the top of my favorites. We had several notable meals there in the early & then the late 80's. One where I told my then newly wedded bride that we were completely changing our holiday plans at short notice because my friend Pierre had called and said he had Girardet reservations & did we want to come? Another where I hosted a lunch for 14 as the prize for the most successful sales competition I've ever run. They actually offered seconds on the truffled chicken dish, but only to the gentlemen! Any memories of Girardet are more than welcome as far as I'm concerned. Its still my standard by which others are measured. Edited to correct Girardet.

Admittedly, I might have exaggerated for effect for a second -- though I wonder if you transported "French" 3-star in New York to Paris and a Parisian 3-star to New York, and let them macerate for a year or so, how each would change. My larger point was that I do think you miss much of the soul of a city if you cloister yourself in grand hotels and multi-starred restaurants; that the question "when is enough too much" is philosophical, as much as a physiological question. ← I'm loving this discussion. Very pleased that my point, philosophical, was well taken. Where lies the culinary soul of a city? Nation? Culture? No easy answers, but I am so pleased that my fellow eGulleteers are prepared to attempt answers. Roll on with your opinions, the more the better.

Here's my personal take on this. I'm assuming that the 4 weeks are a trip, you're not at home. If the trip is all hotel stays then I would limit the 2-3 stars to one a week. My logic being that you are perforce eating in restaurants all day every day so the overload factor is harder to avoid. If you are staying somewhere where you can cook as & if you want then I'd up my 2-3 star experiences to two a week. You can better control your intake when you can cook for yourself. We also tend to make out 2-3 star experiences occur at lunch when we're staying in one place for some time. We do dinners more when we're on the move between places more frequently. Lunches are our preference for our main meal, but the logistics of travel make them difficult. I'm ignoring finance and assuming that you're in places that have an adequate supply of 2-3 star quality restaurants. Purely personally we always try to stay/ rent somewhere we can cook. Going to the markets, buying the food, talking to the locals then cooking & eating the bounty give us as much pleasure as going to the 2-3 stars. The stars become more special when they are less frequent IMHO.

I hate to be churlish, but some of the pairings are absolutely silly. Chalk & cheese?