Dave Hatfield

Lucky you! The first trip to Paris is a magical time & you will be there at the best time of the year. Try to speak as much French as you can. It will be appreciated and will enhance your experience. Shop in the little neighborhood stores & the street markets, its much more fun. Be a pointer. (je voudrais ca!) As you point at what you want. You'll learn lots of vocabulary that way. Use lots of 'si vous plait's & merci's & lots of bonne journees. The French are very polite. Think about lunches. If you need to keep on your budget lunches are a great way to do it. Great meals at fixed prices. Dinners are fine, but tend to be more expensive. Save money on breakfast by getting your own croissants & coffee. You'll have a great time.

Let's put it this way; which is more important? An island or a marriage? I'm pretty sure they would. Just make sure to keep reciepts & not to unpack the fronts. If you get a savvy sales person you can probable order everything without the fronts in the first place. We were afraid to try that because of the language barrier; not sure our French was up to it. Agree & wish it had been possible, but it wasn't in our case. Looks to me as if you've achieved both goals.

Wow! scubadoo97 what a great kitchen. One can see your budget issues given the top quality of everything you've used. Beautiful. How about commenting upon some of the questions posed earlier please. Is your relationship still intact after a project like this, for example.

John - Thanks. I had some time this morning so I searched out the publisher in Paris and was able to order the book on line. They seem a very nice small publisher specializing in things culinary. Go here to have a look. Germain to this thread is that they publish a couple of guides for restauranteurs on how to translate their menus into English. How about that!

I'm amazed all this wonderful eggplant knowledge and delicious sounding recipies yet nobody has mentioned one of the simpliest yet most tasty ways to prepare eggplant. This recipe is adopted from Paula Wolfert's last book. Cut off the stem end of the eggplant. Cut garlic cloves into this wedges. Poke holes, 5-8 depending upon size, around each eggplant. Insert the garlic slices into the holes. (I use an oyster knife for the hole poking as they're broad & stiff, but any knife will do. Rub the eggplant all over with olive oil. Wrap each eggplant in foil to seal. Place in a preheated 425 degree oven for 30 minutes. When done break seal, let cool a bit then slice lengthways into quarters or eights. Serve hot, warm or cold. If you want to jazz this up then jullien some red bell peppers. Saute them gently in a frying pan with some olive oil. Its best to cover the pan until the peppers are soft then remove the lid & turn up the heat to finish off. A little blackening around the edges looks good. Make a lattice arrangement of the eggplant & drap the pepper strips over. The tastes blend well & the presentation is nice. To raise the stakes even more. Make a mild aoli. Add piment de Eschabe (or paprica mixed with some cayenne, but be careful.) Serve the sauce on the side of the eggplant & pepper dish.

Jason, use them just like the black ones. They make a nice color contrast although ther skins do go a bit yellow when cooked.

Good questions & I will ask & try to get answers. I can say that in our case the sink went where it is for 2 key reasons. First it was just about the only logical place given our layout; secondly, the plumbing was already nearby making installation easier. The dishwasher went to the right of the sink for similar logical reasons. Unfortunately I couldn't get my drawing to post so the layout isn't as clear as I would like, but because of the protruding stairwell the fridge pretty much had to go where it is. The built in oven fitted nicely next to it with space for good storage of baking trays & so for that above & below it. Again, the stove had to go across from the fridge & oven from a layout point of view. All of this is not perfect. The sink should be closer to the stove to make a neater working triangle. But we are happy that we've done to best layout within the space/shape limitations. More good questions to be asked. Here are my answers for us. We did all of the design ourselves. Experience says that 'kitchen designers' have too many vested interests & we've been unhappy with them. Didn't do much. I put together the IKEA units ready for mounting & I heped Jacques with the mounting as sort of a carpenter's assistent. It took about a month once we started actual work. We'd spent a lot of planning time & had ordered things so that materiels were not a hold up. We didn't have a schedule as this is after all rural France & schedules can be very disappointing things. Suprisingly, this came together a bit more quickly than we thought. Lucky I guess! Since didn't have a set budget until we had decided most things its hard to answer. From when we first started planning until the finish I'd estimate the cost overrun at about 10%. This was primarily due to having quite a bit of extra oak panelling done. Once we actually started we were pretty much on budget. French craftsmen are very good at sticking to their quotes. No perminent damage. There was enough comprimise that we both feel we got our key needs & we both like the results. As I think I said this is our 3rd or 4th kitchen together so 90% is common ground by now. The heat comes as we struggle to live with the inevitable comprimises. Ok, sapidus, your turn now! Given the quality of your questions I'm sure we are all in for a treat when we see your write up. Meanwhile, I'll be taking pictures of kitchen #2 tomorrow & try to write it up by the end of the week. Thanks to all for the comments & encouragement.

Think the Neal's Yard packing would work well when put into your checked luggage. (Its too hot on the cabin for cheeses, I think.) Your problem is more likely to be USA customs. You might want to do some checking with them prior to your trip. I know for sure that raw milk cheeses are now a no no. Years ago I brought it some stilton, London to San Francisco. In those days the baggage hold was very cold so I packed most of my business stuff in the checked case to make room for the stilton in my briefcase. Despite my best wrapping efforts we were beginning to have a pretty smelly cabin by the time we reached S.F. The stilon was still wonderful though. A while later after I moved back to the states friends brought me a stone of stilton. But that's another story.

Thanks for the kind words. Life is definitly good in France. Sounds like you're just about to start your own kitchen adventure. You realy should get a camera, an el cheapo digital will do nicely, and document your renovation. I'm sure there would be lots of interest. This is especially true as it sounds as if you have some great ideas AND are budget concious. The cost of the camera will get lost in the noise as you add up the kitchen cost!

You may want to try this. Look at about June 26th. This is a recipe for Lemon Cheese which is then incorporated into what I call a lemon Brulee. Never fails to please especially when the roasted fruit variation is served. I'll try to remember to take some pictures next time I make this. It looks great when served in tall open mouthed glasses.

Hummmm - mayonaise without egg yolks. Interesting. I'd try using whole milk or better yet heavy cream (if you don't mind the butterfat) to get a thicker consistency. Or you could just add an egg yolk at the begining, slowly drizzle in the oil & then the milk/buttermilk at the end. That would give you a flavored mayonaise which should thicken up nicely. Good luck.

What? & spoil all the fun? If offered I always take a close look at the English menu just to check out the translations. John, How comprehensive is this ? I've been looking for a dictionary that really covers as many food items as possible, the names of as many techniques as possible as well as the restaurant terms. Hopefully this may be the answer.

Ok, can't say that I've been overwhelmed by the response, but here's the first kitchen. Here’s the first kitchen remodel which happens to be our kitchen. Background The background is that when we bought our house we knew we would want to do a new kitchen when we could afford it. While we waited we had plenty of time to ponder what we wanted to do. In this case the most practical & affordable solution was to convert a bedroom with ensuite bathroom into the new kitchen. (We wanted the existing kitchen space to become part of a large living. dining room.) This limited our space; we have about 18’ X 10’ total, but would work. Limitations The usual financial ones of course. Physically we had the door in the middle of one long wall and we had two mansard windows none of which were movable. We also had part of a stairwell in one corner. I tried a crude drawing, but I can't get it to post. Maybe I'll work it out later. The ‘Discussions’ We both cook, but we both have very different styles. The one easy thing is that we’re both left handed. Much of the design discussion centered on having an island vs. having a place to sit & eat. She likes the eating space, I like an island with a prep sink. Since we’ve 3 previous kitchens together the rest of the design wasn’t too hard to agree. As you’ll see she won this one, we have a banquette. It works well, but I would still have liked my island. Maybe next time. Right hand view from door showing worktop & stove. Essential elements Here’s a list of things we considered essential. Drawers, not cabinets for storage. Two ovens. Vertical storage. Tough counter tops. An American style fridge. Quality dishwasher. A large gas cook top. Storage, storage, storage. Cookbook shelves. There’s probably more that I’ll think of as I go along. Left hand view from door. More worktop & sink. Note the mansard window & just up at the top corner the cut down cabinet. Again couldn't do the drawing, but the photos should make thing clear. All of the under counter storage is drawers. Above are shallower cabinets. At the right end there is a 12” wide vertical storage unit & at the left end underneath are two book shelves. The banquette has benches with hinged tops & storage underneath. The counter at the left of the door is a narrow set of cupboard & drawers designed for wall mounting, but in this case helping us have just enough space for the table & benches. The big larder unit is terrific, everyone should have one. Larder unit with Fridge & wall oven beyond. The other mansard window & dogs bowl. Equipment Pretty standard fridge/freezer with ice maker (not so standard here in France), Wall mounted oven with all the latest features, Bosch dishwasher, hood & extractor fan. The big decision was the stove/cook top. Not having 2 ovens was not an option. After a lot of thought we ended up with a 36”, 5 burner range with full width gas over & electric grill. This was not an expensive stove (about $1,000), but it performs & we’re very happy with it. We bought everything from one store having given our detailed list of equipment to several. Lowest bid got the order. The stove top. 36", simple, space for big pots. Love the oven; big enough for a turkey & extras Cabinets Here’s where you can blow a ton of money so we came up with a strategy. We bought all IKEA cabinets with the cheapest possible fronts. The quality of IKEA hardware, fit and range of cabinets is second to none. BUT, you don’t get the best choice of fronts. We just never unpacked the IKEA fronts & took them back for credit which was happily given. At this point we worked with Gerard (see here for more about him) to choose our wood & the design we wanted. His prices were reasonable, we got exactly what we wanted and the quality of his work was excellent. We conservatively estimate that we saved over $5,000 by doing this. Consider searching out a retired cabinet maker or individual craftsman to try this yourself. The table & banquette area. Looking towards the banquette area. Worktops Another area where you can eat up money. We’re lucky in that in our area granite is fairly cheap so it was our obvious choice. If affordable, the best worktop in our humble opinion. We’ve done laminates in the past; Ok but not for the long haul. Tiles are our second favorite and have always worked well for us & at reasonable cost. Flooring We opted for tiles and they have worked out very well. They look good & are very easy to keep clean. Drawers, beautiful drawers. Can't have enought of them. Ok, I think in the course of this long winded essay I’ve answered most of the questions I posed. What kind of cooking? We do lots of entertaining, dinner parties for 8-12 & a few larger holiday events. See here for some idea of how we cook. A few of our cook books. Only the frequently used stay here. The big design problem was space & the big construction problem was fitting cupboards into a sloping ceiling. We’re most pleased that the kitchen works; it’s a great place to cook in. We’re least pleased about the amount of work space, it’s a bit crowded when we’re both cooking. We wouldn’t change anything serious in this kitchen. Given the space & the budget we’re very happy. Now! Give us another 100 square feet to work with & we’d be off again!

I agree & I'll do what I can to find out, but people tend to be a bit sensitive about costs. I can & will give some cost examples from our own experience. These were all done in one go. Mainly as parts of a larger house renovation or a major remodel. Doing it bit by bit is really tough. It helps spread the cost, but can bbe awfully hard to live with. As with most things there's a story behind the sculpture. We saw it in a field next to the artist's house. He uses old farm machinery as bits to put his sculptues together & then leaves them out in the field. Sort of an open air showroom. Anyway, we bought it & asked if he could deliver which he could. He showed up on time & we said that we wanted it on top of the cabinets. I got a ladder for him & asked if he needed help as the sculpture was pretty heavy. No, no help needed. Well he was puffing pretty hard as he tried to get it up the last bit so my wife fearing he's fall put her hands under this thigh to help push him & it up. He made it, but I think he got the wrong idea about her help. In any case he took hos money & disappeared pretty quickly refusing a drink of water or cup of tea.

Kitchen remodeling is something that most of us have either done or at least seriously contemplated. It’s an agonizing process and a strain on any relationship. The thought behind this thread is that the more practical help we can get on kitchen remodeling the better. The inspiration for this thread was when I realized that I know of 5 kitchens that have recently had complete remodels; each is very nice & each is very different. So, I talked to our friends & got their permission to photograph their kitchens and for them to answer a series of questions. I also have their agreement to answer any questions that you may have. (The answers will come through me as I want to maintain privacy for my friends.) In each post there will be a complete description of the kitchen along with lots of photos. In addition here is a list of standard questions I intend to ask. Q. What was your kitchen before it was a kitchen? Q. How large is the kitchen? Q. What kind of cooking do you do? Family? Dinner parties? Ethnic? Gourmet? Q. What were the 3 top goals for your new kitchen? Q. What was the biggest problem that had to be over come? In the design phase ? During actual construction ? Q. What are you most pleased about in your new kitchen? Q. Least pleased about? Q. If you were doing your kitchen again what would you change? What I’m looking for with this initial thread starting post is feedback. How much interest is there in the topic? Are there other questions I should be asking? Would anybody else like to write up their kitchen once they’ve seen these write ups? I’ll be starting with our own kitchen so here’s a teaser picture.

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=82080&hl= If I've done it correctly the link above takes you to a list of Paris markets. My recommendation would be to save the 130 Euros and visit one or more of these. They're free & you will get lots of photo opportunities. You could use the 130 Euros to buy a truffle should you find one. I'll be interested to see what the 'Parisiens' have to say. After all we rural types are a frugal lot.

Fully agree that white truffles in Paris in October are going to be pretty hard on the budget - if available at all. You might want to try black truffles instead; still expensive & still a bit too early in the year for them, but you might just luck out and get something pretty good. Here's a true truffle story that may amuse you. Some years ago I set up a dinner at a very upmarket restaurant in Berkely with two sets of friends. Now, both of these guys were very successful and both were great lovers of their food and, not suprisingly, both had huge ego's. I wanted to see what would happen when they met and we talked food. Well, I got the results I had hoped for. Lots of spirited conversation, lots of clashes of opinion and lots of oneupmanship. Eventually, after quite a bit of wine, the conversation came around to truffles and whether the black or the white were best. Friend #1 (no names to protect the innocent) swore by black French truffles. Friend #2 swore by the white truffles of Alba. He went on & on about how when he lived near Alba they did so & so & such & such with the white truffles. He went on to say that he would have been able to prove his point if only you could get fresh white truffles on the West coast. At this point friend #1 quietly say's; "how many would you like? I'll have them delivered tomorrow." Friend #1 was the owner of the Oakville Grocery & had white truffles flown in every day during the season! Friend #2 simply shook hands to admit defeat & ordered a good bottle of champagne. Trufflelover, welcome to eGullet. Happy hunting; you'll have a great time in Paris in October!

I'd definitly soak the dry beans by either method you mention THEN start the crockpot cooking. I wouldn't use canned pre-cooked beans at all. In addition to the salt I can only worry about what else in in them to keep them from falling apart. Then again I don't use pre-cooked anything & hardly any canned goods.

The whole point is to make you all jealous so you'll all come to France, spend money & help out the local economy. Thanks for the compliment on the pics. Like Gariotin I mostly eat my cheeses straight. Sometimes with Scandinavian crisp bread as I try to avoid white flour. An exception is strong blue cheeses which are a great indulgence when eaten with good butter on a piece of baugette. Good old macaroni & cheese ain't to be ignored, what's pizza without one or more cheeses & parmesian is essential to most pasta's in my opinion. In England its hard to beat a ploughman's lunch. Usually a really good cheddar with bread & chutney. (or Branston pickle) King of all combos, however, is Stilton & vintage port. Here's the great local cheese dish. Aligot! Originates in the Averyon just East of us. You boil & mash say 2 lbs of potatoes (baking potatoes work well) then add about 11/2 labs of Tome cheeses. You add this slowly over low heat; you want just enough heat to melt the cheese without further cooking the potatoes. Add 2-3 cloves of garlic to taste, add some cream for consistency, Salt & pepper to taste. The trick is to keep stirring as you add the cheese to make sure that the cheese & potatoes are well integrated. It gets to be hard work. (In fact in the old days the men always made the aligot as the stirring was considered too hard to the women. Of course they were making huge pots - 20-30 kilos at a time.) The cheese has to be a tome (tomme is the alternate spelling, but I'm told that tome is the younger type and melts more easily.) and, ideally, a tome from the Averyon or at least the Auvergne. It can be a cantal or a laguiole or just a 'tomme fermier' These all have the right melting characteristics. I've never tried it, but its just possible that a cheddar might work although it may not melt at a low enough temperature. This is a wonderful dish & you can still buy it at the local farmers markets. Its also many times the star dish at the local village fetes. Try it & you'll get addicted! PS: Just thought. Try this. take a piece of young chevre (chalky consistency) and gently dip it into a bowl of cumin seeds. Don't get too many on it. Eat straight. Its a nice flovor combination. You can experiment with othe herbs for fun. Herbs de Provence work well. Very young chevre on baugette with good jam is also a treat. edited to add the PS.

Found a new cheese vendor yesterday who had some really interesting stuff. This was at one of my favorite markets, Caussade every Monday. Yesterday being both August and part of a 4 day weekend in France the market was really really crowded. Great fun though & with everything coming into season the shopping was incredible. Anyway, I noticed a cheese stand that I'd never stopped at before. Wow! 20 Euros later I left with what you see below: Two of the cheeses, the brie de mieux (perfectly ripe) and the St Augur blue (one of our favorites even if it is a 'factory' cheese.) are pretty standard stuff. The other two & the fifth cheese not in the picture aren't. So here's some detail. As you can see the cheese is called Rouelle, its raw goats milk & comes from the Tarn (just South of us.) It looks very similar to the cheese Bleudauvergne posted earlier in the thread. Don't know if its the same or just that thry're both the same shaped & ashed. In any case its mild, slightly chalky in texture and a little different from most chevres. This one is called Pechegos. Another raw milk goats cheese, but with an entirely different taste. Much stronger and a very creamy texture. Note that they're from the same maker, "Le Pic". Questioning revealed that this is a cooperative down in the Tarn; quess where I'm heading soon. The real gem, however, is pictured below. This is Bouysset chevre. A raw goat's milk brie! I'd only ever found this cheese once before & even this time it was not labeled. The seller wouldn't say where he got it from, but he did say that it was only made at the height of summer. It tastes wonderful, like a brie, but at the same time not like a brie. Sort of hard to describe. I can tell you that our dinner guests made short work of it. Sharing is hard sometimes. Living in France is so hard.

Here's a nice little piece of Bethmale from the Pyrenees in the Ariege department just about opposite Andorra. Apparantly the Vallee de Bethmale is one of 18 valley that feed the river Salat. (the area is also known as the couserans) Bethmale dates back to the 12th century, but interestingly it is only fairly recently that it has been made from cows milk. For centuries it was made from ewes milk. In all cases the cheese is made from whole raw milk. Bethmale has a wonderful slighty nutty flavor which intensifies as it ages. My preference is for the 'younger' cheese as pictured. Its still relatively soft, as the cheese ages it tends to get harder & stronger. Nice cheese at any age. edited for typo correction

Don't know about them, but Mark Bittman has a recipe in his "How to Cook Everything" that I've used a number of times. It makes great fridge dill pickles. Don't see why it wouldn't work for other veggies.

Thanks. Now I know!

I'll check & see just how old the aged gouda I buy here is. Question?? What's the prefered pronounciation? Goowda? or Gooda or Neither. I've never been sure. Another cheese that changes & in my opinion dramaticly improves with age is Gruyere. Pretty innocous when young & mass produced, but some of the artisan agred Gruyere's you can buy in Switzerland are wonderful. Great to eat straight & make fantastic fondue.

Think Carlbad's got it! Now all I have to do is figure out what a kudo is. Guess I can offer 4 Big microseconds of fame. As for the rest of you keep trying.