Now, if you want to do a little something ahead of time-say, on the weekend when you have all that extra time- roast some peppers or shred a bunch of hard cheese or pre-bake some eggplant and store them in the fridge. All of which you just pull out of the fridge and put on a plate. (Be sure and give everything a finishing drizzle of your best quality olive oil.) Set a pretty table, open a decent rosé wine and voila! Nothing simpler.Ĭome to that, it’s hard to beat a good couple of cheeses (say a Brie or Gouda with a blue cheese, varying the hard and soft cheeses) with a salad, fresh bread and maybe a simple tapenade. The French can do wonderful things with a cold plate of pickles, a little pâté and a hunk of fresh bread. If you can get your hands on really good tomatoes, for example, you needn’t do any actual cooking. Sometimes the simplest meals are the best. It doesn’t take an elaborate morney sauce or a counterful of mise-en-place bowls to make an exquisite, satisfying meal, (and I’m not leading up to take-out here). So I reserve the creative cooking for the weekend when I have a little extra time (in between soccer games, birthday parties, church, and yard work!) and during the week I take a page from how the French dine when they dine simply and perfectly. But if I do it on a weeknight, I end up agitated and grumpy-if I’m able to pull it off at all. I love to cook my family’s favorites: cassoulet, chicken and dumplings, etc.
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If you have a full time job, any kids at all, and maybe a spouse who expects your occasional participation in his/her life AND you have the least desire to stay up with current events, friends, extended family, a clean house, and keeping your family’s shirts and shorts laundered, not to mention possibly writing a chapter in your latest murder mystery, you will be, without question, no two-ways-about-it, totally crunched for time all of the time. And it’s all eaten in less time than it takes to change the channel.
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I mean, really! Doesn’t preparing, then cleaning up after evening meals (if you bother to do it before slumping in front of the TV set) wear you out? You work hard all day and then there’s all that chopping and prepping in order to put out a seasoned, cooked piece of meat-hopefully with some kind of sauce on it-a vegetable (better make it two, we didn’t get anywhere near our quota of fruits & veggies today), a salad, a starch (rice or risotto-both of which take at least forty minutes to cook), a piece of bread or a roll to help move it all around the plate with, and something to drink. That’s because here in the States our “convenience” foods-frozen processed foods and snack-packs (which tend to be tasteless and generally bad for you) are often the only things we have time to “make.” I don’t think it’s impossible to eat healthily and work full time, but it’s hard. I hate to think that our American way of eating is leeching across the Atlantic to the land of food and style, but there are some things that seem to be the same no matter where you live and the combination of holding down a job and raising a family while attempting to bring good nutrition (and taste!) into the equation seems to be one of them.
And while granted, if you read the piece you’ll see that their Mickey D’s are nothing like ours, it was still a shock. I stumbled across a recent article that said the French were annoyed because there was a grass roots movement to close some McDonald’s restaurants in France. I expect to live in the daily food markets in Aix and environs and–if just for a few weeks–live the life I write about and love. In excited anticipation of my upcoming Provençal research trip, I’m going through my cookbooks and scanning favorite recipes to be uploaded to my iPad.
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