Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Just how do boulangers shape baguette épi (shaped like a head of wheat to make for easy sharing)?

Scissors! You just cut your shaped (but not slashed) baguette and move the pieces in alternate directions. Easy when you know—and easy to do as well.

We also baked our brioches today, first adding butter and sugar to the disk shape for a brioche au sucre and egg washing our praline and small boules.

On the cookery side, the recipe today was Ratatouille comme une Caponata et oeuf poché, coulis de roquette.

I got a “pas mal” from the chef for this presentation. Based mostly on the evenness of the coulis ring and the fact I´d hidden the imperfections in my poached egg, I guess. And I have to admit to being pleased with the coulis pouring—but not the oil drops; I should have taken the picture from the other side. On the egg front, A. was daft enough to trust me to poach them and I failed twice to produce the platonic gastronomic poached eggs—my whites were all stringy. A. did, though, perfectly line my ring with courgettes…

To J.’s relief, chef doesn´t consider Thermomix or Pacojet to be an essential part of the home toolkit—or even that of a bistro; he had an interesting analysis of the differing economics of bistro and 1* establishments. We used the school Thermomix for the coulis but although a stick blender isn´t powerful enough to achieve the desired smoothness, a powerful home blender can do the job.

Despite the usual slog of cleaning I arrived home a little less worn out than the past couple of days and, not having any errands to run, had time for what I considered as a well deserved goûter!