But for me a glimpse of foodie Heaven!
I’ve never been a great meat eater. I’m not a veggie by any stretch of the imagination and although I could go for days without eating any meat at all, I have no wish to be one. I like a good steak, a nicely barbecued sausage, a well cooked shish-kebab or succulent roast chicken as much as the next man, but I don’t have to have meat any more than I have to have potatoes or cabbage, which quite honestly, I rarely eat. Even before I came here I was already eating lighter, more easily prepared meals that, coincidentally also happened to be ‘more healthy’, although that wasn’t my principle reason for choosing them. I think the main consideration was that as I was mainly ‘cooking’ just for myself following my separation and divorce, I wanted things that were convenient, quick and easy to prepare and didn’t need a lot of clearing up afterwards, so I had gravitated towards dishes like rice, chicken, vegetables and, of course, salads.
Salads always have been a favourite of mine and as it has been pretty hot for most of the time I’ve been here, I tend to have one almost every day. I like to make a whole batch in advance, the way I did again this evening. I wash, chop and mix all of the ‘dry’ ingredients, like lettuce, radishes, carrots, onions and courgettes, then spin them to get any remaining water out and store the mix in containers in the fridge. Then I just grab a handful when I want a salad, add the ‘wet’ ingredients like cucumber, tomatoes and peppers and finish it off with some chopped cold meat or cheese.
And, of course, no salad is complete without its dressing. To me, a salad without dressing is like strawberries without cream, Guinness without a head or spotted dick without custard – look the last one up, you non-English speakers 😉 It just ain’t right! And the French, naturellement, are the masters when it comes to salad dressings. My local Intermarche has quite a few to choose from and I haven’t yet finished working my way through them yet, so I’ve still got a few treats in store. When I first came here, I started off with Vinaigrette Nature, which is quite simply vinegar with olive oil spiced up with Dijon mustard – but proper Dijon mustard, mind, not your phoney stuff. It was cheap and delicious and made any salad into a real treat. Next time I scanned the shelf and the one that caught my eye was Red Wine Vinegar vinaigrette with Red Onions. My goodness, when I tried it for the first time, to me this could have been the pinnacle of vinaigrettes and I was worried that I might have peaked too early 😉 But anyway, I stuck with it a few more times until yesterday when I found that it was also a favourite of the latest intake of tourists and the shelf had been cleared. Quelle horreur! But I didn’t panic because I knew that this being France, there was sure to be an equally delicious alternative to choose from, and I was right. Just a bit further along I found vinaigrette made from Vinaigre de Cidre, Jus de Pomme et Echalotes. It even sounds delicious, and although I also bought a bottle of Vinaigrette a la Moutarde a l’Ancienne (another traditional Dijon mustard recipe) as a back-up, I just knew that I’d struck gold with the first one.
By the way, while I’m typing this, I’m also enjoying a glass of rose wine, well-chilled or ‘frappe’ as they say in France, and a fine accompaniment to …… well, almost anything 🙂 Many people who know no better turn their noses up at rose but I used to work in the wine trade many years ago and know that all types of wine have something to offer. Rose is the ideal summer drink, light and fruity and if you’re too snobby to drink it, that’s your hard luck and you don’t know what you’re missing. The roses that find their way to the UK are invariably a bit ‘thick’ on the palate, heavy and over-sweet, but over here that definitely needn’t be the case. Just like the vinaigrettes, I’ve also been working my way through the roses (OK, and the whites and reds too…) and haven’t had a bad one yet. Everyone knows about Rose d’Anjou from the Loire which when bought in the UK tends to reinforce the rose image that I’ve described above. But Cabernet d’Anjou is usually a different kettle of fish (if you’ll excuse the description in relation to wine) being lighter and drier in character. And I’ve had some lovely ones in the last few weeks that have proved that. And I’ve also had some marvellous surprises. The Intermarche stocks rose wines not just from Anjou but also from all of the principal wine regions and many of these as well as being fresh and fruity, are also deliciously dry. The one I’ve just taken a sip of is AC Costieres de Nimes, a southern French wine from the burgundy region, which we usually associate with hot, red wines. But this isn’t – it’s light, fruity and beautifully dry but with 13% alcohol, which initially looks surprisingly high, but isn’t when you think of the region it’s coming from. And know what? It was under 3€ a bottle!
But enough of that, back to this evening’s salad. Here’s what it looked like before I sat down outside in the early evening sunshine and devoured it.
Sometimes I enjoy a glass of white or rose wine with my salad but this evening I decided on a delicious cold glass of Cidre Doux, sweet French cider which only has a 2% alcohol content and goes down a treat. Often I like to have chopped garlic sausage especially or cheese on top of the salad but this evening I chose two chopped small frankfurter sausages instead.
And it was lovely and Toddie also enjoyed his share of the frankfurters 😉
Now after a fairly scorchingly hot day, it looks and feels as though we might have a thunderstorm, so I’ll bid you adieu and good night.
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I’d join you in that Bruce 🙂
Funnily enough, although the French have a reputation for the quality of their foods, which I go along with for the most part, I’ve not been terribly impressed by their fruit and vegetables. I love apples and quite often just have a lunch of an apple and some cheese. But whereas we in the UK go for flavour and crunchiness in our apples, the French seem to value size above all else! So you end up with apples that are really too big for one sitting and to top it off, the ultimate disappointment, when you cut ’em up, you find that they’re soft inside and a bit flavourless. And if you’re really unlucky, you’ve bought a supermarket 2kg pre-pack and you’re stuck with the ruddy things for ages! I’m just eating a Golden Delicious from such a pack – and there’s a contradiction in terms if ever there was one – and as I’m down to the last three or four, I bought four ruddy great Granny Smiths to have for lunch with Gouda cheese over the next few days. I found some of the pre-packed lettuces to have been craftily packaged to hide the rotten brown bits of the leaves underneath where you couldn’t see them and, horror of horrors, some to have been so old and unfresh that the hearts were brown as well. The best salads I’ve had were when my neighbour Benjamin went off for the weekend a few weeks ago and offered me some of the stuff that he is growing in his garden that was ready and that he wouldn’t be there to eat. He cut me a gorgeous head of lettuce and two courgettes and that was the first time (unbelievably) that I’d ever tried raw courgettes in salad – and realised what I’d been missing for years! Delicious 😀
Amazing that your tastes parallel my own, Roger.
I LOVE fresh salads, both of the vegetable and the fruit variety.
My favourite is a Greek salad and, like you, whatever salad I have, it must have a dressing, my favourite being a simple balsamic vinegar.
Summer meals in our home are almost identical to what you had, although sometimes the steak or snags will be done outside on the b-b-q and then the evening meal eaten outside, in the glow of the setting sun as it disappears behind the mountains, with a nice chilled Cab Sav or Merlot or, indeed, a local Rose.
All good. 🙂
Bruce