"The longer I lived in France, the more I ate.  And the more I ate, the more questions I had.  I yearned to discover French regional cuisine, and, I soon realized, the only way to truly understand it was to visit the regions themselves, to be curious, explore, taste, learn.  In France dining is meant to be a special, pleasurable part of the day; food offers not only fuel for the body but also a connection – between the people who have joined you at the table, between the generations who have shared a recipe, between the terroir (the earth) and the culture and cuisine that have sprung from it.  Separate from cooking, the very act of eating is in itself an art to master."
  – Ann Mah, from Mastering the Art of French Eating



Introduction


For a long time I've wanted to pick French cuisine cooking and learn as much about it as I can, study its heritage, cook the recipes, garden according to its needed produce.  After reading the book and seeing the movie Julie and Julia, my interest was even more affirmed – I've read through Julia Child's old masterpiece Mastering the Art of French Cooking, recently bought Monique Hooker's

(from DeSoto WI), Cooking with the Seasons – a classic French cookbook written by a chef born and bred in the French countryside – and have a copy of the French Garden handy and ready for this coming spring.  It was wonderful, then, to stumble across the book above by Ann Mah, a memoir of a young food writer who had far more ambitious dreams of immersing herself in French cuisine.  Her husband a widely traveling diplomat, their next assignment had been chosen for them as Paris (for those who saw the Julie and Julia movie, Julia Child's husband too was a diplomat sent to Paris).  For Ann,

this was to be a true crescendo moment in her life – she had visited Paris when young with her family, and her husband, Calvin, had actually spent time to study in Paris and had friends in the city.  They would cafe-hop, shop open air markets along with the seasons, and Ann of course would have her cooking subject matter wrapped up in the experience.  On arrival to the City of Light, however, Ann's husband had been quickly reassigned to Baghdad, one location of the world where spouses did not accompany.  As she lost her husband, she too lost parts of her romantic vision.  She had to reconceive her self-assignment: "At first I wasn't sure how to maneuver myself toute seule (alone). I missed my husband like an internal internal organ, and the city, which had seemed so quaintly formal when we where together – its bon jours and bonsoirs, and four-course dinner parties, and cheek kisses instead of hugs–felt a little cold now that I was alone…And then, somewhere in the midst of navigating new markets and memorizing new vocabulary, I remembered the wife of another American diplomat, a woman who had lived here sixty years earlier, another trailing spouse who needed a push to find her way: Julia Child."

We visited a replica of Julia Child's kitchen in Washington D.C.

Her memoir became, instead, of "ten different regions of France and their signature dishes, of the link between history and place, culture and cuisine.  I chose these ten dishes and regions because of their significance in the United States or, as is the case with Aveyron, because of its significance to me.  The four years I spent in Paris felt like the shortest of my life, except for one – the year Calvin was in Baghdad – which was the longest.  It changed me, of course, living in France – Julia Child could have told me that it would – even though, like a lot of things, the change crept up on me little by little.  Bite by bite.  Which, I suppose, is the only way to savor life."

Thank Hummus


When moving through challenging times, it is often recommended to write a list or a few paragraphs of gratitude to switch around the route of thinking that can set in.  Among many other foods, I thank hummus for the sake of Julia.  If one thing is happening through the process of nutrition re-education for Julia, it is the expansion of palate.  A kind of pickiness and tight routine had limited calorie intake for sometime for her.  As Julia is a prototype of a 13-year old calorie burning machine – 93rd percentile in height, growing two inches in a year, athletic, exerciser, and a full-time thinker – the fact that she has always also been picky did not come in handy at all.  Given the choice, she might discount hummus as odd, not tasty, unusual in texture, not digesting properly…you name it; not given the choice, well, hummus isn't too bad, is a strong source for protein, some fat, fiber, and vitamin C.  If a kid doesn't know or understand about the breakdown in contents and how the growing body needs these things, he or she relies strictly on the taste test and we all know the likely results.  As a parent, it's naturally not an easy sell to say "hummus or bust."  And yet, in these exclusive cases, that is what must be done.  Julia has been eating five or six meals a day now for three weeks and has handled them all.  Dairy in small

doses has become a possibility again…"yogurt's pretty good!"  Yesterday, the anticipated snack of

 raisins and pretzel twists was welcome.  Pizza night two nights ago, although still not a favorite, (extreme cheese) was done.  Now there is the possibility of a future weekly pizza night because we have seen it done.  Waffles, pot roast, Chinese wraps with hot sauce, pot pie, what have you, all done.  The children obesity epidemic in America (75 percent all American children) has left naturally thin girls on their own a bit in terms of health education and understanding what is happening at such a time of body growth and personal change.  What we thought we knew intuitively still stands as sound, but the great reversal in logic might best be sounded for Julia not as much in the time-tested saying "eat your vegetables," but instead "eat your fat sources!"

Christmas in Oconomowoc

With an hour-long pass (Julia is forbidden all exercise) out on the grounds X'mas Eve, we walked along a rainy courtyard until we found a dark garden lit by trees and took as many pics as we were allowed by two teens and an eight year old.

Christmas Eve was difficult.  Julia, understandably, now at week three in her emergency, was worn out, having been poked at, prodded at, and talked at virtually every hour, including nights (at least in Madison) for 21 days straight.  Perspective sometimes allows the parent to try to come to grips with how we might ourselves handle such pressures. It's safe to say Julia has weathered her own storm at least as well as we ever could have, and in many many cases, genuinely better.  Rites of passage can't always be pretty, but as we hope, as we know, this one has landed and the lessons must form staying power.

 
As Julia almost always does, she rebounds quite quickly, and Christmas Day, sun (yes sun!) shining, as we walked along a trail at the pond, she expressed this might be the best Christmas she has ever experienced.  Like she said, it's weird, but she had nothing to complain about.

When we were signing out for our pass to walk outside and Julia was getting her coat, the nurse confided in us that Julia, although sometimes quiet, was always the group of girls' secret positive spirit.  I think she knows.

Christmas in Oconomowoc

Staybridge Suites

It doesn't look like the fog of this midwest December is giving up anytime soon, but the spirit of Christmas is shaping up here in Oconomowoc in a profoundly wonderful way.  We are only ten

Xmas room at the Staybridge Suites

minutes away from Julia and wait for our daily visits with eager hearts in our hands.  As intensely as the parent fears new problems, those fears are interrupted, as of the moment anyway, by progress as the courage and wisdom of a thirteen year old is quietly, gradually finding itself out.

With only a countertop kitchen range in the room, Christmas dinner will be ham, potatoes and brussel sprouts, maybe boiled together in a pot, and served with enough chocolate to feed Santa's elves.

The Pick and Save grocery is just down the road.  Little shopping centers make stocking stuffers easy

to find, and the presents under the tree probably smell of Frasier Pine from the dangling car scent.

 

Edna Mae's Sour Cream Pancakes




The secret ingredient for these wonderful homemade pancakes, found in Pioneer Woman Cooks, is

the sour cream (plus our own little add-ins).  The description for the recipe makes mention of the idea that these are lighter than the average pancakes, but the sour cream adds a thick and heavy texture which makes them taste and feel like the best parts of a good moist, filled muffin and a crepe. Begin

by whipping a cup of sour cream, flour, sugar, baking soda and salt.  Gently stir, Pioneer Woman tells us, so to keep an interesting cooking texture.  Whisk eggs and vanilla in a separate bowl, combine,

stir together gently, "a little white and yellow swirling is fine!" This is also the moment to add in your own secret ingredient, informed probably by the youngest member of the household.  We put in a handful of chocolate chips yesterday morning, but I could imagine butterscotch, small sweet nuts,

raisins, whatever.  Butter the frying pan and cook for under two minutes each side.  "Stack the pancakes as high on the plate as your appetite dictates.  See how high you can go – take it on as a personal challenge!  Top with plenty of butter and maple syrup and eat to your heart's desire."

Christmas Time is Here

And so the miracle of life continues.  Although the fog of mid December hangs heavy and low, all the while white lights trim homes as if in symbolic gesture lit for the sake of recollections of childhood, when we didn't know whether we might soon see the red coat squeeze down our chimneys or sneak through an unlocked doorway to set on the floor magical gifts.  It is the spirit of Christmas that moves through us and on through our generations. Our children are what we admire and through that they speak and understand the world.  What is Christmas but admiration turned to a tree, a gift, a song, a hug, a good long look in the eye with a hand held tight over their arm so that they know they too someday will look the same way onto the glowing face of their own.

  

Junonia

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated"
       – Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea







Now, the old man was never much for laying around, even on a so called vacation.  It was when the banana colored beach towels came out and were flung down onto the dusty white sand at Captiva when he might fidget some in deference to the wishes of the sun bathers then quietly disappear like a puff of smoke and take to his beloved shelling.  Today, they had found their way to Caya Costa, just north of Captiva, without the help of the hotel shuttle boat.  It took some selling, yes, but they took the two rented kayaks and when he and his granddaughter dipped their oars into the water it did not seem like water at all but a concocted cream of some sorts poured into this great cupped shelf of

surrounding land. They had reached Caya Costa from the northern tip of Captiva in very little time.  It was mid day, the sun probed directly down into the green cream and revealed the current as it invisibly swept – inland, then out again – the bottom of the coast and a milky dust rose at each pulse.
"It is the Junonia that we will seek today," he said boldly as if it were some profoundly new project.

"But that is what we look for every day here," the little girl said, now eight years old, tan as toffee, and her white smile benefiting even more from the darkening skin.
"Ah, but the Junonia, you see, is the magic shell of all the seas.  Do you know what you can hear from inside it?"

The girl rolled her brown eyes and shook her head.  A soft roll of waves fluttered the stern.  A lone tern, fixed in on something below the surface of the water, chugged its wings overhead so slow as though it might at any moment simply drop from the sky and plunge in.
"Did you know that I used to seek shells for my living?" he boasted again, now prodding her a bit for amusement.  He could see her lack of interest.  There was disbelief in the girls eyes.
"No, I don't think so," she said.  "What does the Junonia say?"

At that moment, a hundred feet from reaching the bare shore, two silver flashes rose up from the surface.
"Well, I do believe these two know what the Junonia says.  Close your eyes and you can hear them as well."
The two dolphins scattered the surface of the water then slipped back inside the enormous warmth.  At a dune point of the beach old gnarled beach wood.  It had lost its color to the sea weather long ago.  Trails of shells stuck up out of the sand as little streams of water trickled over over the serrated edges.
"The Junonia holds the last wishes of Zeus."

December Days

"The coming of the snow adds zest to my activities.  Now there will be time for a multitude of things that during the feverish moving about of summer and fall were denied me, leisure after the long and constant busyness.  To me that is the real meaning of the first snowfall – not a cessation of effort, but a drawing of the curtain on so many of the warm-weather activities that consume so much time.  The snow means a return to a world of order, peace, and simplicity."  – Sigurd Olson, from The Singing Wilderness

Olson has it partially right – he having lived up in the Quetico Wilderness, MN, surrounded by the grandeur of ice castle lakes and crystal cathedral pines (not to mention a naturalist by trade).  But for this family, although our bodies 

Mt. La Crosse Opening Day

might find some fun in the speeding dash over icy fields, our minds are firmly set on the sea to come.  

Sanibel, Fl. Lighthouse

The Sanibel and Captiva Islands are considered the top shelling destinations in North America, and people from around the world, attracted to the naturally occurring jewel like treasures permanently on display along the beaches, make pilgrimages to walk the white dusty beaches to perform what is called the "Sanibel Stoop," or the "Captiva Crouch," depending upon which of the twin islands you happen to be shelling.  

As one write-up boasts, "Sanibel Island and Captiva Island have earned their reputation as the Shell Islands honestly.  The Islands are actually made out of shells, like some magnificent work of shell art created over thousands of years.  When islanders dig gardens in their backyards, they find conchs, whelks, scallops, and clam shells often perfectly intact."  

It's the distinct geography of the islands – shaped in a curve along the coastline among a string of other more orderly, straight-and-narrow islands – that creates what is called an "east-west torque...serving like a shovel scooping up all the seashells that the Gulf imports from the Caribbean and other southern seas."  Shellers find themselves on daily scavenger hunts; seeking out new members for their collection for the sake of classification, beauty, or both.  

Old-Time Kitchens and Cooking

If modern conveniences and abundant food availability make it somewhat more difficult to find the 'thanks' in Thanksgiving, all it takes is a short step backwards into history and gaze onto the simple scene of a local La Crosse pioneer-era kitchen, and it should, one hopes, come back quickly.  What's difficult to decide when looking back there is whether we are to appreciate more the simplicity of hunger of the old days, or the exaggerated abundance of today.  Either way, there seems to be some reward in pondering the housewife of old setting a table with home-made gourd cups, or the idea of

using the gas from fish bladders for gelatin in "Calf's-foot Mange," a recipe calling for either a "pint of calf's foot jelly or isinglass along with beaten yolks of six eggs, sweetened and chilled."  In this, the sweetened part shouldn't be taken for granted, for sugar was scarce, to the point that when it did find its way into the cabin, mostly in lumps, it was stored in a bucket-like 'piggin,' or often "wrapped  

in felt-like paper and placed on the top shelf of the pantry...even hung from the attic rafters away from mice and children."  A local story goes that, "on the farm of a certain family sugar was very scarce.  When the son of this family helped the neighbor thresh his grain he was invited to dinner.  To his surprise, they had a sugar bowl of sugar on the table.  When he went home that evening he told his family about the sugar.  They all envied him.  Molasses was used commonly in place of sugar.  Rounds of cheese and firkins of butter were made for family use or exchanged at the market for other commodities."

A lust for spare sugar?  Trading to get a good slab of well churned butter?  My pig for your dried beef?  No doubt the concept of gratitude would be built-in to the year's end celebration of the

harvest.  Who could carve out a smooth wooden spoon had himself a side-trade; to tend to the iron kettle all day long that sat atop a wood stove which must be fired by the labor of axe hands would be

expected.  Food wasn't what you rushed, but what you did for the day.  Many old recipes give some idea of ingredients, but often didn't set out specific measurements, just "a coffee cup or tea cup," full, and cooking times and temperatures were, for obvious reasons, not included.  The skillet distance from the core of a coal might mean black or perfectly brown johnny cakes.  And all too eat on what?  "The early settlers had a very simple table setting, with flour sacking for tablecloths if any...A young bride had round dome-shaped woven wire covers over the food dishes on her table to keep off the flies; especially was this true of the butter dish."

Despite the flies and the work all day long, it must have come as some fine shock to the tongue to sit down to table, hunched over the potato bags, to taste even the most subtle sweet morsel of vanilla in a cold wooden bowl of Philadelphia Ice Cream:

Two Quarts of milk (cream if you have it)

Three tablespoons of arrowroot

The whites of eight eggs well beaten

One pound of powdered sugar

**Boil the milk, thicken with arrowroot, add the sugar, and pour the whole upon the eggs.  If you wish it flavored with vanilla split half a bean, and boil it in the milk

Talapia With Tomatoes and Leeks

Yes, it was back in Toulouse, I remember now, that we would stroll the Victor Hugo Market on a friday night in search of our Sunday fish.  We would never buy at night, of course, but it was then that we would ask the questions of the vendors as to what they might be bringing to market early the next morning.  One man, I remember him well, an Andalusian originally, said that it was he himself,

beginning on thursday morning at rooster call, who would take to the wild blue sea on his dinghy with two small nets to catch only enough Talapia that he could keep cold all the way to market the

next morning.  Once there, his wife sat in the back of their rented kiosk tending to their 'school,' as he called them affectionately as if they were family to the point of giving each of them names.  It gave us a new perspective on such fish, I can tell you this.  It was this man who pulled me aside one morning and with sweet smoky breath said that in his own homeland his aunt prepared the fish with tomatoes and leeks.  You must dice the leeks, she said, thin but not too thin so that they covered the bottom of her favorite baking dish.

Sea salt and the crunch of peppercorn over the oiled leeks to roast over an open fire for two handfuls of minutes.  She said the seagulls circling the crested islands miles offshore would smell the leeks they were so sweetly earthly but luckily flock too late for the serving.  I cannot fully remember the witches brew of seasonings over the fish that she suggested but we covered our filets with crushed garlic and thyme and more oil off of the local branches.  Add cherry tomatoes then the filets for another two handfuls of minutes. Soon after the Talapia would begin to dance again.