If wishes were beggars, horses would ride…  

This little cook wished for lambs a couple of years ago. Lamb is quite dear here in France. Why? No idea!

So I decided to grow my own. After all the grass at Camont is lush and green all summer. And we already had chickens, ducks, cats and Bacon to tend. What could be so difficult?

The two little lambs were cute. CUTE they were, with black lunettes de soleils spots and meaty haunches…  and voracious, challenging and naughty. Eventually they made more work than sense for us here at Camont once they passed the gamboling spring lamb stage. Fences were destroyed, gardens were attacked, and even Bacon was butted into submission. Salvation came in the guise of a good neighbor.

Why go to the market?

I mean the local farmer’s market, of course.

Fresh, simple, direct- a bargain.

Inspiring, colorful, nurturing- satisfaction.

Diverse, diverting, fun- amused.

All those words pop into my head when I think of the many very good markets I can throw a Gascon stone at from Camont. But versatility is reason I stay faithful to one of my first loves in this area, the little true producer’s market nestled under the unattractive eaves of the Chat d’Oc strip mall on the Avenue des Landes. Not only can I buy just picked old-timey vegetables out of neighboring market gardens, get a great baguette  at l’Envie de Pain (thanks Pierre & Valerie!), take my weekly beekeeping lesson from Narcisse, pick up some house paint or maybe get a blood test at the Laboratoire and get Bacon groomed, I can also wash my car at the best carwash in town! It’s a full service strip mall French style… with wine.

What the Chat d’Oc lacks in French country charm it makes up in seriously good content. Here’s a sample of what I picked up yesterday before our MAGYC Day Cooking Class with Michelle & Rochelle where we started with a little fresh herb soup we drank as a hot cocktail.

The ‘King of the Greens’ sells his garden in bunches. He’s one of my favorite vendors selling herbs & salad greens SUPER fresh- everything from small bunches of roquette tied up with string to sorrel leaves folded into little packets of sour goodness. Scruffy chard is made into a sweet bouquet, tight bundles of fresh flowering thyme, and lyrical bay branches litter his card table stand. Most these things grow in my garden at Camont, too.  But when I spotted these long sensual whips of tarragon wafting anise through the air, I went green with herb-envy! Seduced, sold and popped into my basket at 50 centimes a bundle.

Next on my shopping list and menu were some vegetables to tuck around a farm chicken then doused with a glass of water (no stock!) and let simmer under the watchful lid of an acid green vintage le Creuset. One small corn fed chicken= 11€ and two chicken carcasses for a buck each. ( I’ll post my simple version of Gascony’s regional dish- a Poule-au-Pot from A Culinary Journey in Gascony under recipes.)

In the meantime, here’s a roasted chicken version fresh herb recipe here for when the need for crispy skin and oven heat calls.

Next stall over, the first local pommes de terre paper skins and dirt announcing ‘direct from the garden!’ don’t come cheap. But a pound of marble-sized sweet-meated gems are worth adding into the pot. 2.50€

Shopping in Gascony is a joy! Never short on market inspiration, I left the Chat d’Oc with an overfull basket and a head full of menu ideas: fresh pea soupcocktail, tarragon and chervil-infused duck fat in which to sauté little new potatoes, and strawberries steeped in rosé wine & armagnac at 2.10€ for a litre and a half of good local wine from Layrac.

Start at the market and you can’t go wrong when learning to cook in season. Open your eyes and learn why something tastes good and how it is grown by being observant, week to week. That’s how I learned a little MAGYC- Mastering the Art of Gascon Cooking!

Not too late to plant some seeds. A little patch of fraises des bois planned under the watchful eye of the Scare-Hen.

Mayday- Mud! The famous Garonne River Fog is late this year; it has rained, rained, rained these last two weeks. So much rain now that with the soggy bottom clay silt soil holding moisture like a sponge, the promise of a clear sunny sky later makes morning fog. My own little micro-climate at Camont alongside canal & river is good for the garden…if I could only get to it though the muck.

This week’s market also shouted “Mayday” with a rouge abundance of rhubarb, strawberries, peppers and early tomatoes. Instead of pique-niques, boat rides, country walks, and gardening, I’m sticking close to my Keeping Kitchen and brewing up some seasonal treats- micro batches, single jars, starter vats. Here’s the list from the market booty…

• Rhubarb- candied and dried to be used in a Gateau Basque
• Red pepper & piment d’Espelette Jam
• Cilantro & mint salsa verde (Cinco de Mayo!)
• Strawberries… oh, just eat these while working

Lunch is green.

• Sauteed Brouttes or cabbage shoots  with
• Green garlic heads cut in half and slowly caramelized
• Raw Beet salad with walnuts and above garlic

M’aider means ‘help me’ in French. and just as it was adopted as the universal cry for help in 1923, I need help, too! The large glass barrel I bought a couple weeks ago still sits empty. Now with radishes, garlic stems, beets, wild leeks, onions, shallots, cauliflower and carrots to clean and peel, pack and pour…I am in a pickle.

Or will be, as soon as I can fill the jar with homemade vinegar brine and special Gascon pickling spices. Keeping up with the Spring bounty is a serious job not to be slighted by holidays and distressful spirits. My French kitchen is never quiet, at any time of year, but now I see that my lopsided pantry needs a bit of balance. This year, the confitures will be given a run for their money by the newly appreciated pickles.

Where do you go for inspiration and advice? For pickling help across the planet, I turn to my blogger friends and few old reliable cookbooks. Here’s my beginning pickle list:

Ham- Eric Ospital’s Ibaiona brand from the Basque Country.

Asparagus- local, just picked and carried to the market so fresh it snaps.

This week, my Kitchen Godmother, Vétou Pompele,  came by for weekend breakfast (a decidedly not French event) and asked me what I would make for her.

I grabbed a copy of my first cookbook that chronicled my early days sailing on the Julia Hoyt and said,

“Your Asparagus and Ham dish, of course”.

She had forgotten about what was long one of my favorite dishes.  It’s easy. When you cook everyday, EVERY DAY, that’s a lot of recipes under the bridge. We have both forgotten half of the wonderful dishes we cooked together over years of sailing the canals and rivers of France on the Julia Hoyt. This was always one of my Spring favorites, because unlike my life BF (Before France), asparagus is a once a year event, a few scant weeks of spear-ful delight. 

ASPARAGUS: Not only does this showcase the first thin green asparagus barely warmed in a saute pan, but gives green garlic, spring onions and the first mint leaves a supporting role to join in the Spring celebration. Wild foraged asparagus would work great as well.

HAM: The Ham? oh, the HAM. This is indeed HAM spelled in big letters. Eric Ospital’s Ibaiona hand-crafted HAM is aged in sechoirs or drying rooms near Hasparren in the Basque Countries. As sweet as salty, and barely both, there is a toasted nut flavor that lingers as the ham melts on your tongue. It has spoiled me forever. No more cheap ham! or maybe your home-made wild boar ventreche, Hank Shaw?

GREENS: We gathered, some garlic shoots- a good reason to plant garlic last November- thanks Lisa! Then hunted down the mint which is just sprouting after a hard winter, and picked some thyme. I call this ‘frontdoor foraging’- the things I planted, let go wild and then provide my kitchen with high points all year long.

This is a great dish to just use the tips and reserve the stalks for soup or my gingered aspargus stem pickles. I served the barely cooked asparagus while Vetou poured Champagne. The poached eggs have yolks as deep orange as only home-grown eggs can be so I slipped one over a nest of asparagus; more ham was left to pile on the plate, the thin slices waving like little Basque flags before we popped them in our mouths.

These are the meals I love best. Friends, family, some good food and a great idea. Merci Madame Pompèle!

and now the recipe…

Asperges de Vetou 

• 1 tablespoon duck fat (you forgot I was in Gascony?)
• a couple oz or 60-80 grams of thinly sliced ham, ventreche, bacon, etc…
• 1 small bunch new spring onions, sliced in half lengthwise
• a few fresh green garlic shoots- we call them aillets, also sliced lengthwise
• 1 bunch perfectly fresh asparagus- white or green, peeled, trimmed and cut in thirds
• 1 mint leaf (swear that Vetou only uses one!)
• a few springs of fresh thyme
• seas salt and freshly ground pepper
• half a glass of white wine

1. heat the duck fat in a heavy saute pan over medium high heat. Add the ham and warm briefly.
2. add the onions and garlic, sauteing gently until half-cooked.
3. add the mint leaf, a little thyme, salt & pepper. Now cover, turn down the heat a little, and cook for 10 minutes or so. keep an eye on it, you don’t want mushy tips, but nether do you want a crunchy mess. the flavors have to melt into each other. No need to add water because the asparagus is so fresh it gives up it’s sap and makes a nice pot liquor.
4. now, take off the lid, add the wine and let it become sauce as it finds the fat and flavor.
5. when the asparagus is perfectly done, remove to a warm dish, and crank the heat up to reduce the sauce further if desired. for those so inclined, a knob of butter swirled around the pan will emulsify and enrich the sauce. Because we are serving this with poached eggs, I skipped this unnecessary addition. The egg yolks are the sauce!
6. serve with poached eggs and copious rashers of thinly sliced very good ham.

Enjoy a weekend breakfast with friends…

Keeping Kitchen…

• a place for making food to keep for the winter.
• an edible way of keeping traditions alive.
• a gathering then sharing of abundant harvest.

Over the years, I’ve referred to my French pantry, the way of keeping it stocked, and the very kitchen at Camont as the “Keeping Kitchen”. Within these stone walls at Camont, I have been keeping the traditions of Gascon cooking alive as well as adding to it with my own fresh take on authentic recipes- folding in a new good idea here, leaving out an old bad habit there but always keeping true to the spirit if not the actual letter of the laws of the kitchen.

Good friend and co-conspirator in Italy, Judy Witts- the DivinaCucina diva and I hatched the idea of another combined blog effort like the Going Whole Hog blog project we did a couple years ago. We wanted more than a way to keep tabs on each other’s gardens, kitchens, and lives in Tuscany and Gascony. We want to share our euro-view of what surrounds us as not-quite natives/not-quite-expats. Trends come strong and fast up the internet pipeline but from here they can actually be old world news.  We decided to share our everyday cooking habits for stocking the Euro-Larder otherwise known here as the Keeping Kitchen.

I think of Vetou saying this 20+ years ago as I first started gardening at Camont. First a swath of  English-ish border plants lined the pathway to the canal: poppies, roses, lavender…

Next, Jhon Corbin- artist/matelot/friend, created a wine bottle border sculpture- Camont Woman-that filled in over the years with day lilies, delphinium, and more roses…

Until she was rousted from her slumber and the front path was ‘landscaped’. Sort of like trying to dress this old woman in a business suit of pine bark. Uck, it looked bad and didn’t work…

Over planting years came next. Weed-invaded textile ripped up, trees re-introduced, a jungle grew of crabapple, rosa banksiae, magnolia, almond, fig…

Are you getting the picture? Wild. Sauvage. Growing like stones… 

As I meander an early morning drizzle, I spy the common thread that always works in the garden at Camont.

1. plant too much
2. let the winners thrive
3. enjoy the gentle chaos of a jardin sauvage

What is the difference between involved and committed?

In a ham and egg breakfast, the chicken was involved, the pig was committed.

I love that joke. It conjures up the very differences that help define ‘artisan’ to me.

So in my capacity as Head of Butchery & Charcuterie at the School of Artisan Food on the Welbeck Estate,  I sent out that joke as an invitation to several involved and committed British Charcuterie companies  to  join us here at SAF for a day of meaty talks about “the emerging state of British Charcuterie.” At least that’s how I described it. The response was strong, the turn out was epic and as 18 people (with a few special guests dropping by) came together around our Butcher’s Table, it was clear that there is indeed a new British Charcuterie movement strongly afoot. Look who showed up…

While the obvious, well -loved and respected traditional British small goods like pork pies, brawn, country hams, sausage rolls, pasties, bacon & bath chaps were represented, it was the dry cured, aged fermented sausage continental style goods that took the limelight. The British foodie consumer now buys chorizo, salami, confits & rillettes regularly. Do they make a distinction between imported goods versus homegrown fare? Do they choose industrial versus artisanal? How do people make their choices and how do we educate their palates?

The group was a well represented but by no means complete cross section of small, and even very small family operations to well established and successful artisan businesses. What they shared in common was stronger than their differences. What they shared generously around that table was passion.

After a busy morning of getting to know one another followed by shared tastings and lunch, the group continued to raise the questions that they had in common. So what will the future hold for Britain’s top artisan charcutiers and those seriously committed players? More than just bacon & eggs my friends.

If you know a good British Artisan Charcuterie maker, traditional or contemporary, drop us a note below on comments and we’ll start assembling a map of British Charcuterie makers. I think there are more people out there then we know and we want to include as many people as possible on a resource list.

Thanks to all who showed up!  Thanks everyone for your great energy! And keep a look out for more news of BRITISH CHARCUTERIE….

The happy faces looking rather… well, Charcuter-ish!

• Viv Harvey- Master Butcher
• Sally and Jeremy Levell- Forest Pig
• Illtud Dunsford – Charcutier
• Michael Boyle -Welbeck Farm Shop
• Ian Whitehead –  Suffolk Salami
• Andrew Spooner- freelance
• Struan Robertson- SAF student
• Lisa Scothern- SAF alumni & butcher
• Gary Dickenson-  http://www.norfolkdeli.co.uk/
• Kate Hill- SAF & Kitchen-at-Camont Charcuterie courses in France
• Mat Leaver- Student SAF
• Nick Brake- Student SAF
• Matthew Bedell– SAF alumni, Native Breeds & Fat Food Taxi
• Jules Jackson – Norfolk Deli Comany
• Jean & Martin Edwards- Deli Farms Charcuterie
• Henrietta Green – Food Lovers Britain

The Foire au Jambon in the colorful Basque port of Bayonne.

A memory of a Bayonne surfaces from a long ago road trip looking for marine goods along the Atlantic coast for my barge, the Julia Hoyt. Rope, cord, and lines I was searching. I drove along the river port of the Adour outside of Bayonne in the very southwest of  Southwest France looking for some fishermen, a working boat or chandlery.  The newly fitted nose of wooden fishing boat peeked out of an over-sized hanger; I braked for a quick look inside. Yes. Men working with wood and fiber glass, paint and canvas. Ocean going small fishing boats. Sturdy, serious and hard-working. The boats and the men. I knew they would know. I have a nose for these things.

I thanked them for the directions to the Co-op Maritime in St. Jean de Luz, I turned to say au revoir  and stopped dead in my foodie tracks. Although the Captain in me was looking for cord, the Cook in me spotted a treasure trove of maturing hams hanging from every square foot of rafter space. A boat yard/charcuterie shed? Welcome to Baiona!

The image remained for years locked in my barge memories until this weekend when I dragged my petite soeur down the long diagonal chemin des vacances to the Basque coast for some ‘fun with ham’. Those crazy Basque jambonneurs know how to throw a fête!

First you need ham. Lots of it! Not your every day made-in-a-factory and way too salty ham… but smooth as salty silk, sweet and nutty, melt in your mouth, slow grown, properly-cured Jambon de Bayonne- a world-recognized mark of terroir. More than 25+ artisan charcutiers and salaisonniers were on hand to fête and share their wares especially the traditional salt rubbed, air cured, slightly piment d’espeletted Jambon de Bayonne. R&D here I come!

I was letting my nose lead me to the people I needed to meet through the ever increasing crowd of young, old and party goers. I stumbled and grabbed first a cornet of ham slices, then a sandwich of epic baquette and thick sliced chorizo, a plastic cup of red wine, then a taloak- a corn cake rolled out with a wine bottle, slapped on a dry griddle and rolled up with nutty Pyrenees cheese slices. The crowd grew louder, Basque songs erupting from crowded bars spilling out from the stone arcades along the quai of the Nive. It was a PARTY. A Ham Party!  The dark sky broke open, the drinking set smashed into already packed bars and we ducked into the inviting Au Bon Coin Les Pied de Cochon (the little red trimmed building in the middle  below!) where a happy marriage of good pork and fresh seafood, Madiran and Jurançon wines consoled our sodden spirits.

The next morning before the Easter bunny made his rounds, I was back at the fair set up along the Nive. Alone with a convivial group of producers setting up for the last day of ham madness- before the ham mass, the ham dancing and the ham parade. There were lots of slices, shavings and sandwiches to produce. My strategy was to arrive too early, grab some pics, some names, and buy some large pieces of the best ham I could find. I hit pay dirt, ham motherload, pink gold.

I met the man. The Ham Man. Eric Ospital. Son of Louis. Smiling here with his mentor and kitchen godfather- Gabriel  Biscay on the left- one of France’s Meilleur Ouvrier de Cuisine ( in other words- a Chef’s Chef) I got the inside scoop of all things ham. It was no surprise that he and two other young elite producers, Christian Montauzer and  Eric Mayté, were the second generation continuum who produced the exceptional Ibaïona mark of distinction. “We’re the inner circle, like Romanée Conté… in ham.”

Just these three producers work to a credo established by their fathers. Ibaïona  branded hams are only made from pigs grown slowly on quality barley, wheat and corn, achieving a minimum weight of 150-180 kilos, and then cured and air dried in the four winds of the Basque Country for a minimum of 15-20 months. Branded on the rind and draped in a medallion, these fine hams and the fresh pork from the pigs are earmarked for the best restaurants and houses in Europe from the French Presidential Palace to top Parisian restaurants- la crème de la crème de Jambon.

After a coffee and another few slices of ham with Eric, Gabby and Christian, I loaded my basket with samples to bring back to Camont and taste with friends and professionals- a Noix de Montauzer Ibaiona ham, slices of Ospital Ibaiona, and the dried beret saucission of Maison Mayté. The Ham Party in Bayonne might be over for this year, but the Ham Chronicles-at-Camont are surely just beginning…

little goats cheesecakes

There is something about these little cheese cakes, tangy with fresh goats cheese- les faiselles- softer than cream cheese, rich but not too. I make them with eggs from the little black hens here at Camont so they are stained deep saffron yellow and taste beyond delicious. I spooned the thick batter into brown paper baking cups I bought so long ago I can’t remember where. They puffed and huffed and rose above the edges so beautifully…then sank into themselves in a rather self-indulgent way. ‘Eat me now!” they seemed to taunt. So we did. Next time I buy the fresh clean goats cheese from Marie de Chèvre,  I’ll decide if I want a more stable batter or just given in to my whisk driven idea of a Gascon Goat Cheesecake. Soft, dense, not too sweet…more like a tender canelé inside or a miniature torteau

The recipe for les petits gateaux de Marie de Chèvre:

This made about a dozen muffin tin size cakes.

• 400 gr fresh goats cheese called faiselle here in France
• 200 gr white sugar (150gr for yolks- 50gr for whites)
• 50 ml milk (about 4 tablespoon)
• 4 eggs, separated
• 50 gr flour
• Splash of vanilla/rum/Armagnac

1. Pass goat cheese through a food mill or ricer.
2. Beat in egg yolks, 150 gr sugar, milk and flour. (I use a hand whisk.)
3. Whisk egg whites with 50 gr sugar until stiff peaks. (I use a copper bowl and hand whisk)
4. Fold in a large spoonful of whites into the cheese/yolk mixture. Stir well.
5. Fold remaining whites into cheese/yolk batter.
6. Splash in the flavoring (we use  the Secret formula!).
7. Spoon into individual serving size muffin tins, ramekins or paper molds brushed with butter.
8. Place into hot oven (220’C/425’F) for 10 minutes. Turn down to 200’ C/ 390’F.  The tops will soufflé puff up round and start to brown immediately. Don’t panic! Let it cook.
9. Then let the little soufflés cook for another 10 minutes. remove from oven and serve while warm with some spring ripe strawberries from the market.