When we get to spend time at my parents’ vacation house in the Vosges, a mountain range in the Northeast of France, one of our favorite daytrips is to drive over to Colmar, a historic Alsatian town on the other side of the mountain.

We’ve been going for as long as my parents have had the house, a little over twenty years, and though Colmar is as gorgeous as Alsatian towns get (i.e. very), with paved streets, pretty canals, and amazing architecture, the capital-D Draw for me is the flammekueche we get for lunch.

Also known as tarte flambée, the flammekueche (pronounced flam-küsh*) can be described as the Alsatian pizza: a super thin round of dough topped with cream, finely sliced onions, bacon strips, and sometimes mushrooms (la forestière) and cheese (la gratinée), baked in a woodfire oven until the edges are golden brown and crisp.

Sitting at one of the outdoor tables outside our favorite restaurant in Colmar, we make conversation as we wait for our tartes flambées to arrive, and our collective joy vibrates through the air as the waitstaff brings them out, all hot and fragrant, on wooden boards.

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I strive to master simple dishes. I don’t aspire to be a person of whom one says, “What an ambitious cook!” or “She should really open her own restaurant!”

No. I want to be someone who can be trusted to prepare a good, well-rounded, home-cooked meal. A meal that has personality, yes, but one that doesn’t try too hard, and relies chiefly on good taste and good technique.

This is why I had long been frustrated by my limited potato roasting skills. Oh, I’d roasted my share of potatoes, but I had never been able to make perfect roasted potatoes, golden and generously crusty on the outside, moist and tender on the inside.

By the time the chunks had developed enough of a crust, the flesh had begun to dry up inside, and I was left with something a bit cardboard-y. Not inedible — it takes considerable effort to render a potato inedible in my book — but not my platonic image of the roasted potato, either.

And then some years ago, my friend Pascale* shared the recipe she uses for pommes de terre rôties, which she learned from her British mother-in-law. I have blind kitchen faith in Pascale — she has never steered me wrong — and I was very excited about her technique, a classic in British cooking that was unknown to me at the time.

Here, let me show you in this video:

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Le goûter is the afternoon snack kids are given when they come out of school around four. In my family, we called it simply le thé, and it was the highlight of the day. Around five on weekends, somebody would invariably ask, “On fait le thé?”

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In addition to planning my menus, I have been doing more and more batch cooking these past few months.

The idea of batch cooking is to block out time one day of the week to prep or cook a bunch of ingredients in advance, which you can draw from and combine for low-effort homemade meals the rest of the week.

It is the shortest path to feeling like a kitchen superhero, saving you brain juice and money along the way.

And today, I am offering you the vegetarian batch cooking plan for fall I’ve created and test-driven with great success: 1 hour of prep work for easy 6 meals on subsequent days.

• Meal #1: Peanut Noodles with Kale and Mushrooms — the noodles of your choice in my deliciously peanutty “magic sauce”, with garlicky sautéed kale and tender mushrooms.
• Meal #2: Fall Buddha Bowl — a plentiful bowl of flavor with bulgur, beet hummus, a raw kale salad, and crispy falafel, topped with roasted peanuts.
• Meal #3: Warming Red Lentil Soup — a warming bowl of soup full of immune-boosting ingredients to keep colds at bay!
• Meal #4: Lemony Bulgur Salad with Feta and Mushrooms — a filling salad of bulgur with tangy feta, marinated mushrooms, and raisins.
• Meal #5: Toad-in-a-Hole Toast with Beet Hummus — a kid-friendly favorite served with beet hummus for dipping.
• Meal #6: Roasted Cauliflower à la Mary Celeste — irresistibly roasted cauliflower in magic sauce! One of my absolute favorite things to eat, period.

Below you will find:
– A shopping list (of which you can get a free printable) — everything is available from the organic store or supermarket (they cost around 55€ ($65) in my Parisian organic store; your mileage may vary),
– Your instructions for the prep work — allow for 1 hour to 1 1/4 hours of prep time,
– Your instructions for each of the six meals — active time ranges from 10 to 15 minutes, time to table from 10 to 45 minutes,
– Suggestions of variations to adapt the plan to various dietary constraints.

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