Fraises des bois du jardin

High up on my life list is to one day have a garden, a vegetable patch and an orchard.

In the meantime, I have to settle for windowsills and tiny balconies on which Maxence, who is The Official Gardener around here, plants and pampers a lush jungle, making the absolute most of every square inch of space and railing. I have little patience for that sort of thing, but I am certainly grateful for his efforts and happy to enjoy the benefits — green, green, green through every window, flowers and herbs and, most recently, fruit.

I insisted, because when you buy a plant or a little bag of seeds, what you really buy is the dream, the possibility of it growing and blossoming and making you proud.

Last spring on the Quai de la Mégisserie where gardening and pet stores abound, I was the one who insisted we buy a small pot of fraises des bois, those teeny strawberries that grow mostly in the wild and which the observant little girl (if properly trained by her mother) can spot and feast on in the mountain underbrush.

To be truthful, I didn’t think ours would ever bear fruit. Not because I doubted Maxence’s skills, but simply because I couldn’t imagine it actually happening. Still I insisted, because when you buy a plant or a little bag of seeds, what you really buy is the dream, the possibility of it growing and blossoming and making you proud.

Despite my doubts, the plant we bought developed into a healthy-looking little shrub on our bathroom windowsill; delicate flowers soon started to bloom.

And do you know how this works? When the petals fall from strawberry flowers, their heart keeps swelling and then droop under the weight of their elongated shape. It takes them just a few more days to blush and blush until bright red, at which point Maxence harvests them and comes to share the minuscule bounty with me — usually one or two strawberries at a time, each of them softly sweet, uniquely acidulated and astonishingly flavorful for a thing so tiny.

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In French, a portrait chinois (literally “Chinese portrait”) is a kind of riddle in which one person tries to guess a famous person’s name by asking a set of questions and working by analogy: if he were an animal, what would he be? And if he were a flower, a city, a song, a color, a movie?

Since this is incredibly difficult (I mean really, if Charles de Gaulle were a flower, what the heck would he be? I’m telling you, you don’t want to be trapped in a car with people playing that game.), the portrait chinois is more often used as a poetic way to ask someone about his own personality.

It is also a popular interview pattern, although it has been used so much now that the interviewer is obligated to come up with clever questions, otherwise everyone (interviewee and readers alike) will be bored to tears.*

And the reason why I am telling you this — yes! there is a point to this! — is that while I was making this nectarine gratin for our dinner party the other night, lovingly coring and quartering these plump ripe nectarines, the juices running down my wrists and the occasional bite accidently flying into my mouth, I came to the following realization: if I were a fruit, I would want to be a yellow nectarine.

I’m not sure what it is about it exactly, but it has been my favorite summer fruit for as long as I can remember. White nectarines and peaches are fine, but the yellow nectarine is really something else — smooth-skinned and warmly sweet and the color of sunshine.

I am quite content to eat them out of hand, or paired with redcurrants in my mother’s fruit salads. But they lend themselves really well to baking too, so I prepared this simple dessert, in which the nectarines are thinly coated with a bit of cream and sprinkled with chopped hazelnuts, before going into the oven for a bit of flavor-deepening, flesh-softening, roasting action.

*Now that I think about it, maybe this would be a fun idea for a food blog meme, short and sweet — if you were a condiment, a kitchen gadget, a spice, a herb, a pantry staple, a food chemistry phenomenon, a dish, a cookie, what would you be? Hm. I’ll have to think about this.

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Last week we organized a little impromptu dinner party at our place with our dear neighbor-friends Stéphan and Patricia, and our new neighbor-friends Ligiana and Peter.

Ah yes! Did I not tell you? We have new neighbors! They moved in a few weeks ago and now occupy the apartment just to the left of ours. A little welcome note slipped under their door, an invitation to join us for drinks and nibbles, and voilà! New neighbor-friends.

They are both singers of ancient music (yes, that is a thing). She is from Brasil, he is half-Italian half-Scottish. He loves to cook, she loves to eat. Really, we couldn’t have found a better match had we conducted interviews.

That night, Stéphan prepared a glorious loubia tajine (a white bean tajine), a couscous douceur (“sweetness couscous”, with prunes, dried apricots and almonds) and braised beef, and I took care of the appetizer and dessert.

I wanted to keep those nice and light since I had an inkling ’twas a Moroccan feast Stéphan was putting together for us. I also had very little time to devote to the preparation since we were out running errands all afternoon, so I opted for two super-easy, super-quick preparations.

The appetizer was in fact whipped up just as our guests were arriving and Maxence was serving drinks: this simple dip made with fresh cheese and a hefty dose of chopped cilantro, served with sticks of cucumber — a small and knobbly variety that my produce seller calls concombre du jardin (garden cucumber).

A typical example of back-to-basics cooking — just taking good ingredients and assembling them in the simplest of ways, to deliciously fresh results.

And for dessert? A hazelnut and nectarine gratin.

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[Soft Wheatberry Salad with Zucchini and Apricots]

I am a great lover of all things grain. Quinoa, bulgur, kamut, buckwheat, barley, amaranth, millet — each of them nutritious, filling and tasty in its own personal way (although they all seem to be indifferently described as “nutty” on the package, or un goût de noisette in French). I also love that most of them can be traced all the way back to ancient civilisations — you know, way before instant rice and microwave popcorn, when myths and legends saw them as a gift of the gods.

Organic, “natural food” and ethnic stores are usually your best bets to find interesting grains, and I like it when they offer them by the weight in bulk bins (or huge cloth bags in ethnic stores), so that you can buy as much or as little as you need to play and experiment with.

One type of grain that I particularly like is the soft wheatberry, a.k.a. spring wheat, pastry wheat or blé tendre in French. A wheatberry is a wheat kernel from which the outer hull has been removed, and the soft wheatberry is just one variety of wheat, the kind from which pastry and cake flour is made. Pasta on the other hand is usually made from durum wheat, a harder kind of wheat which has more gluten, offers a higher protein-to-starch ration, but takes forever to cook. The soft wheatberry, as sold in France under the Ebly brand (and widely distributed in grocery stores), takes ten minutes to cook and blossom into plump little nuggets — tender, yet offering a nice, slightly chewy bite.

Soft wheatberries are a great side to serve with both meat or fish, you can flavor them with herbs or blend in vegetables, and I think they work particularly well cold, in salad form. I improvized this fresh and pretty variation for lunch the other day, tossing the cooked berries together with raw grated zucchini, a bit of garlic and some chopped cilantro — cilantro I love you so — and then, on a whim, adding in a few of the tan apricots that were lazying around on the counter.

[More info on grains and wheat.]

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