We all need easy and healthy meals that can be whipped up in very little time (and even less planning) for a week-end lunch or a weeknight dinner, without sacrificing taste or feeling like you’re slapping ready-made stuff together. So I thought I’d share the very very simple lunch we had last Saturday.

I’m sure you’ve noticed how the way you cut your vegetables affects their taste, giving them different textures and causing them to cook in different ways depending on the surface that’s exposed to the heatsource. Zucchini is a good example because it lends itself to myriads of possible shapes that I like to play with: half-moons, dice, thick slices, super-thin slices, teeny matchsticks, tagliatelle or papardelle-like ribbons, or today’s little sticks.

As for chicken breasts (blancs de poulet in French, literally chicken whites), I hardly ever buy them because they are so ubiquitous and boring and it feels so easy to overcook and ruin them — thus reproducing one of the most famous dishes in the history of cinema, “Shoe Sole à la Chaplin”. But I made an exception the other day at the (gasp!) grocery store, buying two organic chicken breasts that actually managed to look engaging through the plastic shrink wrap.

What I did with them was exceedingly simple: I just rubbed them with the Bed of Roses spice mix I mentioned before, headily full-flavored and slightly spicy, throwing in a few extra red pepper flakes because I like spicy. Of course, this would work beautifully with other spice rubs and mixes too, including tandoori and curry. The meat was left in the fridge for the chicken to absorb the flavors while I worked on my zucchini sticks.

Exceedingly simple, yet something I had never really realized was that easy, or that good: these little chicken un-nuggets were delightfully moist — I kept as close an eye on them as I could without burning my retina — and the spice coating formed a thin aromatic crust, making the whole thing look mouth-watering and taste delicious.

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GO:: Granted, reaching today’s featured restaurant requires a little more effort than the usual metro ride. This ferme-auberge*, owned and operated by Gianni from Sardinia, is located atop the Luberon mountain range and can be reached after a breathtaking — both literally and metaphorically — two-hour walk up curvy dust paths. Nothing superhuman though, and this guarantees rosy cheeks when you reach the top, not to mention a lion’s appetite and a euphoric feeling of entitlement and pride. (Cheaters and those who don’t feel up to the exploit can get there by car — much less picturesque of course.)

In one of the farm’s stone buildings is the restaurant room, an impressively large affair with low ceilings and two huge communal tables going all the way across. Other guests are already crowding it, little children running around among the staff (some local, some Sardinian) while they work to set things up for the feast to come.

DRINK:: Pitchers of homemade sangria (a red wine and fruit cocktail) are set out before the meal. You can take your glass to the wooden tables outside and enjoy the view, or take the kids out to look at the brown goats grazing on the little hill in the back. During the meal, a seemingly endless procession of jugs will follow, plenty of red wine and moutain spring water to quench your thirst.

EAT:: The fixed menu is different every day, and the food is passed around in platters among the guests, family-style. For starters we enjoyed a lentil salad, a delicious game terrine and slices of homemade boudin noir (blood sausage), served with fresh country bread.

The main dish followed: racks of lamb à la broche (fire-roasted) brought into the room in clouds of steam and smoke, to be expertly cut and sliced by Gianni and his team. This was served with a dish of stewed potatoes and turnips — a great complement to the flavorful meat, which was rosy and tender in places, wonderfully crispy and smoky in others.

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Head over to NPR‘s website today for my Spring piece, a recipe for Asparagus Confit with Almonds and Rosemary! This is the first occurence of their Kitchen Window column that will be published online every other Wednesday, featuring different guest writers.

Yet another edible souvenir I brought back from my stay in Lourmarin over the Easter week-end: this large jar of thick and gloriously amber-colored honey.

I happen to have somewhat childish tastes in honey, and I am often put off by honeys that taste too much like sap, sharp and woodsy to the point of bitterness. This probably makes me a dilettante honey lover — just like real hardcore coffee lovers are supposed to appreciate strong hardcore coffee — but I think I can live with that.

Luckily, this particular honey is one of the most flowery and mellow I have ever been given to taste. It was produced by my aunt’s beehives and harvested by her, late last summer. She explained to me that since the bees feed on the nectar from different kinds of flowers at different times of the year, each season brings its own blend and shade of honey. But last year she had to skip the end-of-spring harvest, so this honey is a mix of the bees’ spring and summer production, making it a highly polyfloral honey — also called miel mille-fleurs or thousand flower honey. It has the texture I like best, velvety but slightly grainy, like an embroidered drapery, and it is delightfully sweet with no bitter hint, complexly flavored but instantly pleasing to the palate.

In addition to this — which I immediately shared with my neighbors because they like honey so much and I am such a good friend — my Lourmarin bounty also included a few rounds of locally produced goat cheese in various stages of ripeness (they are but a distant memory now, but they were really good friends with the honey) and fresh herbs from the garden: sage, blossoming rosemary, and even a small thyme plant, which travelled happily on the train with me for Maxence to add to our little herb patch.