[Red Onion and Rhubarb Mini-Tartlets / Fresh Cheese and Quince Mini-Tartlets]

When I throw a party, even if I’m going to serve food buffet-style, I always try to have a few small nibbles to offer first, at the bar that separates our kitchen from the living-room, which is where everyone tends to linger at first. This allows all of the guests to arrive, get a drink and settle in, before the buffet is declared open and people can start picking up plates and helping themselves happily.

One of the requirements I had set for myself while dreaming up a menu, was to use at least one of my new Flexipan toys, and it is the mini-tartlet molds that ended up being elected.

While visiting my dear grandmother recently, I was leafing through one of the magazines she reads, Prima or Modes & Travaux, I don’t remember which. I usually enjoy looking at the cooking section in those magazines, because of their very practical, no-nonsense approach : the recipes are usually simple, but appealing and tasteful. I also like that they take great care to describe every single step, because their audience is not necessarily cooking savvy.

In this particular issue, a recipe for a red onion tart with apple and raisins caught my eye, and I jotted down a few of the guidelines. This inspired me for these mini-tartlets, for which I replaced the apples and raisins with rhubarb, made mini-tartlets instead of big tart, and filled the shells with just the vegetables, skipping the egg and cream mixture that they used in their recipe.

As for the brousse and membrillo tartlets, the idea just sort of improvized itself, from wanting to offer two kinds of mini-tartlets instead of just one like initially planned. Brousse is a kind of very fresh cheese that is a bit like very thick yogurt, made with cow’s, goat’s or sheep’s milk, and I had some leftover from another recipe. The brousse needed something to top it and kiss it to life, which is where my dear Crema di Membrillo came into play : I bought a piece of this Spanish quince paste on our recent trip to Madrid, and have been eagerly trying to create occasions to use it ever since. But if you can’t find those two ingredients, any other kind of fresh cheese will work, with any other kind of firm, not-too-sweet fruit jelly.

Both kinds of mini-tartlets turned out very nicely, both were a nice mix of sweet (onion and membrillo) and tart (rhubarb and brousse) flavors, cupped by the satisfying, buttery crunch of the tartlet shells. As with all mini-things, they were also a pretty sight in their colorful serving plates, and a very refreshing appetizer on this very warm July night.

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[Continued from Part I]

Later in the afternoon, we accidently drove to Aix-en-Provence. Accidently? Um, yes. We were in fact headed someplace else, took the wrong highway, and found ourselves driving in the direction of the Capital of Calissons. Unfazed and quick to see the finger of Someone Above in this, we said okay, let’s go! In Aix-en-Provence, I could have bought some Calissons of course, but that was really just too obvious, so I bought myself a pair of sexy shoes instead. Not edible, I know, but pretty.

On our way back to Marseille, we stopped at l’Estaque, a quiet little harbor that sprawls up onto a hillside. We took a walk up the steep meandering streets overlooking the port — me trying hard not to trip in my new shoes — and enjoyed the view out onto the sea in the declining light. On the beachfront were several street vendors in small white vans, selling chichis and panisses. Chichis are long and rectangular donuts, fried in the van, rolled in sugar and handed to you in a paper wrapping, while panisses are fried slices of chickpea flour polenta. We had a dinner reservation a bit later at 10 so chichis were not an option (how to spoil your appetite in one easy step) but wouldn’t the panisses make a great amuse-bouche? We bought a half-dozen and got more like ten, in a little paper cone, with a smile on top of that. We sat on a bench by the beach and munched with delight on our salty disks of softly fried dough.

We then headed towards the restaurant Chez Jeannot, which came recommended by a friend as a great place for seafood. Chez Jeannot is located off the Corniche, that long, winding road which runs along the cliff Marseille is built on. More precisely, it is hidden underneath that road, snugly nested at the bottom of the Vallon-des-Auffes, a crevice-like little valley ending in a tiny harbor. To get to it, one has to park the car anywhere one vaguely can — in an improbable and forbidden spot behind a church in a supposedly two-way street that’s barely wide enough for two donkeys to pass each other — then walk down steep convoluted stairs into the vallon : a dimly-lit jumble of anchored boats, little houses and restaurants, loud with the chatter and clatter of diners, and little kids running everywhere, playing tag in the night. I’d never seen a place quite like this : walking down and taking in the mysterious, warm atmosphere, we both suddenly felt like we were stepping into some kind of hidden pirate’s lair (Pirates of the Caribbean, anyone?).

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I had long wanted to visit Marseille, so I was very happy for the occasion to spend a week-end there recently with Maxence.

Marseille is a port city in Provence, and it is in fact the second biggest city in France. My grandmother lived there for a couple of years during World War II, and we have a few family pictures from that period. I remember one in particular, black and white with frilled edges, which shows my grandmother at my age, walking with her first two little boys on the Canebière, with her blond hair elegantly pinned up, and her signature bright white smile.

Marseille is also where one of my favorite novels of all times takes place, Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte-Cristo, and I was delighted in a peculiar way to see signs to the infamous Château d’If and even a rue Edmond Dantès, as if I had bumped into a movie star.

Maxence and I spent a lovely week-end there, driving in and around the city, enjoying the sun, the Mediterranean lifestyle, and treating ourselves to the local specialties.

On Saturday afternoon, we strolled around the Vieux Marseille (the historic city center), a maze of narrow cobbled streets built on a hill. When it was time for a little afternoon snack, a boulangerie miraculously happened upon our path, an intriguing phenomenon often observed in any city or village of our beautiful country. The antithesis of the bright and cheery, spick-and-span boulangeries I’m used to, this one was shadowy and eerily quiet, giving off the distinct impression that everyone inside was having a nap, like any sensible Marseillais would do at this time of day and in this heat.

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Confiture d’abricots aux amandes

When I spend time at my parents’ house in the Vosges, my mother and I start out by making a mental list (we haven’t reached the point of actually writing down that list – yet) of what we’re going to cook, bake and eat. One of the items I mentioned this time was jam : over the years, I’ve often seen my mother make jam, I’ve made jam on my own, we’ve talked about jam together, but we had never made jam together.

At the Gérardmer market, one of the produce stalls had abricots pour confiture : it was not altogether clear why they were labelled so, but they were a bit smaller than the regular ones, maybe not as pretty, and in any case cheaper. There was just one crate left, and we bought it with that special thrill you get from snatching the last of anything.

A couple of days later, we set out to make some apricot jam, taking our apricots out onto the garden table to stone and slice them. And you know the ad that says “great cheese comes from happy cows”? Well, I’m certain that great apricot jam comes from apricots prepped with your mom in a sunny garden, while your boyfriend and your father are having a chat, and your sister is taking a nap inside.

The cool thing about making jam with my mother, besides the simple words “making jam with my mother”, is the industrial proportions it can take. When I’ve made jam on my own, I’ve usually shot for about two jars per batch : I don’t consume that much jam (Maxence hardly any), I want variety, I have limited storage space, and most of all I’ve had to rely on the pricy Parisian produce stalls for supplies. But with my mother, it’s more about making twelve jars at a time, using fruit that we’ve picked ourselves, or bought, for a reasonable price, at the market.

And there’s a definite, indisputable fun factor in putting two kilos of fresh apricots together with two kilos of sugar in a big pot, cracking the stones open to get the almonds inside, bringing all of it to a rolling boil, and stirring it with a long wooden spoon like some kind of witchy decoction, until my mom officially declares it done, at which point you get to pour the piping hot mixture into the jars you’ve prepared and lined up, using the extra-convenient-especially-made-and-mighty-smart funnel tool (my mom’s got gear) and a big ladle. Just be extra-careful to distribute the apricot almonds evenly among the jars, because they really are the best part, aren’t they?

Of course, now comes the hard part, the one in which you have to wait and let the jars rest, allowing them to age on a shelf in the cool cellar. But in a few months, when these glowingly orange jars are nice and ripe, you can be sure one of them has my name on it.

Important note : this apricot jam recipe uses the almonds inside the stones. This gives the jam a particularly good flavor, and makes for a few lovely crunchy bites per jar. However, the almonds inside apricot stones, like bitter almonds, contain hydrocyanic acid. The human body has no problem dealing with it if ingested in small doses, but 30 to 50 almonds eaten in a short amount of time can kill an adult! It’s perfectly safe to include a few in a jar of jam, but just keep the warning in mind.

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