A Summer Menu that will make you Clap for the Cooks
Omelettes, eggplant, and life lessons in Southern France (another Doll Collection Dinner)
Happy Summer readers and friends! If you live in the midwest, and you exult in seasonal eating, this is an exciting time of year. A farmer at the Dane County Farmers Market last weekend goaded my teenage daughter to eat one of his tomatoes like an apple, promising it was the best she’d ever taste. Juice dripped down her chin and she was convinced. We bought a few pounds of his ‘seconds’ and took them home to cook with.
I learned to cook in Southern France, where the farmers are also proud and sometimes pushy, and the produce is incredible. I know it sounds fancy, but it was just bureaucratic luck. I had signed up to live in the dorms and expected to be in a sterile single room, eating mostly cafeteria food, but there was a mistake in my paperwork. Upon arrival, jet-lagged and overwhelmed, I learned that I’d be spending my study-abroad year of college living with three other women in an apartment with a kitchen window that looked over a famous dolphin-spouting fountain. I cried about it, having no idea how lucky I was.
What I learned in France was not how to cook, really, but how to be brave in the kitchen, how to follow a recipe even when I had no idea how the finished result should taste, and how to collaborate with others for the pleasure of the experience. I learned about what the food writer Steve Hoffman recently reminded me is called un bon moment in French, an experience of togetherness that often happens over good food and wine that leaves you feeling as if you are part of something larger than your solo, somewhat lonely and confused new adult life in a foreign land.
The things I learned at age twenty still apply:
Clap for the cooks — more fun than a toast and it celebrates the anticipation of the bon moment that will surely unfold.
No fancy kitchen or tools are needed — but a hand-blender doesn’t hurt.
Use ingredients that are fresh and in season — and keep experimenting.
Before I spent my junior year in a tourist-y French town with very high-end restaurants I could not afford, I didn’t cook. For the first two years as a University of Wisconsin-Madison undergrad, I had worked in the dining hall of my dorm. That student service job mostly involved washing out huge aluminum warming trays and serving my peers french fries. Growing up, as I mentioned in Family Dinner, Caribbean Flavors, my divorced and hard-working parents were not that into cooking. That doesn’t mean we didn’t eat well, and I’m grateful they involved me in helping to get nutritious food on the table, I just mean that I was not taught any techniques aside from microwaving bacon and chopping veggies for a salad.
My new roommates in Aix-en-Provence were all from Michigan and one of them had packed a hand-blender in her suitcase. I’d never seen one before. It looked to me like a plug-in dildo. Packing a hand-blender along with the things that must sustain you for a full year is saying something. Especially in 1995, when hand-blenders were not common like they are now. She introduced us to The Moulinex, our new Kitchen God. The Moulinex was our one and only power tool, so we called on that savior a lot over the year.
Otherwise, we had a European-sized stove, what an interior designer might call a ‘farmhouse sink,’ both of which qualified as antiques, and a Euro mini-fridge. All three were crammed side-by-side in the grease-stained cubby of our long-time student rental.
The main room of the apartment on the Rue des Quatre Dauphins had extremely high ceilings and a big window with painted wooden shutters that could be closed to Le Mistral winds or opened to the bustling cobblestone street below. That window was everything! The single glass window pane hung on a hinge and opened into the room. The 18-inch wall of the old townhouse was a perfect perch for enjoying a cup of French-press coffee and people watching. How to drink coffee is another thing I learned in France.
“Visitors to Aix-en-Provence are constantly reminded of her glorious past — as Roman spa from 123 BC, as capital of Provence from the twelfth to the eighteenth century — and of her brilliant present status as university town and centre for the arts … The sound of water is inescapable in the old quarter, where a maze of restored, boutique-lined streets open on to cobbled squares and spouting dolphins.”
— Leslie Forbes, from A TABLE IN PROVENCE, 1985
A menu they’ll love
That main room — the only room aside from our bedrooms — was filled with a large round wooden table. There were not many chairs — again the windowsill served us well — but there was cheap wine and always enough jelly jars for anyone and everyone who showed up. From the window, we peered out at the main boulevard, le Cours Mirabeau, and watched students en route to the University. A well-established institution of learning founded in 1409, it still attracted students from all over the world. Leaning out the window regularly led to impromptu dinner parties at the big, round table.
That year I bought my very first cookbook. I still have it. Called “A Table in Provence” by Leslie Forbes, the recipes and quirky stories about the region inspired me. Inspired me and my housemates to shop the fresh markets around town displaying ripe, colorful produce from the agricultural regions of France, Italy, and Spain.
If you were willing to walk around, which I was, there was always a market around some corner, usually clustered near the central fountain of that neighborhood. Varieties of olives lined up in barrels that stretched a full block. Fish shimmering in the morning sunshine, caught before sunrise just 20 miles away, in the Mediterranean Sea. And so many kinds of cheeses!
The travel writer Frances Mayes says, “Cheese would be reason enough for a trip to France.” In 2023 I returned to Provence with my husband and daughters. We shopped at markets and the kids sampled their first oysters and fell in love with escargot. The cheese mongers tried to lure them in with samples of their freshest, goo-iest, most fragrant goat and sheep cheeses. My younger daughter, the tomato-tester, is intrepid and open-minded, but she says without hesitation that those cheeses were disgusting. On that trip she learned how to be discreet about spitting out food that she couldn’t bear to swallow.
This same daughter is my main collaborator on the Doll Collection Dinners, dinners that are taking us around the world on culinary adventures in our home kitchen. Since those first experiments cooking in France, markets offering local ingredients like ripe tomatoes, just-picked eggplant, farm-fresh eggs, and regional cheeses have become common in the U.S. We are lucky to live down the hill from the Dane County Farmers Market, one of the largest and longest running in the US.
For our French meal, we selected from Leslie Forbes’ “classic recipes from the South of France” that used ingredients we could find in August in Wisconsin, and recipes that seemed like they might inspiring clapping at our family table. Then we biked to the market.
“Much of the time, cooking is about getting cooking done — getting ingredients off the shelf and out of the crisper, getting at least a minimally healthy cocktail of nutrients into growing bodies, then doing the dishes. But sometimes cooking is about love, and sometimes love can be expressed as a vinaigrette.”
— Steve Hoffman, “A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France.”
Our menu:
Sweet goat’s cheese omelette with fresh mint
Eggplant arranged like a daisy
Grilled goat cheeses on a bed of salad with our everyday vinaigrette
For over two years, we have been making meals inspired by my collection of 72 dolls from around the world, choosing recipes that we think sound interesting, doable, and like something we might like to eat. Many of the recipes have become part of our family dinner rotation.
The three recipes we made from “A Table in Provence” all use fresh veggies from the garden or market, are basic enough to be riffed on, and are simply delicious! They have already inspired more summer meals over the past week.
The Omelette
Just a heads-up: In this French-style omelette, three cooked eggs are divided and served on two very hot plates. For two people. Of course, you don’t have to share it, but that is what the recipe says to do.
I made this omelette a lot for a while, but I had mostly forgotten about it over the last decade plus as a parent trying to get a “healthy cocktail of nutrients into growing bodies.” I warn you, it’s nothing like the overstuffed and fluffy/chewy omelette that is an American standard. This one is cooked very quickly to create a thin, slightly runny, simple egg dish that is buttery and a little addictive.
Gather three fresh eggs, unsalted butter, sugar, mild soft goat cheese, heavy cream, and fresh mint leaves. Lightly beat the eggs with 2 teaspoons of sugar. Slice up some of the mint leaves, then melt at least a tablespoon of butter (15 grams) in a shallow, nonstick pan over high heat. Add the mint leaves to the butter. When the bubbles start to die down (and before it browns and smokes), add the eggs. Pour a tablespoon of cream into the center, then add a dallop of goat cheese. Lift the edges of the omelette and tip the pan so the raw egg runs underneath. This goes quickly since you are cooking over high heat and there are only three eggs in the pan. Then, “the instant the surface of the omelette is no longer runny but is still loose and creamy, fold it in three lengthwise, edges to the middle.” It should just slide right out of that buttery hot pan onto the plate (ideally now hot from warming up on the stovetop). Then sprinkle a little more sugar and some fresh mint leaves on top.
Voilà!
The Eggplant
My family doesn’t think they like eggplant, but they liked this. It’s because of the sauce. You might want to make the sauce and put it on everything. I made a double batch because I was having a bunch of ladies over for wine in the backyard the following evening. It was good for our family meal, but in the backyard under a full moon, it was un bon moment to be remembered!
The first step and hardest step is to peel and de-seed fresh tomatoes. You want four or five tomatoes and they can be bruised or imperfect garden variety. Out garden plants didn’t do well this year, so we bought the seconds from the farmer’s market. Put a slit in the tomato skin, slide them into boiling water, then peel them and squeeze the seeds out. If you want, you could also use a can of San Marzanos (this article about those special tomatoes by
is worth a read!).Then the eggplant should be sliced 1/2 inch thick and fried in tasteless oil, then let to rest on paper towels. Add a bit more oil to the pan so the garlic won’t burn, and add four gloves, finely minced, and a handfull of chopped fresh parsley. Let it all soften, then add the tomatoes. Cook it down til it is “a thick puree.” Stir in 6-8 tablespoons of freshly grated gruyere (we used a local, award-winning Alpine-style cheese called Pleasant Ridge Reserve) and 4 tablespoons of cream. Reduce the heat for just a minute, till the cheese melts, then add salt and pepper. Let the sauce cool (or even chill it) before spooning it over the fried eggplant. Arrange the eggplant to look like a daisy or any local varietal.
Our family vinaigrette
To accompany the omelettes and eggplant arranged like a daisy, we made a very basic salad using frisé lettuce from a local farm, a baguette from our local bakery, and a spreadable local goat cheese that we sampled at the market. My daughter and I agreed that it was delicious. No need to surreptitiously slip away to spit this one out.
In France, the cheese would typically be put onto baguette rounds and toasted, then served with a bitter lettuce tossed in a light vinaigrette. For our simple salad, we went with our standard, house-made and beloved dressing, which is what I’ve been making since I lived in France.
This recipe might be the first one both daughters memorized. They are generally happy to help by making the dressing for dinner and will eat anything (beets, kamut, probably even cauliflower) with it poured over.
Mash a clove of garlic with a healthy amount of salt using a mortar and pestle. Add a little squeeze of dijon mustard and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Mix that up, then drizzle in oil. I usually use a nut oil, like walnut or hazelnut, but olive oil is typical. I have a tiny little wisk that fits in my mortar bowl so I can get the mixture emulsified before setting the bowl on the table with a spoon.
No matter how much dressing we make, it is not enough.
Part of my reason for creating Wanderlife here on Substack was to share the Doll Collection Dinner stories about our adventures in the kitchen.
If you have missed past Doll Collection Dinners, check out:
On my Instagram a have highlights from places like Serbia, India, and Malaysia, and more!
Thank you for reading along! Please share with a friend if you like or leave a comment below.
Your omelette, eggplant and salad -- oooh lala! What fun times you've had cooking in great locations. Neat to know of your French sojourn, too.
Thanks for sharing this yummy story. Grandpa was always proud of his tomatoes.