France

Oh la la Brioche

Brioche

Brioche is a strange bread. It is somewhere between a cake, pastry and bread. In France it is often eaten for breakfast with just butter and/or jam, but it is also very good lightly toasted with butter as afternoon tea, as a basis for desserts, savoury dishes such as Cervelas Lyonnais en Brioche or coulibiac, …

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Tip-top Tapenade

Tapenade Ingredients

Though tapenade is best know as a dish from Provence, France, there exists very similar olive pastes throughout the Mediterranean. The word ‘tapenade’ hides a history in one of its ingredients, capers. In Provence, the caper plant is called ‘tapenei’, and capers used to be stored in vessels filled with olive oil. The capers were …

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Weird French Delicacy – Ortolan Bunting

Ortolan Bunting

As per usual, Bill and I were having a telephone conversation and he brought up the subject of the Ortolan Bunting, which is a small bird eaten as a delicay in France. Though for a long time the Ortolan has been protected, the law hasn’t really been enforced. Bill was discussing how the method of …

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