Around My French Table - Gérard's Mustard Tart

I love food and I love cookbooks with pictures.  A photo of beautiful food will inspire me to shop and labor in the kitchen, all the while drooling in anticipation of the final result.  I'm also pretty intuitive in the kitchen - I can look at a recipe and just know that it will be good based on the ingredients.  Ron thinks this makes me dangerous because I'm willing to try new recipes on unsuspecting guests.  I have been fooled a few times, and only from the standpoint that the final result was less than stellar.  Except for the Sorrel soup incident.  

So, I was looking through my Around My French Table cookbook and came upon a photograph of a beautiful tart.  The crust was beautiful and the tart was cooked to perfection with an alluring display of julienned carrots and something green in a spoke pattern on top.  It made my mouth water just looking at it.

Then I read the recipe.  Gérard's Mustard Tart.  Hmmmm.  I like mustard, and I'm learning to like more types of mustard.  Years ago, while perusing the offerings at Harrod's in London, I found a lovely jar of Bavarian Sweet Mustard.  I bought it more for the pretty jar than the mustard, but it turned out the mustard was quite good! 

Bavarian Sweet Mustard in a lovely blue and white jar

Mustard is not a key ingredient in American cooking, and when we use mustard, it is usually prepared mustard, so the Bavarian sweet variety was a very pleasant surprise and the beginning of my appreciation for mustard.

I don't know what prompted me to buy my first jar of Dijon, but I'm pretty sure it had a lot to do with a man with a British accent in the back of a Rolls Royce looking for some Grey Poupon.  I found Dijon mustard a bit strong, but very tasty and I tend to use it sparingly.

Dijon Mustard - this brand is my favorite!

Having said that though, I use Dijon mustard almost daily as it is a key ingredient to my homemade vinaigrette. 

And somewhere along the line I discovered country style or à l'ancienne - a whole grain mustard that isn't nearly as eye-watering-palate-burning-nasal-passage-inflaming as Dijon mustard.

 

moutarde à l'ancienne

So yeah - I like mustard as a condiment, but as the main ingredient?  I had doubts.  My recipe intuition was working subtlety at over-coming those doubts.  I moved on to other recipes and had half-formulated a dinner plan but the photo of Gérard's Mustard Tart kept calling me back.  The photo is mouth-wateringly beautiful and...well...what's the worst that could happen?  I make a mustard tart, we hate it and have to go get crêpes instead.  I decided it was worth the gamble and embarked on a mustard tart adventure.

I went shopping for my ingredients - and got to experience another first.  Those pretty green things spoked on top of the tart with the carrots were leeks.  I have never bought leeks before, so this will be another first!  Exciting! 

I had to buy a ready-made crust as I don't have the tools to make my own.  I saw lots of French people buying these crusts, so they must be good.  Hundreds of thousands of French cooks can't be wrong.  I made Gérard's tart exactly as the recipe was written except for the crust.   The recipe calls for Dijon and à l'ancienne mustards, so I used both.  I assembled the tart and put it in the oven to bake.  It smelled wonderful as it was baking, but occasionally I'd get a whiff of eye-watering, palate-burning, nasal-passage-inflaming Dijon and I was grateful the crêpe vendor was right across the street. 

I baked the tart with conventional oven instructions in a convection oven - what can I say? - my oven at home does the conversion for me - so my tart was a little over-cooked on the top:

my singed mustard tart

We were armed with a salad and a baguette and change in our pockets to dash over to the crêperie when we took our first bite.

It was WONDERUL!  

We ate the WHOLE thing!

Ron's seal of approval?  "You could definitely make this again."

I did make it again, but this time I used tomatoes and a better tart pan:

Tomatoes are in season! Yes!

I found a handy-dandy conventional-to-convection oven converter on-line and baked the tart at the right temperature for the right amount of time:

Beautiful, isn't it?!  No singeing!

And with the removable-bottomed tart pan I was able to  put my beautiful creation on a serving dish:

The crust is a little wonky - need to work on that

And then we noshed:

délicieux!

Once again, we had a salad and a baguette to round out our meal.  Parfait! 

Fabulous lunch or light dinner!

I am so glad I gave this tart a try!  Once baked, the mustard blends wonderfully with the eggs and adds a remarkable tang to an otherwise traditional tart.  Since the backbone of this recipe is a basic tart, you can refresh the recipe as often as the seasonal vegetables change.

The Mad Rush

Dennis' time in Paris was shorter than Beth's - he had to leave Wednesday morning, she wasn't leaving until Friday morning.   Despite having what seemed like plenty of time to see everything they wanted to see in Paris, time was, of course, short, so the last bits of sight seeing were squeezed in.  

Dennis and Beth saw the Eiffel Tower several times, but they didn't go up it until Tuesday evening.  It was still light out when we got there:

but we did not have reservations so we got to wait in a fairly long line before ascending to the top.  By then, the sky was beautiful:

Only moments to spare to capture the setting sun over Paris!  Phew!  We made it!

And only a few more minutes until the lovely twilight hour!

Wednesday morning Ron went off to work and we helped Dennis get ready and into a taxi, and then it was just us girls. 

First stop - the Avenue des Champs-Élysées of course!

Finally!  A chance to check out those Parisian fashions!

We strolled the Champs-Élysées and wandered into quite a few shops, including this one.   Each shop has some kind of plaque or sign on the building, and this one really caught my eye:

Naf Naf - aka The Three Little Piggies!

Beth found some good buys and got something a tad cooler to wear:

I love Paris in the Spring time...

The Avenue des Champs-Élysées ends at the  Arc de Triomphe, where it then becomes Avenue de la Grande Armée.  The Arc de Triomphe is a monument honoring those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars.  The Arc is decorated with the names of great battles, locations of French victories and the names of military leaders and there are sculptures and reliefs depicting important moments of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.

Under the Arc

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

A few of the French victories

Beth and the Le Départ de 1792 sculpture on the southeast facade

 On Beth's last day, we went on a walk through the Left Bank.  We saw lots of stuff!  We walked from our apartment to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. 

X marks the spot - the Montparnasse Tower with two vapor trails

We stopped at a boulangerie and bought a baguette lunch that we took to the Luxembourg Gardens.  We watched people playing chess while we ate lunch:

Chess in the park

Then we walked towards the palace and the parterre:

Jardin du Luxembourg - Not all the flower beds were planted yet, but still beautiful on a sunny day

Beth and the Luxembourg Palace - now the French Senate

Newly planted flowers - we saw the gardeners with flats of flowers working on the beds

The two of us at the Medici Fountain

 We left the park and went to Saint Sulpice.  Only a few photos this time:

I loved the way the light streamed through the high windows and illuminated the unlit bulbs of this chandelier

Here too, are the names of parishioners who gave their lives in WWI

Candles lit in honor of the dead

We left St. Sulpice and wandered through the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and decided to join the tourists and locals alike for a coffee at Les Deux Magots:

If you squint and tilt your head just so you can see Beth on the left side

I'm pretty sure we sat in the exact same spot as Hemingway and Picasso

I would also like to mention that in order to get these photos I suffered a tremendous indignity.  I was bird bombed.  Actually, I think I was ostrich bombed.  I was leaned over my camera and I felt a horrific smack on the back of my neck.  I reached back and there was a HUGE slimy bomb that weighed 50 pounds, took two people, 300 napkins and a glass of water to semi- quasi- sorta clean up.  And for the rest of the day I had a hardened, greenish patch of semi- quasi- sorta cleaned-up ostrich bomb on the back of my head.  It was  a heavy burden, and it was bothersome.  I kept reaching back to touch the annoying thing on my head and neck, only to be reminded that even if cows don't fly, ostriches do.  In Paris.  I'm sure of it.   

After coffee, we went across the street to visit Paris' oldest church:

Saint-Germain-des-Prés - the bell tower dates to the 7th century while the nave and transept date from the 11th century

The interior, although restored, is painted in the medieval manner

Rounded arches of the Romanesque style

dedication plaques

A quiet moment

After visiting the church, we headed towards the Seine where we saw the Institut de France:

Institut de France

The Institute of France, Parliament of the Learned, is comprised of:

• The French Academy, est. 1635
• The Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, est. 1663
• The Academy of Sciences, est. 1666
• The Academy of Fine Arts, est.1816
• The Academy of Ethics and Political Science, est. 1795, abolished 1803, re-est. 1832

Their goal is to improve the arts and sciences within the principles of pluridisciplinarity. 

Directly across from the Institut de France is the Pont des Arts; a pedestrian bridge that links the Institut de France and the palais du Louvre.  It is a popular place for lovers to attach a padlock to the railing:

Padlocks on the Pont des Arts - we should do that before we leave France!

By now it had been 6 days of high-intensity touring, standing, walking and stair-climbing and in particular, this day I was lugging around an extra 20 pounds in ostrich poop.  We weren't just tired, we were exhausted!  Still - there were things to see, so we walked along the Seine on a round-about walk to a metro station.  It was getting late and the light was low, bu the river, as always, was beautiful:

Kinda cool that you can see 3 bridges spanning the river

We walked along the Seine until we reached the Musée d'Orsay, then we went streetside to catch the metro and go home.  I've said it before - there are always interesting sights in Paris.  We saw this right by the Musée d'Orsay.  Yes, there are homeless people in Paris.  You can find them sleeping on the streets and in the metro stations.  I can't really say this belongs to a homeless person though.  A roll-away bed?  A nice clean duvet, a bicycle with a flat tire and a bottle of beer.  Perhaps it is the new Europe on $5/day?  There's definitely a story in there somewhere!

We had a wonderful visit with Dennis and Beth and were sorry to see them go.  We hope they had as much fun in Paris as we did!  One think I know for sure, they needed a vacation from their vacation!

Fête de la Musique

The summer solstice is a looonng day in Paris.  And although the official sunrise and sunset are  5:46 am and 9:58 pm, respectively, the first light in the sky appears at 5:04 am and the last traces of twilight are slipping away at 10:40 pm.  That's a lot of sunlight!

Awed by the great power of the sun, people from around the world and from different cultures and times have celebrated the Summer Solstice.  Also known as Midsummer,  St. John's Day and Litha, it is longest day of the year and it is also the first day of the sun's decline into winter.  The Celts and the Slavs celebrated the Summer Solstice with dancing and bonfires in the hopes of increasing the sun's energy.  In China, they honor Li, the Chinese Goddess of Light.  The Druids celebrated the day as the Wedding of Heaven and Earth.

The Summer Solstice is still celebrated around the world and in Paris, it is celebrated with music.  The Fête de la Musique began in Paris in 1982 when an American musician, Joel Cohen, who was employed by a French radio station, proposed an all-night music celebration at the moment of the summer solstice.  His idea evolved into a festival to promote music by encouraging professionals and amateurs alike to perform in the streets and in order to be sanctioned by the official Fête de la Musique organization in Paris, all concerts must be free to the public and the performers donate their time for free.

We were very excited to learn about this event, and on the official website, you can access the music programs by arrondissement. We were thrilled to discover that many concerts were right here in our neighborhood.  Ron invited some coworkers to join us and we made plans to have dinner and then wander the streets in search of musicians.  

We knew that a band would be playing in Place de la Convention, right in front of our apartment, so I was kind of paying attention to the goings on during the day.  At about 3:00 pm. the music started.  It sounded like it was piped in from somewhere as there were no bands playing yet, and the music was varied; electronica to Ravel's Bolero.  There was definitely some excitement in the air as well!

I knew Ron would be getting home close to 7:30 pm, so I went out on the balcony to see the goings on and hopefully catch a glimpse of him coming out of the metro.  As I stepped onto the balcony, I startled a pigeon, which is kind of unusual.  So I glanced around and lo and behold, a pigeon nest with eggs!

Mama built a nest in our little olive tree!

The crowds were already starting to settle in to the square:

The band is setting up behind the trees on the left - but no Ron yet!

I went back inside for my longer lens and when I returned, there was Ron!

He sees me, he smiles, he watches where he's going and he waves.  Unlike she - she never takes her eyes off me - and I didn't notice her until I downloaded the images!

Our friends arrived, we went to dinner then we started wandering.  The very first thing I discovered was that the music I thought was being piped in was actually very large and very good quality speakers on someone's balcony:

What the hell???

At Place de la Convention - lots of people came to hear the music and the kidlets were dancing!

This DJ was mixing tunes for the folks outside Moka Cafe on Rue de la Convention

A little further down the street - on the corner of Rue Olivier de Serres

Same band as above - the crowd was really enjoying the band's Pink Floyd cover

A little further up Rue de la Convention - on the corner of Rue de Dantzig

These guys played a lot of covers of popular rock songs

They took advantage of street construction and placed themselves inside the barriers!

Dancing in the streets!

A folk soloist on the corner of Rue de la Convention and Rue Dombasle

Another small group at Parc George Brassens

 For kicks, I took this photo at 10:38 pm just to show how much light was still in the sky!

The longest day of the year - still not dark at 10:38 pm!

Our last musical stop was at another location in Parc Georges Brassens.  There were several artists scheduled and they played traditional French music but by the time we got there, only one man was playing:

These kidlets were singing along, swaying and clapping!

It was a school night and Ron and his coworkers needed to head home and get ready for another work day.  We parted ways and as we headed back up Rue de Vaugirard, I took one last photo of the crowds:

By 11:00 pm it was dark, but the music would continue until 1:00 am!  Thank goodness it was a cool night and we had earplugs!

I had great fun just walking the streets and happening upon performances.  Surprisingly, everything we saw was good - if any of these folks were amateurs, they were GOOD amateurs.  I am so glad the rain stopped early in the day and the Fête de la Musique was a success!