La Recette du Jour

I must confess I am not fond of cassoulet as it is served in the Aude -- too stodgy and grease-laden -- but this is something else entirely, lighter and much more digestible.

Mounjettes is the name given to dried haricot beans. They do need to be good quality for this dish, and preferably the new season's harvest. The dish is much more liquid than cassoulet de Castelnaudary, and it's traditional to serve the sauce first as a soup, with bread broken into it, followed by the beans and meat. We also had a lovely green salad with this, freshly plucked from the garden.

A recipe from Kaliyoga Serve with aioli or chilli jam.

Devised by Steve from several different recipes, this is the best sauce for mussels I have ever tasted. It deserves small, fresh moules de bouchot (grown on posts in Brittany). Make sure you have lots of French bread for mopping up the sauce. This will serve six as a starter, or 3-4 as a main course.

Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main course. Best with the large Spanish mussels -- small moules de bouchot should not be wasted on this!

Yet another recipe for sea bass, one of my favourite fish. Where bass is concerned, simple is best -- and the success of the dish depends entirely on the quality of the fish. Serves 2.

A summery Catalan recipe for those days when it's too cold to eat in the garden.

This is real traditional French bourgeois cooking. To be truly authentic, it should be served with plainly boiled white rice to soak up the sauce, but pasta or steamed new potatoes are also possibilities.

[note for purists -- strictly speaking this should probably be called Fricassée, not Blanquette, as the meat is browned before cooking]

For 4 people:

Effort versus results: 10 out of 10. It only took me about 10 minutes to prepare, plus another 3 for the buttered cabbage we had with it. Excellent in the pressure cooker; if you don't have one it will probably need about 3 hours.

Years ago, I had a dish of boeuf aux carottes in a suburban bistro in Paris. Accompanied with noodles and a glass of beaujolais nouveau, it was absolutely divine (although I had a strong suspicion it was actually horse). I have tried several times since to reproduce this classic French dish, without success. This version, cooked by Steve recently using a recipe in a magazine, is as close as I have ever tasted -- the tarragon is an inspired touch. Lovely with either noodles or baked potatoes to mop up the sauce.

Chicory is something I never ate in the UK, and thought I probably didn't like. But over the last year I have discovered its virtues, when treated correctly (i.e. water should not come anywhere near it, if you want a result that is not limp, soggy, and unpleasantly bitter). Endives au gratin, where the chicory is pre-cooked, wrapped in ham, and covered with a nice cheesy sauce before being popped in the oven, is easy and obvious, but here's a wonderful Simon Hopkinson recipe that sets it off at its best. Serves 2.

This recipe uses little round courgettes. If you can't get them, the risotto will do equally well in peppers or onions -- or indeed on its own, or as an accompaniment to something else.

Serves 4, or 8 as a starter.

The chicken can be a scraggy old boiler as it's going to cook for ages. Similarly the meat should be cheap stewing cuts -- breast or shoulder of lamb, shin of beef, hacked roughly into pieces. This is not an elegant dish!

Ras-el-hanout is a North African spice mixture. If you can't get it or the French 4-épices, use paprika, cayenne, and coriander to season the stew.

Harissa is a kind of very hot chilli paste.

The vegetables can be varied although I think turnips and carrots are essential for the flavour.

You can cook the chickpeas from scratch yourself, but you have to soak them for ages beforehand. I think it's easier to just use a can or jar (particularly if you didn't think of making the couscous until the night before).

You will need a large stockpot with a lid which will take all the ingredients with room to spare.

This quantity will feed at least ten people.

Daurade is sea bream. You could equally use sea bass for this recipe. Whatever you use, it must be very fresh.

Another recipe picked up and adapted from Marmiton.org. A high score on the effort versus results scale -- if you spread the potatoes and tomatoes out on a large, solid, baking tray they caramelise nicely, leaving a small quantity of syrupy juices and giving the dish an excellent flavour.

Simple to do, and delicious.

A tasty, spicy stew which can be made with squid or cuttlefish -- a kind of poor man's version of zarzuela

This is nothing like real Indian food, but it's very nice nonetheless, and easy to do.

This is a Languedoc speciality traditionally made the day the pig was killed. Nobody keeps pigs these days so it tends to come out on special occasions (although it's not particularly expensive to make). As with most traditional dishes, everyone has their own ideas on exactly how it should be made. Steve went to the charcuterie the other day and asked for some pork and pig's liver to make friginat with. The charcutière told him firmly that what he was proposing to make was not friginat, it was fricassée. Friginat is made only from the neck of the pig, she said. Our two Languedoc cookbooks, with three recipes between them for fricassée and friginat, do not make matters clear. Anyway, since the pig's neck was not available, Steve went home and made fricassée more-or-less according to the charcutière's instructions. This is not fricassée as in cream, chicken and mushrooms, but a pork, liver and kidney stew. It is a surprisingly refined dish, very tasty and much less rich and stodgy than cassoulet.

A classic French dish, very sustaining.

Recipe by Simon Hopkinson. Ideal for a barbecue.

This is a smoky little number adapted from Nigel Slater. Very tasty, but if you cook it indoors I recommend opening all the windows and disabling any smoke alarms you may have. Mr Slater recommends a soothing pile of buttery couscous with it -- in my experience it's a good idea to have some yogurt and cucumber salad on hand as well.

Quick, easy, delicious, and low-fat. What more can you ask? Serves 4.

Red mullet is a very special fish, and this recipe makes the most of it. I usually serve it with a tomato vinaigrette (a vinaigrette dressing gently warmed (not cooked!) in a pan with peeled, seeded and diced tomatoes).

An easy way to delight your guests. If you want extra vegetables, grilled or baked tomatoes are an excellent choice; we had tomates à la crème.

Still trying to recapture the flavour of the wonderful "seven-hour lamb" I had at Le Manchot d'Henri in Paris ... this isn't quite it, but it is delicious. Like all casseroles it's even better kept for a day and reheated.

Most recipes seem to assume one shank per person; that's too much meat for me, but carnivores may differ.

A more traditional version of this classic dish than my roasted version, and good for serving in winter, when choice of vegetables is more limited.

There are many ways of combining rabbit and mustard, many of them complicated and most involving cream. This one is a bit different, and it's my favourite as well. It may look fiddly at first sight, but you can cook the vegetables, and even fry the rabbit, well in advance, leaving only the roasting and reheating to do at the last minute.

Caution: it will only work with a nice fat farmed rabbit -- if you've got a wild one, make something else! Here you can buy packs of ready-jointed rabbit -- for two of us, I use a saddle cut into four pieces. If you use a whole rabbit, you will need to leave the legs in the oven a further ten minutes after you have taken the rest out. For 4.

Source: the Roux brothers' French Country Cooking.

There are three sorts of cassoulet, from Castelnaudary, Carcassonne, and Toulouse. Naturally each place claims its version is the best. They all have lots of beans and goose or duck fat in them, it's the other ingredients that vary. Anyway this is the 'quick' version that I make (doesn't include separately cooked stewed lamb), which is probably closest to the Toulouse version. If you are going to make it, make plenty -- it freezes well, and it's one of those things that's better reheated. Credit: the infallible Mireille Johnston.

From 'The Pauper's Cookbook' by Jocasta Innes, a mainstay when I was a student. Serves two.

For 6. Excellent score on effort versus results.

A quick and simple recipe for a special occasion à deux ... Serve with a simple green veg such as green beans or courgettes.

This makes a nice change from a plainly roasted bird. You can of course use chicken instead. Putting a couple of petit-suisse cheeses inside before roasting is an excellent idea -- they disappear during cooking, but leave the flesh very moist.

The method is unorthodox, but the results are excellent and it has the further advantage that much of it can be prepared in advance. As cooked by Louisette, one of the best cooks we know. This quantity serves 8 to 10 people.

Bored with our usual ways of cooking tuna (plainly grilled, or pan-fried with onions and bacon) we decided to try this recipe from our favourite cookery magazine, Cuisines et Vins de France. A truly excellent choice -- though more time-consuming, the result was delicious, and very different. Highly recommended. Serves 4.

This may not sound promising. You may not even like cabbage. But whether you do or not, this recipe is worth trying.

An old favourite of mine which I've been making for donkey's years -- not the least of its attractions is an excellent score on the effort versus results scale. Credit: Josceline Dimbleby, who describes it as a cross between a French blanquette and a Hungarian goulash. She makes it with veal but I am dubious about French calf-rearing practices and I don't like veal much anyway, so I always make it with pork. The meat should not be too lean -- use shoulder or boneless pork steaks.

Low-fat, quick to make, and very tasty (provided your pork is good quality, and the tomatoes really are ripe).

It's a lot of effort skinning the broad beans, but for this recipe it is worth it. Delicious and unusual.

One of Steve's favourite high-carb dishes. No quantities, because it is done "au feeling" as the French say -- just use your common sense, depending on how much leftover chicken you have and how many people you are feeding.

The method is unconventional, to say the least, but the result is a lovely fresh-tasting risotto. You can vary the vegetables to taste. Serves 6.

Made with a free-range, corn-fed chicken or a capon, this dish is worthy of Christmas dinner, and is very quick and easy to do -- once it's in the oven you can sit down and relax with an aperitif. The sauce is wonderful. We thought chestnuts would be a nice addition to the fruits (especially as after indulging in several pre-dinner drinks I forgot to put the almonds in).

Credit: Marmiton.org -- an excellent site if you know enough cooking French to be able to follow a recipe. The comments by people who have tried the recipes are particularly useful.

We never tire of barbecued red mullet with a warm tomato vinaigrette (see the recipe for rougets aux feuilles de vigne). But this recipe, adapted from one at marmiton.org, makes a very pleasant change, especially if it's not barbecue weather.

Not slow food (takes around 20 mins) and a Lewis household favourite. Serves 3 ish (ie 2-4). Adapted from "Good Food 50 beat the clock suppers"

This is one of my favourite quick pasta dishes. Best with fresh tagliatelle, but dried is fine. Quantities are vague -- this will make enough sauce for about 2-3 servings

Ever since I discovered it in one of those 50p recipe books from Sainsbury's, this has been one of my favourite recipes. It features fairly often in our repertoire -- great for days when you are short of ideas or time for shopping, because most of the ingredients are generally hanging around in the storecupboard or fridge. And we never get tired of it. Extra bonus: it's vegetarian.

What I like about marmiton.org isn't just the fact that among its thousands of recipes there are bound to be at least half a dozen using the ingredients you have to hand. It's also the comments from visitors improving or adapting the recipe. The original recipe for this tart (which I chose because I had a surfeit of mozzarella to use up) would have turned out a soggy mess -- it involved boiling the courgettes and then putting them in a raw pastry case! But by acting on several suggestions from other people I turned out a tasty tart that makes a pleasant change from our usual cheese, tomato and mustard tart.

It's important to do all the vegetable preparation in order to eliminate as much water as possible, otherwise you will end up with a watery filling and soggy pastry.

This a dish from Haute Savoie (which is where reblochon, one of my favourite French cheeses, is made). Tartiflette is a classic recipe though, and very widely known in France, if not elsewhere -- surprisingly we discovered it from a woman who cooked it on the spot at Lézignan market and served it as a takeaway. Easy to make, and very sustaining! Reblochon is a soft cheese about the size of a camembert.

A tian is an earthenware dish, which like the cassoule has given its name to the recipe which is cooked in it. This is a good way of using courgettes which have got a bit big. It can also be used as an accompaniment, e.g. with roast lamb.