Feuilletés de St Jacques au gingembre
A highly successful dinner-party starter — not the cheapest of dishes, but quite easy to do and very tasty. You can prepare everything in advance, and then the shells only need 20 minutes in the oven. Serves 6.
Escalivade
A simple and very delicious Catalan recipe, with almost the same ingredients as ratatouille, but a very different result.
Coquilles St Jacques à la Languedocienne
A simple and quick way of preparing scallops. Serves two.
Chevrettes au curry
A popular dish in Tahiti — very light and delicate. It’s made with freshwater prawns called “chevrettes”, but any type of fresh prawn will do.
Carpaccio aux deux thons
You may be dubious about raw fish, but I can assure you that this tastes superb and is a very elegant and original starter (if you can get hold of the fresh tuna of course). It’s very rich — you only need small helpings.
Asparagus gratin
Sounds fairly ordinary, but the unctuous sauce makes it special. An excellent way of stretching a little asparagus to serve a lot of people.
Mounjetada, or cassoulet ariégois
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.