The Salade Niçoise

While it is still sunny, before the cool days begin in earnest, let me present you with the salad that hails from our  town and was made famous in the States by Julia Child:   la salade Nicoise.

If you go to a restaurant here in Nice you will find several variations on the main theme of canned tuna, canned anchovies, a hard cooked egg, and some tomatoes.  The lettuce varies but is usually served here on a bed of mesclun instead of the Boston lettuce that Julia recommends.  (Isn't Boston that insipid pale stuff we served back in the day?)

And new to me (and not to my liking) most recipes here include radishes , red or green peppers( raw), and less often, cucumbers. Indigestible to me, but if you must:  Allez y.

I have never seen potatoes or green beans used in "salade nicoise"  here in Nice itself.

We were a bit pressed today so we prepared the simplest form of this standard for lunch and added the  shallots and anchovy fillets on the side.

The killer ingredient in our salad is a variety of pink tuna in a jar that comes from Italy and can be found in specialty stores like Galerie Lafayette.

  You don't have to put vinaigrette on the fish, since this tuna comes packed in olive oil .  If you prefer less you can drain it and then run it under warm water to get  off most of the excess oil.   If you are really dedicated to watching your "ligne" you can get the tuna in water instead.



 Of course, you can add potatoes, eggs,  shallot or onion.   Always use the slimmest "haricot verts" or the good snap bean variety you have in the USA.   If no potatoes then you'll want to add some crusty bread to soak in virgin olive oil.

Bon Appetit!  Wish you were coming for lunch.

The Niçoise Lemon

This painting hangs in my sister's house in Seattle.  It is an oil painting I did years ago in my "nature morte" or "still life" painting stage.  I am including it because I talked in "gleaners" about the fantastically huge lemons that grow on the cote d'Azur.

  I don't know what the English name would be for them, but this picture gives a relative idea of the size.   You can sort of see that those are big succulent cherries , but these lemons are gigantic, and as lemony as you could ever want.    I still have that jug, that blue cream pitcher and that lovely old dish that I found at the 'marche au puces" (flea market to you).

The Gleaners and I : the philosophy and the film

The Gleaners by Jean Francois Millet 1814-1875

I ran into one of my most charming neighbors today, a retiree who said he was going off soon to go help his cousin bring in the olives.

Yes, it is olive gathering season here in the south of France, there are hundreds falling on my terrace as you read.

 He described how he and his cousiin would collect the bounty with a forked stick, gather the uncured olives with big nets under the trees and put all them in sacks only to have to empty them out and spread them in a dry place while they waited for their date at the mill.  Finally they would take them to Italy where the mills were kept spotlessly clean and have them pressed into oil for salads and cooking.

He is one of just many people I know, who are very keen on collecting everything they can from the land when it comes ready and ripe for the gathering.

 I have had gifts of orange liquor and marmalade made from the bitter oranges so often found down here. I have been offered delicious lemon "tarte" made from our huge local lemons.   I have been given  leaves of "Verveine" and "Tilleul"  to make herbal tea (called tisane) as well as wild sage and thyme which grows in abundance in the hills.  With my french companions on a hike I have eaten figs and grapes and berries from wild trees and vines. And I have a jar of collected mushrooms that I am hesitating to try. It is considered a great shame here to waste any of nature's offerings.

For that matter, I have never seen a French person leave anything uneaten on his plate either.

 This philosophy puts me in mind of the great documentary by french film-maker Agnes Varda called The Gleaners and I.  In it she follows people who appreciate the available bruised fruit after a market day or potatoes left by the farmer after the "recolte".  Some of the participants in this great free- for- all are poor and have no choice but others have taken a conscious choice not to waste anything.   And they get a big kick out of getting it for nothing.  It is a fascinating documentary.

It was much the same for my father who lived during the depression in America.  All my life he could not stand to see the waste of things being thrown away that could be repaired.  And just to prove his point he would collect  "tossed " items from the free box at garage sales and go home and fix them.  He had about 8 toasters just ready for an owner.

 Unfortunately though, most Americans want a new shiny one.

  In France however, especially among the people who were born during or just after the last war with all its appalling shortages, this would not be acceptable.  The mentality is changing as wealth increases today but this wanting of store bought does not apply to the spoils of the land.

Anything you can glean from the land is a sacred bonus and duty to accept as a gift from the gods.

So hummm. It's 10/10/10.

I have decided that you have to make yourself happy.   It's your job.  If you aren't happy neither is anyone else in your entourage.   To that end, I had a super coffee/decaf this morning, listened to my music and ate kitchen sink cookies for breakfast. ( They were in this case, oatmeal-raisin-chocolate chunk-sunflower seed, 5 grain cereal cookies.) Kitchen sink just means you put in anything and everything except the sink, of course.      I just felt like it and then I went out for three hours to tackle the garden.

Gardening is almost always a pleasure for me although at a certain point a garden is mostly maintenance.  Still it is satisfying to trim back and weed and pick up debris so that it all looks so serene afterwards.  You can create little pockets of perfect scenes with colors and shapes and you can get that great false feeling that you are in control!    And you can smell and feel nature and its relentless optimism for growth.  There's certainly always that.

 I could never get into sit-still type meditation.  But doing a repetitive activity, as with hiking or creating art you get out of your head. With gardening as well, you get out of your thought system and just dig in. 

 I have a thing I call the Hundred Leaf Meditation.  The bay tree  (sauce Lauriel) drops leaves constantly and they never disintegrate so at some point, every so often, I go out and pick up 100 leaves.  It is just a thing I do.  Some people would wait and rake them but we have that Japanese bumpy grass so that is not so easy.    And besides, it is a little trip into nature, and a chance to pass your hand over the bumpy grass...like a caress.  

  So have a happy 10/10/10. It's only two more years that we will have this amazing happening of numbers lining up.  It's bound to be auspicious so enjoy the mystery of it and go out and pet some grass. 

Fleur , the idea

This is a series that I did using an old string technique that I used teaching nursery school years ago.  It seems that as an artist like a scientist, you will try anything!   There are also other mixed media secrets thrown in.  It is mostly acrylic and ink and it is on 250 gram acid free Canson paper that has been stretched.

I was inspired really by an x-ray photo of a tulip that I saw somewhere.  I thought it embodied what I wanted to say about women.  No , this series is not really about flowers.

 It is about the striving to be perfect and sexy and seen.  Women kind of do it innately because in our society we are brought up to be "decorative".  Maybe it is a primordial urge too.  But most of us really enjoy it.  I don't think it is betraying any secrets to say that we use make-up and clothes and visual tricks to our advantage when we can.  We mostly love using our faces and bodies as palettes.

 Sometimes we don't love it and just wish that it didn't figure in it.

I also wanted to show transparency and vulnerability.  The vulnerability of knowing that visual is not everything....not even close.

"Fleur" Series

Dancin' The Boogie - Silvan Zingg (piano), Will & Maéva ♫ ♪ ♫

If we weren't meant to dance, why all this music?  Gregory Orr