Last week, my friend Morag and I had ourselves a mini-dinner party fully stocked with wine, warming and hearty food and great discussions, from gin, to boyfriends, to world history. They’re the kind of evenings that you learn to cook for – the opportunity to share a savory meal and a few glasses (or bottles) of wine and leave pleasantly full of food and good feelings.

We decided to cook a rustic (and easier than it looks) dinner with hearty, healthy lentils, garlicky sausage and a lovely smell that follow you around the house. Give me rustic, hearty food any day (especially on a cold one). “Peasant” food is probably some of the best – it’s creative, traditionally cheap and so flavorful. 

The recipe below is based on one I found on French Revolution Food, one of my favorite blogs for easy to tackle French food. We may have taken some liberties with the amount of wine, herbs and… well, every ingredient, but we ended up with a happy and well-fed table of people, so it works, even with a bit of creativity.

We had it with a simple green salad with a balsamic and olive oil dressing and some Irish brown rolls, to soak up all the lovely broth.

Serves: 4

On the Counter

9 banana (or eschalion) shallots
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 Toulouse (or garlicky, or spicy Italian) sausages
3/4 cup (187 ml) dry white wine
800g pre-cooked Puy lentils, drained and rinsed (if from a can)
1/2 cup (60 ml) water
1 tsp Herbes de Provence
handful fresh parsley, chopped

What to Do

Preheat oven to 450 F (35oC). Slice shallots longways into about 6 strips per shallot. 

Heat the oil in an oven and stove-safe pot/casserole dish over medium heat until the oil shimmers, about 3-4 minutes.

Add the sliced shallots and sausages, season with salt and pepper. Stir to coat, and transfer to a baking-safe casserole dish (if necessary.) Bake until the shallots are soft and caramelized and the sausages are browned, about half an hour. Stir occasionally.

Remove the dish from oven and transfer it back to the original pot, or place on the stove, on high heat.

Add the wine, bring to a boil.  Deglaze the pan with a wooden spoon and add lentils, water, herbes de Provence. Season with a bit more salt and pepper. Simmer for about 15 minutes, or until the liquid is mostly gone.

Serve, topped with fresh parsley.

PS: If there’s any funky editing in here, blame photos-taken-while-drinking and the low light.

What better way to start a new cooking blog than with breakfast!

I love having a weekend morning that I can dedicate to stretching my breakfast into brunch. While a weekday’s breakfast might be a bowl of oatmeal or Greek yogurt and fruit, weekends offer the opportunity for pancakes, baked eggs or French toast.

French toast is something that I haven’t made in the year+ I’ve been living in London. I wish I had a good reason for it, but I was really just too into sharing the joys of American pancakes to even consider French toast. Some weekends, though, I just need a break from carbs for… a different type of carbs.

What many people know as French toast is actually called Pain Perdu in France (and quite a few other French-speaking places) and it’s a slightly different style than French toast. Where French toast is exclusively cooked on a griddle or in a skillet, pain perdu is often baked. And while French toast is usually served with butter and syrup, pain perdu is served with honey, creme anglaise, fruit, or even jam.

As a first-timer, I kept it simple with a bit of butter and honey. Next time: summer berries. The nearly-lost bread was a sourdough baguette left over from dinner. It worked nicely, though it requires a lot more soaking time than sliced bread with a wider surface area.

I liked this recipe a lot because it’s baked rather than fried, and there’s much less risk of having bread that tastes more like scrambled eggs than it does custard.

Now, on to the recipe!

Serves: 4, with 5 pieces each

On the Counter:

• 20 slices of baguette
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 tablespoon (15 g) sugar
• 1/2 cup (120 mL) milk
• 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 mL) vanilla extract
• salt to taste
• butter, honey or other topping of choice

What to Do:

Preheat oven to 205°C/400°F. Butter an oven-proof dish or cookie sheet. In a bowl, beat the eggs together with salt, sugar, milk, and vanilla.

Pour into a large, flat-bottomed dish. Put the bread slices into the dish to soak up some of the egg mixture.

Turn them over with a spatula, letting them soak long enough to have taken in the mix, but not so long that they begin to fall apart. (It took me about 1 minute per side, with a little bit of squishing, but my baguette was quite dense.)

Gently move the soaked bread slices to the buttered dish/sheet. Spoon any of the remaining mixture over the slices.

Place the dish in the oven. Bake for 20 minutes total. After the first 10 minutes, turn the slices over so they brown evenly on both sides.

Serve immediately with your toppings of choice.

It looks amazing straight out of the oven. Golden, sweet and ready to be eaten. It was hard to wait to get them to the table!