What's Cooking?

Or rather, who is cooking?

Oh , yes, this is another thing to add to my current creative obsessions. I have always liked cooking - I am an unhappy girl if I don't have my hot, home-cooked meal at night - but lately, and I must admit it started from having watched a few episodes of Masterchef and thinking "I wanna join this cooking show!", I have been taken by the idea that I must improve my techniques and widen my culinary repertoire.

So Saturday, the husband came home with a gift for me, a tome of a recipe book called Saveurs de France, and Sunday morning I was hunting for ingredients. Now, I had never really followed recipes before, having learned to cook by picking up bits and pieces of technique here and there, so Sunday night was a whole new experience in measuring out orange juice in deciliters and butter in grams for me.

The result was - and I am not just tooting my own horn here, I swear - quite good! Husband says he thinks now that the recipe book is actually a gift for him. Cheeky man.

Here then, in pictures, are last night's Legumes Confits Aux Olives et Au Roquefort or Vegetables Confit (how do we say this in English?!) in Olives and Roquefort Cheese, which I chose because I never knew that vegetables and roquefort mixed,

and Magret de Canard Sauce à l'Orange or Duck Breast in Orange Sauce, which was served with white rice.


Recipe books rock, I now think. They make you discover combinations of flavors you had never tried before. Quite exciting. Tonight, after a dinner of something a little more ordinary, I'm going to plunge back into that recipe book to see what I'll cook up next.