It’s been a funny year for the garden. Very wet in the spring through May, then very hot in June, and now milder in July and even rain as I write this – a nice change!  Our garlic and onions, planted in December of last year, have weathered it all pretty well and were ready for harvest in early July.  Here are the drying for a few days in the sun before going into the garage, where it is cool and dark, to rest until completely dry and ready to be stored for the fall and winter.

It should be noted that, having lived all my life in the city, I know next to nothing about gardening, so I am sure that you who are experts will wonder what I am on about.  Each season and each new year presents new opportunities to learn a little bit more, mainly through having things go wrong and trying to fix them.  Plus I spend a lot of time looking  for gardening advice on the site of the Royal Horticultural Society. 

I tasted my green cherry tomato-pearl onion pickles recently and I think they turned out very well.  So I am passing on the recipe. Note that this same method could be used for many veggies, such as green beans, cabbage and cauliflower.

Couple days ago, we pulled the onions we planted last winter, a yield of about 2 gallons of small onions, not bad for a plot of about a meter and a half on a side.  They are firm, crunchy and delicious…should last us for a couple months.  I think that they would have gotten bigger if we had watered more consistently, but one has to have a life outside of the garden.

On a recent warm evening, a storm passed through Orthez, with wind and beating rain.  We were snug inside but the cherry tomatoes took a hit;  the next morning I discovered a lot of green tomatoes on the ground around the plants.  My mom used to make pickled green tomatoes using the same recipe she used for dill pickles…Why not give it a try?   We have just harvested onions , so the smallest these will make a great addition, along with a few cloves of garlic and a sprig of dill.

Since this is a new process for me, I sought out a recipe in my Grand-mother’s cookbook, The Lily Wallace New American Cookbook, circa 1949.  When I say it was her cookbook, I mean that it was the ONLY cookbook she owned, her go-to for everything about the kitchen, stuffed with more than 3800 recipes and advice on everything from canning pears to pickling tongue to serving an elegant afternoon tea to how to make a Sidecar.  The copy she passed down to me is full of mark-ups and notes in my grandma’s hand and stuffed with other recipes and articles she gathered somewhere along the way.

It selected a recipe for “Mixed Pickles”, recipe 3627, which seemed to be going in the direction I was hoping for.  The only change I made was that I salted the vegetables and left them overnight, rather than leaving them in brine for 16 days as the recipe recommended.  After that, I packed the vegetables into a sterilized jar with spices and dill, then covered with a mix of 50/50 cider vinegar and white vinegar, then sealed the jar. Now I just need to wait for 4 weeks and see how they turn out.  I will provide the complete recipe once I have tasted and made corrections.

Pearl onions glazed in their own cooking juices are a common accompaniment to many classic French dishes – Bœuf Bourguignon, Ouefs en Meurette and  Poulet rôti Grand-mere, to name some of the most well known.  They are easy to make and delicious included with many winter stews, so I thought it might be a good moment for the recipe.

In making Soupe a l’oignon Gratinée, or French Onion Soup, there are two basic schools of thought:  1)  the Paris school, which developed around the wholesale market at Les Halles, and which always features beef broth  2)  the Lyon school, which demands a soup made with chicken stock, maybe because of the proximity to Lyon of Bresse and its famous  rouge-blanc-bleu chickens. I prefer the Lyonnais style, because the use of lighter flavored chicken stock allows the taste of the onions to be featured.

At Le Pichet and Cafe Presse, we add “duck jello” to our onions soup.  Duck jello is the term we use to refer to the gelatin rich duck juices that are left in the bottom of the pot when slow cooking duck legs for confit.   Clearly this is an ingredient that is not in every larder.  This sort of addition is typical of the French bistro kitchen, where nothing tasty is ever allowed to go to waste.

For  8 Servings: