Olive

Get in “The Zone.” These calzones are meat-free, super hearty, and super healthy. Eat up, chow down, and enjoy.

Serve with a green salad.

This one is good for B, L, D: brunches, lunches, or dinners.

Caponata is an eggplant dish normally served as a relish or appetizer, but I am so fond of it that I keep reinventing ways to add it to each cookbook I write. I’ve topped polenta with it, tossed it with pasta, packed it into sub sandwiches, and now, here we go again . . .

This one is fun for kids, like me. Serve as is, or accompany with black beans or refried beans and plain or flavored rice, prepared according to the package directions.

Pedro Almodovar is my favorite foreign film director—I have his whole library. My favorite film and the one I most relate to: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

In this recipe we use the olive sauce both to glaze the fish during roasting and to serve alongside it. It has an elusive sweet, savory flavor that will have your dinner guests smiling. It’s also a good use of leftover coffee. Leftover sauce is wonderful with grilled steaks and tossed over roasted potatoes.

Visiting the marketplace of Carpentras, near Avignon, we almost missed the synagogue, the oldest still-functioning one in France, dating back to 1367 and renovated in the eighteenth century. The façade, like that of all synagogues in France, was nondescript, whereas inside it was a jewel box of eighteenth-century Greek Corinthian columns, and all around, the interior was decorated in rose, green, blue, and yellow. As in the synagogue in nearby Cavaillon, the rabbi’s pulpit was perched upstairs, above the congregants. “In 1358, the provincial town of Carpentras was known as La Petite Jérusalem,” Jennie Lévy told us during a tour. “A yellow cloth on their coats and on the women’s bonnets indicated that they were Jewish.” Today about eighty Jewish families live in Carpentras and the surrounding area, most of them emigrants from Morocco. Madame Lévy, who came from Safi, Morocco, in 1964, showed me the basement, which has a mikveh (ritual bath), fed by a natural spring, and an oven used for baking Sabbath bread, as well as another for matzo. As I listened to Madame Lévy’s eloquent history of this French synagogue, I was aware again of how Sephardic Jews are rekindling Jewish life in France. Since it was on Friday when we visited, Madame Lévy was anxious to go home to prepare her Sabbath dinner of vegetable soup, meatballs, and sautéed red peppers and haricots verts, the thin French green beans that are so absolutely delicious.

After getting reacquainted over a game of Ping-Pong with Caroline and Philippe Moos, cousins I had not seen in many years, I joined them for a dairy dinner with four of their nine children in their house in Aix-les-Bains (see page 212). The meal was delicious, consisting of a vegetable soup, an apricot tart for dessert, and this Savoyard tomato-and-cheese quiche as the main course. This is one of those great recipes in which you can substitute almost any leftover cheese you may have in your refrigerator.

Michel Kalifa is one of the few butchers in France who go through the laborious process of removing the many veins in a leg of lamb, a process that is integral to koshering. Because of the difficulties in koshering a leg of lamb, most people will use the shoulder, which he loves as well. Glancing lovingly at his wife, he said, “A thigh of a woman is as nimble and light as a shoulder of lamb.” Here is an old Jewish Provençal recipe for a shoulder of lamb. Make it, as Michel Kalifa would, with a caress of garlic.

When Céline Bénitah cooks this dish, she blanches the olives for a minute to get rid of the bitterness, a step that I never bother with. If you keep the pits in, just warn your guests in order to avoid any broken teeth! Céline also uses the marvelous Moroccan spice mixture ras el hanout, which includes, among thirty other spices, cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, cloves, and paprika. You can find it at Middle Eastern markets or through the Internet, or you can use equal amounts of the above spices or others that you like. To make my life easier, I assemble the spice rub the day before and marinate the chicken overnight. The next day, before my guests arrive, I fry the chicken and simmer it.

Sweetly glazed and flavored with preserved lemons, this chicken, a recipe from Irene Weil, brings a Moroccan flavor to a classic French roasted chicken. Recipes like this represent the new France, with its influences from all over the world. Irene, married to a Frenchman for more than thirty years, was born in the United States to parents who came from Vienna. Even though she raised her children in France, she still has an American sense of adventure in her cooking.