google8659429ea0063bde.html The Rambling Epicure

The Rambling Epicure

JONELL GALLOWAY Freelance food writer and translator, cooking instructor, recipe developer and tester

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I ramble around the world, mainly in Switzerland and Europe, looking for good food and restaurants. Until recently, I shared my discoveries with my friends on my blog, The Rambling Epicure, on genevalunch.com, where my posts are still available for viewing. I develop recipes using local ingredients, write about restaurants and local products and just about anything that is food-related.

But I wear a coat of many colors, so I am available for food writing of all types, including writing of restaurant guides; private cooking classes using my Spontaneous Cuisine method; organization of wine and food tastings, cooking demonstrations, and all food-related events; recipe development using your products; translation (French-English-Spanish) of food- and wine-related materials; design and conception of restaurant menus.

I studied cooking at the Cordon Bleu and La Varenne in Paris, and wine tasting here, there and everywhere in France and at CAVE S.A. in Geneva and Gland. In France, I worked for some years as a contributing editor for the English edition of the GaultMillau guide and as a food translator, while I ran a small cooking school in a château near Paris. I now live in Geneva, where I have been discovering the Swiss approach to gastronomy and oenology. One of my many interests is promoting Les Artisanes de la Vigne et du Vin as an ambassadress for this Swiss women wine producers association.

My cooking method is "spontaneous cuisine." Lessons consist of writing out a tentative menu based on seasonal, local products; going shopping for the products, and adapting the menu according to what is available and fresh; going to the wine seller to select a wine to go with the menu, then going home and cooking all afternoon with my students. The day ends with a candlelight dinner at the château (in the past), and now, at my chapel converted into a house in Chartres or in your home.

I have recently started giving Mindful Eating seminars and therapy for those who have problem relationships with food and eating in general, helping them reconstruct their lifestyle and relationship to food and eating.

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3 posts tagged French cuisine

It’s apple season: Matefin à la pomme / apple pancakes/pie

by Jonell Galloway

O Délices discovered this recipe on blog de Guillemette.

This is a traditional recipe from the Savoy, so it’s not so far from us in Switzerland.

The original name comes from the French mâte faim. Peasants prepared these potato pancakes in the morning before going to work in the fields. It was meant to keep them going until lunchtime.

This version uses apples instead of potatoes, and is perfect for the apple season, which has just started here in Switzerland.

Jonell Galloway is editor of the popular international food chronicle The Rambling Epicure.

 

Op-Ed: Why I don’t like French salads

by Jonell Galloway

We all know what a Francophile I am, especially when it comes to food and wine.

But there is ONE thing the French do which really gets on my nerves!

In the first place, rare is the restaurant that uses good lettuce. Mesclun is considered some kind of luxury, and now that I’ve lived in Switzerland, I’m accustomed to eating the wild greens and mesclun fresh from the mountains. So the supermarket lettuce in France is really not to my liking.

The other thing that really annoys me is that they just throw a bit of vinaigrette on top of the salad, and the bowl is invariably too small to allow one to mix the greens and the vinaigrette without spilling it out onto the table, so I inevitably end up feeling like a klutz.

Of course, Julia Child’s Niçoise salad, when made with top quality, fresh, local ingredients, is impeccable. Ironically and unfortunately, Nice is about the hardest place to find a good Niçoise. The tomatoes are invariably hothouse from Holland, even in the middle of the summer, and the green beans are frozen in the height of the green bean season.

My conclusion is that French restaurants most often just throw salads together, and don’t consider it real cuisine, so they can’t be bothered. But if you really like or yearn for a salad, this is disappointing, especially since the salads are overpriced, as if they were “real” cuisine.

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THE RAMBLING EPICURE

by Jonell Galloway

Corby Kummer of The Atlantic Food is one of today’s most passionate and interesting interviewers in the world of food. In this video, he has brought together Jacques Pépin, Judith Jones (who studied under Julia Child) and Alex Prud’homme (Julia’s great-nephew who finished her autobiography after she died) to discuss their impression of the film Julie and Julia.

For those of us who grew up on Julia, this interview provides an enlightening picture not only of who she was as a person, but of the importance of her mission. Like I, Julia Child believed that French cuisine was the only Western cuisine that was codified, and that if you learned all the basic techniques, you were set for life. You didn’t need a cookbook anymore, because you could then create whatever dish you wanted, using the techniques as building blocks for your own recipes.

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