Picnic in Provence by Elizabeth Bard

Author:Elizabeth Bard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

“THESE ARE BEAUTIFUL,” said Courtney as she helped me set the table in the garden. The right plate is the oldest diet trick in the book. I recently bought a whole service of Limoges dishes at a local flea market. They are white with small blue flowers, the gold rim faded by years of use. Like the French baby clothes, these old French plates are a good inch smaller in circumference than the modern set I bought at Ikea.

Today for lunch I’m making monkfish with a quick pan sauce of tomatoes, white wine, and fresh peas. Monkfish is meaty, as fish goes; if it’s not overcooked, its texture resembles lobster.

“Why do you put peas into the sauce?”

“It just looks nice—and it’s a nice contrast of textures.” I throw in the peas at the last minute so they don’t lose their crunch and their bright green color. I get the feeling that thinking about the aesthetics of food is something new to Courtney. She knows everything there is to know about the chemistry—the building blocks of food—calories, fat, carbs, protein. But a holistic approach, putting together a pretty plate, is not something she’s focused on before.

This morning she picked up the box of Alexandre’s chocolate LU petit déjeuner cookies.

“They’re not very good,” I said, in case she was thinking of wasting one of her allotted snacks on them. “But he used to like them.”

“No wonder—they’re almost two-thirds sugar,” Courtney said, studying the nutrition panel.

“How can you tell?”

“There are a little more than eight grams of sugar, which is four calories a gram. So thirty-two calories’ worth of sugar, and there are fifty-eight calories in a biscuit. The rest of the calories are fat, pretty much—there are two grams, so that’s eighteen calories. What’s not to like about sugar and fat?”

Courtney is a lot more laid back than she used to be about the timing of meals, but waiting to eat past a certain hour will bring out the gremlin in anyone. I still have a hard time convincing friends that fish is fast food in our house, but with precooked organic quinoa out of the bag (even the French don’t make everything from scratch) and steamed broccoli, this is no more than a fifteen-minute operation.

Above all, I want the food to be relaxing for her. Eating outside in the garden is a good start. I know that serving—judging a reasonable portion—is a problem area for Courtney. The French have an excellent solution to this: they never buy more than one piece of protein per person. Meat and fish are expensive.

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