France

Here's a beautiful and substantial salad suitable as a main course for a light lunch or on a picnic. It is full of the sunny Mediterranean flavors of southern France: olives, tuna, anchovies, tuna, tomatoes. I made this one in December for a special feast, so I used sun-dried tomatoes instead of "fresh" ones, and it was great.

The foundation of this is a bed of nice green lettuce dressed with Sauce Vinaigrette and topped with French Potato Salad and cold blanched green beans, then dressed with anchovies, hard-cooked eggs, and everything else.

This exquisite anchovy-based spread is wonderful on crudites or on toasted baguette rounds. It's the kind of recipe that leaves your guests wondering what all the flavors are. This recipe is said to come from the occultist, folklorist, and "celebrated gastronome" Count Austin de Croze (1866-1937), by way of Martha's Vineyard restaurateur, cookbook author, and cycling enthusiast Sarah Leah Chase's Pedaling Through Provence. 

Here's a tasty salty-sweet spread from Provence that is easy to make in quantity. Use good olives, not the woody canned variety. If you cannot get the figs, 1/3 cup of fig jam is an acceptable substitute. Serve this on crackers or on toasted baguette rounds, or with crudites.

Here's another French dish with a creamy sauce, this time sparked up with paprika. You bake the breasts in a savory onion-butter-paprika base, then use that base on the stovetop to prepare a creamy sauce.

When you're done, you'll have a lot of sauce, but it goes great over rice or with boiled new potatoes. If you want a more elegant presentation than shown here, you can serve the breasts with minimal sauce and pass the rest in a gravy boat.

This dish of chicken breasts with mushrooms and a cider cream sauce is a hearty fall or winter dish. The chicken breasts (or thighs) are sauteed in butter with mushrooms, then flamed with calvados and braised in cider until tender and cooked through. Then the sauce is finished with heavy cream and an egg yolk to thicken it, making it awesome comfort food. 

The sauce is delicious, so consider serving this with rice or potatoes, or crusty bread - you will want to get every bit of the sauce!