France

This is a hearty winter dish, bursting with flavor and calories! I think this would be good after shoveling snow for an hour. It's quite easy, you just boil potatoes and then simmer them in cream and top with cooked andouille sausage. The andouille is spicy (especially if you use an American Cajun variety), but the cream and the potatoes moderate the punchiness to a fine degree; this is easy to gobble down more than you should.

A fougasse is a French focaccia, often cut into elaborate shapes for more crusty surface area. If you are in the area of Kittery, Maine, you can find excellent full and half-size fougasse at Beach Pea Bakery that you would be proud to bring to any family event.

You can make it yourself, if you have a few hours to allow time for the dough to rise; baking takes under 30 minutes. If you want to do the traditional sourdough version and you don't have a starter, you can make one but it takes a few days to get really active, or you could try the Biga Starter, which is ready in a day.

The cuts are important. They serve to provide more crusty surface for the bread. This bread is not a light, airy load, it's all about the olive oil and salt and other flavors that you include. It's great with wine and cheese.

This has been called the most expensive omelette in the world, which it may be at 35 Euros if you get it at its birthplace in the shadow of the imposing Mont St-Michel on a little island off Normandy. There's some lore about it that seems to be more a matter of effective marketing than of actual tradition.

So what is it? It's a very fluffy omelet with nothing else. Much has been written about how to achieve the proper fluffiness, but the official recipe is a secret of that restaurant and the various attempts that you see online cover a wide range of efforts. 

From what I can pull together from the history, a brief description by Mere Annette Poulard herself, the many articles about it, and my own attempts, I think I have something that is very close to what she would have served in her little kitchen in 19th century Normandy.

Here's a surprisingly simple, delicious pie for luncheon or breakfast that you can whip up in under an hour. It works best if all ingredients are at room temperature when you begin.

This is a base recipe for a number of classic French white fish recipes. I use sole here, but you could use the same recipe for any white fish: cod, hake, flounder, haddock, etc. This works with trout too.

This is the classic cassoulet recipe lightly adapted to the American kitchen from the master recipe published by the Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary. 

And if you're a cassoulet nerd of the fanatical variety, then you need to know about D'Artagnan's annual Cassoulet War in New York City!

Here I'll do my best to present something authentic and cookable.   

This delicious quiche highlights the little Maine shrimp, with some layers of complexity added by sauteed mushrooms and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese in a cheesy quiche-custard.  

The little Maine shrimp are hard to find, but worth the search. I got a pound of them frozen, cleaned and ready to cook at Pinkham's Seafood in Boothbay, Maine. 

Mushrooms add a great note to all manner of crustacean dishes - shrimp, crab, and of course lobster. Mushrooms also feature prominently in Russian cuisine, so in this recipe I bring in a Russian note with a pinch of dill.

For cheese I used the fine Italian Parmigiana-Reggiano for the warmth that it brings. In hot weather I might try a ricotta, but I made this on a rainy, blustery Mother's Day so the king of Italian cheeses was called into service.