French Food for Everyone: le dner

This second chapter showcases twelve recipes to make and enjoy for dinner. Often, when people hear "French food" they assume the recipe will be too complicated, the ingredients too hard to find, the techniques too fussy for them to attempt at home. In Mardi's first book, In the French kitchen with kids, she proved otherwise. Children and adults alike all over the world discovered that French food was easy to make at home. That good quality ingredients can be transformed with simple techniques to make delicious dishes.

Ok, but what about le dner - the main meal of the day - isn't that going to require some more complex skills? Not necessarily, even though some of them have reputations for being hard to make - (French) Onion Soup, for example. But when you look at the recipes themselves, there's nothing too complicated for a home cook. Some of the recipes (i.e. the aforementioned soup) do take time - the Daube de Boeuf is one you'll want to plan for (it's an "all afternoon to cook" meal but with very little hands-on time) but many of these recipes are simple enough to make even on a weeknight.

These dozen recipes are by no means representative of the breadth of French cuisine; rather these are dishes Mardi has come to love over the years living in and traveling to France. Nostalgic dishes (Bavette l'chalote), comfort food dishes (Tartiflette) and Bistro favourites (Daube de Boeuf) meet beloved classics like Poulet rti (roast chicken but with a quick twist).

Won't you sit down to dinner, French-style, and work your way through this collection of recipes, maybe learning a little kitchen French and French history along the way?

Advance Praise

Every year, dozens of cookbooks that claim to offer you the key to honest real-people French cooking are published. This one is the real McCoy. I knew this as soon as I saw the recipe for endives wrapped up in ham, a dish my mother-in-law in the north of France makes for us everytime we visit. Mardi is both a charming writer and a very honest expert on real-people French cooking, which makes her new book absolutely invaluable.
--Alexander Lobrano, author of Hungry for Paris, Hungry for France and My Place at the Table

French family dinner favorites, each with a little twist, each with a bit of advice or two to get things just right. I will recommend this book series to all of my students - because Mardi, a natural teacher, in walking us through each dish, opens the gate to French cooking, making it accessible and enjoyable.
- Lucy Vanel, Plum Lyon Teaching Kitchen, France