COOKING BROWN RICE IN CROCK POT

For thousands of years, homemakers around the Mediterranean – food-driven by necessity, not by choice -- have used nothing more than sun and salt for curing. Given enough time, a simple brine can remove the bitterness from olives and give them a ripe, balanced, bracing flavor which is what I am doing with the darker half of these Lucques (pronounced "Luke")

Cultivated only in the West of Languedoc-Roussillon, Lucques have a smooth curve and pointed tip. Its pulp is firm and crunchy with a delicate flavor like no other. It is gathered green from September to mid-October. It is an excellent table olive, but not great for cooking as it doesn’t hold up to the heat. Some foodies consider Lucques the best green table olive in the world.

Olives ripen over several months, going from green in late summer and early fall, to maroon in late fall, to black in winter. Olive trees can be laden with olives at three stages of ripeness at one time, in varying proportions according to the time of year, that is why it’s best to hand pick them. If you wait for them to shrivel and fall they have already lost most of their fleshy flavor.

Green olives that are lye-cured or cured in potash in the old traditional way (green ones lend themselves best to that method) can be the mildest of olives; lye extracts the glucosides and other water soluble flavors from the fruit. After lye curing, flavor must be added in the form of a salt brine or a marinade.

These olives can also be used to produce a very good olive oil, but the oil is very hard to extract from them so it commands a high price. Just this morning I was telling my sister that I was not going to do olives this year; last year, I picked a lesser quality type and far too late in the season (as they get black and old they loose their flavor). The ones I cured last year were too small to make it worth the trouble. But then today, my mind was changed when I saw on government property a Lucques olive tree laden with green beauties. Big, full, plump olives as wide as my thumb. The lye is cooking on the wood stove; we lit our first fire tonight. Picked through the basket and got two liters of perfect green ones which I will do a lye bath and then brine; I am salt brining the darker olives (4 liters) directly. I might just go back for more. Lucques are my absolute favorite olive in the world.

Mussels are a specialty of this seaside village and one of David's favourite foods. This was a HUGE pot, cooked in white wine. It took him so long to eat them that I ended up leaving him in the restaurant and walking around the village!

Lower Normandy, and in particular the department of La Manche, produces 25-30% of France’s mussels. All of Normandy’s mussel producers market the mussels under the collective national brand Moules de Bouchot, which was registered in 1994 and guarantees a method of culture that will produce high-quality mussels.

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