Le pique-unique - A typical French picnic with seven different foods/drinks to represent the seven days of the week. These dishes are simple and delicious. The items are the Camembert with crudités and baguette, the fougasse, the pissaladière, vols-au-vent, the salade lyonnaise, profiteroles and a bottle of French red wine.
Salut mes amis!! Aujourd'hui on va préparer un pique-nique! This is one of the things I love doing the most. Unfortunately, living in the UK, where the weather isn't as great, it's not something I do very often anymore. When I was a kid, living in Malta was a dream, as we had picnics pretty much every Sunday during Autumn and Spring.
However, these past few days there have been some nice sunny days so I decided to prepare a picnic with a difference. Since with this post we're learning the seven days of the week in French, I decided to find seven things to eat/drink on a picnic.
Les plats
- camembert
- fougasse
- pissaladière
- vols-au-vent
- salade lyonniase
- profiteroles
- vin
The dishes
- camembert
- fougasse
- pissaladière
- vols-au-vent
- Lyonnaise salad
- profiteroles
- wine
Méthode / Method
Le Camembert
The camembert is a soft creamy cheese with a ripened surface made from cow's milk. Its origins come from the French northern region of Normandy. There are various toppings one could put on their oven cooked camembert. On this occasion, I decided to go with some olive oil, garlic, parsley, salt, pepper and some sundried tomatoes.
La Fougasse
Fougasse is a typical French bread, very similar to the focaccia in Italy. It originated in Provence, however, there are various variations found in other regions. The Provence version dough for the fougasse usually has olives, cheese or anchovies. For today. I decided to add caramelised red onion and smoked bacon cubes. The fougasse has a very particular shape. It usually has the form of a leaf, with two slashes in its middle and three slashes on each side.
The ingredients for this amazing bread are olive oil, a red onion, some chopped bacon, strong white bread flour, dried yeast, salt and sea salt flakes.
Pissaladière
The pissaladière is a dish originating from the beautiful city of Nice in the South of France. The dough is usually a bread dough thicker than that of the classic pizza, and the traditional topping consists of usually caramelised (almost pureed) onions, black olives, and anchovies. Now served as an appetizer, it was traditionally cooked and sold early each morning around Nice.
Vols-au- vent
A literal translation of 'vol-au-vent' in French means for "windblown", to describe the lightness of these pastries. These small hollowed cases are typically made by cutting two circles of rolled out puff pastry and then cutting a hole in one of them. Then, stacking the one with the hole on top of the whole circled one. After being baked in the oven, vols-au-vent are usually filled with savoury ingredients such as creamy mushroom. In France, these are served as an appetiser. For today, I went with mushrooms, fresh cream, parsley, salt and pepper.
Salade lyonnaise
This traditional Lyonnaise salad originates from the city of Lyon. It usually consists of green salad, fried bacon cubes, croutons topped up with a poached egg. The dressing is quite simple; olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and parsley.
Profiteroles
A profiterole, also known in France as choux à la crème is a choux pastry ball filled with pastry cream, custard or whipped cream. These are then most of the time covered with chocolate sauce, caramel or a dusting of icing sugar. You could also get savoury profiteroles, which are usually filled with minced meat and cheese.
Vin
Finally, I decided to add a bottle of red wine with all this amazing food. Today I went with a red wine; a Bordeaux but you could easily replace that with a Rosé, a white wine or even a non-alcoholic drink.
Planning and preparing this picnic has been great fun. Then, I got to enjoy all the lovely food and wine in the sun. I'm sure you'll enjoy all this lovely food. It's a good excuse to meet up with family and friends and eat food!
Make sure to follow me on social media for more frequent updates and photos!! Prepare your wonderful picnics and go enjoy the sun while it lasts! Also, don't forget to tag your photos to #thelanguageskitchen so I can see what else you enjoy taking on picnics. Until next week..au revoir! x
