Jambon du canard or how to make some ham out of a duck breast

First you need a duck breast, of course.

Then we dredged it in our seasonings.

Specifically, this stuff. And did you know that the herbs de Provence does not have lavender in it in France? I bought some here in the U.S., and it has lavender.

In addition to the herb de provence we also used some pimento. Not like in the olive in your martini. It was dried.

Now comes the coarse salt--lots of it. Both sides. And lots of peppercorns.

We then put our duck breast in the fridge....hmmmm, overnight? or longer? I'm not quite sure. I'll look into that. But when we took it out of the fridge, we rinsed it, wrapped it up in cheesecloth and hung it up from the kitchen light fixture. Not something you see in your average American kitchen.

And the curing duck breast hung there until the end of the week. In another post I'll show you what happened to it.

Cooking in France; A new life for this little blog

Thanks to the Virgina Center for Creative Arts, I spent a month in France in 2009. I started this blog there and wrote quite a bit during my blogaholic month. Every now and then when something French popped into my daily life in subsequent years, I posted here again. But then life got crazy and full of turmoil as life does, and the enjoyable French things fell away. I posted on my other blog now and then, but not here. Now I've just come back from a week-long cokking vacation in France and I want to organize what I learned so I can easily find my photos as I work through the recipies provided by the vrai chef du cuisine who ran the workshop. I won't be sharing recipies, since they are not really my creations,but the photos, I think, will be pretty helpful for any beginner working through a recipe. And just plain pretty. Here's where the four participants, two chefs, the administrator of the program, Let's Eat the World, and our kitchen helper stayed and cooked.

Every room in this house, constructed originally in the 1500s was gorgeous.