If you have more than one or two cloves of garlic to peel, soak them in water first for a few minutes. You’ll find the papery outer skins slip right off once you’ve done this.

I bought the Terrine Forestière aux cepes, in the end. €3,45 for 250 grammes. It’s pork liver paté with cepe mushrooms in it.

This is a very old, very Mediterranean dish – squished up olives, garlic, anchovies and capers. Cato the Elder wrote about it; the Greeks probably had it, too, since the Romans nicked many of their recipes from them.Now, it’s a Provençal dish – tapenade comes from the Occitan word Tapenas, which means capers. So, don’t let anyone tell you the capers are optional.Originally the olives would be squished up in a pestle and mortar; now I do it with my trusty stick blender.I take one jar of green olives, 500g dry weight (it’s about a kilo with the water inside too – I drain out the water, obviously). To this I add a jar of anchovies (100g), the oil inside as well; half a jar of capers (30g of capers), and two – four cloves of garlic, depending on how old the garlic is and how many of my wife’s aunts vampires I need to repel.All this gets squished down into the olive jar with the stick mixer. I drizzle in some olive oil – just enough to get it moving, really, otherwise it becomes a dipping sauce rather than a spreading paste. Say, 25-50ml. Keep mixing with the stick mixer until it forms a fairly smooth paste. Some people like lumps in their tapenade, some like it to be completely smooth. Up to you.Some people add other things to their tapenade: onion, herbs, lemon juice, brandy – as I’ve said before, peasant foods like this, bouillabaisse, cassoulet, tartiflette and all the rest are made with whatever you have lying around at the time. Spread it on croutons. I make mine by slicing up baguette or, here, some of the fennel and sesame seed loaves I made yesterday, adding a little olive oil, some herbes de Provence and a very little salt, then baking them in the oven at 200°C for 20 minutes, turning the baking tray once to ensure they’re evenly coloured.I usually make tapenade with green olives simply because they’re the easiest to find which have already been de-stoned, but in fact I prefer black tapenade personally. Black olives have more depth of flavour for me, but they’re less common and more expensive.Black olives are more expensive as they stay on the trees for longer – black ones are riper than green ones. But leaving them on the trees costs money (time=money, remember) and also runs a greater risk of them being hit with a frost, which ruins the harvest.Note also that properly cured ‘black’ olives are usually violet-dark purple in colour, not midnight black as you often see them in shops. Those that are very black have often been coloured with food dye.We do get olives from the tree in our garden and I try to let them go black normally before curing them. But that’s a story for another day. Today, it’s tapenade on a crouton with a glass of Muscat before Sunday lunch.

Bruce Feirstein’s book* came out while I was at university. It was a something of a shock, really – I quite liked quiche, so was a bit disappointed to discover that it made me an unreal man. I shrugged off the pain and the hurt eventually, though, and have been making and eating quiche ever since.It’s originally German – ‘Quiche’ comes from the German word ‘Kuchen’ or cake – but from the part of Germany which is now French and called Lorraine, hence Quiche Lorraine, an open flan with smoked bacon. Add onions and it’s Quiche Alsacienne, also a now-French part of Germany.Whatever; it’s really easy to make, especially if, like me, you cannot be faffed to mix flour and water and some fat together to make pastry. Frankly, a euro buys very nice pastry of many kinds here so I’m right out of faff when it comes to pastry.I usually make two at a time, because. Well, because everyone in the family loves it basically and if I only make one there’s none left for me by the time I get out of the kitchen to the dining table.I unroll the bought puff pastry into a round baking tin, using the paper it’s wrapped in to line the tin, then ensure the side bits are well formed up the sides of the tin.Next, I fill it with my baking beans (some old white beans from somewhere, no idea how long I’ve had them now.) Ensure that you put a circle of greaseproof or silicone paper in the base of the quiche first or the beans will stick into the pastry. Ask me how I know. OK, I know because last time I forgot the lining.Bake it for 10-15 minutes – this, you can tell your less professional friends, is ‘Blind baking’.  I also pierce the pastry many times with a fork to allow the steam to escape – it’s this expanding steam inside puff pastry which makes it rise.Once that’s done, I take out the beans and allow it to cool while mixing the filling, and despite what traditionalists will try to insist you can add more or less anything you like. I’ve even made chocolate and marshmallow quiches which went down very well.This time I made an Alsacienne, with bacon and onions, and a tuna and sun-dried tomato quiche which my wife Delphine and I loved and which the girls Scarlett and Roxanne would not touch because it looks suspiciously as though it contains vegetables (6 and 8 year olds are, as every parent knows, allergic to vegetables).200g of lardons and 200g – approximately – of onions does the job.The ‘appareil’, the mixture I make up in a jug, contains 200ml of cream (I use 30% fat content just because that’s what’s most widely sold in France, I’d use double/40% if I could find it), a healthy pinch of salt, some ground pepper and three whole eggs which all get whizzed up using my faithful stick mixer.I  add 100-200g of grated cheese to the base of the tart, then spread the bacon lardons (or tuna and chopped sun-dried tomatoes or the grated chocolate and chopped marshmallows) on top of that, then finish by pouring the appareil over that. My wife’s family has a tradition of spreading a thick layer of mustard onto the base of the tart whenever they make tuna quiche. Tastes quite nice, but you need a LOT of mustard to be able to taste it at all. Into the oven for 15 minutes at 180°C, turn it round 180° and give it another 5-10 minutes. Until, basically, it doesn’t wobble any more in the middle when you shake it gently.It rises somewhat when you take it out of the oven and, if you can, serve it right now. Otherwise it will fall but still taste delicious.* Yes, I am aware that it was a satirical book. No, I do not think that I am unreal. Or undead. I may be unlikely, however.