Creative, maybe. Fearless, for sure.

In a comment on this blog yesterday, commenter C. asked me how I came to be so creative in the kitchen. "Creative" is not a word I would use to describe myself, but "fearless" is. I'm always ready to try something new. Yesterday, for example, I looked in the refrigerator and was reminded that we had a good bit of our Thanksgiving lamb roast left in there. I had also bought a kilogram of "flat beans"(aka "romano beans" or haricots plats) at the supermarket. Those needed to be blanched and frozen. Some of them might be good in an Asian-style stir-fry, Walt said. What a good idea. That's what I made for our lunch — I was too busy to take any photos.

This morning I was looking for some pictures to post. I was looking at photos from a range of years that I had taken on November 30, and I came up with the ones in this post. It was a lamb lasagna that I made with leg of lamb leftovers on that date in 2008. I never posted them back then, as far as I can tell. It turned out to be very good. I made it with ricotta cheese, lasagna noodles, and a tomato and vegetable sauce containing chopped and sautéed lamb. It was a successful experiment, just as the 2025 lamb stir-fry was. Here are some photos of that 2008 lamb lasagna. Scroll down to read the rest of my reminiscences.

I owe my fearlessness to several French women that I got to know in France back in the 1970s. They were excellent home cooks. The first one was a woman in Rouen whose son was a student of mine. In 1982-83 I was working as an English language teaching assistant there. It was a part-time job and it didn't pay much, but I was learning a lot of French. I was 23 years old and too cash poor to be able to afford restaurant meals.

I had learned to appreciate French food a few years earlier by eating in inexpensive restaurants when I was spending six months as a student in Aix-en-Provence, including a two-week stay in Paris over our spring break from classes in Aix. My parents, especially my mother, sent me money every week in the form of an American cashier's check that a bank in Aix would cash for me. I saved as much of that money as I could so that I could afford to spend Spring break in Paris.

Back to Rouen (in Normandy): The mother of one of my students there told her son that she'd like to meet me. She invited me to dinner at her house. We hit it off. My French was good enough for me to have good conversations with her and her three children. After a few of the dinners she served, I decided to ask her if she could explain how she made some of the dishes she made that I thought were really good. During that school year, I probably had dinner with her, her children, and sometimes American friends who were visiting the city. I learned a lot of techniques that I could practice in my little kitchen there that year. I couldn't afford many restaurant meals, but I could afford groceries. Even so, I ate a lot of inexpensive Camembert cheese and bread that year.

A few years later, in the late 1970s, I got to know a woman whose granddaughter was a student at the Sorbonne and who took an American history class that I was teaching. The student had her own apartment in Paris, and her divorced mother and widowed grandmother made Sunday dinner for the three of them every week at her mother's apartment. One day, she asked me if I'd like to come have Sunday dinner with them. I of course said yes. Her grandmother did most of the cooking and it was always delicious.

The Sunday dinners became a weekly event. I didn't ask if I could come into her kitchen to watch her work and ask questions about ingredients, methods, and techniques. Her kitchen was tiny. She was in her 80s and had spent her childhood in Burgundy, which is known for its fine cuisine. I learned so much from her, adding to what I had already learned in Rouen. Simone was her name, and as a birthday present that year she gave me a well-known French cookbook called Je sais cuisiner ("I know how to cook") written by a woman named Ginette Mathiot and published in 1970. I still have the book and consult it often for ideas and explanations. I think it has been translated into English now.