Asparagus and Tomato Flan

Vegetarian, gluten-free.

Jul 19, 2025

Bonjour and welcome to this recipe no. 17.

Do you know what the French's favorite subject is? The weather! The television news always starts with the weather. When you pick up the phone, it invites itself into the conversation. If you meet your neighbors - and harmony reigns - it becomes our accomplice. To fill a silence or start an exchange, it extends its hand to us. My whole family consulted it three times a day during my childhood. This is one of our cultural singularities.

So I delved into this enigma: where does this French meteorological passion come from? Our country enjoys remarkable climatic diversity - oceanic, continental, Mediterranean, mountainous - which makes the weather inconstant, unpredictable and therefore fascinating. It can be twenty degrees in Nice while snowing in Strasbourg the same day. These contrasts nourish our daily conversations.

Until the mid-20th century, a large part of our compatriots lived off the land. Weather then reigned at the heart of existence, dictating harvests, movements and moods. Since the fifties, it has become a television ritual, broadcast after the news with that sometimes poetic, sometimes dramatic tone that characterizes us.

In France, we love to philosophize, complain, observe, and weather offers that perfect mirror. Is it raining? We grumble. Too hot? We worry. Beautiful weather? We savor. An excellent pretext for expressing our emotions without talking about ourselves directly.

Our writers, from Proust to Giono, have often used the weather to set an atmosphere, reflect an era, translate introspection. This shows that weather also inhabits our poetic and cultural imagination.

It remains a universal and neutral subject: everyone can talk about it without creating tension. Perfect excuse to start a conversation with a stranger, revive a silence, avoid a delicate subject. It works everywhere: in the elevator, at the bakery, at the market... Next time you meet someone, try it and you'll see.

And right now in Provence? The weather is radiant, perhaps too much so. The sun reigns supreme, and I confess to having high spirits these past days. We climbed to thirty-seven degrees. Curiously, most of us southerners don't have air conditioning - surprising for France's hottest region, when even the West equips all its houses! So we open all the windows wide from eight in the evening and close them early in the morning, between six and eight, to preserve the coolness. This too is living Provençal style: in summer, we rise with the sun and the cicadas.

Catherine Laborde — Tribute to our beloved weather presenter, Catherine Larborde, who passed away at the beginning of 2025 at the age of seventy-three. She orchestrated the weather on the first French channel for twenty-eight years, from 1988 to 2017! An emblematic figure of our television, she cradled my childhood and accompanied me until I was twenty-three.

Heat, heat... Here's a summer dish for eating healthily and especially lightly: asparagus and tomato flan.