French vegtables

Well today I consulted mastering the art of French cooking for a recipe for cucumbers and found that you can bake them and to my surprise they need to be baked for 1 hour. While this may sound crazy because you probably think I ended up with a burnt mess I got a wonderfully seasoned and soft cucumber that had a taste of dill that made it seem like a classy dill pickle. I found it amazing that the way to remove there natural moisture was mentioned by julia child was not exactly to blanch them but to leave them in a bowl with salt,vinegar, and sugar. You can season the cucumbers with either dill or basil but I prefer dill it just seems like the spice for cucumbers. (recipe on pg 500 in mastering the art of French cooking.). The other side dish I made was creamed spinach in "french classics made easy" by Richard Grausman. And straight off the one thing I love about this French cool book is that it really does break things down and delivers authentic French food that a beginner cook can manage. The creamed spinach recipe I made (pg 191). Was simple because all I did was boil fresh spinach, right after I boiled it I refreshed it with cold water to stop the cooking and tossed it into a blender where I added white sauce to it and freshly grounded nutmeg to it. The dish was very edible and had a nice autumn spice to it from the nutmeg. My family thought it was pumpkin spice which made me laugh because some pumpkin spices do have but meg but maybe next time I'll add some pumpkin spice to it...