July French Field Notes

Every month in France leaves its own wake: The recipes that stuck, the pastry I kept walking back for, the pharmacy skincare finds, the phrases I tried to translate for my family (and failed to, in the best way).

Writing it all down is how I bottle the season before it slips through my fingers. It’s also how I watch the life I’m building as an American in France take shape.

So here’s what stayed with me this month. Maybe you’ll find something to borrow, or maybe it’ll spark your own list of what’s worth remembering this June.

I've been a SafetyWing customer since 2023. They covered me through my digital nomad years, and they’re still covering me today while I wait on my French health insurance (sloooooowly working its way through the system). Nomad Insurance is built for people living across borders, with the Essential plan for shorter trips, and the Complete plan as full primary health coverage that follows you between your home country and wherever you've landed.

From hospital stays to lost luggage, SafetyWing has you covered. Trust me, travel is full of unexpected plot twists (never fun in the moment, though they make for great stories later 😉). Future-you will be glad you signed up.

Thanks SafetyWing for powering today's French Field Notes!

Find Your Plan at SafetyWing

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin and Hildegarde Serle (Translator). Violette Toussaint keeps a cemetery in a small Burgundy town, and her lodge has slowly become the warm heart of the place — the gravediggers, the groundskeepers, the priest, all of them wandering in for coffee and confessions and the occasional cry. Her days run on the rhythm of other people’s grief until a police chief turns up wanting to scatter his mother’s ashes on a stranger’s grave, and the thread he pulls on turns out to be knotted into Violette’s own buried past.

I went in expecting something heavy (it’s a book set almost entirely in a cemetery) and got the opposite. Perrin finds the funny and the luminous in the most ordinary corners. It’s slow in the way I’ve come to love about French storytelling: no rush, no tidy plot, just a life unspooling detail by detail until you realize how much you care for the characters. A perfect story to read in the sun with the afternoon going nowhere (how very French of me!).

“bellevie" by marguerite. If Paris in summer could be pressed into three minutes, it would sound and look like this. It's the new single off her debut album, guérir, out October 2nd, and the chorus just chants belle vie, belle vie, belle vie — the good life — over and over until you've fully surrendered to it. Put it on and try NOT to dance. I dare you.

Cannelloni Farcis — and yes, I’m putting another Italian-adjacent dish in these notes, but hear me out. The cannelloni tubes are unmistakably Italian, and if you order them almost anywhere else, you’ll get the classic version: ricotta and spinach, tucked into the tubes and baked.

But the Niçois farci (the stuffing) tells a different story: braised beef and Swiss chard, the same savory filling that goes into our little stuffed vegetables and ravioli in the south of France. Same pasta, completely different soul. It’s a direct edible souvenir of Nice getting passed back and forth between France and Italy for centuries until 1860 (I know, I know, I bring this up every month — but the food really is the proof).

Cannelloni Farcis, Serves 4–6

Ingredients:

For the filling

• 1 lb beef chuck or leftover braised beef, finely chopped or shredded

• 1 large bunch Swiss chard (about 1 lb), stems removed

• 1 tbsp olive oil

• 1 small onion, finely diced

• 3 garlic cloves, minced

• 1 cup ricotta

• 1 large egg

• 0.5 cup grated Parmesan

• Pinch of nutmeg

• 0.5 tsp kosher salt

• 0.25 tsp black pepper

For assembly

• 12–14 dried cannelloni tubes (or fresh pasta sheets to roll)

• 3 cups tomato sauce (a good jarred marinara is fine)

• 1 cup grated Gruyère or mozzarella

• 0.25 cup grated Parmesan

Instructions:

1. Cook the beef (skip if using leftovers). Season the chuck and simmer it gently in a covered pot with a splash of red wine and water until fork-tender, about 1.5 hours. Let it cool, then chop or shred finely.

2. Wilt the chard. Blanch the chard leaves in boiling salted water for 2 minutes, drain, and squeeze out as much water as you can (really wring it, soggy filling is the enemy). Chop finely.

3. Build the filling. Warm the olive oil in a pan over medium heat and soften the onion for about 5 minutes. Add the garlic for a minute more, then the chard, and cook off any remaining moisture. Let it cool slightly, then stir together with the beef, ricotta, egg, Parmesan, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

4. Stuff the tubes. Spoon the filling into a piping bag or a zip-top bag with the corner snipped off, and pipe it into each cannelloni tube.

5. Assemble. Spread a thin layer of tomato sauce across the bottom of a baking dish. Nestle the filled tubes in a single layer, cover with the remaining sauce, and scatter the Gruyère and Parmesan over the top.

6. Bake. Cover with foil and bake at 375°F for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake another 15 until bubbling and golden on top. Let it rest 10 minutes before serving so it sets.

Notes: If you’re using dried tubes, make sure they’re fully blanketed in sauce — they cook from the moisture, so any dry edge stays chewy. Fresh pasta sheets rolled around the filling are more traditional and more forgiving if you can find them. And like the osso buco (last month’s recipe), this is a next-day-is-better situation, so don’t fear leftovers.

La Roche-Posay Cicaplast Baume B5 (affiliate links included throughout this post if you want to support my work 💕). This one comes straight from my skincare guru Natalie O’Neill, who I just happened to feature on Petal + Hearth this week (interview below). Her hack: a dab of this balm on your nose at night, right before bed. It won't remove sebaceous filaments — nothing can, since they're just oil channeling up through your pores and always refill — but it makes them look dramatically smaller by morning.

The theory is that Cicaplast is exceptionally good at sealing in hydration and stopping water loss, and hydrated skin makes pores look less noticeable than stripped, parched skin does. I've been dabbing it on my nose before bed and waking up to a smoother, less oily, better-behaved T-zone.

One caveat Natalie’s clear about: this isn’t a whole-face situation if you’re acne-prone (there’s shea butter in it), but the nose tends to be more forgiving than cheeks or chin, so most people can get away with it right where the filaments live. You can read her whole breakdown on this skincare hack here.

Lessons from Le Sud, written by a former corporate city-dweller who left the grind behind after a serious burnout, and rebuilt a slower life in the south of France. Sara Maria George’s expertise is environmental design — the idea that the spaces we move through every day unknowingly shape our mental health, our physiology, our behavior, and that most modern environments are built to overstimulate and drain us.

The flip side is the hopeful part: we can redesign the environments we live in to get our energy, focus, and calm back. Sara sends 3–4 posts a month to help you do exactly this. It scratches the same itch as my own obsession with romanticizing the everyday, but from the nervous-system-and-space angle, and I’ve been finding it surprisingly clarifying.

Okay, technically this isn’t a corner I’m sending you to, it’s a philosophy. If you’ve ever been to Nice in summer, you know the beaches are insane. We live fifteen minutes from the water and we avoid it at all costs: it’s wall-to-wall people, no shade, blistering hot, and honestly kind of miserable unless you’re willing to drop 40 euros for a seat at a beach club.

So this summer we’ve been driving inland instead, chasing the rivers. And that’s where all the locals turn out to be: picnicking on the banks, playing games, swimming in water that’s actually cool and quiet.

That’s the thing I’d tell you to revisit, or really to seek out if you come this way: the local swimming spots off the beaten path. There is nothing better than a French summer afternoon of swimming and sunshine and a card game, followed by a baguette picnic spread out on a towel: cheese, saucisson, ripe tomatoes, and a little salt.

Photo courtesy of Pinterest. I’ve got my eyes on these pieces to recreate it this month:

• MANGO | Oval-Frame Sunglasses

• MADEWELL | The ‘90s One-Shoulder Tank Top in Compact Cotton

• EAVES | Stav Mini Skirt

• BAGGU | Mini Recycled Leather Shoulder Bag

• PEUGEOT | Women’s Square Watch With Glossy Brown Leather Strap

• DOLCE VITA | Ramia Kitten Heel Flip Flop

Profiter. To make the most of a moment — to squeeze every drop of pleasure out of it while it’s happening. The French say it constantly: profite bien! as you leave for the weekend, il faut en profiter when the sun finally comes out.

“Enjoy” is the closest English gets, but it’s missing half the meaning. Enjoy is usually just about the pleasure — profiter is pleasure plus the awareness that this won’t last, so you’d better be all the way inside it now.

It’s the sunshine you drop everything for because next week it might rain. The river afternoon you stretch as long as you can. The second swim because there might not be another day this good. English needs a whole phrase to carry it — “make the most of it,” “take advantage while you can” — where French just has the one verb.

About the Author:

Hey there! I’m Olivia, the heart behind Petal + Hearth. I’m a full-time Substack writer, originally from California, now living in the south of France. Here, I write about life abroad, what I dub ✨main character energy ✨, and what it really takes to build a creative business you love. When I’m not writing, I’m teaching other writers on how to grow their own Substack publications. It’s the kind of life I once only dreamed about, and I’m so glad you’re here for it.

Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:

🍭 Founding members get a personal annual Substack audit, plus monthly groups coaching calls and more.

🪩 How to Take Your Substack Full-Time is my full course for going from a newsletter you love to an income you can live on.

✨ Get your product or service in front of my audience through a sponsored newsletter.

❤️‍🔥 And if you want to hang outside of your inbox, find me Instagram or LinkedIn!!

💬 Feel free to like or comment on this newsletter so more Substack users can find it!