David Lebovitz

One thing I've learned in France, is that if someone who's an expert tells you to eat something—you should eat it. (Except squid, of course.) When I lead tours, right before I place their hand on the bible, I make guests promise that if I tell them they have to try something, they will. It's not that I'm on commission, it's just I've sifted through a lot of stuff and it's not worth filling up on the bland when the extraordinary is within equidistant tasting distance.

When my girlfriends Peggy Smith and Sue Conley, who make the wonderful cheeses of Cowgirl Creamery, were in town recently for the Salon du Fromage, they were surprised to be honored with a medaille along with an induction into the French Guilde des Fromagers.

I'd met Peggy way back around 1983, when I started working at Chez Panisse. She was a chef and I was a bit scared of her, standing over a large lamb carcass wielding a large, and very sharp knife, getting the beast ready to roast on the spit.

My recent banana windfall gave me the chance to play around a bit with various banana ice cream combinations. Although I loved the taste of this one, frankly, I wasn't sure I should post the recipe.

Since bananas are such a natural partner for coconut, I reasoned, "Why use milk or cream when there's coconut milk? So I reached for a can of it. Continuing with that train I thought, I had a bag of jaggery, raw cane sugar that's used in Indian cuisine.

I'd bought the husky, ultra-dark sugar up near the gare du Nord, in the Indian and Sri Lankan neighborhood, for no other reason than I was attracted to its rich color and the aggressive scent that wafted through the bag when I pressed it against my nose. When I moved to Paris, I remember people telling me to avoid that neighborhood, that it wasn't safe. But it's become one of my favorite quartiers, mostly because of the lively ethnic communities that have settled there. (As well as being the home to the Paris chapter of the Hell's Angels.)

I'm always surprised when people say that they don't have time to cook. I mean, aside from reproducing, physiologically, we don't really exist on this earth for any other reason. (Unless someone knows something that they're not telling me.) Feeding ourselves is really our most basic human need.

Now if someone said, "I don't have time to clean up afterward", then I can totally relate. I spend at least 40% of my life standing in front of a sink, washing dishes. When people ask if they can come and help me test recipes, I always say, "Bring rubber gloves!" And that's the last I hear from them.

This is one of my very favorite, go-to dinners. It's incredibly easy and there's hardly any dishes to wash; just toss chicken pieces in olive oil, vinegar, soy sauce, and shallots in a baking dish. Season with salt and pepper, and pop it in the oven.

I'm happy to be taking care of two things with this recipe. One is that about a week ago, I was late to the market, arriving near the end, when everyone was packing up to leave. Scanning quickly to see what I could procure in a short amount of time, I passed by a stand where one fellow lorded over an enormous pile of organic bananas, and was hollering, "Un euro, deux kilos!...Un euro—deux kilos!"

Since that's roughly a buck for a little over four pounds of fruit, I stopped right there, and took as many as I could carry off his hands. And then, he threw another bunch in my basket after I paid. So I had a whole bunch of bananas...five, to be precise...which was great. But I was a little concerned about having what looked to be like around fifty bananas for just one person.

Once home, as they started ripening during the week, seemingly all at once, a mild panic set in. So I called into service a recipe from my archives, one of my all-time favorites: Banana and Chocolate Chip Upside-Down Cake.

When I was speaking at the Blogher Food Conference last year, one of the organizers was telling us that on the last day of each month, she carries out what she calls E-mail Amnesty Day. On that day, she deletes all her e-mail in her Inbox, then issues an all-points-bulletin to everyone she knows that if there was anything important in there, to e-mail her again. She swore that it drastically reduced her e-mail and any meltdowns one might have trying to answer it all.

I thought that was an interesting idea, and when I looked around my apartment the other day, (which wasn't half as scary as my Inbox), I realized that I had a huge miscellany of half-bags and jars of stuff left over from various baking projects, odds and ends that I was saving, which I said to myself (at the time) that I'd certainly use in the future. And this weekend, I thought it was high time to do something about it and get rid of them all, to do an exhaustive, clean sweep and get rid of everything.

What also prompted the purge was when I read where Adam made something called "Compost Cookies", a recipe which includes anything you wish to dump in it, from chocolate chips to Fritos.

Like Pistachio Gelato or Polenta Ice Cream, this recipe might fall into the category of "Things You Can't Make" for some of you.

Yes, bergamots aren't something one runs across everyday in the supermarket, or even at greengrocers. But mid-winter, depending on where you live, you just might get lucky and happen across some, as I recently did. Twice! (Although the second time took a bit of moxie.)

There's conflicting information what a bergamot actually is, but it's definitely a member of the citrus family and most consider it to be a relative of the bitter orange, which might have been mated with a lemon at some point in its dubious past.

They say that you know you're holding a glass of wine from Cahors if you can't see your fingers on the other side of the glass through the wine. Which is why the malbec wine from Cahors is nicknamed "black wine".

Peer into a glass of it, and it's easy to see (or should I say 'not see') why.

I didn't know much about the wine, or the region, before my recent visit. I just knew there were allegedly a lot of truffles, foie gras, and duck dishes cooked up in the Lot. So when I was asked by some folks who were shooting a film about the regional specialties if I wanted to tag along with them, I happily accepted.

(In addition to shooting the grapes, and getting a truffle or two ready for its close up, we made a video of me, too. Which, if I don't come off as too much of a dork, you'll see on the site when it's finished.)

For the first five years in Paris, I wouldn't go to Scoop. I'd walk by, scan the selections of hamburgers and "les wraps", and keep going. Even though I was intrigued with the list of house-made ice creams, I'd always reason to myself, "I didn't move to Paris to eat a hamburger."

I was reading recently about a site called My American Market that carries American foods, mostly targeted at expats living in France. There's some hard-to-find baking products, like unsweetened chocolate and molasses, but there's also plenty of goofy stuff, like muffin mixes, trail bars, and something called Molly McButter.