David Lebovitz

About a year ago, I was having supper in a friend's apartment and everything we ate was simple, and tasted really good. He'd lived on a farm near Toulouse for many years, where he worked for one of France's agricultural organizations. Now he lives in Paris and I was surprised when he told me that the onions we were eating on the tart he'd made were from a panier, or a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box.

He gets a weekly panier from Les Paniers du Val de Loire. I kept hemming and hawing, thinking how nice it was to shop at my local market and pick out everything myself. But I finally signed up a couple of weeks ago, and got my first panier yesterday.

Living in San Francisco and working closely with a lot of farmers and small-producers in my restaurant career, I have a weakness for hard-working small producers who are trying to do the right thing. I remember a woman showing up at our back door with a box of amazing French butter pears, asking us if she planted more trees, would we would buy them? (We took a bite and said that we'd take any and all that she wanted to bring us, a promise we made good on.) I remember an organic dairy sending us their first samples, and customer reaction made us realize that people weren't ready for the strong taste of farm-fresh dairy products.

And there was Mr. Hadsell, a frail old man who could barely walk, who'd open the kitchen screen door and shuffle inside, balancing a few flats of just-picked raspberries from his backyard. You could feel the warmth of the sun radiating from each basket of plump, perfect berries. Those were the best raspberries I ever had in my life and I hope the lucky customers that got them felt the same.

But elsewhere, it can be an uphill battle to find just-picked, fresh produce, even in a country with strong ties to its agricultural traditions, like France.

When I started this site, I had forums, where people could chat and post messages. Before we took it down (because my brain was about to implode), one of the burning questions on there was this: Is couscous pasta?

My contention was that it wasn't, since it wasn't a 'paste' (or as the French would say, un pâte), which is what I believe—in my limited intelligence—that pasta is.

On the other hand, perhaps it is pasta, because couscous is flour mixed with water, then rolled until little granules form. Theoretically, then, it is a paste before it's broken down into little bits. Which makes me wonder if kig ha farz is pasta, too? (Although back then, no one would have know what that was, so it wouldn't have bolstered my argument.)

Then, to make matters even more complicated, there's Israeli couscous, whose springy, chewy texture wouldn't raise an eyebrow if someone called it pasta.

If you go to Lyon, you'll find Saint Marcellin pretty much everywhere. It's the best-known cheese from that region, and the user friendly-sized disks are inevitably piled high at each and every cheese shop you step in to. Locals bake them at home and slide the warm disks onto salads, and I've not been to a restaurant in that city that didn't have Saint Marcellin on the menu doing double-duty as the cheese or the dessert course. Or both. At the outdoor market stands, you can see how popular they are with les Lyonnais. And if you don't believe me, their presence is so pervasive that I once bought a ticket on the bus in Lyon and instead of change, the driver handed me a ripe Saint Marcellin instead.

Because they hover around €3, I used to pick one up at the fromagerie since they're an inexpensive way to add variety to a cheese platter. The ones I'd buy were decent, although I never heard anyone put a dab on their bread and say, "Good gosh David, that cheese is friggin' amazing!" (Although I'm not sure "friggin" is a well-used word around here.)

Every year I get a slew of requests from people looking for a recipe for Pumpkin Ice Cream. While in The Perfect Scoop I have a recipe for Sweet Potato Ice Cream studded with maple-glazed pecans, there's something about the fall that makes people think of all-things pumpkin. I'm a big fan of sweet potatoes, personally, but old traditions die hard I suppose. And Pumpkin Ice Cream got put on my to-churn list.

As luck would have it, I was leafing through a copy of The Craft of Baking by Karen DeMasco, former pastry chef at Craft in New York City, and landed on a picture of Pumpkin Ice Cream. Quelle chance! So I thought I'd give her recipe a spin in my ice cream machine.

Karen uses canned pumpkin, which a lot of people like to use because it's easy and consistent. But it's not so easy to find in Paris. And even though I'm an outcast for using sweet potatoes, I'm still a bit old-fashioned and like to make my own puree. So there.

I've been living in France for almost eight years and in all that time, I've yet to make even one of these classic French pear tarts. I don't think I've ever been in a bakery that didn't have wedges of this tart in little paper footings, ready to take out and be consumed right away. So I guess because I could always buy one, why make it? But since I had a kilo of almond paste that I bought for another project, a batch of poached pears on hand, and an unbaked tart shell waiting it's turn in my freezer, I decided to give one a go.

This is a wonderful tart: pears fanned out in a golden-brown, buttery pastry shell that's been spread with almond cream, then baked. And after I pulled this one out of the oven, I realized why it's important to make this yourself; because it tastes amazing when still-warm from the oven, and you can use your own poached pears so you can vary the spices to your taste. (However you can use canned pear halves, which many of the French pastry shops do.)

Aside from the almond paste, I also had a jar of quick-candied sour cherries on hand from another baking project (if it seems like I have a lot of baking odds and ends on hand, welcome to my world...), so I used them as well, which is something I haven't seen in any French bakery. I'm thinking of suggesting they use them on my next visit.

For someone who doesn't drink that much, I sure have a lot of liquor on my liquor shelf. I guess I should rephrase that. For someone who drinks an a lot of wine, but not a lot of liquor, I sure have a lot of liquor on my liquor shelf.

The French don't have anything on us Americans when it comes to drinking cocktails, although that seems to be changing a bit. Fruity, sweet drinks won't likely catch on around here, which I'm happy about, but minty Mojitos are popular, fueled on by their love of a fascination with anything Cuban. And one of my commenters got a big laugh out of me when I was explaining in another post the lack of ice cubes in Paris, and she said, "The only time you get a lot of ice in Paris is when you order a cocktail."

Every year I spend an inordinate amount of my time poaching fruit. It's usually because I'm powerless to resist all the pears in baskets at my market, and buy far more than I need. Yes, much of my sweet bounty find its way into sorbets, cakes, ice creams, and jams. But one of my favorite ways to keep those pears around a little longer is to poach them.

Poaching is gentle, stove-top cooking, and winter pears are ideal candidates since they keep their shape. Poaching also improves the taste of ho-hum pears. That's especially good news for you do-ahead folks out there; the longer the pears sit in the flavorful syrup after poaching, the better they'll taste. Since there isn't a big variety of fruit tumbling my way in the winter, to get my fruit-fix, I'll keep some poached pears in the refrigerator and enjoy them diced and mixed with my mid-morning yogurt and granola.

Be sure to start with firm, ripe pears.

I'm not going to say a thing, because I'm certain I did the same thing back in the day. But a lot of people who are en route to Paris ask me where they can find things like bouillabaisse, a true salade Niçoise, or Kig ha farz, and when I answer, "You can't", they either don't believe me, or get irked because they think I'm being elusive and keeping those addresses a secret and probably say mean things about me behind my back.

To get those things, you need to go where they originate; they just don't travel outside their particular region in France. I'm not sure if it's because in America, we're used to things being available whenever and wherever we want. Or because of our "melting pot" status, we readily accept foods from other parts of the country and the world with a little more fluidity than they do elsewhere.

But I've been duped one too many times in places like New York City, that advertise "San Francisco-style" burritos, which are about as close to the original as most of the rice-plumped salades Niçoises you'll find on the Île-de-France are.

(The true salade Niçoise should only contain raw vegetables: cooked eggs are allowed, and in some cases, canned tuna or anchovies. But that's it, folks. And don't get me started on those New York City burritos...and I use the term "burrito" loosely. If you cut it in half and can see any air pockets, it's not a burrito.)

I've learned my lesson and will stick to Black & White cookies, corned beef sandwiches, and the Halal stand in Manhattan.