I just spent a long weekend in the French countryside, trying to enjoy the last bits of summer before the rentrée, when everyone in Paris returns en masse, usually bronzed to an unsavory crisp. And because last Friday was a national holiday, I spent a prodcutive morning at a vide grenier, an enormous and pretty fabulous flea market in the town of Esterney. Like anywhere,…
During the next week, I’m going to do a series: Five Great Places in Paris That You Might Not Know About. In a city that hasn’t been overrun by chain stores and restaurants, it’s nice to be able to profile some of the smaller places around town that I frequent. When I’ve had friends come to visit and suggested we go out for pizza, they…
I happily eat raw-milk cheese. I’ll dive into steak tartar without any fear. And heck, I drink horse milk like it’s going out of style. (Actually, if someone could tell me that drinking horse milk never was in style, that’d be great, so I can stop drinking it…) But I have a confession to make: I wash melons.
During the recent site redesign, the feed address for the blog changed and some of you weren’t receiving feeds or notifications in your blog readers. Subsequently, my web fellow re-did the feed—so if you’re using the old feed, it is presently directing you to the new feed, but you should change it to the new one. You can get the current RSS feed address by…
Earlier this year I was sent some of the new chocolates from Valrhona to play around with. While I made quick work of the rest of them, one stood out in particular: Xocopili, smooth balls of chocolate flavored with a myriad of spices, including a heavy dose of cumin. Frédéric Bau, a professor and head chocolatier at the fantastic Ecole de Grand Chocolat Valrhona, developed…
It’s that time of the year—the season for Reines-Claudes plums in France has arrived! These little green fruits, no larger than a marshmallow, are perhaps the most delicious fruits in the world. Don’t let the army-green color fool you in to thinking these plums might be tart or sour. If you get a good one, reines-claudes plums (also known as Greengage plums), are the sweetest,…
I can’t believe I’ve waited so long to share one of my all-time favorite recipes, from one of my all-time favorite books. And if you don’t make it, you’re out of your mind. Okay, I don’t really mean that. But I just get so excited about this book and I can’t help myself; this is my favorite salad ever. When From Tapas to Meze was…
1. Sell Classeurs The most prevalent fixture in every French home isn’t the gleaming shelf of copper cookware, the bottles of medicaments crammed into every nook in the john, or their collection of books, which the French hold in the same reverence as Americans do their flat-screen televisions and their iPhones. No, it’s the shelf of classeurs, the sturdy, colorful cardboard folders to hold the…
Of course, I picked the hottest day of the summer to make popsicles. After the success of my Vietnamese coffee popsicles, I thought it’d be fun to try something dipped in chocolate. In retrospect, am I insane? Our summer in Paris has been uneven; some cool days, and a few nice warm ones. Unfortunately the day I decided to make chocolate-dipped popsicles was the one…
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