June 2008 Archives

I recently read The Pedant in the Kitchen, which Michael Ruhlman also wrote up, and while I found it an enjoyable rant, one vexing thought that stuck in the author's craw was recipe instructions that call for "a handful" of something. He didn't know what that meant and wondered why recipes couldn't be more precise.

Writing a recipe that's acceptable to absolutely everyone can be daunting, if not impossible. The purpose of any recipe is the guide the cook through the process; too much explanation and overtly-long recipes turn readers off, while short recipes often get accused of not giving enough information. How much is enough, and how little is not enough?

I once saw a three page recipe for chocolate brownies from a famed pastry chef.

In the south of France, they're pretty generous with les glaçons. It's never any problem to get ice cubes, which are often brought to the table heaped in a bowl, and sometimes even already added to the rosé for you by the barman.

Contrast that with Paris, where a drink with ice may have one puny cube roughly the size of a Tic-Tac, languishing on the surface, tepidly melting away. Which I've always attributed to a couple of factors:

My favorite travel tip that I rarely advertise is to tell people I'm leaving a day prior to my actual departure.

And tell them I'm coming back a day after I actually return. That way, I avoid all those last-minute crises as well as returning home and being slammed by a few weeks of backed-up panicky messages on my machine.

I think everyone's figured it out by now and after getting in late last night, today is my day to put out the fires that erupted while I was gone, so to speak. But first, while it's all fresh, here's some of the high points of my trip to Nice and the Côte d'Azur:

"Sun-drenched" is a cliché that's often applied to the food of the region, and at the cours Saleya market in Vieux Nice, as well as others, you can see that it applies decidely well.

"The great thing about socca," Rosa Jackson told me, as we ripped into our second double order of the giant chickpea crêpe between us, "is that even if you're not hungry, you can still eat it."

A few days later, while standing on the square in Vence, waiting while a young man poured chickpea batter onto a very hot oiled griddle, a timid young American woman asked him for a crêpe. He explained, in fractured English, that he only made socca, and she started to walk away.

Enough with all this eating. I'm hitting the beach...

(More pics.)

Recipes?

Who needs recipes?

While you might be familiar with the more famous "Panisse", these are the real McCoy.

Panisses are made from chickpea flour and shaped into hockey puck-sized disks. Once firm, their texture is similar to cooled polenta, and they're cut into elongated bars and fried in very hot olive oil until crisp on the outside.

If there's anything nicer than taking a break and heading to the south of France, I can't imagine what it could be right now. My first day in Nice, we ran from socca stand to socca stand, tasting as many as we could. Fortified, we hit the wonderful market in the old part of town to select our fixings for a lovely dinner.

The way of life down here, and the cooking, are a world away from Paris. Generous bunches of basil find their way into pistou, which we pounded in the mortar and pestle until almost smooth.

No complaints about the food at Racines. In fact, it's one of the best places I've eaten in Paris in a long time.

Unfortunately I took some of the worst pictures of one of the best-looking—and probably the most heavily-inked—restaurateurs in Paris, so you'll have to go meet Pierre Jancou for yourself.

Believe it or not, there's much more to France than Paris.

Or so they say.

I obviously don't get out much, but last year when I went to Camp Cassoulet, also in attendance was Jennifer of Chez LouLou. Although all who were invited I knew previously, she was the only one I didn't. Brave girl!

LouLou lives in the Southwest of France, which I think it just beyond the 13th arrondissement. (I haven't tried to take the métro there, but that's where I think it is...isn't it?)

She'd written up an intriguing recipe on her blog for Sour Cherries with Bay Leaf and bookmarked the page, assuming I wouldn't see sour cherries in Paris: they're about as hard to find here as they are in the states.

So when I saw fresh griottes, I almost lunged at the stand, and walked away with 2 kilos (about 4½ pounds).

A dining companion said to me— “Let’s eat inside. It’s too smoky out there.”

I began my cooking career at a vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, New York. Although you've probably heard of the other vegetarian restaurant in town, I worked up the hill at the Cabbagetown Café. While we weren't as famous, the food was quite good. (I say we were better, but I'm somewhat biased). I guess the public agreed since by the time we opened the door each day for lunch and dinner, there was already a line down the sidewalk of hungry locals and regulars waiting to get in.

We cooked everything from scratch from produce brought to us by farmers in the area, directly, before it was trendy or cool to pat ourselves on that back and write an article about it.

We just did it.

I finally got a chance to track down that butter I found worthy of rapture from Le Jules Verne. Oddly, when I searched the name, I found out that I actually commented on way back in 2006. How I forgot about it, I’ll never, ever know.

It’s from Pascal Beillevaire, a chain of cheese shops in France. While their cheeses are very good, I have a little bit of difficulty getting past the beret-wearing salesclerks, theatrical straw mats, and hyper-bright lighting.

Living in Paris, it isn't always very interesting watching television, which I sometimes like to do during dinner. Sure there's some great French channels, but I'm kinda lazy when I'm eating and prefer the English-language ones, which usually means CNN International. It's not bad, but they often repeat the same story over and over and over again, tweaking it ever-so-slightly each time they report it.

(Although one story they haven't reported on, oddly, is their reporter who got caught in Central Park with a knot—and more, in his knickers.)

So I often find myself flipping through cookbooks while I eat, glazing over the text and scanning the glossy photos. But when I came across this one, for Florentines, I stopped and bookmarked it right away.

I'm always attracted to anything nutty, crispy, salty, or caramelized, and this recipe had them all.

This is the salad I made myself for lunch today:

And I decided that I would use it to finish one of the previously unfinished posts.

Note that there's no canned corn. No rice. And yes, real potatoes, garlic, and fresh green beans. Except for steaming the green beans, it took me all of about 2 minutes to put together. The potatoes were leftovers and were just as good cold as they were caramelized and freshly-roasted out of the oven the night before. And the cheese is cut from a hunk of cantal that I buy from the heartthrob-worthy cheese guy at my Sunday market. Needless to say, I always make sure I have plenty of cantal on hand.