One of the first places I went to in Paris when I was setting up house, was Goumanyat. My friend David Tanis took me there, who is a chef and lives in Paris part-time. And as I roamed through the neat shop, poked in the wooden drawers and sniffed in the jars, I was thrilled to find such a treasure trove of spices and comestibles to stock my petit placard.

Yet the real star of the show at Goumanyat is saffron, which they stock in every conceivable fashion. Of course, there's a huge glass urn of wispy saffron threads, which one can use to flavor a tagine or even a batch of ice cream. But saffron also shows up in many other guises here, sometimes in places where you'd least expect it.

Yet another friend is moving back to the states (woosies!) and she had a going away party last night on one of the bridges over the Seine. Since I'd stashed a few clandestine bags of marshmallows, which were getting a little long in the tooth, I thought it time to use 'em or lose 'em. In fact, they were a prominent staple on my Too Good to Use shelf and they were just languishing there, waiting for the right moment to rip open that bag.

Romain was very surprised when I told him that you can't even buy a bag of marshmallows or a box of Rice Krispies in America without some version of this recipe appearing on it.

For those of you who don't live here, you're probably scratching your heads as who in their right minds would want a hamburger in Paris. If you're a visitor, you probably don't come to Paris in search of a burger (unless you've got kids in tow). But Parisians, as well as the rest of us, often get the craving for a nice, juicy patty on a big, fluffy bun, and I'm happy to help in our quest to find the best of the lot.

Here's a list of the places that were suggested by helpful readers in the comments of my post on the burgers at Hippopotamus. I was pretty bowled over with the choices out there and look forward to trying some, or all, of them out.

Please note that I haven't been to most of these places (yet), and I can't personally vouch for them.

Hence I'm trusting you guys on these...so they'd better be good! : )

...one that I can really sink my teeth into.

(Um...I think...)

I've been craving a big, fat, piled-high juicy hamburger for the last few weeks. I don't know why. Romain told me, "C'est normal et culturel, Daveed." I'm not entirely sure about that since I've never been a big beef eater. But lately, just the idea of lifting a hefty, rosy, big mess-of-a-patty of seared meat wedged between two fluffy, lightly-grilled cushions of bread with plenty of fixin's, has been first and foremost in my little mind.

While l'hamburger is available at more and more cafés and restaurants in Paris nowadays, too often the dried-out burger is paltry, the bun is lame, and the much-anticipated le hamburger that arrives is wildly overpriced and nothing more than a glorified, microwaved sandwich.

Since the last post (#3) focused on something so beautiful, and so perfect; an exquisite cup of gelato, I thought it'd be okay to spring the Musée Fragonard on you now.

Located in on the eastern fringe of Paris, the Musée Fragonard d'Alfort is part of the Alfort Veterinary School, founded in 1766, which is one of the oldest veterinary colleges in the world. Lest you think I've got a thing for cadavers of malformed animals and tumorous cow spleens, you're wrong.

But what I do have is a thing for are very unique places in Paris.

This week, Grom opens a branch of their famous Italian shop in Paris.

Originally from Torino, Grom uses all-natural flavorings, which include growing some of the organic fruit they use in their sorbets and graniti, grinding up vivid-green Sicilian pistachios for pistachio gelato, and melding the exquisite hazelnuts from Piedmont with Venezuelan chocolate for their ultimate, silky-smooth version of Gianduja.

I first tasted their exquisite gelato in Florence with my friend Judy and was hooked. It truly is one of the best in Italy, and now you can savor it in Paris.

I'm pretty sure that there's sometimes a secret conspiracy around here to make me think that it's me who is crazy. For example, I bought this little glass dish last weekend. When I brought it to the seller to pay, I said, "This is such a beautiful butter dish."

She looked at me, then at it. Then back at me.

"Non, non, monsieur, it's for garlic."

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, once you get out the big city, prices drop substantially and I can't believe the stuff I hauled back to Paris!

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 balk.

"Pizza? I didn't come to Paris for...for...pizza!"

To which I always want to reply, "Honey, well I didn't come to Paris to listen to you diss my dining suggestions."

But when you live somewhere, no matter how good the local cuisine might be, one cannot live on duck confit and galettes de sarrasin slathered in butter forever, you know.

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 in soap and water.

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 new RSS feed address by clicking on the little white logo on the far right end of the green menu bar at the top.

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 at their notoriously difficult to get into Ecole du Chocolat (I've been invited—and uninvited, a number of times...can someone please put in a good word for me?), developed this blend.

And for the life of me, I had no idea what to do with it.

It's that time of the year—the season for Reine Claude 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, Reine Claude plums (also known as Greengage plums), are the sweetest, most succulent piece of fruit you'll bite into.

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 released, I was invited to the book party in San Francisco, and all the food was—to be modest, amazing. Everything I ate was incredibly good; the salads, tarts, appetizers and tapas. I wolfed everything down.

Once I brought the book home, each recipe I made was an out-of-the-ballpark homerun.

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 massive, sprawling, spiraling out-of-control amount of paperwork your accumulate here, in the form of les dossiers, which are the two most important words in the French language.

You quickly learn to never, ever, ever, throw away even the tiniest, most insignificant piece of paper or receipt in France because invariably, six years later, someone will ask you to produce it. So it's imperative to save each and every scrap of paper and because of that, soon you'll find you've accumulated your very own stack or dossiers.

I know, because I have at least fifty. Or more filed away somewhere.

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 day the temperature in my apartment shot up to 98F degrees (37C). But I'll stop talking about the weather since there's only one thing more boring that people talking about the weather, and that's having to listen to someone recount their dreams for 15 minutes while you sit there and pretend to be interested.

I could never be a therapist—obviously.