Being confined for two weeks has been, um, interesting. As someone who works at home, I was, like, “I got this…” But by day two I started getting loopy. As much as I think Romain is the greatest thing ever, it’s hard to be cooped up and not allowed to go out. True, we can go to the grocery store or bakery if we bring…
With spring around the corner, all thoughts are turning to fruit, while we wait for stone fruits to arrive. Nectarines, peaches, plums and apricots will soon be at the markets, usually led by cherries, which are often the first to make an appearance. I was leafing through Sweeter Off the Vine, by Yossy Arefi, a book dedicated to using fruit year-round, from squash, pumpkin and…
It was quite a summer, starting with sipping homemade cherry wine, a picnic at Versailles, checking out the Le Creuset factory, and frying up a batch of “French” fried chicken in a sizzling pan of duck fat. A few weeks later in the season, I was pulling a cherry clafoutis from my oven, grilling deviled chicken, and pickling strawberries, to take care of the overload from the outdoor…
France is the land of wine but it’s not necessarily something of adulation. I was told the average price spent on a bottle of wine in France is €3,20, which means a lot of people are spending less than that. To many, it’s just a drink and not something that’s considered a special-occasion beverage. And while people scoff at things like boxed wine, or wine in…
I think I have something wrong with me. I seem to be afflicted with a particular malady that forces me to buy way too many summer fruits when they’re in season. It gets particularly dire when faced with apricots and cherries, two fruits whose seasons are much shorter than the others. The first fresh apricots I saw were back in upstate New York, around the…
When I took pastry courses a number of years ago here in France and in Belgium, I tended to want to focus on the chocolate classes because – well…gosh darn it, I love it so much. We’ve become the best of friends over the years and I am never far from my bin of chocolate that I buy in bulk. (Although at some point, someone…
I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was talking to someone at the airport, just after my arrival in Israel, who had asked me what I was doing in her country. When I told her I was there to learn about the cuisine – by eating it, her eyes lit up, and she said – “Whenever I leave Israel, after my family, the thing I…
The last copy of The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth that I had, I’d lent to a good friend who was excited about starting a career in cooking at a local culinary school. I don’t know another book that captures precisely everything I love about cooking, written by a man truly passionate about his subject, and I though he’d like to read it, as it’s…
Michael Recchiuti was recently here in Paris for a few weeks, visiting, and eating his way around town. Because he’s a chocolatier (from San Francisco), of course, he concentrated on chocolate. Interestingly I couldn’t remember how we met, but he recalled the event pretty well. Apparently a group of us had been invited to Robert Steinberg’s kitchen, since he was working on developing ScharffenBerger chocolate….
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