I wasn’t planning on beginning this post for a pie recipe with anything other than a story about how much I liked it, encouraging you to make it. (Which I’ll get to later.) But after I had started writing it, several neighborhoods in Paris came under attack, including mine, and I put everything on hold. Cafés and restaurants that I knew, and areas that I frequent, were…
I’ve been having my own little lemon festival ever since I got a Meyer lemon tree. Meyer lemons aren’t well-known in France (yet), although I have a feeling once people get a taste of their sweet, highly perfumed juice, we may start seeing them more and more.
Pecans are the great American nut and at no time of the year are they more in demand than around the holidays. There are a lot of different nuts grown in the United States; walnuts, almonds, pistachios, and hazelnuts, but a pie made with toasted pecans is a holiday tradition and every year I have the urge to make one. Recently an American membership-only store…
Quiche got a peculiar rap back in the 1980s when eating it was described as something that was not masculine. I’m not sure where that came from, but in France, everybody eats quiche. As the French debate how to address gender pronouns, in a language where crème, baguette, and salade are feminine and pâté, vin, and quinoa are masculine (although quinoa is a plante céréalière, which…
I’m back on the wagon of tackling the recipes in the bulging files of recipes that I’ve been collecting and hanging on to for the past thirty years. Many pre-date the internet and were from food magazines (made of paper) that I subscribed to. A surprising number of the savory recipes have the words “adobo” or “chipotle,” and “pork” in the title, so if I ever…
One of the things I keep vowing to do is to read more books. It’s hard when I’m at home, where there are many other things beckoning for my attention. But when I go on vacation, I bring a few books along and find a good chair to park myself in as much as possible. It helps that internet is either non-existent, or the connection…
It’s almost pie season. Right now, there’s not much fruit available at the markets, but I’ve had this recipe card lingering in my “to try” folder, and decided the time was right to give it a go. This is a pie I’ve enjoyed at Four & Twenty Blackbird Pie Shop in New York and I had the recipe on a card that was in the…
I get it. Some people have an aversion to making pie crusts. They’re worried about which fat to use; some recipes insist on butter for flavor, others advocate vegetable shortening as the key to success, and lard has its fans. Then there are the processes of rolling out the dough, and baking it, that makes people pause when they want to make pie. I understand…
Summer is a great time for ice cream. It’s cool, it’s creamy, and I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like ice cream. It’s the absolute crowd-pleaser when the temperatures climb. Add toasted marshmallows, salted butter chocolate sauce, and Graham crackers? I’m in, all the way. Unlike others, I don’t have nostalgic memories that involved S’mores, so I’m making up for lost time. This S’more…
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