Marshmallows are one (or some) of my favorite things. We don’t often use ‘marshmallow’ in the singular and we certainly don’t make them one at a time. When we talk about marshmallows, it’s generally in the plural since it’s hard to imagine just one, lone, solitary marshmallow. That would be triste, as you’d say in French, or sad. Except, of course, when it’s floating on…
A couple of weeks ago, I took a trip to the Savoie, a region of France that was once a dukedom of Italy. As you travel through France, especially away from the center of the country, you see more influences from neighboring countries, such as in the Basque region, where cornmeal and chile peppers figure into the cuisine. In Nice, pistou and socca from Italy are…
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…
[Update: Mon Éclair closed in the spring of 2018.] I was recently part of a panel on France24 television to debate the subject: “The argument over French cuisine.” Rather than being a debate, though, it was more question-and-answer session once the cameras were rolling. But beforehand, the four of us on the panel had a very lively discussion in the lobby about the subject, which at one point,…
When I was growing up, I would not eat pumpkin pie. My mother never made it but they served it at our school cafeteria in New England and the orange filling looked a little jelled. It certainly wasn’t as appealing at the Boston Cream Pie on plates just next to the slices of the pie, with the glossy chocolate icing and the cool vanilla pastry…
[As of September 2020, Butter & Scotch has closed its doors. Fortunately, they are still in the baking business and their treats are available at their online shop.] With over 1200 pastry shops, Paris has no shortage of places to satisfy one’s sweet cravings. That is, unless it’s after 8pm, when all the bakery shelves are wiped clean and they close up for the night….
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…
I was trying to explain to my French other-half what an incubator was. In America, we don’t use the term just for babies, but we use it to describe groups that exist in places like San Francisco, where new ideas are born from creative minds which are often the result of thinking “outside the box.” There are the tech giants, like Apple, Facebook, and Google, that started that…
I just returned from a four-week book tour where I met a lot of people. Everyone was incredibly nice and it was a treat, although because of the nature of the events, it wasn’t possible to spend lots of one-on-one time with anyone – including myself. However, I tried to answer as many questions as possible. The most frequently asked questions were; “Where have you…
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