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Grapefruit Vermouth Marmalade

When I arrived in Paris, I was surprised to see pink grapefruits as objects of such adulation. Métro billboard ads extolled the virtues of pink grapefruits, with ones from Texas being the most prized. Of course, it was a marketing campaign, but those grapefruits are rather good. When I lived in California, we didn’t just have grapefruits, we had everything, from Oroblancos, to tangelos and…

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Purple Paris

I was buying a bike recently and, for some reason, the store offered the bike I wanted in two shades: black and prune (plum), one of the many variations on purple (which include, but are not limited to, violet, purple, and magenta) in the French vocabulary. I wasn’t sure I wanted a purple bike, but then I thought about how purple has invaded Paris –…

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Paris Safety Tips

Paris is a relatively safe city, as cities go, and recently, I was having a discussion with someone about places to be wary about traveling to and was told that the only place in the world that they felt unsafe was in….San Francisco. (And they were from Naples!) So anything can happen anywhere in the world and petty crime sometimes occurs in places where you…

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Dave and Kate’s Chocolate Brownies

One thing you may not know about me – after blogging for twenty years, you thought you knew everything about me, didn’t you? – was that the Hepburns were my neighbors growing up. They were extremely nice people, always smiling and very pleasant. While Katherine wasn’t in the ‘hood, it was her brother and his wife who lived just down the street. If you grew…

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Paris Apps

I am accro (hooked) on my smartphone and when friends told me right before I got it, about how it would change my life, I was skeptical. But the moment I started figuring out all the features and downloading apps, it became an integral part of my life. And like many things, the rest of the world has adapted to the phones and enterprising folks…

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Cookware Shops in Paris

Paris is a mecca for cooks, and folks come here from around the world to stock up on French and specialty cookware. Many of the shops are clustered around the Les Halles area, where for many years restaurateurs shopped at the giant market there for produce and other comestibles, as well as professional kitchenware. Although the market is gone, many of those stores exist and…

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The Barbes Market

Every once in a while there are contests in Paris to decide who makes the best croissant, a hot new restaurant list get published somewhere, or a market way on the other side of Paris that supposedly has great onions grown in the same soil where Louis the XIV once took a squat, becomes a “must visit”. It’s pretty encouraging to see and hear about…

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Will a KitchenAid Mixer from America Work Abroad or in Europe?

Over the years, a number of people have asked if it was possible to bring a KitchenAid mixer from the United States to Europe, and use it here. I certainly couldn’t live without my 5-quart mixer, and since they’re less expensive in America than they are abroad (because of the electrical modifications and shipping), many folks, naturally, want to know if they can bring their…

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My Favorite Sesame Baguette

A woman who writes highly-regarded bread books recently contacted me. She was coming to Paris, and wanted to ask me some questions about various bakeries and their baguettes, specifically, which I liked. I wrote her back and told her that when you live in Paris, you buy your bread from the local boulangerie (there are four within a block of my apartment) rather spending thirty…

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