I’ve always dreamed of writing a soup cookbook. A book of recipes where there’s no need to carefully measure or weigh things, variations are not only allowable…but encouraged, and cooking times are not cast-in-stone instructions to be followed like the ten commandments. It’s no wonder the French love les soupes so much! The word “supper” comes from soup, and in parts of France, the verb…
When people inquire about recipes from the pastries on offer in Paris pastry shops, I look at the recipes we used when I went to pastry school at Ecole Lênotre and it’s hard to imagine cutting down a recipe that makes a hundred canelés into a recipe that makes six or eight for a home cook, who likely doesn’t want to go out and buy…
I don’t know about you, but there are a few things I need to get off my chest. One is that I can’t think of any time when I don’t want Mac & Cheese. And two, long before the advent of the internet recipe (and food blogs), words like “world’s best” weren’t considered clickbait. They were a declaration by magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks that whatever…
I am a bad blogger. While others are posting recipes for green bean casseroles, newfangled stuffing, and yet another way to improve turkey (it’s amazing how many ways there seem to be, and they just keep coming…) this year, I’m back to digging into my recipe files, finally getting around to making some of the recipes I’ve clipped over the years. This usual-sounding cake was…
King Henry IV of France promised “a chicken in every pot, every Sunday” to the French back in the 17th century and things haven’t changed much since then. Chicken remains a classic French Sunday meal, as the lines for roast chickens prove at the markets and butcher shops on the weekends will attest to. People in France eat chicken on other days of the…
This year, for some reason, fig season just refuses to end this year, which is fine with me. Figs have two seasons; the first is usually late summer and the second begins mid-fall. The second crop is better-tasting and toward the end of the season, the prices drop as the bounty increases. I was at the market the other day, planning to buy some figs, when…
Gosh, it seems so long ago when food blogging started. But once word got out, others started jumping in. Not only were there new and even more diverse voices from around the world to be heard, but the next geners were better with their cameras than the rest of us were, setting the standards for the future. (For me, it was quite a learning curve….
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…
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