2007 Bloggies: Best European Weblog [view: normal]

Chewing giraffe provided by Wildlife 2008.

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week's idiom is, "Ne pas mâcher ses mots."

Literally translated as, "Not chewing one's words," it means expressing one's opinion plainly and bluntly, with no concern for how it's going to be received. It is equivalent to the (s...

Ever since I received an electric steamer for my birthday last summer, I have been steaming vegetables with abandon.

Before that, I used a set of those bamboo baskets that you nest in a wok if you have one (I don't) or place on a saucepan that's never quite the correct size for optimal steam circulation. That thing sputtered and leaked and drove me a little crazier every time I used it, so this...

[Cake marbré au chocolat]

I grew up eating a store-bought chocolate marble cake called Savane. Created in the sixties by a French manufacturer that was acquired by an American company shortly thereafter, it came as a whole loaf cake in an ocher and brown box. The bottom of the loaf was wrapped in a paper liner that you peeled off as you sliced your way through the cake, the crumb was fluffy as only factory-made cakes c...

When Maxence and I were in San Francisco late last summer, we had bagels for breakfast every single day. There were a couple of bagel shops not far from where we were staying, so we alternated between the two, and on those mornings that we went for a run through the Golden Gate Park, bagels awaited at a busy coffee shop by the ocean.

I like mine dotted with poppy seeds or sesame seeds, and spre...

At the beginning of every month in 2009, I am offering C&Z readers a new desktop calendar, i.e. a wallpaper to apply on the desktop of your computer, with a food-related picture and a calendar of the current month.

Our desktop calendar for November is a picture of what I think of as a Parisian tartine, an open-face sandwich made on naturally leavened bread (here, a slice of pain des amis from ...

[Velouté de topinambours au bacon]

It has been a while -- five years, to be exact -- since we last discussed Jerusalem artichokes around here, but they do belong to my regular winter vegetable rotation so I thought I'd bring them up again.

The tubers have just started to appear and will stick around until March or April, so you can start looking for them now; you should have better luck finding them at a farmers' market of som...

Maxence and I like to spend a weekend in Amsterdam every once in a while: we love the atmosphere of the city in any season, and we usually stay in a neighborhood called Nieuwmarkt that is both lively (plenty of shops and restaurants) and residential (real people live there), the ideal mix if you want to pretend you're an Amsterdammer (only with terrible language skills) for a few days.

It doesn...

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week's idiom is, "Long comme un jour sans pain."

A literal translation would be, "as long as a day without bread," and it is used to express that something is very long -- in reference to physical length (a long road, a long list) or, more frequently, to the duration of...

The funny thing about a food blog, especially one that has been around for a long time, is that it doesn't really reflect the frequency with which each featured dish is cooked: if you look at an archived post from years ago, how do you know whether it was just a one-time experiment, or if it has made weekly appearances at the author's table since then?

After a recipe has been given the spotligh...

A friend of mine was just admitted to the traditional French cooking program I attended four years ago (read all about it here and here), and the good news got me thinking about a type of cookie we learned to make in class as we approached the holidays, called sablés diamant.

These "diamond cookies" are classic butter cookies that you form using my favorite technique, referred to in English as ...

At the beginning of every month in 2009, I am offering C&Z readers a new desktop calendar, i.e. a wallpaper to apply on the desktop of your computer, with a food-related picture and a calendar of the current month.

Our desktop calendar for October is a picture of lemon butter cookies, as they appear in my cookbook. Delicately buttery, crisp, and thinly glazed, these sablés au citron draw their...

Due to my ever-widening enthusiasm for breadmaking, I have become a close follower of the Bread Baker's Apprentice challenge, wherein a group of bakers bakes its way through Peter Reinhart's revered opus and blogs about the results, with numerous details and step-by-step photos. This makes for fascinating posts if you're into that sort of thing, and reading about others' well-documented hurdles ...

A favorite from the archives, this post was originally published on November 2, 2007.

I say, one can never have too many recipes for lamb shoulder.

A versatile cut, the lamb shoulder, one that can be grilled, stewed, braised, or here, slow-roasted.

This dish was born out of a typical moment of greenmarket frustration, which I shall get off my chest just now.

A few Saturdays ago, I was waitin...

A favorite from the archives, this post was originally published on October 23, 2007.

Fig season is upon us and produce stalls boast plentiful trays of purple figs, soft at the hips and oft leaking a drop of sap from their, um, bottom. Of course, they cost an eye -- figs are a luxury in Paris any time of the year -- but the fig fanatic in me is willing to make any sort of monetary sacrifice to ...

A favorite from the archives, this post was originally published on September 22, 2008.

When I recovered my kitchen after seven weeks (seven! weeks!) of renovation chaos -- and this was just to redo the bathroom, mind you -- the very first thing I made was a yogurt cake, to fortify us through our next mission: the meticulous cleaning of, well, the entire contents of our apartment, which we had ...

At the beginning of every month in 2009, I am offering C&Z readers a new desktop calendar, i.e. a wallpaper to apply on the desktop of your computer, with a food-related picture and a calendar of the current month.

Our desktop calendar for September is a picture of Mussels Marinière, a preparation of mussels cooked here with Champagne and a pinch of saffron -- though the recipe can absolutely b...

When it comes to appetizers, I generally try to offer relatively light preparations, and often opt for vegetable-based dips* that can be scooped with raw zucchini sticks or dolloped onto cucumber rounds : if I'm serving something before dinner, when my guests are, all things considered, starving, the idea is to sate them temporarily, not until next week.

On the other hand, if I'm hosting an a...

I grew up in a household where le goûter is a cardinal ritual, and I can safely state that I've been eating an afternoon snack practically every day for the past thirty years.

It is so much a part of my food habits that I actually size my lunches to make sure I'll feel a bit hungry around 5 or 6, and in need of something to tide me over until dinner. It is also a welcome alibi to look up from w...

[Pâtissons rôtis et pois chiches aux herbes]

The patty pan squash (in French: le pâtisson) is a member of the blended summer squash family. Shaped very much like a UFO with undulating edges -- each bump a tiny cockpit with an alien inside, presumably --, it can be conical or squat, and comes in shades of yellow, green, or white. The flesh inside is the color of clotted cream, its heart studded with edible seeds like the center of a zucch...

Photography by Bertrand.

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week's idiom is, "Ménager la chèvre et le chou."

Translated as, "Accommodating* the goat and the cabbage," it means trying to please both sides in a situation where the two parties are in fact irreconcilable. It is equivalent to the English expr...

At the beginning of every month in 2009, I am offering C&Z readers a new desktop calendar, i.e. a wallpaper to apply on the desktop of your computer, with a food-related picture and a calendar of the current month.

Our desktop calendar for August is a picture of homemade rose-raspberry cupcakes -- a vanilla cake base, a rose-flavored buttercream frosting, and a fresh raspberry on top.

The r...

[Cake Cerise Noisette]

I had lunch with my friends Pascale and Caroline a couple of weeks ago, and afterward we followed Caroline back to her apartment so she could share samples of a quirky ingredient she'd just laid her hands on: hazelnut flour.

I had initially thought she was referring to finely ground hazelnuts (hazelnut meal or poudre de noisettes), but no: this is made by grinding hazelnuts finely, yes, but a...

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week's idiom is, "Retomber comme un soufflé."

Literally translated as, "Falling back like a soufflé," it is a colloquial expression that means running out of steam in a quick and sudden way: after an initial phase of enthusiasm, an idea, an initiative, or a phenomenon (...

[Salade de semoule aux herbes]

My sister and I went through a pretty intense couscous* phase when we were teenagers: my mother kept a kitchen cabinet stocked with little pre-portioned pouches of semoule that barely needed a minute and a half of boiling before we could snip them open, pour their contents into a bowl, add a bit of salt and butter, and call it lunch. We loved the stuff.

I remember suggesting this very menu to...

Fresh lemon verbena is a recent newcomer to my herb repertoire. I was familiar with plain dried verbena, a popular constituent of French tisanes, but only this spring did I come across long stalks of verveine citronnelle, bushy with feather-shaped leaves, faintly sticky and powerfully fragrant. Stroke one with your thumb and it will knock you over with a floral and citrusy scent that does bear r...