Le Diner Etrange

Only in Paris, with a group of French people expected at a dinner themed Le Diner Etrange would the first thoughts of what to cook be peppered, excuse the pun, with the ingredients above.

Chili. Strange to French. Espresso Chili. Strange to the few Americans.
Chiles. A heavy hand with both the whole ones from Passage Brady and the flakes from Istanbul and homemade chili powder.
Spicy Hot Chocolate with the Mayan Chocolate from San Sebastian.
Donuts. Savory ones. Sprinkled in paprika. Sel de cannelle. Fleur de sel.

The strangest event of the day was the 80F temperature while I cooked kidney beans for hours and then melted chocolate into milk before steeping it with some cinnamon and more chile.

What am I doing? I emailed Dana , why am I cooking these spicy things as I sweat in my 5th floor apartment?

How can I make jello shots out of sheet gelatin? Dana replied, and thus the collaboration of 2 American girls feeding a table of French people strange food began.

I served up fat bowls of the chile, which after cooking all day had the creaminess of mole ("it's a savory dish with chocolate!" I'm later explaining, with the help of the lone Chilean, to a Frenchman. "Chocolat?" he clarifes. 5 times. Then asks for exactly what I mean by the fact that there is espresso in the chili.).

I watched as people picked, very politely, bean by bean, mixing in the creme fraiche as their last hope - "there's more creme!" I offer, but they all assure me they love this chili, before putting it down and blowing their noses.

We 2 American girls and mostly-American Liam have cleaned our bowls and are salivating over the others'.

Dana cooked up amazing broiled shark and a watermelon and feta salad and people picked at the Lemondrop Jello-shots.

I spent a long time re-heating hot chocolate spilled so many times in transit that I was relieved to see Dana pull out shot glasses to serve it with fruit and donuts that failed miserably. Gourgeres. Sans fromage et avec sel de canelle.

"These are quite wet in the middle," a Frenchman cautioned me, "they should be more dry."

I attempted to explain how I didn't know how to use Dana's oven, how the hot chocolate had spilled on the parchment in my bag, and then I dropped it, winking my eye to say .. ."etrange? eh?"

Favas and Other Santorini Specialities

Greek favas are not the painstaking cloudy-sheathed green ones, nor their dried counterpart fatter than thumbnails. These favas are tiny, like moong dal if not actually moong dal: yellow and referred to by many Greeks as chickpeas.

I had been fooled by this faux ami week before in Brooklyn, ordering favas with cilnatro and imagining a pile of green filled with vitamins after a week of whole wheat crackers and camomile tea (all my belly could handle), and here I was again with a hummus-like dip in front of me.

And damn was it good.

We had favas at nearly every stop. Whipped up into a near-soapy mess at Captain Dmitri's and drenched in olive oil, above, at our fabulous hotel Ikies.

After a trip to the lighthouse and pictures on a crumbling-into-the-sea-quickly cliff, we stopped at a road side stand. The woman piled small plates high with capers, caper leaves, olives, and honey. She gave us tiny glasses of regional sweet wine and then a taste of the dry. She pointed out the gorgeous gems of canned produce - tomatoes, caper leaves, grapes, olives - all from the farm behind her, and I tried to explain in my slowest English that we just had carry-on bags. This was lost on her, but we left with a self-corked bottle that came straight from a blue barrel and a bag of favas still with the stones in them.

"You boil ..." she started, as Liam paid out the 6 euros for this bag, "4 of water, 1 of fava" she continues with the other necessary ingredients "2 of oil" (pointing at our shot glasses sticky with wine residue), "not garlic, you scrape" and we offer onion, which she agrees to ... "yes," she concludes, "yes, that's it."

Athens: Alatsi

On Sunday, I sat in Blackbird Parlour watching the hipsters roll by in Williamsburg, reading the Sunday Times with Emily, when I came to 36 Hours in Athens. How bougie is my life that I could say, "hey, I'm going to be there on Thursday!" and so Liam and I found ourselves just a few days later (with lengthy travel back to Paris in between) walking into Alatsi.

I was ready to order whatever the most Rustic Crete cuisine there. Cheese Fries. Except - they're not cheese fries, but rather, potatoes with staka - described by the waiter as 'full of cholesterol' but research shows is either a 'cooked goat butter' or a roux with clarified butter. It was good - like the lightest heaviest cheese fries you could imagine.

We paired this with a salad that he warned had bitter greens but also had pomegranate, candied quince and aged balsamic. [Unfortunately, our bread/oil/olives never came ..]

For dinner Liam and I both had pasta, since we had just gorged on a mezze plate at a cafe overlooking Athens where we witnessed a tourist cut open a water bottle to put her remainders in only to be stopped by the waiters who offered her foil to no avail.

The pasta was fresh made - Liam's was boiled in 'lamb juice' and mine had mostly pine nuts. It was good, not as great as staka but I don't think we did the best ordering here.

We saved room for our first Greek dessert, if you don't count the vacuum-packed baklava on our Olympic Airlines flight: loukoumathes, the donut puffs fried and soaked in sesame and honey and then some semolina halva that was covered in rose petal ice cream and sprinkled with lavender blossoms and closed with a cup of Cretan herb tea.

Macaroni and Cheese Diaries

I first ate Annie's at Liza's house, I'm sure of it. I didn't tell her this when we met for Thai food in Union Square with two purple boxes in my new tote for the return trip home, but when I made it today with French milk, French butter, French kitchen, I thought about my first time.

For three days in a row in New York City, I had macaroni and cheese. Tuesday I found myself between two interviews, waiting to meet Liza, so I took myself to Whole Foods and ate in the 'picnic area' a mediocre version made with my least favorite pasta, bowties. Wednesday I was there again, between more interviews, microwaving Amy's version in the picnic area along with a hefty dose of salad bar. Thursday, in Crown Heights all day for another interview, I imagined iceberg lettuce salads in my vegetarian future but alas, one of the interviewers was coming from Whole Foods and brought along a little 'cake' of mac and cheese that I microwaved straight away in its plastic container in the teacher's room, with a falafel salad on the side.

One night I ate just refried black beans with jack and blue corn chips, another night I was so exhausted it was a few ak-mak crackers and some tea before bed. There were no cupcakes, but in the days I found myself at WF, I also was able to go to the Greenmarket, where I proceeded to try nearly every version of apple cider donut and at a maple stand: syrup, cream and candies.

I'm sure the New Yorkers are tired of apples in May in between a few ramps and sappy slabs of cedar, but I was thrilled with it all - only saddened that I had nowhere to bring great bunches of apple blossoms, dogwood or cherry.

I did pick up a travel mug though, and after I filled it with a japanese green after my picnic, I sat against a chain link fence and soaked up the sun, trying to focus before another interview.

Report from the Cupboard

It has been a crazy few weeks with a few more of craziness to follow. In London there was the jam (pictured to the right), which has yet to be opened, and the dulce de leche that found itself swirled into last week's brownies. There was a lot of candy from London: brown sugar fudge, Cadbury cream eggs, Cadbury mini-eggs, and some Turkish delight.

San Sebastian brought pimenton in everything: a confiture for cheese, a nougat with a spicy center, powdered in small tin cans taken for tchochkes, wrapped in plastic for the mole that never gets made.

Israel resulted in za'atar with too much citric acid and a chai tea in bags (there were some whole wheat honey pretzels, but they're long gone now).

This weekend we went to the Loire Valley for the first time with my parents and came back with wines and beer and remnants of sheep's cheese from a chateaux picnic and tilleul honey and walnut mustard for vinaigrettes.

Is there even room to bring things back from New York?

Sesame (in its many forms)

Favorite sesame snacks in Israel include:

Sesame loop of bread with fluorescent za'atar for dipping all wrapped up in recycled newsprint. 5 NIS (about $2. Tourist price?)

Sesame roll with thicker dough, somewhere in between a kaiser and a bagel, slightly sweet like a simit.

Sesame-laden pita then covered in very tart za'atar and even when dropped on the souk floor it still tastes ok because the 5-second rule is legit. 2 NIS.

Halva halva halva. Mostly pistachio, but sometimes plain. Kosher. Non-kosher. Freshly made. 'Freshly made.' Sweating in a plastic bag when it's 96 in Tel Aviv or melting when it's over 100 in Tiberius, the way you can pull it into chunks and it melts in your mouth or sweetens your yogurt... yum.

Hummus

When I was growing up I would beg my dad to open a can of chick peas so I could eat them straight out of the can. It was the perfect treat -no lettuce that could get in the way. Later, he taught me to make hummus and I thought perhaps all dreams of vegetarianism had come true. Soon after, years of vegetarianism gone bad resulted in an aversion to humus, but then I visited Israel.

Above is what was called 'the best Hummus in Israel': by our guide book, my cousin, the Israelis sitting across from us at the most crowded of lunch tables. Tucked inside the souk in Old Acre (Akko), we stood in line and spoke English with smiles simply repeating 'hummus' hoping we'd get it. Our waiter, who spoke English just fine, laughed at us and brought us what you see above: a plate of tahina thick with oil and chick peas, a plate of onion, pickle, hot pepper, olive and tomato and some hot pita. Always one to be in Rome, I followed the men across from me as they ate it with their forks - only to have them turn to me later and say 'no fork!' and mime how to wipe my bowl clean with pita.

If only I were a plate cleaner.

The hummus we had across Israel and the Palestinian Territories varied - most was thick and creamy and delicious. Some was thinner, with a few sad chick peas on top. Others, even the one on the flight home on El Al, were creamy with something quick thick and, well, cream-y. Some were too bitter and not fresh, but this one - this one was incredible.

Markets of Israel

Markets in both Israel and Palestine were incredible. Piles of seasonal produce in a country that has incredible bounty - in fact, the vegetables I bought at Monoprix this week when I returned to Paris tanned and lazy, were all imported from Israel.

Above you can see in the main market in Jerusalem a typical sight of hot peppers and of course some radishes (masquerading as beets, I know) and even some corn that for some reason was ubiquitous across the country.

In Jerusalem, we visited as the entire city was picking up their food for Shabbat -rugelach, challah, whole heads of fresh spring garlic, raw almonds piled up next to glowing strawberries.

Jerusalem also has a souk that we frequented daily where I bought my first halva of the trip and tip-toed over fish juice on the Via Dolorosa.

In Tel Aviv the market was more commercial - lots of things manufactured in China but in between an old man selling 8 kinds of green beans: fava, haricort vert, peas, striped, and others I had never seen before.

Hebron had an intense market - dried herbs in piles and sacks, some even including mashed up cigarettes. On a restaurant-sized grill, a man fried up small pancakes that looked somewhere between a crepe and injera, that you wrap up with filling (we moved too quickly to try some). In Hebron we had tea brewed with sage and coffee with cardamon before heading back out among sesame-speckled bread products of all shapes and shades of yellow.

I have to say that while they had their share of year-round products, these places had a higher percentage of seasonal produce that I see around the corner at one of Paris' most famous markets. The piles of onions and garlic alone were enough to make you want to go home and put a sautee pan on the stove with some oil and just cook whatever was available - which is what many of the restaurants we went to did. More on that in a bit ...

San Sebastian

The other day I was re-telling a story to Jasmine and Jill about my reluctance to enter Berkeley's Cheese Board for the first time - last year. I hadn't been there, didn't know the set up or how to ask for cheese, I was sure that everyone was the cheese expert I longed to be and would judge me as such.

I had a nervous belly before I went in for the first time. And the fifth.

Living in Paris now, I laugh at this story - my worst fear of someone laughing in my face has happened, a couple of times, and thankfully I don't always understand what they're saying! I would take the Cheese Board any day. But this asking, the language, the wanting to know what's best and eat what's freshest and drink the right thing - all very stressful again when we went to San Sebastian this weekend, except they smiled more at our Spanish than I get in an average day at my French.

No Basque attempted, but we did manage to order the olives above while we sat over-looking the clear blue bay and drinking txakoli, a local drink that Liam just pointed to in a magazine that I had. I don't know if it was the sun, but something about it became a little less stressful - although then I looked around and everyone else was drinking something red that looked like sangria but came in a bottle and I was overwhelmed with the options.

Our favorite finds on our trip were the pinxtos of olive/anchovy/hot pepper on a stick, some fried cheese that looked like a plantain and some ham cut from a leg above us that Liam enjoyed in a bocadillo.

On the drive from San Sebastian to Bordeaux, we stopped at a boulangerie to get a gateau basque creme which rounded out our train ride picnic of basque cheeses, piment confiture, a bread shaped like a cinnamon roll but oiled with olive, and a nougat filled with spicy pepper as well.

We bought these on the French side though, slightly side-stepping the language worries, but I let Liam do that.

Perfect Snack for Writing a Novel

As some of you know, I'm working on a novel in poetry for young adults. It's a coming of age tale of a 16 year old Nora Smith: 1/2 Jewish, 1/2 Catholic, trying to define her own identity in the year following the death of her best friend. She is taking a Black Studies course at her high school and falls for an African-American boy. Through the course of the novel, we learn more about Nora, her family, her grief and her growth.

She may even end up in Paris.

While there's not much food in the novel (Nora does prefer a Chai Latte to a cappuccino), there's a great deal of food fueling the author on her end.

A recent favorite any-time-of-day-while-writing snack includes brown sugar sea salt cookies from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian with a cup of homemade chai (all novels are based on some kinds of facts, yes?)

These cookies are incredible - the butteriness is shown off by the addition of semolina flour (sandy, but in a way that renders this writer speechless for a better synonym) and the fleur de sel on top makes you lick your lips and grab another. I've tried them several times in several different thicknesses - I don't have an electric mixer here, so my dough has ranged from crumbly to creamy (and subsequently frozen for cutting because I've melted the butter too much).

The recent batch pictured here started as a creamy dough and then baked very thin and crispy.

A handful with a cup of tea can fuel an author for a pre-lunch revision session, a tea-time hour of drafting two new poems for Part II or an after dinner re-read.

I cannot recommend How to Cook Everything Vegetarian enough, even for meat-eaters (indeed, you are Bittman's audience here), but until you buy it, here's the recipe:

1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup dark packed brown sugar
1 egg yolk
1 C. semolina flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 t. salt
about 1 t. coarse sea-salt for sprinkling

1. Use an elect. mixer on low speed to mix the butter and sugar together just until combined, 30 seconds or so. Still on low speed, beat in the egg yolk, then the flours and salt, until the mixture barely holds together; this will take a few minutes.
2. Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface and shape it into a round, triangular, or rectangular log about 1 inch in diameter; wrap it in plastic wrap and refrig. or freeze until firm, about 30 minutes (or freeze the log for up to 3 mos well wrapped).
3. Preheat the oven to 325F. Unwrap the dough and slice it 1/4" thick, put the slices on an ungreased baking sheet, sprinkle each with a little sea salt, and bake right away until the cookies are firm but now browning, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, let them cool in the pan for a minute or two and then transfer the cookies to a rack to cool. Stir in an airtight container for up to 2 days (I've kept them a few more and they've still been good)

Makes 3 or 4 dozen.

Butter Tasting

It was a Fromagette reunion this month, with Sara here a few weeks ago and Jasmine this past week with Jill. To celebrate, we set out to sample the dairy product loved by both fromagettes and the future maman: les beurres des France.

"What would you say if you saw someone in the store with 6 kinds of butter?" I asked Jill as we watched people eying us.

"There aren't 6 kinds of butter at the American grocery store - unless we're talking butter substitutes?!" and we laughed as four kinds of doux and three brands of demi-sel passed by.

Using recommendations gleaned from Regal, a Parisian eGullet Butter Tasting and the generally agreed upon belief that Bordier reigned, we put all out on the table. Sweet to salty, we spread bits ranging from near white to a saffron yellow on baguette and paused.

Perhaps it was because I mistakenly I picked up the beurre tendre version but the Elle & Vivre recommended by Regal was a waxy loser. For Jasmine, the salted Bordier was Queen. Jill and I preferred the AOC Monoprix Gourmand brand.

Conditions weren't ideal - the Bordier was cut just an hour before by wire at the fromagerie while the others were still a bit firm from the grocery store shelf.

We kept out the demi-sel Bordier and Monoprix's Gourmand, added some bio bread (one loaf of nut, another of complet, a 1/2 roasted chicken for the ladies, some petit pois to get some green in and three cheese old and new to the fromagettes: chevre Reblochon, an aged comte, and a cone of soft tarragon and garlic (?) covered in paprika and pepper (Basque? Corsican?) and had une grande pique-nique!

Return of the Cheddar

Upon arriving in London last weekend, we went straight to Kensington High Street to visit the most beautiful Whole Foods I've ever seen.

Only living in Paris would render the airy, chalk-board sights of this store so gorgeous to me. I picked up some rose petal masala, a make your own muesli, chocolate with lavender, fennel toothpaste and a pound of flax seed (linseed as they call it there).

As we walked to the till, we passed a display of hot chili crackers - on the side it said, serve with aged cheddar so I grabbed the first one I saw and headed upstairs to eat a tostada with beans, cilantro, 'soured cream,' and fresh jalapenos.

We brought the cheddar to our dear hosts who added the Keen's Cheddar they had purchased - half of an incredible cheese plate that we ate this all weekend. The Keen's Cheddar is complex and strong and on those chili crackers? Perfection.

Saturday we went to the Borough Market. I filled my basked with danson jam and burnt sugar raw sugar caramel fudge and some dulce de leche from Spain and as we left, I eyed a cheese sandwich stand. Above you see the grilled cheese, greasy and wrapped, cut with some salad of onions and cucumbers and something else, that I ate on the way out.

If only they'd had macaroni and cheese at Whole Foods, it would've been the perfect cheese weekend.

Bienvenue Printemps

We Pisces know that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb but surely in Paris there could be a better way to welcome spring than with hail and near-snow?

A dinner party. Some French friends, some American, and food that brings hope of sunny days.

What I miss is the glory of flipping through food magazines and newspaper sections for inspiration. What do I do instead? Click on Epicurious links which I don't enjoy as much, but which led me to some fantastic recipes.

We started with what's pictured here: Goat Cheese Crostini with Blood Orange Black Pepper Marmalade - the tart sweet spiciness of the marmalade was the perfect way to wake us up to the potential of spring, albeit with wintry citrus. The recipe was written by Amelia Saltsman, whose recipes I am always moved by when she's interviewed on the Good Food Market Report (she wrote a cookbook about this market).

Also inspired by Good Food, was Russ Parson's suggestion for making a Spring Potato Chowder - new potatoes (12 euros a kilo!), green garlic (the best I could do was green onions), and topped with a bit of vinegar, olive oil and pecorino - one guest said, "I know this might not be a compliment to you, but it tastes like bacon!"

To work on my goal of roasting whole fish, I succeeded in ordering a 4kilo bar de ligne (line-caught sea bass) for a recipe for Roasted Fish with Coriander and Vinegar Sauce. Liam and I worked together to stuff it with roasted almonds, lemon slices and coriander and then laid it out on a bed of bay leaves and set to roast for the good part of an hour. Topped with the vinegar sauce, it was pretty remarkable - tangy without being too, well, vinegar-y, and with all this great roasted crunch from the stuffing.

Bienvenue Printemps! I shouted with the dessert, welcoming spring with strawberries. whipped cream and boulangerie-made meringues - an idea that I got from the New York Times - so, perhaps, I'm still doing my 'flipping through the pages' anyway...

Bebe Food

Last weekend Liam's family visited. It was a fun-filled three days of parks, drizzle, visits to Notre Dame complete with the "Who is God?" question, more drizzle, a tea party, and some nachos.

At one of our between-the-park-and-a-nap stops, we sat outside at Marche des Enfants Rouges, one of my favorite markets in the 3rd, to eat our lunch. Liam took off to get cous cous for everyone while I held it down with a middle eastern plate and 2 young ladies aged 5 and 3 eating dolma and hummus off of my fork.

Liam's sister pulled out the food for her youngest, a 9-month old that I lovingly refer to as Sweet Potato, and what was he having? Cous cous!

Later, a 5 year old and I played a game in the grocery store called, "If I were a baby, I would eat ..." which I created on the spot solely to memorize the fantastic array of foods for the bebe at the store.

The game went like this ...

If I were a baby, I would eat ....
duck and peas for lunch
ratatouille for dinner
creme caramel for dessert
more duck for lunch the next day ... and so on.

Canard avec petit pois for lunch? Who could say no?

Dejeuner

Last week, Sara visited us, and we were able to show off our now-nearly-honed Tour Guide skills. Early morning walks to Ile St Louis for a cafe creme with a view of Notre Dame, pictures on various ponts, and petit sacs of macarons at Pierre Herme to be consumed at Luxemborg Gardens. Following the sunny walk and garden tour, we decided to avoid a touristy haunt and thus, we ended up lunching at Bread and Roses - a British place that I had passed many times on my way to French class in the fall, but had heard wasn't that good. It proved us quite wrong.

I had the "Ploughman's Lunch" that you can see above. A fat old slice of cheddar with a beautifully soft piece of Irish soda bread and some water crackers. A little bit of 'pickle' it was called in French, but was more like chutney and some salade on the side. I decided that despite my aversion to cold lunches, this was the perfect dejeuner for me.

Lunch has been a weird experience for me now that I spend most of my time at home in the day.

I went through a short-lived "I can cook lunch every day!" phase. What followed was the "Bittman was right, baking an egg is the way to go!" ramekin phase. Finally, there's been the "Alice Waters says you don't even need to cook to eat well a perfect loaf of bread can be a great lunch!" phase.

Today, I had a pain aux cereales from the fabulous Veronique Mauclerc with some 48 month aged Gouda and a few lucques olives with some hot peppers. Yummy, but I will admit publicly - sometimes I think it would be nice to have Annie's mac and cheese and a Smart Dog for a "I was a child in 1982 who ate Kraft mac and cheese and hot dogs but now I'm grown and eat organic/vegetarian lunch."

That is a favorite dejeuner phase too.

Why I Should Stick to Buying Cheese

Setting: 5aSec, Rue Rivoli (dry cleaner's)
Time: 2:30pm
Major Players: A 'French-speaking' Fromagette and a kind cashier

[conversation translated into English for your reading pleasure]

C: Bonjour Madame!
F: Bonjour Madame!
C: Would you like to take a free card today to have a discount?
F: No thank you!
C: No, it's free, you just take a card for a discount.
F: No thank you Madame, it's good!
C: laughs
F: smiles 'knowingly' believing that she has not been scammed into some kind of 'membership card' to pay for a discount. C continues to laugh.
C: ringing up purchase. 8.60 please!
F: looking over at the cards and seeing that they're actually a free discount now that she has time to translate: March 1- 15 - Game Days! Free Discount up to 40%!. Hands cashier money.
C: I guess you had the correct change! another giggle
F: feeling stupid but not having enough French to say 'oops, can I grab one now?'. Yes!
C: They will be ready tomorrow!
F: I am in agreement! Thank you! Good bye!
C: smiling. perplexed? Good bye!

Grocery Store Maven Goes to Monoprix

Monoprix is like Trader Joe's meets Safeway. It has a small 'ethnic aisles' like the Shaw's of my college days, including one for Italian food. In another, you'll find coconut milk, tortillas, and peanut butter on the same two shelves.

For Chinese New Year, a seasonal aisle was chock-full of Vietnamese rice paper rolls and nori and nothing discernably 'Chinese.'

Monoprix, being a French grocery, has an extraordinary yogurt aisle, butter collection and four grades of cheese: regular packaged, a gourmet package, a just-cut-from-across-the-way fromager package, and a fromager. These are in four different locations in the store.

Like Trader Joe's, Monoprix doesn't seem to have the same inventory each week. They also seem to add new sections frequently - this past week I saw an all-bio (organic) vegetable section with some of the saddest plastic-encased vegetables I've seen. The same refrigeration weirdness that has tofu underneath zucchini at Safeway has cranberries by prepared salads and a fancy citron yogurt that I like hidden next to pre-made sandwiches here in Paris.

This week I explored an aisle I'd never paid much attention to. I imagine it's the Cocktail Aisle (or apero for aperitif). I turned from picking up honey for my Cream of Wheat and saw the display small packages with yummy treats that seemed perfect for a PMS week. My favorites: cheese puffs in a small package so they don't get stale and Pringles-like paprika chips.

We don't have any plans with friends for an apero over here any time soon, but I figured it'd be good to be ready - and by ready, I mean to have sampled them before I put them out there for guests.

L'Arpege

With all apologies to Monsieur Passard, L'Arpege is decorated like a dentist's office (credit to his website for this photo). Warm and not too stuffy, but unlike the lovely squash you see here, we saw paintings and Mr. Passard's book translated into Japanese.

We sat at the table you see here and I'm regretful that I did not bring my camera - the dining room included a teenager wearing jeans, several large 35mm cameras and a couple that couldn't get enough of the sommelier (another picture taken) - and I was worried about what we wore and what we carried!

But I digress from the meal.

Liam and I both had the menu. Pas de viande! the waitress informed us, but she had just explained that one of the first courses included a foam of lardon, so perhaps this was 'without meat' the French way?

There was foam on everything, and this made me happy.

I fell first for a foamy oeuf flavored with sherry vinegar and maple syrup and tasted as amazing as it sounds terrible. A dish that followed that seemed to be buttery foam on potatoes was like the essence of dauphin - but this may be the fume of a good hunk of ham.

A slice of celeriac was covered in crispy chestnuts and black truffle - Liam did not like it - I thought it was a bit too salty. A final plate of roasted root vegetables - everything from slices of rutabaga to salsify to several colors of carrots all covered in, yes, saffron foam. There was an earlier beet dish which was one of the least sweet beets I have ever had.

Our main course was by far the best - a slice of abalone covered in another white foam, accompanied by onions caramelized in vanilla bean and an onion gratin that came to the table a few seconds later. I was nearly full at this point, but wiped every bit of foam off of that plate.

And while I was surely smitten with Liam for bringing me here for my 32nd birthday, I made a several-glasses-of-wine-later suggestion that if I am ever to leave him, it might be for the incredible wheel of salers that arrived on an oak bench with a 4 year aged comte, served only in L'Arpege (no where else in the city), and, I quote (this was in English so I know what I'm saying here) "raised as you would raise a child."

Needless to say, it was some of the best cheese I have ever had.

Dessert: a honeyed souffle with a 'heart of chocolate' was so light and deliciously honeyed without being too sweet and a plate of petits fours that ranged from fun (celeriac and beet macarons!) to classic (chocolate puff pastry).

Despite rain that started off the morning, there was sun streaming into our faces while we ate - some of the best ambiance you can hope for during a late-winter Paris lunch.

The Serendipity of Turmeric (and other rhizome tea tales)

It was a week of culinary serendipity.

One day I'm reading Madhur Jaffrey's top 100 of Saveur piece on fresh turmeric, a few days later I'm at Paris' Passage Brady in front of a bin of the stuff.

One day I'm reading a blog about making ice cream with condensed milk and cursing the universe that I can't find it here. Several days later, Veronica tells me that she adds it to horchata and I need to scope out the part of the grocery store I'm not as familiar with - the unrefrigerated milk section.

And so, one serendipitous week and a few days later, I am the queen of rhizome teas.
After taking Katie and Veronica on a spice run to make homemade chai, I remembered Ginger Tea and with the canned milks find, fled home for a quick blended brew. It's deep with ginger and smoky with black tea and that earthy undertone of sweetened condensed milk and one of the best teas I know.

Today, I returned to my less familiar rhizome and peeled a knob to make sure it was the orange yellow finger-stainer that I thought it was. A faint Dr. Weil-said-that-Okinawans-live-to-be-100-because-they-drink-it-daily memory and several Internet searches later, I boiled it with a few cups of water and one cardamon pod. One cup later, I'm a fan.

2008 Food Intentions: Update

In my effort to keep my 2008 Food Intentions alive, I've decided to post updates. To date, I have

• roasted an entire fish (dourade), quite easily, stuffed with some fennel and lemon and the moral support of Liam (I am still a semi-recovering vegetarian who eats fish)
• added salade to our dinner with my homemade vinegar to no avail (we still eat it to eat it and not because we enjoy it).
• after a trip to Patrick Roger, I have inserted confiture into my day with little success, but might try this week with scones and pair those scones with a Chinese black after having a great one in Honfleur called gui hong.

Finally, you can see above a cheese course that I put together last week. Inspired by the ginger spread that Emily sent me back with me to Paris, I paired it with a pear and our new favorite: a 48 month-aged Gouda. Then, slightly inspired by reading an article in Saveur about how to pair ports, I got the idea of the sweetness of the gouda/ginger and the pear to pair with the bleu d'auvergne.

The pairings have made me happy for 3 days. Maybe 5.

Now, onto knowing more about my teas and picking up some salsify.