It’s summer! Whether you’re in or outdoors, hopefully for all of you there are beautiful summer fruits and berries to be had, and I hope that you’re able to get your hands on as many of them as you can. I am loading (actually, overloading…) myself up at the market. While a good portion on the fresh fruit gets eaten just as-is, some of it…
This may or may not happen to you, but sometimes when I’m a guest in someone’s home, where everyone pitches in to make dinner, all eyes (or just the host’s eyes) fall on me to make dessert. Gulp. I happy to pitch in with the cooking or bringing along a few baked goodies for the weekend, but I’m not always prepared to bake on the…
During the summer, at outdoor flea markets and brocantes, you’ll invariably find me on my hands and knees, rifle through boxes that are jammed with stuff, since ya never know what you’ll pluck out. I’m particularly keen on finding old French baking items, although I’ve learned that all those pretty little tin tart molds are best left to clutter someone else’s kitchen drawers. And since…
I came up with this cake almost fifteen years ago because I was looking for ways to use all the plums that we had when I was living in California. Northern California becomes plum central during the summer, with thanks going to Luther Burbank who developed a lot of varieties of fruit in the region, including the Santa Rosa plum, named after the town in California…
I am sure that after I am gone, they are going to find something peculiar in my brain. (If they find anything in there at all…) It’s a special spot that compels one to make jam, and maybe they will name it after me. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been on a jam-making binge. We’re in the final weeks of strawberries here and I…
My favorite fruits are plums, which, confusingly for anglophones, are called prunes, in French, or pruneaux, when they are dried. (And boy, are they delicious!) They show up late at the markets in Paris, but stick around longer, overlapping with apples and pears, which arrive in early fall. Most of the plums that you see in Paris markets aren’t the tart varieties that are eaten out…
I’ve gotta say, I’ve taken a few dings for not presenting only the best parts of life in a foreign city. People may, or may not, want to hear about dealing with cranky cashiers, rigid administrators, or worse, paper-thin bath towels, instead wanting a perfect story of life in an apartment with a balcony, and watching sunsets every night over chilled glasses of Champagne, toasting…
Like New Yorkers, Parisians swear they would never live anywhere else. But once the summer – or the weekend – rolls around, everyone can’t wait to make a sortie toward the nearest exit. After fighting the usual traffic to get out of the périphérique, we took an exit and were shortly in the countryside, where the skies are big and clear, you’re surround by wheat…
The French have a lot of protests and manifestations. Some of the issues they march for are a bit of a reach and we roll our eyes. And it’s annoying when the trains and other forms of transport go on strike and you need to get somewhere. But on the other hand, it’s good that they feel strongly about certain issues, enough to hit the…
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