It was definitely mercury in retrograde recently when I got a phone call at 8:20pm, while we were having dinner at home, from a restaurant I’d reserved a table at, asking if we were showing up for our 8pm reservation. I was sure I had reserved for the following night, but – nope – I erred and our reservation was for that evening. (Fortunately, the…
Bergamots aren’t something one runs across every day in the supermarket, or even at greengrocers. But mid-winter, depending on where you live, you just might get lucky and happen across some, as I recently did in Paris. But no matter, this recipe can be made with other kinds of lemon, especially “sweet” lemons, such as Meyer lemons. There’s conflicting information on what a bergamot actually is,…
I was recently gifted an overload of strawberries: I bought four baskets from a vendor at the market, whose booth I shop at often, and he threw in two extra baskets for free, the equivalent of a carte de fidelité (loyalty card) in Paris. So I’ve spent the past few days washing, hulling, cutting and cooking my unexpected bounty. I’ve been making a number of…
Boston Cream Pie is one of my favorite desserts of all time. It was one of the options in the cafeteria line at my elementary school and the one I always grabbed and put on my tray, next to my codfish sticks, boiled potatoes with parsley, and butter sandwiches on dense Pepperidge Farm-style white bread, which they served in half-portions, each rectangle slipped into a…
I was recently reunited with something I miss very much – a loaded apple tree! Friends of mine who had a house in the French countryside had a tree that, come fall, had so many apples, the limbs threatened to break off. Not wanting to be an accomplice in apple-cide, I decided to do my part to save the tree, and the apples, and make…
One of the first “recipes” on this blog was No-Recipe Cherry Jam, posted in 2005. Why some hyperventilated about making something without an exact recipe, a lot of people successfully used those guidelines to make cherry jam over the last fifteen years. The basis for it was how I’ve been making jam forever; use 3 parts sugar to 4 parts fruit puree. The standard ratio…
As you get older, you tend to forget things. Often it’s blamed it on age, or an allusion to an early onset of a memory-loss disorder. I forget things all the time, but I blame it on a full brain. Think about it; every ten years, our brains have so much more information to remember than they did a decade ago. Think about all you’ve…
I’ve been making my own jams and marmalades for many years, so with apologies to those who’ve asked me which French jam to buy when they come to Paris, they’re often disappointed when I can’t guide them in the right direction. (Unless they want me to guide them to my jam-crowded kitchen cupboard.) Unless someone has given me a jar of theirs, I have so…
When it was on the cusp of popularity in the U.S., I sort of introduced crème brûlée to a restaurant where I was working at the time, and, predictably, they took off. So much so, that most of my nights were spent torching crème brûlée as fast as I could. Finally, I put an end to that (popularity is overrated), and that was that. There…
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