While Paris is always beautiful, when winter comes, the city gets rather cold and gray – called la grisaille. In fact, it’s so cold that I refuse to go outside until spring. Believe me, all those romantic photos of Paris you see are taken during the spring and fall..and are very deceptive. And although it’s very pretty, it would take a mighty big levier (crowbar)…
We all want granola to be healthy. And some granolas are so sweet they could easily qualify as candy. But since I tend to spend the better part of the day roaming around my apartment sticking my hand in various boxes and jars of stuff to eat, I wanted to come up with a granola that was satisfying enough for breakfast, but one that I…
Pecans are the great American nut and at no time of the year are they more in demand than around the holidays. There are a lot of different nuts grown in the United States; walnuts, almonds, pistachios, and hazelnuts, but a pie made with toasted pecans is a holiday tradition and every year I have the urge to make one. Recently an American membership-only store…
Lest you think this is turning into a blog about obscure, leafy ingredients, you might be right. But when I sniffed the very fragrant leaves of lemon verbena, or verveine, growing at a friend’s house near Nice (where we were staying a few years ago), she told me to take as much as I wanted home, and I dove for the clippers. Almost as soon…
Like most Americans, even French people aren’t so familiar with persimmons. They may see them at the market, look at their curiously, but don’t stop to buy any. Or if they do, they take them home, bite into an unripe one, make a face, and toss them out. One of my friends living north of San Francisco in Sonoma County had an enormous persimmon tree….
Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people wanting to live their dream and buy an apartment in Paris. When buying mine, I learned quite a bit (more than I thought!) but the most important thing was learning the value of having someone on your side who knows the ins and outs, and idiosyncrasies, of the unique world of Paris real estate….
It’s the season for apple tarts, Fall, when the biggest bounty of apples shows up at the market. I’ve had to learn about all sorts of other varieties of apples since the ones available in France differ from the ones in the United States that I was used to. But it’s been a wonderful journey of discovery and I’ve found unusual varieties that were one day, abundant at the…
German baking, I don’t think, gets its due. It’s partially because the names of the pastries and baked goods don’t exactly roll right off most of our tongues. Kartoffel-Käse Dinnede, Zitronenbiskuitrolle, Aachener Poschweck, Schwäbischer Prasselkuchen, and, well…I’ll quit now, because it’s taking me too long to hunt down all those keys on my keyboard. And I’d rather be wrapping my tongue around German cakes and cookies, rather than trying to…
This week I saw the first promise of tomato season. A few brightly colored cherry specimens were brought home from the local market, as well as the more standard varieties. I was down in Gascony visiting my friend Kate Hill, and her photographer friend Tim Clinch was there preparing to lead a photography workshop. Looking for something tempting and colorful, tomatoes seemed the obvious choice…
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