Once upon a time, there was something called I Hate Peas – French fries with ridges that you baked in the oven, aimed at kids who wouldn’t eat their vegetables. They supposedly had all the nutrients of peas without whatever it is about peas that apparently some kids don’t like. They didn’t last long, and I (or my mom) was fortunate because I always loved vegetables, including…
I wasn’t always friends with no-knead bread, partially because I like kneading, and find those five minutes out of my day become the least-stressful activity that I know of. Although I worked at a bread bakery one night because I thought it might be interesting to become a bread baker. By the time we finished up, very early the next morning, my aching legs, back,…
The French are known for their fine cuisine. Their lavish lunches and sumptuous dinners are legendary. But breakfast, or le petit déjeuner, might seem to get short shrift, to the dismay of travelers coming from places where breakfast is a more elaborate affair. I remember as a tourist in France, I felt so French having a baguette or croissant for breakfast, smearing jam and butter on either, enjoying…
As much as we like to rib each other about our differences, France is no different from America when it comes to a few things. You can discuss amongst yourselves some of the other things, but the one I want to talk about today is green onions, or scallions, as they’re called in certain parts of the United States. No one can quite agree on what…
[UPDATE: Gus retired from the bakery in 2025 and passed along the bakery to other owners.) I’m often dismayed when I take a trip back to the U.S. and people tell me they wonder why they can’t get good food where they live, like they have in France. While it’s certainly true there aren’t bakeries on every street corner in America (I think people would miss all…
I’ve been thinking about man’oushe for years, ever since I went to Lebanon and someone handed me a warm flatbread right out of the wood-fired oven. It was the perfect snack: A warm, slightly supple dough slathered with za’atar, an herbaceous seasoning blend punctuated with sumac and sesame seeds. It has a slightly astringent flavor, due to the tang of sumac and the sharpness of the wild…
When people ask me “Why did you move to Paris?” I’ll usually stop, point to the nearest cheese shop or bakery, and let them figure it out for themselves. There are a lot of pastry shops in Paris, over a thousand of them. But the first was Stohrer, which opened in 1730 by pastry chef Nicolas Stohrer, the pastry chef for Louis XV of France and his…
One of the high points of going to Ireland is the Irish breakfast. In France, breakfast is usually some toast and coffee, and I’m fine with that – although a few hours later, I usually have a plain yogurt with some dark honey or a bowl of fresh fruit, to tide me over until lunch. The Irish breakfast, on the other hand, is a major…
One of the things that I see when dining with visitors to France is that right after they pluck a piece of bread out of the bread basket that is invariably set on the table in cafés and restaurants, they start looking around – a little nervously – where to put their bread down. While the conversation is going, I sense a bit of multitasking…
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