When the virus hit, I’m pretty sure the first thing people didn’t think about stocking up on was cabbage. I only saw the empty shelves of pasta, rice, and toilet paper from photos posted online, taken in the U.S., but I didn’t see any pictures of the empty cabbage bins. I’ve loved cabbage for a long time, and even my mother shredded red cabbage to…
I love a big salad, especially in the summer. Actually, a big bowl of greens, one that includes lots of crunchy things, is one of my favorite things at any time of the year. My default dressing is a French vinaigrette, which is sometimes slightly creamy, courtesy of a large dollop of Dijon mustard, but it’s fun to swap out another dressing from time-to-time for…
The first avocado I ever had was at Scandia restaurant in Los Angeles and I hated it. The slippery little green cubes avoided my fork, until finally, I managed to spear one. Once I did, I swallowed it – reluctantly, then avoided the rest of them on my plate. I’m not sure how I came to eventually love avocados, but the city of Los Angeles is…
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…
This year seems to be a banner year for cookbooks and there are so many that I’ve leafed through and bookmarked, that even though it’s early in the cookbook season, I feel like I already have the next twelve month’s worth of great recipes to try on my docket. Lately I’ve been impressed by books that make cuisines that people might feel daunted about tackling, accessible. And even…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to use up things I already have in the cupboard, plus eat seasonally, plus make things that are relatively easy to make – and this salad fit the bill on all counts. It combines tahini with wild rice and used up some of the marvelous root vegetables that I can’t help buying at the market, even though…
I don’t think about this so much anymore, but one of the reasons I moved to Paris is that I could, whenever I wanted to, go to Poilâne and buy myself a nice chunk of pain Poilâne. Just like that. Although I’m from San Francisco where there are quite a number of excellent bread bakeries, there’s something special about the bread at Poilâne – it…
I don’t know what possessed me the other day, but there I was, and there it was—I was faced with a big mound of Iceberg lettuce heads at the market, two for one euro, so I bought two of them. Although I don’t eat it very often, I love Iceberg lettuce salad and anyone who says they don’t is probably fibbing. People will often justify…
A story on CNN talked about how former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, was not bourgeois, noting that he didn’t grow up in a rarified family and as the (American) commentator exclaimed…“He didn’t grow up eating pâté!” I thought that was pretty funny since meaty pâtés and rillettes aren’t upscale delicacies in France, but are considered everyday fare. And some of the best pâtés I’ve had…
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