I know this doesn’t sound like a problem to you, but I’ve got too much gin on my hands. I love gin but suddenly I found myself with five or six bottles of the stuff. I do plan on more Gin and Tonics, Martinis, Negronis, Jasmines, Rosemary Gimlets, and other gin-forward cocktails in my future. But I also had too many pink grapefruits on hand, the…
There are a lot of desserts in my repertoire, but the one that I always have room for – and crave – is Tangerine Sorbet. Come winter, when the markets are loaded up with citrus, Parisians rifle through the piles on the market stands and buy ’em by the kilo. (About 2 pounds.) I do too, never failing to come home with a sack bulging…
Jennifer McLagan always seems to know what we want to read about, and cook, before even we do. She wrote a slew of popular and award-winning books, which include Fat (which bravely came out during the low-fat craze, and nevertheless was a big hit), Bones, and now, Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor. The book is a celebration of flavors that are on the cutting edge, taste-wise….
I never really “got” London. It was always this hulking city that I struggled to navigate, overwhelmingly large, with a subway system that seemed like a tangle of routes and directions that I just couldn’t unravel. But part of it is my fault as I never really spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. I just accepted defeat early on. So this…
A while back, a friend made the Apple-Red Wine Tart (in Ready for Dessert), which calls for the fruit to be cooked in red wine in a nonreactive pan. I didn’t realize it at the time, but many people don’t know what nonreactive cookware is and he called to tell me the dessert was great, but his pan was stained. (And this was someone who…
[UPDATE: The restaurant is no long an Alain Ducasse restaurant.] Uncharacteristically, I’ll spare you the specifics, but I need to catch up on about 147 hours of sleep. And while we’re at it, I could use a hug. And since the former isn’t necessarily easy to come by here, as is the latter, I was embrassé by dinner at Alain Ducasse restaurant. While it’s been…
I’m tired. Or as Madeleine Kahn more bluntly put it in Blazing Saddles, “G-ddammit, I’m exhausted.” The last few weeks I’ve been racing around Paris in my dusty clothes, trying to find things like electrical switches, bathroom shelves, and making a decision about kitchen cabinet knobs for much longer than any sane person would consider prudent. And I’ve been averaging about three hours of sleep…
When I started working at Chez Panisse, there was something called crème anglaise on the menu…and my job was to make it. Of course, I had no idea what crème anglaise was – other than something with a funny name that I got in trouble for pronouncing wrong on several occasions. But I pretended I knew what it was when everyone was talking about making…
One of the great things about France is that people spend a lot of time talking to each other. True, it’s not so great when you’re behind someone in line and they’re carrying on a conversation with the sales clerk at the bakery as if they have all the time on the planet, when you’re hopping up and down behind them (and there are people…
Join me on my Spring 2026 book tour for my latest book, The Great Book of Chocolate
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