Last month I was teaching at Central Market, a chain of pretty amazing supermarkets in Texas that has just about anything you can imagine—including cooking classes. And I never pass up the chance to teach there. For one thing, the staff is uniformly excellent and it’s just a pleasure to step into their kitchens and work with them. But the other is that I get…
When is a cake not a cake? When you’re in France. These ‘cakes’ (pronounced kek) are what we might call ‘quick bread’ in the United States, although we usually make them sweet. So I’ll have to give one to the French and say that they’re right—this actually falls more in the category of a cake rather than a bread. People often ask what people in…
During my trip to the Côte d’Azur with Matt and Adam, after the second or third day, we realized that we hadn’t eaten in any restaurants. With the fresh ingredients available, we were preparing our own meals (pretty well, I might add), and we didn’t feel the need to hand over the cooking duties to a third-party. It was a bit of heaven being in…
Every once in a while there are contests in Paris to decide who makes the best croissant, a hot new restaurant list get published somewhere, or a market way on the other side of Paris that supposedly has great onions grown in the same soil where Louis the XIV once took a squat, becomes a “must visit”. It’s pretty encouraging to see and hear about…
The other night I was standing on the métro and found myself face à face with a little affiche advising me, minding my own business as I rocketed below Paris, that it’s not alright to eat Mr. Ed. Then on Tuesday, I was taking a stroll through the thirteenth, on my way to have lunch with a friend in Chinatown, and came across a sign…
Did you know that (technically) there is no such thing as a Meyer lemon? Well, at least not as we know them. Officially, they haven’t existed for about fifty years, since a virus attacked the Meyer lemon trees and they were banned in the United States. In 1975, an Improved Meyer Lemon was introduced, whose plants were virus-free, and people began planting them in backyards…
For someone who used to not drink that much, I seem to have a lot of liquor on my liquor shelf. I guess I should rephrase that. For someone who drinks a lot of wine, but not a lot of liquor, I sure have a lot of liquor on my liquor shelf. Is that clear? Americans may be known for our cocktails, but in France,…
I once asked a restaurateur, who owns restaurants in European and in America, what he thought was the main difference between the food in American and the food in Europe. “Everything’s is sweeter,” he replied right away. I thought about it for a moment, and considering everyone’s got their panties in a knot about all the sweeteners that are dumped into everything from tomato sauce, bottled salad…
Not everyone thinks of citrus fruits as “winter fruits.” But that’s when oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, tangy lemons, and enticing limes are often at their peak. And that’s a good thing because there’s nothing that brightens up any season – but especially winter – better than a classic French lemon tart. Any bakery in Paris will have a Tarte au citron on offer. Some are on…
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