Patricia Wells has been writing about Paris for decades, and put a lot of bakeries, restaurants, and really…anything food-related—on the map for visitors. And when Patricia recently invited me and some friends over for lunch in her well-equipped Paris cooking school kitchen to celebrate her new book on salads, I jumped at the chance (okay, I didn’t jump because people would have looked at me…
I have a bad habit of reading cookbooks while I’m eating, if I’m alone at home. I like flipping through the pages and looking at pictures, but the downside is that too often I get so excited about a recipe that I don’t even finish dinner and head over to the kitchen and start pulling out the tubs of flour and sugar. To avoid malnutrition,…
I was a little perplexed as to what constitutes authentic Mexican Hot Chocolate. Thankfully a reader from Mexico explained to me that unlike other hot chocolate “drinks” in the Mexican repertoire, it traditionally was a mixture of cocoa beans and sweetener. Yet nowadays folks generally use sweet chocolate bars as a base, which are made from coarsely ground chocolate with a dose of cinnamon and…
Many years ago I worked in a restaurant in New York with a group of other cooks, who were mostly women and we were all friends. We’d gather in the cold morning kitchen, working around a communal wooden counter near the warm stove armed with cups of strong coffee as we set about our various tasks while engaging in conversations while doing all the repetitive…
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…
I was teaching recently in Texas at Central Market, and I’d have to say after spending a week there, it’s the best supermarket in the world. I was using the marvelous citrus fruits they foraged from around the United States, including fresh yuzu, limequats, jumbo pomelos, bergamots, Seville oranges, citrons (which I’ve been trying to find in Paris—anyone know where I can find one?), and…
I usually try to make pecan pie every year for Thanksgiving. The list of ingredients sends me on a little scavenger hunt around, as American baking in a foreign country can do. And in spite of my best efforts, I don’t always quite make it. But I’ve gotten wiser over the years and brings things back with me from the States for this all-American dessert,…
Often people aren’t sure what to do with persimmons. While Fuyu persimmons are eaten while crunchy and are good in fruit compotes and wintery salads, Hachiya persimmons are abruptly tannic when unripe and must be squishy soft before eaten. And if you’ve even tried an unripe one, you’ll know that I’m being kind when I say “abruptly.” Fully ripe, they’re quite sweet and even though…
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…
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