After years of whizzing all of my soups to liquid velvet, I have recently and suddenly become a chunky soup convert.

This change of preference happened overnight, and I don’t know what prompted it, but ever since the beginning of the fall and the first batches of the season, I can’t think of a more desirable soup format than cubes, coins, and ribbons of vegetables intermingling in a broth. There’s chew and slurp, and the combination of the two provides a greater satisfaction than one or the other.

A few things to keep in mind when preparing that type of soup: first, the vegetables need to be cut into even sizes and shapes, so they’ll form a coherent ensemble in the bowl. This is of less concern when you’re preparing a mixed soup, but here you have to imagine that the pieces you add in will essentially remain the same when cooked, so you want smaller than bite-sized morsels.

I can’t think of a more desirable soup format than cubes, coins, and ribbons of vegetables intermingling in a broth. There’s chew and slurp, and the combination of the two provides a greater satisfaction than one or the other.

Second, you’ll get best results if the ingredient mix you use includes one that’ll give body to the soup, and by that I mean enough starch that the broth has substance, rather than feel watery. A small amount of floury potatoes or split peas works well.

Third, if you find yourself in a position to add a sprinkle of fresh herbs — leaves or blossoms — at the surface of the bowls, the soup will light up and love you for it. Nuts are a fine topping, too, and if you happen to have a colossal supply of walnuts, you may agree that they’re very much a one-nut-fits-all for autumn soups.

My current favorite version, which I’ve been making weekly for the past month, is this chunky pumpkin soup: it involves pumpkin (now that’s a surprise), shallots, potatoes, and the greens from Swiss chard or a bunch of young turnips.

Here are the tricks that make it, in my humble opinion, really really good: one, I use a mix of floury and waxy potatoes, so the former thicken the soup while the latter provide little cubes of potato flesh to bite into. And two, when the soup is cooked, I lace it with a good spoonful of harissa, the North African purée of hot chilies and garlic, and this gives it a one-two punch of warmth and spiciness.

Like all soup recipes, this one may be configured to fit your preference and the ambiant mood in your vegetable drawer: just last week, I included the stem of a head of broccoli leftover from making a broccoli salad (please tell me you don’t throw these out), and two weeks before that, I’d added white radishes, finely sliced to the point of transparency, and scattered at the surface like rice paper confetti.

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If you’re celebrating Thankgiving this Thursday and are still trying to decide what to make, this soup could be a good, easy option. I can also suggest the following recipes:
~ Carrot and rosemary mini-scones,
~ Mâche salad with endives and beets,
~ Sunchoke soup with bacon,
~ Brussels sprouts with onions and squash seeds,
~ Saffron-roasted cauliflower,
~ Swiss chard gratin with vegan bechamel,
~ Gratin dauphinois (potato gratin),
~ Carrot and ginger quickie pickle,
~ Banana pecan cake with maple glaze,
~ Quince and almond cake,
~ Brown butter spiced crisp.

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I love the bulk section at my local organic store.

I love that it allows me to cut down on the packaging, as I strive to bring back and reuse the same paper bags until they give out in exhaustion. I love that I pay less for the exact same products or ingredients, and I love that it gives me an opportunity to purchase sample-size amounts of new foods without committing to a whole package.

This is how I recently got ahold of some shoyu roasted cashews from Jean Hervé — an all-around fantastic brand for nut butters — that proved all kinds of good, crunchy and toasty and salty but not overly so.

I found myself reaching for small handfuls that soon turned into bigger ones while preparing dinner, and sprinkling them over my lunch salads as well, and soon enough my sample was gone.

Of course I could have just gone out and bought more — oh, how I love pulling down on those levers! too! — but when I compared the price of plain cashews with the soy sauce roasted ones, I calculated that they were charging 30% more for the soy sauce marinating and the roasting, which seemed like steps I could very well accomplish myself.

And it was indeed a most straightforward process: you simply pour soy sauce over the cashews, and let them soak it in overnight before roasting in the oven, where the cashews will crisp up as the soy sauce dries up and caramelizes.

These you can nibble on with a pre-dinner drink — I like to present them on the adorable mini cutting boards that Earlywood now makes — or snack on during the day (word of warning: very. hard. to stop.), or sprinkle over your salads, or package up and present as a low-effort but well-received edible gift.

Mini cutting board from Earlywood.

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I spent my childhood eating Liège waffles we bought at the grocery store. Those thick and cake-like grids studded with sugar crystals seemed to me infinitely superior to the thin waffles stuffed with vanilla cream that my sister prefered and I ignored disdainfully.

I hadn’t eaten such waffles since my teenaged days — I stopped buying supermarket pastries years ago — but they made a major comeback into my life earlier this year, when a tiny Comptoir Belge opened a stone’s throw from my house, at 58 rue des Martyrs.

This stand offers Belgian waffles in the style of Liège, cooked fresh while you watch and sending seductive, buttery wafts right up to the little carousel on Place Lino Ventura, a powerful marketing ploy indeed. And the first time I tried them, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

The artisanal and freshly cooked Liège waffle is a study in contrast between the crisp shell, the tender and yeasty insides, and the thick sugar crystals that melt and caramelize.

A far cry from its distant plastic-wrapped and palm-oiled grocery store cousin, the artisanal and freshly cooked Liège waffle is a study in contrast between the thinly crisp shell, the tender and brioche-y insides, and the thick sugar crystals that melt and caramelize in the waffle iron.

And since I recently received from Cuisinart (see note at the bottom of this post) a fabulous griddler with waffle plates, it wasn’t long until I tackled this monument of Belgian gastronomy.

In my research I found dozens of recipes, with such widely varying proportions my head spun, and my solution was, as it always is, to draw up a spreadsheet comparing the different ingredient amounts in proportion to the flour weight (you can take the cook out of the engineer, etc.). This led me to formulate a recipe that would be best suited to my taste, i.e. less sweet and less butter-heavy than average, while still retaining 100% of its deliciousness.

The resulting waffles are an absolute delight, the recipe is easy, and the dough freezes perfectly well, allowing you to invite your sister over for an impromptu snack one afternoon and, with hardly a finger lifted, have her discover in turn how a Belgian waffle really should be eaten: still warm, caramelized, chewy, irresistible.

Want more fabulous waffle recipes?

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Transparency note : The griddler and waffle plates were sent to me to review by Cuisinart France through their PR agency. I will note that this was actually the model I had set my heart on and was about to get as a birthday gift from my parents when I had the opportunity to receive it for free. All opinions expressed here are my own.

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When we get to spend time at my parents’ vacation house in the Vosges, a mountain range in the Northeast of France, one of our favorite daytrips is to drive over to Colmar, a historic Alsatian town on the other side of the mountain.

We’ve been going for as long as my parents have had the house, a little over twenty years, and though Colmar is as gorgeous as Alsatian towns get (i.e. very), with paved streets, pretty canals, and amazing architecture, the capital-D Draw for me is the flammekueche we get for lunch.

Also known as tarte flambée, the flammekueche (pronounced flam-küsh*) can be described as the Alsatian pizza: a super thin round of dough topped with cream, finely sliced onions, bacon strips, and sometimes mushrooms (la forestière) and cheese (la gratinée), baked in a woodfire oven until the edges are golden brown and crisp.

Sitting at one of the outdoor tables outside our favorite restaurant in Colmar, we make conversation as we wait for our tartes flambées to arrive, and our collective joy vibrates through the air as the waitstaff brings them out, all hot and fragrant, on wooden boards.

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