French Easter Pie with Spinach and Goat Cheese

French Easter Pie with Spinach and Goat Cheese

Among the French dishes traditional served at Easter, you’ll find tourte pascale* and pâté de Pâques, French Easter pies enclosed in a flaky crust, with eggs nested inside the filling. The purpose of this is to use up the surplus of eggs that hens have laid during Lent, the six-week period leading up to Easter when Christians abstain from certain foods, including anything derived from animals.

I love French Easter pies; they are fun to make and present beautifully on the table. These tourtes are often filled with minced meat such as you’ll find in French terrines, usually a seasoned mix of veal and pork. Unsurprisingly, I like them even better when they’re filled with vegetables, especially springtime greens. I’ve made it here with spinach, but if you have beet tops, Swiss chard greens, kale, perhaps a little fresh sorrel, those will work just as beautifully.

Some French Easter pie recipes have you put hard-boiled eggs inside, but then the eggs end up quite overcooked, so I prefer to form little nests in the filling and break the uncooked fresh eggs inside them. With fresh goat cheese — also a springtime treat — mixed in with the spinach, the result is a wonderfully moist and aromatic pie, simple and elegant in both its looks and flavor.

French Easter Pie with Spinach and Goat Cheese

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French Easter Recipes

French Easter Recipes

Easter is just round the corner and, just like I did last December with my tips on how to host a French holiday meal, I thought you might like me to outline how to host a French Easter meal.

If you celebrate Easter, you are probably already following your own traditions, but just in case you would like to add a French twist to this year’s celebrations, here are my recommendations for a delicious, traditional French Easter meal.

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French Crêpes

February 2 is La Chandeleur (Candlemas), a holiday that welcomes the first signs of spring. In France, it is traditionally celebrated by making crêpes, with a variety of superstitious little tricks to bring happiness and prosperity upon your household.

One of those tricks involves holding a coin in your left hand while you flip the crêpe pan with your right hand: if all goes smoothly and you haven’t dropped the crêpe or the coin or killed anyone, chances are you’re lying. But if you’re not, that is a very good omen. Another one is to throw the first crêpe of the batch (which is always a dud anyway) on top of a high cupboard, and leave it there for the rest of the year. Well, do you want good luck or no?

If you’re experiencing sudden pangs of anguish because you missed La Chandeleur, fret not: Mardi-Gras is coming soon (refer to this page to know this year’s date), and the French like their crêpes so much that they eat them to celebrate Mardi-Gras, too!

The recipe I use for crêpes was handed down to me by Maxence’s mother a few years ago. We had our own little crêpe party with our neighbors on Saturday night (the perfect equidistance from La Chandeleur and Mardi-Gras entirely fortuitous) and enthusiastically tested a variety of toppings — from nutella to crème de marron to maple syrup to lemon juice — only to conclude, as we unfailingly do, that beurre-sucre (salted butter and sugar) is really your best bet.

(Check my recipe for Savory Buckwheat Crêpes, , or galettes de sarrasin.)

Crêpe batter

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French Holiday Recipes

Gorgeous stove photo courtesy of La Cornue.

Christmas is just a few days away (not to stress you out or anything) and I was shocked to realize that, in fourteen years of Chocolate & Zucchini, I have never offered an actual post outlining how to host a French holiday meal.

So whether you’re seeking to add a little Frenchness to your holiday celebrations, attending your first bona fide French holiday meal this year, or even hosting one (gah!), let me break things down for you, and suggest some winning French holiday recipes.

Christmas and the New Year

French families get together for a Christmas Eve dinner (le réveillon de Noël), and often there’s a second meal for Christmas Day lunch (not breakfast or brunch), either with the same cast or with a different part of the family.

Christmas is largely celebrated in the home; most restaurants are closed that night for staff members to celebrate with their own family. It is considered an intimate occasion reserved for family members and close family friends, so if you are a guest from outside the family, it’s a big deal. Presents are opened either after dinner on Christmas Eve, or in the morning on Christmas Day.

The French New Year’s Eve (le réveillon du Nouvel An) is often celebrated with friends rather than with family, and it is more of a grown-up occasion. If there are small children, they will be tucked into bed early or allowed to collapse on some couch, but the party is not about them. (Sorry kids.)

Some people go out to dinner on New Year’s Eve, but I don’t know who they are and I wouldn’t want to go with them. In my circle, we are more likely to have a special dinner at someone’s house, and possibly go out later, or just push the furniture and party at home*.

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French Christmas Cookies (Sablés)

Biscuits de Noël

Laurence is one of my best and oldest friends. I met her when I was fourteen, on our first day of high school, and soon we were inseparable, so alike in so many ways that people sometimes mistook us for sisters.

I loved going to her house after school. For one thing, there was a television there, which wasn’t the case at my parents’, so there was always the electrifying prospect of maybe catching one of those shows everyone else was watching at the time.

But aside from that, the house felt like a big happy place: Laurence had two (actual) sisters, and her mother, Christine, took care of small children at home, so there were a lot of comings and goings, conversations, people at the door, and girls shouting things down the stairwell.

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