Before I tell you about this amazing carrot quick pickle with ginger, I want to make sure you know this: pickling means preserving food in a seasoned brine or vinegar mixture, and in case you didn’t get the memo, pickles are the new cupcakes.

I sorta kinda doubt it — try bringing pickles to your nephew’s birthday party — but, as someone who grew up with store-bought jars of cornichons (gherkins) as the single pickled element of the family diet, I am most intrigued by the techniques involved, and the wide range of products they create.

I am a city dweller and it is unlikely that I’ll ever have the bumper crop and larder space (or, um, patience) to fill dozens of towering jars with multicolored vegetables biding their time in their sterilized bath, so the method I am most drawn to is the quick pickle: this simply consists in pouring a boiling brine or vinegar solution over pieces of raw vegetables, and letting the mixture cool to room temperature. This type of pickle keeps for about two weeks in the refrigerator, so it is usually done in small batches that you can consume within that time frame — unless you’re giving some away to well screened friends and relatives.

I am a city dweller and have neither the bumper crop nor the larder space to fill dozens of towering jars with multicolored vegetables, so the method I am most drawn to is the quick pickle.

My first near-pickling experience, long before this carrot quick pickle with ginger, occurred at my friends Braden and Laura‘s place recently, as I helped Braden prepare the quick-pickled chili peppers he was later to serve with squid ink pasta and fried squid rings. My involvement was limited to the chopping of said chili peppers, which taught me an important, though non-pickling-related lesson: you should protect your hand with a glove or a light film of oil before handling a large amount of hot peppers, otherwise you’ll wake up in the morning feeling like it’s been dipped in acid.

Scoville scale aside, I had thus been introduced to the quick pickling thing, and was ready for a re-run in my own kitchen. So when I received a copy of Pierre Lamielle’s very lovable cookbook Kitchen Scraps, the first recipe I decided to try was the carrot-and-ginger quickie pickle on page 82.

If you don’t know who Pierre Lamielle is, head over to his food blog and tell him I said hi: he’s a talented illustrator/cook with wit to spare, a definite knack for food-related puns, and a weakness for root vegetables.

His book is a collection of humorously written and illustrated recipes, and I am enjoying it more than a little. It is wacky, irreverent, and funny, yet the recipes are built on solid ground: the author went to culinary school, and this you can tell by his intermittent use of the verb “to blap,” a technical term that means sticking something in the oven without making too big a deal out of it. So it’s a book you can actually cook from, chuckling privately at the prospect of serving the bear butt-kicking granola, the whirled peas soup (give whirled peas a chance — get it?), or the angel hair conditioner pasta.

Among the recipes I’ve flagged are the bread of roses (a bread pudding with chocolate and rosewater), bruno “bloody beets” barbabietola’s beets and ricotta risotto (one of five mafia-approved risotti) and, of course, the stinking french onion soup, because that’s hard to resist.

The carrot quick pickle was indeed a breeze to make — it took about ten minutes, and I was on the phone for most of that time — and I am delighted with the result: the ribbons look terribly pretty, and we’ve been eating them as a sweet and sour condiment nested inside tuna sandwiches, as Pierre suggests, or swirled over this warm squash and bean salad, and I can see it bringing a lovely brightness alongside a hearty, brooding stew.

As for the book, it has earned its place on the special bookshelf I reserve for alternative publishing projects from Canada, right between L’Appareil and Au Pied de cochon, and when my little nephew turns 19 years old rather than 19 months old, I have an inkling he’ll get a kick out of it, too.

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This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s idiom is, “Être dans le pâté.”

Literally translated as, “Being in the pâté,” it means feeling drowsy and out of it, usually in the morning after too much partying and/or not enough sleeping. It is a slang expression, not vulgar but definitely not elegant, so I don’t really suggest you use it — slang is the trickiest thing to get right in a foreign language — but I offer it here in case it comes up in conversation.

Example: “Elle était tellement dans le pâté qu’elle est partie en oubliant son téléphone.” “She was so badly in the pâté that she left and forgot her phone.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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Gratin de courge spaghetti, noix et lardons

It saddens me when people attemp to pass off food items as something they’re not: they’re selling those foods short, and setting eaters up for disappointment. No, meatless burgers are not at all like beef burgers, carob chips have nothing to do with chocolate chips, and I don’t know in what parallel low-carb universe spaghetti squash is seen as an acceptable substitute for actual, durum wheat spaghetti.

But those food items do have unique qualities of their own — well, except for carob, which is vile — so why not simply tout them as such?

Going back to the spaghetti squash, it deserves a lot better than to be treated as a stand-in for pasta. It is a wonderful winter squash in its own right, with a delicate flavor that’s not too sweet, and it is therefore a good choice for those who find winter squash a bit cloying.

But its most distinguishing feature — and the source of the misunderstanding — is its flesh, which easily separates into soft strands when cooked. The spaghetti comparison ends there, naturally, but those little tufts of filaments do create a delightfully fluffy mouthfeel that sets this cucurbitaceae apart from its peers.

Some recipes suggest cooking spaghetti squash in the microwave, but I no longer own one, so I just roast it in the oven — a method that is all in all preferable, as it also serves to deepen the flavor of the squash and evaporate some of its moisture, preventing it from getting soggy. All you need to do then is run a fork across the flesh, and the strands will appear before your very eyes, like magic.

In late afternoon on Sunday, as I was pondering what to do with my gourd, I got many great suggestions through a Twitter brainstorm: Kim likes to cook the strands like potato pancakes, with green onions, ginger and soy sauce; Anna eats her spaghetti squash with tomato soup; Yasmin dresses hers with pesto and chili oil; Michelle pointed me to this Gourmet recipe; Ariane suggested brown butter and sage; Lucy likes to layer the squash lasagna-like, alternating with spinach and ricotta and a Moroccan-inspired tomato-lentil sauce.

But, as is usually the case in my kitchen, I ended up devising a recipe inspired by what I had on hand: the thickish slice of smoked bacon that needed using, the bowl of walnuts from our neighbor’s sister’s garden, and the butt end of a mozzarella log I’d bought for a pizza aux cèpes made with ceps I hunted and captured in the forest last Thursday (see below).

This lineup of ingredients spelled gratin quite clearly: I roasted the spaghetti squash, arranged half of the flesh in a baking dish, sprinkled it with browned strips of the bacon and crumbled walnuts, layered the rest of the squash on top, covered with thinly sliced mozzarella, and topped with breadcrumbs to foster crunch. The whole thing went back under the oven grill for a few minutes, and then dinner was ready.

We had it as our main course, which left room for slivers of salted butter caramel tatin left over from the previous day’s dinner party, but it would also be lovely as a side and, come to think of it, a most suitable one if you’re cooking for Thanksgiving this week.

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Chewing giraffe provided by Wildlife 2008.

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s idiom is, “Ne pas mâcher ses mots.”

Literally translated as, “Not chewing one’s words,” it means expressing one’s opinion plainly and bluntly, with no concern for how it’s going to be received. It is equivalent to the (similarly food-oriented) English expression, “Not mincing words.”

Example: “Les journalistes adorent l’interviewer parce qu’il ne mâche pas ses mots.” “Journalists love to interview him because he doesn’t chew his words.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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