I had lunch with my friends Pascale and Caroline a couple of weeks ago, and afterward we followed Caroline back to her apartment so she could share samples of a quirky ingredient she’d just laid her hands on: hazelnut flour.

I had initially thought she was referring to finely ground hazelnuts (hazelnut meal or poudre de noisettes), but no: this is made by grinding hazelnuts finely, yes, but also removing the oil they contain, until you’re left with a delicate powder, light brown in color and supernally fragrant.

I walked home with the package of hazelnut flour pulsing with possibilities in my purse, and halfway up the hill I had decided I would bake this rustic cherry and hazelnut loaf cake.

I walked home with the little package pulsing with possibilities in my purse, and halfway up the hill I had decided what I wanted to do with it: I bought sweet cherries at the produce stall around the corner, and baked this rustic cherry and hazelnut loaf cake. Nutty, moist, and dotted with soft morsels of cherry, it did not last for long on the kitchen counter.

I elaborated on the basic formula for sweet loaf cakes that Florence laid out on her blog: it incorporates a portion of sourdough starter into the batter, and it is one of those recipes that starter bread bakers yearn for, as we are always looking for ways to use up the extra starter that the keeping of a healthy colony produces. You do not need starter to make this cake, though; the two options are outlined in the recipe below.

The hazelnut “flour” I mentioned above is made by a French manufacturer of stone-ground nut oils that once had the idea to give a second life to the round cake of pressed nut meat that remains after the oil has been completely drawn out of it. This byproduct was formerly sold to serve as cattle feed or fish bait (!) but they realized it was perhaps a case of de la confiture pour les cochons (literally, “jam for pigs,” the French version of “pearls for swine”) the day one of their clients asked if he could buy it for his own cooking needs.

They are only selling this flour to professionals for now (my friend Caroline obtained it through a chef friend of hers), so I can’t give a source for it at this time, but if you ever stumble upon something similar, you have a recipe in which to use it. And if you’re unable to find it, regular ground hazelnuts will work just as nicely, as will chestnut flour if you have some lying around.

In passing, let me share a simple tip regarding the melting of butter for baking recipes: instead of zapping it in the microwave oven (I no longer have one), I place the required amount of butter in the baking pan I’m going to use (or in an ovenproof ramekin if it’s a pan with a removable bottom), and place it in the preheating oven. After two or three minutes (I set a timer so I don’t forget) the butter is almost completely melted, and will continue to melt from the residual heat. I set the pan or ramekin aside for the butter to cool slightly, then pour it into the batter as needed, and use a pastry brush to spread the remaining traces of butter around the bottom and sides of the pan to grease it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my time-and-energy-saving tip of the day.

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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, “Retomber comme un soufflé.”

Literally translated as, “Falling back like a soufflé,” it is a colloquial expression that means running out of steam in a quick and sudden way: after an initial phase of enthusiasm, an idea, an initiative, or a phenomenon (but not a person) loses momentum, as the interest for it wanes.

Example: “Il y a eu tout un battage médiatique autour du projet, et puis c’est retombé comme un soufflé.” “There was a lot of media hype around the project, and then it fell back like a soufflé.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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My sister and I went through a pretty intense couscous* phase when we were teenagers: my mother kept a kitchen cabinet stocked with little pre-portioned pouches of semoule that barely needed a minute and a half of boiling before we could snip them open, pour their contents into a bowl, add a bit of salt and butter, and call it lunch. We loved the stuff.

I remember suggesting this very menu to Maxence once, early in our relationship, and he looked at me like I had two heads. (Sometimes I think about this, and my former flame for canned beef ravioli, when people ask, “So, were you always interested in cooking?”)

I no longer make whole meals out of plain couscous (see there, on top of my shoulders? only one head!), but I have retained my fondness for the unique mouthfeel it provides, each forkful soft and pillowy before it bursts into a thousand tiny beads that roll around the tongue.

I favor whole wheat couscous now, for reasons of nutrition and taste, and I serve it as an ultra-easy side to stews, Maghrebi in spirit or not. And in the summer, I like to use it as a base for quick, refreshing salads such as this one.

It is inspired by the North African tabouli, better known in France and more ubiquitous at parties than the Lebanese version: couscous-based where its Lebanese cousin involves bulgur (cracked wheat), the North African tabouli also reverses the proportion of white (grains) to green (chopped herbs).

Unless you make your own semolina, hand-rolling, steaming, and sun-drying the grains, which is crazy but admirable, preparing couscous takes ten minutes and approximately zero effort: the store-bought kind is pre-cooked, and only needs plumping in freshly boiled water. You don’t even need to turn on the stove; an electric kettle will suffice.

Other than that, there will be a little herb snipping involved — I like the well-balanced trio of parsley, chives, and mint, but you can pare that down or go wild depending on what you have on hand — and the slicing of a few cherry tomatoes, but that’s about it. Simple, really, and ideal for satisfying lunches, barbecues, and picnics.

Tabouli ordinarily calls for lemon juice, but I find its sharp trill can overwhelm the other flavors, so I prefer to use bottled verjuice — the juice of unripe grapes — as the acidic component.

The tomatoes in tabouli are usually diced from regular-size whole fruits, the juices of which help rehydrate the couscous grains, but cherry tomatoes tend to offer a sweeter and more concentrated tomato flavor that works nicely here, and is accented by a pinch of cinnamon.

* The term couscous can be used to mean either, 1. a pasta of North African origin made of crushed and steamed Durum wheat semolina, like here, or 2. a North African dish consisting of said pasta, steamed and served with stewed vegetables and grilled meat.

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Fresh lemon verbena is a recent newcomer to my herb repertoire. I was familiar with plain dried verbena, a popular constituent of French tisanes, but only this spring did I come across the amazingly vibrant and refreshing verveine citronnelle.

I have been steeping fresh leaves in hot water for a soothing after-dinner drink, cold-steeping them overnight to make an ice tea of sorts, and infusing them in browned butter — much like you would sage — to dress potato gnocchi. But I had yet to take the flavor much further.

The resulting sorbet was of an elusive shade, teetering between yellow and green, and it was the most refreshing thing ever to grace my ice cream machine.

And then one evening, we invited a friend over for dinner at the last minute. We were going to share the excellent leftover lamb we’d brought home from J’Go* the night before, and I planned to sauté some potatoes and dress a few greens to go with it.

For dessert, I felt sure I had everything needed to whip up a quick batch of lemon kefir ice cream, but it turned out I had drunk the last of the kefir, so I decided to make lemon sorbet instead, with some lemon verbena thrown in.

I thought of drawing out the flavor of the leaves by infusing them in hot water and using this infusion as the liquid element of the sorbet, but I doubted there would be enought time to chill the mixture properly before churning. It also seemed more appealing to try and capture the vibrancy of the fresh leaves, some of which gets lost when the leaves are dried or steeped, so I opted for the lavender sugar approach, whizzing the lemon verbena leaves with the sugar into a moist, lemon verbena sugar, which I would then use to sweeten and flavor the sorbet.

Because I worried the little flecks of ground leaf might get in the way of the texture, I strained the mixture before churning. The resulting sorbet was of an elusive shade, teetering between yellow and green, and it was the most refreshing thing ever to grace my ice cream machine.

My friend Estérelle says she makes panna cotta flavored with lemon verbena, which sounds lovely. I think it would also make a good rub for a lamb shoulder, or a syrup to drizzle over strawberry-filled crêpes; if you have your own clever uses for lemon verbena, I’d love to hear them.

* Yes, you read that right! We had dinner at a Paris restaurant and we took the leftover meat home! Maxence asked, and they gave us a doggy bag! A doggy bag! In Paris! We were floored, and enjoyed our reheated gigot even more.

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