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

This week’s idiom is, “Avoir/Prendre de la bouteille.”

Literally translated as, “Having/Gaining some bottle,” it is a colloquial expression that illustrates the fact that a thing or a person gains value, experience, or wisdom with age.

Example: “L’entretien s’est bien passé, mais ils ont préféré embaucher un commercial qui avait plus de bouteille.” “The interview went well, but they chose to hire a salesman who had more bottle.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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Pain au levain naturel

If you keep an eye on my Twitter feed or subscribe to the C&Z newsletter, you already know that I’ve been trying my hand at natural starter bread for the past two months.

A natural starter, also called a sourdough starter, is a culture of wild yeasts and friendly bacteria that the baker keeps alive and thriving by feeding it water and flour on a regular basis. When mixed with a larger quantity of water, flour, and salt, and left to ferment, these microorganisms act as a leavening agent that will make the dough rise to form an extraordinarily flavorful loaf, one with mildly acidic notes, but not as sour as the typical San Francisco sourdough — unless that’s what you’re shooting for.

The beauty of such starter breads is that their flavor is complex and unique.

The beauty of such starter breads is that their flavor is complex and unique (because they rely on yeasts and bacteria that are naturally present in grains, no two starters are alike, especially from one region of the world to another), they keep very well (“the [friendly] bacteria somehow delay starch retrogradation and staling, and the acids they produce make the bread resistant to spoilage microbes”*), they are more nutritious than breads leavened with commercial yeast (the long fermentation induced by the starter is said to make the nutrients in whole grain flours considerably easier to absorb, as well as lower the glycemic index of the bread), and they’re as close as one can get to the essence of bread: a mixture of flour, water, and salt that does not rely on a store-bought leavener.

I had long been drawn to this bread-baking approach, but had always shied away from it because it seemed work-intensive and forbidding, and I had trouble relating to the people who wrote about it: the discussions were usually so advanced as to be overwhelming for a beginner. And then one day, I stumbled upon Florence’s blog by way of Clea’s, and I recognized a kindred baker spirit: Florence wrote about the process in clear terms, technical enough that I could grasp the underlying science, but practical enough that I could see it happening in my own kitchen. I was excited, and ready to take on the challenge.

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