Let me tell you this: girls aren’t what they used to be. Present them with a spiffy British actor who knows how to bake an apple crumble, and they will smile, shake the actor’s hand (twice), and walk away with a good story, yes, but their heart unstirred.

Allow them to spend half a day with a famous pastry chef, however, and you will get a rather eloquent embodiment of glee.

This opportunity was brought to me on a dessert plate by my friend Louisa: she was in Paris with a television crew to film an episode for the upcoming season of Diary of a Foodie, and she asked if I’d be willing to appear in the segment on Sadaharu Aoki.

At this point, I feel compelled to state that I am vehemently opposed to the use of the term foodie, a word that makes me cringe so deeply my fingers refuse to type this combination of letters and I have to copy-paste it. But I love Louisa, I had met part of the crew last summer, and hanging out with them in Aoki’s lab while he showed us stuff sounded like a fine use of my time, so I said yes.

And indeed, a terrific afternoon it was: my role was simply to be curious, ask the chef about his work, his pastries, and his creative process, and translate our exchanges from French to English for the camera.

Continue reading »

If you are a long-standing reader of this blog, and I do mean a loooooong-standing reader, the kind that deserves a medal, you may recall my quest for the elusive IKEA havreflarn, those Swedish oatmeal cookies that come as singles or in pairs, sandwiched together by a layer of dark chocolate.

Over time I’ve tried a few promising recipes, and although they produced good cookies, none of them quite replicated the original.

But good things come to those who wait, and it seems I wasn’t the only one smitten with these cookies: Belgian food blogger Sophie developed a copycat recipe, and a vegan one at that.

Hers is the recipe I semi-followed for my IKEA-style oat crisps, making a few modifications to lighten it up and use the ingredients I had on hand: I lowered the amount of sweeteners and fat, added a bit of salt to bolster the flavors, sliced almonds instead of almond extract, and regular milk and butter instead of almond milk and margarine, thereby annihilating the intrinsic vegan-ness of the recipe (sorry).

Continue reading »

I am just a few days — three, to be terrifyingly exact — away from delivering the manuscript for my second book*, and although it is nowhere near as stressful a time as it was for my first (why do I sound like a young mother all of a sudden?), it is still a time of waking up bright and early and working intently through the day, with a few necessary breaks to shower, lunch, and take a few steps around the room when my foot has fallen asleep. (Not that I need it to help me write, but I wish it were more supportive.)

I have little time to cook, but I still have to eat, otherwise I die and my publisher is not happy, so my strategy is to prepare big bowls of salads that will make a few meals. I still have deep and sincere feelings for the grated carrot salad with avocado that got me through my last hang-in-there episode last spring, but this quinoa salad is the new teacher’s pet.

It uses quinoa, generally considered to be the nutritional superhero of grains, but it doesn’t use any old kind of quinoa, no: it uses red quinoa, which is enough to make the most blasé of your health nut friends go, “Oooh, fun!”

I might add here that red quinoa is not so much red as it is reddish brown, or mahogany. (I’ll admit that the first color comparison that presented itself beneath my fingertips was “dried blood”, but I am told that it is not a food-friendly image.) I spotted it at the organic store right by the regular quinoa, and thought, “Oooh, fun!” so I bought a package.

Because of color considerations, and because quinoa, red or otherwise, has a thinly crunchy personality, I chose to complement it with the moist plumpness of roasted red bell peppers, which we all know are very easy to make (see below).

A little more protein was needed to make this a meal-in-a-bowl type of salad, so I added cubes of smoked tofu (the Tossolia brand; I am addicted to this stuff, and I live in the fear that they will discontinue it or change the recipe, like they did with my sesame seitan burgers). But then the textural balance was leaning too heavily on the soft/tender side, so I threw in some toasted pine nuts to crunch it back up.

And the result, I’m happy to say, is just plain good, flavorful and satisfying, which is a lot more than I can say about the zucchini flans I attempted to make yesterday night, to disastrous results. (We fled and went out to eat.)

* Clotilde’s Edible Adventures in Paris is a book on Paris restaurants and food shops, with recipes. It was published in the US by Broadway Books in April 2008.

Continue reading »

Late last summer, a young chef from Seattle wrote to tell me about his underground restaurant project: Hidden Kitchen was to be set in an apartment somewhere in Paris, where he and his girlfriend would serve a tasting menu with matching wines to twelve diners each week. The price would be reasonable and chef friends visiting from out of town would be invited to cook there on occasion, too.

He had the vision, the name, the funding, the location, and the nifty cut-out cards, but he wanted to reach out and ask for a local’s thoughts.

And this local’s predominant thought was: yay! (I may have offered a bit more insight — I forget.)

The concept of an underground restaurant is common enough in some countries to be documented on Wikipedia and to have been written up in the press, but I have heard or read very little about similar initiatives in Paris — of course, they may be so underground as to fly below my radar –, so I was excited to learn about this one, and to be in the front row as it made its debut.

It took the team a few months to pull things together, renovate the apartment, set up the kitchen, and decorate the dining room, but the chef wrote again in the spring to announce that things were just about ready: the first official dinner would be held on June 24, but would Maxence and I like to come and lend our taste buds for a proof of concept dinner a couple of weeks before that?

My reply was: see above.

Continue reading »