As some of you have already reported, my cookbook was featured on the Today Show* this morning — you can view the segment online. This was my very first television experience, and it was a fun, fascinating, and rather nerve-racking one: I’ll admit I didn’t sleep so well the night before, and the jetlag can’t have helped.

But the segment was so short — just three and a half minutes — that it was over before I had time to even realize it had started, so the part I enjoyed the most was the peek behind the scenes (the brand-new kitchen set; the so-called “green room” — not green at all — where assorted guests eat cookies as they wait for their turn; the make-up room, from which they emerge with glossier lips, shinier hair, and a heart that beats noticeably faster) and the advance prep work.

Because I was a guest from (way) out of town, a food stylist named Deb was to prepare the food that would be shown during the segment. I had been in touch with her and the segment producer a couple of weeks before, to decide which recipe I would be demonstrating (the Two Tomatoes and Parmesan French Toast) and what other dishes would be displayed as beauty shots on the set (the Very Chocolate Cookies, the Zucchini Carpaccio, the Pan Bagnat, and the Cumin Cheese Puffs).

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[Carrot and Peanut Muffins]

In the interminable list of blessings that come with having a food blog is this one: readers will come forward and share their favorite recipes with you.

I am always honored to receive these gifts and the stories that are delivered with them, and even though I seldom get around to making the dishes (my epitaph will read, “So Many Recipes, So Little Time”; I’ve left instructions), they do contribute to my inner culinary landscape. I file them away in my bulging stash, complete with donor information so I can give proper credit if and when I take the recipe for a ride.

Today’s muffins were born from such a contribution, a recipe sent to me recently by a San Francisco-based, Spanish reader named Alex, who has come up with the formula to reproduce a carrot and hazelnut cake he had tasted at a tea parlor in Barcelona.

I’ve adapted the recipe a bit (“She Could Not Leave A Recipe Alone,” my tombstone will read also, in smaller letters), baking it as muffins instead of a cake, substituting ground peanuts (bought from an Ivorian shop the other day) for the ground hazelnuts, decreasing the amount of baking powder, using Olivier Roellinger’s poudre équinoxiale spice mix in place of lemon zest, and just adding the whole eggs to the batter instead of incorporating the stiff-beaten egg whites separately.

The latter two changes were for convenience’s sake: I had no lemons and, because I was baking these as a short diversion from my work, little time. The batter was quick and easy to assemble — no mixer or elbow grease needed — and the resulting muffins just the sort of gratification I needed on an industrious Saturday afternoon: the size of a child’s fist, they were moist, lightly crusty, and full of warm flavors, which bloomed even further over the next few days, as the muffin tops softened.

It occurred to me that there were distinct similarities between these muffins and my flourless orange and ginger cake (the proportions are comparable, and the grated carrots and boiled oranges play a similar part in the texture), which makes me think that one could omit the flour from these muffins.

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[Ewe’s Milk Butter]

Every once in a while, life presents the gourmand with a scintillating novelty that tickles his curiosity with such insistence that he is left with the willpower of a charmed snake. So when I read about ewe’s milk butter in ELLE a couple of weeks ago (you would do well to keep an eye on those Vie Privée/Cuisine pages at the end of the magazine, they’re full of inspired ideas), it was all I could do not to run out and buy some.

But I was still in my pyjamas (I read ELLE at breakfast, there’s nothing like it), so I simply added the item to the shopping list that’s tacked on to the refrigerator door of my brain, waiting for an opportunity to visit the cheese shop mentioned as a source in the article. And sure enough, a few days later, I met with a friend for ice cream in that neighborhood, and after a chocolate-dipped visit to Patrice Chapon, we dropped by Nicole Barthélémy’s fromagerie.

Hers is a dollhouse of a shop in which you can’t fit much more than five or six human beings amidst the towering shelves of cheeses. Its posh location has earned it a following of assorted movie stars, and the prices have been adjusted accordingly, but I was willing to make an investment for the sake of research.

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[Chocolate Jelly with Pineapple and Violet]

This is the dessert I served to close my recent spring lamb dinner: it was a few days before Easter so chocolate was definitely in order, but since lamb shoulder is a rather rich cut (though I must note that French lambs seem to be much leaner than their American cousins; French Lambs Don’t Get Fat), I wanted to chase it with a weightless dessert.

Inspiration came in the form of a recipe card I’d clipped from ELLE. It was called Variation Poire-Chocolat, and it was one of Anne-Sophie Pic‘s recettes cultes (staple recipes): a milk-based chocolate jelly made with very little sugar, held together by the power of gelatin, and topped with slivers of vanilla-poached pear and crumbled sablés bretons — butter cookies from Brittany.

And somehow, as it moved through the folds and creases of my brain, her idea morphed into this one: pineapple instead of pears (it is the tail end of the pear season, and I’d found delicious small pineapples aptly named pains de sucre — sugarloaves), violet instead of vanilla (pineapple and violet have been best friends in my mind ever since I tried this bread roll), agar-agar instead of gelatin, and dried slices of pineapple (a riff on my dried pears) for crunch, instead of cookie crumbs.

It turned out that the recipe, as printed, didn’t make nearly enough gelée for four servings: I don’t know what Anne-Sophie feeds her guests before dessert (though I’d love to know), but mine need a little more than three spoonfuls each. So once I’d filled the glasses with a ridiculously thin layer of chocolate jelly, I realized I had to make a second batch. I was out of the 70% chocolate I’d used for the first, so I used a 55% for the second, and this produced a subtle, entirely serendipitous chromatic variation.

The end result was lovely, light and floral, the jelly offering just the right compromise between gelled and creamy. I can picture endless variations on that theme, using different seasonal fruits and flavoring or infusing the jelly with spices to match. But the real discovery here was the dried pineapple, crisp and chewy and sweet as honey. I had made more than I needed for this dessert — I wanted to make sure I had four attractive slices to sit prettily on the rims of the glasses — and we gobbled up the leftovers like candy the next day.

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