Cha Soba, Concombre et Tofu

So verdant is this dish that it could have been my contribution to Saint Patrick’s Day. But because the French don’t really celebrate it (unless they happen to find themselves at one of the Irish pubs on boulevard de Clichy) and because my father’s name is Patrick, March 17th is simply that: my father’s fête. He usually receives a gift of pâtes de fruits, we get to help him gobble them up before they have time to hit the ground, and that’s that. No color theme.

So this is not what this dish is about. This dish is about going to dinner on rue Sainte-Anne — Paris’ pocket-sized Japantown — and noticing as you exit the noodle joint that the Juji Ya convenience store is still open. It is about stepping in, walking past the take-out counter and up the steps towards the back of the shop to buy mugicha (barley tea), azuki beans, cha soba (buckwheat noodles flavored with green tea powder), and a block of firm tofu — and throwing in a couple of the mochi rice cakes that blink up at you at the register, to share on the walk home.

It is about thanking your lucky stars when you realize, the next day, that a cucumber has recently taken up quarters in the fridge (yes, you bought it yourself, but sometimes you forget about those things), and that if it joins forces with the tofu, the soba noodles, and a few pantry ingredients, you have the makings of a fine dish of cold soba, possibly the most refreshing, replenishing lunch imaginable.

And finally, it is about setting your chopsticks in twitching motion, slurping up the slippery strands (making sure you do not cut them with your teeth, ever), munching on the crunchy cukes, and exclaiming, because you’ve started learning a little Japanese and would never miss an opportunity to practice, “Oishii desu yo!”*

Juji Ya / map it!
46 rue Sainte-Anne, 75002 Paris
01 42 86 02 22

* “Delicious!”

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When I was in New York City a few weeks ago, my flight landed in early afternoon on a Saturday. By the time the cab dropped me off on the sidewalk of my hotel it was mid-afternoon, and clean sheets and a plump pillow were a tempting proposition, but I resisted. The only anti-jetlag strategy that has ever worked for me is to fight sleepiness and stay active until the local clocks give me permission to pass out.

When I tasted a small spoonful of the wax structure, it shattered on my tongue in a most pleasing way.

In this case I had quite a few hours to fill, as I had a late dinner date with a friend. So I kept myself busy, ate a bagel sandwich (is there a way to eat those things without having all of their innards spill out onto your lap?), tried to survive hypothermia long enough to decide which apples looked best at the Union Square greenmarket, met a friend for coffee (make that a double!), bought a pair of jeans, and spent the rest of the time browsing the aisles of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

I found the chocolate I’d been meaning to sample, and from the depths of the sweetener section, a box of honeycomb from Georgia.

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As the weather in Paris becomes increasingly springlike — hello daffodils! come sit by me on the kitchen counter! — I thought it was high time I illustrate the point I recently made about salads and the ones that carry us through to the end of winter (however mild ours has been).

The original motive for this one was to try and vanquish my dislike of endives, one of the very last bastions of my childhood aversions. It is going to require more work before I clap my hands at the thought of endives au jambon — even my mother’s — but at least this salad has flown me over the raw endive hurdle.

It’s a simple trick to play on one’s senses, really: if the taste buds recoil in the face of bitterness, they may tolerate it when balanced with sweeter, more consensual flavors. And given time and multiple exposures, they may even grow to enjoy that grown-up, mixed-signal pleasure. It is a strategy well-known to pharmaceutical companies, though one might wish they used beets and parmesan more often than the revolting artificial strawberry.

And this is how this salad works: you carve out the hearts of small endives — therein lies most of their bitterness, if only you knew what they’ve been through — and toss them with roasted beets and mâche, a fleshy winter salad for which baby spinach could be substituted.

The colorful trio receives a sprinkle of parmesan and toasted seeds — I keep a jar of pumpkin, sunflower, and sesame seeds for such purposes — before it is dressed in olive oil paired with a tangy-sweet agent: balsamic vinegar, pomegranate molasses, this rejoicing staple of the Lebanese pantry, or oxymel, a versatile syrup of honey, vinegar, spices, and fruits with which I’ve recently been playing to lovely results.

The product of these simple steps is a good sidekick to a juicy chicken thigh or a grilled sole, and it makes a fine lunch in its own right when topped with diced ham or a poached egg. The recipe is — need I stress it? — open to endless variations in terms of dressing and accessories: I like the addition of green peppercorns, crushed, or a few cloves from a head of fresh garlic, finely minced.

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[French-Toasted Brioche]

After a main course of cider-stewed pork served with pasta gratin, this is the sweet note on which my last dinner party ended. Inspiration sprung, again, from my recent meal at Le Caméléon, where the Amaretto cherry pain perdu was enchanting.

In its most basic incarnation, pain perdu — literally “lost bread” — is stale bread that one recycles into a simple treat by soaking it in a sweet egg batter and browning it in the skillet. I love this sort of waste-not-want-not recipe, but what I had in mind here was something with just a hint more sophistication, so brioche, rather than ordinary bread, was in order.

Ideally, I should have bought the brioche the day before and let it turn stale the slow food way, through the natural action of time, but I didn’t. I showed up at my corner bakery in the morning of, and asked if they had any pain de mie brioché* leftover from the previous day. The salesgirl looked at me as if she was on candid camera (caméra cachée in French), and said that no, they didn’t keep old stuff around. All right. Fresh would do. I got home, sliced the slices, and left them out on the counter to dry.

Pain perdu normally gets eaten right off the skillet, but there were too many of us for that to work (if I wanted to sit down and eat with everyone else, that is), so I dipped and browned the slices in late afternoon, and reheated them in the oven before serving.

The plan was to serve the French toast with mango coulis and vanilla whipped cream. The mango coulis was simply mango flesh whizzed in a blender with a drop of lime juice, and for the whipped cream I was going to use the fancy N2O-powered whip I’d laid my hands on over two years ago — it’s a long story — and never once used. I was going to flavor whipping cream with fresh vanilla, pour that into the bottle, and effortlessly crown the golden slices of brioche with weightless dollops of whipped cream. My friends would be so impressed.

Turns out you should always test your weapon before you go hunting. Or, at the very least, read the manual. You would then know that you should to fit the top onto the bottle before you screw in the gas charger (oops, there goes the N2O) and that the whole thing needs to be refrigerated for a few hours if you want to produce anything more spectacular than a sputtering gurgle of unwhipped cream. Ah well. My friends love me whether or not the cream is whipped.

* A type of brioche that’s slightly less rich than the classic brioche and is baked in a loaf pan.

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