Cookbook writing guidelines tell you that naming a recipe after someone is not a good idea: it doesn’t tell the reader much about the ingredients or the process, the reader doesn’t know this person, and frankly, the reader doesn’t care. This is all true of course, but I have a certain fondness for those recipes that sound like they were found in some old handwritten recipe book — la Carpe farcie façon Hortense, le Boudin du Père Thibault, le Pain d’épices de Célestine* — and although I promise not to make it a habit, I really wanted to name this particular dish after the person who inspired it.

A few weeks ago, Maxence and I spent a glorious day visiting friends of his mother’s in the Perche region, a two-hour drive to the south-west of Paris (less if you’re the speeding type). Le Perche is the essence of the French countryside — I’m pretty sure it is what the language guys had in mind when they invented the word “picturesque” — and as soon as we got off the freeway and started driving through the bocage (hedged farmland), I could feel my shoulders relaxing and my breaths deepening.

Muriel had slow-baked the chicken in one of those clay pots from Alsace and Germany called a Römertopf with whole garlic cloves, a quartered lemon, and fresh herbs from the garden.

Our hosts welcomed us warmly into their beautiful house — I want one just like that when I grow up — and a simple glance around the kitchen made me feel confident that lunchtime would bring very good things. And indeed, after a salad of perfect tomatoes from the vegetable patch (oh, the joy of living a cliché), we dug into the centerpiece of the meal: a farm-raised chicken so big it could have easily been admitted into some select turkey association.

The chicken came from a nearby farm, where one buys the chicks at birth and pays for their food, lodging, and education until they are plump enough to return the favor, at least for the food part. Muriel, the lady of the house, had slow-baked it in one of those clay pots from Alsace and Germany called Römertopf with whole garlic cloves, a quartered lemon, and fresh herbs from the garden.

Maxence took care of the carving (he seems to be the appointed chicken carver wherever we go, it is such a useful skill to possess) and the platter of chicken parts was brought to the garden table with sides of mashed potatoes and green beans, and a saucière (gravy boat) of golden brown cooking juices, in which the softened garlic cloves were paddling about, ready to have their pungent-sweet pulp smooched out and used as a condiment.

That chicken was hands-down the best I’ve ever had. Muriel was happy to share the recipe, and I soon reproduced it with my very own larger-than-life chicken bought from the farmers’ market, an organic lemon, pink garlic, and herbs that Muriel had snipped for us to take home (along with a few ceps, a crate of tomatoes, and a bushel of plums from their overloaded tree). I don’t own a clay pot yet — rest assured this will be fixed on my next trip to Alsace — so I used the largest of my cast-iron cocottes instead.

I have trouble deciding whether my chicken was as stupendous as Muriel’s — a dish that someone else has made for you always feels more magical — but it was pretty close, and I have a feeling that le poulet de Muriel will make frequent appearances on our menu. It is an extremely easy and foolproof recipe (since the chicken cooks in its own steam and at such a low temperature, there is no risk of it overcooking or drying out) and all you really need is good ingredients and time.

* These recipes are quoted from a book called Recettes gourmandes du Poitou-Charentes by Francis Lucquiaud, a collection of the author’s grandmothers’ recipes.

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A little over three years ago, over a dinner of shabu-shabu, I mentioned to Maxence that I was considering starting a food blog. “I think you should go for it,” he said. “But it’s going to take up a lot of my time, and I worry that I might tire of it after the honeymoon phase,” I replied. “I think you should go for it,” he said. A few days later, after a few evenings spent playing around with blogging tools and html templates, Chocolate & Zucchini was born.

Starting the blog was a small, trivial decision to make, but it is one that changed my life. It may sound a bit grandiose when I put it this way, and yet how else could I put it? How I think of myself, how I picture my future, what occupies my thoughts and my work hours, whom I get to meet and interact with, what I reply when people ask “So, what do you do?” (in French: “Et tu fais quoi dans la vie?“) — all of these elements have gradually shifted, making me happier by the day. This is all thanks to C&Z and thanks to you, so thank you.

To thank my blog properly I bought this violet and chocolate macaron from one of my favorite pastry shops (Aurore-Capucine, 3 rue de Rochechouart in the 9th). I placed it next to my laptop and waited. After a while it became obvious that the blog wasn’t too interested, so I took the liberty to eat the macaron on its behalf: thin crackly shell, chewy-creamy filling, smooth chocolate ganache, rich almond flavor, tingly hints of violet — oh yum.

And to thank you properly and in person, I would like to invite those of you who will be around on October 11th to join us for a Paris get-together. The plan is to meet in early evening at Le Takbo, an arty-friendly bistro in my neighborhood: we’ll have drinks, we’ll chat, and if we get hungry we can get something to eat there. No need to RSVP, just come as you are, on your own or with a friend or with a pet of your choosing.

Details (where the devil is, in case you need him):
When? Wednesday, October 11th, 2006.
What time? Starting from 7:30PM.
Where? Le Takbo, 52 rue Condorcet in the 9th (01 48 78 39 59).
Closest métro stop? Anvers (line 2).

Amongst all the towns Maxence and I cruised through on our roadtrip across the US, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is the one that stands out the most in my memory (and no, I don’t receive any money from the mayor’s office). We stayed there a bit longer than originally planned — car troubles will do that to you, have you seen U Turn? — but unlike Sean Penn in Superior, Arizona, we loved every minute of it.

A few of my favorite minutes in Breaux Bridge were spent eating a hefty serving of gâteau sirop at local gastronomic institution Café des Amis. Gâteau sirop, or syrup cake, is a typically Acadian confection sweetened with cane syrup — sugar cane juice that’s been boiled down to a thick syrup — and optionally topped with pecans. Spice-rich, dark-flavored, and spongy moist, it is a cake after my own heart: I ate it down to the last pecan and swiftly added the mention “Pure cane syrup, one (1) bottle” to my Cajun shopping list.

I finally got around to opening said bottle last Sunday — I, too, wage a constant battle in the too good to use arena — to try and recreate gâteau sirop in my own kitchen. I searched the web for recipes, found a few that looked promising, drew up a comparison chart (welcome to the world of geeky bakers), and merged them into a recipe that I hoped would approximate my benchmark experience. (I did stumble upon a recipe that was supposedly shared by Café des Amis owner Cynthia Breaux, and while I enjoyed the piece that introduced it, I had strong reservations about the recipe itself: it called for no cane syrup — huh? — and an alarming amount of sugar.)

The batter was very quick to assemble, it is one of those wonderful one-bowl recipes, and the only pause in the process was the tasting of the cane syrup, for the sake of my palate’s education. My conclusions: pure cane syrup, when tasted on the tip of a spoon, can be described as a cross between molasses, for its powerful, almost petroleum-like smell, and Golden Syrup (which is a cane syrup, too), for its complex sweetness and lack of bitterness.

I had decided to bake a small batch of muffins instead of a regular cake: if the recipe was a disappointment, there wouldn’t be too much spilled cane syrup to cry over. As it turns out, such prudence was unnecessary — the resulting mini-cakes were just as moist and intensely flavored as I’d hoped — but no matter: it just gives me a fine excuse to bake a fresh batch sometime soon.

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[Goat’s Milk Faisselle with Chives]

Originally, a faisselle (feh-sell) is a container pierced with tiny holes, in which fresh cheese is placed so the whey will drain out. But then metonymy came into play (or perhaps came in to play) and the word now also designates an unsalted soft curd cheese sold in such a container, itself nested in a larger, bucket-shaped tub. This clever contraption allows the whey to flow freely around the cheese, keeping it fresh and moist. And when you want to use the cheese, you simply lift the inner rack from the tub, and decide how much of the liquids you want to keep, depending on the consistency you’re looking for.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, good faisselle is hard to come by and the ideal balance of flavor and texture is a difficult one to strike. Products labeled as “faisselle” have become increasingly common in the dairy aisle of French grocery stores, but most are bland and overpriced, so I don’t buy them anymore.

To my great pleasure, however, I have recently discovered that the small goat cheese stand I frequent at the Batignolles farmers’ market — the stand that appears every other week and has a photo album on the counter, presenting all the goats by name — sells an artisanal goat’s milk faisselle. I bought a tub once (2.70€ for 500g) and it turned out to be very close to what I’m looking: soft and silky curds (my only complaint is that they could be a bit more firm), a lightly acidulated sourness, and fresh, clean flavors with hints of barn and hay that reveal themselves when you breathe out through your nose.

So, what does one do with faisselle? Because it is unsalted, it can be used in any number of ways: you can serve it for dessert as you would fromage blanc or yogurt (with sugar, honey, fresh fruit, compote, jam, or a combination of the above), you can drain it and substitute it for cream in sweet or savory tarts (especially zucchini tarts, but I may be biased), and you can season it with herbs and spices to make spreads and dips.

Although faisselle is a good carrier for bolder flavors, I prefer to let its personality shine in the simplest of preparations — the one below is a nod to the Schnittlauchkäse I liked to buy when I visited my sister in Frankfurt and we went to the Kleinmarkthalle (an indoor market) on Saturday mornings.

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As a side note, I was briefly interviewed on Julie Andrieu’s radio show on Europe 1 last Sunday: the show is called Droit dans le buffet and it is on every Sunday morning from 11am till noon. You can listen to last Sunday’s edition online: select the date of September 17th and click on “Ecoutez l’émission > Play” (my interview starts about fifteen minutes into the show). [The show isn’t on anymore, and you can’t listen to the archives.]

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