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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On rue Garreau in Montmartre — right off the place Emile Goudeau, which I like very much because it has trees, benches, and a Fontaine Wallace — was the tiny workshop of a violin maker. Earlier this summer, I walked past it and did a double-take: the dusty window had been cleaned, and the instruments had been replaced by a miscellany of Japanese trinkets — origami animals, garland lights, purses to keep your change, and tinkling thingies to hang to your cell phone.

I walked in, browsed the displays, and my eyes fell on a flyer that advertised the shop’s sushi classes. The attendant inside was busy paper-folding a horse or a squirrel or a tortoise — it was too early to tell. He told me that he was just filling in for the owner and couldn’t say when the next class would be, but that he would take my contact information. A few days later I received a call from a Japanese woman, who explained that she didn’t give classes during the summer because of the heat, but that I could sign up for September.

And this is how Maxence and I attended a sushi-making class last Saturday. Our teacher was Tomoko, owner of the shop and, incidentally, wife of the violin maker whose workshop it used to be. Teacher and students climbed up to an appartment five flights of stairs above the shop, took off our shoes, admired the view, and sat down at the table.

Since this was a lunchtime class, Tomoko first prepared donburi for us (a category of Japanese dishes in which ingredients are served over a bowl of hot rice), so hypoglycemia would not hinder our ability to listen and learn. Her bols de sashimi spécial consisted in Japanese rice, topped with torn nori and bite-size pieces of raw tuna and salmon, tossed together in a dressing of wasabi, soy sauce, and ground sesame. This was a splendid lunch and I will no doubt try to reproduce it. She also served us chilled mugicha (barley tea), which I’d never tried before and very much enjoyed.

Tomoko stressed that what she was about to teach us were the basics of family-style sushi — it takes Japanese chefs years to master the noble art of sushi-making, and a two-hour class wasn’t going to cut it, obviously. She had trimmed and sliced two kinds of raw fish for the class, ahi tuna and salmon, in long sticks for maki (rolled sushi) and in rectangular pieces for nigiri (oval lumps of rice topped with fish). This was my first time making any kind of sushi so I had everything to learn, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy when you have someone by your side to show you the moves.

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Five years ago today, I boarded a flight from Paris to San Jose. I was returning to my apartment in California after spending some time with my family and friends in France.

Little did we passengers know what horrifying events were taking place as we were flying over the Atlantic. Mid-flight, we were told that there had been terrorist threats against the US — a gross understatement, presumably to avoid panic attacks –, that all American airports were closing down, and that our plane was diverted to Calgary, Canada.

Stranded in Calgary for a few days, feeling cold and lonely with my heart in my throat, I had plenty of time to watch in disbelief as the same images appeared on television, again and again. Plenty of time to reflect on what had happened, but not nearly enough to make sense of it. Even five years haven’t been enough, really.

I won’t add to the chorus of political analysis of this gruesome day and its world-changing consequences, but I did want to say that I am right there in the ranks of those who remember.