Chose promise, chose due*, here is my take on absorption pasta, or risotto-style pasta. The idea of this technique is to coat the pasta with a little olive oil, add just enough liquids to cover, and cook until desired tenderness. According to Virka — who read it in the Italian paper La Reppublica so it simply must be true — this cooking technique dates back from the early 13th century, and was in fact the only one that was used before it was displaced by the now-classic boiling method.

For this first trial, I used the ricciole pasta that came in my package of Italian goodies, and followed Pascale’s instructions as a guide. I didn’t have stock on hand — I am a bad, bad person — so I just used filtered water: the flavor was fine, but will of course be richer if you use homemade stock, you Martha Stewart you. The pasta was cooked with thin sticks of zucchini (cut with my mighty mandoline — no fingers were sliced in the process, I’m getting better at this), and received a sprinkle of crushed cacao nibs and crispy flecks of aged Parmesan just before serving.

The crispy flecks of Parmesan are a fortuitous by-product of my recent attempt to make Parmesan wafers with the previously featured hunk of 3-year-old Parmigiano Reggiano. It turns out that this Parmesan is marvellous, yes, but much too dry and much too proud to let itself be turned into a vulgar wafer: the grated cheese didn’t so much melt as grill, and my golden circles just crumbled into bits when I tried to lift them from the baking sheet. Said bits were delicious however, so they were promptly recycled into sandwich garnishes and canapé toppings.

Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, the absorption pasta. So, how was it? It was lovely, that’s how it was — so lovely in fact, that I might stick to that technique from here on in. First of all, and however odd this may sound, I hate bringing pots of water to a boil — it is the most boring thing in the world. Since I am an impatient cook, I cannot help but lift the lid every ten seconds and, as we all know, watched water never boils, which is kind of a problem, especially when you’re hungry and thus cranky.

Secondly, the absorption method makes it easier to test the pasta for doneness: when you pluck one from the pan, you can taste it (almost) straight away, since it isn’t as scorching hot as when you lift it from a pot of boiling water. And once you have reached the consistency that you like, the pasta can go straight from the pan into your plate, without continuing to cook as it does when you have to drain it and toss it with the sauce. Finally, and more to the point, this technique allows a delectable coating of starch to develop around the pasta, giving it a toothsome, silky texture.

As the pasta softly simmered, I was quite surprised to notice that a scent of almonds wafted up from the sauté pan: I am not entirely sure whether that came from my olive oil, from the pasta itself, or a happy alchemy between the two, but I had never had that happen before. This scent had somewhat subsided by the time the pasta was cooked, but it was still a lingering presence in the finished dish, and went delightfully well with the softened zucchini, the toasty flecks of Parmesan, and the earthy crunchy cacao nibs**.

* Chose promise, chose due means “a promise is a debt.”
** Cacao nibs (éclats de fève de cacao in French) are tiny bits of rosted cacao beans, not sweetened or processed any further. They have an intense chocolate scent, and they are crunchy and nutty.

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Earlier this year, I received an email from an Italian blogger named Massimo, who announced to me that C&Z had been voted Best Non-Italian Food Blog in the awards he’d been hosting on his website, Peperosso* — I’m sure that having an Italian word in the name of my blog helped. And since Massimo puts his mangoes where his mouth is (Lost, season 2:episode 17), there was a prize for each of the winners, and the prize was a 100€ gift certificate from San Lorenzo, an online store that specializes in Italian goods, and ships them in Europe.

You probably all receive those fake “You’ve won the lottery!” emails by the dozen (please tell me I’m not the only one), but this was a bona fide offer (no credit card information was requested) and I was delighted: it’s nice to discover you’ve won something, it’s even nicer when you didn’t even know you were in the running for it, and when the something you’ve won is edible, well, there’s no price tag on that.

Because I am me, it took me a couple of months to log on to the website and make my order. But when I finally did, it felt like writing a list to a foreign-exchange Santa: armed with my Italian-French dictionary (the website is available in other languages now, but wasn’t at the time), I spent quite a while browsing the virtual aisles and agonizing over what to get. It turns out my dictionary isn’t very food-savvy, but I got by, and learned lots of new words that were promptly forgotten the next day. And when I received the package — a rather huge box that I went to collect from my guardienne‘s office — here’s what was inside:

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When I was little, I had long and exclusive relationships with my breakfast menus. For years on end a particular food item was all I would have in the morning, until suddenly and without warning, a new monomania came to replace it.

The earliest phase I remember involved pain de mie (white sandwich bread) and Nutella. Two slices of bread would be toasted until lightly golden (if it got too brown I had to find someone who would eat it, and start again), both slices were spread with hazelnut-chocolate-and-trans-fat paste, and assembled into a sandwich. The crusts would then be sliced off, and the sandwich cut into two neat rectangles. I often had trouble finishing the thing (I might stress here that both slices had been spread with Nutella) and I usually took the leftovers back to my room and put them somewhere safe — on the corner of a bookshelf or inside my little sloping top desk — in case I wanted a snack later. Usually, this just went stale until someone found it and tossed it, though I’m not sure who.

Then there was the pain d’épice phase, two slices of store-bought honey spice cake, from which I also removed the crust because it was a bit gummy and a bit bitter. Years later came the quatre-quart breton phase, for which countless loaves of pound cake from Brittany were purchased. I would precut the long loaves into slices beforehand and store them in a tin box for a few days, because I liked the cake better when it had had time to dry out just a bit.

But the phase that lasted the longest was the chocolate granola obsession. My granola of choice was called cruesli au chocolat, and I had it with the thin yogurts in glass tubs with bright red screw-top lids that my mother made in her yaourtière — or yaourtières I should say, since she had to buy a second one when the first one died of overexertion.

I would bring the box with me to the breakfast table, and carefully study the little Quaker characters pictured on it — I had no idea then what a Quaker was and the outfit was very intriguing — as I munched gleefully on the crunchy clusters and the chocolate spangles (new boxes had to have the inside bag flipped upside down, otherwise all the chocolate was at the bottom and that wasn’t right). This particular type of granola still exists, but whether it is their recipe or my taste buds that have changed — probably both — it isn’t nearly as blissful.

I am now a much more eclectic breakfaster (although I draw the line of eclecticism at cold leftovers from the night before) and will choose the menu according to my mood and my appetite, but I still have an intense fondness for granola. And since I am often sorely disappointed by boxed ones (bland, completely crushed inside, or over-processed), the day I discovered how easy it is to make your own came as quite an epiphany. I like to experiment with different ingredients — nuts, grains, sweeteners, and flavorings — depending on what I have on hand, but this one is a favorite, sprinkled on yogurt or fruit compote or both, as in the Creamy Mango Ricotta recipe featured in my Chocolate & Zucchini cookbook.

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I have a special bookshelf where I keep the books I plan to read. Some of them I’ve bought myself, and some of them I’ve borrowed, mostly from my mother or from my neighbor Patricia. At latest count — let me get up from the couch and count them for you — there are thirty-two books there. As you will infer, I am a bit of an unread-book hoarder, and I don’t feel quite serene unless this stash is well fed.

Perhaps my most cherished moment in the whole reading experience is when I kneel in front of the shelf (it is a low shelf), twist my neck this way and that to read the titles (English books have you bend your head to the right, French books have you bend it to the left, and my shelf is not very well organized), check my reader’s pulse to know what I feel like reading now, pull the chosen book by the spine (the others, while disappointed, let out a little sigh of relief — they have a bit more room to breathe now), and relocate my bookmark (a very old tattered thing) from the previous book to the promising new one.

Some of the books on my shelf have nothing to do with food — a couple of Simenon novels, Zadie Smith’s latest, a biography written by Jonathan Coe, a series of short novels about the Inuit people, an essay about Paris’ street life in the 18th century, my father’s two latest Le Guin translations — and some do — Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, a book on chocolate, Jeffrey Steingarten’s second collection of essays, and a history of French cakes and pastries, a fascinating thing into which I’ve peeked already, in a patent breach of my official rule.

Some books find themselves waiting for months in this temporary settlement — fortunately, my two favorite book lenders don’t seem to mind — but some barely have time to unpack their stuff. The most recent example was Laurie Colwin’s first collection of essays on food, called Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen.

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