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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When life gives you lemons… make almond lemon curd.

I like it when I can count the degrees of separation between an ingredient and myself, especially when I only need the fingers of one hand to do so. In this case, there were just four degrees of separation between me and three large lemons: my sister Céline has a boyfriend I adore, named Christian. Christian has a father, who lives not far from Nice. And this father has a bountiful lemon tree, currently overloaded with beautiful, smooth-skinned fruit, pale yellow like the baby clothes you buy when you don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. So when Céline went to spend a few days in Nice recently, she came back to Paris with half a dozen jumbo lemons, which my mother and I shared gleefully.

These lemons, being organic and all, had lemon curd written all over them (if you looked at the rind very very carefully with a magnifier, close to the stem, it said lemon curd in super fine print).

My first attempt at lemon curd, many moons ago, did not quite qualify as a success. I don’t remember where I had gotten the recipe from, if I had followed it with enough care, or if it was just a case of beginner’s crap luck, but as I was standing over the pan, dutifully stirring the mixture, it became painfully apparent just why they called it a curd. It curdled all right.

Because I was young and too proud to admit defeat, I insisted on eating it anyway, spreading my morning toast with curdled curd, which tasted fine if you managed to ignore the tiny lumps of viscid egg white staring up at you with fierce little eyes. Thankfully, I had made a miniature batch with just one lemon, so it was soon done away with, and I could get on with my life.

Years later I tried my hand at lemon curd again, this time with a bit of research, and it appeared that my first attempt had been somewhat misguided: I had cooked the curd directly in a saucepan, when it is really best to do so over gentle heat, in a bowl set on a pan of simmering water. The result was infinitely more convincing, and this is the method I used again yesterday with my sunny lemons.

Wanting to try something a little different, I made an almond lemon curd this time, using one less egg than I normally would, and adding lightly toasted ground almonds to the thickened mixture. This adds a lovely textural twist, giving the lemon curd just a touch more presence on your toast, and the subtle, nutty, and toasty almond flavor is a great partner to the tartness of the lemon (lemon and almond are such good flavor friends that they have four letters in common, although this doesn’t work in French at all).

Aside from spreading lemon curd on toasts of baguette in the morning, or on English muffins, crumpets, and scones (a regional affinity thing), I like to spread it in the middle of a horizontally split yogurt cake, make sandwich cookies, or fill twee little tarts. I should probably note here that I am one of those people who drink lemon juice straight from the juicer, without water or sugar, so it is safe to say I like a tart lemon curd — if you prefer a milder one, use a bit less lemon juice, or a bit more sugar.

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[Nettle Soup]

How often do you get to cook with a hostile ingredient? Sure, you could hurt yourself with pretty much anything — drop a head of celeriac on your toes, rub your eyes after chopping chili peppers, stab yourself with a carrot — but nettle leaves are actively belligerent. Stinging you is their life calling, it is what they were meant to do, and you can hardly blame them. Wolves will be wolves, nettles will be nettles.

And so it is with extreme caution that I handled the bunch I got from the market on Saturday morning. The lady who sold it to me said that holding your breath lessened the effect, but I find breathing to be a pleasurable activity and I am reluctant to give it up, so I opted for the pink rubber glove strategy instead. I did follow her advice of storing the bunch in a glass of water in the fridge door, but I covered it with a brown paper bag on which I wrote “Attention: Orties!”, in case an innocent victim opened the refrigerator before I had time to use the nettles.

Since this was my first time cooking, or even tasting, anything nettle, I decided to make a very simple soup, figuring it was the best way to discover the flavors, unadorned and unmasked. As the soup gently brewed, I was very surprised by the smells wafting up from the pot: I was expecting spinach, but it was seaweed I smelled, like a Brittany beach at low tide. (Not all that puzzling perhaps, since stinging nettle is a weed too, albeit an earthy one.)

We had this deep green, velvety soup for lunch, and the marine impression was confirmed: if you closed your eyes you could imagine yourself sipping on a soupe de poisson — fishy in a pleasant way, and mildly iodized. We liked it very much, and reflected that it would do well with a bit of rouille stirred in: rouille* is a sauce of garlic and chili peppers mashed with olive oil and crustless bread (or simply a garlic and chili pepper mayonnaise), traditionally served with fish soups and bouillabaisse in Provence.

This was quite a flavor encounter, and it makes me wish I had a garden that I could neglect, so stinging nettles would thrive in the back. Since I don’t, I had to buy mine, but if you want to pick your own, here’s what I’ve read: you should avoid nettles that grow too close to a road, you should pick the tops of young plants only (older ones are tough and bitter, poor things), and you should rinse them well. Oh, and they’re very good for you, too, full of vitamins and minerals and stuff.

* Literally: “rust”, because of the color.

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