Oh gifts, gifts, gifts! Is there anything sweeter in life than having your friends go out and find something just for you, something that they think you will like and enjoy, something that will surprise and delight you? And when you do and it does, when the idea is fabulous and the gift exactly to your taste, when it is something that you really wanted or something you would have wanted had you known it existed, when it is custom-made for you and even better than what you would have chosen for yourself, you are entitled to feeling lucky and grateful and loved and happy — yes, simultaneously.

For my 26th birthday I was literally showered with joy-inducing perfect gifts, and I thought I would share with you the ones that are food and cooking related:

– My friend and cooking heroine Louisa went to Le Potager du Roi in Versailles, where Louis XIV’s vegetable gardens are kept intact and operational. From the boutique she got me the picture-perfect zucchini flower that you see above, as well as eight little white peaches, delicious and juicy: in Chinese culture, as she explained to me, peaches symbolize a long life and the number eight good fortune…

– My parents bought me a superb enameled cast-iron cocotte by Staub. We picked it out together last week in Alsace, as we were driving by Turckheim where the Staub headquarters are, complete with a huge factory outlet in which my mother and I spent an unreasonable amount of time. I chose a beautiful grey oval 6-quart cocotte, which unfortunately still lives in my parents’ house in the Vosges as we speak, for it was much too heavy to be lugged on the train home with me. Just a couple more weeks and they’ll bring it back and we will never be apart again I promise.

– My friend and ex-coworker Sophie got me three kinds of Fleurs de sucre — lavender, rose and blueberry. Fleurs de sucre are crystallized flower petals or berries, beautifully packaged up in tall glass tubes. They can be used to bejewel a dessert, or you can sprinkle some to decorate a table, serve them with tea or coffee, or drop them in a glass of champagne. Can’t wait to try them!

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[Zucchini and Chicken Salad with Raspberry Vinegar]

Ever since I served raw zucchini sticks with my anchoïade a few weeks ago and experienced a private tastebud epiphany, I have felt it my personal mission to let the world know how incredibly delicious and subtly sweet zucchini tastes in its most natural simple naked state.

It is best to keep this treatment for the freshest zucchini, slender young things with smooth skin and firm flesh that feel heavy for their size, and summer’s a good time to find them at the elitist farmers’ market nearest you — if you’re lucky they will still be wearing their pretty yellow flower hat — or in your own garden if you belong to the happy zucchini growers’ club, in which case you should fedex me a crate, thank you so much.

This salad is a lovely use for leftover roasted chicken: I also like to buy cold roasted chicken from my rôtisserie on rue des Abbesses, as they sometimes sell in the afternoon what’s left from the lunch rush, for the mere price of 5€. The salad also features my newly acquired and much treasured bottle of raspberry vinegar, which complements the moist chicken and the snappy zucchini in a beautifully colorful and tangy way.

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On an unrelated note, if you are a food blogger living in Europe, it’s not too late to join us in the Blogging by Post event that’s taking place this week-end: send a small care package, receive one, and blog about it!

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Authenticity can be a fine line to tread when it comes to cooking. Dishes and recipes originate in certain parts of the world and are often deeply rooted in local traditions. But then people emigrate, they travel, they adopt, they adapt, they improvise, and the same dish gets recreated in a different kitchen at a different time, with the same name but a completely different face.

Naturally, food and recipes are meant to be played with and built upon, and it would be a sad life for our taste buds if no one ever dared look authenticity in the eye and say, “you know what? I think I’ll do this my way”. But however playful and inventive and even irreverent we want to be, I think we owe it to the generations of cooks before us to at least know what we’re doing. Feel free to stray from the authentic path and go do your fun, fusion and quite possibly genius thing in the wilderness, but be aware that you’re doing so and make sure you understand the how and the why.

I love the simplicity of this salad and how the bread soaks up the juices, blending in and softly coating its companion ingredients, making a humble tomato and cucumber salad something more substantial and satisfying.

Granted, following this rule takes quite a bit of effort, research and curiosity, and more often than not it is hard to pinpoint what the authentic recipe exactly is. It can vary from one village to the next, from one family to the next, and even locals get into terrible street fights about whether ratatouille should include eggplant or not.

And we are probably all guilty of the occasional sloppiness, giving in a little too easily to the temptation of naming a dish in a cool and interesting way just because it’s somewhat related to another (“Hey, it’s cut in thin slices! I say it’s a carpaccio!”). We certainly mean no harm or disrespect and most cases could be endlessly argued upon, depending on how conservative or tolerant you want to be, but I believe that a big part of learning to cook is to read up and learn about the history and the culture and the people behind the things you make and eat.

These thoughts were brought about by the fact that I wanted to make panzanella, a Tuscan salad that will gainfully employ good-quality stale bread. While researching recipes, I found an article from 1998 in which the author, appalled by a recipe published in a cooking magazine, explained what was wrong with it (a majority of ingredients that had nothing to do in there, and the unacceptable toasting and cubing of the bread), and went on to share a pared-down version, translated from a Tuscan book, that he considered to be capital-A authentic. This is the recipe I followed, changing a couple of things along the way (sorry, can’t be helped), but trying to stay true to the spirit nonetheless.

The resulting salad was very tasty, unusual, and fun to make. I loved the simplicity of it and how the bread soaked up the juices, blending in and softly coating its companion ingredients, making a humble tomato and cucumber salad something more substantial and satisfying, with which you could simply eat a slice or two of freshly sliced ham and call it a meal.

It is however a most unforgiving salad, one with which you can’t cheat, one that will be exactly as average or sublime as the ingredients you put into it. If your tomatoes are rock-hard, your olive oil tasteless and your bread substandard, well, this salad won’t do anything for you. And I suspect that this is why most recipes feel the urge to add in something — anything — to jazz it up, be it anchovies, garlic, capers, eggplant, peppers, olives, mozzarella or all of the above, making it a delicious salad without a doubt but not, apparently, the real McCoy of panzanella.

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Today’s recipe is for cacao-nib-topped raspberry muffins.

I see raspberries as a sort of baking commodity, like chocolate chips or almond meal, and I usually keep a bag of frozen framboises in the freezer: in Paris, fresh raspberries come at too high a price for too tiny a basket to drown their delicate taste in a cake, so I have taken to buying Picard‘s framboises brisées for my baking. Framboises brisées, as you may have guessed, are raspberries that were smushed at some point in their lives, so they can’t be labelled as whole raspberries and can hence be bought for a little less. For me though, it’s not so much the price thing as the idea that I’m saving those poor flawed raspberries from disdain and oblivion, giving them their proverbial fifteen minutes.

As for the cacao nibs (éclats de fèves de cacao in French), they are simply tiny bits of roasted cocoa beans, not sweetened or processed any further. I am pleased to say that mine have flown across one continent and one ocean to reach my kitchen: they were a gift from one of my favorite food bloggers, Derrick, who was kind enough to send me this specialty from the Berkeley-based chocolate maker Sharffen Berger. I have always loved chocolat noir aux éclat de fèves de cacao (oh, the texture, the aroma, the flavor packed up in those tiny flecks!) and was a big fan of Scharffen-Berger’s Nibby Bar when I lived in California, but I had never actually thought of purchasing the cacao nibs themselves. Derrick mentioned that they worked wonders in savory dishes and this idea is simmering somewhere on the stovetop of my mind, but these raspberry muffins were my first impulse to use them.

I love baking with yogurt, as some of you may have noticed by now, as I think it lends a delightful moistness to the finished product without using truckloads of butter. I normally use plain yogurt or fermented milk (which can go by the name of kefir or lait ribot) indifferently (depending on what’s in the fridge) and here used both — buttermilk would work fine too.

These raspberry muffins were a popular item in the sunny brunch spread we laid out for our friends last Sunday. They were just the right sweetness in my opinion (read “not very sweet”) and this was confirmed by a quick table survey, but if you like your sweets to be very sweet you may want to up the sugar a little. As for the raspberry and cacao nib pairing, it worked particularly well, their subtle flavors melding together harmoniously without stepping on each other’s toes or competing for your attention.

Note that the basic recipe (minus the raspberries and cacao nib topping) is easy-breezy and can be adapted to welcome any other ingredient/topping that you would like in/on your muffs.

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