The minute I read Heidi’s post about making your own ricotta and her comment that “this ricotta tastes and smells like the milk it is made from so use the best and freshest dairy you can find”, I instantly thought what a perfect use it would be for the bottle of raw milk that Christoph and Susanne gave me for my birthday as part of their superb farm-fresh gift basket.

I set to work in late afternoon the next day, slightly incredulous as to whether this would actually work: I mean, heat up some milk and surely what you get is hot milk, not cheese, right? I must say I am pretty baffled by my own tendency to be the St Thomas of food chemistry — I’ll believe it when I see it. Where does that come from? I shall write myself a prescription to carefully read the entire revised work of both Harold McGee and Alton Brown.

And sure enough, everything went according to plan. When the combined milk and fermented milk reached the magic temperature (I was merrily using the candy thermometer I acquired months ago and never ever used, not even once), curds started to gather at the surface: this was my cheese! I carefully ladled first the whey then the curds into the prepared dishcloth and sieve, waited a bit, gathered the dishcloth into a bunch, tied it to the faucet with a string and a shoelace knot, waited some more, and reopened the dishcloth to collect my pretty ball of fresh ricotta. Does it get any easier? I think not.

Later that night Maxence and I tasted it on its own, then spread it on little Swedish crispbreads, and again in the morning on slices of toasted bread under a thin layer of Christine Ferber’s blackcurrant and violet jam, and declared it to be among the best fresh cheeses we had ever had, one in which the real tastes and smells of the milk and the barn and the happy cow all explode in your mouth — a far cry from the muted fluffy thing that they sell as ricotta in grocery stores here.

Maxence requested that I make a fresh batch for him every day.

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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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