[Soft Wheatberry Salad with Zucchini and Apricots]

I am a great lover of all things grain. Quinoa, bulgur, kamut, buckwheat, barley, amaranth, millet — each of them nutritious, filling and tasty in its own personal way (although they all seem to be indifferently described as “nutty” on the package, or un goût de noisette in French). I also love that most of them can be traced all the way back to ancient civilisations — you know, way before instant rice and microwave popcorn, when myths and legends saw them as a gift of the gods.

Organic, “natural food” and ethnic stores are usually your best bets to find interesting grains, and I like it when they offer them by the weight in bulk bins (or huge cloth bags in ethnic stores), so that you can buy as much or as little as you need to play and experiment with.

One type of grain that I particularly like is the soft wheatberry, a.k.a. spring wheat, pastry wheat or blé tendre in French. A wheatberry is a wheat kernel from which the outer hull has been removed, and the soft wheatberry is just one variety of wheat, the kind from which pastry and cake flour is made. Pasta on the other hand is usually made from durum wheat, a harder kind of wheat which has more gluten, offers a higher protein-to-starch ration, but takes forever to cook. The soft wheatberry, as sold in France under the Ebly brand (and widely distributed in grocery stores), takes ten minutes to cook and blossom into plump little nuggets — tender, yet offering a nice, slightly chewy bite.

Soft wheatberries are a great side to serve with both meat or fish, you can flavor them with herbs or blend in vegetables, and I think they work particularly well cold, in salad form. I improvized this fresh and pretty variation for lunch the other day, tossing the cooked berries together with raw grated zucchini, a bit of garlic and some chopped cilantro — cilantro I love you so — and then, on a whim, adding in a few of the tan apricots that were lazying around on the counter.

[More info on grains and wheat.]

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[Swimming Cherries, Hazelnut Rosemary Tuiles]

I have a new piece appearing today in NPR‘s weekly Kitchen Window column. The recipe I am sharing this time is for a chilled cherry soup that you can serve with hazelnut rosemary wafers, a variation on the typically French tuile.

The metric measurements are below.

(Previous contributions to Kitchen Window:
– Artichoke and Goat Cheese Mille-feuille,
– Asparagus Confit with Almonds and Rosemary,
– Chocolate and Candied Ginger Tartlets.)

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As my trusted friend the Webster tells us, a meme is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”. In the blogosphere, a meme can be a questionnaire about a particular theme — your tastes in music or books, 100 things about you, etc. — that you reply to on your blog and pass along. Nicky started such a meme just a few weeks ago called the cook next door, giving us all a chance to talk about the hows and the whys behind our food obsessions. The added bonus (made possible by her and Oliver’s impressive web design skills) is that she follows the meme’s progression, thus mapping out our ever-growing food blog neighborhood.

What is your first memory of baking/cooking on your own?
I believe my first cooking adventure was mastering the art of the microwaved oeuf cocotte when I was nine. The first thing I baked on my own was the Gâteau au Chocolat de Csaba when I was about twelve, a classic family recipe given to us by a friend who’s originally from Hungary. My rendition was somewhat undercooked in the center and my friends would only eat the outer rims. In retrospect, I like to think it was a molten chocolate cake and I was simply a misunderstood visionary. Ahem.

Who had the most influence on your cooking?
In order of appearance: 1- my mother, 2- the Internet. My mother is a superb cook and baker, and the countless hours I spent with her in the kitchen — watching, helping, licking the bowls — have undoubtedly laid the foundations for my own cooking. The rest of what I know has been gleaned not so much in books or cooking magazines, but rather on websites, forums and of course, blogs.

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Besides eating out at restaurants, what is the other capital dimension through which to explore a city and its food scene? Food shopping! Show me your grocery stores, and I’ll try to guess how you eat at home when no one’s looking, how you cook and how you feed your friends.

As in all other respects, New York did not disappoint. I loved the hyper-luxurious Dean & Deluca in Soho (rarely have I seen such a beautiful — and insanely pricey — store) and the exotic stalls of Chinatown, its amazing array of fresh fish and its buckets of live, though none-too-cheerful, toads.

I paid my respects to Whole Foods for the sake of old times — the Whole Foods of Cupertino and Palo Alto were regular haunts of mine — but fled as fast as I could for fear of being stomped by the weeknight crowds.

I walked around the Chelsea market built inside an old Nabisco factory (enjoying the industrial architecture at least as much as the stores), as well as the Union Square Greenmarket, with its profusion of lush and vibrant greens (such variety!) to be plucked at the foot of skyscrapers, while sipping on a glass of fresh and delicious, no-sugar-added, raspberry-apple cider.

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