Photography by cmiper

Well, it looks like Maxence and I will be spending a few days in New York City this June — my excitement can barely be contained. I have long wanted to return to this city, which I visited just once when I was 15.

Ten years later, I have read a lot more books and articles and restaurant reviews and blogs, I have seen a lot more movies (not to mention episodes of Sex and the City), and I feel I have an infinity of things to discover, see, hear, experience — and more importantly, taste.

So. Plane tickets, check. Hotel room, check. Guidebook, check. I have a few things in mind and a lot of reading up to do in the archives of NYC food bloggers, but I would also like to turn to you, readers of C&Z, for advice!

If you were me — more interested in exploring the streets than visiting museums, thirsty for the quirky and the authentic, and undeniably tastebud-driven — what would you do, where would you go, what would you eat, what would you absolutely not want to miss?

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Update: Oh wow, what a response! I knew I could count on you, many thanks for the terrific suggestions. It will probably take me a dozen more trips to cover them all, but I will take your good advice with me and try to make the most of my stay. It certainly seems like I won’t go hungry!

Panna cotta is a traditional Piemontese recipe — the name means “cooked cream” in Italian. There are many variations of the recipe, but it is generally made by simply simmering together some cream, milk and sugar, mixing this with gelatin, before letting it cool until set.

The cream mixture can also be flavored, often with a vanilla pod, sometimes with fruit or fruit juice, but you could also experiment with tea, cocoa powder, and different spices or extracts — not very traditional but also very good. Some people enjoy the panna cotta on its own, but it is usually served with a sauce (often a berry coulis), which adds some sweetness: the cream itself is supposed to be only subtly sweet.

When the chef appeared behind the bar after the meal, my cousin’s wife Guénola and I asked him if he could possibly share his recipe for panna cotta.

A couple of months ago, two of my cousins, my sister and I had dinner together with our respective darlings at an Italian restaurant in the 15th called Swann et Vincent (named after the two little boys of the previous owner — three locations in Paris). For dessert, each couple shared an order of panna cotta (ain’t that sweet). Now, panna cotta is not usually my first choice, especially when a large and moist chocolate cake is winking at me from the dessert counter, but we had eaten well — those people make an astounding herb focaccia — and panna cotta sounded like a good way to end the meal with something sweet, yet not too heavy.

The panna cotta was very good, and when the chef appeared behind the bar after the meal, my cousin’s wife Guénola and I asked him if he could possibly share the recipe. He hesitated for a moment (he is probably not used to customers asking him for a recipe: this is pretty rare in France, and may even be considered impolite or undistinguished by some, but hey, we took the risk), then smiled and told us the list of ingredients and their amounts. It turned out to be much simpler than I thought, and I jotted it all down on the restaurant card as we stepped out, promising all the girls in our party that I would tell them if I tried reproducing it (the boys were strangely uninterested, you could tell who insisted on dessert in the first place).

And this is the recipe I used (scaling it down to a quarter, they obviously make bigger batches at the restaurant!) for dessert when Derrick and Melissa came to dinner a week ago. I served it with fresh strawberry coulis (a breeze to make and so much tastier than store-bought), a few fresh strawberries and a Petit Beurre, the classic French butter cookie. Definitely a make-again dessert, so fresh and fruity and pretty!

PS: This came after a cheese course, served with traditional baguette and baguette des prés, the multigrain baguette I love so much, and featuring cheese bought at the market that morning: a semi-dry goat cheese from the Ferme de Bréviande (Loir-et-Cher), a tome de brebis (sheep’s milk), a runny and super-flavorful goat cheese with sarriette (summer savory) and a Nivernais, a deliciously creamy cow’s milk cheese from the same-name region. I think we got our dose of dairy for at least a week.

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[Braised Lamb Shanks, Grilled Polenta Sandwiches]

…and this is part III of the dinner I served on Saturday, when I was (at long last) given the opportunity to meet Derrick and Melissa, dear friends from the Blogosphere now happily upgraded to dear friends from the Real World.

After a lively chat going in ten different directions — we were so excited to finally meet, where were we to start? — over a nice appetizer of crostini and anchoïade at the bar, Melissa, Derrick, Maxence and I sat down to the main course: lamb shanks, slowly cooked in the oven in a red wine and mushroom sauce, and served with sandwiches of grilled polenta squares.

In French, lamb shanks are called souris d’agneau, which literally means “lamb mice”, most probably because of their shape. Be it for the cuteness of the name or the tenderness of the cut, souris d’agneau is a favorite of mine I often fall for in restaurants.

This was my first time cooking it myself though, and the first hurdle to hop through was procurement: since la souris is the tip of le gigot (leg of lamb, a noble cut), the butcher will only sell them to you if he is sure to sell the rest, which will then be called gigot raccourci (shortened leg of lamb) and is ordered by people for whom the whole leg is a bit much.

I knew from Pascale that Picard, the life-saving frozen food store, sold lamb shanks and that they were quite good, but I thought — this is Derrick. And Melissa. I can’t serve them frozen meat, now can I? No. Nothing but fresh would do, and I ended up having to call and negociate with three different butchers (and yes, I did it all from the office, going out onto the terrace for a little butcher-calling privacy).

The first one didn’t do souris at all. I hung up. The second one thought for a bit (I could hear the furrowing of his brow over the line) and said “Four? I can’t do four. I can sell you one, but not four.” Um, okay. Let me think about it and call you back when I have just one person to feed. Thankfully the trusted Boucherie des Gourmets came to the rescue, not even blinking at the request (or I would have heard). They wrote down my order, and the next day I went to collect my four beauties.

The recipe here is inspired from a cookbook called Recettes Mijotées by Joanne Glynn, which is in fact an Australian book, originally titled Slow cooking. It includes slow-cooking recipes from all over the world and is lovely to look at. I’ve had it for over a year (we got it for our friend Ludo’s birthday, but I liked it so much we bought a copy for ourselves, too), but this was my first time trying anything from it — you know how it is, so many cookbooks, so little time.

I made a few minor adjustments to the recipe, using mushrooms where the author called for red peppers (I wanted to use those fabulous fresh mushrooms from the market) and changing a few of the ingredients and amounts here and there, just because I can’t help it. But since I have a lot to learn when it comes to meat cooking, her instructions as to the general process were most helpful, and everything went perfectly according to plan. I’m always impressed by slow-cooking and how magical it feels: you simply combine ingredients, close the lid or the oven door, cross your fingers and let the heat do the work!

With this I served grilled polenta squares, skewered into sandwiches with Italian cherry tomatoes in the middle: I adore polenta, I knew from last time that polenta and lamb worked well as a team, and the sandwiching sounded fun — the idea came to me while sitting in a particularly lengthy meeting during which my mind had escaped to the wonderful world of menu-planning and recipe invention, where everyone is happy and eats really well.

I was delighted with the appetizing look and the deep flavors of this dish, the moist meat having slow-cooked until you hardly needed a knife to cut it, the fragrant sauce thickened to a velvety consistency, and the grilled polenta squares being their usual crispy-outside-tender-inside selves. Maxence and my guests confirmed, both with and without words, that they shared my pleasure.

With this we drank a 2001 Corbières, a delicious wine from the Languedoc, as recommended by my wine seller after I carefully explained what the recipe was like, what went into it and what I would be serving it with — the pairing worked beautifully.

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Anchoïade, a garlic and anchovy dip, is a specialty from Provence and the city of Collioure in particular, famous for its anchois. It is typically served with an assortment of raw vegetables, or spread on little toasts. When I was in Lourmarin for Easter, my aunt served a delicious anchoïade for lunch the first day, and it had the consistency of a thin mayonnaise. I have also seen anchoïades that were thicker and chunkier, a bit like tapenade, and this is what mine was like.

I made this anchoïade as an appetizer for our dinner with Derrick and Melissa on Saturday. Traditional recipes call for anchovies packed in salt, which I had never used before. They were somewhat difficult to come by, anchovies packed in oil are much easier to find, but I finally located some and soaked them overnight. The next day however, once the heads and spines were removed (which was a bit of a mess and left a nice pungent smell on my fingers), the yield was not as much as I had hoped, and I had to go out and buy more, going for the oil-marinated ones this time since I had no time to soak them. This worked fine, so unless someone has anchovy-handling tips to share, I probably won’t bother with salt-packed anchovies next time, as indicated in the recipe below.

The anchoïade was served with a bowl of assorted crudités bought fresh from the market that morning (oh, the joy of the market under the pouring rain), featuring: spring leeks and spring garlic (delicious, and almost indistinguishable from each other except for the shape of their base, straight for the leek and rounded for the garlic), sticks of young zucchini (raw zucchini is way underrated — stick to small ones and you’ll see what I mean), raw fennel, pink radishes and plum tomatoes. The choice of veggies provided a nice variety of tastes (sweet, aniseedy, sharp, peppery) to match the salty smooth anchoïade.

With this I also served grissini (Italian breadsticks) from Piemont, handmade in the traditional way and thinner that ordinary grissini, and we washed it all down with dry muscat.

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