The first day of May in France is La Fête du Travail (Labor Day). It is a holiday, which is nice, except when it’s a Sunday and then you feel slighted. Anyway.

May 1 is also La Fête du Muguet, and the tradition is to give the ones you love a little bouquet of lily-of-the-valley, for good luck and to celebrate the arrival of spring. Originally the idea was to take the kids into the forest and lose them pick your own muguet together. Of course, in the city you will more likely buy it from the florist’s, or better yet, from one of the countless stands that sprout up overnight on every street corner and every road in France, most of them doing this as a fundraiser for one cause or another. Some years you really feel sorry for them, sitting in the cold and rain and hardly selling anything, but this year they are in luck, as the last couple of days have been a fabulous sneak preview of summer, all bright skies and super-warm temps.

On another note, the new issue of the New York Times “T” magazine comes out today, and includes a piece I have written for them about cook-dating, a new cooking-class-cum-dating-service that has been invented here in Paris. The article is called Love at first bite and it is available online (second piece from the top).

On a Saturday morning, you go to the pool for your weekly swim. As you come out, limbs pleasantly weary and hair still wet, you reflect that it would be nice to buy a baguette for lunch. So, instead of making a right and walking directly home — you are fortunate enough to live just a block from a clean and quiet swimming-pool — you go left and make a detour by the boulangerie to buy a warm and crusty Renaissance baguette (their signature traditional baguette).

As you walk back up the street, you pass the fish stall, and the thought pops: bulots! That will be great for lunch.

Bulots — also called buccin, ran, coucou or cuter still, calicoco — are whelks, those pretty snail-like shellfish that you eat cooked, after delicately removing the little opening cap and pulling the chewy body out, optionally using a special metal pick. In Paris they can be purchased, already cooked, from any poissonnerie — and each fish stall cooks them to its own recipe. Relatively cheap, super nutritious (they are full of vitamins and minerals) but more importantly, delightfully tasty and fun to eat.

You step in to enquire whether they have any, and the poissonnier says yes — in fact he has just finished cooking the daily batch and they are still warm. You buy a generous portion for two that he gets from the back.

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[Smoked Herring and Broccoli Parmentier]

In France, we get pretty much the same télé-réalité shows as everywhere else in the Western world — yet another perk of globalization — but I don’t often watch them, as I find most either really boring or really painful to watch.

However, I have somehow let myself get sucked into the current show called La Nouvelle Star — the French rendition of American Idol — in which successive selections lead to the discovery of the best new singing talent. I can’t explain how this happened, really, but Stéfan, Patricia (my dear neighbor-friends) and I have developped an inexplicable interest in the competition, turning this weekly event into an occasion to share a casual dinner and dish about the candidates, the judges and various other topics, nouvelle-star-related or not.

This little Thursday night ritual is usually conducted at their place — I wouldn’t want to impose this upon Maxence, who cannot understand what in the world has gotten into us — and Stéphan does most of the cooking, with his usual talent. But he was out of town last week, so I told Patricia that I would gladly be the interim chef for our nouvelle-star viewing, and I made us this Herring and Broccoli Parmentier, the inspiration for which came to me during my metro ride home.

Parmentier, or hachis parmentier, is a traditional French dish of ground meat (usually beef, sometimes a mix of beef and pork) topped with mashed potatoes and oven-baked. It is named in honor of Antoine Parmentier, the 18th century agronome we have to thank for promoting the potato as a vegetable fit for human consumption. Depending on whom you talk to, hachis parmentier is either a blissful comfort food or a horrid school cafeteria memory. It is considered very humble fare and is mostly reserved to home cooking or very basic restaurants — it is a notorious way to use up leftover meat — but you can occasionally see it featured on fancier restaurant menus as a twist on the classic recipe, using a more noble kind of meat or even fish. (For a little more on the history of the dish, let me point you to my recipe for Duck Confit Parmentier on the Bonjour Paris website.)

This Parmentier variation — admittedly getting further and further from the original concept, but I’m sure Antoine won’t mind — substitutes smoked herring (a.k.a. kipper) for the meat and broccoli for the potatoes. I love smoked herring and the intense flavor it lends to a dish, but it can easily be overpowering: here the mashed broccoli provides a light blanket that complements and tones it down.

But sadly, Francine got kicked out. She was my favorite. I am utterly disconsolate.

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[Asparagus and Strawberry Tart]

About a year ago, a little group of us Parisian (by birth or by heart) food enthusiasts started a tradition of organizing potluck dinners at one another’s place. On Saturday night, my dear friend Alisa hosted her second such event, setting Aphrodisiac Foods as the theme for the night. The event had been scheduled for a while and I had done some basic research about those ingredients that were notable aphrodisiacs, but somehow I could not get the culinary half of my brain to think further than “ginger”. Thankfully, a couple of days before the event, inspiration struck.

I was reading the handy list at GourmetSleuth and two ingredients jumped at me, begging to be finally paired off after years of secret yearning — Mr. Asparagus and Ms. Strawberry. One green one red, one slender one squat, both bringing into the relationship their own subtly sweet taste and personable texture. I decided to lay them on a bed of almond pâte brisée (almonds symbolize fertility) and call it an Asparagus and Strawberry Tart.

For the crust I started with the perfect pâte brisée recipe I got from Pascale, substituting almond powder for a quarter of the flour. This and the butter formed a nicely supple — if a little soft — ball of dough, to which the addition of an egg (as the original recipe calls for) was unnecessary. The asparagus were steamed, the strawberries cleaned and quartered, and a simple batter of crème fraîche and eggs formed the sheeting on which I arranged the couple, in as aesthetic a pattern as I could, before I gave them a little oven privacy.

To my glee, the tart was very well received: its crust was light and flaky, the asparagus/strawberry pairing worked superbly and the whole thing vanished in no time. There were about twenty of us, and the contributions were as varied and delicious as oysters with ginger sauce, grilled asparagus, sesame tuna tartare, lapin à la moutarde (rabbit in mustard and white wine), frogs’ legs in parsley butter, pistachio tabouli or arugula salad.

The dessert spread did not disappoint either, boasting a chocolate fondue and a mountain of strawberries, brownies topped with candied almonds, a cream cake flavored with tonka beans and artfully decorated with homemade and cute breast-shaped mini-meringues, figs served with a crystallized ginger cream, and chocolate mini-financiers flavored with long pepper and ginger.

And before you ask, my story does not (and will not) discuss the relative merit and efficiency of the aforementioned aphrodisiac dishes — some things are just better left unsaid.

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