I finally caved in and bought a pair of stainless steel egg poachers, for 3€ each.

When even the best advice and tips don’t help and your poached eggs are ugly ducklings everytime, you can either settle for a life without home-poached eggs (too terrible to contemplate), or humbly admit to your own failings, and resort to the tool that some genius designed — probably because s/he was missing that same gene.

We tested the poachers the other night, bringing water to a boil in a large saucepan, breaking fresh eggs inside the buttered hollows, and lowering them carefully into the water. We left them in for three minutes, shuffling anxiously around, worrying about the hovering white filaments, relieved when they eventually disappeared. We lifted the poachers out by their convenient tails, drained the eggs on paper towels, and served them on warm slices of garlic-rubbed toasted bread.

The result? A slightly unnatural shape (a sharp half-oval with tiny spots from the holes in the cups), but a perfect consistency. Not to mention, the poachers look like cute little rodents that work as fuzzy inverted mirrors, should you feel like practising goofy faces while you wait for the water to boil. And just how many kitchen utensils will do that for you?

Last week was my sister’s birthday. I didn’t come as much of a surprise, really, because I have quite the analytical mind, and a careful observation has led me to the conclusion that this phenomenon happens every 8th of December, year in, year out. At least it always has. Of course, just because the sun has risen every morning for as long as we can remember doesn’t mean it won’t one day set and refuse to rise again. But one cannot live in such troubling uncertainty, one needs to rely on a few solid beliefs, and the yearly occurrence of my sister’s birthday is not the least of them.

This year, I offered to bake her a birthday cake, to be served at the party she threw last Saturday night. Our mother had already made one for our little family celebration (there is no such thing as celebrating a birthday too many times) : it wasn’t technically a birthday cake, but rather a beautiful pear and chestnut charlotte, made with slices of her homemade biscuit roulé (the French jelly roll). Impressive and particularly delicious, it was gulped down between the four of us — you know, a charlotte just doesn’t keep that well.

To me, cakes pretty much fall under two categories, chocolate and non-chocolate, so I asked the birthday-girl-to-be which kind she wanted. Her reply was that she simply wanted a surprise cake, so I followed my deeper instincts and went, well, the chocolate route.

I still had some of that super-cool super-good pistachio paste, and since chocolate and pistachio are such good friends, I chose to make a chocolate and pistachio cake, starting with my favorite and highly adaptable cake recipe. I made half of the cake batter chocolate (with cocoa powder and chocolate chips, which are in fact “ganache drops” if you please) and covered it with the other half of the batter, made pistachio by mixing in pistachio paste and chopped pistachios.

I was in fact shooting for two clean layers, but apparently pistachio and chocolate are better friends than even I suspected, and they got themselves a little action in the oven, ending up in a marbled tangle, accidental but pretty. I then covered the cake in a thick blanket of ganache — if life has taught me one thing it’s that you can’t go wrong with ganache. Ever.

I named the cake Chocolate and Pistachio Surprise Cake because you can’t tell it is pistachio until you slice it and oh, look! there’s a pistachio cake inside that chocolate cake! Of course, you cannot tell people the name of the cake before you’ve sliced it, otherwise there goes your surprise, but I am highly amused by this little name-giving business, what are you gonna do.

The appropriate number of candles were placed on the cake and blown out with talent, the cake was cut in as many slices as I could and passed around. I was pretty pleased: the crumb was nice and moist, the pistachio taste fragrant but not artificial, the ganache luscious (you can’t go wrong with ganache I tell you), the guests were very appreciative (one gourmand in particular, hi Arthur!) and my sister loved it, which was really what mattered the most…

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Amongst the many riches Chocolate & Zucchini has brought me, I think it is safe to say that new friends are the most precious. In particular, a small group of us here in Paris has started gathering around potluck dinners every month or so. Some of us are bloggers, some of us are readers, all of us are enthusiastic cooks and eaters. The potlucks are hosted in turn by one or the other, and they have gone thematic for the past two editions, which curiously makes them both easier and harder to prepare for.

Christoph and Susanne hosted the last one a week ago, and the theme was Gemütlichkeit — German comfort food. The temptation was strong to bake some of the fabulous Christmas cookies the Germans are so good at, especially since I have a beautiful and authentic cookie press which comes straight from Frankfurt — but Christoph had mentioned that the menu could use a few more savory items, so I chose to go that route.

I did a little research on German food specialties, but nothing really appealed to me in that wow-I-have-to-make-this kind of way without which there is little point in cooking. So I took matters into my own hands and decided to make a savory strudel. Probably not traditional, true, but the strudel concept is Germanic enough that I can label it German and get away with it, no?

I had made a nice swiss chard strudel last Spring, but repeating a recipe is no fun at all (besides, what would I post on C&Z then), so I branched off and made it with leeks this time: leeks lend themselves well to this with their soft texture, and more importantly I adore leeks. Instead of raisins I used diced dried apricots, for the sole reason that little specks of pale orange would match the soft green of the leeks perfectly, and I threw in toasted pinenuts because I have yet to find a dish that doesn’t benefit from the addition.

Herr Strudel travelled the metro rather uncomfortably (I didn’t have a large enough container and simply wrapped it in foil), and was reheated for a few minutes in Christoph’s oven — which had to be run with the door ajar because the inner glass had split broken a few days before, slightly unwieldy but a rather efficient way to heat an apartment.

It swiftly found its place on the Gemütlichkeit buffet, soft and sweet inside with its crispy flaky outer skin, surrounded by its own new friends, the potato dumplings, the Pumpernickel Brot, the homemade pretzels, the German cheese specialties with assorted sauces and the Wienerschnitzels, washed down with tumblers of delicious mulled wine made with Pascale’s recipe.

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[Pomerol Wine Jelly]

I am a religious reader of a handful of carefully selected cooking and women’s magazines. Some I subscribe to, some I buy at the marchand de journaux (self-respecting magazines are not sold at the grocery store in France). New issues are welcomed with a tiny whoop of joy, carrying the promise of relaxing entertainment and a new set of colorful nuggets — the latest fashion, gossip, book, trend, store or recipe.

In women’s magazines, one of my favorite sections is — need I spell it out — the cooking section, usually tucked away in the last pages of the magazine, the perfect place for me because I always work my way from front to back, and I am definitely a save the best for last kind of girl.

One of my absolute faves is a magazine called Biba, a magazine féminin I have been reading for years, without skipping more than a month here and there. I even went so far as to subscribe from the US, even though the issues took weeks to reach me. I strongly suspect they were slipped in bottles and thrown in the ocean, fingers crossed, in my general direction. By the time I got them the hottest news were barely lukewarm and the summer diet made little sense in the fall — but still, each new issue was cherished as a heart-warming little whiff of France, and I would read it slowly, savoring every page. After all, who knew when the next issue would make it across?

Now that I’m back in Paris, even though it’s not quite the same ritual, I am still partial to Biba, in part because of the great cooking section *. In particular, their What do I do with… article, focusing on a different ingredient every month, always proves handy and inventive. In the latest issue (this is when you start to see what in the world I’m getting at), this article was about leftover wine, and offered a recipe for wine jelly, to serve as a condiment with cold meat.

I loved the idea, clipped the article, and when I happened to have a little 1999 Pomerol left from dinner with my family the other night, I gave it a try. The recipe is incredibly easy, and the result is this beautiful ruby jelly, with a deep wine flavor and a surprising tanginess that tickles the palate. We tried it with leftover roasted chicken and loved it, so I will definitely make it again. I did think it lacked a bit of sugar and was a little too solid, so below is the modified recipe, as I will make it next time.

It would also make a great and unusual food gift for the holidays (although I am not sure how long it will keep).

[* I must however raise my voice in protest against their slacking off in the past few issues, buying content from the British edition of Delicious and translating it rather sloppily.]

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