Happy fall!

It’s been a wonderful month of September for me, full of exciting projects and bursting with fresh ideas. Here are some highlights.

• I have scheduled a full day of recording later this month, to capture the material needed to craft my pre-order bonus for Tasting Paris. Tasting Paris is my new cookbook that will come out in North America* on March 20, and to reward early buyers of the book, I am putting together an exclusive bonus that I think you will like very much.

(Anyone who orders the book before March 20 will get it, so you can pre-order it as soon as you like; you’ll just need to email the receipt to a dedicated address when I announce the pre-order bonus is ready.)

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The fall is near, students are going off to college, and young adults are moving into their first apartment.

Outfitting a kitchen for the first time can be daunting: there’s so much stuff available in cookware stores, what does one really need?

I have put together a selection of (what I consider to be) kitchen essentials for beginner cooks, allowing them to spread their wings and begin their cooking life on a solid foundation.

You will notice that I did not select the cheapest option for each item, but rather I picked models that will last a lifetime.

Certainly each cook will have to adapt the selection to their financial constraints and see what they can afford. But if you’re the parent, the big sister, or the older friend who wants to get them something nice as a housewarming present, this is what I would wholeheartedly recommend.

You’ll be giving them the gift of learning to cook with equipment they can trust, and these are pieces they’ll take with them from one apartment to the next.

They’ll hold that saucepan in their hand for decades, remembering the pasta days of their youth.

For the experienced cooks among you: is there anything you would add to my list? If you had to start again from an empty kitchen, what would you get?

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This is a strange time of year, when the universe conspires to tell me summer is over — Paris is again full of life and the kids are back in school — but I want to prolong the feeling of it for just a little while longer.

My favorite way to do this is to continue, for another couple of weeks or so, to sip cold-brew coffee that I prepare at home.

My earliest memory of iced coffee comes from making café frappé at my parents’ house in my late teens. We would make coffee from instant coffee granules, pour it with some ice cubes in a promotional plastic shaker we’d received from the brand of instant coffee, and shake shake shake, shake and shake some more. The sound of the shaking was at least as delicious as the beverage, and my sister and I felt very sophisticated.

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Oh, what a wonderful summer it has been!

Did you have fun? I hope you did.

Summertime in Aveyron

Maxence, the boys and I had a marvellous summer vacation in July: we are juilletistes, the French term for people who take their summer break in July, as opposed to aoûtiens who take it in August. Don’t you love that we have words for that?

We spent our summer vacation in Aveyron, a beautiful low-mountain region three hours north of Toulouse, and we loved everything about it. We rented a house with a gorgeous view of an untouched valley and a vegetable garden where we were welcome to pick zucchini and tomatoes and kale.

We visited medieval castles and organic farms, we rented boats to chill on lakes, we mini-hiked, we barbecued, we took part in village meals cooked in 15th-century woodfire ovens and served in barns on long communal tables, we filled our lungs with fresh air, we made friends, and we came home happy and a little tan.

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