Finally!

Finally, I have acquired a pestle to go with the marble mortar my dear grandmother gave me as a birthday gift last summer.

Okay, I make it sound like I’ve been searching high and low for one but it’s not quite true. It’s been on my mind all that time, I was thinking well, isn’t it a shame to have such a marble beauty and just use it as a vide-poche, a catchall for keys and loose change — but for some reason a part of me could not believe anyone would ever sell me a pestle without a mortar : who in the world would they then sell the pestle-less mortar to? (Well, whoever holds hostage the pestle that should go with my mortar, that’s who!)

So in fact I never gave the quest a real chance, until just recently when I found myself (an utter fortuity, I swear) at Dehillerin. I enquired about mortar-less pestles, preferably wooden, and the salesguy shook his head no. But his colleague, overhearing the conversation (they’re always eavesdropping on each other’s sales pitches, contradicting whatever is said or adding their two centimes, it’s fun to watch) said they did in fact have one left. He even went so far as to fetch it and hand it to me — probably they don’t see too many 25 year-old female customers.

Holding it in my hand, feeling its nice, balanced weight and waving it around a bit (causing the salesguys to look at me with alarm and take a half-step back), I had the sudden, almost magical certainty that this was a perfect fit for my lonely marble friend. This was confirmed when I got home and placed the pestle in its hollow, where it nested itself with an audible sigh.

They go everywhere together now, and look so happy it’s a joy to everyone who sees them. Ah, matchmaker to the cooking utensils, there’s a new career to consider!

At the Bar à Veloutés I hosted a few weeks back, one of the little accessories you could choose to dip in your velouté was an Allumette Noisette-Thym, a hazelnut and thyme cracker shaped like a matchstick. These allumettes were a personal favorite of mine, because they happened to be a recipe I had created from scratch, simply based on the idea that we’d had and the feel/look/taste of the dough as I was working with it. I enjoyed their crunchy crumbly texture and deep flavor very much — and was pleasantly surprised, too, for baking by instinct is usually a rather risky endeavour.

As I was working on baking a large amount of them (around 130) for the big day, I underestimated the yield of my basic recipe (always better than the other way around) and ended up making about twice more dough than I really needed. No matter, thought I, you can never have too much of a good thing, and I simply froze the excess (divided in small lumps) for later use : it would be nice to bake a little batch for an impromptu apéritif one of these days.

But then a few days later (while at the Opéra, of all places) a better idea knocked at that little door I have in the back of my mind, with a shiny brass handle and a sign that reads “Ideas : Enter Here”. I welcomed it, sat it comfortably in the petit salon with a cup of tea and a few cookies, and listened : “You could use the leftover dough as a tart crust!”, the idea said.

And the opportunity to do just that arose soon after, as Marie-Laure and Laurence came for dinner this past Saturday. Since I wanted the crust to really shine through, I topped the tart with a zucchini and mascarpone filling, which was subtly flavored and a good match to the hazelnut and thyme. I was also happy with the look of the tart, having tried to arrange the zucchini in a pretty sunray pattern.

And I really liked the idea that for once, it was the crust which expressed most of the tart’s personality, instead of being eternally the supporting actor.

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Today is the 10th edition of Is My Blog Burning?, the collaborative blogging event! It is hosted this time around by Fabulous Baker Jennifer, from The Domestic Goddess, and the theme is Cookie Swap.

A cookie swap, if you’not familiar with the concept, is a little party thrown between friends and/or neighbors before the holidays, where each guest bakes large quantities of one type of cookie to be swapped with the others, so that each attendant leaves with an assortment of cookies. From what I understand, it is originally a tradition in Northern Europe countries (where they know a thing or two about holidays and cookies), and was then imported and widely adopted in North-America. I’ve never heard of such a thing being hosted in France, but baking holiday cookies isn’t that big in France — we’d rather just eat chocolate and glazed chestnuts.

So. Cookies. What kind could I make? I love anything pistachio, from pistachios in the shell to pistachio macarons and pots de crèmes à la pistache, not forgetting pistachio ice-cream. I had once wondered how pistachio things got their pistachio flavor — it seemed unlikely that it was from grinding shelled pistachios — and a brief research led me to pistachio paste. I looked for it at G.Detou, my trusted source for all things baking and hard-to-find. They did sell pistachio paste, but in cans of one kilo that cost 25 €, and I found it somewhat hard to justify the expense, as tempting as it was.

So I reluctantly filed the idea in the back of my mind, until I started working on the Bar à Veloutés project, for which we decided to make a velouté pistache. And there was my justification! I promptly purchased a can of pistachio paste, and made the pistachio cream (simply using my crème brûlée recipe and adding two rounded tablespoons of pistachio paste per 4 yolks).

This happily left me with some of the paste leftover, which I decided to use to make a batch of pistachio cookies for our virtual cookie swap. I started with a chocolate chip cookie recipe, substituted pistachio paste for one third of the butter, and skipped the chocolate chips. I used half whole-wheat flour and half all-purpose, because I like the depth of taste that it brings. I also used light brown unrefined cane sugar : I think it works particularly well in baked goods, because it keeps a crystallized texture that’s really lovely to bite into. I bought this one from the organic store, it is from Paraguay and has the Max Havelaar fair trade label, which I support whenever I can.

Those cookies filled the apartment with a wonderful smell (I vowed not to open the windows for a week), and I love how they turned out : crispy on the edges, moist and tender inside with the crunch of sugar, and that fabulous (but not too overpowering) pistachio flavor underlined by a hint of salt. I served them for dessert when Marie-Laure and Laurence came for dinner, to accompany a simple no-sugar-added apple compote. I gave my dear friends a few cookies to share with their respective boyfriends and some pistachio paste so they could conduct their own pistachio experiments. Possible variations include half-dipping them in chocolate, or adding in chocolate chips, pistachio chunks or dried cranberries…

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On Sunday night, wanting to put the finishing touches on my talk, I decide to stay in and have dinner in my room, a small room with a view out onto the harbour, in the four-star Cannes hotel where the Gourmet Voice festival is taking place.

I order a club sandwich of course, not hesitating for one second : the first room service of my life, it has to be the epitomical sandwich, no? Besides, club sandwiches are one of the better inventions of mankind, and an opportunity to eat one should never be passed up.

The club sandwich arrives moments later, wheeled in on a tablecloth-clad table by a red-suit-wearing, white-haired, phonebook-serious majordomo. He maneuvers the table up between the bed and the television, and expertly hooks the collapsible sides back up so the table is, once again, nice and round, adorned as it is with a pink rose in a little vase and a brand new ketchup glass bottle.

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