Saturday was the first day of my vacation, and Maxence and I decided to take a little trip to Asia : all it took was a twenty-minute motorcycle ride to the Parisian Chinatown where I had, for reasons I cannot fathom, never been before.

We sat down at a Vietnamese restaurant for a bo-bun (a delicious salads of noodles and beef with lemongrass, soy sprouts, mint and ground peanuts), then did a little shopping at Tang Frères, a gigantic Asian grocery store — so huge and busy they’ve even built a private railroad track that leads to their warehouse.

There, we marvelled at all those unusual and unknown fruits and vegetables, but since we were leaving just the next day, we couldn’t get too much fresh produce. We did get two big Kent mangoes, sweet and juicy. We adore mangoes, and it seems to be a really good year for them : they are everywhere these days, excellent and very affordable. We also got a few ears of fresh corn, which are nowhere to be found in regular stores : in France, corn is eaten mostly from a can and used in salads, so corn still in its husk is a rarity. Corn on the cob, here we come!

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I have a particular soft spot for polenta and anything cornmeal.

Unfortunately, they are not at all common in France : I have occasionally seen polenta served at restaurants (and I will reliably dart onto any dish that mentions it as a component, especially if it claims to be croustillante), but it is rather hard to find in French food stores. You need to go to organic stores — where you will find instant organic polenta, passable but not stellar — or to some small Italian stores, where you will likely be charged an arm, a leg and the left ear of your firstborn for what was, originally, peasant food.

Another solution is to have your two best friends get some for you on their trip to Rome, or a blogger-friend bring some from Ticino as she comes to Paris for a few days (thanks again Theresa!), but these aren’t sources you can rely on year round, of course.

The idea for a tart in which the base would be a disk of oven-baked polenta had been on my mind for a little while, and this recent profusion of excellent quality polenta in my happy kitchen cabinets (oh they certainly can’t complain of deprivation, no) was the perfect occasion to put it in practice, using Marie-Laure and Laurence’s Italian polenta with dried porcini.

There is something singularly satisfying about imagining a dish in your mind, making up the recipe as you go, and have it turn out even better than you expected : this tart was everything I hoped it would be, pretty and appetizing, its base golden and crispy outside, but moist and nicely mealy inside (with embedded mushrooms as a bonus), the layer of thinly sliced zucchini well-seasoned, its flavor wonderfully teased by the sharpness of the fresh parmesan. It also made for a very nice lunch the next day, and would be a great brunch item too.

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[Apricot and Melon Crumble with Pinenuts]

Maxence and I were recently invited over to our friends Peggy and Julien’s appartment for dinner. They used to live just three blocks down the street from us, but they have just moved and now live, oh, a good six blocks further, so visiting them still has that special neighborly feel to it. Although Peggy is a talented cook, she wasn’t the chef on that particular night : Manu, another food enthusiast and faithful reader of this blog, who is sadly leaving in a couple of weeks to work in Sarajevo, had decided to treat us to a Yugoslavian dinner.

Yugoslavian cuisine is an interesting blend of Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean influences, and we enjoyed a feast of red pepper dip, delicious olives, a tomato and cheese salad (reminiscent of Greek feta salads but with shavings of Yugoslavian cheese), cevapcici (those tiny sausages with the cutest name ever, pronounced “tshay-vap-tshee-tshee”) and a fabulous burek, a spinach and cheese pie made with layers of crispy golden delicious filo dough.

I had volunteered to bring a dessert, of no particular Balkan descent however. It was quite warm so I felt like making something fruity, and since melons and apricots were threatening to disappear from the produce stalls very soon, I decided to combine them in this crumble, as a farewell to them and to Manu at the same time.

I do hope they stay in season long enough for you to try it, so very appetizing with its glowing orange and golden brown colors. The unusual taste of cooked melon adds an interesting depth to the sweet and tart apricot flavor, and the pinenuts (also rather uncommon in sweet dishes), oatmeal and wholewheat flour each add their own voice to make this a subtly flavored and delightful dessert, which would be a great brunch item, too.

As for Manu, he has promised to show me around the hard-to-find Yugoslavian grocery stores hidden in Paris before he leaves. I hope he’ll share some of his recipes too.

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Quail eggs : one of nature’s smallest wonders!

The beautiful thing with these teeny tiny eggs, is that they all look different, each of them with a unique half-inch of personality, random patterns of little smudges and freckles, some brown, some black, some blue.

You half expect them to crack open any minute, letting out a very small gawky dinosaur, or some other thumb-sized critter out of a fantasy.

Maxence bought a tray of them at our fantabulous and newly redecorated grocery store, where shiny bright aisles compete for your attention and unsuspected treasures of modern marketing await you at every turn.

He boiled them for four minutes, and we ate them still warm and soft inside, peeling them with the tips of our fingers, dabbing them into a little mushroom salt, and popping them into our mouths.

Quintessential egg pleasure in just one bite, perfect white-to-yolk ratio.

And just think : mini egg, sunny-side up! mini poached egg! mini oeuf à la coque! even better : mini oeuf cocotte! Oh, the possibilities!

[Related post : the opposite adventure in egg scale, the goose egg!]