My cooking resume, if I had one, would have to say “Grilling experience : little to none”.

Growing up in the city, in a non-grilling family at that, BBQ has never been part of my gastronomical landscape. In fact, I attended my first barbecue in the US, at the ripe old age of 21. I do love it though — the smell and taste of grilled food, but also the atmosphere, the joy of cooking outdoors and the fascination of working so close with fire, king of all elements.

I have no grilling gear, indoor or outdoors, and my recent schedule didn’t allow me to properly prepare anything for the 6th edition of Is My Blog Burning?, the collaborative food blogging event, hosted this time around by Too Many Chefs on a grilling theme. But of course, not participating at all wasn’t an option, so I chose instead to go out for a grilled dinner with Maxence, and share it with you.

In Paris, one of your best bets if you feel like a little grilled meat (grillades in French), is a couscous at a Moroccan restaurant. As it happens, there is a very good one called Le Dattier (“the date tree”) just around the corner from my parents’ apartment, where they’ve lived for the past seventeen years. It’s been owned by the same family for as long as we can remember, and it was a regular destination for us when we felt like eating out, and a very convenient and stress-free way to entertain guests : pre-dinner drinks would be had at home, and then everyone would head out animatedly, walk twenty meters up the street, and take a seat at the pleasant terrace.

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I remember very well the first bruschetta I ever had, served at the San Francisco vegetarian restaurant “Herbivore”. We had arrived in the US about two months before, it was the night of my 21st birthday, we were with our friend Jérémie, and after dinner we went to see Arling & Cameron play. The barman wouldn’t give me a free drink even considering the occasion, but we had the artists sign their album’s poster for me, which sure made up for it. A very good birthday night indeed.

We enjoyed bruschetta so much that we kept ordering it whenever the occasion arose. But as much as bruschetta is a common appetizer in Californian restaurants, I have very rarely seen it served in France, so I had been in bruschetta withdrawal for quite a while.

The other night, I was coming home from work on the bus, wondering what to make for dinner, like a good 80% of my fellow passengers I’m sure. I was mentally probing the contents of our fridge and pantry, when the happy thought dawned on me that I had all the ingredients to make bruschetta. Or my version of it, at least.

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Tarte aux myrtilles

Blueberries are by far my favorite berry, and this has been true for as long as I can remember. Something about their color (blue), their size (tiny), and their taste (tart and sweet) really appeals to me. As luck would have it, much like blackcurrant in Burgundy, blueberries are the emblematic berry in the Vosges, where they grow by the bushload up the steep mountain slopes, and go by the name of brimbelles.

When we went to the market yesterday morning, all the produce stands had them, in sumptuous overflowing crates, and I pleaded with my mother for us to bake a tarte aux myrtilles: the family tradition (read: weird rule) is to stick to the blueberries we pick ourselves, but for some reason it’s still a bit early this year to find any on our side of the mountain. And yet, I really really wanted a blueberry tart, and I was going back to Paris just a couple of days later, and I wouldn’t be there anymore when they were fully in season and we could go blueberry-hunting with our little buckets and climb up above the paths and take care not to step on the shrubs and risk our lives and turn our fingers blue and compare the weight of our respective bounties when we get home and bake cakes and tarts and make jam.

So my mother said all right, all right, we’ll buy blueberries and make a tart.

And so we did, enjoying it in the veranda at teatime, when we returned from our daily afternoon hike. I’m not sure if it is the sweet crunchy crust, or the soft and intensely flavorful fruit layer, or the bright blue smiles everyone has afterward, but really, aren’t blueberry tarts something.

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I am currently spending a few days with my family in the Vosges, a mountain range in the East of France where my parents have a vacation house. One of the great pleasures of being there, besides enjoying the garden, taking walks up and down the mountain, and sleeping soundly in the perfect quiet, is baking with my mother. This is something I used to do often when I still lived with my parents, but now that I’m a big girl with my own place and all, these occasions aren’t so frequent and are to be cherished.

The bottom of the cake is nicely dense, its sweetness lovely against the tart apricots, and the top of the cake is deliciously moist from the fruit and the creamy topping.

The cake you see here I didn’t actually bake, as my mother made it before my sister and I got off the train from Paris yesterday. But I did eat it for the goûter in the afternoon, and it was absolutely delightful, which hardly comes as a surprise when my mom bakes. The bottom of the cake is nicely dense, its sweetness lovely against the tart apricots, and the top of the cake is deliciously moist from the fruit and the creamy topping.

I asked my mother if she would be willing to share the recipe with C&Z readers, and she said, “Oui, bien sûr!” She explained that it came from Woman’s Journal, a now defunct British magazine she liked to read, and which my father always picked up for her when his work took him to London.

She brought me the page she had clipped out: the theme of the article was “American Bakes” and it included — oddly enough — a Mincemeat Crumble Cake. But when she took a closer look at the recipe, she said, “Wait. Actually, that’s not how I do it at all,” and proceeded to walk me through her version, which was indeed quite different from the one in print.

So it seems that the inability to follow a recipe runs in the family, and it is my mom’s Apricot Coffee Cake, of course, that I share with you below.

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