You know how sometimes, you’ll be reading a cookbook or a cooking magazine, and a recipe will call for a specific piece of equipment? And all of a sudden you just have to have that thing, right that minute? Even though this is the first recipe you’ve ever laid eyes on that mentioned it? Because you can just feel, deep inside of you, that it will make your life better?

Well, this is exactly the story of my mini paper cups.

In no way can I be held responsible, of course. The culprit, in this instance, was Pierre Hermé, by way of his cookbook Mes Desserts Préférés. Among all the gorgeous tempting if-I-had-three-days-to-devote-to-it-I’d-definitely-make-this recipes, he offers a simple recipe for Moelleux aux Amandes. These are bite-size almond cakes, on which he encourages you to plop anything you fancy, a pinenut or a piece of pineapple for instance, and he instructs you to bake them in caissettes en papier. “Mini paper cups?”, thought I, “But I don’t have mini paper cups! I can’t go on living like this!”

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[a.k.a. Tomato Chorizo Pistachio Pasta Salad]

Pasta salads are one of these things I start to crave all of a sudden, when the weather gets warmer. As I’ve mentioned before, I usually bring my own food to work, and pasta salads are great portable lunches : they’re quick to make, they get better as they sit, and they are an easy way to fill up on starch, protein and veggies in one tasty dish.

They’re also an excellent companion for lunch on a bench with a book, in the nearby Parc Montsouris : you hold the book in your left hand, prop the tupperware container up against you with your left wrist, hold the fork in your right hand, and dig in voraciously. Maybe not the classiest of postures, but it works, and it also efficiently discourages anyone from interrupting your reating (reading + eating) activities.

I made this particular pasta salad with multicolored quinoa fusilli from the organic store, and combined them with my homemade tomates confites and the rest of the chorizo we had bought in Madrid. I also wanted to throw in some kind of nut, so I rummaged through my stash, and opted for pistachios, which I consider to be grossly underused.

This mix of flavors turned out to work delightfully well, from the spicy-salty chorizo to the crunchy-sweet pistachios, from the tangy-moist roasted tomatoes to the satisfyingly chompy pasta. My only regret? To have made just two servings.

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[Chocolate Orange Bread]

I bought this loaf of bread at the BoulangEpicier the other day. I’ve mentioned that store before, and it continues to be a favorite of mine : whenever I’m in the area I make sure to stop there, to buy some bread or grab one of their pricy but mind-blowing sandwiches.

I have also adroitly albeit heavily hinted at my neighbor Patricia, who works close by, that it was really perfectly okay to surprise me with a little something from Be every now and then. This has already won me a loaf of fig bread, one of a life-altering walnut bread, a little visitandine (a financier-like almond cake, named after the nuns who belong to the order of Visitation Ste-Marie), and a chocolate chip cookie. Good yield, no? Fine neighbor, too!

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Soupe de Châtaigne au Chorizo

This recipe comes from Trish Deseine’s book Mes Petits Plats Préférés, and it sounded like the perfect way to use the chorizo we bought in Spain, as well as the chestnuts that had been sitting in my freezer for a while.

Maxence and I have embarked on an ambitious Empty-The-Freezer Project, as it is in dire need of defrosting. Surprisingly, it turns out to be a lot of fun, as we work our way through its contents (you wouldn’t believe the amount of things we had in there), trying to find the most efficient ways to use things up. We regularly update each other on our progress : “ETF Project status report. I killed the asparagus and the steamed dumplings.” “Copy that,” replies the other. We may be watching 24 a little too intensively lately.

Warm and fuzzy feeling #1: I had everything on hand to make this soup, a personal satisfaction beyond words. The original recipe for this soup calls for carrots, but I used turnips instead as I had some cute young ones on hand. I also decided to add some parsley for color and flavor.

Warm and fuzzy feeling #2: The soup turned out fantastic. Not very spring-like, but in Paris the summer reaches us in progressive waves, with promising sunny days followed by chilly setbacks, and this is the perfect soup for a low-tide evening.

The soft sweetness of the chestnuts and turnips is a great match for the salty and spicy chorizo. The soup is a beautiful orange color (the use of carrots in place of turnips would accentuate that even more) with flecks of green. And I left it chunky, because nothing can quite compare to the pleasure of biting into a nice big piece of chestnut. Except maybe biting into a nice big piece of chorizo.

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