This is Pierre Hermé’s Marron et Thé Vert Matcha macaron.

This is a delicate confection of chestnut almond meringue and fresh chestnut cream and voluptuous green tea cream.

This is a true delight, to the eye and to the palate.

This is my Valentine’s Day gift to you.

Joyeuse St-Valentin!

Back when we lived in the Silicon Valley, whenever I ordered a sandwich, I would invariably and happily go for the California sandwich. Not only did it sound most appropriate given the location, but avocado is among my best friends, and sprouts are a fantastic addition, adding the perfect peppery crunch to its comforting and sweet tenderness.

I have had many different types of California sandwiches, with different types of bread and cheese, some vegetarian and some with turkey or even bacon, some with tomatoes and some with roasted red pepper, some without greens and some with spinach leaves.

But to me, the essence of the California sandwich lies in the combination of avocado and sprouts, hugged by excellent good-for-you bread and a mellow kind of cheese.

So when I got avocados in my Campanier order the other day, I quickly started a batch of sprouts. When the avocados were ripe and the sprouts had grown, I bought mozzarella and multigrain bread, for a delighful trip down memory lane, flying on the wings of this simple and scrumptious sandwich.

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And this is the delicious main course that Maxence concocted for our dinner party this past Saturday! The recipe is from the same “Cooking Class Japanese” cookbook as his last cooking stint. I have taken the liberty to rename the dish though. Well, yeah, if I don’t cook, I have to at least do something!

In the book, the recipe is called “Chicken and Egg on Rice“, but the original witty Japanese name is “Oyakodon”, meaning “Mother and Child Donburi“. In case you’re not familiar with the term, “Donburi” means “bowl”, and in a typical case of metonymy, it is also the name of any dish served atop a bowl of cooked rice. This mother and child thing sounded somewhat morally disturbing, so I took matters into my own hands and decided, with no disrepect whatsoever for this traditional dish, to call it the Which Came First Donburi. Just because it amuses me. So there.

If anything (other than his talent of course), Maxence’s take on cooking a main course for eight proved this : we have two very different approaches to menu planning. Where I spend a whole week consulting, researching, thinking, leafing, jotting, striking, imagining and just generally obsessing, here’s what Maxence does : picks up the recipe book at 4pm on D-Day, two whole minutes before we are to go to the Japanese supermarket. Flicks through the recipes. Finds one that’s appealing. And… stops right there. Writes down what he needs. Closes the book. Gets up. Says “ok, let’s go!”.

I am Jack’s flabbergasted befuddlement.

And I must say, his style yields excellent results. We found everything we needed at the Japanese supermarket – a great store but pretty crowded on a Saturday afternoon – including a beautiful set of large shiny black bowls. Maxence prepared all of the ingredients ahead, and started the actual cooking after we were done with the first course.

We all enjoyed this very much : the eggs, still a little runny, have a creamy texture that complements the strips of chicken very well ; the shiitake pieces are their chewy and tasty selves ; the chives are very aromatic ; and all these elements, together with the excellent California rice, make for a very satisfying dish. With the added bonus automatically awarded to anything served in a bowl and eaten with chopsticks.

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[Fig and Pear Salad with Bresaola]

While planning the menu for our Saturday night dinner party, I realized I hardly ever serve salad as a first course. I’ll often use salad to accompany the star item, like a tartlet or a bruschetta or a mousse or a slice of terrine or what-have-you, but it is rarely a salad in its own right. I’m sorry.

I guess this is because salads don’t sound like they’ll be much fun to prepare : they’re pretty easy, it’s just a lot of ingredient preparation before the final tossing-together. But this time, I reflected that they can be nicely colorful and light, a fresh and satisfying opener served with good bread. And the added value is really in the pairing ideas, so I decided to explore that route, and composed this fig and pear salad with bresaola.

The idea came from a sandwich I recently ate at Cojean, a trendy healthy fast-food place that serves deliciously fresh products. It’s one of my absolute faves for a quick lunch, and I have written a review for Bonjour Paris (Note : it is in the premium content area of the site, for which you need a subscription, but I encourage you to consider getting one : it will open the door to a wealth of interesting and witty articles — and there is a money-back guarantee if you don’t like it).

Last time I had lunch there, in addition to my delicious spelt and green bean salad with hazelnuts, I enjoyed a mini-sandwich of fresh fig, pear, bresaola, and Fourme d’Ambert, on a loaf of whole-wheat walnut bread. Bresaola is an Italian specialty of dried beef, lean and moist, cut in paper-thin slices ; Fourme d’Ambert is a blue cheese from Auvergne. It was excellent, and the idea stuck in my mind, to be transformed into this salad. I substituted mozzarella for the Fourme d’Ambert though, because I thought blue cheese was a little too sharp for the ensemble.

This salad turned out pretty and tasty, and I loved the way the different elements came together : sweetness from the fig and pear, saltiness from the bresaola strips, mellow and tender mozzarella, crunchy slightly bitter walnuts, and tangily dressed greens.

We served it with fresh baguette, or more precisely the beautiful fresh heart-shaped baguettes the Boulangépicier makes for Valentine’s Day this year!

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