[Pasta Shells Stuffed with Ricotta and Tapenade]

Last Tuesday, my sister Céline and I met for lunch. The plan was to eat at Rose Bakery, but it was closed for the holidays, so we went down the rue des Martyrs to Fuxia instead, a really nice Italian restaurant, hip yet friendly, where we had truly excellent salads. After that, we spent the afternoon strolling around the neighborhood, enjoying the unexpectedly sunny weather, and running various errands, which culminated in the buying of great fabric and crafts material at the Marché St Pierre, a huge discount fabric store at the foot of the Sacré-Coeur.

At one point, we went into a little store that the Fuxia people just opened, an Italian fine goods store and trattoria called Fuxia l’Epicerie. It’s open everyday till 10 pm, and sells a variety of Italian goodies (pasta, biscotti, condiments and the like) as well as freshly made antipasti and main dishes to go, which you can also eat at the small counter – comptoir de dégustation. Nice.

From one of the shelves, I distinctly heard a pack of conchiglie, big shell-shaped pasta, calling my name with their many little voices. Hmm, thought I. Stuffed shell pasta! Great finger food for the new year party! Back home, I took out a cookbook in which I remembered seeing something like this, but the recipes, though nice, didn’t appeal to me very much at the time (chicken-tomato, salmon-dill and ham-béchamel), so I made up my own.

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On Christmas day, Maxence and his mother joined us for lunch at my parents’. My mother and I cooked for this meal, preparing most of it the day before.

As a first course, we served a Zucchini and Mushroom Crumble, a recipe we had come up with a week before, during our Christmas-menu-brainstorming session. Elaborating menus is one of my favorite activities, and practicing it with my mother was a lot of fun: the ping-pong mode we fell into, throwing different dish ideas into the air, catching them, morphing them, and throwing them back, keeping an ingredient but changing the method of preparation, staying with a theme but putting a different twist to it, until we settled on a combination that suited our needs in terms of taste, festiveness, ease and fun of preparation.

After this, we served a roasted turkey, which I unfortunately didn’t get to photograph before the carving, stuffed with a walnut chestnut stuffing. I had never made stuffing before, but my mother had numerous times, and the walnut chestnut idea was from a magazine clipping.

But as we started making the stuffing and I was asking about ingredient X or Y or some step the recipe called for, I quickly realized with a laugh that she needed no recipe at all: what she really intended to make was her usual (delicious) stuffing, adding walnuts and chestnuts to the mix. We served the turkey with celeriac purée, a traditional Christmas side in France, and a sweet potato purée with maple syrup, inspired by the Thanksgiving meals Maxence and I were lucky enough to partake in back in the US. The turkey was fantastic, moist and flavorful, and the trimmings were equally wonderful.

Next came a cheese course of dry goat cheese, Mont d’Or (a.k.a. vacherin, served in its pine bark with a spoon as is the custom) and Etorky, a sheep’s milk cheese from the Pyrénées.

Finally, we served an excellent store-bought chestnut and vanilla cake called Carré Marron Vanille, brought to us by our friend Monsieur Picard.

Every body raved about the crumble. It’s a light and tasty dish that leaves room for what comes next, and the combination of soft vegetables and crispy topping is an excellent one. And I particularly liked the little dried parsley leaf! The crumble topping can of course be used on other combinations of vegetables, and I used it once successfully in a main dish of salmon and leek crumble.

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Pomme Rôtie aux Fruits Secs, Quenelle de Glace au Calisson

My mother and I wanted to end our Christmas eve dinner with a dessert simple to prepare yet festive, and satisfying yet (more or less) light. This is what we came up with.

The store Picard Surgelés sells excellent ice-cream created by François Théron. They come in a variety of flavors, all of which quite unusual and incredibly tempting, like marron glacé (chestnut ice-cream with candied chestnut pieces), mendiant (vanilla ice-cream with dried fruits and nuts), or calisson (almond ice-cream with bits of calisson).

A delicious combination of warm apple, sweet caramel and fresh ice cream.

A calisson is an almond shaped specialty from Aix-en-Provence (South of France), made with pâte d’amande (almond paste) and crystallized melons, with a layer of feuille d’hostie (the thin wafer the catholic host is made of) underneath, and a crispy sugar coating on top. In my family, we are all big fans of marzipan in general, calissons in particular, and my parents happened to have a box of fresh calissons they had recently received as a gift.

This was a delicious combination of warm apple, sweet caramel and fresh ice cream. I am more and more into serving desserts with a little handheld accessory to nibble on, and here the scrumptious little calisson was a real treat. We all went for seconds, to stock up on energy before we tackled the gift giving session!

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[Scalloped Foie Gras Mi-Cuit, Poached Pear, Toasted Rustic Bread]

Christmas eve this year was spent just the four of us : my parents, my sister and myself. A week before, having come to my parents’ on a weeknight, my mother and I had brainstormed over an after-dinner cup of tea, and we had come up with the Christmas menus. My mom having taken care of the grocery shopping, the afternoon of the 24th found us preparing the dinner together, in between miscellaneous tree decorating and last minute gift wrapping activities.

I enjoy cooking with my mother very much. Probably because I have watched her cook so often and also because she has taught me a lot of what I know, we just seem to move around the kitchen in unison, picking up where the other has left off, handing out the right tool at the right time without being asked, the different tasks dispatched seamlessly, chatting all the while.

On the special request of my father, the dinner menu started out with slices of smoked salmon. My mother had bought two kinds : Norwegian farm-raised smoked salmon and a pricier wild smoked salmon. While both were very high-quality, the latter, of a lighter pink shade, proved particularly succulent. Sprinkled with lemon juice, served with oven-warmed blinis and crème fraîche, this was a delicious first course. Smoked salmon seems a more and more common fare, but I’m wondering if one shouldn’t hold off eating it unless presented with the real thing.

We then prepared and served the main dish : scalloped foie gras mi-cuit with poached pears and toasts of rustic bread. Mi-cuit (“half-cooked”) is a way to prepare foie gras, in which the raw liver is cooked in a terrine, slowly and at a very low temperature, allowing the natural flavors and textures to develop in very subtle ways. The resulting product has a very short shelf-life, whereas regular canned foie gras can be kept at room temperature for up to four years. Foie gras mi-cuit can be bought whole, or in slices (“escalopes”) as was the case for us.

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