Every Sunday morning throughout my childhood, my father took my sister and me to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a charming amusement park for children with structures to climb, goats to feed, carousels and bumper cars. It was quite the SuperDad thing to do: my sister and I had a blast of course, and I imagine my mother treasured those hours of weekend tranquillity.

Between an Enchanted River boat ride (I will forever remember the unique smell of stagnant water and weeping willows) and a game of Whac-a-Mole (we called it boum-tap), we were allowed a treat at one of the park’s snack outlets.

Whatever the age, everyone loves the idea of a freshly made waffle, and gets wide-eyed like a child when the golden squares materialize from the iron.

And this is where I developed my taste for the kind of light waffles one finds at fun fairs in France: crisp on the outside, creamy soft on the inside, steaming hot in the cold winter morning air. All kinds of toppings were proffered — whipped cream, chocolate sauce, chestnut cream — but we favored the generous sprinkling of confectioner’s sugar that left the tips of our noses white.

I haven’t bought a waffle like this in years, though I have sometimes been tempted by the smell wafting from the stands on Paris’ Grands Boulevards, or the one propped up against the carousel where I take my own son now. But as I researched recipe ideas to use my spiffy waffle maker, I found this good-sounding formula on a blog written by food stylist and writer Isabelle Guerre.

Said recipe, along with the author’s helpful tips, has largely lived up to its promise. I’ve made it so many times since that I know it by heart, and it takes me barely ten minutes to whip up the batter. I enjoy making it when we have friends coming over in the afternoon: whatever the age, everyone loves a freshly made waffle, and gets wide-eyed like a child when the golden squares materialize from the iron.

(I’ll note that this kind of waffle batter is simply a thicker crêpe batter with leavening added, which means it can be cooked in the skillet to make pancake-ish crêpes if you have a child who, because he’s two and a half and opposition is his job, insists he wants a crêpe, not a waffle.)

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I am delighted to announce that The French Market Cookbook, my book of French vegetarian recipes, is being released in France today under the title Veggivore.

Just like the original French Market Cookbook, Veggivore is a collection of original, colorful recipes to cook with vegetables according to the seasons, with lots of tips and stay-with-you ideas to eat tasty and healthful dishes daily. I have translated and adapted the texts for my French readers so that it is similar in spirit, but slightly different in tone and content.

Veggivore is a beautiful hard-cover book with a refreshing layout and inspiring photographs. It is now available from French bookstores and on Amazon France, and it is scheduled for release in Canada on March 11 (Amazon Canada has it on pre-order). If you have a French-speaking friend you think would enjoy it, please consider letting him/her know, and maybe even surprise him/her with a copy! (And if you still don’t have your own copy of The French Market Cookbook, you can read more about it here.)

Win a copy of Veggivore !

To celebrate the release, I have three copies of this French book to give away. To participate, head over to the French version of this post and leave a comment (in French or in English) telling me about your greatest challenge when cooking with vegetables. You have until Wednesday, February 11 midnight (Paris time); I will then draw three entries randomly and announce the winners. Good luck!

The story of these crackers started quite serendipitously.

I had prepared my trusty olive oil tart crust to make one of my favorite dishes ever, the onion and cumin quiche featured in my first book. I was left with some scraps, which I usually bake in whatever shape they happen to come out in, to nibble on at a later date. But this time I decided to go one step further and stamp out crackers using an actual cookie cutter, and the first one I grabbed when I reached into my cavernous miscellany cabinet was a puzzle shape I’ve owned for years and years.

These crackers are thin and delightfully crisp, with air pockets that form randomly and add to the thrill of them.

I had enough leftover dough to make, oh, about three, but they were such a hit with my two-and-a-half-year-old (crackers! puzzle-shaped! what’s not to like?) that I soon whipped up another batch of the dough just for this purpose. The crackers have been on heavy rotation at my house since then, pleasing toddlers and adults alike.

Over time I have fiddled with the recipe to boost the flavor (and nutrition), eventually settling on this favorite version, which includes mixed seeds (sesame, chia, and flax) and dried seaweed flakes (all of these are easily found at natural food stores).

These crackers are thin and delightfully crisp, with air pockets that form randomly and add to the thrill of them. We tend to snack on them as is, either to hold us over till the next meal or to accompany a pre-dinner drink, but naturally they’d do just as well with the dip or spread of your choice, such as these colorful and veg-heavy beet hummus or peacamole.

PS: Add more fuel to your cracker fire with these Zaatar pita chips, Cheese thins, and Chestnut and herb canistrelli.

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Have you read anything by Laurie Colwin?

She was an American author based in New York City, who wrote novels and also penned a column in Gourmet magazine for a few years, writing about her kitchen life in such a warm, witty, and approachable way that it was impossible then, and remains impossible now, for the reader not to develop a strong connection to her. These essays were published as two collections, Home Cooking: A Writer In The Kitchen and later More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns To The Kitchen, which have become cult reads for admirers of quality food writing, sharing shelf space with the work of M.F.K. Fisher, Edna Lewis or Alice B. Toklas.

Ms. Colwin died unexpectedly in 1992, at the unfair age of 48, and left a child, RF, who was only eight at the time. RF Jurjevics is now thirty and works as a writer, animator, and multimedia producer — founding Big Creature Media a couple of years ago — and I had the opportunity to get in touch last fall, when Open Road released Colwin’s books as ebooks for the very first time, and offered the contact to promote this release.

I immediately jumped at the chance to feature Laurie Colwin, whose writing — both fiction and nonfiction — I greatly admire, as part of my Parents Who Cook series, in which I explore how children shape and inform a cook’s kitchen life. This is the first installment in which it is the child who speaks, and I am grateful to RF for sharing such touching and uplifting childhood memories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Please consider downloading one of Laurie Colwin’s wonderful books from Open Media, and do share any of your own memories or tips about cooking with and for children!

Can you tell us a few words about the kind of child you were, and the kind of mother your mother was — both in general and with regards to food?

I was a headstrong kid and spoke my mind – asked or not. A teacher once wrote on a school report that I was the tallest in my class and that my mother had referred to me as her “Viking child.” I’m not sure if this was a nod to my Baltic heritage (though Latvians were not Vikings, to my knowledge) or simply to suggest that I was a bit brutish in manner and stature. I admit to being both of these things as a child!

My mother was a similarly opinionated person, and she seemed to like having an opinionated kid – even when we clashed over, say, what was and was not appropriate for my school lunch. Open dialogue was encouraged, but I was a handful (to say the least), and there were definitely many times that I wore my poor mother out with pestering, arguing, or throwing fits.

I adored my mother’s cooking. It would have been hard not to. She put so much care into it, so much thought, and really loved to do it. People flocked to her table, and were so happy to hang out in the kitchen as she cooked. She would constantly ask her dinner guests to taste things and give their honest opinions of them. She wasn’t a showy cook, or one who kept her methods to herself, but instead really delighted in sharing food, recipes, and conversation.

Still, there were times when it was hard to be the kid who ate the “weird food.” My mother had very strong opinions about things that were good and bad for kids and for people in general. Keeping perishables in plastic was bad. Making jam from scratch was good. She didn’t like to budge much on the subject of good and bad. Though a lot of my classmates and neighborhood chums learned that they loved gingerbread and salmon and asparagus at my house, I envied them their Oreos and American cheese slices and radioactively colored “juices” nonetheless.

There were times I wished that I could just be “normal” and get chocolate-laden granola bars in my lunchbox (a pink, formerly Barbie-themed plastic trunk with the doll decal scraped off and cat stickers in its place) instead of a kiwi fruit, or have Wonderbread on my sandwich instead of slices from a Bread Alone boule. Some battles I won (fruit roll-ups, the kind that involved peeling Little Mermaid characters from their centers) and others I lost (no store-bought cookies!), and so I continued to be the first-grader with the goat’s milk yogurt and smoked Gouda. Years later, an old friend told me how jealous she’d been of my lunch. “All I got was tuna fish,” she told me. “And maybe a yogurt. Your food was exciting!” And she was right.

Laurie Colwin and then 2-year-old RF in 1986.

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