I will remember 2013 as the year Chocolate & Zucchini celebrated its 10th anniversary, and as the year The French Market Cookbook was published (and so generously well received).

It is also the year I worked on a whole new version of the site — I cannot wait to unveil it! — and on a brand new book project, which I will tell you more about very soon (hint hint).

In 2013 I also got to visit not one, but two of my bestest and favoritest vacation destinations, Corsica and San Francisco, and this has felt like winning the lottery, twice.

But beyond these biggies, here are more of the everyday joys that have lit up my year:

Favorite new places to eat in Paris: Bones and Mary Celeste.

Favorite new utensils: my Earlywood spatulas, scrapers, and spreaders, my fabulous new chef’s knife, and my cinnamon grater.

Here are some of the everyday joys that have lit up my year.

Favorite new chocolates: bean-to-bar unconched chocolate by Nicolas Berger for Alain Ducasse, and Marou’s organic chocolate from Vietnam, especially the 70% from the Mekong delta.

Best breakfast: The entirely homemade breakfast served at In De Wulf the morning after (see picture above).

Favorite new cookbooks: Michelle Tam’s Nom Nom Paleo and Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Isa Does It.

Most mileage on a single recipe: the Roasted Cauliflower à la Mary Celeste, which has become a weekly fixture at my table.

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A few of my favorite finds and reads for December:

~ What has Ferran Adrià been up to lately?

~ The power of cookbook writing.

~ How to have a beach body.

~ The Parisianer project.

~ The New York Times’ 100 notable books for 2013.

~ How to make chocolate-covered almonds (I recommend this alternate method for easy candying).

~ And a bunch of cookbook round-ups for 2013 that have done me the honor of including The French Market Cookbook: Love and Lemons’ Favorite cookbooks, by region, Eat Chic Chicago’s Best Healthy Cookbooks for 2013, Simply Recipes’ 2013 Recommended Books List, Red Online’s Best Cookbooks of 2013, Yoga Journal’s 10 Best Cookbooks of 2013 and The Corner Kitchen’s Gift guide for cookbook lovers.

On Sunday I woke up from an early afternoon nap with a seasonal itch to bake cookies.

Now, at any given moment I carry around in my brain a list of recently acquired, exciting ingredients I want to use, and in my half-slumber I started to review them. Jumping to the forefront were the broken walnuts I’d gotten for a good price at the organic store — if you’re going to chop them, why buy whole kernels? — and a handsome bag of grated chocolate from Alain Ducasse’s bean-to-bar manufacture*, which I’d been sneaking a spoonful of here and there while trying to think of a more respectable use for it.

Chocolate walnut cookies; that’s what I was going to make.

I wanted a simple, one-bowl cookie base that would get me from start to finish in under an hour, and I wanted something reasonably nutritious so I could share with my toddler without triggering a surprise inspection from the bad parent police. The recipe for these walnut and date cookies, which I’ve been making regularly for the past three years, fit the bill perfectly.

Once the cookies had cooled on the window sill, we all agreed they were well worth the wait.

Rice flour and rolled millet, equal parts finely chopped walnuts and grated chocolate, a little cinnamon and a sprinkle of sea salt on top — these were easily made, swiftly shaped into small pucks, and soon inserted into the oven. The only difficulty then was to find activities tempting enough to distract said child from the oven, at which he would otherwise be pointing while repeating, with increasing urgency, “Gâteau ! Gâteau !”

And once the cookies had cooled on the window sill, we all agreed they were well worth the wait: crisp-edged but tender in the middle, rich with the perfect flavor combo of walnut and chocolate, they were the ideal snack for the Christmas tree decorating session we held later that day, with glasses of mulled apple cider for the grownups.

Join the conversation!

What would you have done with the broken walnuts and grated chocolate? (I have some of both left.) And are there snacks you particularly like to keep around this time of year?

*Disclosure: I received the bag of grated chocolate from Alain Ducasse’s PR department, with no obligation to write about it. All opinions expressed are my own.

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Whenever I get to stay in an apartment away from my own, my first order of business is to secure the makings of a good breakfast for the next morning. And when we arrived in San Francisco last month, we got to do so at the nearby Bi-Rite Market.

I first collected a bunch of farm-direct, organic apples from one of the produce baskets at the front, picked up a half-gallon of orange juice from the refrigerated section, then made my way straight to the nut butter aisle.

There, I surveyed the scene, picked up this and that jar, compared ingredients and prices, and set my heart on the lightly salted, crunchy almond butter from G.L. Alfieri. I adore lightly salted, crunchy peanut butter, but had never tried it in its almond incarnation; clearly I was missing out.

And this choice turned out to be one of the gastronomic highlights of the entire trip: the almond butter base was vibrantly flavorful, the salt dosage perfect, and the crunchy almond bits, well, what grinch doesn’t like crunchy almond bits?

We went through the jar at such a clip that we soon had to buy a second one, and the first kitchen project I undertook on our return was to recreate it with the ingredients I can get in France: here, we get a choice between blanched and unblanched almond butter (purée d’amandes blanches or purée d’amandes complètes), but sadly, no salted or crunchy options for us Gauls.

The almond butter base was vibrantly flavorful, the salt dosage perfect, and the crunchy almond bits, well, what grinch doesn’t like crunchy almond bits?

It took a few tries, but I nailed the formula, using Jean Hervé’s whole almond butter: it is made with Sicily almonds stone-ground at low temperature, and it is the closest in flavor to the Alfieri almond butter; the Naturalia brand is a bit cheaper, but the almond taste is less refined. To that I added unblanched almonds, toasted and evenly chopped (see note below recipe), and some grey (or unrefined) sea salt.

It’s a pretty simple preparation, but one that is a significant step up from regular old smooth almond butter: the salt bolsters the almond flavor, and the roasted crunch of the almond nibs makes a fine thing even finer.

And it is the key component of my current breakfast of choice: a crisp, tart apple cut into slices, dusted liberally with freshly grated Saigon cinnamon, and dipped into a good dollop of the lightly salted, crunchy almond butter. It is both refreshing and satisfying, and I find it holds me over until lunchtime.

Now, I have also brought back a pretty jar of this pecan peanut butter with wildflower honey and sea salt from Big Spoon Roasters, and I suspect this may have to be my next Pimp My Nut Butter project.

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