A few of my favorite finds and reads for September:

~ Lots of new cafés opening in Paris this fall.

~ Plant foods and just how much protein they contain.

~ Dishwasher cooking: faddish or clever?

~ A blog devoted to Quebec French + illustrated expressions.

~ Caitlin Moran‘s letter of posthumous advice to her daughter, originally published in The Times.

~ Vintage French medical posters.

~ Samantha Lee’s shockingly cute edible scenes.

~ Making flax seed mayonnaise and turmeric tea.

~ My friend Kristen Beddard is The Kale Crusader.

~ Six tips to tidy up your pantry.

~ How a short fast can help you beat jetlag.

~ David Jaggard on what it’s like to be an American in Paris.

~ Dan Barber on the perils of farm-to-table cooking.

~ National flags, made edible.

~ Twelve types of procrastinators. Which one(s!) are you?

Ten years ago, after a conversation with Maxence over shabu-shabu at a wonderful — but now extinct — Japanese restaurant in Montmartre, I decided to create Chocolate & Zucchini. I needed a space to write about the many things that make me happy at the greenmarket, in the kitchen and at the table, and I wanted a chance to reach out to like-minded cooks.

The first recipe I ever published was one for chouquettes, or sugar puffs, and I’m really glad it was, because ten years later I am still just as excited about them as I am about this blog.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: Chocolate & Zucchini has changed my life. It has allowed me to build a career around the things I love the most: cooking, writing, learning, eating, sharing, exploring. It has widened my world view while simultaneously making me feel connected, it has taught me that nothing beats pursuing your dreams, and it has allowed me to meet — virtually and in real life — more fascinating and passionate people in ten years than I expected to in a lifetime.

Naturally, none of this would have happened without you, your presence, your support, your messages, your stories. So I want to thank you for everything that you’ve given me over the past ten years, and tell you how grateful and honored I am that you come here, and read what I have to say, and cook what I suggest you do, and come back to tell me about it. Here’s to ten more!

As a 10th anniversary gift to the blog, I am preparing a complete redesign of the site: it is well under way, and should be ready in the next couple of months.

And as a 10th anniversary gift to you, I will be holding ten giveaways throughout the month of October, each offering you a chance to win one of the many fabulous things I’ve discovered and fell in love with these past ten years.

Please come back on Wednesday for the first one!

One of the reasons why I love to cook is one I have in common with people who knit: it is involving enough to keep your mind off world peace issues, but leaves enough mental space that you can wander, hold imaginary conversations, turn sentences around in your mind (everyone does that, right?), and generally putter about in the coziness of your own head.

Prepping vegetables launches me into such inner monologues, and in recent months they have been dominated by this nagging question: why does food stick to my knife, and how do I make it stop?

You know the phenomenon, I’m sure, but let me describe it for you: whenever I slice something (say, an onion or a zucchini), the pieces I’ve just cut tend to stick to the right side of the blade (I’m right-handed), so that when I’m cutting the next slice, the pieces that are stuck on there get pushed up and off by the new slice, and fall either to the right of my blade (unruly, but fine), or tumble off the cutting board and possibly onto the floor (messy), or fall to the left side of my blade, in which case I’m likely to cut into them again moments later (extra annoying).

After composing an imaginary email in my head over a few zucchini-slicing sessions (I eat a lot of zucchini), I finally sat down and wrote to Peter Hertzmann, the spectacularly knowledgeable creator of the à la carte website and associated blog, cooking instructor, and author of the must-own Knife Skills Illustrated, of which he kindly offered me a copy when we met in San Francisco a few years ago (more details about the book)*. And naturally Peter had answers, which I’m sharing below, mixed in with a few more tips I gathered in my research.

So, why does food stick to my knife?

The main reason is surface tension, a physical phenomenon that makes the surface of liquids resist an external force. In this case, it means that foods with a high water content (and many vegetables are more than 90% water) create slices with a moist surface that clings to the flat of the blade.

And how do I make it stop?

You could decide to subsist on low-water foods — I’m sure a diet of beef jerky and rice crackers will do you a world of good — or you could adopt one or more of these three strategies:

Continue reading »

If you plan to be in Paris on Saturday, September 28, please join me at WHSmith for a booksigning from 3 to 6pm! (Here’s a link to the Facebook event.)

This event marks the release of my latest book, The French Market Cookbook, and will also be an opportunity to celebrate C&Z’s 10th anniversary. Complimentary wine and nibbles — cooked from the book by yours truly — will be served. I look forward to meeting you then!

{WHSmith, 248 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, M° Concorde, map it!, +33 (0)1 44 77 88 99.}

On an unrelated note, for those of you who have nutritional restrictions, I have drawn up a comprehensive list of the recipes in the book with the allergens and possibly problematic food groups they contain (gluten, rice, soy, corn, other grains and pseudo-grains, dairy, eggs, nuts, legumes, nightshades).

I make it available to you (at no cost, naturally) so you can see if enough recipes will meet your dietary needs to make it worth your while. Feel free to request the list through my contact form and I’ll email it to you. I hope you find it useful!