I fancy myself a seasoned granola maker — see my Basic Granola Formula, my Macadamia Maple Granola, my Raw Buckwheat Granola, and my Savory Granola — but granola bars have long eluded me.

My various attempts over the years have invariably been disappointments, impossible to slice neatly and quickly reduced to a mess of randomly-sized granola clumps. So, for portable snacks, my go-to recipe was the delicious homemade lärabar.

But then some months ago I received a copy of Sara and Hugh Forte’s inspiring Sprouted Kitchen cookbook (you know their blog, right?), and among the recipes I was quick to tag (the Honey Mustard Broccoli Salad, the Crunchy Curried Chickpeas, the Corn Cakes with Cherry Compote…) was Sara’s formula for Granola Protein Bars, on page 154.

The recipe uses rice syrup, and indeed this sweetener serves as an efficient binder to keep the granola bars from crumbling. It also calls for puffed rice, as a clever way to add crunch to the oats’ chew.

The recipe uses rice syrup, which keeps the granola bars from crumbling. It also calls for puffed rice as a clever way to add crunch to the oats’ chew.

I have been making these regularly and with great enthusiasm, and I have altered the recipe slightly so I could share with my 14-month-old, who enjoys them at breakfast and can eat them independently: I omit the dried fruits and nuts, skip the protein powder (not a fan), and use half rice syrup and half apple or pear sauce as the sweetener.

And now that the summer travelling season has officially begun, you can’t have too many on-the-go treats for road trips, train rides, and mountain hikes. What’s your portable snack of choice?

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Well, this is it! The French Market Cookbook, my new book of vegetable recipes, is coming out today.

[Scroll down to see how you can enter to win a copy!]

It is an exciting day for me, one I’ve been looking forward to for three years, ever since the idea for the book first popped into my head. (I know the exact date because I have the email I sent my agent that very day to share!) It has been a pretty smooth ride since then — the planning, the proposal-ing, the writing, the recipe testing, the shooting, the editing, the correcting, the naming, the designing, the waiting — and I am most grateful that I’ve had such a great team at Clarkson Potter on my side all along.

And now the book is finally ready — and dying! — to start its own life in your hands and on your kitchen counter. It is my most ardent hope that you and it enjoy each other’s company, and that perhaps you’ll write and tell me about it from time to time.

The French Market Cookbook is available wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.

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Every once in a while, I develop a fixation on a particular sauce or condiment that makes everything taste more interesting.

I’ve had a pretty intense tahini sauce phase, which I haven’t quite recovered from, and a ginger and scallion sauce phase as well, both of which have left lasting marks on my repertoire.

But my current favorite is a sauce I now think of as my magic sauce. It’s a super simple combination of sesame oil, lime juice, and fish sauce that you add to your dish — any dish! — just before serving, and gives it a most rewarding depth of flavor.

The inspiration first came from a dish of cold, roasted cauliflower that I had in early May at Le Mary Celeste, a great little bar in the Haut Marais that serves shellfish and fabulous small plates cooked by Canadian-Chinese chef Haan Palcu-Chang.

It was served in a soup plate with roasted hazelnuts and fresh cilantro, and the dressing that pooled at the bottom reminded me of the typical dressing for bun bo, the Vietnamese noodle salad that Parisians love love love. And like most things I’ve tasted at Mary Celeste, where the menu changes daily, it was stop-you-in-your-tracks good.

It is with that idea in mind that I made up the formula for my sauce a few days later. Bun bo dressing, or nuoc cham, is typically a runny dressing made with fish sauce and lime juice, sugar, garlic, and chili, but I chose to make something more akin to a vinaigrette, using just the fish sauce and lime juice, and adding sesame oil.

I first served it over roasted cauliflower, but have since enjoyed it over all kinds of sautéed vegetables as well as steamed fish, and it is astonishingly good in a vegetable stir-fry with a little ground beef and lemongrass. It is the kind of sauce that instantly raises the flavor bar by a few notches, and I am so glad I have it on my team now.

Depending on my mood and time resources, I sometimes add peanut butter to make it creamier (this version is particularly good over sautéed zucchini), and some chili sauce and garlic to make it even more complex, but the basic trinity of sesame oil, lime juice, and fish sauce is really all you need in a pinch.

What’s your magic sauce, and what do you use it with?

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During our recent trip to Corsica, we chanced upon U Salognu — “the sunny place,” in Corsican — as we do many of our happiest discoveries: by following a roadside sign.

“Traditional Corsican cuisine,” the sign promised from a grassy shoulder off the road that leads from Cargese to Piana. We hadn’t had lunch yet, the hour was creeping dangerously into mid-afternoon territory, and we pulled over hopefully.

It was an old sheep pen made of stone, like there are thousands of abandoned ones across the island, but this one had been restored and turned into a tiny restaurant: six tables inside, and maybe twice more on a terrace outside, overlooking a deep, untouched valley with a waterfall in the far distance.

On the door, another sign announced, “Our menu is composed of ingredients from local sheep breeders and our own farm.” We looked at each other with mirror twinkles in our eyes.

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