Peeling onions is one of my least favorite cooking tasks. The stubborn papery skin that refuses to come away smoothly, the pesky little flakes that get stuck under your fingernails and on the cutting board, not to mention the occasional outer layer that’s part flesh part skin (what to do with those?), all conspire to vex me.

Yet I adore onions and the pungent or sweet things they do, so I put my head down and try to take each specimen as an opportunity to refine my onion peeling skills, hoping I may one day come to enjoy the process.

And for a welcome respite when I want perfectly tender, caramelized onions without the peeling hassle, there’s roasted onions, as presented in the book What Katie Ate by Katie Quinn Davies, food photographer and author of the same-name food blog.

The idea is quite simple and I have no idea why it never occurred to me before, but I am certainly grateful to Katie for introducing me to it: you just halve onions — with! the! skin! on! — place them on a baking sheet, drizzle with oil, sprinkle with salt, and place in a hot oven.

And just a little while later, what you pull out is a batch of beautifully softened onion halves, the concentric layers tinged a dark gold at the rims.

These you can serve with or without the skin, as you prefer. But when I tried the recipe with the cute plum-sized onions I was putting off using because they were so small the peeling daunted me, I confess I just plopped the baking sheet on the table and we helped ourselves right off of it, plucking the little morsels of sweet onion flesh out of their skin nests.

Katie sprinkles thyme sprigs over the onions before baking, but I opted against it, fearing that they might burn during the roasting. If you’d like to add the thyme back in, I suggest sprinkling it on for the final 10 minutes of baking.

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Happy New Year! Here’s to 2013 and the glorious meals, peals of laughter, new friends, and unforgettable adventures I hope it has in store for you.

Before we remove the protective film from this brand new year, I’d like to take a moment to look back on some of the best things 2012 brought. The two biggest, happiest events for me have been (1) the birth of my baby boy in the spring — Milan is now seven and a half months and he’s a ray of sunshine — and (2) wrapping up the manuscript for my upcoming vegetable cookbook, which will come out mid-2013 under the title The French Market Cookbook.

Here on Chocolate & Zucchini, after a little post-baby break, I was delighted to come back with two new series of Q&A posts: Draw Me A Fridge (in collaboration with my friend Alexia Colson-Duparchy) offers a sneak peek into our guests’ fridge habits, while Parents Who Cook asks parents about their kitchen life after they had children. I also picked up the Edible Idioms series where I’d left it, except now they’re illustrated by Mélina Baumert‘s wonderful watercolors.

Aside from these, here are some of the highlights of my year — and if you care to share your own, I’d love to hear about them!

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This is a good time of year to reflect upon one’s blessings, and among the very many things I feel grateful for is the way this blog connects me with remarkable people whose path I might never have crossed otherwise.

Case in point: Colins Kawai, the marketing director of the University of Hawaii Press, but also an artisan chocolatier and the founder of Choco Le’a (“chocolate pleasures”), a small chocolate company based in Hawaii that he started to raise funds for charities and non-profits around the world.

I met Colins and his wife Joan when they visited Paris in November: Colins and I had exchanged a few emails, and he had told me about his company, which does mostly catering for weddings and other receptions, and about the truffles he makes for those events, garnished with such exotic flavors as lilikoi (passionfruit), haupia (coconut creme), or lychee liqueur.

We arranged to meet at the Salon du Chocolat, the Henri Le Roux stall serving as our rendezvous. We chatted for a little while, and Colins and Joan handed me a few boxes of their truffles, which they had, amazingly, hand-carried from Hawaii for me, along with a few other gifts, including the most adorable onigiri-pattern bib for Milan.

Maxence and I enjoyed the chocolates a great deal (read: we inhaled them), and the ones I was most taken with were the mochi truffles, which came in four flavors: plain, strawberry, honeydew (my favorite), and orange.

I adore mochi in all its forms, as evidenced by my posts on the strawberry daifuku mochi and the warabi mochi, but this was the first time I’d witnessed its encounter with chocolate. I have since researched the subject, and while I’ve found many instances of chocolate truffles wrapped in mochi — delicious too, I’m sure — I haven’t found references to truffles with a piece of mochi inside.

Curious to know more about this novel treat, I asked Colins to answer a few questions.

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Amanda and Addie, photographed by Sarah Shatz.

Parents Who Cook is a Q&A series in which I ask my guests about cooking with little ones underfoot. If you think of people you’d like to see interviewed as part of this series — especially fathers! — your suggestions are welcome.

I have long admired Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs for founding the Food52 website, and developing it with such savvy over the past three years. Originally created as a way to crowd-source a cookbook, it is now a remarkably rich website with lots of smart features, and a vibrant community of cooks.

The first Food52 cookbook came out last year, and the second volume, also crowd-sourced and edited with great care, has just been released.

Amanda and Merrill are both mothers, and I am delighted to welcome them as my first guests on the Parents Who Cook series.

Can you tell us a few words about your kids? Ages, names, temperaments?

M: Our daughter Clara is almost eleven months old. She has seven teeth and is determined to start walking. We think she’s learned her first word (hi), although it could just be a random sound she’s making. Clara is a really good-tempered baby and very social, but on the rare occasion that she’s unhappy or tired, she lets us know it!

A: We have twins, Walker and Addie, and they’re six. They’re losing their baby teeth, which they’re very excited about. Walker is methodical, competitive, and snuggly. Addie is social, a daydreamer, and willing to be amused.

Clara, photographed by James Ransom.

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