Illustration by Olivier Valentin. Click to enlarge.

For this new installment of our Draw Me A Fridge series (read about it here), Alexia spoke with food writer Claire Chapoutot.

Claire Chapoutot is better known as Clea, of Clea Cuisine-fame, a food blog in which she’s been presenting her mostly vegetarian recipes (she describes herself as a flexitarian) since 2005. Claire has two new cookbooks out: Recevoir en bio and Solo et bio (La Plage editions).

Although her blog and recipe books are only available in French (for now), her recipes are so delicious they are worth brushing up on your high school French, or registering to your local Alliance Française.

But as a bonus for non-French-speaking readers, Claire has kindly allowed me to translate her pain d’épices recipe, one of Alexia’s personal favorites (see bottom of post).

AC: What are your fridge staples?

CC: Each shelf is dedicated to a specific category of products: on the top shelf are my homemade yogurts (with cow’s milk for my daughter, and vanilla soy milk for my boyfriend and myself). The shelf below is for jams — all prepared by my mom! Then on the shelf below, I store all sorts of condiments and mustards, umeboshi prune paste, marinated artichokes and other stuff.

The next shelf is for fresh products. Right now I have ham, tofu and ravioles in there. I also have a big Tupperware-like box, in which I store cheeses. And a bowl with eggs right next to it — I find they keep longer in the fridge.

In the crisper, I have vegetables that don’t do well in the open air, as well as fresh ginger and bags of prunes once they’re open, to keep then nice and moist.

Then you have the door… also very well organized! I have my more exotic condiments in there, such as tandoori and curry pastes, wasabi, ginger and preserved lemon paste by Le Voyage de Mamabé, tomato concentrate, small bottles of lemon and lime juices (which I use when a recipe calls for only a little bit), bottles of all sorts of non dairy milks and, when we have them, fruit juices.

I also store the more fragile vinegars in the door, such as a pomegranate-flavored one, and bouillon cubes that I find less gritty when kept cold. I almost forgot: you will also find my matcha tea, agar-agar and the more “alive” of organic flours, such as chestnut flour.

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It’s not often that I am as charmed and captivated by a book as I was by Tamar Adler’s Everlasting Meal. Her discourse on “economy and grace” in the kitchen is all about making the most ingenious use of the ingredients you buy, and giving new life to your scraps and leftovers — an approach that resonated with me deeply for it is exactly the way I aspire to cook.

Her beautiful, haunting voice, her wise words, and her sound advice come together into a timeless book you want to read slowly, savoring each chapter and pausing every few pages to try and commit to memory* a gold nugget of an idea that you particularly love.

I requested the publisher’s permission to share with you one of the many passages that delighted me. This one is found at the end of chapter thirteen, “How to Find Fortune:”

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Many thanks to those of you who participated in the Desert Island Dishes contest! It was a treat to read through your entries.

It was hard to pick just three, but it had to be done, and Thomas Blythe and I narrowed it down to the following, which showed inventiveness and common sense, and just plain made us hungry. Their authors will receive a Desert Island Dishes cookbook and a Maldon seasoning box.

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Before I met these vegan lemon squares, silken tofu had always stumped me.

Regular, firm tofu, I know what to do with — most often I pat it dry, cube it, and sauté it until golden brown and crisp, to be served over puréed, roasted, or stir-fried vegetables.

But silken tofu, with its strange, curd-like texture and the whey that pools at the bottom of the tub (is it part of the tofu? should I use it? not use it?), has always felt like a riddle. More times than I care to admit it, I’ve bought a package only to use half of it and throw out the rest, for lack of a timely, suitable recipe to use it in.

Enter the Vegan Lemon Squares!

This is why I was so pleased to clip out not just one, but two uncommonly appealing recipes using silken tofu from the September issue of Whole Living: one for Beets and Kale with Creamy Tofu Dressing, and one for Lemon Coconut Tofu Squares.

It is the loveliest of three-bite desserts: the crust crumbly just so, the lemon topping slightly chewy, and the perfect balance of sweet and tart.

The former I’m keeping under my elbow, as we French say, for when I finally lay my eager little hands on a bunch of Parisian kale*, which I plan to order from Bob’s Juice Bar as soon as I get my act together. But the latter I tried right away, and served it to friends — one of them my son’s godmother — who had come to lunch on a sunny Sunday.

It was wonderfully easy to put together: a crust made with coconut oil that you press into the pan and par-bake, and a lemon filling that is prepared by mixing silken tofu with sugar, lemon juice**, and a touch of flour.

Once cooled and cut into squares — I made sixteen where the recipe suggested twelve — it is the loveliest of three-bite desserts: the crust crumbly just so, the lemon topping slightly chewy, and the perfect balance of sweet and tart.

Vegan lemon squares become vegan “anything” squares

I feel doubly gratified because this is a two-in-one recipe: the crust is particularly good and could be used for all sorts of tarts and fruit squares. With the rest of the package of silken tofu I made a dairy-free yogurt cake (oxymoron, I know!), substituting tofu for the yogurt, and nobody noticed a thing.

What do you like to do with silken tofu? Any favorite idea or recipe to share?

* For the longest time, kale has been a most elusive vegetable in Paris, but thanks to the efforts of a few enthusiasts, it looks like it’s about to finally become more readily available.

** I actually used yuzu juice for this inaugural batch, because I had a bottle on hand brought back from Japan by my friend Chika-san.

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