If there was a candy making for dummies book (what am I saying, of course there is one) this recipe would deserve a prominent spot.

No sugar thermometer, no elaborate trick, very few opportunities for a major burn (unless you really apply yourself). Just a bit of boiling, stirring, and baking, and still these minimal efforts will yield something delicious that anyone will recognize as candy.

The technique was brought to my attention by a post on Rose & Cook, a French food blog I’ve only recently discovered and is one of my latest favorites. The post in question was about a chocolate and hazelnut cookie recipe that the author had drawn from the book 190 Cours illustrés à l’Ecole de cuisine Alain Ducasse, a big book that is in fact a compilation of recipes and step-by-step pictures drawn from the many smaller “Leçon de cuisine” books that Alain Ducasse’s publishing house has issued about various culinary themes over the years.

I actually have a copy of this thick tome myself, but I hadn’t particularly noticed the cookie recipe, nor had I realized that it contained a short but powerful little sub-recipe for noisettes sablées — literally “sandy hazelnuts” — that you were directed to fold into the cookie dough. But Rose (I assume such is the name of the author of the Rose & Cook blog, though it’s not clear) pointed out that the candied hazelnuts were particularly irresistible, and the recipe looked so simple I tried it as soon as I had a moment.

The recipe didn’t quite work for me as written: there was way more syrup than was needed to coat the quantity of nuts listed, so I reduced the quantity of water slightly and doubled the amount of nuts, using both hazelnuts and almonds. I also sprinkled on some salt, because it felt like the right thing to do (it was).

A mere twenty minutes later, I was standing over a tray of candied almonds and hazelnuts in their golden brown sugar coating, waiting impatiently for them to cool just enough for me to try a bite into their crisp and lightly caramelized outer shell.

And after some extensive tasting (ahem), I can imagine a million uses for these: in cookie or brioche dough, certainly, but also to garnish fruit (or vegetable) salads, fold into or serve on top of ice cream, embed in homemade chocolate bars, simply snack on (they pair well with dried fruit or a square of dark chocolate in the afternoon), or give away in little bags or jars with a pretty ribbon. You could also imagine all kinds of spiced variations, though I myself prefer to keep the flavors simple here.

What would you use those in, and what’s your favorite easy candy to make?

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In ELLE à table, a French cooking magazine I contribute to, one of the longest-running sections is one called La Cuisine du placard (literally, cuisine from the cabinet or cupboard) that presents a picture of common pantry items, and offers recipes that make use of those, requiring as little fresh shopping as possible.

I consider myself a fresh ingredient cook, chiefly inspired by seasonal produce and market stalls, yet I get a special kind of kick from my occasional forays into the realm of pantry cooking: there is something curiously satisfying about using up supplies in ingenious ways, and a kind of primal gratification to be drawn from cooking in survival mode, even if the kind of ordeal you’re surviving through is just an empty-fridge Thursday night.

And now it’s almost 2pm and everybody’s hungry and clearly that food shopping expedition is not going to happen, but you should be able to scrape together some sort of a meal if you rummage through the kitchen cabinets long enough.

This pasta dish is the latest of my serendipitous cuisine du placard discoveries. I first made it for a late lunch a few weeks ago, on one of those weekend days when you know you should have gone out to shop for food in the morning, but you decided to laze around instead, and now it’s almost 2pm and everybody’s hungry and clearly that food shopping expedition is not going to happen, but you should be able to scrape together some sort of a meal if you rummage through the kitchen cabinets long enough.

In this instance, the three items that clicked were: a package of semi whole wheat spaghetti, a small carton of organic tomato coulis, and a can of sardines from Brittany. The former dived into a pot of boiling water, while the latter two joined a sliced shallot — I always have onions and shallots on hand, but you could omit that if you don’t — and a little cumin in the skillet, where they formed a deeply tasty, surprisingly complex, and very satisfying sauce.

I’ve made it again several times since then, even on days when there was fresh produce in the fridge but I wanted something quick and easy, and it always feels like a treat, so now I make sure I keep those ingredients on hand for emergency needs of tomato sardine spaghetti.

And of course, I’m curious: will you share your own favorite pantry cooking dish, and the ingredients you stock to prepare it?

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If you’ve ever bought or baked fresh brioche, surely you’ve noted the subtle shift, occurring sometime during day two or three, when said brioche turns from something you can’t keep your hands off of, to something you feel you should be eating because it’s there.

When that initial magic is gone, the toaster can help revive it to a certain extent, especially if you top it with thin slivers of salted butter and generous amounts of grated chocolate straight out of the toaster. But my favorite thing to do is to give an entirely new life to the brioche, either by cooking a simple pain perdu (“lost bread,” the actual French toast) in the skillet, or by baking it into a bettelman.

Bettelman is the Alsatian word for bread pudding: it means “beggar” in the Alsatian dialect, and I like the reminder that it is, at heart, a thrifty dish, meant to use up scraps of bread. I first learned about it from Christophe Vasseur, who runs the now deliriously popular Parisian bakery Du Pain et des Idées and bakes a wonderful apple bettelman drawn from his childhood memories, for which he kindly shared the recipe for my book Clotilde’s Edible Adventures in Paris.

The bettelman I’m presenting here is a different — and slightly more indulgent — version with chocolate and almonds, and it is an equally easy and enthusing way to upcycle your brioche: cubed and soaked in an egg and milk batter made chocolate-y by the addition of cocoa powder, it is then layered with chocolate chunks and chopped almonds, and baked until custardy in the middle and crusty-crisp at the top.

If it’s not brioche you have on hand, but challah or croissants or any other kind of bread enriched with milk and/or eggs, feel free to substitute that. The recipe can also be made with stale bread of any kind, though the texture will be less pillowy then. And if you have less than 200 grams or 7 ounces of brioche leftover, feel free to cube it and keep it in the freezer until you have enough to make the recipe.

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This post has been eight years in the making.

Eight years ago, Maxence and I visited friends in London. On the night we arrived, Zoe made lasagna and a big green salad, which she proceeded to toss in the bowl using two gorgeous wooden instruments, shaped like four-clawed bear paws.

If this had been a cartoon, you would have seen me hypnotically drilling my gaze into her hands, red and white spirals spinning in my eyes. “Where does one find those?” I asked, hoping they were a London treasure I could hunt for. “Oh, the bear claws? I got them as a gift back in the US,” she explained. If this had been a cartoon, you would have seen the balloon of my hopes deflating with that elegant sound balloons make when they deflate, and falling, a limp rubber thing, to the ground.

Ah well. This did nothing to detract from the pleasures of the London weekend, and I put the bear claws out of my mind.

Fast forward eight years, and I found myself spending time in Canada, in Stratford, Ontario to be exact. And on my very first day there, while walking around the city center, my eyes locked with a stack of the long-yearned-for utensils in the window of a Canadian arts and crafts shop.

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