Happy New Year! May your 2012 be a year of glowing health, simple pleasures, serene prospects, and dreams fulfilled.

2011 has been an eventful and wonderful year for me, full of exciting and gratifying projects in both my personal and professional lives. I got to travel around France (Deauville, Aix-en-Provence, the Basque country, Corsica) and beyond (Marrakech and Toronto), I was invited to be the host of an international food festival and the writer in residence at a chefs school, I worked on The Art of French Baking and on a new book of my own devoted to vegetables (to be released by Clarkson Potter next year), I did a two-week stint in the kitchen at my favorite vegetarian restaurant in Paris, I had my kitchen and living room remodeled, and I was admitted as a member of a famous French chocolate appreciation society, which had long been on my life list.

Beyond those big events, here are some specific highlights from my year, in no particular order. I’d love to hear about yours, so feel free to share in the comment section!

Most frequently made dish: Chicken in a bread crust, inspired by a dish demo’d by Saturne’s Sven Chartier at the Omnivore Food Festival.

Most frequently made dessert: Butterless apple crumble, a dairy-free version of the classic that is possibly even better for breakfast the next day.

Most elusive ingredient: Kale, a beautiful and nourishing green that is near-impossible to find in Paris, but which I filled up on while in Canada.

Most popular ingredient: Chestnut flour, which I brought back from Corsica and have been slipping into everything since.

Favorite new utensil: Bear claws, handmade in Canada, to toss salads.

Favorite homemade condiments: Dukkah, an Egyptian spice mix, and Celery salt, after a recipe by my friend Heidi.

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From the department of Who Has Time To Make Edible Gifts In Advance Anyway comes this last-minute recipe, shared by French food writer Cécile Cau on her blog a couple of days ago. It is a recipe for croquants, which is the French word for a variety of crunchy cookies from the South of France, most often thin and involving almonds.

I read the recipe and was enchanted by its simplicity. Flour, sugar, eggs, almonds, and a splash of orange flower water: I had all these on hand, and since my desk is about four steps from my kitchen, the temptation was great to just drop whatever it is I was supposed to be doing and bake a batch.

I was enchanted by the simplicity of Cécile’s recipe. Flour, sugar, eggs, almonds, and a splash of orange flower water: I had all these on hand.

I halved the recipe, wanting to take it for a test drive before I committed three cups of almonds to it, and modified a few things: I used a combination of regular and light whole wheat flour, decreased the quantity of sugar, determined an amount of orange blossom water that seemed right to me (Cécile’s recipe didn’t provide a measurement), and added a bit of salt, both mixed into the dough and sprinkled on just before baking.

The result is a truly delicious, crisp, slender cookie, not too sweet, and subtly (but noticeably) flavored with orange blossom. It could be compared to biscotti or cantuccini, and indeed they are cousins, but these are two to three times thinner, which makes a significant — and in my opinion, desirable — difference in the final texture and eating experience.

So, will you give these a try? And do you have any last-minute edible gift ideas to share?

Have you tried this? Share your pics on Instagram!

Please tag your pictures with #cnzrecipes. I'll share my favorites!

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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