Chef’s medallions

I’ve always had a major thing for stationery. When I was a child, I would spend a large portion of my allowance at the neighborhood stationery shop, which my family refered to as ta papeterie chérie, and to this day I go weak in the knee for smooth-paged notebooks and well-designed greeting cards. And stickers. Oh, stickers.

So when the good people at Felix Doolittle got in touch and offered to send me samples of their personalized labels, I found it hard to resist.

Oval kitchen labels

Felix Doolittle is a small Massachusetts company that specializes in “extraordinary illustrated papers,” whimsically designed by Hong Kong-born artist Felix Fu. They use premium materials and print, cut, and package everything by hand. Indeed, the quality and attention to detail were evident when I opened each of the incredibly neatly packed boxes.

I am quite smitten with my labels, and I thought I’d share them with you in plenty of time before the holidays. It seems to me that these would make a one-of-a-kind gift for the cooks you love, or you could order your own personalized labels to adorn the homemade edible gifts you’ll be giving out this year.

{Keep reading for a promotion code!}

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Today marks the eighth* anniversary of Chocolate & Zucchini. And just like last year and every year before it, I am divided between two feelings: on the one hand, I can’t really remember what it felt like to experience life without a blog. On the other hand, I consider the years, months, and days, and I think, wow, it certainly is a long time to be keeping an online cooking journal. This year is an especially meaningful milestone, as it appears I have been blogging for an entire quarter of my life**. It’s a little dizzying to think about.

And as always, I feel compelled to mark this anniversary by thanking you, dear readers, for being here. Some of you have been reading since the early days, and some have known me for a shorter while, but it is all of you, with your different backgrounds and opinions and talents, who make it worth my while to write and share here. Your support, your comments, and the way you weave your own stories into mine, make my life immeasurably richer, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

If you’re in Paris on Friday, October 21 (rescheduled from October 14), I’d like to invite you to join us for a celebratory drink at Verjus, the wine bar that my friends Braden and Laura (of Hidden Kitchen fame) are just about to open. We’ll be there from 8pm, but feel free to drop by whenever you like. I hope to meet you there! Verjus, 47 rue Montpensier, Paris 1er, +33 (0)1 42 97 54 40 (see map).

* Isn’t “eighth” an awkward word to spell?
** Because yes, 32 divided by 4 is 8.

Cooking inspiration is not the least of the pleasures I draw from a vacation, especially when I’m able to bring back a few local ingredients. It’s not always a sensible maneuver, though: I’m sure we all have old packages of dusty exotic spices we haven’t once cooked with, but can’t quite bring ourselves to toss.

I’ve done this often enough over the years that I am now a lot more prudent about my vacation ingredient purchases. My strategy is twofold: one, I try hard to assess whether this string of chilli peppers or that guava jam really will look as appealing once my tan (though barely visible to the naked eye) has receded; and two, whatever it is I opt to bring back, I vow to put to use within a few weeks of my return.

I had a mind to make bite-size savory canistrelli to emulate the ones we’d bought from a shop in Sagone on our last day on the island.

These savory chestnut canistrelli are living proof that I’ve been successful this time, as they’ve allowed me to put the first dent into a bag of roasted chestnut flour from Corsica, and a sachet of herbes du maquis, a dried herb mix made up of thyme, rosemary, myrtle, and bay leaf from the local scrubland.

What are canistrelli, you ask? They’re the typical Corsican cookie (singular form: canistrellu), a rustic, crisp little cookie that is much more than it looks, and which I first discovered at U Spuntinu, a Corsican épicerie on rue des Mathurins, not far from the Paris Opera.

I adore the original, not-too-sweet version, and in fact included a recipe for them in my Paris book, but this time I had a mind to make bite-size savory canistrelli to emulate the ones we’d bought from a shop in Sagone on our last day on the island. We were expecting friends for the apéritif, and I thought they would go well with the white wine chilling in the fridge.

I took out my sweet canistrelli recipe to build on that, and all went smoothly; it is a very easy dough to work with. The crunchy little diamonds (which happen to be vegan) turned out to be so flavorful I prepared a second batch on the spot, thinking any extras would get nibbled on during the week. A wise move, as it turns out; very little was left that night.

If you’ve never had anything made with chesnut flour, it’s worth seeking it out. It’s a gluten-free flour with an assertive flavor that doesn’t taste like actual chestnuts, but is earthy and sweet in its own way. The one I got is a Corsican flour dried over a wood fire, which makes it subtly smoky. Chestnut flour is not cheap (mine was 10€/kg, or $6/lb), but a little goes a long way as it is generally used in combination with other, milder flours.

I now intend to use more of that flour to make chesnut flour crêpes and also sweet chestnut canistrelli such as the ones I bought in the village of Evisa, and which proved quite the extraordinary snack, eaten in alternating bites with a square of dark chocolate.

Any other ideas on how to use chestnut flour?

The dough is cut into squares or diamonds with a dough cutter or sharp knife.

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When I read Heidi’s July post about her homemade celery salt, I bookmarked it immediately, murmuring to myself how simple and beautiful and clever the idea was.

While I am an enthusiastic consumer of celery root, I don’t cook with celery stalks much, and only ever buy it in small quantities to flavor stock. Still, in those cases, I am faced with a fair amount of celery leaves that come with the stalks. I usually just add those to the stockpot along with everything else, but I much, much prefer the idea of turning them into something new altogether.

And it’s precisely what Heidi suggests: wash those leaves, dry them until crisp, and crumble them with salt to produce an incredibly fragrant condiment* that you can then use to season eggs and salads (especially tomato or potato salads, or in this herbed couscous salad), to flavor bread (I’ve made really good little dinner rolls with it), to sprinkle as a finishing salt on soups, bean or lentil stews, to season a tomato or carrot juice… the list is endless.

Being thrifty is one of the traits I’m most looking to develop as a person in general and a cook in particular, and this works doubly in that direction: not only does it make use of the celery leaves one might otherwise discard, but in my take on Heidi’s recipe, I’m also suggesting you dry the leaves in the oven while you preheat it for something else, to make the most of the energy it expends.

Such optimization is something I always try to do: whenever I turn on the oven I ask myself whether I have any seeds, nuts, or spices that need toasting, or lemon peel that needs roasting.

Another bonus of this celery salt recipe is that it will also lead you on the track to the crispest celery stalks available, since the health and vibrancy of the leaves are an unmistakable sign of freshness. (The same is true of any vegetable that comes with the leaves still attached: radishes, carrots, kohlrabi, beets, etc.)

Do you make flavored salts yourself? Any favorites you want to tell us about?

* The celery salt you can buy at the store is in fact made by grinding celery seeds with salt, so the texture is different, but the flavor is very similar.

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