Our spring has been so warm and sunny for so many weeks, it feels like we’re living a perpetual July.

Although this is terrible news for farmers, who need a wet spring for their crop, Parisians have been enjoying this gift of a weather obliviously. Drinks and meals out on sidewalk terraces have become a daily pleasure, as have light dresses and strappy sandals.

Produce stalls bear witness to this meteorological oddity as well: we already have darkly sweet cherries and, to my delight, French-grown organic zucchini, when neither normally appear so soon.

This bowl of pasta is the first thing I cooked with the first zucchini I bought: I tossed spelt fusilli with zucchini half-moons sautéed with garlic, and added chopped almonds and fine strips of lemon zest.

A simple dish that sings with bright flavors and wholesome nutrition, both of which are much needed when your own kitchen and living room are a chaos of rubble and dust with wires coming out of the walls.

It’s a simple dish, one that can be put together in under twenty minutes while listening to the radio in a kitchen that’s not yours but that you’re growing fond of. A simple dish, yes, but one that sings with bright flavors and wholesome nutrition, both of which are much needed when your own kitchen and living room are a chaos of rubble and dust with wires coming out of the walls.

The combination of zucchini, almonds, and lemon zest is one I’d never had, or thought of before: it was a happy case of improvisation gone right, drawing on ingredients from my temporary pantry. But the trio is a solid one, the almonds bringing a sweet crunch, the lemon zest an aromatic punch. I like it so much I’ve made the dish twice more since that inaugural time.

As you’ll see in the recipe below, I use a small energy-saving tip to cook my pasta: I bring water to a boil, add the pasta, cover, and turn off the heat. I then cook the pasta in that near-boiling water for as long as I would if the water were actually boiling. I know it is hard to believe, and it may even seem a little sacrilegious, but the pasta comes out perfectly al dente*. This method is actually more forgiving — if you leave the pasta in the water a moment too long it still tastes fine — and it saves a few minutes’ worth of energy.

* Note that I’ve successfully tested this on two kinds of electric stoves that do remain hot for a little while after you’ve turned them off. You may have to cook your pasta the classical way if you’re using an induction or gas stove.

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From the department of Saving Money By Making Things From Scratch — the same department that campaigned for homemade hummus a couple of months ago — comes this public service announcement: preparing homemade oat milk is very easy and very cheap.

I don’t drink milk myself — oat or otherwise — but I use oat milk as an ingredient regularly, in this vanilla oat milk tapioca pudding or in this Swiss chard gratin, but also to make pastry cream for strawberry tartlets, or to whip up a batch of crêpes.

If you want to make homemade oat milk, there are several ways to go about it. You can start from rolled oats, from oat flour, or from oat groats, i.e. the dehulled grain of the plant. I like to use the latter (available from natural food stores) as they are the least processed of the three, and give the best results flavor- and texture-wise.

How to prepare homemade oat milk

All you need to do then is soak the oats overnight, cook them (or not, if you choose to make raw oat milk), blitz them with water and a little salt in a blender or food processor, and then strain.

From the department of Saving Money By Making Things From Scratch comes this public service announcement: making your own oat milk is very easy and very cheap.

Oat milk made from oat groats has a very pleasant texture, smooth and milky, with a richer mouthfeel than most non-dairy milks.

I will note that the raw version has a distinctive flavor that I would describe as grassy, and a bit of a bite, which you may or may not like. I personally wouldn’t drink it straight up (then again I don’t drink milk) but I use it in preparations that call for boiling or simmering the milk, which takes the edge off. The cooked version has a much milder flavor, one I very much enjoy, and it’s the one I use for crêpes, for instance.

The bonus byproduct of homemade oat milk is the oat pulp that remains in the sieve after you’ve strained the milk; this is sometimes referred to as okara by analogy with the soy milk making process. It is quite nutritious, so it would be foolish to toss it: if you’ve cooked the oats, you can eat it as porridge if you’re into that sort of thing, but if you haven’t or you aren’t, you can fold it into cake or muffin batters, or add it to bread dough, as I do.

Just to drive home my point about the money one saves by doing this: in my organic store, I can buy a package of 500 grams (17.6 ounces) of oat groats for 1.65€ ($2.45). This amount allows me to make 10 liters (10 quarts) of oat milk, which ends up costing 0.16€ ($0.24) per liter (if you cook the oats, a few cents should be added to account for the energy needed to run the stove for 40 minutes). By comparison, a carton of oat milk sold at the same organic store costs about 2€ ($3) per liter, in other words twelve times more.

Factor in the environmental cost of packaging and transporting the oat milk (which is mostly water) rather than the dried grain, and then transporting and recycling the carton (so much the better if you can buy oat groats in bulk; I can’t), and you have a pretty strong incentive to make your own.

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Of all the kitchen inconveniences the cook has to live with, the one that generates the highest number of defensive strategies is no doubt the peeling and chopping of onions, and the associated teargas effect.

The reason why it makes you cry is explained in detail here, and if you like to read about enzymes and syn-propanethial-S-oxide, as do I, it is worth a read.

But to put it more simply, chopping onions causes the release of an irritant gas in the air, which, upon reaching your eyes, triggers a blinking and tearing reflex designed to wash it away. Yet another illustration, albeit an annoying one, of what a nifty machine the ol’ human body is.

Such an unusual tip could not go untested, so I soon tried it, using the butt end of a loaf of pain au levain and feeling both experimental and silly, but I am happy and amazed to report it worked perfectly.

Not all onions are created equal (the fresher the onion, the less you cry) and not all cooks are as sensitive, but this phenomenon explains the volume of tips and tricks floating about — some of them amusingly contradictory — designed to either hinder the release of said gas, or prevent it from reaching the eyes.

Some people rinse the onions in cold water after peeling, or chop them underwater. Some recommend keeping onions in the fridge, or plopping them in the freezer for a few minutes before chopping. Some chop from the stem end down, others from the root end up. Some recommend breathing through the nose, others only through the mouth, while others still hold a sip of water in their mouth, and try not to laugh and spit it out.

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Garden sorrel (Rumex acetosa) is commonly cultivated in French vegetable patches, and the season is just beginning. It is a sturdy, easy-to-grow leafy plant that comes back year after year, and belongs to the same botanical family as rhubarb and buckwheat, which is always fun to know.

I think of it as being halfway between a green and an herb: its flavor is notably tangy and sour, and sorrel recipes have you eat it raw or gently cooked, but in both cases it is best served in combination with other ingredients, so its pungency won’t overwhelm.

Well used, it is a delight that can really lift a dish, especially in conjunction with a sweet or fatty element.

But the operative phrase here is “well used” and I thought I would turn to you via twitter to hear about your favorite sorrel recipes using the fresh stuff, as I did last year for sage recipes.

Many thanks to all who chimed in; here’s the list of sorrel recipes I compiled, for your use and enjoyment.

(Note: in French, sorrel is oseille and it’s a classic slang word for money, in use since the late nineteenth century. Woody Allen’s 1969 movie Take The Money And Run was released in France under the title “Prends l’oseille et tire-toi.”)

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