Today marks the seventh anniversary of Chocolate & Zucchini, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for being here.

The past seven years have been, without a doubt, the fullest and the most exciting of my life, and it is in large part thanks to this blog and to you.

I feel lucky to have such an enthusiastic, curious, kind, positive, funny, helpful, thoughtful, articulate, inspiring and well-informed crowd gathered here, and it is an honor and a joy to converse with you.

To celebrate this anniversary, I want to invite you to get together in Paris, and my proposition is twofold:

On Saturday, October 16, you can join me at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France from 11am till noon, for a discussion on food blogs (in French) as part of a series of talks called Les Samedis du Savoir. (The event is free and open to the public.)

And on Sunday, October 17, please come and have a drink with us at Café Charbon; we’ll be there from 7pm (109 rue Oberkampf in the 11th, see map).

I hope you can make it to one or both of these occasions, and I look forward to meeting you in person.

(Note: neither of these is a booksigning event per se, but if you own one of my books, feel free to bring it along; it will be my pleasure to sign it.)

Have you ever tried soaking flaxseeds? If not, know that something eerie transpires as soon as your back is turned: while the seeds swell and absorb the water, they release a gel-like substance (called mucilage) so that next time you look, your bowl is filled with a kind of jiggly aspic in which the seeds are suspended.

This little trick makes flaxseeds (also called linseeds, or graines de lin in French) particularly popular with raw food practitioners, because that very goop acts as an efficient binding agent in all manner of uncooked preparations*, such as these raw flaxseed crackers.

And since I have temporary custody of a spiffy dehydrator, as you may remember from my raw buckwheat granola post, I’ve been using it to make regular batches of raw flaxseed crackers.

The simple idea is this: you soak flaxseeds so they’ll ooze out their mucilage, then combine them with other seeds, soaked** and drained, and the seasonings of your choice. This mixture is spread on a dehydrator tray and left to dry for a few hours, until you get — tadaa! — uncooked crackers, crisp and nutty, ready to be snacked upon alone or with your favorite dip.

The most delicious raw flaxseed crackers

I have played around with spices and flavorings, and I think I like smoked paprika (not raw, I imagine, but very good) or cumin best. But naturally, you could dream up a fennel seed or ras-el-hanout version, mix in a crushed garlic clove (just beware that the crackers will give off a very garlicky smell while they are dehydrating) or some fresh herbs, use soy sauce in place of the salt… whatever floats your cracker boat.

And if you don’t have a dehydrator, you can spread the mixture on parchment paper and use your oven at a very low setting (preferably around 45°C/110°F) or even, I am told, the energy of the sun, if the weather complies: it would take a few days, certainly, but you’d have yourself some pretty cool sun-dried crackers.

Flax Seed Crackers and Hummus

* And I can’t not mention that some people use flaxseeds to make their own hair gel! Apparently it works wonders on very curly hair, not that I would know anything about that.

** The purpose of soaking grains, nuts and seeds is explained here.

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Good cheeseburgers aren’t hard to come by in Paris these days (my favorite comes from Burger and Fries, an In ‘N Out copycat), but I greatly enjoy the ones we make ourselves for lunch on weekends, with homemade buns, organic ground beef from the Batignolles greenmarket, and slivers of comté cheese lounging on top.

Having gleefully discovered that I could buy portobello mushrooms at said greenmarket — although we have plenty of the brown mushrooms we call champignons de Paris, the overgrown version is rarer than a Vélib’ with tight brakes — I have added portobello cheeseburgers into the rotation, and would be hard-pressed to decide which version I like best.

To make my latest batch more exciting, I made tomato burger buns, simply adding tomato purée to the dough.

All of this starts with a good bun naturally: one that’s soft enough to be bitten into without a struggle, but not so soft it breaks down under the combined effect of the seeping juices and the girdle of your thumbs.

My ideal burger bun

Supermarket buns are a total turnoff for me — I incriminate the ingredients’ list as much as the styrofoamy buns themselves — and since the French like to say on n’est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même (a Type-A aphorism that means nothing’s ever done as well as when you do it yourself), I just take matters into my own hands.

After a few errant trials over the years, I found my ideal bun in a NYT article last summer, for which baker Hidefumi Kubota had shared the light brioche bun recipe he’d created for L.A. restaurant Comme Ça.

I made it as written and liked it a lot, but soon altered the recipe to incorporate some of my sourdough starter for extra flavor — here’s my conversion method by the way. I do still use some commercial yeast, because enriched doughs need more leavening oomph than the starter alone can provide in a reasonable amount of time. (Trust me: I recently tried a starter-only version that turned out so dense I nearly broke a toe when I dropped one bun on my bare foot.)

Making tomato burger buns

And to make my latest batch more exciting, I made tomato burger buns. The inspiration came from a tweet by my friend Chika about a slice of tomato bread, which she wrote about in more detail a few days later.

Chika explained to me that the lady who had made that tomato loaf had simply substituted tomato purée for the milk in her recipe: a marvelous idea that could be winningly applied to these burger buns, I thought.

I used an organic, no-salt-added, slightly chunky tomato purée from Italy which I buy in jars for next to nothing at the most unglamorous supermarket ever, but if you have garden tomatoes you could certainly make your own. What you need here is simply ripe tomato flesh, mashed or chopped, but otherwise unprocessed and unseasoned.

My tomato burger buns are as light-textured as their plain counterparts, but have a much more arresting look, sunset orange with red highlights.

My tomato burger buns are as light-textured as their plain counterparts, but have a much more arresting look, sunset orange with red highlights. The tomato flavor is faint, especially when it has to measure up with the boldness of the other burger elements, but it does add zing to the bun. And anyway, the point is, that warm color changes everything, right?

So before you turn your back on summer altogether, I suggest a batch of these, so you can treat yourself to a few transitional burgers, indoor or out. And already I am wondering what other breads I shall tomato-ize. Bagels, maybe?

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Two years ago, I met a young British woman named Poppy — that alone made my day — who introduced herself as a raw chocolatier.

I had a taste of her heart-shaped raw chocolates, assembled from raw Arriba cacao and a bunch of raw superfoods, and liked them so much I devoted one of my ELLE à table columns to them.

And when we met one day for her to demonstrate her chocolate-making prowess, she gave me a bag of her raw buckwheat granola, which was one of the items she served during the raw brunches she then hosted at Bob’s Juice Bar in Paris.

I can’t picture myself “going raw”, but I do admire the necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention effect of such dietary limitations, and I love learning about, and tasting, the entirely new dishes they spur.

If you’ve been scratching your head over the high incidence of the adjective raw in the above paragraphs, I’ll quickly explain: raw foodists, or proponents of “living foods”, consider that the nutritional benefits of plant-based ingredients are essentially lost when they are heated beyond a certain temperature — the exact threshold varies depending on whom you ask, but it’s around 40-46°C (100-115°F). So their (often vegan) diet focuses on unprocessed raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, as well as sprouted seeds, grains and legumes.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m immensely curious about this kind of rebellious diet. I couldn’t picture myself “going raw” — I like bread and comté cheese too much — but I do admire the necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention effect of such dietary limitations, and I love learning about, and tasting, the entirely new dishes they spur.

Especially when they’re as fantastic as Poppy’s raw granola. When I asked how she made it, I was a little deflated to learn it required a food dehydrator, which my arsenal didn’t include, and certainly regretful that I had munched down the bag so fast.

Fast-forward two years, and I find myself with a food dehydrator on loan for a month. What was my first impulse? Yes, exactly.

I emailed Poppy again to get details, and although she didn’t have an exact recipe to share, she was able to explain the straightforward process: soak* some buckwheat groats, soak some almonds and/or nuts and seeds of your choice, combine with honey, spices, and salt, and dehydrate.

I followed Poppy’s directions for the most part, filling in the blanks when it came to the actual amounts of each ingredient, and adding a little coconut oil because I felt like it. I have also read that you can sprout the buckwheat in addition to soaking — as demonstrated in these videos — and I may try it next time, but I’m here to tell you it works splendidly without that extra step.

It is really quite amazing how the somewhat slimy mixture — buckwheat groats become viscous little things when soaked — transforms itself in such crunchy, nutty clusters. The buckwheat flavor is subtle, which I like, and blends beautifully with the nuts, honey and spices to form a delicate alliance.

Because I prefer bread for breakfast, I’ve been eating my raw buckwheat granola as an afternoon snack, with fresh fruit and homemade kefir.

I think I may like it even better than regular baked granola, of which I am terribly fond, and although I’m still hesitant to acquire a dehydrator of my own, this recipe alone might be all the convincing I need.

* The purpose of soaking grains, nuts and seeds is explained here.

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