If you read French food blogs at all, you’ve no doubt come across Clea Cuisine: Clea has been writing since March of 2005 — first from Japan, where she was living then, and now from the South-East of France — and her unique voice has quickly earned her stripes in the French blogosphere.

I’ve been a reader practically since the beginning — I remember early posts about baking cakes in her rice cooker, teaching members of her French club how to make bugnes (a traditional Mardi-Gras donut), or eating ekiben (railway bento) on the train — and I am very fond of her quietly inspired style, which blends French and Japanese influences, and focuses on simple, wholesome foods.

She’s a prolific cookbook author, too, and she writes for an independent French publisher named La Plage (literally “the beach”) that’s devoted to natural living and vegetarian cooking, and is therefore a perfect fit.

One of her most recent titles is called Croquez salé*, a prettily styled book that contains recipes for savory cookies and crackers to snack on in the afternoon, pack into your lunchbox, or serve with pre-dinner drinks. The savory cookie category is one that definitely deserves more attention than it usually gets, and Clea works to change that with some thirty recipes that manage to be both original and unfussy.

My eye was immediately caught by the Petits croquants au sésame on page 54. The recipe calls for ingredients that are easily kept on hand for an impromptu batch — sesame butter, gomasio, sesame seeds, flour, an egg — and uses the slice-and-bake technique, my favorite shaping method of all.

I make just two changes to Clea’s recipe: I use tahini rather than sesame butter (the former is made from hulled sesame seeds, the latter from whole or partially whole seeds) because that’s what I usually buy, and I press the rounds of dough with the tines of a fork before baking, to create little grooves and ridges that boost the textural interest.

These tasty little numbers are crisp and crumbly with a vivid sesame flavor, and they pair well with a few radishes at the apéritif. I’ve also had them with a smear of fresh cheese to accompany a green salad at lunchtime, and they come in handy when you need to hit pause on your appetite because dinner is taking longer to cook than planned.

[More crackers and savory cookies from the archives:
~ Raw multiseed crackers,
~ Olive oil and seed crackers,
~ Cheese thins,
~ Aged gouda and dried pear scones,
~ Carrot and rosemary mini-scones,
~ Zaatar pita chips.]

* An awkward-to-translate phrase that invites you to “bite into something savory.”

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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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