This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s expression is, “Être serrés comme des sardines.”

Literally translated as, “being packed together like sardines,” it is a colloquial expression that’s used when people are squeezed into a very small space with absolutely no room to move. For some reason, I remember liking this expression a lot as a child.

Notice that serrés is in the plural form — the singular would be serré(e) — because this expression is always used to liken a group of people to a group of sardines, and never refers to a single individual, however sardine-packed he might feel.

Example: “Ils ont laissé trop de gens monter dans le bus ; on était serrés comme des sardines.” “They let too many people on the bus; we were packed together like sardines.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

Continue reading »

I’ve long been uneasy about spring onions. It’s the kind of produce that I feel deserves a special treatment that will make it shine — local scallions are in season but briefly before the onion part bulges and takes over the green stems — but I’m never quite sure what that treatment might be.

They taste too sharply onion-y to me to be served solo as a side vegetable, yet cooking them with other vegetables seems wasteful, because then their spring nature gets lost in the shuffle and they are reduced to playing the role of an expensive onion.

It occurs to me just now that using them in a stir-fry with noodles and a little meat or perhaps shrimp would be a fine solution (I’ve been watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and he does like his stir-fry), but for some reason I don’t really do stir-fries (though I’ve been watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and now I might do more stir-fries).

Piquant from the onion, hot from the ginger, and savory from the soy sauce, it is an outspoken topping that will amp up any number of preparations, Asian-inspired or otherwise.

This is why I was thrilled to add David Chang‘s ginger scallion sauce to my spring onion repertoire. The recipe is in his Momofuku cookbook, co-written with Peter Meehan, which I borrowed from my Hidden Kitchen friends*. It also happens to be excerpted on the Amazon page, so I suspect this might be the single most executed recipe from the book, and deservedly so: it is very simple (six ingredients and as many minutes of prep) and very good.

All you do is take a bunch of scallions, slice them finely, and toss them with fresh ginger and a salty-sour dressing. The resulting mixture David Chang calls a sauce, but you shouldn’t imagine a sauce in the conventional sense: it’s chunky, not liquid, but it is meant to be spooned over things, so it might best be described as a cross between a sauce and a condiment.

Piquant from the onion, hot from the ginger, and savory from the soy sauce, it is an outspoken topping that will amp up any number of preparations, Asian-inspired or otherwise, so it’s a great one to have up your sleeve.

In the book, it is presented as part of a dish of ramen noodles topped with (really quick) quick-pickled cucumbers, bamboo shoots, pan-roasted cauliflower, and torn pieces of nori seaweed. I’ve done a sort of take on that (with lo mein noodles and without the cauliflower or bamboo shoots), and we’ve also had it over various other things like tofu, rice, scrambled eggs, or steamed potatoes with smoked trout — the latter was particularly successful. Chang recommends it with grilled meat, too, and I can see how well that would work.

* Did you know my Hidden Kitchen friends have a blog now? Well, they do!

Continue reading »

I recently remarked to a sympathetic friend how difficult it is to buy fresh sage around here. There aren’t many sage recipes in French cuisine, so it’s not part of the classic range of fresh herbs sold at produce shops or at the green market. But I enjoy its flavor very much, so I decided I would try and find seeds to grow my own.

Only days later, I walked past the sidewalk display of Etablissements Lion on my way home, and noticed that they sold potted sage plants that looked exceptionally healthy. I couldn’t resist; I chose the most beautiful one and adopted it.

It now rooms with our blooming strawberry plants on the bathroom window sill, but it is so bushy I thought I’d better start thinking of ideas to put it to good use. And I did what any modern person would do: I turned to twitter and asked, “What do you like to do with sage?”

The response was multicolored and inspired, and I thought it would be a pity not to share it with you. Surely there are other owners of expansive sage plants who would benefit. So here’s a compilation of the suggestions I collected — my sincere thanks go to the twitterers who kindly contributed their ideas.

Continue reading »

We had our first taste of warabi mochi on the basement floor of the Tokyu department store in Shibuya, Tokyo. Amid the extraordinary spread of edible goods — sweet, savory and in between, fresh, dried, hot, cold — was a little stand from which a lady was offering samples of soft, bite-size morsels dusted with a light brown powder.

We each took a wooden pick, lifted a piece to our mouth, and started chewing. It was amazing: the coating was fine-grained and nutty — I recognized it as being kinako, toasted soybeans ground to a fine powder — and the fleshy inside was cool on the tongue, offering a slight chew then quickly dissolving into a delicate sweetness.

We were moved to purchase some right on the spot, but the lady took the time to explain that these had to be eaten fresh that very day, and we felt the box was too big for us to make that commitment.

Later, when our travels took us to the Kansai region, we started seeing that same mochi-like confection everywhere, shaped as small cubes, flat little bricks, or oval balls, slumped against each other. We bought some here, some there, and loved it every time, though we had no idea what it was, or what it was called.

Eventually, we got a small box at the Nishiki-dori market in Kyoto, and the top had a beautiful label on which I was able to decipher the hiragana characters like a six-year-old: wa-ra-bi-mo-chi. Aha!

I looked it up online that night, and found out that it is indeed a Kansai specialty, and a particularly popular treat during the summer months. Although it is called mochi, it is a different kind of mochi made not with glutinous rice flour (mochiko or shiratamako), but with warabiko, bracken starch painstakingly ground from the root of the plant.

In my bulging travel notebook, to the list of things to bring back from Japan I added: warabiko.

On another visit to the Nishiko-dori market, I spotted a stand that sold little bags of assorted flours and powders. We walked up to it and asked if they had any warabiko. They did, but the lady, aided by her daughter who in fact didn’t speak much more English than we did Japanese, managed to convey to us that pure warabiko was very pricey (~¥30,000 — $320 — for a 300-gram pouch). She could, however, offer a more economical substitute called warabimochiko, a blend of sweet potato starch and tapioca starch with a small percentage of bracken starch mixed in (~¥300 for the same amount). When I asked if my warabi mochi would still be oishii (delicious), they nodded forcefully.

Considering the price we’d paid for the different warabi mochi we’d tasted, it was clear they had not been made with the expensive stuff, so I got a bag of the low-cost warabimochiko, and the lady sweetly slipped us a little bag of kinako as a gift. A great many arigatos and small bows later, we walked away, hovering slightly above ground from the pleasure such small encounters provide.

About a week after we’d returned home, I took out the packets and got to work. To complement the little instruction sheet (in Japanese) the lady had included, I’d searched for recipes online and though there weren’t many in English or French, I’d found enough helpful ressources to feel prepared.

The process is really quite straightforward: you mix the starch with water and sugar, sieve the mixture into a saucepan, and cook until it thickens and becomes translucent. Then you simply dump it on a work surface dusted with kinako, cut it into pieces and coat them some more, or chill the mixture in ice water first for a more refreshing mouthfeel.

Within minutes my warabi mochi was ready, and all we had to do was wait for it to cool. Armed with toothpicks, we tasted one, then two, then a couple more, and smiled broadly: this was it! Part of me had not quite believed the warabi mochi experience could be reproduced in my Paris kitchen, but there was no doubt about it now: my batch had very precisely the same taste and texture as the ones we’d eaten on our trip. It was delicious.

Of course, the Japanese backdrop was sorely missing, but we chose not to dwell on that, and focus on the mochi instead. And now that I’ve found a Parisian source for warabimochiko (see ingredient note at bottom of recipe), I’ve promised myself I wouldn’t fall prey to the too good to use syndrome, and I’ll be making warabi mochi with abandon every time nostalgia strikes.

Continue reading »