A Taste of Home

Straddling two cultures, leaving one kind of culture shock for another, sometimes the best way to feel at home is to eat like you did at home. While we were in Paris, this meant home-made bagels and tacos, granola bars, banana cakes, mac'n'cheese, baked French toast, and especially cookies. Back in Somerville, this means reproducing some of our favorite dishes from the past year, and making as many French-flavored recipes as possible.

We started with a palate cleanser we enjoyed at Hidden Kitchen, adapted to suit our tastes:

That's farmers market-fresh strawberries and mint from our own garden over home-made strawberry sorbet over limoncello jello. We served it as a dessert, and will definitely make it again - maybe adapting it differently to be peach sorbet over raspberry liqueur jello, or kiwi sorbet over orange vodka jello . . .

Our next flurry of cooking and baking took inspiration from one of our favorite Parisian food bloggers, Clothilde Dusoulier. Her blog and eponymous cookbook, Chocolate and Zucchini, provide English-language recipes that cover a wide range of French cuisine, both traditional and modern.

Here are some of the things we made:

"Papillote de bar aux asperges" - "Papillote" is the technique of cooking something wrapped up in wax paper; we substituted turnips for bar fish.

"Chicken and cashew mini-quiches" - so many substitutions in this one, they don't deserve their name. Basically it's flour, milk, and egg, with whatever else you want to throw in, cooked in muffin tins. Perfect for an appetizer or brunch, and crust-less, so not terribly time-intensive.

"Zucchini carpaccio with raspberry vinegar" - didn't have raspberry vinegar so we had to improvise a little, but it tasted as pretty as it looks.

"Bulgur-stuffed round zucchini" - again, lots of substitutions, but you get the idea. Adjectives we'd use to describe this dish include "filling," "healthy," "seasonal," and "Halloween-y."

Not pictured: super tasty gougères (cheese puffs) that we've now made a few times, all thanks to Chocolate and Zucchini.

One of the souvenirs we picked up months before leaving Paris was a cookbook called Rilletes à la folie. Rillettes are usually meat-based salads, kind of like tuna fish, but made with goose and duck and pork. We were almost never without rillettes in our fridge, since they're perfect for a snack, a picnic dish, an apéro or something to go along with a meal. The cookbook we found provides recipes not only for the meat-based rillettes, but also for veggie and dessert options. 


Craving rillettes a few weeks after we moved back, we started out trying to make a strawberry-lavender-cheese version, but realized we didn't have the right cheese, and turned it into a sorbet instead. Influenced by Dimi's spice-inspired approach to food, we topped the sorbet with espresso sugar-encrusted banana and served the ensemble in shot glasses, for something different.

Turns out that it's hard to miss Paris too much when the scent of French cooking fills your apartment a few nights a week. Come on over, we'll treat you to something fabulous!

Sunday Brunch

This Sunday we invited a few friends over to enjoy an American-style brunch. Louis and I tested out a new baked "French" toast recipe from his mom (thanks Joy!) and it was delicious. You clever readers will probably have figured out that the picture above was taken the night before while I was prepping the bread for baking the next morning. This, we are told, is a great way to host a stress-free brunch. Turns out, it's true! The French toast paired nicely with a potato and egg scramble we made and our guests brought colorful and slightly less hearty (but no less delicious) fare.


Thanks friends/guests, let's do it again sometime!

For the love of cheese

Eden and JP have now returned to their lives in Minnesota, but we can't quite forget them and the fun/delicious times we had. Here are some photos (some taken by us, some by JP) that we particularly like:

Below you'll find photos of several delicious treats we consumed during their visit (mostly cooked/baked by Eden and JP... I suspect you'll figure out which was not). First, a picture-perfect cherry clafoutis, then an utterly divine tartiflette (sans bacon, of course). Next, a tasty and filling leek bread pudding (JP, please send us the recipe!). And finally, a platter of cheeses!

Thanks, Eden and JP! Come back again real soon!

/kwɪns/

The night we ate sausage soup, our guests mentioned they had recently made some delicious quince-based treats. Quince? We had never heard of it. Was it an animal, vegetable, or mineral? Turns out, it's a fruit! We didn't have to wait too long to try them for ourselves as our generous guests gave us an entire bag of them the very next day!

Quince may be hard to find in your local U.S. farmer's market due to its susceptibility to fire blight. If you do find some, I wouldn't recommend eating one raw, as you might not like how it tastes. These tough and high-pectin fruits are ideal, however, for poaching or roasting, and they are often used in jams or preserves.

After some deliberation and an equipment-related delay (we didn't have a sharp enough knife to make it through the quince and had to go out and get one), we decided to start our quince adventure by following David Lebovitz's Rosy Poached Quince recipe.

After the poaching, we blended the now-soft quince pieces with a bit of the poaching juice to make this purée:

Then, we used this recipe to make quince paste, or membrillo, as it's called in Spain. It's a fragrant and slightly sweet jam-like paste that's supposed to be best when paired with Manchego cheese. (We still haven't tried this combination yet, but as I made 10,000 pounds of paste, I'm sure we will in the not-too-distant future.)

We then took David's suggestion to reduce the poaching liquid to a jellied state. Unfortunately, I think we went a little further than required and ended up with something a bit more like quince taffy.

It all worked out in the end as we enjoyed the bright, powerful taste of a few reserved poached quince slices and the quince taffy on top of vanilla ice cream. The next night we devoured some extremely good quince crêpes.

Most recently, the quince paste found a home in this utterly divine quince and apple tart. (Thanks to the kitchn for the filling recipe and smitten kitchen for the tart shell recipe.)

We still have a few tons of quince paste in the fridge and freezer. Any suggestions on what to do with it?

Banana Cake Recipe

In honor of my mom's visit to Paris, and as a follow-up to our last post, here's a treat for you. Legend has it my maternal great-grandmother Lena came up with this recipe, which has become a family heirloom of sorts. People are always asking for the recipe, and since I've made it twice so far on this trip, it's multiply postable. Enjoy!

1 cup butter (two sticks, 226g)

1 1/2 cups sugar (~300g)

2 eggs

2 cups flour (240g)

1/4 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup (three or four) mashed bananas (very ripe - I usually only use very brown bananas)

1/4 cup milk (60 mL) + 1 tbs white vinegar

1 tsp vanilla extract

Cream margarine with sugar. Add eggs. Sift together dry ingredients and add to mixture. Add mashed bananas (you can use more than 3 very ripe bananas if you like more flavor, and I do). Add sour milk (milk + vinegar) and vanilla extract. Bake well-blended ingredients in 2 greased and floured 9" cake pans or one 9x13" baking pan at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. If using pure convection, bake at 340 for 27 minutes.

Bittersweet Icing:

2/3 cups cocoa (160 mL)

4 tbls butter or margarine (57g)

1/2 cup sugar (98g)

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/3 cup milk (80 mL)

Simmer on low, the ingredients are approximate and you can make it as sweet or as bitter as you like.

Yes.

Cooking Conversions

Cooking and baking American recipes in France requires all kinds of conversions, and not just the most obvious ones. In general, all volumes and weights need to be converted into metric - that much we knew before we got here. But what we didn't expect was that we'd also have to convert volumes into weights, and vice versa. That is, because of our limited selection of measuring cups, it's usually easier to figure out the weight of a volume than it is to measure out that volume. Example: one cup is 240 mL, and with 100, 50, 15, and 5 mL measuring scoops, that means two scoops of 100 mL, then approximating 40 mL in the 50 mL scoop, or trying to scoop slightly fewer than three full 15 mL scoops. So tedious! With our electronic scale, measurement is not only easier - it's also more precise.

We've put together a list of the some of the most useful conversions (most of which come from allrecipes.com):

1 cup = 240 mL

1 cup white flour = 120 g

1 stick butter (1/2 cup) = 113 g

1 cup granulated sugar = 196 g

1 cup brown sugar = 220 g

Tablespoon = cuillière à soupe

Teaspoon = cuillière à café

This website calculates based on whatever you plug in, rather than forcing you to do the math yourself: http://www.france-property-and-information.com/cooking_converter.htm

And finally, since our oven is marked in Celsius, we've had to look up the Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversions (since we're too lazy to do it in our heads). We're actually lucky our oven shows Celsius - many European ovens show a "gas mark" instead of a temperature. Crazy! Examples:

Fahrenheit            Celsius          Gas Mark
275                       135              1
300                       150              2
325                       165              3
350                       175              4
375                       190              5

And if all conversions and recipes fail, we can always make something "au pif" - by feel, by guesstimate, by eyeballing things. That usually works out just fine.

Crack-and-Cheese

Thanks again to Smitten Kitchen for providing another absolutely delicious recipe. A few weeks ago, the same night we debuted this warm-for-winter sausage soup, we discovered a mac-and-cheese recipe that called for two things we just can't resist: cheese and cheese! You might call this a "grown-up" version of mac-and-cheese, but the 9-year-old we had over for dinner seemed to enjoy it just fine.

The key to this recipe, and perhaps the reason why this SK commenter can't get enough, is the rich, creamy roux-based cheese sauce:

A few simple (really!) steps later, and out pops this:

Looks good, huh? It is! And here's our version of the recipe (In addition to changing a few ingredients, we halved everything and converted to metric):

120 g butter, plus more for greasing the pan

half a baguette, left out for a night or two, broken into bite-sized pieces

660 mL whole milk

30 g flour

2 t salt

1 t Beau Monde spice mix courtesy of The Spice & Tea Exchange of Sarasota, Florida

250 g grated Mimolette cheese

115 g grated Gruyère cheese

350 g elbow macaroni

1. Preheat oven to 190°C. Butter a 2-liter casserole dish; set aside. In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt 30 g butter. Add the breadcrumbs to the melted butter and toss. Set the breadcrumbs aside.

2. Warm the milk in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Melt the remaining 90 g butter in a high-sided skillet over medium heat. When the butter bubbles, add the flour. Cook, stirring, 1 minute.
3. While stirring, slowly pour in the hot milk a little at a time to keep mixture smooth. Continue cooking, whisking constantly, until the mixture bubbles and becomes thick, 8 to 12 minutes.
4. Remove the pan from the heat. Stir in salt, Beau Monde, 200 g Mimolette, and 90 g Gruyère; set the cheese sauce aside.
5. Cover a large pot of salted water, and bring to a boil. Cook the macaroni until the outside of pasta is cooked and the inside is underdone, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer the macaroni to a colander, rinse under cold running water, and drain well. Stir the macaroni into the reserved cheese sauce.
6. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish. Sprinkle the remaining 50 g Mimolette, 25 g Gruyère*, and the breadcrumbs over the top. Bake until golden brown, about 30 minutes. Let cool for 5 minutes; serve.

*I gave Louis a hunk of Gruyère and told him to grate it. Therefore, we don't have an exact measurement for this step. I say, the more cheese, the better.

And the perfect accompaniment to the most delicious mac-and-cheese ever? Challah! (Looks strange, tasted great.)

Winter Granola

It's "winter" here in Paris (I mean, come on 30 degrees F, that's all you got?) so of course we try to keep the oven on as much as possible. That means trying out things that we've been meaning to make for years. Example: homemade granola.

We always knew it would be easy. We just didn't know it would be this easy.

We borrowed a recipe from food-blogger and American-in-Paris David Lebovitz (another person we not-so-secretly want to be our friend) but made a few changes based on our own preferences. Here's the ingredient list:

5 cups (450g) multi-grain flakes or old-fashioned rolled oats
3 cups (375g) almonds, coarsely chopped
1 cup (125g) sunflower seeds
3/4 cup (100g) untoasted sesame seeds
1/2 cup (120g) packed light brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon dried ground ginger
1 teaspoon sea salt

3/4 cup (180g) unsweetened applesauce (or another unsweetened fruit puree)
1/3 cup (100g) rice syrup
1/4 cup (80g) honey
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

(We eliminated the sunflower seeds and used unsweeted apple/pearsauce.)

I would highly recommend that you visit the post where he describes this granola, mostly because it includes a picture of a hot dog. Mmmm... hot dogs.

Happy Chanukah!

We couldn't wait for the holiday to start, so we actually bought each other our first presents Wednesday morning, during a tour of the various kitchen stores around St. Eustasche/Les Halles. (More on that soon.) Louis got me a Chef's knife (second year running!) and I got him - drumroll, please - a crêpe pan! And of course that meant we had to make crêpes, stat.

We filled our first homemade crêpes with dark chocolate and banana. Delish!

Tonight, to officially ring in the holiday, I cooked up a menorah from scratch, using a pan, some aluminum foil, a flour/salt/water dough, and tea lights (call me Mag-gyver).

Louis surprised me with more presents - I got a butter warmer! And Louis got (himself) a book.

We had to try out the butter-warmer by making crêpes again, this time with a special filling I'll post about later. (Hint: it starts with "q" and ends with "uince.")

Can't wait to see what the next 7 nights will bring! Happy Chanukah!

Aftermath

To finish up "food weekend," a tale focusing on the dark side of cooking.

Maggie and I have a deal: I take Panda out at night, and she does the dishes. After Friday night's dinner party, I definitely had the better end of the deal.

First, she ran out of room on the drying rack.

Then, she ran out of room on the fold-out table in the kitchen.

Luckily, the rest fit on our stovetop.

Because we didn't prepare anything in advance, we ended up using almost all the dishes, pots and pans in the kitchen. This just in from Maggie: "Dear Dishwasher - I miss you. Love, Maggie"

PS Props to everyone out there who never uses a dishwasher and still throws awesome dinner parties. (Especially Becky.)

The Dinner Party

Last night, we had new friends Sara and Guillaume over for dinner. (Thanks, Robert, for introducing us!) As if the day hadn't already been taxing enough - Maggie took the GRE and I drank a lot of coffee while waiting for her to finish - we decided to whip together a four-course meal. By "whip together" I mean we had three hours to buy a bunch of ingredients and make everything before our guests arrived. It was a little intense.

Our menu ended up being slightly eclectic but all delicious:

Entrée - tortilla chips and home-made guacamole

Plat - Tacos! Chicken, white beans, home-made salsa and grated cheese on whole-wheat home-made tortillas

Salade - basically the same thing you see here

Fromages - Sara and Guillaume contributed three excellent soft cheeses to our multinational, multicultural meal

Dessert - my great-grandmother's famous banana cake (some day I'll post the recipe)

So - when are you coming for dinner?

This is Ridiculous

As if we didn't spend enough time posting on our own blog, we're now guest-posting on another blog: my classmate Andrea writes "If Worst Comes to Wurst" about her experiences trying out different kinds of (you guessed it) sausage during her time in Poland, where she is also doing dissertation research. If you click on the link you'll be treated to a picture and description of a sausage-based dinner we enjoyed a few weeks back. And below you'll see the picture Andrea wasn't able to post (for technical reasons):

We love food too much!