Essential Kitchen Tools For a French Cook
When I get into the kitchen and begin to organize ingredients, I have several (let’s say many…!) essential and indispensable tools that make life easy, making cooking extra fun, and make food delicious. They’re often simple things, but they’re essential to my style, and they can become essential to yours too. Some you can pick […]
The Season’s Silver Lining
We had a halcyon moment last week, given the deluges of the weeks before and the grey skies and intermittent torrential rains of this week (I’m looking out the window now at cars crawling through rivers of water on the street, roses bent under the blast). After Monday, each day began in the mist […]
Poems on Plates
Sa Qua Na is a two-star restaurant in Honfleur, tucked on Place Hamelin among tourist shops, cafés, and restaurants serving moules-frites. The façade is discreet, the window shades hung at different heights as though someone got distracted in the midst of pulling them up. Peering in the window, the restaurant looks dark, closed. Once inside, […]
Scallops and Vanilla?
Yes. It’s a combination made somewhere near heaven. It came about through serendipity. A friend stopped to visit, and brought with him a large, heavy bag of scallops in the shell. (He’s a fishmonger). I had lightly salted butter in my fridge along with (unusually I admit), the seeds from half a vanilla bean that I […]
Love Letter to a Parisian Restaurant
At 21 Mazarine Chef and Paul Minchelli, has the softest, most delicate touch with seafood of any chef I’ve ever known. Didier Granier, also part owner who runs the front of the house, greets each guest as though they were JUST the person he wanted to see. Their combination is irresistible. And then there is […]
Scallops are Here
Scallops are here! Scallops are here! They’re early this year and the prediction is there will be few on the market because the price of oil is keeping boats in the dock. I hope this is not true. There was plenty for all at the Le Neubourg market this morning, and I hope it stays […]
Toasts de Sardines
With all of the glorious fresh seafood around me here in Normandy, I tend to forget about tinned sardines. I had occasion, recently, to do some research on their production and I needed to taste what I was writing about, so I gathered several different brands, and set to. What I re-learned was that when […]
