A Fridge Full of Christmas

You know it’s Christmas in Paris when the refrigerator looks like this: the fruit drawer is full of cheese, the cheese drawer is full of foie gras, the four bottles of water on the door have been replaced with champagne and the lettuce (wrapped loosely in a dishtowel) is wedged in over two broad, beady-eyed live crabs (nicknamed Gerard and Gaston). G. forgot they were in there. When he opened the door they started rustling - he thought it was a poltergeist.


It’s not even Christmas Eve and I feel like we’ve been eating forever. My new strategy is to skip one meal a day – so I can actually be hungry for the next one. So far, so good. I had a fine appetite for lunch today with friends: duck terrine with pistachios, rare calf’s liver in sherry vinegar and light as a feather baba au rhum with freshly whipped chantilly (I love when they leave the bottle of rhum on the table).


It’s been glacial and snowy in Paris these past few days. We even had a dusting on the geraniums. This, of course, makes staying in the house cooking – and eating – that much more appealing. Last night, G.’s grandma came to meet her first great-grandson. I made pot au feu, which is essentially boiled beef (I use beef cheeks and veal shank) and vegetables garnished with mini pickles, mustard and parsley – with the beef bouillon served on the side. It’s perfect warm tummy food. Finished with a few bottles of red wine and a Mont d’Or Vacherin cheese so creamy it needed to be scooped with a spoon, one could consider never leaving the house again.



This morning G. went to the post office to pick up the next round of cheese – an entire Saint Nectaire (the size of a generous chocolate truffle cheesecake) and two etch-a-sketch size chunks of Cantal – a gift from his great aunt, which has been waiting at the post office for 3 days. As if postal workers don’t have enough to deal with over Christmas – someone behind the counter was stuck sitting next to our odoriferous package.

Since G.’s family is from Brittany, on the Channel coast, Christmas dinner chez nous is usually fish, and fruits de mer (shellfish). My mother-in-law is very particular about her oysters. Only those from the seaside town of Cancale will do. They are hard to find in Paris, so ixnay on the oysters. The still-squirming langoustines were 79 Euros a kilo, which seemed excessive, even for Christmas. That’s how I ended up with Gerard and Gaston. I will boil them alive tomorrow, and let them hang out on the windowsill until fully cooled. My neighbors across the way hang socks. I hang crab.

Pot au Feu

3 large beef cheeks (about 4 pounds of meat) – you can use a mix of meats – traditionally different cuts of beef – sometimes I add a large veal shank (it’s nice to have something with a bone)
Sea salt
1 onion
5 cloves
20 whole peppercorns (black or mixed)
A small bundle of fresh thyme
A bundle of parsley (on the stem)
2 bay leaves
8 carrots (what my mom calls “dirty carrots” – they’ve been harvested and buried in sand – so they are mature and extra sweet)
8 golden turnips
1 large bulb fennel
12 small potatoes, peeled
3 leeks, trimmed and cut into 4-5 inch lengths

To garnish: mini cornichon pickles, chopped flat leaf parsley, dijon mustard, coarse sea salt

Place the meat in your largest stockpot and cover with cold water, add some salt, the onion pricked with the 5 cloves, and the rest of the spices. Bring to a boil, skim the foamy fat, and simmer, covered, for 3-4 hours. Beef cheeks have a lot of gelatin that needs to dissolve – so as long as you cook them at a slow simmer, there’s not much risk of drying out.

Add the veggies, and cook until tender but not falling apart. If you don’t have a seriously large pot, you’ll have to do this in stages, for example – add the turnips, fennel and carrots, wait until they are cooked through, then fish them out. Add the potatoes and cook through. The leeks take the least amount of time. If you do the vegetables in stages, you can add everything back to the pot to heat up just before serving. You might want to season the bouillon with more salt as you go along – up to you.

Serve the meat and veggies on a platter. Pass the pickles, parsley, mustard and additional coarse sea salt. Serve the steaming bouillon in bowls on the side.

Serves 6-8

Presentable Lentils

I can cook myself out of a funk. I’ve done it before, I can do it again. Last week I was thanking the world for all its riches, this week I’m having trouble dragging myself out of bed and I can’t seem to dig a path toward the surface of my desk.

Part of this, I think, has to do with child care – we have not yet availed ourselves of the many fabulous options for French day care – not even sure what we could get into at this point. Not sure why the new parent exhaustion has decided to hit me now – but here it is, and it feels like a sledgehammer.

I was on the phone with my mother last night trying to put together documents for Augustin’s American citizenship appointment next week. They need proof that I actually lived on US soil for 5 years. I have my college transcript of course, and Paul found some electric bills and old pay stubs from my job at the American Craft Museum. But my childhood, it seems, has been all but erased. Mom called back later, just for fun, to tell me she’d been to the vault and found my 1st grade report card from Ms. Lydia Becker, saying, in so many words: “Elizabeth is very creative, but doesn’t quite have her shit together.” What else is new? I’m working on it.

The apartment, it has to be said, is a disaster at the moment – if we were trying to adopt a child, we would never pass inspection. Somehow half the contents of the linen closet ended up in the bathtub – and what came out simply won’t go back in. I tried to remedy the situation by throwing out a shoebox of old make-up – the lipstick from my wedding (was it really that brownish?) and some Annick Goutal perfume samples that I couldn’t bear to toss because I love the name – Ce Soir ou Jamais (tonight or never), but hate the smell.

Thank god, cleaning out the cupboards in the kitchen is a lot more satisfying than the bathroom. I have a city kitchen – so there is not much room for stock, but I do have my staples. No matter what else is out of whack, I can usually count on having a box of Puy lentils and a can of tomatoes on hand.

The French are very attached to lentils; they are sensible unpertenious year-round fare - served cold and al dente in summer salads or warm and spiced under a piece of pan roasted salmon for a dinner party. Lentils are yet another example of what Americans might eat only as diet or health food that the French eat just because they're really good.

Often I just simmer my lentils as a vegetarian dish – onions, a can of tomatoes, some broth cubes, lots of chopped parsley a bit of white wine. But this week required a little extra omph, so I added a cured ham hock – which gave the whole pot a wonderful smoky sit-by-the-fire-and-put-your-feet-up flavor.

When I de-boned the pork and spooned some lentils into shallow bowls – it looked rather put together, like something you might see in a trendy “comfort food” bistro of the moment. Not bad for the back of the cupboard. I figure, if I can still put together a presentable dinner, it’s possible that I’m not quite as strung out as I feel…

Stewed Lentils with Smoked Pork

1 smoked ham hock
500 grams (2 ½ cups) dried Puy lentils
2 tbsp. oil olive
1 medium red onion, chopped
2 carrots, chopped

1 small blub of fennel, with stems, chopped
A handful of fresh flat leaf parsley, including some stems, chopped
1 fresh bay leaf

A few sprigs of fresh thyme
1 28 ounce can of whole tomatoes (with their juice), chopped
1 cup of dry white wine
6 cups of water or broth
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

To serve: chopped fresh coriander, sour cream or cream fraiche, fresh lime

Heat the oil over a medium heat in a large stockpot. Add the onion and carrot, sauté for 5-10 minutes, until the onion is translucent.

Add the lentils and stir to coat with oil. Add the wine, broth, chopped tomatoes, parsley and bay leaf and a good grinding of pepper. Place the ham hock in the center. Leave to simmer over a low heat with cover ajar until the lentils are tender and most of the liquid has been absorbed, about 1 hour.

Debone the pork. Serve lentils in a shallow bowl topped with chunks of meat – I like to serve with a slice of lemon or lime and some fresh coriander on top. There will be enough meat for two. Enough leftover lentils to get serve another 3 or 4. The leftovers make excellent soup – try stirring in a little cumin when you reheat. Then serve the lentils, steaming hot, with a dab of fresh plain yogurt or sour cream – squeeze over the lime and a add some chopped fresh coriander.

Serves 2 the first time around with meat, enough lentils for 6

Thanksgiving at Tiffany’s

As I might have mentioned in an earlier post, Pillsbury Vanilla Frosting was the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll of my adolescence. Never having smoked a cigarette, dropped acid or overturned a golf cart, my feeble attempt at teenage rebellion was to study for my pre-calculus finals hopped up on icing mainlined with a plastic spoon.

When I need a fix I go to Thanksgiving. This shop in the Marais sells outrageously priced American imports to homesick ex-pats. An 8oz. package of Philadelphia cream cheese is $6. (Apologies for the lack of original photography below, but the shots I found on paris.unlike seemed to frame the Fruitloops much better than mine.)

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When you enter Thanksgiving, there’s always greeting in French and English, along with rows of familiar boxes. I'm like Audrey Hepburn in Tiffany's, running my hands along the shelves of Poptarts and Raspberry Fluff. I stop to read the ingredients - something I never do in the States - drinking in the comforting, possibly carcinogenic, polysyllabic beauty of it all.

Strangely enough, I’ve never bought a can of icing in Paris. It would be like eating Pho in Minsk – ne’er the twain shall meet. There are too many wonderful things to eat in Paris to get stuck in my childhood obsession with partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

That being said, I do occasionally indulge in cupcake porn – the oogling of icing online. Surely this picture of a “frosting shot” (God Bless America) should come with a rating of some kind. Thank you to Cupcakes Takes the Cake for, well...being, and to The Girl Who Ate Everything for the oh so delectable photo.

It’s always odd to wake up on the morning of an important American holiday in Paris – and find it’s just business as usual. G. goes to work, and there’s radio silence on my email from New York. So a girl has time to think. For me, 2009 has been a year full of things to be thankful for. I have a happy, healthy baby boy, a husband I love more every day, a family who cheers me on in my crazy life projects, friends who challenge and comfort me, and a professional project that makes me pinch myself. I’m also thankful for being in Paris – because it’s Paris that taught me how to appreciate all this. Raised as a type-A control freak American, it was my reflex – and I fight it still – to quickly abandon all pleasures, all accomplishments in favor of the road ahead – the next item on my interminable to-do list. Paris has taught me how to take a moment. Even if it’s not a day off here, I now know how to pause and be grateful for what I have. It’s only when I moved to Paris that I truly learned how to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Happy Holiday Everyone!

Daily Flâneur: No Bling, No Fling

In honor of those fleeting Paris images and amusing factoids that just beg to be shared, I'm starting a new category of posts - The Daily Flâneur.

Here's a tidbit about the Lapérouse restaurant from this Sunday's NY Times:

In 1840, this former wine shop and bar was taken over as a restaurant by Jules Lapérouse, who had the brilliant idea of maintaining private rooms upstairs for married gentlemen to discreetly entertain the courtesans of Paris with Champagne, delicacies and expensive gifts. After an excellent, over-the-top lunch, ask the waiter to visit those notorious chambres particuliers, which still survive in the attic. They are suitably cozy, and the antique mirrors are covered with etched marks, made, according to tradition, when the astute filles de joie tested the authenticity of their diamonds by scratching on the glass.

Ah, those savvy courtesans...

The photo is the upstairs hallway - le couloir des salons prives. That a restaurant should have its own private brothel is no news to the French. As G. said: bien, oui - tu manges, tu montes.

Liberty, Equality, Gastronomy: Paris via a 19th-Century Guide
By TONY PERROTTET
A food-obsessed traveler uses the Zagat guide of the Napoleonic era to explore the culinary wonders of this city in the 21st century.

Pomegranate Mini-Break

Sometimes the winter market can feel a little bare. Monochrome. The riotous colors of summer are gone – and we are left with knobbly roots – the subtle grays and golds of mushrooms and the tapered parsnips. If it weren’t for the electric orange of the pumpkins and the Mon Cheri celemtines from Spain – I’d have to get myself one of those happy lamps.

Like Bridget Jones, I believe in the mini-break. I found some inspiration when I passed by a small Turkish shop in our neighborhood – they had three crates of pomegranates just in. I’m a sucker for food you have to dissect, so pomegranates are a favorite winter dessert of mine. I suspect it has something to do with the number of Shirley Temples I consumed as a child. (I know I’m taking my life into my hands, but I love a good maraschino cherry.) I first tasted a fresh pomegranate in India; we massaged the fruit like Nigella rubbing garlic into a leg of lamb, to crush the seeds, then cut a tiny X in the skin and drank it like a juice box (Thank you, Azar).

When I’m looking for a bit of summer on a gray day I often crave grilled sardines, or octopus – thoughts of a secret seaside village in Crete that G and I have been frequenting for the past few years. This year, instead of eating my yogurt and honey in a bikini with a view of the sea, I was sweating it out in a Paris delivery room with no AC. (I love my son, but next time, I want to get pregnant on the vacation, not instead of the vacation.)

I don’t have a rock to smack my octopus on, like the Greeks do (apparently it tenderizes), but octopus preserved in oil is available year round from our Sunday fishmonger. I chopped a bulb of fennel that had been hanging around the fridge waiting for an suitable dance partner. I added a small handful of fresh dill and sprinkled on the pomegranate seeds, like tiny rubies, for color. A dribble of olive oil and a splash of sherry vinegar completed the dish. It’s hardly a substitute for a Greek Island, but followed by a bubblebath, it did add a ray of sunshine to my day.

In other news, we have two contenders for personal geo-political disaster of the week. I was on the metro the other day when a man sat down next to me. Not too close, of course, as the seats in the Paris metros are calibrated so that no one can stretch across them to sleep.

“You are French?”, he said, leaning over.
“No, I’m American.”
“Hi,” he said, putting out his hand. “I’m your occupation.”
I blinked. How did he know I was a writer? Did I have long forgotten press pass around my neck? Maybe it was a translation problem. “Excuse me?” I blinked again.
“I’m from Iraq. I’m your occupation,” he smiled, his hand still dangling between us.
What to say? If that’s a pick-up line, it (like our foreign policy) needs some work.

But first prize goes to G, who was in Warsaw this past weekend for a conference. He listened to a perky young blond explain how her region could apply for European Union funding to help equip digital cinema screens: “They put aside money to help develop regional tourism.” she said with a big PR smile, “We have a salt mine, and Auschwitz."

Many of you will soon be descending into the button-busting, fight about the lumps in the gravy, who absconded with the electric knife weekend known as Thanksgiving. We are having our Thanksgiving Dinner on Saturday, I’m off to ask the butcher today to see if he will roast my Turkey for me with the daily chickens…no room in my teeny Parisian oven…

Fennel and Octopus Salad with Pomegranate and Fresh Dill

1/2 pound octopus in oil, drained
1 bulb of fennel, coarsely chopped
1 handful pomegranate seeds, about half a pomegranate
1 small handful of fresh dill, chopped
1 avocado (optional)
1 can of red kidney beans (optional)
Drizzle of good olive oil
Splash of sherry vinegar
Coarse sea salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Place the fennel, octopus, dill, pomegranate seeds (and beans, if using) in a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil, a splash of vinegar and add salt and pepper to taste. Toss to combine. If you want to make the dish slightly more substantial, add the sliced avocado on top.

Serves 2

Shirley Temple

Ice cubes
3 oz lime soda
3 oz ginger ale
Dash of grenadine
Maraschino cherry for garnish

Pour lime soda and ginger ale over ice in a Collins glass. Add a dash of grenadine, stir, and top with a maraschino cherry. Hand to a little girl. But only if she is wearing a velvet dress, and preferably, a tiara. (Too much information?)

Serves 1

I'll take the X-Small

Is it me, or does Konstantin Slawinski’s SL 14 S-XL CAKE pan, which outlines slices in several sizes, seem tailor-made for judgment and humiliation? Go ahead, take the piece that’s the size of a throw pillow, I dare you. The French are very good at this kind of foodie peer pressure – and to be fair, it produces excellent results. Moderation is king – so nobody wants to take the last bite, or the biggest. Bien sur, nobody should deny themselves the pleasure of dessert, but just un tout petit peu.

French eating habits are all about balance. If you never go overboard, you never have to swim your way back. As an American who grew up with her anchor firmly planted in a jar of Pillsbury vanilla frosting, it takes time to learn. But it does work.

A Crispy Day

I had a great day. An unequivocal, smell the roses, totally without irony great day. (If you're not nauseous already, read on.)

The next book proposal is in, I have some instructions (thank you, nettap) on how to add widgets etc. to this site (coming soon), and Augustin’s thank you notes are ready to go into the mail, thus saving the honor of our family. There was nothing on my desk that couldn’t wait. It was such a perfect, mild, bright fall day. Crispy leaves kept falling into Augustin’s stroller.

I walked down to Goumanyat & Son Royaume, my favorite spice shop (see, I did take you). The picture up top is the sun shining through the jars of honey in their window (oh vomit, says Beanie). They are just setting up for Christmas, so I’ll wait on the saffron chocolates till December.

I did pick up a bottle of Tasmanian pepper syrup for cocktails. (Mayur, there's a bottle in my suitcase for the first guy to come up with a Thanksgiving aperitif recipe.) I also bought some stone ground polenta; I’m looking for a corn soufflé that’s equal to or better than the one on the back of the Jiffy corn muffin mix...

My big purchase was a bottle of poivre long, whole Java peppercorns, which look like miniature bunches of shriveled grapes. It has this musty medieval monkey smell - clearly meant to be stuffed into the cavity of a recently killed pheasant (I’ll let you know). It reminded me of a Chaucer class I took my sophomore year in college. The professor was British, a former opera singer with a big booming voice. He invited us to his house for a medieval feast, game in wine and honey etc – which we had to eat off of big flat circles of bread with just a knife. After dinner, we all sat around in a circle on the floor and read The Canterbury Tales aloud, late into the night. (I guess that probably doesn’t sound like fun to anyone but me.) He said we were less fun than his students in England, because we weren’t old enough to drink.

On the way home I made a decision. I decided that my own acid trip back to the 80s (fashion does seem to insist that I have one this year), should involve a nod to the Solid Gold Dancers. (Don’t deny it. If I remember, so do you.) So I went into this Brazilian fitness shop on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir and bought myself a pair of solid gold sneaks to go with Augustin’s new orange polyester play mat, which he adores. I hope this doesn’t say anything too long term about our taste as a family.

Then Augustin and I walked to the garden of the Hôpital Saint Louis. There’s not a lot of green space in our corner of Paris, and this really feels like a secret garden. It’s the interior courtyard of a 17th century hospital, built by Henri IV to control outbreaks of infectious disease. (In the early 17th century our neighborhood was still well outside the city limits.)

The hospital also houses one of my favorite museums – open by appointment only. In my days as an art critic, I took the liberty of getting myself in. There’s a huge wood-paneled lecture hall with a balcony – displaying hundreds of plaster models of skin diseases. (Again, that probably doesn’t sound like fun to anyone but me.) But hey, who can resist a museum with a sign that says Syphilis, right this way. (Thank you Adam of Invisible Paris, for the fab photo...)

I was having such a nice day, I decided to cancel the babysitter. G. was away on business, so Augustin and I have been together 24/7. When we got home, Augustin had his bottle and I had leftover daube (that’s French for very fine pot roast) for dinner with a handful of penne. Then I watched the last episode of Band of Brothers on YouTube (in honor of recent Veteran’s Day), and the baby went to sleep - and stayed asleep - till 8 the next morning. All in all, a marvelous day.