David Lebovitz's Blog, page 28

Multiseed Muffins

I was talking to someone about cookbooks recently. In the age of the internet, things have changed as recipes became available by the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, online. Some are good and others don’t quite make the grade. Developing and testing recipes ensures the recipe is a good one, or at least will work. But when recipes are churned out, or posted by who-knows-who, all bets are off.

One thing my favorite cookbooks have in common is that the voice of the author is in there, and even better, they discuss the origin of the recipe, including how the recipe was developed. There’s been a backlash a little about food writing, aka: “get to the recipe,” as some don’t care about process shots, “I don’t need to see a cup of cream,” but those photos are proof positive that the recipe actually was made (which, surprisingly, doesn’t always happen…) So it’s good to keep your scrolling finger in good shape, and keep your cookbook collection well-curated.

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Coconut Caramel Shrimp

Spring is the time of year when new cookbooks land. (Fall is the other.) I check out a lot of them, buy them or get review copies, cooking and baking from them. But it’s always interesting when one cookbook comes along, and as I’m reading through it, I realize that I want to make every single recipe in it.

But I should backtrack for a moment. A few months ago, I was sent a preview of Vietnamese Food Every Day: Simple Recipes for True, Fresh Flavors (for a back cover quote), and as I was paging through the PDF, I found myself mentally bookmarking all the dishes that I wanted to make. So I was thrilled when the actual book finally landed in my lap, or in my kitchen, and decided to start with the Coconut caramel shrimp. I mean, with a name like that, how could I not?

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Salted Honey Pie

It’s almost pie season. Right now, there’s not much fruit available at the markets, but I’ve had this recipe card lingering in my “to try” folder, and decided the time was right to give it a go.

This is a pie I’ve enjoyed at Four & Twenty Blackbird Pie Shop in New York and I had the recipe on a card that was in the stack of recipes I’ve been hep to try. (I believe it’s also in their book, The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book.)

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Pretzel Pie Crust

I get it. Some people have an aversion to making pie crusts. They’re worried about which fat to use; some recipes insist on butter for flavor, others advocate vegetable shortening as the key to success, and lard has its fans. Then there are the processes of rolling out the dough, and baking it, that makes people pause when they want to make pie.

I understand all these things (and for the record, my preference is always butter), but and it’s nice to have a crust that you can transfer into a pie plate or pin, press it in with your hands (no rolling!), and fill with whatever kind of filling that you want, including chocolate, lemon, pecan-chocolate, pecan-ginger, or the one shown here – salted honey pie.

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Cafe du Coin

I’m often asked by people coming to Paris what neighborhood they should stay in. The usual “off-the-beaten-path…but not too far from the center” doesn’t help me figure out what fits those seemingly opposing bills. Everything in Paris is pretty close and most places are a 20 minute métro ride away. Like most cities, the good places aren’t clustered in the center of the city. They’re everywhere.

People tend to opt for the lovely St. Germain area, or the Marais, which are nice areas and people feel comfortable there. I know when I travel, I don’t want to stay in the outskirts of town and face a long commute to go anywhere. I don’t necessarily want to live like a local. When I’m on vacation, I don’t want to have to check my mail, do paperwork, and pay bills. I’m happy to go out to lunch every day and drink wine, or head to the beach.

I get that people don’t want to eat in a tourist trap, but if you walk around the popular-with-visitors neighborhood around St. Michel (in the 5th), for example, there are plenty of those kinds of places over there. (Lest you think I’m turning my nose up at that area, there are good places around there such as Shakespeare & Co. Café, Maoz, Café de la Nouvelle Mairie, the Beaufort cooperative, Treize, and Les Papilles, that I frequent.)

But Paris has changed, and continues to evolve. The majority of interesting places are now in the double-digit arrondissements, like Café du Coin. Lower rents and a neighborhood vibe are much of their appeal to the chefs and owners. As a visitor one needn’t feel hesitant about going to places in those parts of town. You’ll get a friendly welcome at Café du Coin, as I did with a friend when we took a break from work for a weekday lunch.

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The White Lady cocktail

I sometimes joke that if I ever wrote a book devoted entirely to cocktails, it’d be called “Brown Drinks, Up” because I tend to order whiskey-based cocktails when I go out, and prefer those on the bitter end of the spectrum, to boot. My favorite trend in the cocktail world is to put a little picture of the type of glass next to the cocktail on the menu, to let you know what kind of glass it’s going to be served in.

I like iced cocktails, too, but generally prefer them in the spring and summer, and stick to “up” drinks in the winter months. I have read that some men won’t order drinks in coupe glasses because they don’t look manly drinking out of them, or something dumb like that. Roger Sterling on Mad Men routinely drank martinis and James Bond enjoyed his Vesper in a stemmed glass as well. Men come in all shapes, sizes, proclivities, and persuasions, and you’ll have to pry my coupe glass from my cold, cocktail-chilled hands.

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La Cigogne

I was realizing lately, while packing up to head to another airport, stressing to make sure I had all my chargers, adaptors, noise-canceling earbuds, credit cards, SIM cards, and travel documents, and getting my luggage ready, fastidiously weighing it, and to make sure I wouldn’t have to pay $150 in excess fees, then checking in and getting my seat assignment, then braving the traffic on the way to the airport, waiting in separate security and passport lines, sitting around for a few hours until it’s time to board the plane, and finally, squeezing myself in a seat that’s made for someone a foot shorter than I am, that travel isn’t as fun as it used to be. (Although I did see a bunch of great movies last month. And found that the food on Air Canada isn’t bad at all.)

So it’s nice to stay home, and discover places where you live. Whether you’re traveling or staying put, whatever city you live in, it’s nice to find new places, which you can do without spending a few days recovering from jet-lag and kicking yourself for not downloading a few movies when you find the entertainment unit in your seat on your long-haul flight wasn’t working, which happened to me once, and made for a very, very long twelve hour-plus flight

I discovered La Cigone right in my own backyard, so to speak, when my friend Jane asked me if I wouldn’t mind if a shop that sold local and regional foodstuffs supplied treats for a book event I did at her cooking school, La Cuisine, I met Philippe Caumont, the owner of the shop. I tasted some of his superb pâtés, as well as a tipple of Armagnac, and fixed a date when I could visit his épicerie in Paris.

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Les baskets

Once upon a time, if you arrived via an airplane, or left your hotel room, wearing puffy white sneakers, you were immediately branded un américain, scorned for your fashion faux pas. So Americans (myself included) purposely wore regular shoes so as not to be pegged as, well – Américains.

A few of us brave souls occasionally bared our American patrimoine (heritage), bucking fashion in favor of comfort. I sometimes wore sneakers, carefully sidestepping those of the puffy variety, and if anyone had a problem with it (or them), I didn’t see it. But I was in the minority in Paris as sneakers were vaguely interdit, and most wore regular shoes around town. When I returned to the States for visits, if I ran into friends, looking down at my feet, they thought I had returned to attend a funeral

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San Francisco Book Signing

I’ll be at Omnivore Books in San Francisco this Thursday, March 14th from 6:30 to 7:30pm for a chat and to sign books. Copies of all of my books will be there, including a few vintage copies of Room for Dessert (!)

If you can’t make it to the event and would like a signed book, contact Omnivore Books and I can personalize it, and they’ll send it to you.

Note that the link to the event and bookstore, above, lists a price if you wish to purchase a copy of The Perfect Scoop from the store, but the event is free to attend. There’s also a Facebook Event page if you want to RSVP, although it’s not required.

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Pad Thai

Even though some think it’s a cop-out ordering Pad Thai in a Thai restaurant, marking you as a newbie, I like it quite a bit. I do tend to go for Pad See Ew, wide pan-fried rice noodles, although I’m a little picky about them because I like the dish when the chewy ribbons of noodles have stuck to the wok and start sticking together, getting charred in the process, and the dish isn’t overly saucy. Chow fun can be made like that, if you order it dry-fried, which I do.

At a book event in Paris, Danette St. Onge stopped by and gave me a copy of her book, The Better-Than-Takeout Thai Cookbook, knowing that I liked to make foods from other countries. Being from California, foods from Asia are part of our DNA, regardless of our individual ancestry. I’m happy to be part of that mix, and in Paris, Asian restaurants are thriving (and usually packed) outside of the traditional quartiers asiatiques, most notably Belleville and the 13ème. Thai cuisine isn’t as well-represented as, say, Vietnamese (perhaps due to the seasonings), so I often take matters into my own hands, or wok, or skillet, and make it myself.

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