Toasted

Only about a week ago did the boulangerie stop smelling like toast. I was concerned that it would always carry the faint odor that comes from 150 contiguous years of bread baking in one place, a pleasant aroma at first that reminded me of rich history and artisan dedication. But one morning, quite out of the blue, we were seated at the breakfast table, and at what is usually a calm, relaxed meditative moment in my day, I was gripped with a feeling that something was terribly wrong. Why this fear and loathing, I wondered? Have I forgotten something? Loic in his thoughtful way had just brought me a steaming generous slice of toast from a freshly baked loaf of half kamut with that fresh Jura butter and the salt grinder as is my preference, along with my coffee. The warmth of spirit that comes from such olfactory pleasures wafted squarely to my senses and then it hit. "We'll run out of steam" a quiet smug inner voice crooned, and my chest tightened. Going to the site, seeing the dust and piles of rocks and broken things and bundles of wires that aren't moving and breathing the aroma of ancient toast that exudes from the walls and beams over and over again has conditioned me in some way. I feel slightly nauseated at the smell of bread or toast these days. Strange. No better time like the present to switch to fruit and keep climbing stairs, I suppose.







So far in the project there have been times when I could not make decisions because of a missing element, or missing passion. Missing something, anyway. This summer we marched through the cookie cutout kitchen showrooms of all the big manufacturers, and I kept ordering myself to pull myself out of it and make some kind of decision, any decision. I held out for awhile and just at the beginning of this week when I could pinpoint why I can't stand these kitchens, the ideas came easily. I can't stand them because the spirit and chaos of really good cooking straight from living things and the earth is missing from them. The lines are too straight, too many ball bearings, sleek things that match, stainless steel racks and spotlights, and not enough spirit. Even the expensive ones. Like meat in styrofoam and plastic, I don't want them. I don't want ceiling high wood veneered particleboard armoires decked with ball bearing baskets that slide out in ergonomic blissful perfection, I want old oak cabinets that creak a little bit and that came from the back landing of a Savoyard chateau with the direct knowledge that they were used to keep linens until the chateau was sold to someone who didn't want them anymore. Even if I have to bend down to get to the bottom shelf. I don't want marble because it's expensive nor do I worry about stains or etching, I want old marble that has been etched and honed with time and not by machines. A slab that tells a long friendly story to keep me company while I flip and roll pastry and dough. I want my kitchen to welcome like-minded people in this way, to tell a story of Lyonnais and French cooking. I suppose it's the story I'll have to insist on, like I always have. I hope you don't mind me telling it.



During times of waiting, or inactivity on the site, I go up there and do what I can. I occupy myself by measuring things again (my father always said to measure 3 times, I'd never be sorry), or with little tasks like removing layers of old paint from some drawer handles I recuperated from an old counter left behind by the boulanger, or wiping down the marble slabs we have, still not sure if we're going to be able to use them, due to technical questions that came up yesterday.

Summer in a Glass

About 5 years ago, I took my in-laws on a three week tour of the Northeast. Near the end of our journey, we went to New York City. At the end of one day, we wandered into a cocktail bar where the music was so loud I could not hear anything my father in law was saying. What a relief to get a load off our feet after walking around Manhattan all day! Brigitte and I shared a little grin while we looked at the cocktail menu. All were expensive beyond my wildest dreams, but since it was a special trip, and we'd had a great day, we splurged and each ordered a fancy cocktail.



Mine was a delightfully refreshing gin cocktail involving cucumbers. I wondered how they got this amazing essence of cucumber into the drink, and asked the woman behind the bar how it was done. She smiled and said that that they utilized the services of a mixologist for that cocktail and she was not at liberty to tell me their secret, which cost them a lot of money. I imagined all kinds of special techniques involving scraping the inner side of the skin of the cucumber to spritz precious flavorful oils across the top of the icy glass. A clear taste memory of the drink has come to mind from time to time over these last 5 years. One of those "I must figure out how that's done" kind of thoughts, on hot summer days, mostly.







Fast forward to this summer. We're up in the mountains, where a couple of months ago, I planted cucumbers and we left them to tend to themselves. The two plants have flourished and each time we come up, we're treated to the most delicious cucumbers. When you crunch into a fresh picked home grown cucumber fresh from the vine, you come to understand why people just call them "cukes". The sublimity of the gustatory experience is so jarring, so refreshing, that it simply boils down to a single syllable in your mind.



Oh look what I found! The cocktail! I fixed mine with ordinary gin, good juicy limes, a generous handful of suit shaped sugar cubes I had hanging around from a card playing weekend, fresh cukes, and mint plucked direct from the garden. It's exactly what they were serving in that cocktail bar. It turns out that the original recipe was submitted by a curator (obviously a man of good taste) named Adam Frank who entered a New York Times readers drink contest in 2006. It's too bad that owner of that cocktail bar didn't read the newspaper, he could have saved himself a lot of money. I plan to prepare it for everyone I know. You should too.



The Cuke, Original Recipe here, for which I think I paid something like 11 dollars for one in New York City. Serves 3-4.







3 limes

a huge cucumber from the garden

a generous bouquet of fresh mint

a large handful of sugar cubes

a cup of gin

ice

Perrier



Wash the limes, cucumber, and mint. Slice one and a half of the limes, and put them in a big bowl. Do the same for half the cucumber. Squeeze the rest of the limes and add the juice. Add the sugar cubes and the mint leaves. Take a spoon and crush it all up until it begins to render a good deal of juice. Add the gin to this, stir it up, and then transfer everything into a container you can put into the refrigerator. Chill for 30 to 45 minutes. I suppose you could chill this longer if you're getting ready for a party.



When you're ready to serve the cocktail, fill up tall glasses with ice, a long thin slice of fresh cucumber, and strain the mixture over the ice until it's about on half to two thirds full (depending on your guests). Top with Perrier (or any soda water you have), and serve immediately. Delightful.

Prunes to Pie

The ones I got on the Marché Saint-Antoine the other day were this year's last. There will be no more Prunes St. Jean this year. Soft and flavorful, they expand like summer days in our mouths. Ian looks doleful and waits sweetly while I pit them for a pie. We're waiting, hoping, fingers crossed for news on our grant application for the teaching kitchen. I toss Ian a pitted plum every now and then and he repeats each time "merci, maman". Wishing I had filmed him, I hear Loic running the bath. The baby trots back, mouth full of plum, to peel off his play clothes and arrange his boats. I head to the kitchen to dump these plums onto some quick finger-spread dough. Look, there are some currants. A little sugar. Fingers crossed, then licked.

*the word for plum in French is prune.

La Boite à Café

There comes a time in every expat's life when the question of coffee comes up. It does not matter what country you're in or what country you're from. In my first years abroad in Beijing, for example, I harbored a persistent daydream of my country's "bottomless cup". That waitress at Denny's Erie Boulevard Syracuse played a role, the one who was very tan all year round and had beached hair. When we went there to study for exams, she'd come over and purse her shriveled lips voluptuously, her halo of brittle split ends backlit by a sunken spotlight in the ceiling and say "more coffee, hon?" Her wrinkled cleavage always shifted plumply in her polyester uniform and there was that hot pouring sound.

What you think is good at 18 and what you think is good at 28 are completely different. My university days pre-dated any really good coffee in Central New York. But in my expat mind, the dream-coddled cup festered and grew. I remember coming home from one really long stint away, stopping in New York City for shopping on the way home and suddenly being hit at a Manhattan cafe with the reality that all the great service and bounty of unlimited fabulous coffee was indeed a distilled composite. It didn't really exist.

Since that time, however, good coffee actually materialized in the States, in the west. I went back for a couple of years and have very good memories of worshipping one particularly fabulous coffee shop in Santa Monica. They were so mean there! I was pleased as punch to submit to any amount of cult induced scorn to read the paper on a ratty old couch with the west coast sun steaming through abundant windows. Man, did I love that place. And when I became we, and we left the country again, I'd pay for the good coffee that had then made it's way east and drink it down, I'd pack so much of it into my suitcase to return to France that it looked like I was trying to smuggle something. I always distribute it to friends and freeze as much as possible. People ask what to bring and I always say "good coffee". I'll sit at one of the chain shops that have proliferated from time to time and pretend, but it really doesn't amount to anything but suspension of disbelief. Even Illy doesn't do it, although I do like the limited edition tins.



I have taken to walking stairs with a little spitfire of a Korean American who will not accept "my hip hurts" as an excuse not to get out early and go at full speed for an hour or two each day. I love her determined will and knowing ways, she's a very good coach. Some days we conquer stairs until there are none left to conquer, and some days we saunter through neighborhoods and stop in the cafes for a cup of whatever coffee they're serving. We figure if we try a different cafe every morning, in a few years we will have tried every one in the city of Lyon. This old dust pressed through dirty valves ranges from dimly acceptable to abominably bad. One fine morning just a few weeks ago, we happened, on one of our sauntering days, across a brand new cafe, and sat down.

Imagine my surprise to be transported by an initial sip that pierced like a steam engine straight to my longing soul. I am talking years. Maybe even a dream come true. "We are drinking real coffee here, Mimi", I remember saying. We then fell into a conversation with the man who roasts his own beans. He is one dedicated barista and they have their ways of strongly suggesting certain manners that fall in line with the culture of people who really care about coffee, but to my grand pleasure, the cult of scorn has been eliminated from the equation. Their summer menu lists weekly roasted coffees along with their provenance, altitude, estate at which the beans were grown, variety of bean, and any certification the coffee enjoys, as well as ideas about what to expect in the flavor of each kind. They serve their coffee filtered, French pressed, syphoned, brewed by Chemex, and of course regular expresso, with a variety of classic cafe standards on the chalkboard every day. They'll grind you a sack full of whatever is in season to your specifications and send you on your merry way leaving a swirling waft of heaven in your wake. Your neighbors will wonder at the aroma in the hallway when they arrive home hours after you've come home. This couple's work completes something in your life, and in the neighborhood.

Their coffee is so good, they don't need anything but that to keep a steady stream of customers all day long, every day. But they do have Free wifi and a terrace, which basically makes the place perfect.

La Boite à Café
3 rue Abbé Rozier
69001 Lyon, France
04 27 01 48 71

You can read more about this couple and their business on their website.

Slow Feuilletage

A few days ago, I was planning to have a dinner party and while on the Quai St. Antoine, I saw the man who comes down some days from the Jura mountains. Amid various mountain cheeses, he had a slab of raw butter. After asking his price, which when calculated in my mind cost slightly more than your average supermarket butter, but less than the haut gamme butters in mass distribution, I asked for a taste. Light, unsalted, complex as it flowered on my tongue, it sold itself to me easily. I bought a kilo. While he wedged off two large chunks that miraculously enough came out to weigh about 500 grams each, he told me that the butter he was selling me had been made at the farm just the day before. Walking back home, I wondered at the deliciousness that this raw butter made just the previous day would produce in my home made pastry.

Having my recipe for fast feuilletage already in your notebook, I thought I'd share a few ideas and a reminder that puff pastry rolled out at home tastes far superior to anything you can find in the store and quite possibly better than you can get from the neighborhood bakery. It's all about the butter. When I talk about good butter, I don't mean some technical quality that one or another butter might have, but the flavor of the butter. A butter that tastes good makes excellent puff pastry.

Puff pastry has got such a bad rap. I just don't know what to say when people say they can't bring themselves to do it. After all, I used to be one of those people. Oh the things I never dared to do! But after some risk taking and realization that it isn't nearly as easy to mess up as people say it is, I felt like I was in on a kind of secret. One of the most wonderful things about puff pastry is that it freezes very well. Instead of hours of hard labor, hands-on time is more like 15 minutes, in little pleasurable bursts interspersed over an evening. If you have a kitchen timer and a little counter space or a table, you can easily fit feuilletage between cooking dinner, bathing children, story time, reading a book, catching up on your e-mails, or talking on the phone. It fits into normal family contemporary lifestyles, and can make a huge difference in your inclination to invite people over at a moment's notice, because you'll be able to serve really great tasting and beautiful feuilletage-based creations if you already have the good kind ready in your freezer.

What can you do with feuilletage? For starters, I suggest taking a good look at the many recipes that require pre-fab puff pastry. Next, know that you don't need recipes to have fun with puff pastry. You can roll things up in it and slice them, make matchsticks and spread them with things before baking, use leftovers, cut shapes with cookie cutters, make sweet desserts, tartes, classic millefeuilles, and hundreds of other things just by using your imagination.

Last night I had dinner out, and enjoyed a first course of this season's asparagus, roquefort and thin sliced cured ham layered between two little rectangular wedges of feuilletage. The asparagus had been cooked in advance, and this first course was constructed and placed in the oven just long enough for the cheese to melt and the pastry to puff, crispen and brown on top. It was a delicious combination and will be even better with my own pastry. I plan to do a variation on that very soon as a first course for friends.

In the meantime, I have a freezer full of tapenade rolls ready to bake, and several blank slates ready for just about anything. There are so many things, sweet or savory, that you can do with this pastry dough. Use the kitchen scale for this and weigh the water too.

Recipe: Slow Feuilletage

500 grams flour
12 grams finely ground sea salt
300 grams water
400 grams butter, chilled

Place the flour and salt in a bowl and make a well in the center. Pour the water in and work it into a smooth homogenous dough. Work the dough with your hands to get it nice and smooth, place it in a ziplock or wrap it in plastic wrap and place this dough into the refrigerator to rest for 30 minutes.

Notice the rounded ends are tucked under at first.

You don't have to do this but it makes things roll out more squarely.

Remove the dough from the wrap and lightly flour your counter surface. Roll the dough about 1 inch thick and then with the rolling pin roll out four edges to form flaps that you will fold over the butter. Once you have done that, remove the butter from the refrigerator, and place it on a big sheet of freezer paper or baking parchment, fold the paper over it to protect the rolling pin from getting greasy, and pound the butter with the rolling pin into a flat piece that will fit easily into the center of the dough. Fold the edges you have created over the butter in the center. Now, you are ready to roll it out.

Roll this mound of dough folded over your butter out flat into an oblong rectangle. Now fold this rectangle into thirds, turn it a quarter turn, and roll it out again. Fold and roll once again, then place this into the refrigerator to chill for 40 minutes.

Repeat this folding into thirds process 2 more times, for a total number of folding and rolling of 6 times. From there, you can place it back in the refrigerator to be ready when you plan to use it in the next day or two, or put that into the freezer, where it will keep up to three months.

Thanks go to Chef Sylvain Malland of Cuisine et Dependences Acte II, 68 rue de la Charité, in Lyon's 2nd arrondissement for allowing me to take photos of him rolling and folding puff pastry during a coaching cuisine demonstration at Emile Henry.

This Season's Asparagus

If you want the ultimate asparagus experience, the time is now. People are talking at the market about this year's unusual weather. Spring officially started 3 weeks ago and the weather's been like we're about to enter the month of June! Aside from an amazingly flush selection of culinary herbs, promising fabulous workshops and inspiring great ideas for how to best put them in the spotlight, we see that the Asparagus is out. This is quite extraordinary, actually. If you cook with the seasons where you live, you might have already observed some things where you live being ahead of schedule. The producer's stands are piled high with crisp fresh spears here in Lyon. This won't last long. As the season evolves, the prices will drop as well as the quality, since the smaller stems are better eating than the larger ones. The producer of the asparagus pictured above confided that the early season is going to leave him in the lurch until his next wave of produce reaches maturity. I think also it was an excuse for charging such high prices for his product. I didn't hesitate to buy from him anyway, since he's got great produce at reasonable prices the rest of the year. We are eating his excellent asparagus either plain or lightly dressed with a lemon boosted green olive oil dressing, and with hollandaise. As the season wears on, soup is on the menu chez Vanel. Here's my sampling of French market menu uses for asparagus, one I refer to often when thinking of great ways to use it. Green asparagus is kind of exotic in France, because traditionally the French only had white. This struck me as strange when I first arrived, having only had the green ones growing up.

Giving it Up

Many good years in this apartment. We hadn't planned on selling just yet, but when we met that sunny afternoon in the notary's office on the Quai Saint Antoine and each signed our names on every page of a big stack of documents, it was like a hammer slid into the cog of the inner workings of a big ancient clock. The papers were signed and everything got set in motion, to open the next doorway along the passageway to ownership. We must come forth with the full amount for the new site, design work and renovations, and in order for us to get the loan, our lovely apartment must at least be on the market. I am scrambling to get all of my creative clutter under control, mainly planning to sort and pack it up, living in more of a blank slate while we show our home. While I take these little objects and place them into boxes, I am reminded of my stubborn belief in charms. The baby delights in the big open spaces, placing himself in various staging areas to dance and play. I didn't know it was possible to harbor such opposing emotions. We tried to find a way to keep this apartment, guarding it for retirement, maybe renting it out, while at the same time moving into a place that better suits our needs. But sometimes you just have to make that decision to move forward, when the dream comes forth with enough momentum and you remind yourself that you needn't let go of the memories.