Cucina Testa Rossa

La Mouffe! aka Rue Mouffetard

I have the great fortune to live a few blocks from rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest streets in Paris. As a matter of fact, it is the original Roman road that ran from Paris to Rome via Lyon, with plaques on buildings dating from the late 1500s! It runs from Hemingway’s early stomping grounds.... Click here to read the entire story.

Le Pré Verre, Paris

This blogging phenomenon has flung open the doors to the world and connected me with people all over the planet. This particular evening I was having dinner with a woman from Los Angeles who, like me a few years ago, wants to make a change in her life and being a Francophile at heart, is naturally drawn to Paris.  She stumbled on my little web site, felt a kindred spirit, et voila two months later she lands in Paris!   

We met at Le Pré Verre, a bistro du vin (wine bar) in the 5th arrondisement in the heart of the Latin Quarter. It is on the corner of rue Thenard and rue Sommerard, 1 block south of blvd St Germain and 1 block east of rue St Jacques. My friend Antoinette enlightened me to this local gem that I never would have stumbled upon. Chef Delacourcelle lived in Asia so he incorporates ingredients such as a cassia (cinnamon), bard and tamarind into traditional French cuisine. He also trained with the late Bernard Loiseu and mastered French pastry at Fauchon.  Needless to say, we were in for a memorable meal.

I had the exact same plat (entrée or main course) and dessert I had the week before as it was so superb I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I opted for a different entrée (appetizer) as the petite pois et fois gras (baby peas and duck liver) terrine was too tempting.  Last visit I started with the velouté de cresson (watercress soup) topped with chorizo sausage flavored foam and chopped peanuts. The melding of flavors and textures was a wonderful surprise and simply delicious.  This time, in honor of spring blooming around me, I opted for the petite pois et fois gras terrine. Once again a subtle combination of flavors and textures and combine perfectly. The lettuce on the bottom was unnecessary and distracting but the lovely little radish disks and slightly spicy vinaigrette added a wonderful crunch and spice to this already perfect dish. 

For my plat, I selected the morue avec purée fumée (cod with smoked mashed potatoes).  The cod was seared in cassia (cinnamon) which not knowing this when I ordered it (on my first visit) made my first bite a brilliant surprise. The cod simply melted in my mouth and the unctuous  cinnamon cream sauce enhanced the caramelized spice. The puréed potatoes were other-worldly.  They were smoked first so they had that earthy, smokey, hickory taste and puréed perfectly smooth.  When scooped with a bit of the cinnamon cream sauce, I didn’t want to stop eating them…ever.

Dessert, the crescendo, was simple yet spectacular. The descriptor, fraises mariné au persil (strawberries marinated in parsley), doesn’t begin to do it justice. The strawberries were quartered and marinated in cointreau and chopped parsley. The mound of berries were then topped with a sprinkling of chopped nuts and a large quenelle (football shaped scoop) of glacé du persil! Parsley ice cream!!! Who’d a thought? Pas moi (not me) that’s for sure! A very refreshing, light, and visually beautiful end to another amazing meal. Cue cymbals!

35 euros each with a glass of wine…worth every centime and then some!  Make reservations!

Le Pré Verre
Chef Delacourcelle
8 rue Thenard
75005 Paris
+33 (0)1 43 54 59 47
Metro: Maubert Mutualite (#10)

Librairie Gourmande, Paris

Visiting the Librairie Gourmande has been on my Things I Must Do In Paris list for longer than I care to admit, and especially since I just discovered it is a 5-minute walk from my apartment and that I had passed by it many a time and never noticed!  From what I understand, it is THE culinary bookstore in Paris and any respectable cook worth their weight in fleur de sel goes there. Who knew?  Not me, obviously!

My friend Sophie, one of the pastry chefs I worked with at the George V, asked me to meet her there so off I went, map in one hand and visa card in the other. I am like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store when I get within 100 feet of a bookstore, not to mention a COOKbook store!, so I knew I had to practice restraint.

I keep forgetting "librairie" does not equal library and I was expecting a large, office-like building, not an unassuming little Parisian shop.  But that did not deter it from stocking what looked like every cookbook ever written!  We spent 2 hours turning page after page of the most beautiful pictures of mesmerizing platings and spectacular desserts.

I asked the woman if I could have one of every book. She stared at me stone-faced. My humor was lost on her so rather than cause her more pain by trying to explain myself in my 2nd grade level French, I simply handed her 2 books and my visa card. I was looking for ideas more than recipes (since I can't read French unless I have a dictionary on one side of me and my roommate on the other) so compelling photos of food that I could re-create or that would give me ideas was key.  As was being written in English, so I bought one of each.

Agrumes: Le soleil dans les verres et dans les assiettes, by Armin Zogbaum (in French)

The title translates literally to Citrus Fruits: The sun in the glasses and the plates.  You get the jist. I love citrus fruits and even more so cooking with them and this little book is chock full of wonderful recipes all using an agrume!

a little taste of france, by Maria Villegas (in English, thank goodness!) offers traditional French recipes that have been simplified and modernized (read: easy) with stunning photography of local country markets, cheese stands, etc. There are many of the same recipes that I studied in cooking school but with half the ingredients and a quarter of the steps!  My kind of cooking!

I'll let you know when I make something from these books.
Until then, bon appetit et mangi bene :-)

Librairie Gourmande
4 rue Dante
75005 Paris
+33 (0)1 43 53 37 27
Fax : 01 43 54 31 16
Web : http://www.librairie-gourmande.fr
Email : [email protected]

Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Paris

One thing (of many) that the French do well is les fleurs (flowers). They really “get” flowers and the impact of their visual beauty. And now that spring is here, the most glorious flowers are illuminating the parks, lining the streets, overflowing from window boxes, and brightening every nook and cranny of Paris, guaranteeing a smile on every piétons (pedestrians) face.

My friend Kendall and I decided to do a walk once a week to a different part of the city and today we picked the 19th arrondisement in the northeast corner of France. It is an out of the way part of town, not high on a tourist’s list of must sees. But add it to your list as it is a cultural melting pot known for it’s Turkish cafés, Arab grocery stores, Thai restaurants, exotic food markets and kosher butchers as well as many beautiful parks: Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Parc de Belleville, and Parc de la Villette.  Local lore also claims that legendary Edith Piaf was born under a streetlamp at 72, rue de Belleville!

We spent most of our time at Parc des Buttes Chaumont which was the site of a quarry (as was Parc de Belleville) on a steep hill in the center of the 19th.  30 meters (100 feet) above in the middle of the lake on the top of a hill is the Sybille Temple which presents you with a 360 degree view of Paris.  Looking off to my left was the spectacular Sacré Coeur. Having never seen it from this vantage point, it was even more stunning than when standing at the foot of Montmartre and looking up.  From our perch, we spied a small café across the street as we were famished after our uphill-downhill trek. We ended our walk with un verre du vin rouge (a glass of red win) and an omelette mixtes (ham & cheese omelet). So simple but so delicious. I love this city! :-)

Parc des Buttes Chaumont
bordered by rue Botzaris, rue Manin & rue de Crimée
Metro: Buttes Chaumont (#7bis) & Botzaris (#7bis)

More information about this park :
http://www.aviewoncities.com/paris/parcbutteschaumont.htm 
http://www.pps.org/gps/one?public_place_id=366
http://www.atkielski.com/inlink.php?/PhotoGallery/Paris/General/ButtesChaumontSmall.html
http://www.paris.fr/fr/environnement/jardins/liste_jardins/parc_buttes_chaumont/default.ASP (in french)

Bay Area Bites

Not literally!  The Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area that is, actually rocks, and even more so with this cool new culinary blog, Bay Area Bites, courtesy of KQED, the local PBS station.  I am so excited that I am now one if their contributing "bloggers" (hate that name but if the proverbial shoe fits...) and hopefully providing an interesting perspective of culinary life in France.  Click here to see my first story about cooking at Chateau de Villette (of The Da Vinci Code fame) just outside of Paris. I'll be posting on Fridays so please stop by and see what life has stirred up on this side of the pond.

à vendredi (see you friday), Laura

Ditta Alberto Cozzi, Firenze

I love journals. Any color, any size, delightful designs or no designs at all. I have a stack filled with the best of intentions but nary a word to be found among them.  And yet I continue to collect these journals with the promise or new year’s resolution to put pen to paper and fill the pages with a myriad of thoughts and observations, and somehow hope to make sense of this thing in which I find myself, thru no choice of my own, called life.

There is one special journal that I bought in Florence in the summer 2001 that I actually used, albeit briefly, to document that vacation. It is a beautiful leather bound book that wrapped around and tied and on which I had my name embossed!  I was so delighted with my purchase that I managed to write a few comments and tape in a few ticket stubs but the novelty quickly faded.  So I gave up, simply embraced my addiction to journals, and watched the pile continue to grow.

Enter France 2004. When I washed up on these shores almost a year ago, I found myself for the first time ever craving to write, to notate every single detail around me as banal or novel as it may be. The cat in the window across the street, the way the fish fins continue inside the fish and become the spine, the way food tastes so much better with a sprinkle of sea salt, the pebbly sand on the Côte d’Azur, the vibrant fire-engine red petunias in the flower boxes in Quimper, the flame orange feathers on the chickens at the Nice Market, the names of French cars, the roof of the Gare St Lazare train station, the Christian Delacroix uniforms on the Air France flight attendants, the lace curtains in the windows in Brittany, the carving of the date and architect on Parisian buildings, the plethora of types of yogurt (none of which I can read) at the grocery store, and on and on and on…..

So I find myself back in Florence and my first stop is a beeline to that lovely little paper, book, journal store just off the Arno around the corner from the Grand Hotel where I purchased the above mentioned coveted journal 4 years ago. Ditta Alberto Cozzi. Founded in 1908, nearly 100 years ago, by the same family that runs it today. 

There are many beautiful paper, book, journal stores in Florence, actually just about one every few blocks, but this one earned my undying loyalty when on the above mentioned first trip I stumbled upon this store just as I had to leave for the airport. As luck would have it, the store was closed but I could see someone inside.  I knocked and a handsome gentleman unlocked and opened the door.  I explained my dilemma in my worst “Frenglish” with an occasional Italian word thrown in for good measure, and he gracious let me in, embossed a journal for me, locked up the store and returned to his lunch.  No attitude, no rolled eyes, no “stupid American” muttered under his breath. Just gracious and charming as can be.  Say no more. 

So back to Ditta Alberto Cozzi I went for another embossed journal in which to detail what I hope is another extraordinary year in France, but this time, for the first time, I knew these pristine pages would not be so for long!   

Ditta Alberto Cozzi
Via Parione, 35r
Firenze, Italia
+39 055 294 968

Buongiorno de Milano e Firenze!

the Arno River, Florence, Italy

Buongiorno de Milano.  The food is of course heavenly ~ a simple caprese salad with tomato, mozzarella and basil is a dream and a slice of proscuitto wrapped around a thin breadstick - well life just doesn't get much better than that! I'm headed to Florence tomorrow :-)

“To be in Tuscany is heaven...somewhere north of Rome, on a stretch where town and country, sunlight and seascape, exist in spectacular harmony, one will be struck by the near certainty that here lies the most perfect spot on Earth. Art, architecture, literature, history have done much to embellish what was already quite flawless.” -from Condé Nast Traveler

ciao, ciao.....et mangia bene!

Groeten van Rotterdam

Greetings from Rotterdam in the Netherlands!  I just arrived from Warsaw where I had the priviledge of witnessing history, an outdoor mass honoring the pope last night with at least 1,000,000 people in the city center of Warsaw.  Truly amazing.  I'll write more about it, once this crazy traveling stops. 

So after a balmy few days in Warsaw, I am in raining, windy, frigid Rotterdam.  I'm staying at the Hotel New York, a very hip, cool hotel that was one a shipping line building where all the people boarded ships heading for..... New York, hence the name. It's in the bottom left corner between the yellow crane and the tall building.

Witamy w Warszawa

Welcome to Warsaw, Poland. Just landed and checked into the hotel.  The park by the hotel was full of people, kids, dogs, and bikes all on a Sunday afternoon walk absorbing the sun's warmth while tens of thousands others were pouring to and from churches.  The mourning is palpable -- mourning for a man who is so revered and adored, responsible for the fall of communism, for their very freedom and for giving a voice to Poland. The New York Times beautifully conveys the sentiment in this story on Pope John Paul II. 

Cracking the code at Chateau de Villette

...the Da Vinci Code that is ! 

There is something magical about Paris.  I don’t know if there is a fairy perched atop the Eiffel Tower sprinkling fairy dust upon unsuspecting piétons (pedestrians) but things happen here that would never happen to me in the States. In this particular case, it’s probably because there are no real centuries old chateaux in the San Francisco Bay Area (though a few dot.com nouveau-riche imitations), but I digress....

Two days ago I was in Munich (sprechen sie deutsch?) in the midst of a 4-week non-stop whirlwind travel schedule when I received an email from a friend asking me out-of-the-blue if I wanted to cook a luncheon at Chateau de Villette just outside of Paris and, oh by the way, it’s this Saturday, two days from now!  AAAAAK!  There was no thinking about it, of course I wanted to cook there!  Chateau de Villette is a stunning chateau just outside of Paris and the center of action in The Da Vinci Code book.


So I flew back to Paris late the next afternoon, pulling together a menu on the flight home, ran to my local poissonerie (fish store) and ordered salmon for the next morning, to the boulangerie (bakery) where I ordered bread, and to various little épiceries (gourmet stores) such as Hédiard and Bon Marché’s La Grande Épicerie de Paris  for things I couldn’t buy at the marché (open-air market) early Saturday morning. 

At 7:00am the next morning, after a fitful sleep, I ran up to Rue Mouffetard (the very first market in Paris) to the open-air produce vendors for fresh pineapples and asparagus, then back to Place Monge to Poissonerie Quoniam to pick up the salmon and Patisserie Pinaud where Jean-Marc greeted me with a resounding “Bon-JOUR Lau-RA!” and 3 crunchy, chewy baguettes traditions graines (traditional whole wheat baguette with various grains sprinkled throughout).  I hopped in the car, chateau or bust!   

For this meal, I selected some tried and true recipes that I had made at least once before and that were very easy! Some of you might recognize these from earlier posts... Ease was key here as my stress and exhaustion level were through the roof!  I’m sure I would have sent an EKG machine smoking that morning. 

The entrée (appetizer) is a variation on a recipe from The New Basics, one of my favorite cookbooks.  It calls for green beans but the asparagus looked so good that morning I opted for those.  The salmon plat (main course) recipe comes courtesy of my colocotaires (flat mates) and if you follow it exactly, the salmon comes out perfect every time. 

The dessert recipe hails from Jacques Pépin and his new book, Fast Food My Way, where I had the professional privilege of a lifetime to be the back-kitchen chef on the KQED series of the same name. Ironically, it was almost one year ago to the day that we started taping.  So voilà le menu (here is the menu) and les recettes (the recipes). I hope you try them as they are really delicious and very easy.  Bon appetit et mangia bene!

Bienvenue à Château de Villette
Samedi, 2 Avril 2005
Chez Olivia

Asperge Sauté avec Noix Épicées et Roquefort
Sautéed Asparagus with Spiced Walnuts and Blue Cheese

Saumons Tropicaux avec Cous-Cous
Tropical Salmon with Cous-Cous

Ananas Caramélisés de Jacques Pépin avec Pistaches et Rhum
Jacques Pépin's Caramelized Pineapples with Pistachios and Rum

___________________________________________________________________________




Asperge Sauté avec Noix Épicées et Roquefort
Sautéed Asparagus with Spiced Walnuts and Blue Cheese

2 lbs asparagus
1 pkg lardons (thick bacon cut into small chunks)
1 pkg blue cheese
2 pkgs walnuts - toasted with cinnamon, curry, cumin,  paprika,  salt & pepper

1. toss walnuts in oil and spices and toast in 350F oven til golden brown
2. snap off tough part of asparagus and use peeler to remove the top layer of the bottom ¼ of the asparagus
3. sauté lardons til not quite done & pour off most of oil
4. quickly blanch asparagus then sauté in lardons to finish cooking
5. toss in crumbled blue cheese, add pepper to taste (a lot of salt in the lardons so no need to salt this) and serve.




Saumons Tropicaux avec Cous-Cous
Tropical Salmon with Cous-Cous

¼ cup soy sauce
2 tbsp honey
1 cup tropical fruit juice
4 – 8oz (225 grams) pieces of salmon
1 pkg instant cous-cous
1 small can petits pois avec carottes (small peas with carrots)

1. in a microwave safe bowl, combine soy sauce, honey and juice.  warm in microwave for 15-20  seconds to warm the mixture and melt to honey. stir to combine.
2. put salmon in container or zip lock bag, pour in marinade, ensure the salmon is coated with the marinade. Place in fridge and marinate for 20 minutes to 1 hour max (any longer and the marinade starts cooking the fish).
3. when you are ready to cook, set oven to broil. take salmon out of the marinade and place on a foil lined sheet pan. put the pan on a shelf about 6 inches away from the heat source. cook for 8 minutes.
4. baste with a spoonful of marinade on each piece of salmon and cook for 4 more minutes.
5. while the salmon is cooking make the cous-cous according to the directions. once it has absorbed the water, stir in the peas and carrots and let sit for a few minutes covered to heat through.




Ananas Caramélisés de Jacques Pépin avec Pistaches et Rhum
Jacques Pépin's Caramelized Pineapples with Pistachios and Rum

2 small pineapples
6 tbsp butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 cup orange juice
4 tbsp dark rum
1 cup pistachio nuts, chopped

1. cut off skin from pineapple and cut pineapple into 8 wedges. cut off the core on each wedge.
2. heat butter, brown sugar, juice in skillet over med heat and stir til just moistened.
3. add the pineapple wedges in 1 layer, bring to a boil, cover and cook for 6-7 minutes without stirring.
4. uncover, turn wedges over and continue to cook, uncovered for 6-8 minutes, shaking the pan in the end, until the syrup is a dark thick caramel.
5. turn the wedges again and transfer to serving plates. sprinkle with rum and top with pistachio nuts.

Bon appetit ! :-)