Yogurt Cake Brings Back Memories of Growing Up in France

Posing like a tourist with the kids in Paris.

Immediately after college, when career, love, and life were still somewhat up in the air, people always asked me why on earth I was living in New York. As soon as they heard I was from France, they'd ask with this envious and confused look on their face, "Why aren't you in Paris? Why would you choose to live here? I would kill to live in France." I'd try to answer them, but they were never listening, their eyes were far away, no doubt dreaming of walking on cobbled streets arm in arm with a French lover, eating baguettes.


Even though the often repeated conversation frustrated me, I understood. Why would someone who had such romantic memories of France from a vacation or a few months studying abroad want to hear about unemployment rates, cost of living, and limited opportunities? It was much more romantic and pleasant to dream of biting into a croissant than to imagine yourself not being able to afford one.

Last week, I read a memoir that captured life in Paris so honestly and vividly that I wish I'd had it in my hand to give to everyone who ever asked me why I chose to make a life in the States. Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard is the story of how she fell in love with a Frenchman and came to live in Paris. There's plenty about the markets and the amazing food you'll eat in Paris. But she also talks about how cold many apartments are in the winter and how difficult it is to make friends with French people who have had the same group of friends since high school. It's all told in a straightforward, thoroughly entertaining manner, and I alternated between laughing out loud and nodding in violent agreement throughout the book.

Elizabeth Bard met her prince in Paris and made her home there. She gave him some of her American optimism and entrepreneurial energy while adapting to making small portion meals without leftovers and a bikini-wearing mother in law. By taking France in her heart, she became a American-French hybrid, something she makes peace with through cooking. I met my prince in New York and my home here. I gave him some of my French palate and relaxed attitude towards time while adapting to strip malls and my mother in law's matzo ball soup. I too became a hybrid, a Franco-American hybrid with my own set of recipes and memories. My home is here now, and I experience France as a visitor, stuffing all the tastes of my childhood in a week or two each year. I look forward to those food-filled weeks all year. I'm a tourist in France, a tourist with a treasure trove of childhood memories.

Each chapter of Lunch in Paris closes with recipes, wonderful recipes. I made the yogurt cake the other day, a simple cake to throw together that makes a perfect breakfast or snack treat. Its moist crumbs are pure comfort, and with one bite, I transported back as a little girl with a page boy haircut home from school in Paris, having my 4-heures snack with my mom, sisters, and our many dogs.

You should make the yogurt cake your own, with whatever fruit you happen to have on hand. I used strawberry kefir drinkable yogurt to make this and it gave the cake a pleasant strawberry flavor. Next time, I'll try it with plain Greek yogurt.

Strawberry Yogurt Cake (Gateau au Yaourt) - adapted from Lunch in Paris
Ingredients:
1 cup plain or flavored yogurt
1 cup sugar
a large pinch of kosher salt
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1/3 cups of vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 2/3 cups of flour
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1/2 cup of sliced supermarket strawberries
optional: zest of 1 lemon

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit. Butter a round or bundt pan thoroughly.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, combine the yogurt, sugar, salt and vanilla. Whisk until smooth.
3. Add the oil in a steady stream, whisking as you pour, feeling like a kitchen rockstar. Now add the eggs one at a time, whisking to blend after each one.
4. Sift together the flour, baking soda and baking powder. Add to the yogurt mixture. Mix with a spatula or wooden spoon until blended. If you're going with the lemon zest, add it in now.
5. Transfer the batter to the cake pan. Top with the strawberries. 
6. Bake in the middle of the oven for 45 minutes. Will be golden brown and will have risen. The cake is done when a knife comes out clean.
7. This cake is delicious warm, or saved for breakfast for the next morning (or two). It's moist and keeps well. Top with a little confectioner's sugar for fun.

Special thanks to the From Left to Write book club who provided me with this wonderful memoir to read. I'm really looking forward to the Pot Luck lunch I'll be hosting next week with the other Chicago members who also read the book. If you're in the area and have an appetite for French food - let me know!

Crepes for Mardi Gras

We weren't very religious growing up, but we never missed an opportunity to celebrate holidays with food. Mardi Gras was always one of my favorite holidays, because we got to have crepes for dinner. My mom would fire up the crepe pan and start flipping. She would flip until we couldn't eat any more, our bellies filled with crepes.

My mom would begin with the traditional savory crepe fillings: grated Swiss cheese, ham, and egg. To keep things simple, she didn't use buckwheat sarrasin flour for the savory crepes, and I was glad because I hated the bitter taste of galettes de sarrasin. After a few salty crepes, she would allow us to move on to sweet crepes, filled with salted butter and sugar, jams, and Nutella. My sisters and I would stumble from the table in the throes of the happiest food coma.

Crepes are my kids' favorite food, but they won't waste their time with savory crepes. They insist on going straight to the sweet stuff. So instead of a dinner time treat, they've become their favorite breakfast. But tonight, to celebrate Mardi Gras like I did as a child, I'll whip out the crepe pan and flip until they can't eat any more. It's only now that I'm a mom that I realize how much my mother must have welcomed the relative peace of our food coma.

Crepes (Makes 15-20 small crepes)
Ingredients:
1 cup of flour
3 large eggs
1 1/4 cups of milk (I always used whole or 2%, but this weekend I used skim and found the crepes to be thin and tasty)
2 tablespoons of melted salted butter

Toppings: Butter, Sugar, Jam, Nutella, Sweetened Condensed Milk and fruit

1. In a food processor, pour the flour, milk and eggs. Pulse 3-6 times until just blended. 
2. Pour into a bowl, add the melted butter and stir together. The dough should be very liquid, much looser than American pancake dough. Add more milk if it feels a little thick. You can always add a little more flour to even things out. Err on the runny side, better to have a thin crepe than a thick one.
3. Many cookbooks would tell you to rest the crepe batter for 20 minutes at this point to let the gluten in the flour relax. I sometimes do this, but often the kids are out of their minds with hunger and I just get going.
4. Heat a non-stick skillet on medium heat until hot. Pour some vegetable oil on a bunched up paper towel and grease the bottom of the pan.
5. Pour the crepe dough into the hot pan, swirling the pan around until all the batter has been spread around. Keep on swirling until no batter is moving.
6. Place pan back onto the flame. Cook the crepe until the bottom is lightly browned, peeking for doneness with a spatula. Flip the crepe either with a grandiose flick of the wrist (after loosening it with a spatula), or the old fashioned way with a spatula. Cook it for another 30 seconds to a minute and serve.
7. For butter and sugar crepes (my kids' favorite flavor), I melt the butter on top of the crepe as soon as I flip it.
8. You can serve these immediately, cooking and eating as you go, or make a big batch that you cover with plastic wrap and reheat in the microwave for 5 seconds a crepe.

Cooking Wild Boar, Back in my Mother's Skirts in her Kitchen

Being back in my mother's skirts in her kitchen, amidst her copper pots and well-worn wooden spoons, has definitely been the highlight of our trip as far as I'm concerned. I learned how to cook sitting by her side as a child, earning increasing responsibilities as my abilities increased. I started out observing, then graduated to chopping baguettes in time for dinner.

Every night as I aided with little tasks, I soaked in her techniques, her improvised sauces and the little finishing touches that brought it all together like the squeeze of lemon or the spoonful of creme fraiche. When I went off to college, I matured into my own as a cook, cooking up half a dozen scallops with beurre blanc sauce before going out to keg parties.

Now that I'm a mother, I treasure the infrequent opportunities to be a guest at my mother's table again, the rare moments to sit perched by her side at the stove, writing down her last minute additions to the sauce bubbling up on the range in my notebook. But mostly, I just enjoy the final reward: the dinner feast.

Here in the country, a lot of what ends up on the table used to run around in the woods behind the house. Most weekends during the fall are spent hunting, filling up the house freezers with wild boar, duck breasts, and entire pheasants. They actually have a stone larder at the back of the house which is quite cool where I was startled to discover dozens of hanging ducks and pheasants during my last visit here.

My mother saved the wild boar leg for our second night. It was a huge piece of meat, almost as long as her arm. She saved the hoof in an attempt to scare her American guests. We must be perverse because it only added to our excitement, kids included. They were all clamoring for their share of the wild pig, and were crushed when I put them to bed before it was ready. The next morning, they requested it for breakfast, and when I finally served it to them at lunch, they all had second and then third helpings.

Wild boar tasted a little like pulled pork, with a crunchy caramel like exterior. The sauce was nothing like barbecue, of course, but was equally addicting.

I'm fairly sure you don't have any wild boar sitting in your freezers to make this recipe... but it would probably be quite good for a hearty pork roast.

Sanglier
Ingredients:
For the boar:
Haunch of Wild Boar
Honey
Olive Oil
Thyme (fresh if possible)
Rosemary (fresh if possible)

For the sauce:
2 onions, minced
1 liter of red wine
1/2 cup of cranberry sauce (confiture d'airelles)
1/2 cup of honey
1 tablespoon of demi-glace veal stock

To make the boar:
1) Preheat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. (150 degrees centigrade)
2) Sprinkle a little olive oil in a saucepan. Brown the boar on all sides.
3) Mix the honey, olive oil, thyme and rosemary together to make a pommade in a bowl.
4) Rub the boar on all sides with a the oil and honey mixture.
5) Place the browned boar in a sturdy aluminum pan with about 1/2 inch of water on the bottom.
6) Cook in oven for about 3 hours, applying more honey mixture every 15 minutes.

For the sauce:
1) Mince the onions and saute over low heat in sauce pan until translucent.
2) Add red wine, cranberry sauce, honey, veal stock, and salt and pepper to taste.
3) Simmer over low heat for at least 30 minutes, until thick and reduced.


Juliette with a clean plate, asking for more FAT WILD PIG!

Paris Day 7: the Past and Future of the Loire Valley

After a day relaxing at my mother's house, we set off to discover the Loire Valley.

We first headed out to the Chateau de St Fargeau, which has been lovingly restored by two brothers for 30 years. Just imagining their to do list and their budget gave me a headache: with 15 staircases, 250 windows, and over 2 acres of roof to maintain, their work is truly a labor of love.

The castle was really amazing to visit as they provided access to every part. Some rooms had been set up to recreate scenes from the lives of various previous owners like Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, la Grande Demoiselle, a rich and eccentric cousin of Louis XIV who was exiled at St Fargeau, and Louis Michel LePeletier who was one of the first noblemen to be murdered during the French Revolution. Other rooms, like the guard room, was filled with swords and armor from the middle ages. We ran from basement to attic, posing as wenches in the kitchen, throwing Steve in jail, and imagining our lives ending in the guillotine.

Sightseeing in France requires a lot of explanations of violent history but the kids have been enthralled by it all. Rather than giving them nightmares, it's resulted in fascinating conversations about democracy, the rights of monarchs to their citizens, capitalism, and even the failure of communism! Just when I thought we were getting carried away, Bella blew me away when she answered Jack's question about whether bad guys ever win wars by saying,
"Jack, there are no bad guys or good guys, it's just whose side you're on depending on what you believe."

It only seemed fitting that after exploring the French past, we would also witness its future. We drove by the massive towers of a nuclear power plant and stood staring at the columns of steam it propelled into the sky. France is a big believer in nuclear energy. They have 56 nuclear power plants, generating 76% of the electricity used in France.

Paris Day 6: Off to the Country

We're now settled in my mother's house in the Loire Valley. My mother was born in nearby little village called Briare where she returned after my parents divorced. Although I lived in Paris as a child, my grandmother's house in Briare was where we spent weekends and vacations. We hunted for Easter eggs in its woods and pricked our fingers on blackberry bushes in the fall. Now when I return to France, it's where I feel most at home, surrounded by the seas of green and gold of the fields of the Loiret.

My mother lives with her new husband, Serge, in a remodeled medieval farmhouse near Briare. The house is built in a large square with a large courtyard in the middle. It's still easy to see how protected the house's inhabitants were in times of war once they swung shut the massive entrance doors to the complex. The kitchen and guest quarters are on one side of the square while the bedrooms of my mother and her husband are on the other. If she has a craving for a midnight snack on a rainy night, the only way to get it is to dash through the courtyard in the rain.

An hour and a half South of Paris, this is "La France Profonde" (deep country) where huge blue tractors will overtake you on dusty back roads and where jars of gun ammo will sit at the center of the table next to the bottle of red wine. My mother's life is a curious blend of cutting edge technology and old world traditions. She and her husband run a website selling electric horse fencing (an invention of his) while living on a huge property where they host frequent wild boar hunts. In their spare time, they play golf and he invents new products (the picture is of his latest project -the wine box).


This is rustic living, with drafty stone houses, dusty brick floors, and adventurous leaky plumbing. The house is overrun with animals: 4 dogs, 2 cats, kittens galore, and a horse, not to mention the 200 acre property filled with wild boar, foxes, bunnies, and pheasants. The kids are in heaven, suddenly free to roam wherever they please.

They've each "adopted" a dog and are busy exploring this new world. Juliette and Jack climbed a ladder and discovered a cherry tree laden with fruit and reappeared with vibrant red toothy grins. Bella gave us all the thrill of our lives when she took the wheel of the golf cart to drive us to the fishing pond.

At night, when dusk made the house seem just a little too spooky, all of their bravado vanished and they begged to share a bed. In this huge medieval farmhouse, my three little monsters bunked down together and fell fast asleep snuggled together, ready for another day of adventure.