Category

French

  • French Louie

    French Louie

    It’s funny how your neighborhood becomes the lens through which you see the New York restaurant scene. When it’s twelve degrees outside and wind is slapping your face like Joan Crawford in “Mommy Dearest,” are you really going to trek to the Upper East Side from Brooklyn to check out a new two-star bistro? Or…

  • French Apple Tart

    French Apple Tart

    If you told me twenty years ago, when I first started cooking, that one day I would be able to spontaneously whip up a French apple tart, I would have balked. “What am I? A French grandmother?” But that was before I knew how to pinch together a pie dough in a matter of minutes,…

  • French Cabbage and Onion Soup

    French Cabbage and Onion Soup

    There are certain ingredients that food people adore that make normal people cringe. Take cabbage, for example. Last week, I told Craig I was going to cook a cabbage for dinner and it was as if I’d said, “Instead of going out for cocktails, let’s get our flu shots!”

  • Le Rock

    Le Rock

    [From the 2/3/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter] For Craig’s big birthday restaurant meal, we went out with our pals Diana, Rob, and Kath to the snazziest New York restaurant — perfect for a birthday: Le Rock in Rockefeller Center. You may recall that I went to Le Rock with my parents and they found it “too…

  • Le Veau d’Or

    Le Veau d’Or

    [From the 2/21/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter] My birthday dinner was at Le Veau d’Or, where we went once with my parents, but I was eager to go back. We met up with my friend Jenny who you know and love from Dinner: A Love Story and our pal Chris, whose birthday we celebrated in Mexico…

  • Breakfast Crêpes with Eggs, Bacon and Cheese

    Breakfast Crêpes with Eggs, Bacon and Cheese

    Our first weekend in the new apartment and it was my mission to make breakfast. I’d carried a box of foodstuffs from our old refrigerator to the new refrigerator so as not to waste anything and that box contained perishables like eggs, bacon, butter and milk. In my pantry, I had flour, sugar and salt.…

  • Brittany Cake Aux Pruneaux

    Brittany Cake Aux Pruneaux

    The Neverending Story was one of my favorite childhood movies. I loved the back and forth between Sebastian eating his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the attic of his school and young Atreyu on his white horse (well, not for long…Artax!) journeying to kill The Nothing. Mostly, though, I loved the idea of this…

  • Bouillabaisse! A French Seafood Odyssey At Home

    Bouillabaisse! A French Seafood Odyssey At Home

    Certain recipes are so complicated, so expensive, and so high-stakes that they become, for adventurous home cooks, the equivalent of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or sailing a boat around the world. Bouillabaisse is that sort of recipe. Originating from Marseille (in France), bouillabaisse–at least, the authentic kind–asks you to make your own fish stock (with fish…

  • Last Minute Gougères

    Last Minute Gougères

    On Saturday night, with 45 minutes left to go before our friend Dara was due to drop by for drinks, I made a drastic decision. I decided to make gougères. This seemed like a drastic decision because: (a) I didn’t have the right cheese in my refrigerator and (b) I’d have to dirty the kitchen…

  • Chicken Cooked in a Pig’s Bladder (Chef Eric Frechon at Daniel)

    Chicken Cooked in a Pig’s Bladder (Chef Eric Frechon at Daniel)

    Maybe I’m crass, but when I think bladder, I think pee. When the bladder comes up in conversation, it’s usually in the context of “my bladder is going to explode, please pull over” or “ouch, don’t sit on my bladder, I just drank a liter of Coke.” It’s rarely: “Mmm, you know what would be…