Tabloid tacitly ADMITS GUILT, then gives credit to WRONG photo

It's summer, which calls for sipping chilled rosé outdoors (something we never did before going native) and taking advantage of the numerous terrasses Paris has to offer... That means it's time for slowing things down, taking the better part of a week off, watching fireworks, and eating a lot of salad.

From the simple...

Wedge of iceberg with heirloom tomatoes and homemade Thousand
Island dressing and breast of rotisserie chicken

To overly complex attempts at fusion...

An Italian take on classic Vietnamese – post forthcoming

It's time for chill attitudes and chilled veggies. In the meantime, the Huffington Post has quietly rectified their little uncredited content situation by giving me some credit for my work, but not all is rosy in amateur food blogger land.

I had complained rather loudly about not being credited for my awesome cheeseburger photo – more out of cheekiness than anything – and they very quietly went back and gave me credit for the photo. Furthermore, they even gave a link back to my Flickr page!

Our kick-ass burger, with an appropriate photo credit. Yay!

Unfortunately, they were a little overzealous in their corrections, and further gave me credit for the article's lead photo. One of Popeye's fried chicken.

It may say "Tavallai" under the photo, but I assure you,
we did NOT go to Popeye's!

Not that I mind having our noble family name on the front of Huffington Post's food section. But a) there's some other foodie photog out there who's not getting credit for his/her work in the field of 2-dimensional food facsimile, and b) it implies that I have the lousy taste to eat at Popeye's!

Mind you, Popeye's is the "Guilty Pleasure" selection of one of the chefs we madly respect. After reading his Momofuku Cookbook with much delight, David Chang cemented himself as one of our idols quite simply for doing things his way and turning a capricious middle finger at the food establishment. However, I ungraciously disagree with his love of Popeye's. I do admit to having eaten there. But I will not sacrifice the integrity of my endeavors by putting up a photo of carefully arranged "chicken" parts and styrofoam for the world to see.

So please, HuffPo editors, take more than 30 seconds when doing the – you know – editorial part of your job. So I won't look like some dweeb who loves Popeye's.

In the meantime, here's a look back at our rendition of fast food fried chicken: KFC vs. Local & Organic: An Epic Tale.

Toss This Salad

A week in Italy is a beautiful thing. Especially when you can largely eschew the restaurants and cook simply for yourself. The trouble is that in a land largely known for its meats and cheeses and gelatos, you pretty much mostly eat meats and cheeses and gelatos. (Don't talk to me about the unsalted bread.) And let's not forget about the pasta.

When you eat nothing but proteins and starches for a week, things in your body slow down. You get lethargic. You move less nimbly. You prefer to do everything laying down. So when we got home, I laid on the couch with a meat and gelato hangover. Alannah found the will to hit the market and go up to the kitchen.

After some banging around, I wondered what in tarnation was going on. Was she actually cooking a full meal up there? Would I have to call a surgeon in Neuilly (Paris' Beverly Hills) to make a liposuction appointment? Is my wife mad to bother feeding us after a trip like we had?

There. This oughtta make you regular enough
to star on German video sites.

The result was a ginormous salad, replete with half a head of red-leaf lettuce, lightly blanched broccoli (raw broccoli is for hippie), red peppers grilled under the broiler, fresh cucumber, and plenty of coeur de pigeon (pigeon heart, what kind of name is that!?) tomatoes. Drizzled with a touch of vinegar, a hit of salt, and plenty of our favorite olive oil, it was the antidote to a week of overindulgence.

Upon consuming what seemed like 2 kilos of nothing but vegetables, a wave of healthiness swept over us. Perhaps too much, so we high-tailed it to our neighborhood gelato joint for an appropriate Italian dessert.

Realizing that this much vegetable at once can constitute a shock to the system, our next meal incorporated one of the most fabulous ingredients we happened upon in Italy: Cuore di Proscuittuo. If you think Parma ham is something amazing, imagine this, the filet mignon of the ham. This is seriously drool-inducing stuff.

Handle this meat with care.

Normally you'd use one of those circular deli-style meat slicers to cut this stuff to the fineness it deserves, but we're amateurs here, remember? But even with our insanely sharp knives (the ones we didn't have with us in Italy...) it's tough to cut ham deli-thin. The solution? Cut "normal" slices, lay it down on the cutting board, then horizontally make slices from the slices sushi style. This way you get delicate, manageable strips without having chef's salad-type matchsticks whose rough shape interferes with the enjoyment of such refined hammy flavors.

We again went with a bed of red-leaf lettuce, coeur de pigeon tomatoes and a tiny bit of cucumber, topping it with a nice helping of cuore di proscutto and freshly shaved Parmesan. A bit clichéd, sure, but I opted for a balsamic vinaigrette this time for a hint of sweetness to go with the salt from the cheese and ham.

Moist & glistening.

The one touch that really made this magical, in my most humble opinion, was using several whole leaves of basil to garnish the salad. The occasional but powerful punch of basil rounds out the salad with a perfect balance of flavor, and distinguishes it from typical meat-based meal salads you get at your typical workaday lunch spot.

Egg. Salad.

Not egg salad. But salad. With eggs as the centerpiece.

Thanks to the whole dealie with frying my finger, literally, last week, I've been shying away from any heavy-duty cooking. First off because I'm now terrified by the sound of searing flesh. Secondly because almost any wet kitchen activity - from cleaning fish to doing the dishes - would require re-dressing my finger over and over again.

While Paris is a fantastic place to eat out, though, it can get old... Not to mention expensive. And with all the awesome ingredients available, it's maddening not to be able to cook. The solution? Cold dishes. Or those with easy, minimal cooking/prep. Or salade composée, as they like to say here.

Wanna Root?


Root vegetables may be more of an autumn thing in most people's minds, but French markets – like those in most places – are stocked with beets, carrots, and potatoes year round. The colors, though, are varied enough to shout "SPRING!" And chives seem to be on market shelves and fancy menus in amounts unseen since the Sour Cream n' Chives mania of the 1980s. Non-veg components include a gently poached egg and a walnut oil and strawberry syrup vinaigrette.

Egg on Egg on Egg Action


This one's pretty simple... Lumpfish caviar over diced egg whites on toasted baguettes with butter. We decided separating the yolk out and turning it into decor was the best way to go – not only for aesthetics, but to have the option of picking off some yolk to put on top of the canapé: Some folks find the yolk to compete too much with the caviar. This being cheap lumpfish, it's not a big deal either way... Oh, and look, somehow some chives snuck in. (Gotta use up the giant bunch from the market somehow!)

Brown Town
Salade de lentilles et son oeuf poché (er, lentil salad with poached egg) is a lunchtime staple around town, especially at the new upmarket "fast food" joints that try to push healthy meals (i.e. small portions) at non-fine-dining prices (i.e. cheaping out by serving mostly cold dishes). This is actually fine, because as is often the case with French cuisine, the simpler the better. And sometimes, we do actually crave something this stupidly simple.


I figured any moron could make a lentil salad, but I decided to look at recipes for inspiration anyway. Among the first I stumbled upon seemed one of the simplest, and by virtue of it being by Alice Waters, it must be among the best. I got as far as her first ingredient – she recommends French green lentils, and those happen to be the cheapest and most plentiful around these parts – and scanned over to the onion-type component and saw shallots. At that point, I nodded and threw the rest out the door. A new inspiration struck me.

The Persian dish addassi is a lentil dish that somewhat resembles Mexican refried beans in consistency. It's often eaten as a belly-warming breakfast with a pat of butter and nana-dagh, which is essentially fried mint. And you know, nothing goes better with lentils than melted butter. (Alannah agrees, and pleasing the wife comes first and foremost.)

Taking inspiration from that, I scrapped Ms. Waters' recipe (which I'm sure is fantastic) and started making an addassi-style salad.

The cooked lentils were combined with some chopped scallions (whites only) softened in butter. They were then stirred with a dressing based on melted butter, a bit of olive oil, cumin, pepper, and dried mint that I'd ground down into a fine powder with a pestel and mortar. While all that chilled, it was on to poaching the eggs and slicing up – you guessed it – chives to finish.

It's all criminally simple, and above all, mouthgasmically good.

It also keeps quite well, so you can make a huge batch, throw it into a Weck jar (or other fancy-pants brand of canning jar) and take it to work for lunch, where all your coworkers will think you scored a promotion and are now getting your take-out from Fauchon/Neiman-Marcus/Harrod's/(enter-your-local-overpriced-food-hall-here).

[Insert Italian Sausage Joke]

This post is dedicated to another couple in Paris, as it wouldn't have been possible without them.

They recently shared with us some goodies shipped over from family in Italy, and we had to honor the gift by consuming it as elegantly as possible. As much as I'd personally have no problem simply biting chunks out of a hunk of twine-wrapped provolone cheese, or shave off chunks of spiced soppresatta sausage with my pocket knife like a country bumpkin, I have to pretend I'm as classy as the wife sometimes.


So we went all trendy and had it on the cutting board, along with a super fresh baby spinach leaf salad drizzled in olive oil, balsamic, and freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. There's something almost primal about eating off of a well-used cutting board - maybe the way it invites you to pick things up with your fingers and lick off bits of olive oil here and there, rolling slices of cheese and meat between your fingers... That whole classy thing went right out the window.

Sticking with the board theme, we served up a from-scratch pizza the same way. The smell of the proofing pizza dough (yeast + warm water + flour) drove me nuts all day, and it remained untainted and perfect by being baked as the simplest and best of all pizzas: The Margherita. Mozarella cheese, tomatoes, basil. Nothing else.


The simplicity of this pizza demands the best ingredients, as it can reveal any and all faults. Our only shortcoming was not having a pizza stone or slab to really retain the necessary heat underneath the crust as it cooks. While our oven is pretty admirable, reaching 260ºC/500ºF, that's still nowhere near the heat of a proper pizza oven. And somehow, I don't think installing a wood-burning oven with a reflector dome to achieve 375ºC/700ºF would really be up to code... Mmm, but think of the tandoori we could make!

'Til then, these simple Italian fixin's will do us just fine... We'll put up with slightly less than perfect, as long as the ingredients are...

Sweet Little Bunny

Eating rabbit can be problematic for people. To many, it's an adorable woodland creature deified in Disney movies and Looney Toons cartoons, and very often kept as a (copiously poop producing) pet. To others, it's a rodent, and as such probably carries disease and shouldn't be touched, let alone eaten.

My problem with rabbit... is that it's insanely hard to bone. Or is that de-bone? (And you would've thought boning is the least difficult thing for us...) Granted, it was my first time, so it was messy, bloody, and a bit frustrating. But I eventually got my half-rabbit into nice, boneless chunks, leaving the legs intact, because really, without a visual identifier to know that your dinner is rabbit, you might think it was veal or turkey.

Which brings us to the choice of cooking style. As our first bunny, figuring out what the hell to do with it was half the battle. Roasting or braising it seemed so missionary... so vanilla. With the weather having turned from the "Paris in the Springtime" of musical fame to nearly bone-chilling wind and rain, a blanquette seemed in order. No, that's not a pun. A blanquette is a stew in a creamy white sauce, generally made with veal, and excellent for warming up when something nasty blows in from the North Atlantic.

Not actually being big on blanquette - for something that looks so rich, it's often very bland - we opted for a little sweetness, in the form of vanilla. (Just when we were trying to avoid "vanilla...") It may sound odd, but after having a Tahitian-inspired shark steak in vanilla sauce recently, it seemed like a brilliant idea.

And boy, was it. After stewing with onions and sand carrots on top of the stove and then in the oven in cast iron, the rabbit meat and legs were tender and moist... The vanilla blanquette sauce (made with butter, milk, and egg yolk) was poured in the pot and mixed in about 10 minutes before serving. Regretfully, the sauce curdled a tiny bit during the few minutes of broiling (to brown the legs), but it didn't affect the finger-lickin'-goodness of the taste.


Going with the sweet theme, we had cardoon 'n prune salad on the side. Sliced cardoon blanched in saltwater and lemon juice was mixed with an orange vinaigrette, basil, and slivers of prune. Served chilled and topped with a bit of orange zest. The whole looks-like-celery-but-tastes-like-artichoke trick of the cardoon went hand-in-lucky-severed-paw with the mindfuck of vanilla flavored rabbit.

It was like a Miracle Fruit party, without the Miracle Fruit.

Creamy... But Where's the Meat?

We took a couple of days off to appreciate some professionals in action, celebrating Alannah's first Franciversary with a rare Michelin-starred bistro lunch. Needless to say, we were too damn filled to the hilt by Alain Ducasse (or whomever his stunt cook is) to make dinner... Then we shifted gears and went to the best damn crêperie in Paris for dinner last night.

After hitting up an event at a wine bar near the Latin Quarter, I was hoping to have tonight off, too, being that a new, California-authentic sushi bar (which is to say about 500x more Japanese than a standard Parisian sushi joint) just opened in our neighborhood. I was exhausted, starving, and in dire need of something raw and fleshy. Unfortunately, the little prickteases apparently close at 7PM, which is about 2.5 hours shy of peak dinner time in Paris.


This left us to improvise at home. Alannah offered to do most of the cooking while I did some prep... She cobbled together some spaghetti, a gorgeous garlic Emmenthal cream sauce, and the last of our delectable market mushrooms into an amazingly rich but none too overbearing dish.

Not to be outdone, I hit up some of our other artisan food fair ingredients and whipped together an acacia honey and walnut oil vinaigrette, to top a salad of mâche, walnuts, and crumbles of soft, ripe brebis cheese from a family farm that deals exclusively in sheep's milk.


Note to self: When crumbling ripe brebis in the future, wear gloves or use a fork. My fingertips still smell like those of a man who got some "extra mileage" at the Spearmint Rhino.

Oddly enough, this is the first vegetarian meal I can recall having in months. It was probably last in November – when Alannah was eating out Italy and leaving me to fend for myself – when I'd have monastic meals of rice, tofu, and a simple miso soup. For me, making a mess in the kitchen just isn't fun if there isn't someone else to feed.

Taking Her Delicate Flower

Mesclun is, quite literally, a fancy French way of saying "mixed greens." But when we say "mesclun greens," you pretty much know exactly what's going to be on the plate, as opposed to "mixed greens," which could damn well be anything. Anyway, I say mesclun, you say mixed, tomato, tom-ah-to, arugula, lettuce... let's call the whole thing elitist and base a presidential election around it.

Anyway, mesclun greens get even more fancy and elitist when you add edible flowers to the mix, which our local green market was more than happy to provide. Run some red radishes through a mandolin and you're getting some über-elite salad.

A salad with this much inherent flavor deserves a light, unobtrusive vinaigrette. Mix a healthy portion of extra virgin olive oil with tiny portions fresh lemon juice, rice vinegar, and cider vinegar, add salt and fresh-ground black pepper. Drizzle it over the greens 'til it looks moist and glistening, like it's ready and waiting for you to pierce it with your fork...