Strawberry Seduction

The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.

That old saying is dead wrong.

We've been in the midst of springtime strawberry madness, ever since our first fling experimenting with gariguette strawberries. We've since dived head-first into these relatively pale, small, but surprisingly flavorful berries.

Going back to using the passoir à grosseiles food mill/strainer/toy type thing, our first order of business was to turn a 280g basket of gariguettes into syrup for desserts, beverages, etc.


After hours of cooking down, straining, filtering, and cooking down some more, it's a bit disappointing to find that a heaping basket of strawberries yields less than 100ml of concentrated syrup.

Then you taste it, licking a tiny little drop off the the tip of your finger, and it's as though about 100 berries just invaded your mouth, overwhelming your tastebuds and palate like a big strawberry monster.

Despite past (successful) attempts on both of our behalves to survive on a liquid diet, we then decided to try something more solid: Jam. Of course, we had to go that extra trendy, Parisian route and make it a confiture de gariguette au poivre noir – with black pepper. During the cooking process, the generous pinch of black pepper (in about 1.5 basket's worth of strawberries, macerated in sugar the night before) seemed a bit much and gave the rapidly reducing mixture a cough-inducing bite.


But after canning and cooling, the pepper mellows out into a sublime foil to the extreme sweet and tart supplied by the powerful little strawberries.

And that hint of pepper somehow rounds out the combination of strawberry jam, salted butter, and freshly toasted baguette. The sweet and savory makes this simple, quick breakfast item feel almost like a meal. Other than, you know, that whole part about wanting more, and more, and more...

Greased Up and Ready to Go

Ahh, Easter Sunday.

While normal people in France get together with their families or attend mass or something ridiculous like that, we thought we'd get outside and do our thing in the park. But such adventures require fuel, or as trendy Parisians call it on weekend: Le Brunch.

The concept is relatively new here and is having growing pains, so – as usual and like so many other things - we take matters into our own hands and do it at home.

After a quick trip to the local outdoor market (where half the lazy-ass vendors took Easter off, hmph!) we brought back a load of farm fresh eggs, medium and "gros", the latter weighing in at a minimum of 80g each. Mmm... ¡Huevos grandes!

Alannah did her best dominatrix impression and beat the eggs into submission, making a frittata with some fantastic mushrooms we'd purchased at the Paris small-producer food fair last weekend, green onions, and great big gobs of white creamy stuff. Not cheese, not sour cream... but yogurt. (Or are you freaky and spell it yoghurt?)

Well, in French parlance, it's fromage blanc - or "white cheese" - but to me, it's just slightly thicker yogurt. In fact, it's exactly like the yogurt any part Middle Eastern boy grows up with - or the "natural" yogurt you get at healthy food stores - and nothing like cheese. Until you cook it in eggs, apparently, where it hardens up and takes a nice ricotta-like consistency. A fan-fuckin'-tastic surprise. Dieters should keep this in mind.

Any health benefits of substituting a yogurt-like substance for cheese was magically wiped away by what we like to call steakon. If you go to a French butcher or grocery store and ask for bacon, you'll get something similar to that heathen Canadian bacon. If you want real bacon flavor, you can use lardon, or best yet, ask for some poitrine fumée, which is smoked belly meat, and about the closest thing you can get to American-style bacon. You can get it in thin slices, but we often just like to get a thick slab and grill it like a steak in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet.

Regularly eating a dish like this will likely kill you. But the occasional slab of steakon will - at worst - just have you sweating bacon fat. Think of it as natural lube.