Clotilde Dusoulier
Blogger Buzz: Six Podcasts For Food Lovers
Jul 23rd
Whenever I walk, bike or metro my way somewhere, whenever I go for a run or sit down for a lengthy fava bean peeling session, I rely on podcasts to keep me entertained.
Although there are a few I listen to that are not food-oriented – This American Life being my unrivaled favorite — you won’t be surprised to hear I lean toward those that discuss cooking, eating, and the cultural or political ramifications of both activities.
I can’t be alone in this, and I’d like to share those podcasts I listen to regularly.
I wrote a similar post almost four years ago, but there are new kids on my podcast block, so I thought it was time to update that list.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: [Edible Idiom] Tourner au vinaigre
Jun 17th
This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.
This week’s expression is, “Tourner au vinaigre.”
Literally translated as, “turning to vinegar,” it describes a situation or a conversation that’s taking a bad turn and may get ugly. It can be likened to its English cousin “going (or turning) sour.”
Example: “Il a vite changé de sujet avant que la discussion tourne au vinaigre.” “He quickly changed the subject before the discussion turned to vinegar.”
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: Yves Camdeborde’s Sablés
Jun 15th
Menu Fretin is a young French independent publishing house that specializes in culinary books*. Considering the teeny size of the organization, and how crazily difficult it is for an indie to carve a space for itself among the Goliaths of publishing, its book list is impressive, featuring daring projects that straddle the old and the new.
Menu Fretin has published such historical gems as an augmented edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, a biography of Grimod de la Reynière and other assorted texts of nineteenth-century food writing, but also new works by contemporary chefs Olivier Nasti in Kaysersberg, Juliette and Jean-Marie Baudic in Saint-Brieuc, or the twenty-six expatriated French chefs gathered in a collective called Village de chefs.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Clotilde Dusoulier
May 3rd
Clotilde Dusoulier is the 30-year-old Parisienne behind the award-winning food blog Chocolate & Zucchini. Born and raised in Paris, she discovered her passion for food while working in California as a software engineer. She started her blog in 2003 and its success has allowed her to start a career as a full-time food writer. She is the author of the cookbook Chocolate & Zucchini (Broadway Books, 2007) and of Clotilde’s Edible Adventures in Paris (Broadway Books, 2008), a book on Paris restaurants and food shops. She has also helped edit I Know How to Cook (Phaidon, 2009), the newly translated bible of French home cooking. She lives in Montmartre.
Top 3 Paris Tastes
- Spider roll from Rice & Fish
- Sunday poulet-frites from Drouant
- Chocolate loaf cake from Cojean
Website
http://chocolateandzucchini.com
Books
- I Know How to Cook
(editor)
- Clotilde’s Edible Adventures in Paris
- Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen
Blogger Buzz: How to Taste Chocolate
Mar 23rd
Last week I had the good fortune of visiting Tain-l’Hermitage, a town in the southeastern quarter of France, near Valence. It is right in the middle of the Hermitage and Crozes-Hermitage wine country, in a gorgeous area that’s full of peach, cherry and apricot orchards. But me, I was there for the chocolate: Tain is also home to the Valrhona chocolate factory, and I’d been invited to take a tour.
We spent the day in paper hats, paper coats, and paper shoes (v. becoming), going in and out of large halls housing huge machinery, fat bags of cacao beans and ripples of chocolate, breathing in the intoxicating scents cacao emits as it is submitted to the many torments (cleaned, roasted, husked, crushed, ground, conched, molded, cooled, wrapped) that will turn it from bitter bean to the voluptuous antidepressant we know and love.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: Twelve Hours in Paris
Sep 24th
My friend Adam has just had what I think is a brilliant idea of a meme, named Twelve Hours in Dot Dot Dot: if you had only twelve hours left to spend in your home city/town/village/oasis, what would you do with them?
Because I lived abroad for a while, I have, on several occasions, spent twelve semi-final hours in Paris, and I admit they usually involved a combination of the following activities: 1) buying several months’ worth of my then-favorite face cream, 2) trying to locate my passport, 3) spending time with people I knew I was going to miss, simply enjoying the normalcy of being in the same time zone.
But I posit cosmetics, traveling documents, and companionable silences weren’t what Adam had in mind for this meme, so I came up with a more suitable — and food-oriented – timetable for my hypothetical last twelve hours in Paris.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: Hidden Kitchen
Jun 16th
Late last summer, a young chef from Seattle wrote to tell me about his underground restaurant project: Hidden Kitchen was to be set in an apartment somewhere in Paris, where he and his girlfriend would serve a tasting menu with matching wines to twelve diners each week. The price would be reasonable and chef friends visiting from out of town would be invited to cook there on occasion, too.
He had the vision, the name, the funding, the location, and the nifty cut-out cards, but he wanted to reach out and ask for a local’s thoughts.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: Saigon Sandwich
Jan 16th
True dining bargains are so few and so far between in Paris that by the time you discover a new one, the previous find has usually turned into an old legend that the Elders like to recount around the fire while the Young sit there and wish they’d brought their iPod.
But when it comes to lunch and fuss-free food, Paris has no shortage of hole-in-the-wall gems: you just need to know where to look. And today, let us look in the general direction of Belleville and, more precisely, a little street off the general hullabaloo of the boulevard.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: Favorites of the Moment
Dec 15th
Barbie dolls didn’t do much for me when I was little, but I had a passion for plush animals. Each of them had a name and a set of personality traits (often refined by my father, who would improvise bedtime shows for my sister and me, with voices and everything), and they felt more alive than I think grownups can really remember. A direct consequence of this was that, even though I had preferences, naturally — I remember a black crow I’d won at the Jardin d’Acclimatation: it was ugly, it smelled funny, and I couldn’t bring myself to really love it –, I forbid myself to even admit these feelings, for fear of hurting theirs.
But now that I’m more or less an adult and have a pretty strong hunch that inanimate objects can’t get upset, I feel comfortable listing a few of my current edible and drinkable favorites from recent food shopping excursions. (
Blogger Buzz: La Bague de Kenza
Oct 26th
Walking through the Oberkampf neighborhood this past Friday on my way from one appointment to the next, I glanced at my watch and gleefully realized I had just enough time to drop by La Bague de Kenza, a luxurious Algerian pastry shop on rue Saint-Maur.
There was a line snaking outside onto the sidewalk — it was still Ramadan then and many of the customers were buying sweets for the nightly fast-breaking feast — but this gave me time to be entertained by the verbal fight that broke out when one lady accused another of trying to cut in front of her (if you hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day, you would be nippy too), and to admire the colorful multitude of picture-perfect delights filled with almonds, pistachios, walnuts, figs, or dates, and flavored with honey, rose water, orange blossom water, mint, citrus, or vanilla.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Zucchini
Aug 25th
It’s probably safe to assume that I pay more attention to zucchini than the average joe, but if you had been walking by Joël Thiébault’s market stall* with me that day, you wouldn’t have missed these either: there, between the hostess-gift-worthy bouquets of fresh herbs and the off-white bulbs ofhélianthi (a cousin of the Jerusalem artichoke with fewer knobs), was a basket of curvy-necked, bi-colored zucchini.
These zucchini were a little scratched, yes, as if they’d spent the morning playing in the bramble thicket, but they were thin-skinned and firm, they looked as if their bottoms had been dipped in pale green paint, and this was too pretty to pass up.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini
Blogger Buzz: Noël à Paris – Shopping
Dec 2nd
Food gifts
If you’re unable to attend the previously mentioned Salon Saveurs but still want to find food gifts that will travel well, the classic recommendations are La Grande Epicerie de Paris and Lafayette Gourmet: these never disappoint and the broadness of their product range will guarantee you don’t come out empty-handed. If you feel more comfortable in smaller shops, Da Rosa is a great purveyor of interesting condiments, vinegars and spices, and I have to put in a good word for G. Detou as well, which specializes in baking supplies sold in bulk, but also offers regular-sized and very reasonably-priced fine goods — chocolate, mustard and a variety of canned items.
> Continue reading at Chocolate & Zucchini