A Little Perking Up

Parisians have nothing to complain about when it comes to winter weather, as I often point out to my work colleagues by a daily report of the current conditions in upstate New York. Part of the magic of Paris seems to be if it’s cloudy all week, its totally sunny and beautiful on Saturday. Okay, so maybe that was just these past two weekends. In general, the lack of sunlight when you wake up and come home and the preponderance of gray skies leave me a little sluggish, and craving bright flavorful foods that remind me that its warm and sunny somewhere else in the world.
So, I was excited to see that the latest issue of Régal, a French cooking magazine, had a series of recipes “100% vitaminé” that feature fresh fruits and zesty flavors. One of those recipes happened to be by Clotilde Dusoulier, a Parisian food blogger who has a cookbook coming out in the US in the spring. She has lots of great food photos and features on her website, Chocolate and Zucchini, but I never have actually tried any of them. That’s mostly because my tiny kitchen is just not very well-equipped, although I am always extremely tempted to go out and buy the high quality special ingredients she combs from the many gourmet boutiques in Paris.
This time, though, all I had to do was borrow a blender from a friend to try out Clotilde’s Pomegranate Lassi and Tiger’s Tongue Cookies. It also gave me a chance to try the Breton version of buttermilk, lait ribot, which she has featured on her blog.
The recipe specifies one pomegranate per serving, simply blended with lait ribot and sweetened with just a bit of honey, pretty much to taste. The fruits I had were a little on the small side, so I ended up with a color a lot lighter than the picture in the magazine, but the flavor did not disappoint. Overall, the drink was rich and creamy, and the added honey just took a little edge off the tartness of the fruit.
The cookies were a perfect accompaniment, too, crispy at the edges and soft and buttery in the middle. The recipe was the same as the vanilla version of her cat’s tongue cookies, only made to be twice as long. The cookies were trés facile, but unfortunately went soft after a day, and were not quite the same even after re-crisping them up in the oven.
I was so happy with the way that the rich tangy-sour flavor of the lait ribot complemented the sweet-tartness of the pomegranate that I decided to try one of the variations she suggested, which was to use passion fruits in place of the pomegranates. Of course, the color was even more pale, but the lovely fragrance and zippy tartness of the fruits really perked me up. You can see that there are flecks of the seeds, but the ones left after straining it were not perceptible in the drink's texture.
Although she suggests fondant au chocolat (molten chocolate cake) as an alternative dessert to go with the lassi, I think it would go perfectly with crepes, since we have now passed from the holiday season of the frangipane cake, I mean Epiphany, to Chandeleur, when crepes are the dessert. I made crepes yesterday and took them in for my labmates—half of them were plain but half had some cocoa powder in the batter. ‘Trés Originale!’ was their response to the chocolate crepes. Okay, well the recipe was by Pierre Hermé in a little chocolate cookbook I got with a weekend edition of ‘Le Figaro’ in December. But I happily took the credit and decided to reward myself by making another batch, just for me!