Need ideas for New Years Eve?

An idea for an appetizer, with scallops and passion fruits. The combination is great.

Serving 4 people, you need : 8 scallops, fresh ones, 8 passion fruits, butter and green salad as a side dish.

Open the passion fruits and take the pulp and the grains, mix them with a fork, with 2 tbsp of butter.

Heat your frying pan, spread a tbsp of olive oil and bake the scallops 1min on each side, until nicely brown, then add the butter with passion fruits and use a spoon to put it on the scallops for 2 min.

Serve these scallops with green salad with arugula and a balsamic vinaigrette.

This is a great recipe inspired by a great cooking class I attended recently at Guy Martin's cooking school in Paris.

The chouquettes of my son Paul

I love it when I'm the help of my 11 years old son Paul. He likes to cook, to bake ... and to eat. The recipe of tonight is "chouquettes", in other words small "choux" covered with small sugar pieces.

Kids love it as a snack. He prepares them for breakfast at school tomorrow morning.

To make them, you need :

- 1 cup of water - 250ml

- 8 tbsp of butter - 110g

- 1 tbsp of sugar - 10g

- 1 cup of flour - 120g

- 5 eggs

- a pinch of salt

In a sauce pan, bring to a small boil the water and butter. When the butter is melted, add the flour and quickly stir with a spoon until it has the shape of a ball. Put the dough in a mixing bowl and add the eggs one by one. You should get the texture of a smooth dough.

Add sugar and salt.

Preheat the oven at 400F (180 degrees C).

Shape the chouquettes with 2 teaspoons on a plate that goes to the oven covered with parchment paper.

Bake for 20min until nicely brown (wait until brown otherwise they would deflate).

Put little pieces of sugar on each of them. Bravo Paul!!

Another soup recipe to warm up...

I left Boston last summer but brought back Boston's weather in Paris. Incredible!

Temperatures have been below 30 degrees for a week and we left the whole Boston's weather equipment in our house in the Loire Valley!

Not so many solutions to warm up : soups, soups and soups... or pot-au-feu, this will be for the next post.

Today's soup is a vegetable soup with a hint of curry. You'll have your "5 fruits and vegetable per day" portion.

You need for soup for 4:

- 1 leek

- 2 zucchinis

- 2 carrots

- 1 celery stalk

- 2 potatoes (baking ones, Idaho, Russet or all purpose ones like Yukon gold; if you're in France use "pommes de terre à purée", like monalisa or bintje)

- 2 or 3 tomatoes (you can use whole peeled tomatoes)

- 2 teaspoons of curry powder or curry paste

- salt, pepper

- Vache Qui Rit (processed cheese)

Peel and cut all the vegetables, put them in a pot full of water with salt, pepper and curry and bring to a boil until everything is cooked (about 30 min).

Blend all the vegetables with part of the boiling water (according to the texture you want) with 2 portions of Vache Qui Rit

Ready. Enjoy and stay warm...

Happy Thanksgiving! Need for a simple and last minute recipe for apple pie?

OK, this is my grand mother's.

Make a dough with 1 1/2 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of butter, 2 tablespoon of granulated sugar, 2 tablespoon of sour cream, my little secret. Mix everything together until it has the shape of a bowl, and put the dough in the fridge for an hour. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin and put it in a baking dish on a parchment paper. You can also us a ready to use dough(I like the Pillsbury one - pie crust).

Cut the apples in slices and spread them on the dough with each slice recovering partly the previous one. Then spread on the apples 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar and small slices of butter.

Bake for 30 to 35 min in a pre-heated oven to 400F.

Guess what : the smell in my apartment is great, and the pies will be ready to celebrate Thanksgiving in my son's class tomorrow! Happy thanksgiving!

Shiny soup for grey and cold weather

You know I love lentils. Here is a recipe of my friend Françoise who leaves in Poland. She enjoys there, as in Boston, very cold weather and has become the world champion of soups.

The lentils and tomato soup is one of my favorite.

You need one onion, lentils, a can of diced tomatoes, curry powder and a can of coconut milk.

Dice the onion and fry it until translucent, add 1 cup of lentils, salt, 2 teaspoons of curry and the diced tomatoes, and cold water of course. Cook for 1/2 hour and blend it with the coconut milk. Delicious!!

Now, direct comments and recipes from Paris...

It's been a long time since my last post. Actually, my life has changed again a little bit and we moved back to Paris. A nice apartment right in the center, a very good cheese shop, butcher shop and of course, a bakery just around the corner. It was very difficult to leave Boston but nice, in a way, to go back to Paris.

Well, I unpacked my cooking equipment and utensils recently and went back to my passion. Last thing I tried, was a duck confit gratin. Whaouh! This was just so French just served with a green salad or steamed broccolis.

It's quite simple as soon as you find duck confit. Remove the flesh from the bones and cook it in a frying pan with diced shallots and 1/2 teaspoon of ginger powder for 10 min until it's a bit caramelized.

Slice potatoes, cook them in milk for 10 min.

Then spread the duck confit at the bottom of a gratin dish, then put the potatoe slices shaped like petals or rose windows. Bake in the oven at 350F for 30 min until slightly brown.

Welcome to France and more precisely to Périgord in the south west, The area of the duck confit.

Smoked salmon pasta for tonight

6:30pm, some friends just came by to say hi... Of course, we ask them to stay for dinner, wondering what's left in the cabinets and the fridge to improvise a dinner.

Well, I have the basics to cook the salmon pasta I love. Let's cook!

You need for 4 servings: a box of penne pasta, 4 slices of smoked salmon, 1/2 a lemon juice, one small container of salmon eggs, heavy cream, olive oil, salt and pepper.

Boil a full pan of salted water and put the pasta for 10 to 11 min.

In the meantime, slice the salmon and put in in a bowl with lemon juice. Drain the pasta when cooked. Add to the pasta, 1/4 cup of heavy cream, 4 tablespoon of olive oil, the slices of salmon and the container of salmon eggs. It's ready! So easy!