In the kitchen

When we decided to take this opportunity to come to Paris, it meant leaving my job and becoming a full-time housewife/part-time French student. Before we moved, I imagined myself making elaborate dinners, working my way through my favorite cookbooks, and doing all of it in a charming French kitchen. The reality is quite a bit different.

My kitchen here is much more limited than what I had at home. I posted a few pictures of the kitchen back in November; other than a few more spices on the spice rack and a new piece of cookware I received as a Christmas gift, it looks pretty much the same today. I’ve tried to keep the counter fairly clear so that I have a good-sized workspace, but it is less than a quarter of the counter space of our kitchen in the U.S. Our refrigerator and freezer are each the size of a typical dorm room refrigerator in the U.S. The sink is very small, which means washing our larger pots takes some creativity (thankfully this is J’s job, not mine). And our combination microwave/oven is just barely big enough to accommodate a 13 x 9 inch baking dish. Despite these challenges, I do manage to pull together dinner for the two of us five or six nights a week. It probably helps that I learned to cook in a studio apartment “kitchen” with miniature appliances and a single counter the size of a cutting board.

Here are a few of the things I made in our tiny kitchen last week...

We had fresh chevre from our favorite cheese shop a while ago and loved it, so I decided to use the cheese in a goat cheese salad. The base of the salad was the batavia lettuce that I usually get at the market. A single head is big enough to make side salads for most of the week in addition to a main course salad. I pressed chopped walnuts into the pieces of goat cheese, then put the cheese in the oven to warm it and toast the nuts. We also had roasted sweet potatoes.

I make some sort of Mexican food almost every week. This week’s effort was a tortilla soup from Mexican Everyday, by Rick Bayless. As an experiment I made some corn tortillas, sprayed them with olive oil, and baked them in the oven to make chips for garnishing the soup. They tasted kind of like corn-flavored pita chips (we had a few with some guacamole), but they worked in the soup.

We also had a lentil stew topped with a poached egg, parmesan cheese, and balsamic vinegar, inspired by this recipe. I used French green lentils instead of Umbrian lentils and omitted the proscuitto, using a little smoked paprika to give the stew a hint of smokiness instead.

J had asked for a butternut squash and goat cheese tart that I make once in a while. This is a recipe that I’ve made successfully many times before, but this time I managed to screw it up in many different ways. I decided to try substituting a slice of potiron (a pumpkin-like winter squash) for the butternut squash. I noticed giant slices of squash at the market a while ago and thought this was the perfect time to try it out. This was one experiment that didn’t work at all - the potiron I bought had a much higher water content than butternut squash and less flavor.

I usually peel, cut up and roast the squash before I put it in the tart. When I pulled it out of the oven I found mealy, limp-looking squash sitting in a pool of water instead of the gorgeously caramelized pieces I was expecting. I tried to drain off the water without dropping squash pieces in the sink (burning my arm in the process) and put it back in the oven to give them more time to cook. The potiron released so much liquid that the final volume was much lower than I was expecting, and I ended up not having enough to fill up the tart shell.

I also decided to try out a new recipe for the tart crust. I usually use a pâte brisée recipe from Martha Stewart, but decided that “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Or in this case, when in France, do as Julia Child would do, so I tried a recipe out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I’m not sure if I did something wrong when making the crust or if the squash released even more water while the tart was baking, but the bottom of the crust ended up being soggy.

I ended the day having spent way more time than I thought possible making a dinner that I thought would be easy, with soggy tart leftovers I am not excited to have for lunch, and a painful burn on my arm. Not exactly the way I imagined our Paris life.

Luckily, Friday is always an easy day for cooking. We arrived in Paris on a Friday, and all we could manage to put together for dinner in our jet-lagged stupor was a plate of bread and cheese. We enjoyed it so much that we’ve kept up the tradition of having bread, cheese and wine for dinner on Fridays. This week we also roasted some cauliflower garnished with truffle salt, but it was still in the oven when I took this picture. This week’s cheese was brie with truffles, and it more than made up for whatever the rest of this week’s meals were lacking.