Sunday, July 10, 2011 
I'll definitely miss the fallafel (from l'As du Fallafel, the best in Paris). Of course you have to follow up a Sunday fallafel with a stroll around the Place des Vosges.
And a hop, skip and a jump over to the Ile St. Louis.
Of course no trip to the Ile St. Louis would be complete without some Berthillon ice cream (and licorice-flavored tea).
Ahhhh, weekends are tough here...
Thursday, March 31, 2011 
It's obvious to anyone who’s read more than a few of my blog entries that one of my favorite things is dessert. My taste buds have evolved over time, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve developed more of a “savory tooth”, but I still love cakes and cookies and other sweets, especially discovering those from other cultures. My husband plus one bakery owner in Athens, Greece can attest to this…
One dessert I had never tried until we visited Vienna a few years back is apfelstrudel. As in Budapest, we ate quite a bit of pie / cake / sweets during our visit. My favorite was the Sachertorte (see my attempt to make one here), but the apfelstrudel ran a close second. If you’re one of those people who eats the pie but leaves the crust, I think you would really like this dessert. There’s the perfect ratio of pastry-to-filling and since the only butter in the recipe is brushed onto the outside crust, it’s not too rich.
It wasn’t reminiscing about our trip to Vienna that made me decide to make an apfelstrudel. The idea actually popped into my head during my daughter’s bathtime the other night. She’s fine when she’s in the tub but doesn’t really appreciate the shock of the cool air when we take her out. So, to calm her down, I sing “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi” from the movie musical The Sound of Music. Any fans out there probably recognized that the title of this posting was taken from a verse of “My Favorite Things”. Well, as I was singing it the other night, I thought to myself, “Hmmm, some apple strudel and schnitzel and noodles sounds really good actually…”
I recently decided that each Sunday, time permitting, I would cook a big meal from scratch. During the week, the nights are always rushed and there never seems to be enough time to tackle any remotely complicated dishes. This past weekend I decided to make an Austro-German-inspired meal. We had Wiener Schnitzel, spätzle, a salad based on one we had in Freiburg and, of course, apfelstrudel.
Recipes taken from:
Wiener Schnitzel: Martha Stewart’s Cooking School
Spätzle: Joy of Cooking (1997 version)
Salad: from memory (lettuce, shredded carrots & cabbage, tomatoes, cucumber, alfalfa sprouts, pumpkin & sunflower seeds + homemade salad dressing: 1/8 cup milk, 1/8 cup light cream, 1 teaspoon cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 2 teaspoons sugar)
Apfelstrudel: Joy of Cooking (1997 version)
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 
For a wedding we will attend later this month, one of the friends of the couple getting married requested that each invitee provide a favorite recipe + photo to be compiled into a cookbook. Since I have a very sweet tooth, it is only natural that our contribution will be to the dessert section. I ended up choosing a classic American treat and one of my all time favorites: rolled sugar cookies.
Last week when I was browsing the book section of our local fnac, I stumbled upon the French translation of Martha Stewart’s Cookies. I had considered purchasing this book when I was back in the States this summer but decided against it since I was pretty sure our suitcases would already be overweight with all of the other baking, sewing and beauty care loot I had already amassed up to that point of the trip.
Leafing through the book, I noticed that the ingredients for some of the recipes were slightly different than those I am used to. Having been disappointed in the past by recipes from my American cookbooks that simply didn’t turn out when using French products (chocolate chip cookies, brownies, pound cake), I quickly decided that I needed this book badly.
The first recipe I tried from the book was the rolled sugar cookie recipe (click here for the recipe from the Martha Stewart website), and I’m happy to say that it’s a winner. These cookies are great on their own, but if you have the time – and, it must be said, the patience – I highly recommend icing the cookies. I used the recipe for royal icing included in the book and also available online. I hope the happy couple will enjoy making this recipe together!
