Now Take Control Books has released version 1.1, freshly updated for 2007. I’ve improved the recipe for candied sweet potatoes considerably, added a few helpful tips and notes, corrected some minor errors, and clarified some items readers had questions about. Everyone who bought version 1.0 can download the new version for free. The price to buy it new is $10 for a downloadable PDF; a printed version will be available Real Soon Now.

Thanksgiving comes much earlier in Canada than in the United States—it’s just over a week away. I want to assure Canadian readers that I’ve included metric equivalents for all the measurements, and all the food has been tested and approved by a real live Canuck (my wife, Morgen).

Click on over to Take Control Books now to buy a copy or download a free 33-page sample.

Your mother probably told you not to play with your food. But did she tell you not to play your food? As Morgen described on Interesting Thing of the Day, the members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra do just that. The morning of each performance, they go shopping at a local produce market and pick out the specimens they think will make the best sounds. Then they set to work creating the instruments for that night’s show—mostly percussion instruments, but also flutes made of carrots, horns made from bell peppers, and all sorts of other weird concoctions. And these guys can really get a groove on (as the video demonstrates). After the show, they serve vegetable soup to the audience—though not, thankfully, made from the actual instruments that were just played! Way cool.

In that vein, I present the Wallet Fish & Chip Tool. If fish & chips is your thing, and if you can’t bear the thought of eating them with your fingers or with plastic cutlery, you might want to pack one of these babies. You get a stainless steel card the size of a credit card with the knife and fork (mostly) punched out; just pop the tabs and away you go. It’s available from such purveyors as touch of ginger, ShinyShack, and PresentProvider.com; you can even buy them in bulk, personalized with your company’s logo. Cost is less than £8 each.

This tool is just one of a series of gadgets, all stamped from a single small sheet of stainless steel: toothpicks, bottle opener, comb, ice scraper, cufflinks, mirror, and so on. You can even get a set of lock picks, though how that’s legal for non-locksmiths, I’m not sure.

Although this design appeals to my geeky sensibilities, I do start to wonder about a few things. First, once you’ve broken the tabs to remove the Fish & Chip Tools from the card, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to store them. (Surely they’re not intended for a single use, are they?) Second, I presume you’ll want to be careful to remove these from your wallet before getting on an airplane; I know I wouldn’t want to have to explain this to a security screener. And although any one wallet tool wouldn’t be too heavy, I’d hate to carry a wallet with half a dozen stainless steel cards—however useful they may be, a massively bulging wallet sort of defeats the purpose.

During our first several weeks living here in Paris, we became accustomed to shopping at either of two local supermarkets, a Monoprix and an ATAC. Both of them have a pretty good selection of the basics, though their prices are typically higher, and their freshness typically poorer, than any of the outdoor markets. Still, there were a few items we’d been unable to find here in our neighborhood, such as baking soda and baking powder (yeast is easy to come by, but not chemical leaveners), Swiffers, good sun-dried tomatoes (the brands we could find were all way too salty), respectable soy sauce, and a few alcohols (you know, gotta have Lillet Blanc for our Vesper martinis).

As Morgen wrote a few weeks ago in Truffles for Breakfast, we found all these items and much more at a famous old supermarket called La Grande Épicerie, which is part of a larger shopping complex known as Le Bon Marché.

La Grande Épicerie has one of the widest selections of any supermarket I’ve seen in any country. I’ve been in larger supermarkets and fancier ones, but the breadth of options here is what truly struck me. They have numerous foreign food sections, for example, so if you’re looking for Italian pasta or coffee, British specialties such as Marmite, Spanish spices, Thai coconut milk, or American staples such as marshmallow creme, popcorn, cream of mushroom soup, and maple syrup, you can find it all here. And, naturally, a full array of produce, meat, seafood, dairy products, frozen and canned goods, and everything else. Plus some awfully attractive pastries and desserts. Nearly everything food-related (and a few non-food items) we’d ever said we wished we could buy but couldn’t find elsewhere in Paris, we saw at La Grande Épicerie. If you’re a food geek in Paris, and particularly if you’re from outside of France and homesick for special foods, this is somewhere you must visit.

We’ve heard several people complain about the high prices at La Grande Épicerie, but most of the items we were interested in were quite reasonably priced—some considerably cheaper than at Monoprix. On the other hand, you’d have to pay the equivalent of about US$7 for a single large sweet potato (ouch!), eggs were terribly overpriced, and a few other items just didn’t seem to be worth what they were charging. So you have to shop carefully, but then, if you need something that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else in the city, it’s likely cheaper to buy it here than having it shipped from North America.

I’ll say this about Gaggenau’s new Lift Oven design: it looks cool. At the touch of a button, the bottom of the oven descends to enable you to add or remove items—a clever solution to the problem I’ve frequently encountered of the oven door getting in the way, particularly in cramped kitchens. This design could plausibly prevent some charred forearms, and in that sense I think it’s marvelous. Plus, you know, many bonus points for the geek factor.

Since this oven isn’t actually shipping yet and I haven’t seen one in person, I can’t say how great the real-life experience of using it will be. But a couple of things give me pause.

First, there’s this statement: “Since heat rises, the heat remains in the oven cavity, resulting in minimal energy loss during the lift operation.” I’m not sure I find that entirely convincing—but I suppose it depends where the heat is coming from. This oven has 11 heating methods, presumably some of which involve the heat coming from below. In those cases, I have a hard time seeing how this oven would lose less heat when the bottom is completely extended than a conventional oven with the door open. Notwithstanding the fact that heat rises, that hot air has to be contained somehow, and three walls would seem to do a better job of that than one. Still, when the heat is coming from above or from the sides, I can imagine this design would work quite well.

Second, the picture shows rolls being placed directly on the floured bottom surface of the oven—not on a baking sheet or rack of any kind. OK, great that you don’t have to clean one more thing, but…won’t that surface get, you know, hot? Won’t that be sort of hard to work with, particularly when you’re doing multiple batches of baking? Of course, you don’t have to bake directly on that bottom (ceramic) surface. Grill shelves, baking trays, and grill trays are available as accessories. You can attach these optional shelves at various heights (on those two round metal supports in the back), and up to two of them can fit at once (so you can bake on two separate racks at once, or grill something on an upper wire grill shelf while using a lower tray to catch drippings). But still…I have to wonder if this will be as convenient to use as all the technology suggests.

I came to France for the bread. There, I said it.

OK, I had lots of reasons for moving to France, but even though I joke about it, it’s absolutely true: I have what some might call an unnatural fondness for traditional French breads—especially baguettes. I’ve gotten into several arguments animated discussions recently about whether one truly can’t find a decent baguette anywhere in San Francisco. My position has been, and remains, that I personally was unable to find any, despite considerable looking (that is to say, tasting). There were breads that looked like baguettes and even smelled like baguettes, but they Just Weren’t Right. In other words, they made the wrong sound (or none at all); an incorrect texture was simply a natural consequence.

I mentioned the sound of baguettes three years ago on Interesting Thing of the Day, and this summer, in the movie Ratatouille, Colette spelled it out during a lecture to Linguini: it’s not the appearance or smell of a baguette that lets you know it’s fresh, it’s the sound it makes when you break it in half. Right on.

So what’s the problem? Since moving to France I’ve had a lot of baguettes that were excellent, though very different from each other. I’ve had exactly one decidedly substandard baguette (yes, it’s possible, even here). And I’m confident in my ability to distinguish good from bad baguettes. What I’ve discovered I can’t do at all is to discern which of half a dozen great baguettes is the best. On the Baguette Perfection Scale, I can tell the difference between a bread that scored a 3 and one that scored a 7. But when the choices range from 9.1 to 9.9, I’m totally out of my league.

It’s very much like wine: I can tell a lousy wine when I drink one. But my palate isn’t refined enough to distinguish a merely good wine from a fantastic wine. Particularly if I’m trying them on two separate days—side-by-side comparisons are definitely easier.

One of our local bakeries sells two species of baguettes: the “normale” variety (pictured here) and the “traditionnelle” variety, which is shorter, denser, chewier, and more expensive. I like them both equally, for different reasons, and can’t even come close to deciding which is better. Likewise, we’ve had fresh (normale) baguettes, hot out of the oven, from at least four different bakeries. We’ve smiled, we’ve sighed, we’ve moaned. But I am completely unable to compare them in quality. And yet, clearly there are lots of people who do make such evaluations and who, moreover, agree with each other (”Oh, everyone knows X’s bread is way better than Y’s bread.”). How do they do this?

Obviously, I need a great deal of practice.

Contrary to what every cookbook instructs, I’ve frequently cooked pasta in the following unorthodox manner: put the dry pasta and just enough water in the pot, turn on the heat, and turn it off when the liquid is all absorbed. In other words, somewhat like the way you cook rice (though uncovered). No draining, no getting a colander dirty. Add the rest of your ingredients (think: cheese) in the same pot, cook a while longer, and your meal is done.

I didn’t invent this technique as a way of advancing the culinary arts. I started doing it partly just to see what would happen, but mostly because I was lazy. And, for my applications, it worked just fine, with the proviso that one must stir the pasta frequently and watch that evaporation carefully—if you don’t turn off the heat just before the last of the water is gone, the pasta sticks to the pot, which is not what you want. But the bottom line is that I felt I was saving myself a bit of effort and, as far as I could tell, the end result tasted every bit as good as pasta cooked the conventional way. Maybe even better. Yes, I know that a certain amount of starch that would otherwise have gone down the drain went back into the pasta, but I haven’t been able to detect any negative impact from that starch on the pasta’s taste.

Well, it seems that great minds think alike. No less a chef than Alain Ducasse (yes, French, of course) has developed a “new” and revolutionary way of cooking pasta, which is essentially just to do everything in a single pot without any draining. He calls this technique the Pasta Pot. And, OK, I’m oversimplifying a bit. Using Ducasse’s method, you’d typically start by briefly sweating some aromatics or greens in the pot, then adding your dry pasta and sautéeing for a few minutes, and finally pouring in some stock or other flavorful liquid and cooking, uncovered, until the liquid is gone.

I have no quarrel at all with the method, of course, since it validates what I was already doing all along. But what I do have trouble with is a new piece of Alessi cookware designed expressly for Ducasse: the (eponymous) Pasta Pot. It’s this, you know, stainless steel container that sits on your stove and holds ingredients while they cook. It has a removable cover, and a melamine trivet on which you can place it when it’s not on your stove. The only thing that makes the design unique is that its handle doubles as a spoon rest (spoon included). And for this, the retail price is $238. Naturally, they’re currently sold out, but you can be put on a waiting list.

If you have money to burn and style is the most important consideration, hey, knock yourself out. I’m sure it’s as good an all-around pot as you’ll find anywhere else. But you can employ the Pasta Pot method just as well with any $30 pot, too. With the money you save, you can buy yourself an appetizer at one of Ducasse’s restaurants.

To read what another Big Name in Cooking had to say about pasta, see Pronunciation and Pasta.

As I mentioned last week on Truffles for Breakfast, I recently paid a visit to Vert d’Absinthe, the only store in Paris devoted exclusively to absinthe and its various accouterments. When the owner asked if we’d like to sample some absinthes, we eagerly agreed. He poured a bit in a glass, put a slotted spoon on top, placed a sugar cube on the spoon, and then positioned the glass carefully under one of the spigots of a device like this one.

Although such gadgets are generally called “absinthe fountains,” that term is a bit misleading. In fact, you fill them with ice water and use them to dilute your absinthe. Turning on the spigot, or robinette (various models have anywhere from one to four), allows the water to flow, but only one drop at a time. Yes, this is a type of fountain designed expressly to drip! The idea is that the water must fall slowly enough to dissolve the entire sugar cube by the time your drink has reached the desired level—typically a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of water to absinthe.

Vert d’Absinthe sells the fountains here in Paris; you can also buy them online from such sources as La Maison d’Absinthe and Saxon Gifts, as well as (naturally) eBay. They’re pricey, and of course you’ll pay more if you’re getting an antique model from the early 1900s than for a modern reproduction. But they automate what is otherwise the rather tedious job of drizzling out ice water from a pitcher at a slow and steady rate for several minutes per glass.

Now, on the surface, this concept seems sound. Certainly, you can save a bit of money by baking your own bars—so at least there’s that. But I’ve read lots of reviews of these bars that proclaim them the best thing since manna, and frankly, I don’t get it. They’re totally adequate—there’s nothing wrong with them—but in my opinion they completely fail to live up to the hype.

Let’s start with the most important thing: taste. They taste fine, which is to say they have yummy ingredients (like chocolate chips—nothing bad you can say about that) mixed in reasonably pleasing proportions. But they do not taste like energy bars. If you’re expecting something along the lines of a PowerBar, or Clif bar, or Balance bar, you’ll be disappointed. These bars are much fluffier, more like a slightly dense brownie than the firm and grainy texture most of us associate with commercial energy bars. And actually…I like that sort of texture. I’d prefer a Clif bar over Matisse & Jack’s any day. True enough: that’s just my personal preference. But I’m saying that it wasn’t what I was expecting, and the difference was so striking that I have difficulty putting these bars in the same category of food as other energy bars.

Maybe, however, the taste of these bars is exactly what you’ve always wanted, in which case, more power to you. Even then, though, be aware of a few facts:

• The mixing instructions are kind of weird. There are actually three different suggested recipes, with different combinations of applesauce, plain or vanilla yogurt, water, and/or vanilla extract, depending on what sort of sweetness you’re looking for and whether you need to avoid dairy products. For example, I chose the “less sweet” option, which required combining the dry mix with 1 cup + 3 tablespoons of plain yogurt, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon of water. So, I had to get three measuring implements out and dirty, not counting the spoon, bowl, and baking pan. And, using whichever set of ingredients is only convenient if you already happen to have them in your home. What I’m saying is: minus a couple of points for added effort.

• A lot is made of the fact that these bars reduce packaging waste, but you’re still left with a cardboard box and a plastic inner bag to dispose of. Given that the mix makes 9 bars, I’m not sure you’re saving a whole lot, in terms of square inches of material, over regular bars. And also: think about the time you’ll spend (at least a half hour), plus the water and energy required for baking and washing. I don’t think the net environmental impact is truly smaller.

• One of the best things about commercial energy bars is that they’re handy. You just grab one and go. You don’t have to individually wrap each one, or find a plastic bag to put it in. They’re packaged in a way that makes sense for athletes and other active people. Matisse & Jack can’t offer you that. In addition, although the bake-at-home bars may taste “fresher,” they only keep for a few days. For better or worse, most commercial bars taste fairly fresh even after months.

Now, I hate to be hard on these guys. I know they mean well. As I said, the bars do taste perfectly fine, and I can’t quarrel with their nutritional specs. Plus, lots of other publications have given them rave reviews. So I accept that it’s entirely possible I’m the only one who doesn’t think they’re great. But to be entirely honest, my experience with the bars just didn’t impress me.

The biggest of the many things I was busy with all those months was moving…to Paris! (You can read about the move and my life here in Truffles for Breakfast.) Now that I’m here and settled, and not nearly as overwhelmed with projects as I was for so long, I feel that the time has come to resurrect The Geeky Gourmet. New posts will appear, starting tomorrow, on a respectably frequent basis. (I can’t promise they’ll be daily, but certainly I hope to post multiple times per week.)

Paris, of course, has a lot going on in the world of food. I’ll be mentioning some of that in future posts. I’m not the sort of person who dines out at fancy restaurants every week, though, so look for the same sorts of down-to-earth topics that have appeared here in the past.

This year, I headed over to the local Sur la Table store to take a class from a professional cake and cookie decorator. It was a revelation, and the revelation was three-fold: icing ingredients, decorating equipment, and basic technique.

Ingredients Last year, I’d mixed up a batch of royal icing, divided it in three, added liquid food coloring, and got to work. Bzzt! Wrong move. Instead of liquid food coloring, I should have blended in coloring in paste from, available at cooking stores. I’d also used decorating gels, pre-mixed, in tubes from the supermarket. Wrong again. Gels (as I discovered) melt and blur. You need to prepare your own icing, and fine tune it (adding water or confectioner’s sugar) to the right consistency.

And, as it turns out, there are two consistencies. The thick one, which I was familiar with, is for outlining. The other (very liquid) is for “flooding,” a technique explained below.

Equipment One of my frustrations last year was the discovery that I needed not just one bag for piping the icing, but several — one for each color I was working with. The Sur la Table instructor showed us how to turn zip-closure plastic bags (freezer grade) into quick, cheap pastry bags by making a tiny snip in one corner, adding a piping tip, and then filling with frosting.

Toothpicks (round ones) also turned out to be an important tool. They are used for plugging the tips of the piping bags to prevent drying out and/or leaking as you work. And they are used for making designs in the flooding icing, much the way a barista makes designs in espresso foam.

Technique The outlining technique, using firm, thick icing, was what I had previously mistaken for simple decorative lines. As it turns out, the outline of firm piped icing serves as a dike to contain the large, smooth swatches of “flooded” color (see the snowman, or the green ornament, in the photo; click for a larger version). Instead of trying to smear thick icing around with a tiny offset spatula as I had last year, we simply squirted the thin icing into the outlined area, nudging it around a bit with the piping tip, and it melted into place.

A second, very elaborate-looking technique involved taking advantage of the melting property of the soft icing. A dot or a stripe of soft icing is piped directly into a lake of soft color (see ornament and stocking top), where it melts flush to the first color. Then, a clean toothpick is used to marble the two colors into a design (see top of bell). This technique was also used to transform a red dot on the gingerbread man’s vest into a heart.We also learned to use the firm icing as glue for attaching the candy cane (stocking) and miniature candies (eyes on the gingerbread man).There were 16 people in the class, and by the end of the two hours, every one of them was creating bakery-quality cookies.

Want to try the dual-icing technique? Here are some online recipes and guidance from Country Living (good recipes and detailed instructions) and Epicurious.com (nice pictures of decorating technique).

When we walked in, we saw what turned out to be the eggettes displayed behind a glass case next to the cash register, labeled with their flavors but not the word “eggettes.” I inferred that’s what they were from the fact that they were vaguely egg-shaped and that it seemed to be the only food item on display. So, lesson #1: if you want to attract new customers, and if you want those customers to have any idea why they should come in and order your wacky new food, give them at least a tiny clue as to what that food actually is.

Well, we decided there was little to lose by ordering the things without any explanation, so we asked for one order each of original, chocolate, and coconut flavors (sesame was also an option). What we were served is called gai daan jai in Hong Kong, and often described as egg puffs or egg waffles. They’re made by taking a thin batter (not unlike a sweeter waffle or pancake batter) and cooking it on a special iron with small egg-shaped indentations on both plates. The result is a sheet of little dough eggs you can break apart. They’re slightly crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, almost like beignets. And let me end the suspense: they’re delicious. I mean, seriously, addictively delicious. I could almost give up doughnuts for these things. But although they’re relatively light and relatively low in fat, they’re clearly full of sugar and nasty carbs—no surprises there.

So, eggettes are a winner. The Eggettes store, on the other hand (apparently just the latest in a small chain), needs some work. The food was great and the staff was friendly, but the place has, shall we say, user interface issues. The lack of an explanation of eggettes on the menu is just one example. We decided to plop down on the couch and watch the DVD that was playing on their big flat-screen TV, but we couldn’t figure out how to adjust the volume (turns out the staff controls the remotes, but they also had to do some rewiring of the speakers to get any noise to come out). We noticed the card reader on the cash register and tried to pay with plastic, but the cashier informed us apologetically that they hadn’t yet managed to get a merchant account. And although there are a few Net-connected computer kiosks, you have to stand to use them—not the most comfortable arrangement. The store is neat, shiny, and spacious but not cozy, and that’s a big strike against it in my book.

Nevertheless, I’m sure I’ll return for eggettes and bubble tea whenever I need a quick break from the South Beach Diet. You can do worse.

Now, for a mere $90 (plus an extra $11 for a package of nitrous oxide cartridges)—ingredients not included—I can have my cake and eat it too, nicely smothered in freshly whipped cream that didn’t require me to turn on a mixer or dirty a bowl. There are plenty of these gadgets on the market, but the Williams-Sonoma Brushed Stainless-Steel Cream Whipper must be among the classiest (and most expensive). Oh yes, I want one.

• Recipe: Roasted Green Beans (September 15, 2006)
• Turkey Giblets (September 19, 2006)
• “Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner” Released (September 22, 2006)
• Food Loop (September 25, 2006)
• Thanksgiving Dinner: the Ithaca Beta Test (September 27, 2006)
• Baker’s Edge Pan (September 28, 2006)
• Happy Thanksgiving, Canada (October 9, 2006)
• Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner in Print! (October 20, 2006)
• Thanksgiving Book Sale & Promotion (November 8, 2006)
• Seasoning the Turkey: Their Aim Is True (November 9, 2006)
• My First TV Appearance (November 13, 2006)
• The Food Loop Lace (November 16, 2006)
• Three-Tiered Oven Rack (November 17, 2006)
• Thanksgiving by the Numbers (November 17, 2006)
• New Thermapen Models (November 20, 2006)