The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City Read Online Free PDF Page A

goat cheese along with a glass of crisp white wine, the first of many to come.
    Coat cheese toasts
    2 slices of hearty bread, such as pain au levain, or good white bread
    Extra virgin olive oil
    3-ounce (90 g) round, or crottin, of goat cheese, sliced in half horizontally
    Salad
    ½ teaspoon red wine or sherry vinegar
    2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
    ⅛ teaspoon Dijon mustard
    Coarse salt
    2 cups (100 g) torn green lettuce leaves, rinsed and dried
    Freshly ground black pepper
    ¼ cup (25 g) walnut halves, toasted, optional
Preheat the broiler and set the oven rack 4 inches (10 cm) below the heating element.
Brush the bread with just enough olive oil to moisten it. Place half of the cheese on each slice. Broil on a baking sheet in the oven until the cheese is soft, warmed through, and a little browned on top. This should take 3 to 5 minutes, depending on your broiler.
While the toasts are baking, make a vinaigrette in a large bowl. With a fork, stir the vinegar, olive oil, mustard, and a nice pinch of salt.
Toss the lettuce in the vinaigrette and pile on a plate. Grind fresh pepper over the top, rest the warm toasts over the lettuce, and scatter with walnuts, if using.
    SERVING: Serve with a chilled glass or
fillette
of white wine, such as Muscadet, Sancerre, or Sauvignon Blanc. Enjoy by yourself.

MA PETITE CUISINE
    In order to finalize some of my affairs stateside, later that same year I had to head back to the States for six months. So I decided to sublet my recently painted, state-of-the-art telecommunications-equipped apartment. I posted a listing on a popular Web site and got a few encouraging responses. The most enthusiastic of the lot was from a potential
souslocataire
who “couldn’t wait to be cooking and baking away in the well-stocked and professionally equipped kitchen of—
David Lebovitz!”
    I must not be that good with a camera, because the pictures I sent in response didn’t quite seal the deal, and Inever heard from him again. Even with my wide-angle lens, it’s hard to hide the fact that my kitchen is barely big enough for one person, let alone any professional equipment. And apparently my renown with this fellow wasn’t enough to overcome my kitchen’s shortcomings.
    Coming from America, where the average kitchen is the size of my entire apartment (and often larger), it was quite an experience learning to bake on a counter so small I had to lift one bowl up before I could set down another. I wasn’t baking so much as practicing crowd control. People see my kitchen and think it’s so cute:
“C’est très parisien!”
they say as they lunge forward in excitement. It’s not until they lift their heads back up and thwack it hard on the sloped ceiling that they begin to understand some of the challenges I face. I learned to watch out for the ceiling eventually. But in the beginning, my head got banged more times than the gals up in Pigalle.
    When I moved in, the kitchen was no different from the rest of the apartment: a complete disaster. The refrigerator looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned since the all-out strikes of May 1968. The dishwasher pipes were so caked with Paris’s insidious
calcaire
that when you switched the washer on, instead of humming to life, it would start off with a hopeful buzz that soon led to convulsive wheezing, with plates clattering inside. Shortly afterward, it would progress to violent shaking and begin body-slamming everything around it, wrenching itself loose from the confines of the cabinets, forcing me to race across the room to pull the plug before the plate-shattering
grande finale.
    Just behind the dishwasher, tucked in the corner, is a small washing machine. For the life of me, and every other American living in Europe, I can’t figure out why it takes two hours to wash a load in a European machine in Europe, whereas washing a load in a European machine in America takes only forty minutes.
    That, coupled with the subsequent drying for those of us who