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" If any one element of French cooking can be called important, basic and essential, that element is soup." --Louis Diat, chef for the Ritz-Carlton After a mostly mild summer, with just a few hot days here and there, we're having our first real heat wave in my neck of the woods. Naturally, that presents a challenge when it comes to mealtimes, since one cannot subsist on ice cream--alas!--and an endless array of salads and cold sandwiches can pall faster than you'd think!  Fortunately, I discovered a solution nearly a year ago, during a similar hot spell:  vichyssoise, a cold soup that is simple, delicious, and doesn't require tons of exotic ingredients. There are countless variations on it, but in the end, the basics come down to stock (or broth), potatoes, leeks, and milk or cream. What I didn't know when I started researching the recipe was that vichyssoise has an interesting history. Despite the name, it originated not in France, ...

Fabulous Facts About France! I’m sure, like me, you were shocked and saddened by the events that took place in Paris a few days ago. For me, it was almost surreal because for the past few weeks I’ve been heavily steeped in the events leading up to and during the French Revolution. I feel like I spend a good part of each day in Paris, even if it is the Paris of the past. As writers, we often have to limit how much research we can include in our books. I find out so many cool things, but I can only use about a tenth of them and only those that fit in the story. So I thought I’d share here 5 of the fabulous facts about France I’ve discovered through my research. Chocolate and Coffee=Yum! If you love your mocha latte at Starbucks, you are not alone. Parisians have been adding chocolate to coffee since at least the 1700s. Know what the prisoners drank in the Bastille? Coffee with chocolate. The Bastille At one time it probably did house political pri...

One thing I love about the Victorian Age is its epic scope. Choose any decade, any year, even any month, in that era and you can find something important--whether political, social, or cultural--happening and not only in England. My current project is a novella set in 1879, a prequel to my just-finished manuscript, which takes place in 1888. To get the ball rolling, I entered the date on Wikipedia to see which events had shaped that year--with fascinating results. Here are just a few important things that happened in 1879. 1) The Anglo-Zulu War: Given the spread of colonialism and size of its empire, it was no surprise to learn that Britain was at war, somewhere in the world. This conflict involved the Kingdom of Zululand in South Africa, was marked by a number of bloody battles, and lasted from January to July, when the British defeated the Zulus at Ulundi. But one of the most notable casualties of the war was Napoleon, Prince Imperial of France, the twenty-three year...

Lemon Tree...and Feline Guardian! Just as there are certain colors and smells that you automatically associate with specific seasons, so are there particular flavors. So if autumn tastes like pumpkin, ginger, and cranberries, winter like peppermint and chocolate, and summer like strawberries and peaches, spring--at least to me--tastes like lemons. And right now, with the warmer weather coming in, Southern California's lemon trees are putting out bumper crops of sunny yellow fruit! And enthusiastic cooks like me eye the laden branches with mingled speculation--and acquisitiveness! Because lemons are among the most versatile of ingredients, finding their way into all kinds of dishes: hot, cold, savory, sweet, liquid or solid. Whether it's avgolemono soup or lemon cream pasta or lemon meringue pie, lemon enlivens any springtime menu. Today I'm sharing a recipe for madeleines, those pretty scallop-shaped cakes that you can now find as overpriced three-packs at your loca...

by Libby Malin www.LibbysBooks.com Many moons ago--well, really, about one--I wrote a post about Bal'mer (that's Baltimore, Maryland), my hometown, and how I often set stories there. There's one other spot that ends up skittering through my tales from time to time -- France. The heroine in my very first humorous women's fiction, Loves Me, Loves Me Not , took off for France at the end of the book, fleeing some weighty problems. Once there, she had to decide on a dime whether or not to return early to take a chance on love. In Fire Me , the protagonist doesn't go to France, but she does daydream about speaking in French. Whenever she's stressed, she hears herself prattling like a character in a French movie, her passionate problems rendered dispassionate at the flick of a " mais oui, Mademoiselle ." One of the lines she thinks to herself in this episode is " Je vais cherchez du bon vin a la cave " (or something like it). That's a line from...