It’s already Tuesday and I am a day late. Désolée ! I promised a winner for the Around Fog Linen catalog. And I am happy to announce that Dawn McBeth is the one with the lucky number. Thank you Dawn, I will be sending you the catalog tomorrow.

This week is also one amongst many that requires my full attention. So you’ll have to excuse the lack of chit chat. And recipes. I have my cookbook manuscript to finish, the pictures to organize and prepare for print–and I am feeling fairly rushed with life, to say the least. But I am *so* looking forward to finally see my cookbook take shape. To see my recipes on paper, with colors and a design. To have the book be given a life outside my home. It will be published and available next Spring.

This morning, while I was chatting with a friend and I told her that I felt quite exhausted, “I am not surprised,” she said. “Your book,” she went on, “it’s like you are giving birth again!”

Obviously, it’s not exactly the same kind–we know that. But it’s definitely a life event that took its course over numerous months, growing slowly and steadily, step by step, day after day. And today, I am really keen to feel the final product between my hands.

Merci! Thank you for being here. For coming back, no matter what. Next to the love and support I receive from P. (who is well fed, under all circumstances, as he likes to tell me when I ask that he goes grocery shopping at odd times of the day) and Lulu–who took her very first steps this weekend–you are making this book happen!

Here’s a snapshot of what’s going to be the feel you’ll find inside my book.

It’s the feel of a soft fabric touching my hands that becomes addictive. Its color and pattern. And its thickness and shape. My imagination flows and my head bubbles with ideas as I look at the pile of kitchen towels loosely arranged on the old wooden corner table in the living room. It’s high enough so that Lulu cannot reach for them. Not yet.

I look at them again. They make me dream of pictures.

With food in the middle.

I think that it’s about a year ago that I discovered Yumiko’s textiles. It was love at first sight. Yumiko is simply the talented Japanese woman behind Fog Linen Work. She is a lovely, friendly woman.

I forget how it really started, that connection Yumiko and I developed. To start, there was the purchase of a few kitchen towels that sufficed to make me become a fan of her work. Then we started to email each other. And one day, when I didn’t expect it, she asked whether I would like to participate in one of her projects. She wanted a few designers, stylists and photographers to collaborate with their own personal touches to her new Spring catalog 2010. She wanted to see her linens and baskets and aprons and pretty objects to find a home in the context of these people’s own homes. She wanted to hear about these people’s stories. Their lives. I loved her idea. And I felt honored that she asked me. I accepted right away. Enthusiastically.

A few months later, a few clicks and pictures after, her catalog is now available. It’s beautiful and lively. It’s full of pretty pictures.

If you happen to see it, perhaps like me, you’ll fall for Fog Linen Work. It’s easy to. It’s yet another reason that will make us travel to Japan. One day, we really will.

Here is the list of the other people participating in Yumiko’s project. Absolutely gorgeous work. All.

• Maria Alexandra Vettese
• Ryan and Alissa
• Julie Baine
• Rae Dunn
• Marisa Shimamoto
• Jennifer Causey
• Sally and Chris
• Jenny Hallengren
• Lena Corwin
• Elodie Rambaud
• Lotta Jansdotter

I’ve also recently found out that La Tartine Gourmande was nominated as one of the Best Special Interest Food Blogs in Saveur’s 1st Annual Food Blog Awards.

Yes, that’s right. It’s Saveur magazine! I am honored. Un grand merci!

If you are interested, there are many wonderful blogs nominated too, and you can vote for your favorites in each category by following this link. You have until Friday April 2d to do so.

The winners will be announced on April 5th. Good luck to everyone!

If you recall, last year, I told you about the first cookbook I contributed to, styling and photographing the foods. Jennifer, the author, came to my house for a few days to work — we immediately became friends. Her cookbook was just published and I am so honored to have been able to work with her and the people at Chronicle Books.

It’s a book about Gingerbread and every goodie that comes with it. It’s funny to think about it. I was three months pregnant when I worked on this project last summer. It was so hot, I remember, and I was completely morning sick, but it was a marvelous experience to team with Jennifer. She’s funny and witty, and full of energy–we worked really well together.

Her book is now available in bookstores and amazon, if you are interested. And, since I baked all the recipes with pictures attached, I can tell you that they work fantastically! So if you like gingerbread, you know what to do next. It’s the season!

Note that the second picture (a gingerbread I baked from her recipes) in this post is not in Jennifer’s book, but I just liked it so wanted to put it here! Simple and tasty!

My friend R. and I were chatting about food while cleaning up in the kitchen after dinner. Then, I told him: “Tu sais, ça fait des années que je veux voir la récolte des canneberges,” (You know, it’s been years since I wanted to see the harvest of cranberries).

“Ah bon ?” he exclaimed, surprised.

I looked at him. He became quiet. He’s thinking, I thought. I could see it. He’s cooking something!

“I think I can help,” he said, with a glorious smile lighting his face.

It’s one of the many nice things I like about R. The fact that he’s têtu comme une mule (stubborn like a mule), persistent — did I say before that he’s a medical doctor? — and that he’s always enthusiastic about anything that’s in relation with food. We’re friends because of that too.

A few days after we talked, he emailed me.

“C’est fait!” (Done!) he wrote.”You’re all set. Going to visit a cranberry bog.”

“How did you do it?” I wrote back.

“I know people,” he had casually added.

What he actually meant was that he had written to a friend working at Ocean Spray, and one thing leading to another, he managed to plan the visit to a cranberry farm for me.

He might not have known it, but that simple thing made me really happy!

On Thursday, we woke up to a bright sunny day. That’s really lucky! I thought. It had rained the entire day before.

“Lulu, on va voir des champs de canneberges** aujourd’hui,” (Lulu, we’ll see cranberry bogs today,) I told her as I was slipping a cozy jacket and a warm hat over her head. It might be windy on the bog, Jennifer, our guide, had warned me. Bring layers!

My friend E. was going to come with me. While waiting for her, I ate one bowl, or rather two, of warm spicy sweet potato and butternut squash soup to keep my energy up, and I packed a few hard-boiled eggs and an avocado comté sandwich along with Lulu’s lunch, cumin-flavored mashed vegetables and stewed peaches I had prepared for her. I knew it was going to be a beautiful day.

** Perhaps the right term is cannebergière, but I like the way words like “champs de canneberges” sound.

It’s hard to know where to start. During the few hours we spent with Jennifer, I learned so much. My eyes were taken by so much beauty as I watched beautiful shades of red coloring the ground generously. Like a happy painting.

It took us forty five minutes to drive south to Carver. As soon as we got out of the car, Lulu looked around swiftly, stared for ten seconds and then started to smile and laugh. I looked around too, and just realized that I wanted to do the same. I was so happy to finally see a cranberry bog in real life!

A tall man with a generous look on his face walked in our direction to greet us. He was Larry, the owner of the farm. With his brother, he started to tell us about the farm and how the harvest takes place. I was all ears. I had my questions ready too.

Cranberries are harvested in various states throughout the United States. Wisconsin is the biggest cranberry supplier, but Massachusetts, Maine, and neighboring states in Canada like Nova Scotia, Québec and New Brunswick have a fair amount of cranberry growers too. To do well, cranberries need an acidic soil to grow, and a climate that combines cold winters — even if they are sensitive to ice and snow — and warm summers, just like in New England.

It takes a year for a crop of cranberries to be ready. Ninety percent of the time, the bog remains dry. Then, by mi-September each year, when the cranberries are ripe, the bog is flooded, ready for harvesting. The harvest will then last until about the end of October. It’s a cycle that repeats every year, with crops better some years than others.

“Many of the farmers believe in Mother Nature,” Jennifer said. “If a crop is good one year, it’s partially because of the weather, of course, but it’s also due to what Nature keeps for us,” she told me her growers often report.

When the bog is flooded, while under water, the cranberries are still attached to the vine. Harvesters drive across the entire the bog on a machine — resembling a tall tractor — that detaches the cranberries from the vine. Once this done, the cranberries are gathered in one area to facilitate the harvest (called corralling). They are pumped, washed and then transferred to a truck.

The process is simple and beautiful to watch. Lulu enjoyed it as much as E. and I did.

“Do you want to taste a fresh cranberry?” Larry said, picking a berry between his big fingers.

“Can I?”

“Sure!” he said, laughing.

He took a knife out of his pocket, cut the berry he was holding open and held it to me. I bite in the fruit, not sure what to expect. “Wow!,” I said, making a face after I swallowed the fruit. It tasted tart. But I liked it. I had to try again. I popped another piece in my mouth. The taste was becoming addictive.

“It reminds me of a red currant,” I told Larry.

“Here!” he said, holding large bags of plump cranberries for me to bring home. For some odd reason, they looked much bigger than the ones I was used to seeing in the store.

“That’s a lot of cranberries,” I said, laughing. He responded something, I knew, but I was already lost in thoughts of what I was going to make with my precious freshly harvested fruit.

And once we were back home, later that night, the first thing I baked was a cranberry and apple crumble. And I made an upside down cranberry cake and cranberry sauce too, thinking that, somehow, the cranberries looked almost as pretty served on the table as they did when they were floating on their bed of water.

Almost!

You know that I like to travel and write about the experience of my trips. I’ve always been that way in the family.

Don’t ask me why but I’ve always been extremely attracted by les pays du Nord — Scandinavia in general. Over the years, P. and I traveled twice to Iceland and once to Denmark.

And we’ve been dreaming about Norway.

I’ve not yet been to Norway but it’s a destination high on my list. So when Hanne, a journalist working for the Norwegian magazine Maison Mat & Vin, emailed to ask if she could interview me for a feature in their magazine, I felt pretty excited. It had me dream of traveling to Norway and its colors and fjords and culture again. Lulu will love it as much as we will — I know.

The article Hanne wrote is about food bloggers and was just published in the September 2009 issue — the recipe of mine they featured is my upside down olive oil apple cake. I was really happy to see fellow food bloggers like Ilva, David and Cecilie. I don’t speak Norwegian but sometimes it doesn’t matter. Pictures speak for themselves. Maison Mat & Vin is one of those delicious-to-read food magazines that make you dream of food and travel.

Thanks Hanne!

“Vous avez dû attendre pendant longtemps ?” (Did you have to wait for long?) my parents asked. We were standing at one end of terminal E in Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, hugging and kissing. My parents were as eager to see us as we were to see them. But I knew that, in fact, they were even happier to greet and hold their little grand daughter. Lulu was snuggled cozily against my stomach in her ergo. We could only see the top of her head and hair and eyes which she had wide open. She was smiling and flapping her bare legs against mine, turning her head to the right, then to the left, not to miss anything that was happening around us. We were all tired but so happy to be home in France.

The thought of traveling back home had filled me with feelings of excitement even if I had worried about our journey to Europe. It was Lulu’s first transatlantic flight. How would she handle it? Would she be fine with the many plane rides, between Boston, Paris, Dublin and Paris again? How would she do with the jet lag? But our little Lulu didn’t mind at all any of it. In fact, she adjusted extremely quickly, much faster than P. and I did.

Summer in rural eastern France, where my parents and brother live, has left me wonderful memories. I realized that it had been years since I had traveled there during summer.

It’s the soft morning light cast on the countryside early in the morning, the colorful wild flowers illuminating the fields, the rich smell of freshly cut grass, the butterflies dancing from flower to flower and the clacking sound of the crickets late at night that I love. It’s the time of year when, I remember, as a young girl, we used to harvest hay at my grandparents’. Sometimes, I was allowed to drive the tractor back from the fields, and proudly did so. Later in the afternoon, my brother and cousins would sneak in the barn to play, jumping on bales of hay neatly stacked high.

Days in the countryside are spent at a slower pace even if summer means it’s a busy time for many who live there. In my family, we like to pick all sorts of fruit to make jams and preserves and bake tarts; we preserve French beans and beets, and make ratatouille. We walk in the grass bare foot and nap under the cherry trees, if we feel like it. We did that very well, I must say, the day after we arrived, then the next, and the day after the next too — and we never seemed to find the activity boring. Would you?

Lulu, too, made the place her own. She and I loved the daily routine we established. There were the usual morning and afternoon naps, the walks to the village to buy baguettes for lunch, and the many hours spent playing on a large blanket spread under the trees, in my parents’ garden. It was delightful to see her enjoy herself so much. She was fascinated by trees and loved to watch the wind move their leaves. She played with the flickering shadows created by the rays of sun filtering through the branches.

I told her about where our food comes from. When I took her to the village, I showed her the cows and sheep and chicken and rooster and rabbits. I pointed at eggs nested at one corner of the hen house. I made her smell red currants and apples and strawberries and plums that my parents grow.

She ate the vegetables — carrots, beans, zucchini, beets and tomatoes — we prepared from my mother’s and brother’s gardens. Every day, it seemed that she was learning something new — her new discovery is to clap her hands (she does that so joyfully, really, it’s cute!) while blowing raspberries at the same time. It’s amazing, actually, how quickly she has changed over the course of these last three weeks away.

Our life is so much richer with her at the center of it.

“Tu veux que je la prenne ? “(Do you want me to take her?) my mum asked me one morning after I had just finished to nurse Lulu. She was wide awake, laughing, talking and kicking her legs above her head. It was also 6 am, the time of day when my mother gets up — it’s brave! I didn’t need to answer. She knew. I felt relieved. Si tu veux! (Sure!)

While falling asleep, I could hear them *converse* with each other in the kitchen at the breakfast table — Lulu sitting in her high chair while my mother was eating her bowl of muesli and yogurt.

It didn’t matter that we did not travel long distances or do much. We did what we had been craving for weeks: we rested.

The food was gorgeous, and I ate a ton. I even wonder where I put it all! Between the fresh vegetables and fruit from the garden, I also indulged in dairy products hungrily, eating yogurts, petits-suisses and fromage blanc as if I was discovering them for the first time again. I devoured cheese greedily, at all times of the day. Oh yes! Everything felt more tasteful and flavorful. My mother cooked — isn’t this the nicest? — and I helped, baking and making fruit tarts.

Every day, Lulu came with me to the garden where I picked more berries and seasonal fruit, carrots, salad and tomatoes for lunch. The mirabelles, prunes de cochon and quetsches were so ripe that we stewed them and made tarts.

One day, my mum and I took Lulu to the local market.

In my brother’s garden, I collected fresh herbs, different types of basil, sage, thyme, chervil, livèche (lovage) — my sister-in-law’s favorite — and mint to make a herb risotto. I’ll have to tell you about it. We enjoyed it so much that I cooked it twice.

We had family lunches and dinners at home that we ate outside and a few times, we drove the scenic winding road, just a few kilometers away, to l’Ecluse 16 — a lovely restaurant nested in the Bonne Fontaine forest, by the canal de la Sarre — where we ate scrumptious modern food.

I thought I wouldn’t find red currants, as suggested by my dad, but I was excited to discover that the bush in my parents’ back garden was still heavy with bright red berries, fully ripe. Every day, my mum used them in fruit salads while I baked them in muffins.

I also made a red currant and almond tart.

Red currants are a delicacy in the US, which always surprises me when they are so abundant and easily found where I am from in France. In the city of Bar-le-Duc near by, locals use the fruit to make a special jam. The tradition consists in removing the seeds with a goose feather and dates back to 1344. The jam is extremely delicate.

If you’ve eaten the berries before, you know that the fruit is rather acidic, and has small seeds inside. The berries are delicious in tarts when they are prepared with a sugary almond batter, which balances the tartness of the fruit.

“I told you it would be worth it,” I told my dad, with a victorious look on my face, when we all sat down at the table again to have dessert. He had jokingly asked that I stopped stealing the last red currants on the tree. It was hard to! One of his favorite thing is to pick and snack on the fruit while working outside.

“Oui, elle est très bonne ta tarte,” (Your tart is really good) he said, helping himself to a second slice.

What I didn’t tell him is that, a few days later, I grabbed another handful of the red berries to bake muffins. I just couldn’t resist.

Everyone commented on how delicious the muffins were.

And the missing red currants went unnoticed.

It’s wonderful how that works.

You are not going to be mad, are you? I mean, I am not coming to talk about soup or dessert, two things I actually love to prepare. But instead, let me tell you about a special event you might like. It is still very tasty, I promise.

Do you remember two years ago, when I was lucky to attend the International Food Styling and Photography Conference in Boston? It was so much fun — creative and rich in information. I remember how shy it felt for me to be there, amongst all the professional stylists and photographers — and how I felt so glad that my friend L. attended with me! I remember keeping my eyes and ears wide open in order to grab as much information as I could.

And I did.

They had already talked about another conference back then.

“In two years,” Lisa had told me when I asked. Deep inside, I was already looking forward to 2009.

Then, of course, I was also far from imagining that 2009 would bring me two other wonderful events: a beautiful baby daughter and a cookbook deal. Needless to say that je n’ai pas le temps de m’ennuyer, as we say in French. (I do not have time to get bored!)

But here it is. Two years later, the conference is about to take place again for the second time in Boston.

Exciting!

What I was far from imagining though is that I would be speaking this time. Another new reason for me to feel shy and nervous.

Seriously!

I will be part of a general discussion:

You can find the detailed program by following this link, and if you are interested in joining, check the full details here.

Fun, non?

I am spoiled.

A few months ago, contributing editor Anne Ditmeyer who writes for inspiring Design Sponge (“a daily website dedicated to home and product design”; see the feature of In the Kitchen column too from February) asked me if I would like to give a tour of our house, for their Sneak Peek column. No need to add that I felt really honored. It took me some time to finally take pictures of our house — there seemed to always be food projects and a baby’s room to renovate in the way — but here it is now, finally.

You can check the full article with more pictures by following this link here.

Many thanks again to Anne and Grace at Design Sponge for giving me this honor. I hope you will enjoy the short tour inside our little house.

Incidentally, I wanted to add a note about my lack of response to emails some of you have sent, with questions about camera, food styling and photography. So sorry I have not yet managed to answer them all. If you do not hear from me, feel free to send another note!

For some reason, since I was a kid, the days after August 15th always felt like already the end of summer — after my grand-mother’s regular family reunion meal of August 15th, date of her fête since her first name was Marie. She always started the meal with melon au porto and jambon du pays. And we invariably had a salade de fruits du jardin (garden fruit salad), amongst other things, to finish the meal. Red and White currants were a must in her fruit salad, as well as preserved cherries. After all, we were no less than twenty-eight mouths to feed.

I am already dreading when these lovely beauties, les fruits rouges de l’été, will be gone! I’d better get some recipes done before this happens.

You too ?

When I arrived at my local farmer’s market last week, I was on a really important mission: finding round zucchini, my favorites by far. They are simply too lovely to resist, always looking pretty on your dinner table.

Delight! I was successful. One farmer tucked in a corner had some.

Upon my return home, I set myself to work immediately and prepared des petits farcis, a favorite summer dish in my kitchen.

I wrote this summer Squash recipe for this week’s Seasons column of the Boston Globe’s Food section, and prepared the dish a few times. The first time I tested the recipe, I used regular long yellow summer squashes and green zucchini, the second time I used my newly purchased round zucchini beauties from the market.

So perhaps if you are as hooked as I am, you will go back to the market every week to buy a batch of round zucchini — making sure to arrive there first to put all chances on your side — and you will indulge in these delicious vegetables as long as their season lasts! Frankly, I am always sad to see the end of it.

But until this happens, I will make a point of preparing petits farcis (small stuffed vegetables) as often as I can, sometimes as a vegetarian dish with all types of rice or quinoa, and at other times prepared with ground meat.

And in all cases, simply too cute and too good to resist.