Béatrice vs. Martine

(I'm about five days behind on life due to an 800-page manuscript that needs tending, but let's pretend all of the following just happened today instead of last week. Ok?)

I have been looking for a non-meat-centric, non-baking-centric French cookbook since I arrived. I have picked up some cookbooks here and there, but have mostly regretted leaving my copy of Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Cooking back in New York. The closest all-natural cookbooks I've seen here are full of salad and soup recipes. Let me tell you something: salads and soups have their place, but I do not live on them alone. Also, it's hard to read through recipes coupled with tidbits on how to grow my own vegetables. I am fairly committed to urban dwelling at this point in my life. I accept that I will not be digging in the dirt to turn up the raw ingredients for my next meal. 


Enter La Tartine Gourmande by Béatrice Peltré. Béatrice is a French-born, Boston-living woman with a passion for food and an adorable young daughter. She mentions Whole Foods a fair amount in her book and said book is even blurbed by none other than Heidi Swanson and David Lebovitz (whose charming memoir/recipe book on Parisian living won me over despite my initial skepticism). Such a perfect find for me already, and to boot, her recipes are written with side-by-side measurements for both an American and a French kitchen. I can use my Matriushka-shaped measuring cups or tell the farmer's market folks exactly how many grams I need of something. I quickly promoted this volume to "most treasured cookbook ever" status, before I'd even cooked a single recipe out of it.

So, I was all set to bake some chocolate-tahini cookies when my sous-chef Malanga Girl questioned why I needed to listen to this Béatrice woman at all. Didn't I realize that Martine was the only French girl worth emulating, experienced as she was in such admirable and diverse activities as ballet dancing, horseback riding, taking care of her baby brother AND cooking? Oh yes, it's true, long before La Tartine Gourmande came out, Martine had her own cookbook. Béatrice Peltré even mentions dear old Martine in her own book!

But did I listen to Malanga Girl at first? No, I overrode her and went off to the health food store. I searched for all the special flours Béatrice calls for in her chocolate-tahini cookies: brown rice flour, millet flour, and quinoa flour, plus quinoa flakes. I tossed a neat little jar of tahini sauce and the perfect tablet of chocolate into my panier (basket) and headed to the downstairs flour section. There was the millet flour, mercifully also called millet in French since I had forgotten to look it up, and there were two bags of what could be brown rice flour if I could just figure out why the names were slightly different. But, the shelf that was labeled with "quinoa flour" was empty. Well, no matter, surely I could ask for some from the back. I headed to the register.

Now, I should mention that for months and months, I was greeted at the health food store by the same wonderfully pleasant woman who always chit-chatted with me, asked about Malanga Girl and recommended new recipes. Sadly, she went back to school this fall. (But not before telling me she was leaving and exchanging phone numbers and e-mail addresses with me!) Her replacement is not nearly as charming. Actually, she borders on rude. So when I asked her about the quinoa flour and received a mildly sarcastic response indicating that if I didn't see it on the shelf, then they clearly didn't have any, my dreams of baking chocolate-tahini cookies were crushed. I like to think my refusal to buy everything in my panier would show that rude clerk that she should perhaps offer a cheery "I'm sorry we're out of that right now" to the news of no quinoa flour, but I am mostly certain she could care less.

So what's a Malanga Mama to do when she craves chocolate cookies and has no quinoa flour? That's right, I turned to Martine's recipe for chocolate-chip cookies, using regular old flour, chocolate chips, butter, sugar an egg and pecans. The recipe even has a little note about the origins of pecans and how they grow in North America, a factoid that Malanga Girl was very excited about.

We ate the cookies too quickly to photograph them at all. But they were delicious!