cabbage-tomato-sausage-duck A delicious sulfury vegetable soup. The sausage and duck are from Boucherie du Marché. A couple of extra side dishes are given.

carnitas-black-beans This is the festival piece. Good guacamole should be eaten with a spoon. The best jalapeños are typically at Chez Nino. These are small, dark, ripe, have corky skin and are very hot. Serranos are most often available at Potager Mont-Rouge. If both are available, prefer the riper one. If equally ripe, prefer the serrano. The echine de porc from Ferme St. Vincent is perfect for this.

jambalaya A classic. I usually just make this with chorizo and shrimp. The chorizo is from Les Cochons Tout Ronds. Belgian beer is great with the prefume from the mold that grows on their chorizo.

pork-chops-lentils-wine Once again the sausage is from Les Cochons Tout Ronds. I like the thin-cut bone-in pork chops from Ferme St. Vincent. Don't pass up the chance to put fresh morels in the sauce. Made with black truffles, the perfume it leaves in the kitchen is a truimph.

saumon-en-papillote Quick and easy and delicious. The ginger-sesame alternative is even easier. Record sratch! I just made an addition to the ginger-sesame variation that puts it over the top. Radicchio di Castelfranco is the secret ingredient I was looking for. I now have four brassica-related combinations that I think deserve wider acclaim. One is duck and bok choy. The second is Alsatian style choucroute with fresh daikon and kohlrabi. Now the third is radicchio di Castelfranco and daikon (or watermelon radish), and the fourth is gai lan stems and kohlrabi leaves. I also recently discovered daikon microgreens, which are teriffic.

vivaneau-en-papillote Matsutake mushrooms, or else horn of plenty or morel, seem to be available all the time now from Le Jardin Sauvage. Fleur de courgette is available in the summer from Birri.

chocolate-coconut-almond-tart My signature dessert. It takes all day to make, but not too much work. It's best about 36 hours after being put in the fridge. Creamed coconut is the stuff in little cardboard boxes. It contains only coconut. See below about cream and butter.

ice-creams This chocolate ice cream base is so rich and thick it could almost be eaten unfrozen. Only use cream without vegetable thickeners. The shop Qui lait cru? has the good stuff in glass bottles (pasteurized non-UHT), and also good butter. Once again eat the sauce with a spoon from a separate bowl - it would just melt the ice cream.

4brews Four homebrew recipes for a single-infusion mash setup. Optic pale malt is terrific stuff. The last one is a showpiece for a pale malt and a whole leaf hop of highest quality.