Cooking Confidential

Today, I found a ridiculously easy and delicious sounding tart at Passionculinaire.fr website. I enjoy tuning in to a handful of Francophone websites for French reading practice in particular and cooking inspiration in general. I say inspiration because often very ordinary inexpensive ingredients in one country become exotic and expensive in another. But here’s one that will cross national borders very nicely and I’m going to make it as soon as we’ve eaten up the cake I just shared with you yesterday (Jan. 11 : pound cake). If you want to get a jump on my effort, it’s a cream cheese and apricot tart that calls for canned apricots–but just be sure that the label reads sugar only, no high fructose corn syrup. Aldi sells apricots canned in a “lite” syrup that are excellent. My personal change (”ma touche perso”, as my most prolific blogeuse, “Stella”, would put it) would be to use my usual press in tart crust recipe, cut back to 2/3 of original size since this is for a smaller tart pan that my usual 11 inch production,that can be found in Cooking Confidential.

Which brings me to the primary point of today’s blog:
In trying to think of ideas for free and frequent French practice, it occurred to me that reading about food in French would be a very attractive incentive for doing a little French every day. Not being the most disciplined of beings (I was ADHD before it had a name and a medication), I tend to need very powerful incentives to keep up the good work beyond the original blast off stage of a particular enthusiasm. In spite of the fact that my thoughts are at this very moment hurtling somehow through the stratosphere into the mechanism in front of you, gentle reader, I am totally ignorant of how it all happens, so I can’t quite remember how I found these particular sites, but with Google/Yahoo, etc, you, who doubtless can’t help but know more than I ever will, are more than able to figure it out for yourself.
Check these out:
passionculinaire.fr
La Comunate des Gastronomes

Browsing the food section of plurielles.fr, canalblog.com, and overblog.com (blog host sites)

A couple newsletters that come to me regularly:
Clafoutis & Compagnie @stella.overblog.com
Ma cuisine, mes livres et moi: boudloune.canalblog.com
dinettedenanette.canalblog.com
avocat et chocolat : alicecuisine.canalblog.com

Of course, each site features a list of own their favorite blogs or new good blogs, so you can pick and chose among these to build your own little group according to what appeals to you.