The Sweet Life in Paris: Cooking fish is hard, fromage blanc is easy

In the recent comments (thank-you very much!) there were a lot of votes for tackling the fromage blanc souffle from David Lebovitz's Sweet Life in Paris. I've never actually tasted fromage blanc and given your accounts of its tastiness and scarcity, decided to see if it would be hard to make at home. 

It isn't. I tried Emeril's recipe, the first one that popped up on the search engine, and it took about 10 minutes of so-called "active" time. You slowly heat milk with buttermilk and lemon juice until curds form, drain off the whey, and there's your cheese. It doesn't differ all that much from homemade ricotta, except it was smoother and slightly more delicious, maybe because I added the optional cream. I always add the optional cream, a personality trait and perhaps a problem. Tomorrow night: fromage blanc souffle.

I also baked Lebovitz's lemon-glazed madeleines, the recipe for which is here. 

Pretty. Lebovitz's innovation is to "swathe" each madeleine in a "puckery" lemon glaze to ensure that they are as moist as the madeleines at his favorite Paris bakery. I haven't actually tasted one yet, am trying to wait until after lunch.

In other news, I've decided it's silly to rush through the remaining dishes I want to try from Paris. Like, what's going to happen if I don't keep to a schedule? I'm going to have to fire myself? So I'm going to start cooking from the next book tomorrow -- Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen -- and we'll just have a few days of overlap. Vietnamese entrees, French desserts.

Also, this interesting story by Joel Stein made me want to buy both the books he mentions and brew some cherry bounce.