Stuffing cheese into a chicken thigh doesn’t necessarily sound like a wise idea, but when the cheese in question is panir, a dry non-melting Indian cheese, all is well. We found this dish in a recently acquired cookbook, Modern Spice (on clearance at Village Books!), which is full of wonderful recipes that fuse Indian flavors with the American pantry. In this case bone-in chicken parts are stuffed with Indian herbs and spices mixed with Indian cheese, but baked in the oven instead of being simmered in liquid on the stovetop, as with so much Indian cookery. The chicken gets crispy on top, and the stuffing takes on the flavor of the bird as well as that lovely cheesy toastiness and a kick of chile heat.

Panir is crucial to this recipe, since no other cheese behaves quite like it (maybe halloumi?), but if you can’t find panir you could still make all the other ingredients into a rub for roasted chicken parts. What’s not to like about butter, chiles, ginger, garlic and cilantro?

A fusiony sort of dish like this didn’t seem to need a traditional Indian accompaniment, so we recreated a salad we invented on our Paris vacation, caramelizing finely diced fennel in a skillet and stirring in chopped ripe tomatoes. Pure essence of summer, it played beautifully off the spicy cheese and chicken. With a bright Sangiovese rosé, this was a very successful summer-to-autumn transitional dinner.

Panir-stuffed Chicken Thighs

adapted from Modern Spice by Monica Bhide

• 4 bone-in skin-on chicken thighs
• 1 garlic clove, pressed
• piece of ginger, grated
• 1 Tbsp melted butter
• 1 1/4 tsp kosher salt
• 1 cup finely grated panir
• 2 serrano chiles, red or green, minced
• 2 Tbsp cilantro, minced
• 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
• 1 tsp red chile flakes (our serranos were so hot we left these out)

Preheat the oven to 375°.

Combine the butter, 1 tsp salt, ginger and garlic. Loosen the skin on the thighs, then rub the paste all over the chicken.

Combine the panir, chiles, cilantro, turmeric, chile flakes and the remaining 1/4 tsp salt. Stuff this mixture under the skin of each thigh. Place the chicken in a roasting pan, skin side up.

Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until cooked through and the skin is crispy on top. You can either baste the thighs halfway through, or use my technique of just turning them in their juices with tongs.

On Sunday we made sure to make it up to the Bastille open-air market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir. It begins at Place de la Bastille and stretches for several blocks, four aisles wide and teeming with people, dogs and little wheeled shopping carts.

You can buy everything from tomatoes to underwear. Not to mention foie gras. And wine.

It was so exciting to see wine being sold out in the open! At a farmer’s market! We have somewhat arcane liquor laws here in Washington, it makes me easily impressed by this sort of thing.

The “as-is” bottle selection was particularly scary. Some of them were only one euro, but looked thoroughly toxic. Maybe we should have sprung for a bottle, what the heck?

There were sausages of all sorts, and complex looking loaves of pate stuffed with indescribable body parts. I saw little cups of brains and lots of tripe.

You could buy handmade pasta and gnocchi…

…and cheese of all shapes and sizes…

…and fish!

We bought a few vegetables, some fresh herbs and flowers, and some Moroccan bowls (only one of which survived the trip home, alas) then headed for the fish counter. Some had been cleaned and filleted, but most were intact and bright-eyed on their hill of ice. We bought a bag of fresh sardines – always a treat for me, since they’re so rarely available back home.

Back in our tiny apartment kitchen, we realized that we had a certain lack of sharp knives. Jon used a bread knife to cut a fennel bulb and some tomatoes into small dice.

I used a dull steak knife to gut the sardines. They were so tender, though, I probably didn’t even need that. I rinsed them out and patted them dry, then used a pair of scissors to cut up chives and parsley.

We had one decent skillet, so first Jon used it to saute the diced fennel until soft and caramelized. This we mixed with the chopped tomato and herbs, with a drizzle of fruity olive oil from the Ducs de Gascogne store around the block.

Once the pan was free, I fried the sardines quickly in olive oil until the skin crisped.

To accompany our fish and salad, we had a loaf of bread from the bakery down the street, plus a bottle of rose and a round of St. Marcellin cheese which we had also brought home from the market.

It was very simple, yet completely different from any meal we’ve made at home before. I loved the salad, with the deep sweet flavor of the cooked fennel and the summeriness of the raw tomato and herb. We’ll have to make it again.

After a rather tough week at work, I felt that I had earned a little blowout for our Friday night dinner. My husband aided and abetted by driving up to Taylor Shellfish after work and picking up a bag of fresh oysters, then compounding his wonderfulness by also stopping by Slough Food for manchego and sopressata. I came home on a sultry afternoon to a cold flute of muscadet and good cheese and salumi. The perfect antidote to a long, mostly booze-free week.

After soaking in the fragrance of the lilacs and daphnes on the porch, we moved inside and had a “counter dinner”. I laid out everything we needed on the kitchen island, we pulled up stools and poured fresh glasses of wine, and began.

Jon used our mandoline to shave the manchego into feather-thin slices, then did the same with the fennel. I whisked together a dressing of fresh lemon juice, olive oil, mayonnaise, salt, pepper and some chopped fennel fronds, and tossed it into the fennel and cheese.

We (or rather, Jon) shucked the oysters, eating as we went, alternating with bites of fennel salad directly out of the bowl, and occasionally chasing an oyster with a slice of sopressata or a piece of buttered bread. The wine went down easily. It felt like Friday.

One of our new (to us) cookbooks was beginning to pine away from lack of use, and we decided we must make something from it. As it turned out, we managed three different dishes from the book in one meal: not all exactly as written, but definitely inspired by. As a result, we’ve decided that Greg Malouf is a genius. These recipes are from Artichoke to Za’atar (I prefer its UK title, Arabesque)- now we have to get to work on Turquoise. And I really must get hold of a copy of Saha.

The meal was composed of very normal things for us to make: lamb chops, mashed potatoes and a shaved fennel salad. But the lamb was glazed with mustard, cardamom seed, honey and sherry, then coated with breadcrumbs mixed with lemon zest, fennel seed and sumac powder. The fennel was tossed with fresh mint, dried mint and parsley in a lemon dressing, and the mashed potatoes were sieved and beaten with a large quantity of butter and goat cheese. It all looked so good we decided it was worthy of opening our bottle of Stephenson Syrah, and oh lordy.

I can recommend all of these recipes, but I really think anyone who likes potatoes and goat cheese needs to make this one. I’m printing the recipe in all its caloric glory, but I freely admit that I couldn’t bring myself to add the full amount of butter (I did add plenty of cheese). I also subbed some half and half for the cream, because that’s what I had on hand. I did, though, for the first time ever, actually sieve the potatoes. It made me cranky, but it was so totally worth it.

Goat Cheese Mashed Potatoes

from Artichoke to Za’atar by Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf

• 3 russet potatoes
• 1 Yukon Gold or other waxy potato
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 7 Tbsp butter
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1/3 cup goat cheese
• salt and pepper

Peel and dice the potatoes, place in a large pan and cover with cold salted water. Bring to a boil and simmer 15-20 minutes, until completely cooked.

Combine the oil, butter and cream in a small pan, bring to a boil, then simmer until reduced by a third. Keep warm.

Press the potatoes through a sieve, then pour in the butter mixture. Beat thoroughly, then break up the goat cheese into the potatoes and beat it in. Salt and pepper to taste, and eat immediately.

I can hardly believe it, but it’s true: I had never eaten pasta carbonara before this week. Shocking, I know. And I might not have gotten around to it, if I hadn’t seen this amazing post. Jennifer’s carbonara was full of delicious local eggs, plus she had some wonderful looking pork jowl to work with; mine was a little more subdued but still very successful.

We had come home from a wine tasting at our local shop, and were feverishly trying to think what we could cook with what was on hand. We had two eggs left in the fridge, a fresh pack of Hempler’s bacon, some parmesan cheese in the freezer, and some random boxes of Barilla pasta – and I already had carbonara on the brain from the aforementioned blog post. It seemed worth a try.

While the water for the pasta was heating, I broke the two eggs into a big mixing bowl and microplaned the parmesan directly on top. I sauteed chopped-up bacon in a little olive oil until it was good and crispy and the fat was rendered out. The cooked, steaming-hot pasta (we didn’t have any long pasta, so I used penne) was added directly to the egg and cheese and mixed thoroughly, then the bacon and its hot fat was poured over and mixed in. I sprinkled in a little parsley, ground in plenty of black pepper and it was finished!

In the meantime, Jon had sliced a bulb of fennel paper-thin. I tossed it with some salad greens left over from earlier in the week and a quick vinaigrette of lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.

The pasta wasn’t nearly as deadly-rich as I feared; instead, it had a warm, creamy, bacony flavor and light texture that was pure pleasure. The fennel salad provided just the right acidity and bite to contrast with the carbonara. This may just be the perfect dinner-in-a-hurry for our repertoire.

We were dying for vegetables after our odd weekend in the Tri-Cities, so we loaded up a shopping cart with mushrooms, onion, fennel, beets, carrot and a parsnip and took it all home to roast with olive oil and salt. I separated out the shrooms and fennel to roast together, parboiled the beets and put them in a pan with the carrot, and put the onion and parsnip in a third pan (J is not a big fan of the parsnip). When everything was caramelized and soft I tossed it all together on our plates, and topped the piles with a lovely halibut steak that I had roasted as well. It was all very fresh tasting and delicious, and made us feel that it was nice to be home (sleeping in our own bed helped, too).

So dinner was nice, but I felt the high point was lunch the next day. I was feeling inspired after seeing this post and video on poaching eggs, as well as months of reading the wonderful blog posts on Last Night’s Dinner featuring beautiful poached eggs on top of duck hash or other yummy things. I had been known to poach an egg occasionally, but usually wimped out and ended up frying them (I’m good at frying eggs, at least) and eating them for breakfast on top of leftover greens or couscous.

But I did it! It’s not as pretty as it could be, but it was perfectly done and it tasted wonderful with the roasted parsnip and beets and such, with the yolk dribbling down and mixing with the sweet vegetables juices. With a good sprinkle of fleur de sel, it was a cheery and restorative lunch.

Our plan for Sunday – which actually worked out, astonishingly enough – was to go get our Christmas tree at a local farm, set it up, and braise something for dinner so it could be cooking away and scenting the house while we decorated our tree. Often, of course, these plans don’t work out, because getting the tree into the house takes approximately five times longer than you think it will, and by the time it’s upright, the floor is vacuumed and the furniture has all been rearranged twice, you don’t have time for an involved dinner. But we actually allowed enough time for once, so we had our braise and our tree, too.

I was very pleased with the braised short ribs I made out of Molly Stevens’ book All About Braising, and wanted to try another recipe or two from her. We have an Italian friend who used to make pork cooked with milk and sage, but I had never tried it myself (I think I still wasn’t convinced it really worked) so when I saw a recipe for Pork Loin Braised in Milk, I thought I’d try it just as written and see what happened.

First, I combined chopped fresh sage, fennel seed, salt and pepper in a bowl. I sliced up three cloves of garlic and dredged them in the herbs, then stuffed them into slits in a pork blade roast. I rubbed the remaining herb mix over the pork.

The pork was browned on all sides in a dutch oven – the pan was barely big enough for the meat. The pork was set aside briefly, and I sauteed a smashed garlic clove in the remaining fat in the pan, then added 1 1/4 cups of whole milk and brought it to a boil, scraping all the good fond off the bottom of the pan. The pork went into the milk, I covered the pan and popped it into the oven at 280°. After 45 minutes I turned it, and 45 minutes after that it was done! I pulled the pork out, set it on a cutting board with foil over it, and starting boiling down the sauce.

It wasn’t very promising looking, but the recipe lets you know that it’ll look like this, which I appreciated. You boil it down, stirring the whole time, until you just have milk curds in a thick golden sauce.

The pork was perfectly done, and wonderfully moist. The sauce had a great rich salty flavor. Yum.

The recommended side dish to go with the pork was herbed braised fennel, and as long as I was following recipes, I figured I’d try that, too. The recipe seemed very lengthy and called for the oven to be at a different temperature than for the pork, so I simplified it and did it on the stovetop. I chopped a few cloves of garlic and tossed them in a skillet with olive oil, about five anchovy fillets, some fennel seed and a few springs of fresh thyme, added chopped fennel and sauteed it all together for a bit, then added vermouth and chicken stock and covered the pan. The end result was tender and delicately flavored, but actually not very fennel-ish any more. We’ve decided we prefer fennel roasted.

The final plate was pretty unattractive, but much much tastier than it looked. We added a salad of sharp greens and finished off a bottle of wine left over from the day before, a Las Rocas garnacha. The combination of flavors was swoonworthy.

Saturday night’s dinner was pretty exciting (and filling), so I made us a “recovery” dinner for Sunday, just a fillet of wild-caught sockeye salmon, pan-seared in olive oil, and a head of fennel and some beets, cut up and roasted in the oven. It was beautiful, fresh tasting and sweet, and it turns out that salmon and fennel are really good together (note for future experiments).

Of course, we may have undone some of the good of this dinner by also baking up the rest of the gougères and eating them all. Whoops.