After traveling across six regions of France--Brittany, Bordeaux, Basque, Provence, Lyon and Alsace--Rachel Khoo (The Little Paris Kitchen) returned to her Paris apartment and blended together old family recipes that embraced each area's specialties with the newest food concepts and trends in France, creating more than 100 recipes that are full of flavorful and colorful fresh ingredients. Both savory and sweet, and easy to reproduce at home, these recipes include crab and kiwi tartare, cheese and tomato buttery biscuits, chard and preserved lemon blinis, Sand Dune ice-cream cakes and walnut-and-buckwheat caramel tart.
Along with the recipes, Khoo includes her reflections on each region, adding interesting details about the origins of her dishes and the people and cultures that inspired them. Khoo's text and the 200-plus photographs of food and the countryside she explored are the next best thing to an actual trip and should inspire anyone interested in preparing and eating food like the French. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer