Chocolate Mousse

Tomato Kumato started as a tiny project, a little ray of sunshine in the midst an otherwise monotonous summer spent waiting tables on Long Island (a summer that, I’ve come to realize, I reference quite often on the aforementioned blog). I started on a whim: I called my roommate, he set me up with a WordPress account, and now, more than three years later, this blog is still going strong, even if I am sometimes the only one reading what I write.

Every rule has an exception–it’s true of French grammar, and it’s true of my “sometimes,” which does not in any way apply to summertime, when this blog, my tiny project, develops a second role: that of chronicling our adventures here in Paziols. The blog becomes intertwined with the program here, and the girls are surprised to learn that the blog existed before Paziols, that I continue to post recipes even after summer is over and I have moved on to somewhere new.

I won’t lie: sometimes it’s a pain. I’ve noticed that many of you have dropped off the radar for the summer, leaving your readers with the blogger equivalent of a “gone fishing” notice on your homepage. Many of my favorite blogs won’t start updating again until it’s time to talk about pie and pumpkin once more, and I myself have been tempted to do the same thing: it’s not as though we haven’t been eating well here in Paziols–quite the contrary, actually, as I have been having the time of my life experimenting with French recipes from all over this diverse country to see what flies with discerning American palates. But summertime, for me, has traditionally been the time of year when I close my laptop to all writing–not just blogging (if you follow my fiction writing, you’ll notice that updates there have been even more scarce). The last thing I want to do at the end of a long day, when I’m sticky with sweat and bug spray and my shoulders ache from one too many jumps off the rope swing at the Pachaire, is to sit down in front of my computer and comb through endless photos and come up with something marginally clever to say.

Blogging becomes, not a fun way to relax, but a chore, and I hate when things I love become a chore. So if you haven’t seen much of me around the blogosphere, it’s because I’ve been waiting: waiting for inspiration to creep up on me instead of sitting in front of photos of cassoulet and gratin and waiting, waiting, waiting for the words to spill out of me, like they were so eager to do when I was wrapped up in a quilt all winter in Paris.

I logged on today with good intentions: I planned, as I have been planning for several days, to chronicle our recent experience at the moulin de Cucugnan, where we learned to make flour, made bread, ate incredible pasta prepared by the miller himself, and were gifted some fairly incredible chocolate chip cookies. It has been a post awaited and expected by the people who read this blog regularly, and I don’t want to let down my readers.

But when I sat down today to write, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. I have yet to organize my thoughts, yet to decide exactly what it is I want to say. And even if this blog is no longer purely mine, even if it has become something different, changed and morphed by the expectations and desires of others, it is still, first and foremost, my canvas, and I refuse to compromise the quality of it by writing something that I have yet to wrap my head around.

Instead, I will offer you something pure and simple today–a way to ease myself back into something I love. Chocolate mousse is a quintessential French dessert, a classic combination of eggs, chocolate and cream. As in much of French cuisine, it is in the preparation, not the ingredients, that this dessert becomes what it is, and as I watched the girls carefully bring the 20 some-odd eggwhites to soft peaks (by hand), I remembered what it was like, for me, when this blog was just a baby, just a little something I did to pass the time.

Chocolate Mousse (serves 20-some-odd people)

1.25 kilos good-quality dark chocolate
50 centiliters crème fraîche
20 eggs

Chop the chocolate into chunks, and melt slowly over a double boiler, stirring constantly. When the chocolate is completely melted, stir in the crème fraîche. Leave the mixture in the double boiler, with the heat turned off, while you prepare the eggs.

Carefully separate the egg whites from the yolks. In a clean metal or glass bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form.

Beat the yolks and combine them with the chocolate. Fold this mixture carefully into the egg whites. Chill several hours before serving with fromage frais or whipped cream.