Pumpkin Chestnut Puree Recipe

I prepared a pumpkin with fresh chestnuts today for baby Aria and she absolutely loved it. The texture was a little too thick, so I thinned it with mashed plantains and a bit of milk. The pumpkin chestnut purée was as nutritious as it was delicious.

Who said "baby" food can't be tasty? I’ve made an effort to prepare homemade baby food ever since Aria started eating solids. She's already 16 months old and loves trying new foods. My motto is that I won’t serve anything to her that I wouldn’t eat myself. She seems to appreciate it and has become quite the little foodie! She even says “mmmmm” when we’re watching The Cooking Channel. Bobby Flay and the Iron Chef are her favorites!

Purée de Petits Pois Recipe (Mashed Peas)

Mashed potatoes are my guilty pleasure. For this version, green peas complement the flavor of this version and gives a beautiful color and wonderful texture to the purée.

My baby girl is already over 5 months old and I've started introducing solid food to her in the past 2 weeks. I've given her a diversity of vegetables already. Today, I tried feeding  her legumes and made some baby food for her using peas. They're perfect because they're starchy and have a wonderful texture. I passed them through a large mesh sieve to remove the "skin" from the peas, which gave me the idea of making something similar for the family.

Broccoli Puree (Mashed Broccoli)

Mashed potatoes are my guilty pleasure. I've flavored them in the past with garlic, pesto, plaintains, olives and purple sweet potatoes, just to name a few. This time, I used broccoli. It complements the flavor and gives a beautiful color to the purée.

My favorite way to make this dish is to simply mash them using a potato masher, then add milk, cream and lots of butter. It might not be the healthiest approach, but it's certainly the most delicious for creamy mashed potatoes! 

Olive Mashed Potatoes

I came up with the idea of making olive-flavored mashed potatoes (purée de pomme de terre aux olives) while strolling through Parisian open-air markets. Most of them carry the most delicious varieties of olives that are not overly salty. After tasting many varieties, I bought delicious bright green olives that are large, meaty and slightly sweet with a nutty taste to the palate.

Parisian kitchens in general are tiny and contain the bare minimum when it comes to cooking. I mashed the potatoes using the back of a fork, pitted and coarsely chopped the olives and finally mixed them into the purée, adding a little crème fleurette (cream). My husband Lulu loved it and was totally impressed that I was able to pull it off in our tiny kitchen!

Besides visiting museums and monuments in Paris with Lulu, I have to admit that perusing the Parisian open-air markets was my favorite activity! Tasting and seeing the wonderful colors and produce gave me so many ideas and inspirations for new flavor pairings. I’ll be sharing them soon.

Mashed Purple Potatoes

My husband Lulu and I are spending the holidays with my family and friends in Paris. We just arrived and have enjoyed our first couple of days in the City of Lights, despite the cold weather. The sights are wonderful, but the real treat is the wonderful products and ingredients that France has to offer. We went to an open air market this morning and brought back some Vitelotte potatoes.

You might know them as purple Peruvian fingerling potatoes, négresse or truffe de Chine. They are small-sized waxy potatoes, with a skinny and oblong shape. The flesh is dark-violet blue surrounded with a white rim. The texture is quite flour-y and have a different flavor than regular potatoes. I prepared them by boiling, mashing and then mixing the potatoes with butter, cream and milk. I flavored the mashed potatoes with blue cheese and dill. It was a delicious way to start our Parisian vacation!