Gougeres and French Manhattans -- Happy New Year!

LESLIE BUDEWITZ:  A few years ago, I bought Mr. Right a copy of Drinking French by David Lebovitz for Christmas – just in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve with some of David’s treats. Gougère and French Manhattans are a pairing the man himself recommends, and we heartily agree!

What, you ask, are gougères? Little cheese puffs, almost as easy to make as they are to eat! Lebovitz says Comte, Jarlsberg, or Cheddar would work in place of the Gruyere – what you’re after is a hard cheese with a strong flavor. Lebovitz recommends using your mixer’s paddle attachment; at the time we made these, we had a mixer that didn’t have one and the regular beaters worked fine. I’m looking forward to paddling with my new red Kitchen Aid this New Year’s Eve! He calls for cayenne; it’s a small amount, but if cayenne troubles you, try a sweet paprika. Because he’s a pro, he has several recommendations for mounding the dough – a spring-loaded scoop, a pastry bad, yada yada. I settled on a small silicon spatula and my finger as the best scoop.

And a French Manhattan? It’s an American Manhattan with a delightful French accent! (We didn’t have cherries the day I took the pictures. We also didn’t have coupe glasses. Act American and punt!) 

Friends, we are all grateful for your presence in our lives and at the blog this past year. Everyone of us wishes you great joy, good food, and fabulous reading in the year to come!

PS: I finally figured out how to embed a PDF of the recipe for easy printing. 

Scroll down to the 💕 for the link. 

Gougères (adapted from Drinking French by David Lebovitz)

1 cup water

½ cup unsalted butter, cubed

½ teaspoon kosher or sea salt

1/4 teaspoon cayenne or sweet paprika

1 cup white, all-purpose flour

4 large eggs

2-3/4 cups grated Gruyere (divided use)

Adjust oven racks, raising the top rack a bit for maximum air circulation. Heat oven to 425 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicon baking sheets.

In a medium saucepan, heat the water, butter, salt, and cayenne over medium to medium-high heat, stirring until the butter is melted.

Add the flour all at once. Reduce heat to medium and book, stirring continuously, until the dough forms a smooth ball and no longer sticks to the side of the pan.

Scrape the dough into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, and let rest for 2 minutes, “bursting” the mixer (turning it on and off) a couple of times to cool the dough.

Turn the mixer to medium-high and add the eggs one at a time, incorporating each before adding the next, and stopping the mixer to scrape down the sides before each addition. Add 1-3/4 cups cheese and mix.

Scoop 1-1/2 tablespoons of dough onto your baking sheet and repeat, with at least an inch between the mounds, about 15 per baking sheet. Each mound should be about 1-1/2 inches wide. With the remaining cup of cheese, top each mound with as much cheese as you can. 

Bake 5 minutes. Reduce heat to 375 degrees and bake until the top and sides are deep golden brown, about 30 minutes. Midway, rotate the baking sheets 180 degrees and switch their position on the racks so they bake evenly.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Makes about 30. 

French Manhattan (from Drinking French by David Lebovitz)

For each cocktail:

1-1/2 ounces cognac

1-1/2 ounces sweet vermouth

1/4 ounce Grand Marnier or Cointreau

1 dash orange or Angostura bitters

Candied amarena cherry or maraschino cherry, for garnish. 

Add the cognac, sweet vermouth, Grand Marnier, and bitters to a cocktail mixing glass. Add ice and stir until well chilled. 

Strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a cherry. Eat with a gougère -- or two or three!

Bonne année, nos amis!

💕 Click here for a free printable PDF! 

At Seattle Spice Shop, owner Pepper Reece has whipped up the perfect blend of food, friends, and flavor. But the sweet smell of success can be hazardous . . .  

Spring is in full bloom in Pike Place Market, where Pepper is celebrating lavender’s culinary uses and planning a festival she hopes will become an annual event. When her friend Lavender Liz offers to share tips for promoting the much-loved—and occasionally maligned—herb, Pepper makes a trek to the charming town of Salmon Falls. But someone has badly damaged Liz’s greenhouse, throwing a wrench in the feisty grower’s plans for expansion. Suspicions quickly focus on an employee who’s taken to the hills. 

Then Liz is found dead among her precious plants, stabbed by a pruning knife. In Salmon Falls, there’s one in every pocket. 

Pepper digs in, untangling the tensions between Liz and a local restaurateur with eyes on a picturesque but neglected farm, a jealous ex-boyfriend determined to profit from Liz’s success, and a local growers’ cooperative. She’s also hot on the scent of a trail of her own, sniffing out the history of her sweet dog, Arf. 

As Pepper’s questions threaten to unearth secrets others desperately want to keep buried, danger creeps closer to her and those she loves. Can Pepper root out the killer, before someone nips her in the bud?

Available at Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Books-A-Million * Bookshop.org * and your local booksellers!

ALL GOD'S SPARROWS AND OTHER STORIES: A STAGECOACH MARY FIELDS COLLECTION, now available in in paperback and ebook 

Take a step back in time with All God's Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection of historical short mysteries, featuring the Agatha-Award winning "All God's Sparrows" and other stories imagining the life of real-life historical figure Mary Fields, born into slavery in 1832, during the last thirty years of her life, in Montana. Out September 17, 2024 from Beyond the Page Publishing.  

“Finely researched and richly detailed, All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories is a wonderful collection. I loved learning about this fascinating woman . . . and what a character she is! Kudos to Leslie Budewitz for bringing her to life so vividly.” —Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of Crow Mary

Available at Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Books-A-Million * Bookshop.org * and your local booksellers!

Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Spice Shop Mysteries set in Seattle's Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in NW Montana. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody, standalone suspense, most recently Blind Faith. She is the winner of Agatha Awards in three categories: Best Nonfiction (2011), Best First Novel (2013), and Best Short Story (2018). Her latest books are To Err is Cumin, the 8th Spice Shop Mystery and All God's Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, in September 2024. Watch for Lavender Lies Bleeding, the 9th Spice Shop Mystery, on July 15, 2025.

A past president of Sisters in Crime and former national board member of Mystery Writers of America, Leslie lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their cat, an avid bird-watcher.

Swing by Leslie's website and join the mailing list for her seasonal newsletter. And join her on Facebook where she shares book news and giveaways from her writer friends, and talks about food, mysteries, and the things that inspire her.

Gougeres (aka Cheese Puffs) @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: This is another recipe from Dorie Greenspan, although I think the same directions can be found in many cookbooks, from Mastering the Art of French Cooking all the way to The Joy of Cooking. I remember my mother making these puffs for parties. She was a plain cook, but this was one of her fancy company dishes. She would stuff them with tuna fish or maybe shrimp salad and serve them as hors d’oeuvres. Hayley Snow's mother Janet also served puffs like this at a funeral reception in A DISH TO DIE FOR.

Mom with party food

There are so many ways to riff on this recipe, but I decided to make this simple for the first time. But they turned out so well that I will definitely be making again, probably leaving out the cheese so I can serve them as profiteroles (stuffed with ice cream and drizzled with hot fudge sauce.)

Dorie makes a double batch of these and freezes half of them before baking to have on hand for drop in visitors. She is a consummate entertainer!

Ingredients

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup water

8 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 teaspoon fine salt

1 cup all purpose flour

Five large eggs, room temperature

1 1/2 cups a.k.a. 6 ounces coarsely grated cheese (Gruyere is traditional but cheddar or other cheese is fine too)

Preheat your oven to 425 and line 2 baking sheets with parchment.

In a medium pan, bring the milk water salt and butter to a rapid boil. Turn the heat down and add the flour all at once and stir vigorously for a few minutes. 

At this point, you can either move the batter to a KitchenAid mixer with a paddle attachment, or try using an old fashioned mixer, or mix by hand (as I did.) Add the eggs one at a time and beat well until each egg is incorporated into the dough. 

Beat in the grated cheese.

Scoop the dough into rounds on the prepared baking sheets. (A cookie scooper is perfect for this job.) You want about a tablespoon of dough for each puff, leaving 2 inches between the puffs so they can rise in the oven.

Slide the trays into the oven, turn the temperature down to 375. Bake for 12 minutes, then rotate the pans top to bottom and back to front. Bake for another 12 to 15 minutes until the puffs are golden.

Served hot or at room temperature and watch them leap off the plate!

A DISH TO DIE FOR, #12 in the Key West food critic mystery series, is now available wherever books are sold

About A Dish to Die For:

Peace and quiet are hard to find in bustling Key West, so Hayley Snow, food critic for Key Zest magazine, is taking the afternoon off for a tranquil lunch with a friend outside of town. As they are enjoying the wild beach and the lunch, she realizes that her husband Nathan’s dog, Ziggy, has disappeared. She follows his barking, to find him furiously digging at a shallow grave with a man’s body in it. Davis Jager, a local birdwatcher, identifies him as GG Garcia, a rabble-rousing Key West local and developer. Garcia was famous for over-development on the fragile Keys, womanizing, and refusing to follow city rules—so it’s no wonder he had a few enemies.

 When Davis is attacked in the parking lot of a local restaurant after talking to Hayley and her dear friend, the octogenarian Miss Gloria, Hayley is slowly but surely drawn into the case. Hayley’s mother, Janet, has been hired to cater GG’s memorial service reception at the local Woman’s Club, using recipes from their vintage Key West cookbook—and Hayley and Miss Gloria sign on to work with her, hoping to cook up some clues by observing the mourners.

But the real clues appear when Hayley begins to study the old cookbook, as whispers of old secrets come to life, dragging the past into the present—with murderous results.

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