The background color matters so much

to make the color you love pop

Summer is just hanging on by a thread

A pink and yellow tomato.

SIMA

... Likes jewelry flush against her skin, nothing too big or heavy. Wears a sapphire and diamond ring every day. The stones are cut more like baguettes and set flat in the metal.

... Dreams of studs in sparkly neutrals and matte metals with some texture (perhaps multiple facets) to wear every day or from work to play. Wants her engagement ring to woven of rose gold with diamonds interspersed throughout.

... Carries influences from NY and India and California with her. Reads tax books for fun and wears Rag and Bone like a star. She will eat meat (oh lamb chops and sausage casserole) when I cook it even though she is a vegetarian. She is that cool.

FRIED OKRA

and

PEACH COBBLER NOTES

The fried okra came out beautifully. I have no idea how Dexter made it. The small green okras are the best.

A small note, when making peach cobbler it is very important to not have too much peach juice. Before adding any flour or sugar, let the peach juices run off. Feed the juice to a lovely person. The peaches should only need a tiny bit of flour and sugar and should be very happily looking perfect and layered (not mushy and drowning in peach goop like mine ended up). Also, I think more flour and less butter makes for a better topping. Somehow the cobbling didn't go perfectly even though I very much wanted them to be amazing.

HUITRES

Baptiste battled our Normandy oysters quite gallantly and they submitted to his oyster knife technique learned from his grandfather when he was a jeune homme in the Alps. I loved the creaminess, which everyone else called milkiness and regarded with a little. I tasted freshness, just enough of the ocean, and a sweetness that made me lightheaded. Agathe says that the best (imagine the word best said quite earnestly with a slightly airy and small french accent) oysters are from the Atlantic coast. "Meilleures huitres au France sont de M___ Oleiou (Cote Atlantique, pres de La Rochelle)."

ALEXA

... wishes the perfect small, delicate necklace that stands out but is still so subtle and falls exactly in the right place on one's neck existed.

.... wants what she wears to be found, collected on some faraway, wonderous, and glorious adventure. Like the treasure trove of jangley bracelets she dons when not at work. Like a green stone from the ocean or a piece of black volcano rock.

... loves equally Erin Wasson, dogs, the Marilyn Minter eating earth photo I sent her, small drawings by Philippe Dumas, Helen Frankenthaler, Julie Mehretu, and imperfections -- like her mother's pair of not perfectly round pearl earrings, one black and one white that dangle a little and look absolutely stunning or like the two large and one small earrings her French aunt wears asymetrically with such chic.

... cherishes a teeny tiny gold and ruby flower earring that her grandmother managed to keep through WWII.

helen frankenthaler

julie mehretu (crazy like the financial regulatory system post-DFA!)

mon amour

tres beaux

et sauvage

PEACH TOMATO BASIL SALAD

and

ROASTED GARLIC

Inspired by the way that the French present their food -- like art.

Freshness:

This one is easy. Slice the peaches and arrange in a neat pattern like a frame. Sprinkle with thinly sliced red onion (not too much), snippits of basil (mine was picked from a planter outside of Zorba's, next time I am getting it from the farmers market or a store), and drops of balsamic vinegar made slightly sweeter with some brown sugar and thinned slightly with olive oil. Chop tomatoes and pile in the center. Salt and pepper. Let sit before eating so that the flavors can combine.

The salad was just the start to a decadent meal of garlic roasted mashed potatoes, filet mignon, and a deliciously silky Saint Estephe red wine.

Garlicness:

Cut off the tops of the garlic to expose the cloves. Pour olive oil whatever the garlic will be baked in. Arrange the garlic cut side up. Fill the garlic generously with olive oil. Salt and pepper with abandon. I used a "sel fin de camargue aux herbes BIO" from Provence. Cook covered in foil at about 400 F for 20-30 minutes. When finished, the garlic cloves can be squeezed out of the bulb and will taste delicious.

Roughly Mash with boiled potatoes, a lot of butter, whole milk or cream, and a little more salt and pepper. Heaven.

ABBY

... wears two small gold pendants on a long chain (grandmother), two small gold rings etoile style with a diamond each (mother and sister), and sometimes a gold snake bracelet (father).

... her favorite piece was a large vintage Givenchy bull's head necklace. The head was white with black curved horns tipped in gold.

... lives by her color palette, which starts with her green eyes and allows for neutrals, rusty browns, creams, pale straw yellows. No red. She doesn't read fashion blogs because her friends are the taste makers in Brooklyn that the blogs themselves are following. When she wears a large brimmed fine straw hat she looks like Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawn, Yeat's muse in Bright Star.

... is drawn to the shock value of the art in the Musee d'Orsay. The washerwoman is a normal person elevated to the realm of great art by religious light (and the sort of colors Abby loves)! The goddess is portrayed as a common whore and she is staring right at you the viewer!

Olympia by Edouard Manet

The Washerwoman by Honore Daumier

GIRL ALEX

...wears a gold necklace and a gold ring, both are engraved with messages and dates. Neither is too small. Both have a little heft.

...likes designs that allow for and highlight the material's own natural properties and personality. Like metal caught in the act of yielding to pressure, chocolate paused mid melt, or a stone whose imperfections show us how it came to be. In contrast to the idiosyncrasies of how a material likes to behave are perfectly round beads (thrown in the metal) or patterns made of repeated identical shapes (layered over the chocolates).

...enters a slight trance, almost religious, when she tastes her food.

...provided a description of art I like as it is so I'll just include it. "ok, they might come back to me slowly, since i am so un-inspired these days. for painters i like franz kline, his work can always make me cry if i stare long enough at it. all the emotion is in the brush stoke. also i love this one film called zen for film by Nam June Paik : http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/njpaik-zenforfilm.html you can't really watch in online, but you get the idea. it makes me laugh. In general I love japanese things which are wabi sabi over overdone, either way makes me feel funny inside. i love kimonos and other soft things. wait, artists..... stanley kubrick because his stuff is elegant and balanced. the royal tenenbaums because of the appreciation for old things and stuff that has been handed down - I love objects imbued with history. it's a very preppy aesthetic. also he uses a lot of pastels in contrast with brighter colors and leathery things. architecture i like the glass house in connecticutt by johnson because it is simple and something about the translucency also makes me feel funny inside, like playing house."

I kept stopping and looking up and staring. And staring.

Near Otto Potter's place

Near the Paris historical museum Alex Carter likes

In the 11e where girl Alex lives

To me, paris is wandering around

staring up at gorgeous carved stone

and dark, lacey wrought iron balconies

and then like a wonderful surprise

happening upon some brilliant GREEN

PATRICK ROGER CHOCOLATE

Within hours of landing in Paris, Alex and Abby presented me with a jewel Patrick Roger caramel filled chocolate and a small square of jasmine dark chocolate perfection. Monsieur Roger carves chocolate! The absolute best was the immense, rough, absolutely divine smelling gorilla made of hewn chocolate. That cube is an abstract elephant.

MELON

I first had French melon at age twelve during a summer spent in Mimizan near Bordeaux. Every meal started with a slice of the sweet, soft deliciousness. The melon looks, but does not taste, like a cantaloupe. It is just sweetness and soft and slightly heavy fruit flesh that yields easily to a spoon. Abby and I tried melons from all over Paris -- the chain supermarket Carrefour, a random 7-11 type shop, a done up fruit stand near the fashionable Rue de Martyrs, an organic specialty Bio shop in the 11th, and the equivalent of a Korean grocer near Rue Charonne. The best ones come from Provence and had a strong, sweet, heavy perfume like smell.

I think they look most beautiful sliced and served on a small plate near a window that lets in sunlight.