Chocolate and Zucchini | Clotilde Dusoulier | Talks at Google

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming to our Authors at Google event. It's my distinct pleasure today to introduce you to Clotilde Dessollier. Yeah, close enough. She is the author of a wonderful blog called Chocolate and Zucchini that's been around since about 2003. And around November 2004, she surprised us all by telling us some hints about a book that was coming out, which she's here to give us a lecture about today, which is the same name as her blog called Chocolate and Zucchini. It's a lovely cookbook with some beautiful photography and I hope you enjoy the talk. And are you going to do a Q and A after?

Yes.

And we'll have time for some questions when we're finished, so enjoy.

Thank you. Thank you very much for coming. Is the mic okay? Yeah. Okay, you can hear me. So it's great to be here both on the campus and back in Mountain View, because as probably perhaps a few of you know, I lived here for two years back between 2000 and 2002. So it's nice to be back in the area. So as I was introduced, my name is Clotilde du Solier, I'm 27, I'm French, and I now work as a full time food writer, which is not my initial line of work. I initially trained to be a software engineer and this is what brought me to the Valley. And it's actually here in this very region that I really started cooking. So I'm going to tell you a bit about that and about how the blog came to be and how the blog allowed me to write this cookbook that has just come out last week. So the reason why I started cooking when I arrived in California, a lot of people find that ironic that having been born and raised in Paris, I would discover food and cooking in the United States. But I'm a very good ambassador for California because I always explain about the wealth of produce and ethnic cuisines and chefs. So, you know, I'm being good with that. But the reason why I started cooking here is that I was just fresh out of college when I moved here in 2000. And even though my mom is a very good cook, I was never really. I didn't really help her much. I would just hang around in the kitchen with her. But she took, you know, she took charge of the meals and the shopping, so there wasn't really much for me to do. But all of a sudden when I arrived here and my company didn't have, you know, free meals at lunch and dinner So I actually to cook my own meals and learning how to do this and learning about the food shopping and how you organize yourself in your pantry, doing that in a foreign country was really made the experience that much more intense because I was discovering all those ingredients and those food habits and those types of stores that I didn't have back home. And so I felt like I was kind of sleeping, stepping into a new environment and discovering all those things about cooking. So I was buying cooking magazines and lots of tools and trying to reproduce things that my mom cooked at home and trying to reproduce things that I would taste at restaurants here. And it was just something that I found was extremely entertaining. It just became kind of like a hobby, something that I would do to have fun and to relax and to just play in the kitchen. So this is where, you know, this is California is where I started to cook. But after two years, my boyfriend and I moved back to Paris. So that was in 2002. And I kept on cooking, and I started to entertain, to have friends and family over for meals, because it just wasn't something that I did a lot when I was in California, because we usually just went out to eat rather than invited people over. I think it was also a matter of confidence because I was just starting out, and you don't really feel up to cooking for a crowd when you're still a beginner cook. So I started doing that in Paris, and I was pleased to hear my friends say, this is not bad at all. And so it kind of encouraged me to take on more ambitious projects and just keep cooking. And after a while, this. This passion that I had for food and everything around it was taking up so much space and time in my life that I really felt the need to turn it into something else, to kind of channel that energy and hold on to those ideas and kind of document my cooking. And it's around that time that I discovered food blogs. So this was 2002, 2003. There must have been not even 10 back then. And most of them were written by American people, a lot of them in California, I have to say. And when I discovered those vlogs, it was a bit of an epiphany for me, because all of a sudden, I discovered that I wasn't the only one who was completely crazy about those things and who would just get up in the morning and start thinking about breakfast and then lunch and then shopping and then cooking and dinner. So this was. I kind of felt like I had found brothers and sisters who really shared that with me. And so that's why I decided to start mine. It was initially just out of a desire to reach out and connect with other people who share that passion with me. And so that explains why I studied the blog in English is that all blogs at the time were in English. And so I wanted to be part of that community. So I started the blog, I called it Chocolate and Zucchini to illustrate the two sides of my personality, I would say, because I'm very drawn to fresh produce and, you know, food that's good for your body and, you know, just healthy, healthy eating. But I'm also very drawn to, you know, anything that's a dessert and chocolate in particular. So chocolate and Zucchini was a good indication of, you know, the topics that I would be addressing on the blog. And so this was, you know, the blog was a cooking journal for me to share recipes and finds and just, you know, the general joy of cooking and thinking about food. And the response that I got from this writing and from this blog was really one far beyond anything that I had anticipated. It was extremely encouraging and life changing in a number of ways because first of all, I was discovering that I could write about food, which wasn't something I had ever done before. And I realized that food was just a subject on which I had. It seemed limitless, you know, amounts of things to write about. And it also made me realize that there was something that I did that could touch people on a personal level, you know, level that mattered. That food was a warm subject to which a lot of people related. You know, no one is just, you know, everyone cares about food, you know, on different levels, but it's just something that brings people together. And it's also, I find a lens through which to look at the world because it's never just about the food. It's always about the people who grew it, the people who eat it, the people you share it with, the economy, the politics of food. There's so many aspects around it and I'm someone who bores easily and just having this kind of really vast subject to explore and it just feels like I have. There's lifetimes that you could spend just studying the different cuisines and cultures around it. And so I started to think, you know, this is something that I really enjoy and people seem to react well to it. And so I started to explore the ways in which perhaps I could make, I could turn this into a full time job which would have, you know, which I thought would make me immensely happy. So I knew that this wasn't going to happen overnight that it couldn't and shouldn't be rushed into. But I started to work in that direction. I reached out to, to people who were already established food writers and chefs and would just go to events and meet people. And I did some freelance writing. I gave a few cooking classes, a few walking tours of Paris. I was sort of test driving those activities. And one of the things that I started working towards was the idea of writing a book. Because when you cook reasonably well, your friends and people around you always tell you either to open a restaurant or to write a cookbook. And so the second sounded more manageable to me. So I started to think about that. I wrote a book proposal, I found an agent, and when I found a publisher that would buy the project, then I kind of took that as a sign that it was time for me to take that leap of faith and just. I quit my day job, which was. I was also a software engineer, but for a French company at the time, and, and I started to work full time on the book. So that was an interesting and challenging project. If you'll excuse me, I'm just. It was because I had never done anything quite like that. I had never worked from home, I had never worked for myself or on a year long project for which I was the only boss, kind of the only project leader. And so it was an interesting project that kind of taught me about how I work and how I react to different situations. And it seemed very daunting at first, but after a while the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. And so it resulted in the book that you're now holding in your hands. One of the things that I knew early on, because when you want to publish a book, you have to first work on a book proposal, which is the sort of marketing, the marketing outline for the book which says what the book is going to be, why you're the best person to write it, why people are going to like it, who's the target audience, and that kind of thing. So I had a vision for the book. I knew the kind of book that I wanted to write, but that was, you know, that didn't really tell me how to go about it. But one of the things that I knew really early on about the book is that I wanted to have almost all new recipes as opposed to just republishing recipes from the blog. And the reason why I wanted to do that is that I knew that with the kind of readership that I had on the blog, there were a lot of Them who had been following me since the very early stages of the blog and who were kind of rooting for me. And I knew that those guys would buy the book no matter what, and out of support and kind of, because there's a big, you know, when you read a blog, you feel very connected to the person who writes it. And I didn't want those guys to be disappointed when they came home with their brand new book and just open it and think, oh, these are all recipes that I know already. So it was all fresh, it's all fresh content. And I've reused the same kind of approach that I take on the blog, in the sense that every recipe comes with its story that kind of explains the origin of the recipe, the source of the inspiration. Because I feel like when you cook, when you're an enthusiast cook, you're kind of overwhelmed with all of the recipes that you could try from magazines, from TV shows, from all kinds of sources. And I really think that if you want people to try a recipe that you've written, you really have to give them a reason to do that. And I think that giving the reader the story that's behind the recipe really makes the dish come to life and make it feel like something that perhaps a neighbor or friend would have shared with you. So you'll see that's the format. There's always the story before the recipe. And also what the book format has allowed me to do that was different from the blog is that it's allowed me to talk in a bit more detail about things like my approach to cooking, how I organize myself for dinner parties, menu planning, that sort of thing, cooking creativity, which are subjects that I touch upon on the blog but never really take the time to write about in detail. And that's what the book format allows you to do. You kind of have a few pages at the beginning of each section in which I explain a bit about those things. So I don't want to tell you too much about the book. I don't want to spoil the surprise. But for me it's a very important moment because it's the end of a. It's a three year project to write a book like that because it takes about a year to think about, you know, the kind of book you want to write. It takes a year to write it, and then it takes a year for the publisher to actually, you know, package it up and then make it, you know, an actual object that people can leaf through and use. So it's a very. It's an exciting time And I'm pleased to, you know, to be able to tell you a bit about it. And I hope you enjoy the book. So thanks a lot for your attention and if anyone has questions about the book writing process or the blog or. Yes.

Hi.

Hi.

My wife and I just got back from Paris last week actually for our first time, and absolutely loved it. One of the things that I noticed was just a complete difference in the culture there with their attitude towards food. In the States, it's you eat to survive, and in Paris especially, you eat for pleasure. And that is reflected in the length of time spent eating. Dinner and lunch even are seen as events that you just sit and relax for several hours ahead of time. Just hoping you could comment on that. And also if you know where I can find a good cafe au lait here in the Bay Area.

A good what?

Cafe au lait.

Oh, well, I haven't lived here in quite a long time, so I'm not sure about the recommendation. But it's true that there's something about the French approach to the meal where you really have to sit down. And very few people eat on the run or eat in their cars or this is just not something that. That people even picture. And that's also why I've had friends tell me that when they were in Paris and they were eating as they were walking and they would get funny looks from people. And I really think that it's not necessarily judgmental. It's just that people kind of think, why would you not just sit down and take the time to eat that properly? But at the same time, I really think that in the US it's such a vast country and there's really different. You know, even the culture of food is very different from state to state or region to region. And I think that the Californian approach to food and cooking is actually quite close to the French approach, because there's really that attention to where the produce comes from and just the freshness of the ingredients and just that respect for what. What you're eating. If that makes sense. Yes. I was wondering how you tested the recipes with.

I guess you were using a French oven in Celsius. And I was just wondering how you went about doing that.

That was part of the challenges of the project. I kept two sets of notes to measure the ingredients. The temperature of the oven. Oven is actually pretty simple because just Celsius Fahrenheit is not a very difficult conversion. The difficult part is the volume to weight thing, because the French use weight, and in the US you use Volume, you know, cups and spoons. But since I had a lot of experience cooking in an American kitchen, I kind of knew how that worked. But I did call for volunteers on my blog to help me test the recipes in American Kitchen. So I would test them and make sure that they weren't in my kitchen and then send them off to at least three testers per recipe to make sure that one they were easy to follow. Because sometimes you kind of get lost if it's your own recipe. You don't really realize that something is unclear. And also to make sure with the kind of ingredients that they would find. And one interesting difference was in the size of. Because I would call for onions, for instance, and I would say 2 pounds of onions, and I would say about 6. And the person who tested the recipes were like, but if I. A pound of onion is about one and a half onions here. I was like, oh, okay, so we need to say six small onions. So that was interesting because the scale of things seems to be consistently much larger here than in Paris.

So.

Any other questions?

Where did you have lunch today?

We had lunch at. Say that again. Yeah, that one. It was great. It's just I don't know the campus well enough to know the names of all the different ones, but I had the halibu in coconut milk. That was very good. I mean, that's the perk that you would. At my company when I worked here, we had free pizza every other week. And that was really. We did have snacks in the kitchen and that kind of thing, but free pizza just sounded like a birthday party or something.

I was curious, once you got an idea for a recipe for sort of on the creative process of when you come up with a new one, how many times on average would you try it out and sort of refine it to get it to be the way you wanted for what it was going to go in the book.

For the book, it took on average about two trials. Some things just worked the first time around, and some things took three or four times. And sometimes I just couldn't get it right. So that was just tossed or just put on the back burner for some occasion when I have more time to explore it. But yeah, on average, too. I would say.

The mic will come back as a chocolate fan. Also, the Valrhona Noir Amer is sort of what I eat constantly wondering if you have any recommendations for chocolates that.

You could find here or that you could find in Paris.

Here.

Let me think. Well, again, I haven't lived here for, you know, for five years now. But I'm actually, I like Charfen Berger, the Nibi bar, you know, that has little bits of cocoa nibs. And I find that the quality has not gone down since that were bought over by Hershey, I think it is. So I think they're doing a good job of maintaining that quality. And in Paris, if you want good chocolate, I would recommend a guy named Jean Charles Rochoux. It's R O C H O U X. He's in the sixth on the Rue d' Esse and he does great chocolate and he does fresh fruit bars of chocolate on weekends with seasonal fruit and those are really good. So if you want to check it out. And I own no stock of his. I just, you know. And I think there was a question on the first.

I had a question on the business side of things. You know, now that you've written a book, sort of two related questions. Are you going to write another one? You know, what's that experience like? And also so when you had your blog or I guess you still do, you know, was that sufficient to support yourself with the blog?

So the first part of the question was about possibly writing another one. I'm actually the manuscript of the second one is due in a month and this is a sneak peek into it because it's going to be a guidebook of Paris restaurants and food shops. So that's coming out in the spring of 2008. So that's the second one I'm hoping to. I'm already thinking of possibly your third one to keep me busy after this one is completed. I'm not quite sure what kind of shape it's going to take. As for how I support myself, it's really a mix of things because I do some freelance writing, the blog has some advertising. I actually have AdSense on my blog and the book writing also makes me earn some money. So it's really all those things combined that make, you know, that create a full time job. It's actually more than full time. I've never worked so hard since I've worked for myself. So yeah, that's how it works.

Hi. You may be exactly the right person or exactly the wrong person to ask this question to. My question is do you have an opinion on Chinese food?

You mean do I cook it or.

Do you have an opinion on it? What do you think of it? How do you cook it and what would you like to explore about it? What do you like about it? And so on.

I'm very drawn to ethnic cuisines in general. And one thing that I regret about Paris is that Asian restaurants tend to kind of dumb down their cuisine because the French palate is not always very accustomed to things that are spicy or that are kind of strange tasting. But we have three different Chinatowns in Paris that I go to for dim sum and for Vietnamese cooking. We have a lot of Vietnamese restaurants because of the history of both countries. But, yeah, and that's one thing that I like in California also. That's where I started, even eating sushi because. Because you have such great fish from the ocean. So, yeah, I enjoy Asian cooking. I just don't have any in my book because I'm really not an expert. I eat Asian food out. So I have two questions. One is, do you miss being a software engineer at all? You know, I enjoyed it. I just like. I like the food writing more. No, it's true. I mean, it was a choice of. I made that conscious decision to study computer science, and I really enjoyed it. I worked in fine environments with good people. But this is really something that keeps me excited. So my other question is, you mentioned that your mom, you learned from her. Are there any other chefs that inspired you? I do find a lot of inspiration from dining around in Paris because it's very frequent that recipes that I make at home are kind of riffs on something that have ingredient pairings or just an ingredient that I didn't know existed. So, yeah, chefs. The work of chefs is a big inspiration to the home cook, I think. Even though what I make is a lot less, you know, it's really much simpler because I don't have, you know, I don't have three cooks, you know, prepping things for me. But, yeah, in terms of trends and ideas, yeah, it's definitely a big inspiration. Hi. I was just wondering if you had any recipes in the book that were particularly special to you or that you're really proud of? I guess. I would have to say that. Well, I really like the chocolate and zucchini cake because I really think that it's something that I didn't really know. When I chose the name of the blog, I hadn't really thought of putting those two ingredients together in the same recipe. So when I decided to add to make a chocolate and zucchini cake, because I'd been told that in some parts of the world, in the Midwest in particular, zucchini grows like weed, and so people use it in baked goods. And I really like it because it's a cake that's really, really, really good. And sometimes you just make Something and you hope it will work because it would sound good. But this really, I'm really pleased with that one. And otherwise I would have to say that it's mostly family recipes that are probably the most dear to me. The yogurt caico. So you have to try that one. It's really easy and very good.

So I was hoping you could give some tips. The hardest problem I find I'm really enthusiastic about food. I absolutely love it. But I have the hardest time planning menus and I go home from work and I'm totally exhausted and I just don't even want to think about cooking. I was hoping you'd give some tips about menu planning.

Well, I do think that the. What you mentioned about coming home from work and being exhausted, that's not the right time to be cooking. Definitely. Because cooking does take at least 15, 20 minutes of standing in the kitchen prepping things. And if you're just tired, it's not going to be an enjoyable step and you're just making yourself miserable. But preparing things over the weekend when you have time and when it's fun to cook and just making when you do cook and when you have time for it, just making larger batches of whatever it is you're making and then freezing that, you know, keeping a few servings for the first few days of the week and then freezing the rest for the end of the week is, to me, the best way to go. But I have to say that I don't cook, you know, every night because it's just, I really feel that cooking is something if. Unless you have kids to feed, which is different. And it's not my the case for me. But it's really something that I want to do when I really feel like it. And I always have things on hand that can be kind of put together to form a meal without it really being cooking. You know, if you have a few vegetables that you can eat without cooking them and a few cold cuts and a few, you know, perhaps some smoked fish or, you know, you can just sort of assemble things into a meal where you can eat, you know, you can eat in instead of getting takeout without it being too much work. Hi.

Do you still read food blogs and.

Which ones are your favorite? Well, I read a lot of them. I use an RSS reader to kind of alert me to the new posts. I try to stay on top of things in terms of new blogs because I think that, you know, it's a genre and there's new voices emerging all the time. So I Try to stay on top of those things. But there's a list of links on chocolateandzucchini.com that says. That lists the blogs that I read on a regular basis. I have to say that the ones perhaps that I read with the most pleasure are the ones that are written by people who have become friends also because it's a way of keeping up with. With what they're doing in their own part of the world. Do you have a food blog? I don't have one. Okay. Yeah. If anyone has any other question. Yeah. What do you think of molecular cooking? I think it's. So the question was, what do I think about molecular cooking? I think it's fun and interesting and I'm glad that those guys are doing it because it kind of paves the way for, you know, usually they do really wacky stuff and something reasonable will come out of it that others can use. You know, it's like avant garde artists in a way. You know, they're just a bit further up the road than everyone else. I've been to Al Bullyi last summer, and it was the most incredible dining experience I've ever had. I don't know that I would want to eat there every week, though. And so I think it's more of a show than it's more about. Yeah, it's more about a food show than really about a dining experience that you would want on a regular basis. But I find it very fun. Yes. I love zucchini flowers. Do you have any special or what's your favorite way of preparing? I would say in temperature tempura or. Yeah, fried, but in a very light batter. Because I tried stuffing them once. They're kind of hard to find in Paris. They're more readily available in the south of France. And I've tried stuffing them once and it was kind of a disappointment because they don't really have that much flavor. Excuse me. And you kind of lose the flavor if you put too much stuff in them. So just frying them, I think is the best way to go. So when you're trying to cook something.

Sort of brand new and you're not really sure whether it's going to work or not, how often do you cook it when other people are going to show up, say, for some sort of.

Event and, you know, it's sort of a high risk undertaking. I'm a high risk entertainer. I choose my testers carefully in the sense that I won't do high risk entertaining if it's someone that I'm kind of intimidated. By. But, yeah, I don't really have time for trial runs when I'm having people over. I think it's something that sort of confidence comes with experience. I would say I now know what my limits are, and I know how adventurous I can get before it gets really dangerous. And so I know where to stop. I actually had a question you talked about when you were first in the Bay Area, that you were trying to recreate recipes, either your mother's recipes or things you'd eaten in restaurants. How do you kind of go about even starting to recreate something that you've tasted? And what's that process like? Well, recreating recipes that my mom would make. Just took a phone call. I just had to make sure that the time difference didn't wake her up in the middle of the night. So that was easy. Although I can never. I mean, it never. When I make them, they just never taste the same as when she makes those dishes. But when it's just a dish that I taste at a restaurant, it's usually a matter of taking apart the different elements and just kind of trying to identify how they've made it. And usually I rarely try to replicate something exactly. It's more. It's more juicing the essence of the dish, whether it's the pairing or the presentation or something, and just incorporating. It's usually merged with other ideas that I get from other places and turn into something that's my own. Because to me, a big part of the fun of cooking is that it's sort of a craft. Some people knit and I cook. You know, it's. It's kind of. It's something that I like to create. To create, you know, following my own instinct and my own inspiration. So it's usually something that really follows my own. Yeah. What I really want to make of it. Yeah.

Do you ever find it constraining when.

You'Re, like, writing the book, that you.

Have to know the exact amounts of everything in order to put it in the recipe?

It's become sort of a discipline that I have. You know, a part of my brain has developed that kind of keeps track of those things now and then I jot them down when I'm done. But, you know, it happens quite often that I just cook for myself and I don't keep notes and. Yeah, that's nice, too.

One of the elements of your blog that I've always really loved, One of the elements of your blog that I've always really loved is when you go to little stores in Paris or somewhere where you've gone on a road trip with your boyfriend and you found something really amazing and you're so excited to tell us about it. I remember some great bread. I think it was some kind of Polish bread. And you introduced me to some jam, raspberry and violet jam, which is one of the best things I've ever tasted. But I had to have a friend bring it back to me when she went on a trip to Paris. So it always makes me a little sad. But I'm so excited to hear how happy you are about finding things. So of all of your excursions that you've gone around, what's the best food experience that you found that you've been so excited about?

You know, I have trouble naming best of things because it's really the variety that I find really exciting. I really. And this is what I was saying a bit earlier about the fact that food is, you know, food and cooking is just this giant field of study and you could, you know, devote your whole life to it and never, you know, reach the limit of, you know. Okay, I've learned everything that there is to learn. And so to me, it's really always about the novelty and about finding new places and tasting new things and new flavors and experiencing new, you know, new. Yeah. New experiences. That doesn't make sense. So, yeah, the novelty is what really fills me with the most. Joy, I would say. Yep.

So I'm curious, have you ever attempted to combine chocolate and zucchini in any of your recipes?

Well, there is a chocolate and zucchini cake in the book, so that works well. And I actually have a savory dish that's a pasta dish that has zucchini and cocoa nibs sprinkled on top instead of nuts because they're not sweetened. So it works really well as a topping for savory dishes.

When you do a cookbook with photography, is the photography something that you're closely involved with or it's mostly the publisher or.

I took the pictures for the book. So, yeah, I'm pretty. I do the styling and the picture taking for the book and for this one and the book. The cookbook also. So, yeah, all pictures were taken in my apartment and I have this little spot that gets nice light from outside. So. And if. Are there any more questions? Because if not, we'll get started with the signing. Is that one more? No, you don't. I thought so.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you very much for your attention.