Last Thursday I received an email from my friend Ami about picnics. I was coming to the end of a long chicken-pox infected week on my own with the boys, so I jumped at the idea. Friday or Saturday?? Count me in for both! Big brother was past the contagious stage and the weather in Paris had suddenly blossomed into luxurious summery sunshine. I was ready to venture out and have me some adult conversation.

However, as I was on my own with the two boys and under a deadline, I really needed to find the ingredients for a tasty lunch in my kitchen. I knew I had a couple of chicken breasts and a bit of cucumber for the fresh elements. I started searching through the cabinets for the rest of the ingredients. A big box of red quinoa jumped out at me: I'd been meaning to experiment with it for some time but the Critic is no fan of nubbly food. That set me on a kind of a New World strain and so I pulled out the plump sweetened dried cranberries I picked up at Target on our recent trip to the US. As luck would have it, I had a couple of bunches of young shallot shoots in the back of the vegetable bin, which would also liven the mixture a bit. Cumin was my first choice for a spice, but I love it so much lately that I'm frequently out. Coriander was my second choice and it worked so well that I'm glad I had no cumin in the spice drawer.

The resulting salad was delightful: full of flavors that zing and interesting textures. It is the perfect picnic food in that it's relatively quick and easy to prepare and best served either slightly cooled or at room temperature. I loved it so much that I made it again three days later when we were invited to visit friends in the country for lunch in their garden. And even the Critic liked it. I'll be making it again. I'd like to say that I'll be using it as a template for other interesting ventures, but I'd be lying. It really was quite perfect just the way it came out the first (and second) time(s).

My wife's great- great- great- great- great- (and so on) grandfather Fictitious McFall was an explorer in the mold of Captain Cook. Only, instead of discovering things, he went about landing in strange exotic places and melding their cuisines with the foods of old (or auld, as they spelled it then, due to a shortage of the letter "o") Scotland (or Scautland as they then - you get the picture).

Old fictitious was not captain of a mighty flotilla. He did have a string of ships, but all of them were dinghy size. It was rare that more than one of these boats would actually make it anywhere useful, and somehow that boat was always the one with the Captain in it. Well, one of Captain Fictitious McFall's ports of call was an island off the coast of Thailand, and the dish that came from his travels there is this tropical oatmeal.

Now, it might seem strange to combine oats and tropical flavors, but - well, there is no but. It is strange, but it's also quite delicious. I've uncovered this mix of traditional oats and typical Thai flavors like coconut, mango, lime, and a bit of brown sugar from a stash of papers in Fictitious's sea chest.

Whether you believe in Captain Fictitious McFall or not, you'll believe in this sweet and tasty tropical oatmeal.

Since Little Brother arrived, I have had less time for the organic market than when his brother was on baby food. With two munchkins in the house, I do my shopping when I can fit it in the schedule of daily life, and that is rarely on a Saturday morning for some reason. Perhaps it's that the Critic is working again and so our weekend time is more precious. Whatever the reason, last Saturday was the first time in a few months that I had been to the market. I met up with a new friend and enjoyed thoroughly introducing her to my favorite stalls: the woman selling organic vegetables from a farm out near Disney in Marne-la-Vallée, the man who sold me the 4.2 kg duck and the chipper cheese fellows who make their own goat's and ewe's cheeses. At the latter stall, I noticed a little plastic container of wet crumbly cheese labelled "La Brousse". It looked a lot like cottage cheese and I have yet to find a satisfactory cottage cheese in France, so I bought a container and took it home.

For your information, la brousse is not cottage cheese. It's a provençal cheese and actually seems much closer to ricotta in taste, texture and uses. I'll have to stick with the mediocre imported cottage cheese that can sometimes be found at my local supermarket. But I still had a full tub (minus one taste) of provençal cheese. And so I decided to treat it like ricotta and stuff it into some nice fresh ravioli. It was time to introduce Big Brother to the fun of making pasta.

Many years ago, in our careless child-free days, the Critic and I played a lot of snooker. We even belonged to Paris' only snooker league and this necessitated getting up at what then seemed an ungodly hour on Sunday mornings. (Now, of course, 8 a.m. is considered a pretty good lie-in...how times have changed!) And being young(er) and child-free, we had usually indulged in an alcoholic session the evening before. So once a month would find us at nine a.m. scoffing bitter black coffee and croissants with a slightly jaundiced eye. And by noon we would be ready for something more substantial. There is something about a hangover that begs processed, salty, hot food. And this is how I became intimately acquainted with a phenomenon known as the Super Hot Dog (pronounced Soup-air Ott Dogg). You can find them across France in cheap cafés. It's the one dish that is served at any time of the day and mostly to students and manual workers. Although it would pain most tourists to eat something so "American", it is genuinely a part of the French food landscape. And I became totally addicted. Your basic saucisse frites (sausage and fries) is just that: a plate with a couple of hot dogs, some fries and a basket of bread on the side. But a super hot dog is encased in a crisp baguette, slathered with mustard so hot it makes your eyes water, topped with grated gruyère cheese and placed beneath a grill until the cheese is melted and crispy in places, the hot dog warmed through. It's greasy and salty and crunchy, the perfect fast food.

And then, one day, they were gone.

I'm not saying we quit playing snooker because café at the snooker club stopped serving them. The smoke was getting to us too, in those pre-smoke-free-Paris days. But really, once the Super Hot Dogs were off the menu, my motivation sadly faltered. And then we had children and our lives became full in new ways. I sometimes miss the snooker. But I no longer miss the Super Hot Dogs. Because I now have a boy who likes hot dogs for lunch. And armed with a baguette and a bit of cheese, I can make my own Super Hot Dog. I can even improve it (a little).

When the Critic is away (and he is away a lot these days, working in Fontainebleau) I tend to go almost vegetarian. Bacon or ham frequently creeps into my cooking as an accent, but there is rarely a hunk of protein playing a starring role in the center of my plate. In recent weeks, I've had vegetarian Thai green curry, mammoth spinach salads with a warm vinaigrette, egg salad, a big fat steamed artichoke with lemon butter and even the occasional dinner of cheese and crackers. The one dish I come back to again and again when I'm not cooking for an audience, though, is a kind of a garlicky noodle and mushroom pie that dates back to my college days.

Tonight, as I was making it, I was more thoughtful than usual. Last night a friend of mine called to say that her cousin, one of my oldest friends in Paris, had died unexpectedly. I haven't seen Charles in almost a year. The last time I spoke with him he was on the point of returning to California for a few months to help his sister find a nursing home for their father and help with the move. I have asked mutual friends a few times in the last year if they had any news, but no one did and so I assumed he was still with his family back in California. I was wrong; he was back in Paris and I could have seen him. But now it is too late. And so I was thinking of Charles, and the many meals I have made for him. Back when I was dating his best friend, I had to keep track of his many food allergies and balance them with the best friend's food aversions. Later, he was a regular guest at Easter or Thanksgiving, always showing up with a bag of potato chips as a contribution - a bit like a college student, for all that he was four or five years older than me. Another food memory came to mind - being invited to dinner by Charles' cousin Eileen, whose speciality was a kind of pasta with cheese and nutmeg sauce. So I added some nutmeg to the dish. And when it was done and ready to eat, I thought of another of my oldest friends in Paris, Claire. Claire and Charles and I went on a memorable trip to Oktoberfest some ten years ago and at the end of it I think we were close to strangling Charles. He had many wonderful qualities (for example, he would never drink wine when he went out with us because he knew that our friend Ken would throw the keys at him at some point in the evening and declare "YOU are driving us home") but they didn't come out that weekend in Munich. But we were friends many years ago, even if life had pulled us in different directions of late. So I opened a bottle of Gewurztraminer while I thought of Claire, who spent a year studying in Alsace and sometimes would buy us a nice bottle of sweet wine when we were feeling flush.

All day long, I have been feeling a bit emotional, a bit more inclined to cuddle with my boys as I remember this friend who died alone in a flat in Paris. I guess it's not surprising that making dinner brought back more memories - there isn't much in this world that is more emotionally charged for me than making food. It reminded me that I should call Claire tomorrow and ask how she is. I sent a message to my friend Martin in London. My friend Tom, who shared this simple spaghetti and garlic dish with me more times than I care to remember when we were at university surely deserves a call.

On Wednesday we decorated eggs. I had invited four children from our building to introduce them to the fine art of egg dyeing. The French don't "do" decorated Easter eggs. And so I combined the American egg dyeing tradition with the French tradition of the afternoon "gouter" (snack time). The result? Small children on a sugar high with lots of dye and fragile eggs. I didn't have time to take photos. If you want to see photos of a cute kid dyeing eggs, you can check my post from last Easter, when I only had one toddler to contend with.

Although I sent the children away with a box of decorated eggs each, I still had nearly 20 hard boiled eggs in my refrigerator when the day was done. The Critic doesn't like hard boiled eggs. The baby can't have them. And I'm pretty sure the toddler is going to turn up his nose at them too, though I'm going to try to convince him how good they are. It's a good thing I like egg salad.

Fans of Clotilde at Chocolate and Zucchini are already very family with the concept of the yogurt cake. She has posted a few variations on this French classic recipe. So I hesitated about adding my own version to the many existing ones. In the end, I was motivated by three things:

1. My recipe is slightly different and, well, very, very chocolate. That's got to be worth something to our readers.

2. Although she mentions that this recipe is particularly good for introducing children to cake baking, she does not actually have a cute kid who can demonstrate this fact. Big brother is an enthusiastic cook already, though most of his "help" so far has been limited to grating cheese (which he promptly eats) and stirring the bowl occasionally. He had a lot of fun with this recipe and I took a lot of photos.

3. The Critic is in Singapore for two weeks and needs to see photos of the boys he's missing. So I can keep him informed on what we are doing at the same time.

Obviously, I needed to post the recipe and photos. Read on for my take on the most child-friendly recipe on the planet. It really is a lovely, flexible cake: light and yet not too crumbly, perfect for little fingers to pull apart and eat without leaving a carpet of crumbs on the floor. I'm going to be making it again in just over a month for Little Brother's first birthday!