French Fridays with Dorie: Gougères

I love reading stories written by Americans living in Paris. I miss my hometown so I devour blogs like David Lebovitz or Lost in Cheeseland. Their expatriate experience in the City of Light just seems a lot more exciting than mine here in DC. I mean, Washington is great and all, but it’s no Paris.

One of the expat I am most envious of is Dorie Greenspan. Not only does she get to live a fabulous life in the 6th arrondissement, but she also gets to co-author books with some of my culinary idols like Daniel Boulud or Pierre Herme. So I got to go to the West Wing once and saw the Oval Office… big deal!! She authored not just one but two books with the king of pastry himself. I’m officially envious! So when I heard that she was starting an online cook-along book club for her latest cookbook Around My French Table, I thought i’d try it out. The concept for French Fridays with Dorie is simple: she picks a recipe from her book, we cook it then blog post about it.

To start us off, Dorie selected the first recipe from the nibbles and hors d’oeuvres section of the book: cougères. Gougères are basically tasty bite-sized cheese puffs that a French hostess might serve to her guests during l’aperetif. They’re actually a lot easier to make than to pronounce and Dorie’s recipe is pretty straighforward. Nonetheless, I was very excited that this was the first dish that I would get to make for French Friday because I actually took a cooking class at Adour 2 years ago where I learned to perfect my gougères-making skills.