Photo: travelbex, Flickr.

Fontainebleau. Photo: Marie-Anne Cantin

This summer Slashfood blogger Max Shrem is apprenticing at renowned Paris cheese shop Fromagerie Trotté. For the next two months, in 'Le Cheese Course,' Max will share his impressions and opinions of French cheese à la francaise!

This odd-looking fromage is oh-so-French (and, in fact, available solely in that country). Those planning a trip there would be wise to look up the delicious Fontainebleau, which is here pictured with the net that covers it when it is sold.

France has many varieties of creamy cheese, from crème fraîche and fromage blanc to petit-suisse and Chantilly. Combining characteristics of all four mentioned above, Fontainebleau, which must be eaten the day it's put out for sale, is especially worth trying for a rich, sweet taste and fluffy, light texture that's similar to whipped cream.

It's so light, in fact, it requires strange packaging. "The reason for the cloth is to protect the very light structure and to maintain the freshness," says Thomas Le Goff, cheesemonger at fromagerie Marie-Anne Cantin.

• Strawberries are ripe for more than just whipped cream: They work well with lots of dairy like mascarpone, fresh ricotta and sour cream.
• Baco Noir "Southern Oregon" is one of the state's best reds, and Nebbiolo d'Alba "Briccola" is an steal for an Italian red at $22.95.
• Lucini Gran Riserva Balsamico wins a taste test to determine a good and proper balsamic vinegar.
  
• Cutting through the confusion, the Oregonian explains the terminology behind the different varieties of cream that clutter grocery shelves.
• A recipe for Smoked Salmon Hash, which was once a breakfast favorite at Portland's Heathman Restaurant.
  
• Instead of throwing your rhubarb in a pie, stir it into a chutney.
• Fresh market fungi are perfect for crepes.
  
• Small Bites nibbles on everything from Danny Meyer's new cocktail book "Mix Shake Stir" to the phenomenon of "pine mouth."

Yesterday a friend of mine brought by a jarful of lovely, snowy heavy cream from the local dairy, spoils from his job at a coffee shop. I used some of it to make my favorite fleur de sel caramels, but I've still got a cup or so sitting in the fridge. And I can't figure out what to do with the darn stuff! This is the same problem I have whenever I buy cream to cook or bake with and don't use the whole carton - the rest inevitably ends up souring, unused, next to the jar of capers. I am determined to find a better solution. So I've turned, of course, to the trusty interwebs.

Love Food, Hate Waste has a few ideas - creamy tomato soup, quickie pasta carbonara, apple crisp. The Chowhound message board has some good thoughts - cream scones, mashed potatoes, bread pudding, Alfredo sauce, herbed sauce for fish. I especially like the idea of make-and-freeze soups and pasta sauces, as baking scones with the leftover cream seems like it might just result in wasted cream and wasted flour and sugar. Cooks.com has some of my favorite ideas, with suggestions for recipes utilizing slightly soured cream and milk, like Boston brown bread and sour-cream cake filling.

What are your favorite ways for using up leftover cream?

Need a little non-dairy addition to your coffee?

When it comes to Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, I've generally found that the key element is quantity. I save the truffled, blue cheese-infused, roasted garlic potatoes for the rest of the year, when everybody is in the mood to try something new. On Thanksgiving, nobody really wants to be impressed: what they're really concerned with is being full.

And there's nothing more disappointing than running out of potatoes.

With that in mind, here's a basic recipe for making ten pounds of incredibly fattening mashed potatoes. The heavy amounts of cream, milk, and butter give it a smooth, rich texture, while the nutmeg gives it a nice, rounded tone. If you are concerned about having completely white mashed potatoes, use white pepper and omit the nutmeg; otherwise, feel free to use regular black pepper.

10 pounds yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch thick slices
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, cut into pats
1/2 cup whole milk
Salt to taste (I start with a tablespoon and work up from there)
Pepper and nutmeg to taste (I generally use a heaping teaspoon of each)

Drop potatoes into boiling water. Return water to a simmer, but do not boil. Cook until potatoes can be easily pierced with a fork. Drain, place in large bowl, and mash with a potato masher or two forks.

Heat cream and butter in a saucepan until butter is melted. Do not allow to boil. Add cream mixture to potatoes and, using either a spoon or a hand mixer, mix until potatoes are smooth. Add milk as needed to achieve a smooth texture. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste.

Serve immediately.

Flour is the basic structural ingredient. It's the starch in the flour that will, when mixed with liquid and heated in the oven, gelatinize and set when cooled. Flour also contains the proteins you need to make gluten, which is great for baking bread but not so desirable for making pie crusts. All you have to do is use a flour with a lower protein content, which generally means all purpose flour (cake flour might be too weak).

Fats are considered tenderizing agents for baked goods like cakes and pie crusts, rather than shortening agents like they would be for bread. In pie crusts, fats like oil, vegetable shortening, butter, and lard prevent gluten from getting formed in the first place by coating the flour granules, thus ensuring tenderness. Flakiness is achieved by the way you mix the dough: larger chunks of fat from less mixing make for more flakiness while more mixing and smaller fat chunks make a less flaky crust. They also add a lot of flavor, especially in the case of butter and animal fats. Lard and butter are also generally considered to have a better feel in the mouth, and lard is reputed to create a flakier crust than other fats.

Water and milk are the most common liquids, while buttermilk, eggs, and cream can also be used. Liquids function as a binding agent: they allow all of the ingredients to be evenly dissolved and incorporated. They also hydrate the the starch and protein in the flour and activate whatever leavening is being used. If you're using a liquid besides water, you're also adding fats, sugar, and acidity which is a good thing. The fats add tenderness, the adds to crust color, and the acidity makes the dough more stable and easier to roll out as well as taste better. Make sure to always use a cold liquid to keep the fat nice and cold, so it'll retain its shape/temperature and produce a flaky product.

Eggs are used for hydrating the dough, creating structure, giving color to the dough, and flavor. The whites are 90% water and the rest protein, so that aids in hydration and structure. The yolks are 50% water with the rest being mostly fat, contributing to hydration and tenderness as well as flavor and crust color.

Sugar adds sweetness and contributes the most to crust color. Ths crust turns golden brown because the sugar in the dough caramelizes as it's baked. Also, the texture of the dough can be changed by using sugar ground to different levels of fineness. For instance, powdered sugar makes a dough that is smoother, even if it doesn't taste as good as granulated.

I am always amazed at how the simplest things are usually the best. Take chocolate mousse for example: it's a very simple mixture of whipped cream, whipped egg yolks, and melted chocolate and yet it's a classic dessert loved all over the world. Chocolate mousse would make an easy and delicious summer dessert any night of the week. Adding fresh berries makes this an even more summery dish.

Classically, chocolate mousse does not include any cream. For a traditional version, there's actually a bit of work involved, but there are plenty of recipes out there that turn out a light and creamy dessert with very little effort like this one. You can even find egg-free versions.

The traditional recipe involves making a pate a bombe, which is created when you add a cooked sugar syrup to egg yolks while they're mixing, and a basic merengue, and adding them to melted chocolate. That amount of work for a good chocolate mousse is avoidable with the recipes provided above. You'll be out of the kitchen in no time, with brownie points to spare!

America (at least the segment of the population that reads the New York Times Dining & Wine section) has already embraced artisanal raw milk cheeses, boutique breads, bacon from pigs hand-fed on nothing but acorns.

Now, according to the lead story in the Wednesday Dining & Wine section, small-batch milk, cream and butter are the next Big Thing in refined gourmandise. In the article, It-chef Thomas Keller of Napa's French Laundry raves about butter handmade at a small Vermont creamery. "It has a different flavor profile and nuances throughout the year," he rhapsodizes. Fresh local dairy products are great, certainly - I buy pints of thick, downy cream from a nearby farm, and love nothing more than a hunk of baguette slathered with good butter, paved with sliced radishes and sprinkled with sea salt.

But my favorite part of the story had less to do with food and more to do with seventh-grade giggles: a quote from Nancy Nipples, founder of the Pike Place Market Creamery in Seattle. Full legal name: Nancy Nipples the Milkmaid.

We already know that although it's creamy and delicious, eggnog might be one of the worst Holiday cocktails out there. However, there are a few others that you might want to avoid just to get a jump start on those health- and weight-related New Year's Resolutions:

• White Russian, made of coffee liqueur, vodka, and cream, it has 863 calories!
  
• Mudslide, which is basically a White Russian with the addition of Bailey's Irish Cream and chocolate syrup. No wonder it's 851 calories.
• Hot Buttered Rum Latte exceeds the recommended daily intake of sugar by 36 grams.
• Chocolate Martini is probably the least evil on the list because "chocolate is healthy." It's also 438 calories.
• Admittedly, we had never heard of the Blushin' Russian, and wonder why not because it has delicious Amaretto in it! Oh yeah, maybe because we'd rather take 404 calories as a Big Mac.
• Mulled Wine is bad?!?! We were crushed, but if you make it yourself and cut back on the sugar, you'll do better than the usual 356 calories and 40 grams of carbs.
• Eggnog, surprisingly, is lower than the previous half dozen drinks with only 343 calories, but we think it's evil comes from the fact that you drink at least one every night, everywhere you go, from Thanksgiving to New Year's.
• Brandy Alexander has 297 calories. Oh well. There goes another luscious creamy drink.
  
• At 210 calories, Irish Coffee is the slimmest of the cocktails, but let's not get crazy. It's still 210 calories that you could down in 20 seconds (you'll also burn your mouth, but that's not the point, now is it?)

My parents had Thanksgiving dinner with some old friends this year and after the meal was over, my mom called me to rave about the Brussels Sprouts that Lucy, the friends' daughter, had made. Lucy has two young sons and had made these sprouts in the hopes that her boys would eat them. She put a lot of effort into them, removing each leaf from every small sprout head in order to get a kid-friendly consistency. When she gave my mom the recipe, she stressed that one does not have to go to such labor-intensive lengths in order to make this dish.

The way we did it last night was to chop 2 pounds of sprouts into eighths (quarter them and then halve the quarters), which took some time but was worth it in terms of cooking speed. In a large skillet, I sauteed four thinly sliced leeks (they were fairly small leeks, total yield was about 1 1/2 cups) and two chopped shallots in a couple teaspoons of olive oil. Then the chopped sprouts went in, along with a sprig's worth of minced rosemary. When the started to get a little dry, I added about half a cup of chicken stock (there happened to be some around, otherwise I would have used water). Cover until soft. At the very end, add 1/4 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg and 1/2 a cup of cream or half and half. Lastly add salt and pepper to taste.

They were so good and while they felt a little decadent, they weren't overwhelmingly rich. I think these are going to end up on the table come Christmas dinner.

I've never made ice cream. It's one of those foods that I think it's unnecessary to make because what you can buy in the store is just as good (if not better) than what you could make at home. I feel the same way about pasta.

But I was reading one of Andy Rooney's books (he's one of my favorite writers) and he makes ice cream a lot. He has a very simple recipe, and it doesn't include eggs at all. He says that if you add eggs, it's not ice cream, it's custard. He was on Martha Stewart's show one time, making ice cream, and she agreed that adding eggs was a bad idea. But when she was on CBS a while later, she made ice cream, and she added eggs!

So I'm curious: who's right in this? Is ice cream better with no eggs? Do eggs make it richer in some way, or just turn it into something else?

One of the side effects of blogging about food is that you start to want to play around with platings and presentation a lot more than you would if you were not photographing your meals. Joe, from Culinary in the Country, for example, augmented his already attractive Chocolate Crème Caramel with some extra caramel rounds along the outside of the plate and a little freeform sugar sculpture on top. The overall effect is great and really brings the look of the dessert up to restaurant-quality - and probably an expensive restaurant, at that.

The crème caramel itself is actually quite easy to make. The most difficult part for someone attempting their first one is to not burn the caramel before you pour it into the empty ramekins, as it can be sensitive. The "crème" part of this dessert is made with soy milk and bittersweet chocolate, held together with eggs, just like the traditional versions are. The chocolate will cover the soy taste, for anyone sensitive to it, but using soy milk will make the dessert a lot lighter than if it were made with cream.

And if you have somehow managed to overdose on chocolate from Valentine's Day, you might want to check out Elise's recipe for Rose Petal Flan instead!

At home, if I use cream in my coffee, I tend to simply pour it right out of the carton and into my mug. A creamer of some kind looks much nicer when guests come over, though, so it's nice to have something on hand to serve milk or cream in. This science lab-inspired creamer set from Crate and Barrel is a fun take on the creamer idea. The three-piece set comes in the approximate shape of an Erlenmeyer flask, but with a small spout added to the upper lip for ease of pouring. The top portion, which is lidded, is used to hold cream and the base can be used for sugar. Sugar cubes (pictured) seem to add to the science theme because their amounts are standardized, but loose sugar can be used as well.

You might want to consider using a set like this one with some caffeine molecule mugs or even a mathematics mug, just to complement the look.

Having tea with milk or cream in it is not quite as popular in the US as it is abroad, but the practice is far from uncommon. Milk mellows the flavor of black teas and rounds them into a mild, satisfying drink. It seems that the addition of milk might also reduce the effects of some of the flavonoids in tea, so that those who take tea with milk are not getting all the "protective effects against heart disease" that they would be getting if they took their tea black.

This conclusion was published in the European Heart Journal just this month. The study looked at the ability of women's arteries to relax and expand after drinking tea, either with or without milk. The otherwise healthy participants showed a significant improvement in their blood flow after drinking plain tea, while the tea with 10% skim milk showed no benefits. Similar experiments were conducted on rats with the same results.