We had Easter dinner with two sets of neighbors and my job was to bring a light appetizer. I thought I’d try something totally new to me, so I reached for my copy of Chocolate & Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier to look for something quick, light, and vegetarian. Mmmm, cheese puffs with cumin. Sold. After my handsome husband had procured whole cumin seeds and gruyere from the grocery store, I had all the necessities at the ready:

(not pictured: four eggs)

I love it when recipes have so few ingredients. Flour, cheese, butter, eggs, salt, pepper, cumin. I followed Clotilde’s advice and prepped them all in advance so I could go lickety-split through the assembly. The part that frightened me was that after you’ve simmered the butter and salt in a cup of  water, you dump in the flour all at once and stir it until it forms a smooth ball that pulls away from the side. I feared lumpy flour, you see. I am spectacularly bad at whisking up things like bechamel and always manage to produce warty batters full of flour clods. But I did just as Clotilde said and in no time I had a smooth and intriguingly rubbery dough ball that pulled away from the sides of the saucepan. You let this cool for a few minutes and then start stirring in the eggs, one at a time. Again my skepticism rose. Egg the first could not be persuaded to integrate into my lovely dough ball and simply coated the pan with its slime. Egg the second didn’t behave any better, and by egg the third I had chunks of dough floating in slippery goo. But when I added egg the fourth it all magically came together. Hooray! I stirred in cumin and pepper, folded in my grated cheese, and realized that fitting in a dog walk and a few other afternoon chores really had derailed my schedule and I didn’t have half an hour to chill the mixture. So I took my husband’s advice to toss the saucepan into the chest freezer in the basement and hoped for the best for 15 minutes. Then I plopped spoonfuls onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet, slipped it into the oven, and sent my husband over to the neighbors’ to open a bottle of wine and represent for the family while I monitored the baking. Fortunately Clotilde mentions that in France it’s polite to show up for dinner parties at least 15 minutes late, in order to allow one’s hosts time to finish their own behind-schedule preparations. Such a sensible policy. I grabbed my knitting and peered anxiously through the oven glass to see if the puffs were rising despite their inadequate chilling.

They were. I ever so patiently left them in the oven with the heat off and the door cracked open for the recommended five minutes so as not to deflate them by a sudden temperature change, then I tucked them into a tea towel and dashed through the rain and between the garages to Frank and Becky’s house. I was 25 minutes late, but the gougeres were worth the delay: golden and crispy on the outside, just faintly gooey with warm cheese in the middle and a perfectly addictive prick of spice from the cumin.

In other news, my pregnancy journal tells me the Minnow is now about 7.5 inches long and weighs 100 grams. It’s a skein of sock yarn! (Oddly, the journal’s author didn’t think this would be a useful comparison for most readers.)