September 2006 archives

The hardest of all foods to photograph, I’ve learned, are chocolate-covered marshmallows. The bright, fluffy, vanilla-flecked cubes of sweet, airy marshmallow in contrast to the thin, intensely-flavored coating of bittersweet chocolate certainly presents a challenge. I futzed around a bit, trying to figure out how to show the lofty-white cubes in juxtaposition to the coating of pure, dark chocolate. They’re such diverse colors and textures…

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I’ll soon be joining my friend Susan Loomis in her spectacular kitchen in Normandy, one hour from Paris, for a series of cooking classes November 5th-8th, from her home, On Rue Tatin… We’ll learn cooking tips and techniques from Susan in our hands-on classes and I’ll be leading seminars focusing on all aspects of chocolate during special tastings and hands-on demonstrations: you’ll learn everything from…

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I’m in the midst of the insanity that every cookbook, author dreads: reviewing the copyedited manuscript of my upcoming book. Writing a cookbook, especially one that needs to be precise like a baking book, is really a task. I started working on this book well over a year ago and it grew and grew to hundreds of recipes before I reined myself it. I just…

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In my previous post, a reader commented on the picture of a restaurant that I used, which obviously wasn’t the restaurant that I visited (which would be both cool, but very Twilight Zone.) Still, you can’t argue with a depiction of a restaurant where every table has a bottle of red wine on it and the parents are blowing cigarette smoke in their kids faces….

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There’s lots of good food in Paris, but sometimes you have to travel to the double-digit arrondissements to find the gems. And while the 14th arrondissement isn’t all that far (and I live in a double-digit arrondissement myself), it’s worth the trek for the excellent meal at Le Severo. There’s only ten or so tables and a lone cook in the open kitchen, who presides…

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I’m looking at my Pandora playlist this morning, thinking… …”Anyone who sees this is going to think I’m a complete and total dork.” Feel free to add stations. Help me. Obviously I’m in need of an intervention.

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People are going nuts over Ici ice cream, in Berkeley. Mary Canales rocks. Go eat her ice cream. Tell her I said hi. Not to upstage the timely importance of baby Suri, a reader sends me a link to this (a bit too) juicy history of Chez Panisse from Vanity Fair. Um, thanks for sharing, JT. Spend a week in Gascony, without leavin’ your laptop….

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I’d like to introduce you to Henri Le Roux. And if you don’t know who Henri Le Roux is, it’s time that you did. Le Caramelier; Salted-Butter Caramel Spread There’s a lot of very talented chocolatiers and pastry chefs in France. Some are quite famous, and some just go to work everyday and do their jobs well. A few have rather large egos, others are…

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I keep a pretty clean house. I bath regularly. So I wondered why there were so many little flies buzzing around me? Up until a few weeks ago, I never had a problem with insects, save for the nightly attacks of mosquitoes (the bane of Parisian summers). So I was wondered why I had so many little visitors flitting about my kitchen. Every year I…

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