Belated New Year’s wishes – and Nana’s honey cake

October 5, 2011

Truth is, I don’t do a very good job acknowledging any of the Jewish holidays. I grew up celebrating only the basic few and after my grandparents died, even that pretty much faded away.

Writing last week’s post about my grandmother’s pickled green tomatoes, though, combined with Rosh Hashanah items in the news and on some of my favorite blogs (like this one by my friend Jennie Schacht, author of “Farmers’ Market Desserts”) got me to thinking about holidays at Nana’s table.

How to pick a perfect peach

August 17, 2011

Over the weekend I taught a cooking class at Ramekins featuring stone fruits. The students asked me how to pick good fruit, including peaches, and so in the interest of eating a lot of good peaches while they’re still in season, I thought I’d share my answer with you.

Homemade ice cream, part three: Experiments with cherry ice cream with chocolate chips

August 9, 2011

It all started when I saw an online recipe for cherry ice cream with chocolate chips, one of my most favorite flavors. The recipe involved steeping milk with fresh cherries, then pureeing the mixture, then adding cream. This made the ice cream “base” which then got cooled and processed in an ice cream maker, with chocolate chips stirred in at the end.
Right away, I was suspicious.

Homemade ice cream, part two: Fruit ice cream

August 2, 2011

Today we’re going to talk about fruit ice cream. As I said in that last post, fruit ice cream is one step more complicated than basic ice cream – but only that.

Summer project: Homemade ice cream

July 28, 2011

Have I ever told you that ice cream is my favorite food? That I eat it almost every day? That I only hesitatingly admit to, more than once, eating a whole pint in one evening? That, as much as I like all desserts, at the end of a nice meal at a nice restaurant, no matter what’s on the dessert menu, I almost always order ice cream?

It’s sweet, it’s cold, it’s creamy, it’s refreshing. What more could you want?

Lavender-Scented Dreams

April 27, 2011

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to spend the day with Michaela Baltasar, Senior PR Manager of Jackson Family Wines. It was one of the goodies that came with winning a fellowship to the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers and included a tasting with Ted Edwards, director of winemaking at Freemark Abbey Winery; a garden tour and food and wine pairing lunch, care of chef Matthew Lowe and executive chef Justin Wangler, at the Kendall-Jackson Wine Center; and a tasting with winemaker Marcia Monahan-Torres at Matanzas Creek Winery. I know – life is rough.

How to make sorbet without a recipe

August 4, 2010

At the sadly-now-closed COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in Napa, where I worked as a culinary instructor, we did an every-Friday program called the Taste of COPIA Lunch. For several years, every lunch ended with sorbet, which means, over time, we made a lot of sorbet.

More reason to love chocolate—as if you needed it.

February 10, 2010

It wasn’t until I had the delicious fortune to visit the Guittard Chocolate Company factory in Burlingame, where I saw the journey with my own eyes, that I really got it in my gut: chocolate is an amazing, miraculous thing.