DORIE GREENSPAN

Foodie Fight! The Answers

As promised, okay, a day late, here are the answers to the questions I posted from Foodie Fight! the foodie trivia game.

• Which fish has the highest fat content - Chilean sea bass, halibut or catfish?

                            Chilean Sea Bass

• True or False: A rich chocolate dessert should be paired with a wine of greater sweetness, such as French Sauternes, or the wine may taste thin and bitter?

                             True 

• What American artist is known for his paintings of cakes and pies?

                             Wayne Thibaud

• When do you not raise your glass during a toast?

                             When you're the one being toasted

• What chef's trick will hold a cutting board steady, or keep a mixing bowl from traveling, when both hands are busy pouring and stirring?

                             Place the cutting board or bowl on a dampened side (or dish) towel

• How many minutes past the slated time will a restaurant reservation be honored - about 10 to 15 minutes, 20 to 25 minutes, or 30 to 35 minutes?

                             10 to 15 minutes

Thanks to Hotchef, Amy and Jennifer, who left comments on my original post and, among them, nailed the answers.   

Baking with Dorie: Tomato-Cheese Tartlets

This week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is for tomato and cheese tartlets on puff-pastry bases.  The trick here is to bake the (storebought or homemade) dough between two cookie sheets, so that you get the pastry's characteristic flakiness and flavor, but not its puff.  It's a great technique and it turns out rounds that can be topped with just about anything sweet or savory.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BAKING - WIN A BOOK

According to amazon.com, BAKING FROM MY HOME TO YOURS turned one-year old this week!  Hooray and Happy Birthday!

It's been a sweet year for me and BAKING, a year in which I've gotten to meet so many of you on the road and in the blogoshpere - thank you all for being so kind, generous and supportive, and for being such creative and energetic bakers.

To celebrate this birthday, Houghton Mifflin, my publisher, and I are giving away 10 autographed copies of BAKING.

To win a copy, just leave a comment with your name and the name of the person to whom you'd like me to sign the book and I'll pick the 10 winners at random.

The deadline for entries is October 10, so you'll have about two weeks to put your names in the virtual hat (and I'll have time to sign the books before I leave for France).

Happy birthday, BAKING and MANY, MANY THANKS to all of you who have been such good friends to me and the book.

Piperade and Chicken Basquaise in The Washington Post

Here are all the ingredients for that Basque specialty, piperade, ready to simmer slowly, soften, gather flavor and become the base for comforting braised chicken.  My recipes for both the Piperade and Chicken Basquaise are in today's Washington Post.  Take a look.

And, if you want to make the traditional eggs and piperade, just heat the piperade, scramble some eggs and either mix the two together (the eggs may look curdled when they're blended into the warm peppers, but they'll be delicious) or put the piperade on a plate, make a little well in the center and fill it with the eggs.  Or, top the piperade with an egg fried sunny-side up - the runny yolk is great with the peppers.

Foodie Fight! Something to get your mitts on

Last year, I sat next to Joyce Lock at the IACP awards dinner in Seattle and she was all excited about a food game she was creating.  This week it landed on my desk:  FOODIE FIGHT! It's a version of Trivial Pursuit for foodlovers and it's a great idea and great fun to play.   

There are a bunch of endorsements from food celebs on the box - Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich and Chuck Williams weigh in - but my favorite comes from Jacques Pepin, who says:

"Finally, a trivia game that I am interested in and knowledeable enough to play!"

My sentiments precisely.

Here are a few questions I picked at random:

• Which fish has the highest fat content - Chilean sea bass, halibut or catfish?
• True or False: A rich chocolate dessert should be paired with a wine of greater sweetness, such as a French Sauternes, or the wine may taste thin and bitter?
• What American artist is known for his paintings of cakes and pies?
• When do you not raise your glass during a toast?
• What chef's trick will hold a cutting board steady, or keep a mixing bowl from traveling, when both hands are busy pouring and stirring?
• Which cut of food is smaller - minced or chopped?
• How many minutes past the slated time will a restaurant reservation be honored - about 10 to 15 minutes, 20 to 25 minutes, or 30 to 35 minutes.

There are 1,000 questions, six playing boards and hours of fun in store, and I think FOODIE FIGHT would make a great gift when you're heading to someone's house for dinner.  Come Christmas, it could be a super stocking stuffer.  But be warned:  You can only stuff a sturdy stocking: the box, with its neat magnetic close, packs as much heft as a porterhouse steak!

Homage to a Cake: The Gateau Basque Museum

I have a feeling that were you to ask my husband why we traveled to the French Basque Country, he might say that I planned the whole trip around our visit to the Gateau Basque Museum.  I hadn't thought I was so obvious, but yeah, that was pretty much the reason.  I mean, wouldn't you want to go to a region that nurtures a museum dedicated to one particular kind of cake?  And wouldn't you be willing to travel about 8 hours to get there?  Of course, you would - and you wouldn't be disappointed.

I'm not sure what I expected, maybe a small regional museum with docents dressed in old-fashioned garb (think Williamsburg with cake), but whatever I imagined, this wasn't it. 

We followed the signs to the town of Sare, parked our car, as instructed, near a faded step van, then proceeded to walk down a steep curving path with signs that begged us not to pick the wild fruits and berries.  Toward the bottom of the hill, we came to a small, hand-built ticket kiosk (closed until 10 minutes before the tour would begin), a tool shed and two buildings: one clearly a home and the other evidently the museum.

Since we were early and the only people around, and since you could only see the museum as part of a tour, we wandered a bit, pressed our noses against the window of the modern bakery in the back of the museum and the found the gift shop, where we bought a mini Gateau Basque.

If this were all we'd get for our hours of travel, Michael and I decided it would be, as Michelin says, "Worth the voyage."

Time out to describe a Gateau Basque: It's a double layer of dough, more like a thick tart crust than the word "gateau" would lead you to believe, encasing a layer of either vanilla pastry cream or dark cherry jam, a local specialty.

By the time we finished making our mini gateau last as long as possible, there were 20 other cakelovers in line and our guide, Bixente Marichular, appeared.

I was surprised to see him dressed in chef's whites and even more surprised to discover that what we thought would be a tour would be a 90-minute talk and demo.  During what probably seemed like an eternity to Michael, who neither bakes nor speaks French (although he caught most of what the chef said), our guide revealed the secret to making a crust that won't crack when rolled - coarse sugar, the kind used for making jam; admonished us never to use any other preserves but the cherry jam made in nearby Itxassou; and showed us the traditional way to differentiate a cream-filled cake from one filled with jam - the jam cake should be topped with a piece of dough shaped like a Basque cross:

Not only did I learn a lot about the Gateau Basque, I learned a little something about the French, too.

At the start of the demo, Bixente grabbed a hunk of his beautiful dough, handed it to the guy in the first row and told him to taste it and pass it along.  Having given many baking demos, I couldn't help thinking how different things were in France: No one was wearing plastic gloves; no one complained that the dough was being pawed and passed from hand-to-hand; and no one said peep about the raw eggs in the dough.  And, when we were given cookies and told to dunk them in the pastry cream and the jam, no one snitched on the double-dippers.

When the demo was over and people were wandering off, I stayed to talk to the chef.  During the class, I'd asked to see the sugar and the chef, hearing my accent, asked where I was from.  When I said, "New York," he fired back quickly, "You can probably get sugar like this at Dean & DeLuca."  So, my first question to him apres class was: "When did you work in New York?"

Of course he laughed, and of course he had worked in New York.  He'd been in the City in the late '80s and early '90s and had worked with Gray Kunz at the Peninsula Hotel.

Once again, the food world had made the real world a tiny place.  Here we were, in a very small town in the middle of the French mountains and we were talking about shared friends, colleagues and memories.  I love when this happens and I love the community that makes this happen.

When I got back to Paris, I made this Gateau Basque (with the wrong pattern on top - I hadn't left enough dough to craft a cross):

It was pretty good, but it wasn't Bixente's.  I'm still working on it ...

Baking with Dorie: Coconut Domes

Serious Eats has just posted my latest Baking with Dorie recipe:  Coconut Domes.  Another easy treat, but this time it comes from the French pastry chef Pierre Herme, master of everything sweet.  I hope you'll try it.

The Dinner at Del Posto: Bon Appetit/Buon Appetito

It took me sooooooooooooo long yesterday to post the names of the Bon Appetit Award Winners, that I never got around to telling you what we ate at Del Posto.  In between the cheers, clapping and wonderful camarderie, there was truly memorable food and wine from Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich.  Here's the menu:

ANTIPASTO

Insalata Salumi Misti (which included the great Swiss chard tourte at the top of the plate)

Tocai Friuliano, Bastianich 2005

PRIMI

(Cloud-light) Potato Gnocchi al Pomodoro with Basil Pesto

Rosato, Bastianich 2005

FOLLOWED BY

Hand-made Orecchiette with Lamb Neck Sausage ( a WOW!)

Vespa Bianco, Bastianich 2004

SECONDO

New York Strip Steak with Summer Bean Salad (it should have read "Amazing Summer Bean Salad") and Crispy Brasato

Morellino di Scansano, La Mozza 2005

DOLCE

Crostata di Mele with Almond Cream and Pancetta Streusel (another WOW from pastry chef Nicole Kaplan)

Dindarello, Maculan 2006

Biscotti Assortiti

A Swell Party: The Bon Appetit Awards Dinner

Last night was a terrible night to go out to dinner in New York - all the chefs were at the Tenth Annual Bon Appetit Awards Dinner at Del Posto, the restaurant owned by Mario Batali, who was running around in his trademark shorts and sneakers, welcoming everyone to his home and generously doling out bear hugs

Joe Bastianich, who wasn't in my line of sight, but whose wines we all enjoyed, and Lidia Bastianich, the Italian mama we all wish we had

seen here with legendary editor, Judith Jones, the woman responsible for the publication of, among hundreds of other books, Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (she is the one who, as a very young woman working in Paris, found the manuscript in the slush pile and championed its publication) and Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (and almost all of Julia's other books), and who has now written her own story, The Tenth Muse.

The event is relatively small because the guest list is pretty much confined to past and present award winners, Bon Appetit staff and contributors (which is how I got my precious invitation) and friends of the Bon Ap family, which means great chefs, restaurateurs, artisan producers, trendsetters and designers.  I can't believe I was lucky enough to be seated with Eva Zeisel, who, at 100, just designed two new lines of dishes from scratch

Eva Zeisel, who was the recipient of last year's Bon Appetit Lifetime Achievement Award, is seated to the left, her daughter, the actress and childrens' book author, Jean Richards, is next to her, and Barbara Fairchild, Bon Appetit's Editor-in-Chief, is standing.

The invitation read: 6:30 Reception, 7:30 Dinner and Awards Presentation, but it was well past 7:30 when we sat down - people were having way too much fun chatting and catching up with one another to pay attention to the staff gently and probably way too softly imploring us to be seated.  I mean, how would like to be the one to tell Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue's Food Critic and The Man Who Ate Everything, he had to put down his reverse vitello tonnato and take his seat?

Or break up the conversation of (from left to right)

Eric Ripert, chef of Le Bernardin and Bon Appetit's 2005 Chef of Merit, Dan Barber, chef of New York's Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns and this year's Chef of Merit (who gave an acceptance speech that was so funny I thought the talent scouts from late-night tv would grab him on the spot) and Joel Robuchon, who, in addition to being Bon Appetit 2006 Chef of the Year and chef of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris, New York and Las Vegas, is the man most great French chefs consider the greatest chef.  Actually, it's not just the great chefs who idolize him, Americans are pretty crazy about him too, which explains why, when M. Robuchon was leaving and gave me the traditionally French set of kisses, a woman passing by said, "You're never going to wash your face, are you?"  (Well, maybe not those two spots.)

While the awards are very serious, the presentation was pretty lighthearted, which is just what you want and just what you'd expect from our host, Ted Allen, the food guru from Queer Eye, who now hosts the PBS series, Uncorked: Wine Made Simple. 

He's seen here with Peter Elliot (left) of Bloomberg, who looks like his separated-at-birth brother.

And the evening's winners were:

Chef of the Year:  David Chang of New York's Momofuku and Momofuku Ssam Bar

Cooking Teacher:  Molly Stevens, author, most recently of All About Braising

Chef of Merit:  Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Pastry Chef:  Kamel Guechida of Joel Robuchon's restaurants in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas

Wine and Spirits Professional:  Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club in New York City

Designer:  Kelly Wearstler, designer of, among many other places, Whist, the restaurant in the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica

Food Artisans:  Herb and Kathy Eckhouse, whose company, La Quercia produces extraordinary cured meats

Tastemaker:  Target Stores

Restaurateur:  Laurent Tourondel, whose BLT (Bistro Laurent Tourondel) restaurants in New York have become a not-so-mini empire

Food Writer:  Barbara Kinsolver for her wonderful book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about a year of eating locally

Humanitarian:  Father Gregory J. Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles and helped thousands of gangmembers become bakers, chefs and caterers

Lifetime Achievement:  Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw, founders of Zingerman's Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan and a great online resource for all things delicious

Cheddar-Chive Bread on Serious Eats

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This week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is salty, cheesy and really good with white wine.  It's a cheddar-chive quickbread that is, in fact, quick to make.  Cheers!