December 2007| Home | Archives | February 2008
Kitchen Library, A Gem in the New Oxbow Market in Napa
This is Steven Rothfeld standing at one of the tables in his new shop, Kitchen Library, a place so chockablock with beautiful books, photographs, tableware, paper, soaps, ceramics, antiques and vintage finds that people come thinking they'll just take a peek and end up staying hours - every time you turn your head just the slightest bit, there's something new and wonderful to see.
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Hold the Bag, Get a Reward
As I've mentioned before, I always carry my fold-up shopping bag from Monoprix around with me. In fact, when I pulled it out in the Boulevard Raspail market last month, my friend, Louisa Chu, mentioned that mine was a collector's item - it seems that the black bag was a limited edition, which explains why the bags in my current stash are pink and red. Anyway, this week I reaped an extra little perk from having the bag in hand. I was in St. Helena, in the Napa Valley (about which a lot more, when I've got some time), and shopping at this wonderful store, Baksheesh, which offers
" handcrafted gifts from the developing world". I was just window-shopping, but a display of trivets like these caught my eye
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Baking with Dorie: Boca Negra
This week's Baking with Dorie recipe at Serious Eats is for a chocolate cake that really lives up to its name, Boca Negra, or black mouth - it's chocolaty, chocolaty, chocolaty.
The recipe, created by the talented Lora Brody, comes from Baking with Julia, the book I wrote for the PBS series of the same name. I love this recipe for its simplicity: it can be made in seconds in a food processor; it can be dressed up with ice cream, whipped cream or Lora's bourbony white-chocolate cream (the recipe's included); and it can be frozen and kept for that rainy day. Actually, because the cake is so fudgy and has so much bourbon in it (as you'll see when you read the comments at Serious Eats, coffee can be subbed for the hootch), it doesn't really get so hard that you can't nibble a little slice straight from the freezer. Can you tell I'm speaking from experience?
(Photo by Gentl & Hyers)
Michael Laiskonis: Ace Pastry Chef/New Blogger
Yesterday, my friend Michael Laiskonis, the extraordinarily talented pastry chef of Le Bernardin restaurant in New York, wrote to tell me that he's launched his blog. It's exciting to have a new neighbor in cyberspace, especially one who is so smart and has so much to tell us and to teach us.
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Baking with Dorie: Daniel Boulud's Coffee-Cardamom Pots de Creme
Leave it to Daniel Boulud, one of the country's most exciting chefs, to come up with a fresh take on classic pots de creme - baked custard to many of us.
Here, in a recipe from the Cafe Boulud Cookbook, Daniel caramelizes coffee beans and cardamom pods to intensify their flavor, then he uses them to infuse the custard's milk. The inspiration was Middle Eastern coffee; the result is an exotic reading of what is essentially a comfort-food favorite.
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Oysters! And Red Wine????
Now that it's pretty much accepted that white wine is good with cheese - about 5 years ago the sommelier at Le Grand Vefour told me that after a huge tasting, he and his team decided that white wine is better than red with cheese in 70% of the cases - we've got a new tradition on the line: oysters and cold, crisp white wine.
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Baking with Dorie: EVO and Yogurt Cake
I'm always so excited when I can pass along a recipe like this one: It's easy to make; quick to put together; requires no special equipment; uses ingredients we're likely to have on hand; bakes up perfectly every time; and tastes sooooooo good.
I mean, what more could you possibly ask of one little cake?
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Baking with Dorie: Galette des Rois
It's that time of year again: Time for Epiphany and Kings' Cakes, galettes des rois! Last year's best galette des rois was the one above, an Ispahan galette filled with rose-almond cream and raspberries, and it was brought to us by my patissier prefere, its creator, Pierre Herme (above).
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