une récapitulation
a recap
By my count, this is the 232nd time I’ve posted on this blog since it began on May 2nd, 2011. That’s 232 weekly postings, each going live late Sunday evening. That makes this posting two shy of the four-and-one-half-year anniversary of the blog’s start. In that time I’ve learned a lot about cooking, photography, dishware, and myself. more »
macaron à l’ancienne
pistachio macaroons
In the fall of 2011, I was given the task of standing in line outside the newly opened, Madison Avenue edition of Ladurée, the Parisian macaroon producer. A few years earlier, I had visited the company store in Lausanne with a chef friend. He came to Lausanne for a haircut and to purchase a box of macaroons as a gift for a recipient I no longer remember. more »
gelée de tomates
tomato apsic
On October 25th, 2009, in Stockton, California, at about 12:15 pm, I ate tomato aspic for the first time. I had avoided it for over sixty years, but I didn’t even try to avoid it this time. I knew my time had come. It was tasty, but it was also a symbol of all that was bad about food from the 1950s. more »
macarons de cèpes
porcini macaroons
The date was October, 1994. It was my first trip to Paris. It was my first trip to France. It was a life-changing eight days. Although it would be another three years before my true obsession with French food would start, this first visit definitely marked the end of my obsession with Chinese food. more »
truffe perdu
lost truffles
Some recipes work. Some recipes fail. Some recipes almost work. Some recipes that almost work can be repurposed. This is a story of a repurposed recipe. White chocolate is not my favorite chocolate, but as a delivery mechanism for sugar and fat, it’s not bad. I occasionally buy it and use it in my cooking. more »
brocoli parfumée au sésame huile
sesame-scented broccoli
I seriously cooked Chinese-style food for only four years before I headed to the People’s Republic to eat the genuine article. I was part of a group from the US-China People’s Friendship Association in the late spring of 1980. We were one of the first tourist groups to go to Xian. more »
pailles au fromage
cheese straws
One of the curious books I remember occupying the built-in bookshelf in my father’s home office was The Americanization of Edward Bok. Opposite the title page was a photograph of the author. Below that was his signature. The photograph depicts a middle-aged man with graying temples and hair parted slightly to the left of center. more »
le posset
a posset
In the eighth and final episode of the first season of the 2015 BBC costume drama Poldark, the central character’s sniveling wimp of a first cousin, Francis Poldark, sits at the head of the dining table in his ancestral home. He is unaware that he is showing the first symptoms of “putrid throat. more »
écorce de maïs
corn bark
I started drinking coffee when I was serving guard duty. The coffee was Nescafé. The place was the plain of Marathon, site of a decisive battle between the Athenians and the Persians fought in 490 BCE. The year of my guard duty was 1963. I was a Boy Scout, not a soldier. more »
macaroni et fromage à l’ancienne
old-fashioned macaroni and cheese
It’s going onto fifteen years since I first started looking at old recipes. My first venture only took me back to 1928, but by the end of the first year I was digging around in the 14th century. Now I spend much of my time reading books and manuscripts written in the eighteen century. more »
macarons de noix de coco au chocolat
coconut-chocolate macaroons
Here’s a simple question: “How many nickels are in a dollar?” I asked three students that question. Only one was willing to try to answer, and it took him three tries and a hint to get the correct answer. The students had already admitted that they had no idea about simple fractions and couldn’t do decimal math, even with a calculator. more »
crevettes et maïs bouillie
shrimp and grits
There are certain food words that, for me, always have a place associated with them. Say cioppino, and I think of San Francisco. Specifically, DiMaggio’s Restaurant in the Fisherman’s Wharf district and high-school dates in the 1960s. Say artichokes, and I think of Castroville, the sell-proclaimed artichoke capital of the world. more »
boulette de semoule
Roman-style gnocchi
According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the meaning of “bane” is “a cause of great distress or annoyance.” For many years, gnocchi were the bane of my teaching. It was the one dish that I could count on students screwing up. It was the one dish that never seemed to work, even if the students followed the directions as they claimed they did. more »
cluster de macadamia
macadamia-nut cluster
According to the Hawaiian Host website, Ellen Dye Candies, its predecessor, was the first company to dip macadamia nuts into chocolate. The year was 1927. My parents travelled to Hawaii when I was in high school. They returned with a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts for my father’s officemates. The year was 1962. more »
les pois
the peas
Roland Stofeth handed me a liter-size deli container of blanched petit pois. Using kitchen sign language, he instructed me to peel each of the tiny peas. He then quickly left to eat his lunch while I faced the task of peeling what must have been a few thousand peas. Roland was a young apprentice in the restaurant where I was staging. more »
le brevet d’invention
the patent
Eugene D. Gagliardi, Jr.,is an octogenarian inventor of meat products. His most famous product may be Steak-umms, a method of restructuring thin slices of meat into steak-like planks. I first heard about Gagliardi when a friend emailed me a link to an interview where he was demonstrating a novel, patented method of cutting a chicken breast to make the poultry equivalent of a blooming onion. more »
pouding des haricots
bean pudding
We first visited the Otowa-san Kiyomizu-dera in 1986. It’s more popularly known by Westerners as the Kiyomizu Temple. It’s located on the eastern edge of Kyoto although when it was founded in 778, the city was probably still to the west but a bit farther away. I’ve been back twice since my original visit, but I think the first was still the best. more »
rouleau de haricots à la vapeur
bean roll
What do Jackson Wonder, Black Calypso, Cannellini, Pinquito, Canario, and Baby Lima have in common? They are all varieties of dried beans. I recently received a box with one twelve-ounce bag of each variety along with a baseball cap with the producer’s name on it. It was my prize for winning a recipe contest they sponsored on their Facebook page. more »
sandwich « ramen » au fromage grillé
grilled cheese “ramen” sandwich
A month or so before Yoshiko died, she suddenly stopped eating and drinking. She was in her nineties and had lived in a nursing home for many years. She was in good overall health, but her severe osteoporosis often made her extremely uncomfortable. Yoshiko also had dementia. I can’t say that she suffered from dementia. more »
pudding aux carottes
carrot pudding
It was the first old recipe that ever interested me. The recipe was called rafioli comun de herbe vantazati. It was ravioli filled with spinach or beet leaves, ricotta, raisins, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The “sauce” was a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. The recipe was an adaptation of one from the fourteenth century. more »
un petit hamburger
slider
It’s been over forty years since my one-and-only experience of eating a White Castle hamburger. It wasn’t a great experience. I remember buying a bag of six sliders expecting that there would be enough to share with my two friends. We all came away hungry and unhappy. At that point in my life, the first-ever fast food joint and creator of the fast-food hamburger gave all fast-food joints and all the fast-food hamburgers a bad name. more »
la purée de Robuchon
Robuchon's potatoes
I may be a fool. I may be the world’s biggest fool. I think I’ve found a way to simplify Joël Robuchon’s La Purée. Some people call Robuchon’s version of purée de pommes de terre mashed potatoes, but that is blasphemy. This dish is the mythical ambrosia that fed the gods of ancient Greece. more »
les gaufres de Miss Leslie
Miss Leslie’s waffles
Another week, another waffle. My toy is taking over my life. The machine worked better this week than at any time in the past, even with a recipe that is over 175 years old. Maybe I should leave the mini-waffle maker a five-star rating on Amazon and move on to a different category of dishes? more »
gaufres de pommes de terre
potato waffles
I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. Thus wrote Abraham Kaplan in The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science in 1964. The phrase has been quoted in many ways since then. more »
le petit pain avec homard et beurre
lobster roll
It was my first encounter with lobster. It was on the plate of the person to my left. It was on the plate of the person to my right. It was on the plates of the people across from me at the long, communal table. Dave, a business acquaintance from Seattle, was sitting across from me. more »
mandarine confite
candied mandarin
The part we eat is called the endocarp. Each segment in the endocarp is a carpel. Each carpel is made up of small, individual juice-filled follicles or hairs. Each follicle is an individual cell quite visible with naked vision. No microscope required. It’s quite easy to look at the individual cells of an orange before we slurp them up. more »
escargots croustillantes
crispy snails
The stuff was called Bug-Geta, and I used it by the boxful. It didn’t seem to work, but I keep using it in between more ecological and pet friendly attempts to win my personal war with garden snails. I was trying to grow vegetables in a small plot of half-hidden land in front of my house. more »
gaufres de poulet
chicken waffles
When I’m doing my happy dance in the kitchen, I get accused of having too much fun playing with my toys. Mostly I think of my varied and sundry tools as a valuable part of my kitchen life, but I guess one or two really are toys. Certainly my baby-blue mini-waffle maker qualifies as a toy. more »
biscuits de thé vert
green-tea cookies
I’ve often tripped over cultural traditions. Maybe not tripped. More like falling face down with a thud. It usually happens just when I think I have mastered a tradition. Then the traditions get tweaked or modified or scrapped or reinvented. I’m confused, but these things always confuse me. When I was small I was told it was not my place to question why. more »
soupe onctueuse d'avocat
creamy avocado soup
Why do Americans insist on putting a country in front of so many preparations? Why do we have to call a dish French fries or French toast, German potato salad or German pancakes, Polish or Italian sausage, or even Chinese chicken salad? Pommes frit or pain perdu sound so much nicer to my ear. more »
thé aux champignons
mushroom water
Sometimes you don’t realize that your journey has come to an end until you’ve been at your final destination for a while. Plus, your final destination may not be where you intended to go when you started your journey. This happened to me recently, but before I tell you about it, let’s discuss mushroom essence. more »
gâteau au yaourt sans yaourt
yoghurt-less yoghurt cake
Gâteau au yaourt is a French tradition dating all the way back to, maybe, 1950. At least that what one reference that no longer shows up on the Internet said. Different websites describe it as being so easy that even a child can make it, or being child’s play, or being the first recipe taught to French children. more »
champignons en croûte
mushroom rolls
A sign of laziness is using a food processor to “dice” mushrooms for a duxelles. The results can hardly be called a dice, and the practice lacks a certain Zen. There is a certain feeling of satisfaction that comes from producing a uniform dice from something as irregular and friable as a common mushroom. more »
un écrou pour toutes les saisons
a nut for all seasons
It was like the drugstores common to movies from the thirties and forties. Besides serving as a pharmacy, Bryan Drug House had a lunch counter, a supply of greeting cards, and various candies, ranging from Whitman Samplers to Hershey bars, for sale. It was located in the center of town, directly across West Main Street from the old Nathanial Rochester Hotel. more »
pouding de kaki
persimmon pudding
I went to the market today to buy some persimmons. I was looking for the non-astringent type such as the Jiro or Fuyu varieties, both common in my usual markets two days ago when I last went shopping. Today, all I could find were the Hachiya variety, the traditional astringent persimmon available in my area. more »
champignon mariné
marinated mushroom
Mrs. W was a whack-job—a true nut case—my first sixth-grade teacher. She was actually, probably just going through some sort of a breakdown. She had decided to eschew the standard curriculum, and instead, we spent our days doing art projects and going on field trips. On one of those field trips, I visited my first mushroom farm. more »
flan aux œufs et fromage
cheese custard
The denaturing of protein and its subsequent crosslinking is fundamental to cooking. Every time you prepare a dish of scrambled eggs, that’s what you’re doing. You mechanically denature some its many proteins when you beat the egg. Then, as the egg warms in the pan, thermal denaturation occurs. At about 60 °C (140 °F), the proteins begin to crosslink and form a gel that traps water droplets in a newly created protein mesh. more »
tarte à la crème de vin
wine-cream tart
Don’t ask Wikipedia for a list of pies. The list will be too long to fathom. Still, what are the most common pies in America? Apple certainly. All types of berry and other fruit pies. There’s banana- and coconut-cream pie? In the fall, pumpkin pin. At other times, sweet potato pie. more »
champignons tirés
pulled mushroom
There was this one patient in the late 1980s that had ignored a ruptured appendix. Apparently, he just sat on his front porch drinking beer and hoping that the pain would go away. By the time he was brought unconscious to Rochester General Hospital, his sepsis was so bad that edema had formed throughout his body. more »
gésier rôti
seared gizzard
“Do you fret your gizzard?” That’s a question that Dr. Johnson may have asked you if you seemed apprehensive. In the literary world, there seems to be an illusion that we have a body part called a gizzard. Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on June 17th, 1668, “I find my wife hath something in her gizzard that which waits an opportunity of being provoked to bring up. more »
mousse de cheesecake au beurre d’arachide
peanut-butter cheesecake mousse
Some are good. Some are bad. Some are great. Some are so bad that I want to put my fist through my monitor. I have a love-hate relationship with cooking videos. As much as I hate most of them, I’m still attracted to them like the proverbial moth. In the past I’ve mentioned two YouTube series, Cooking with Dog and Ochikeron (Create, Eat, Happy), that I subscribe to and watch on a regular basis. more »
tomates demi-secs
half-dried tomatoes
Taillevent didn’t write recipes for you or me. Irrespective of the fact that he was writing his recipes in the first half of the prior millennium, or as has been suggested, that he was dictating the recipes since he probably was illiterate, his intended audience was most likely his employer. His purpose was to provide a record of his cooking. more »
biscuit salé de riz et nori
nori-flavored rice crackers
Many food items are intumescent. Add the right heat, and they swell and become less dense. The cooked and dried pasta I used in my macaroni and cheese presentation is an example of intumescence. What causes the expansion is straight forward. When the pasta is cooked, cross-linked starch molecules trap water droplets. more »
soupe de melon
melon soup
My mother insisted on serving me cantaloupe even though I hated it. The more often she served it, the more I hated it. I guess she thought she could win me over. Today, if I’m served a dish with even a single piece of cantaloupe in it, I send it back to be remade. more »
poulet riz
chicken rice
Good afternoon, folks. This plate of chicken rice from Maxwell Food Centre is pretty well known around the region after the SingTel Hawkers vs [Gordon] Ramsay competition. Of course, food lovers like me would definitely head down to try. Beware, the queue was long and the shop [Tian Tian, stall 1-10] attracted tourists too. more »
bouillie de pop-corn
popcorn grits
I’m always getting polenta and pancetta confused. Not the actual materials but the words. I think it was in the 1990s when I first repeatedly encountered the words. I was using pancetta in a frisée salad that I learned early in my French cooking days, and polenta was showing up on restaurant menus with increasing frequency. more »
« gum drops » de orange sanguine
blood-orange gum drops
In his 1915 obituary for the dwarf actor Marshal Pinckney Wilder, Elbert Hubbard ends a paragraph where he described Wilder as having a sound mind locked inside of an unsound body with the sentence: “He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.” Supposedly, this line is the original version of the common aphorism: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. more »
poulet au marmelade de épine-vinette
chicken strips with barberry marmalade
Is it the rectus femoris or the abductor magnus? According to Vaughan’s Notes on the Osteology and Myology of the Domestic Fowl from 1876, some anatomists consider the muscles to be the same and some consider them to be different. One friend thinks it may be the semimembranosus. I know it’s probably not the vastus externus since the muscle seems to be internal in the thigh. more »
pickles à la chaux éteinte
lime pickles
In early June, 1969, I quit school. I had just completed my second year at Rochester Institute of Technology, and my third year of college. Ever since I was first abandoned at the door of kindergarten class in 1953, a challenge I accepted somewhat stoically, daily attendance at school was never the high point of my day. more »
biscuits sablés de Douglas
Douglas' shortbread cookies
Today I spent way too much money on a cookbook. I think that at $500 it’s my most expensive book purchase. Even my 18th-century French cookbooks come nowhere close in cost. The most I had previously spent was $420 on Modernist Cuisine, and that purchase has, for the most part, been disappointing. more »
haricots soufflées
bean biscuits
It’s been a Puccini sort of day. Giacomo Puccini has been in my head all day by way of my headphones. I’m currently on a writing binge, and I can’t write without filling my head with music being sung in a foreign language to block outside sounds. At the moment the music is Puccini’s 1880 graduation exercise Messa. more »
mariné zeste de pastèque
pickled watermelon rind
Pickle as a noun meant the kosher dills from a local German delicatessen. Pickled as an adjective meant herring in sour cream. Both were part of my childhood, introduced to my palate by my Bavarian-born mother. At the same time, watermelon indicated a very hot day when we’d eat outside rather than in our hot kitchen. more »
ambroisie de pêche
peach nectar
Ambrosia is the nectar of the gods, or at least that’s how I remember it being described a long time ago in a class dealing with Greek myths. The memory is very faint. It was some time in elementary school. All those gods and their petty grievances made no sense at all to little me. more »
œufs brouillés parfumés aux cèpes
porcini-scented scrambled eggs
The afternoon in 1955 that my mother’s first television was delivered, my brother and I tried to watch Rin Tin Tin through a screen full of snow. (The roof antenna had yet to be installed.) I’m sure it was shortly thereafter when I saw my first cooking program, or at least my first cooking segment on some morning show. more »
carpaccio d’agneau
raw, sliced lamb
Lisa has some very tasty loins. Perhaps I should explain? Lisa is a ewe, but that in itself doesn’t explain everything. As I previously wrote, I periodically purchase a lamb from a rancher an hour south of where I live. He slaughters and dresses the lamb early in the morning. I pickup the carcass within a few minutes of him finishing, and then drive it to the school where I teach the occasional knife skills and butchery class. more »
biscuits « Oreo »
“Oreo” cookies
In 1824, Charles Caleb Colton wrote: “Imitation is the sincerest [form] of flattery,” and we’ve been stuck ever since with similar phrases to excuse our copying the work of others. In my estimation, no other field has as much copying as cooking. Whether imitating, duplicating, mimicking, simulating, or outright plagiarizing, to say that copying isn’t commonplace in cooking is to deny that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. more »
rouleau de fromage
cheese roll
The modern concept of east-west cooking, later supplanted by fusion cooking, has been around at least since the 1970s. In one sense, it has been around forever. When an ethnic group migrates to a new area, they tend to adapt their cooking methods and recipes to locally available ingredients. The result is a fusion of sorts. more »
hamburger de poulet
mini-chicken burger
In August, 2013, I spent a bit over a week in Japan. My main reason for being there was to learn about and make a few Japanese knives. (A two-part article about my trip can be found here and here.) Whether home or away or far away, I’m always thinking about whether something I’m eating or watching being made would make a good amuse-bouche, intermède, or mignardise. more »
les bonbons de Martha Washington
Martha Washington candy
Martha Washington didn’t make chocolate-covered candies. Chocolate is not an ingredient in any of the recipes in either of the manuscripts now given Martha’s name. Other ingredients of these modern candies were also missing from the recipe collections. Dried coconut wasn’t quite yet making the trip to Northern Virginia. Sweetened condensed milk, wouldn’t exist for almost another century. more »
bouffées de thon et algues
tuna puffs
For me, as a typical west-coast, middle-class kid, the iconic dish in the 1950s was a tuna casserole prepared from a can of tuna, a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup diluted with milk, and a 12-ounce package of egg noodles. Before baking, the casserole was topped with crumbled potato chips. more »
gluten de blé braisé avec cinq-épices
five-spice braised wheat gluten
When I seriously started cooking Chinese food in 1975, there was one ingredient that I would run across in certain cookbooks that I had no interest in finding or trying. It only appeared in cookbooks written in China for a Chinese audience, and I was lucky that many of these books had been translated into English in Hong Kong and thus were not Americanized in any way, including removing ingredients not available in America. more »
mousse de carotte séchée
crispy carrot foam
I recently have had the opportunity to eat at a number of modern, high-end, hard-to-get-a-seat-at restaurants. These have been great meals full of attractive dishes and exotic ingredients. For the most part, everything was tasty. A few times, some of the dishes seemed to be on the menu more for effect than taste. more »
palmier de parmesan
parmesan palmiers
Pity the poor palmier! It’s an orphan. No one claims to be its mother or father. No one stands up and says: “I made the first palmier.” Many sources claim that it came about early in the twentieth century, but none give a traceable reference. The earliest mention I can find in my books is in the 1938 edition of Larousse Gastronomique. more »
faux boules de pain azyme
fake matzo balls
If the average Jewish mother making matzo balls for her family Seder is a sprinter, my mother was a matzo-ball marathoner. In the 1950s and into the 60s, she’d prepare the matzo balls for the local temple’s community Seder. This usually meant making between 900 and 1000 matzo balls for a single meal. more »
panna cotta au sésame noir
sesame-seed custard
There are certain brands for which I can accept no substitute. Heinz Ketchup is the first that comes to mind. There’s no other ketchup that tastes as good on a hamburger or fries. I feel the same about Best Foods Mayonnaise. The latest addition to my “no substitutes list” is Roland Classic Coconut Milk. more »
boulette des crevettes
shrimp dumplings
After 18 hours of flying and 6 hours or so in three different airports, we arrived. It was about two in the afternoon when we plopped on our beds. After an hour of napping, we headed into Singapore’s 35 °C (95 °F) air made heavy with the near 100 percent humidity. We didn’t stray too far from our hotel, but we did take the escalator underground at the nearest subway station to purchase our EZ-Link cards so we could use the city bus network to get around town. more »
confit de saumon
barely cooked salmon
I’ve attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery each summer since 2008. I’m told by outsiders that the food and accommodations were atrocious when the Symposium was at St. Andrews College. Now the food is mostly great, and the rooms—if you know what to ask for—are quite nice. The nicest meal was, I think, in 2009 when Raymond Blanc of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons prepared the Saturday evening meal for the attendees. more »
pleurer les bébés
cry babies
I like old recipes. Maybe it’s an ego thing. Like I know something you don’t. Old recipes work for me. I know that when a recipe calls for pounding the sugar in a mortar and then sieving it, the recipe is from a time when sugar was purchased in solid loaves or cones. more »
crêpe des haricots au fromage blanc de chèvre
“King of the Early” crepe with goat cheese
I first encountered socca walking through the vieille ville (old town) in Nice in the mid-90s. During one twelve-month period I saw the chickpea pancake in numerous small cafes near Cours Saleya many times, but each time I was there, my traveling companions didn’t want to try the socca. To this day, I still have not eaten it. more »
salade de lapin
rabbit salad
With a pair of toothed forceps I would lift the belly skin to separate it from the underlying muscles. Then with a small pair of scissors, I’d start cutting along the rabbit’s midline in a cranial direction from near the pubis until the midpoint of the ribs. I would separate the skin from the underlying muscles by sliding my gloved hand between the two, breaking any of the small membranous connections that tenuously connected them. more »
mochi de thé vert
green-tea mochi
At one point in the 1980s, I was flying close to 200,000 miles a year: All on United Airlines and all domestic. This meant that I was spending more time in the air and in airports than I was at home. When I looked back at the end of one year, I had spent 40 weekends on the road. more »
pain au fromage
cheese buns
It’s a cliché now to talk about the world becoming smaller due to the Internet, but this simple recipe is a good example. It apparently started as a challenge from a Brazilian website called Rolê Gourmet to the Japanese website Cooking with Dog. The challenge was to prepare Brazilian cheese buns called pão de queijo. more »
beurre de Rangemore
Rangemore butter
To want to know all but to know so little. That’s my problem with Rangemore Butter. The recipe for the preparation appears in the July 17th, 1939, edition of The Times, the big one from London. This seems to be the only printed recipe in existence for Rangemore Butter. Here’s all the paper had to say. more »
yokan au beurre d’arachide
peanut butter jellies
Azuki beans. Red beans. Red-bean paste. Everywhere. Can’t be avoided. Not my favorite red thing. I’m not a big fan of azuki beans or the red bean paste fashioned from the beans that is used as an ubiquitous filler in many Japanese sweets. Therefore, I’m not a fan of the traditional Japanese sweet called yokan. more »
poulet « nanban »
sweet and sour chicken
Most often, marinating doesn’t live up to it’s reputation. In the 1960s it was touted as the savior of tough meat. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now. Most meat marinade recipes I encounter have soy sauce in them. At slightly greater than fifteen percent salinity, I wouldn’t be surprised if the soy sauce had some brining effect. more »
fromage au curry
curried cheese
I ate dinner by myself at the town’s only Chinese restaurant. It was my last night living in Las Cruces, and I had already said all my goodbyes. Early the next morning I would leave and never return. It had been a long nine months since I left home for my first year of college. more »
biscuit à la milanaise
Mailänderli
For my mother, it was the dessert version of “taking coals to Newcastle”. Maybe I should say she “brought firewood to Newcastle”? When she and my father ate at the best restaurant in town, she brought homemade cookies for the two of them to eat for dessert. She also brought extra cookies to give to the kitchen help. more »
« tokoroten » de bœuf
beef-flavored gelatin noodles
Across the door on each side of every truck was written: “Find a need and fill it!” It was the slogan of the sand and gravel company that occupied a long, narrow stretch of land between my hometown’s main road and the railroad tracks. Somewhere along the gravel road of life, I adopted a similar attitude. more »
cake pounti auvergnat
Auvergne-style quiche
I didn’t plan to make a quiche. I didn’t even plan to make a custard. In the end, I did both. I thought I was making a cake. The recipe called for a cake pan. The recipe included flour, eggs, and baking powder. There wasn’t much milk in the recipe. When I cut off the first slice, I could see that the crumb was smooth and dense. more »
vin rouge aux épices
spiced red wine
The date was Friday, September 29th, 2006. The place was the Hostellerie Saint-Georges in Gruyères, Switzerland. The chef handed me six brown, one-liter bottles and instructed me to empty them into the large Staub cocotte on the induction burner. At first, I didn’t know what was in the bottles. Their shape reminded me of the chemical bottles I used in the darkroom in college. more »
tuile de fromage et de cacao
cocoa-cheese wafer
When we last left the subject of roasted, peeled, and ground cocoa beans the thought was: “This preparation will require more work”. The cocoa-cheese wafers were not ready for prime time. With a little rehearsal and a touch of rewrite, the show is ready to premier. The cocoa beans I used were produced by Claudio Corallo the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe off the coast of Africa. more »
algues mijoté
simmered seaweed
Hijiki is really a neat sounding word! The Latin equivalent Sargassum fusiforme is not so much fun. Both names refer to a brown sea vegetable harvested on the coasts of Japan, Korea, and China. By the time I purchase it in its dried form, it resembles small, black twigs. Even after rehydration, it doesn’t look particularly appetizing. more »
fondant au noix de coco
coconut candy
I drove back and forth across the country four times between August of 1967 and May of 1969. It was actually between Menlo Park, California, and Rochester, New York, a distance of 2,750 miles. The first trip took four days. The last trip took just under two days. Except for traveling through Pennsylvania and New York, the entire trip each time was made on Interstate 80. more »
tapenade de fèves de cacao
cocoa-bean tapenade
It was our annual walkabout. We do it on the first nice Sunday of each year. Although we live just a couple of blocks from our small downtown, when we go there we drive to the store or restaurant and don’t really see the area from ground level. The walkabout is different. more »
farce de dinde
turkey stuffing
I was thunderstruck. It just wasn’t fair. What would I do now? I had come to this market to purchase two loaves of traditional San Francisco-style sourdough bread. These are long loaves made by old-time bakeries. These are not artisan breads by the modern definition, but they are nonetheless very good. more »
cannelé
baked custard cake
A controlled burn sounds like something relating do the management of forests rather than cooking. Usually it does. If we think about it, there may be no flames, but the surface of food goes through a controlled burn in many different preparations. The process of searing is a means of controlled burning the food surface. more »
salade de poulet
chicken salad
Chinese cooking was always straight-forward for me. Prep a pile of ingredients. Modify them in one of forty or so ways, sometimes once, sometimes twice. Finish with a seemingly endless, and at the same time limited, array of sauces. Serve hot, or warm, or cold. The rules I followed were quite simple. more »
poulpe frit
fried octopus
Like the names of many Japanese dishes, takoyaki (たこ焼き) is easy to dissect. Tako (たこ) is the term for octopus and yaki (焼き) means grilled. Takoyaki is a street food made from minced octopus scraps, pickled ginger, minced green onions, and a variety of other items depending on the cook. The solids are mixed with a batter and cooked in a special griddle so the final shape is that of a sphere. more »
liqueur de lait
milk liquor
I wonder if she were alive today whether Mom would agree with those modern folk who long for old-fashioned milk sold un-homogenized in glass bottles and delivered to one’s door. We had such a service prior to when my family moved from Redwood City to Menlo Park in 1957. Milk delivery had been a twice weekly event in the old house, but when we moved, Mom started buying milk in cartons at the grocery store. more »
« manju »
filled pastry
When is manju not manju? Manju is a popular dessert in Hawaii, but I’d guess that most Japanese would not recognize it as manju in Japan, its country of origin. It is even different than the manju I can buy here in California. Hawaiian manju is similar to Japanese manju, but still significantly different. more »
poivrons farcis
stuffed peppers
By the time I led the group of tourists up the dark staircase to the second floor above the only hardware store in Chinatown, I knew that I would be dealing with the usual mixture of personalities. There would be the woman that complained about the “dirty” surroundings. There would be the man that had to have a Diet Coke immediately after sitting down. more »
pudding à la banane
banana pudding
Me: “Here’s a new mignardise to try.” Wife: “Looks like poi.” Me: “Doesn’t taste like poi.” Wife: “What is it?” Me: “Just try it.” Wife: “Should I use my fingers?” Me: “Maybe it’s poi!” When I looked at the little dish with the gray, sticky stuff in it, I thought, “Gee, it does look like poi. more »
rillettes de deux porcs
potted meat from two pork cuts
Some dishes have names that inspire whimsy or simply start my gastric juices flowing. Potted meat is not one of those dishes. That’s why I’ve always had an issue with rillettes, the French dish that is usually translated into English as potted meat. Rillettes sound delicious and exciting, potted meat sounds like something akin to pet food. more »
saucisse et poivron
sausage and pepper
I had to eat something for dinner other than French food. After traveling around southern France for a couple of weeks I needed a change. I needed something with hot spices. I needed a different flavor palette for one meal. It’s not that I don’t like French food. I do. Very much. more »
pain de banane
banana bread
For most of my primary school days, Mom packed me a lunch. The contents were usually a sandwich and a piece of fruit. When I entered high school and individual bags of chips became available, one would be added. The sandwiches were fine, and the chips were always a welcome addition. more »
tartare de coquille Saint-Jacques marinés
scallop tartar
Seigi Uncle was an irascible old coot I knew as a fanatical lover of beer, especially Bud Light. He spent most of his life on Maui and didn’t trust people from the mainland. He also didn’t trust whites. He most certainly didn’t trust white mainlanders like me that didn’t have an appreciation for Bud Light. more »
crevette en saumure
pickled shrimp
I’d hold them up and say, “What’s the difference between these two bottles?” In response I’d get answers that varied from blank stares to genuine attempts to discern a difference other than what the titles on the bottles declared. This was an audience that generally thought of soy sauce as the little bottle with the red plastic top that was omnipresent on the tables of cheap Chinese restaurants. more »
mochi de framboises
stiff-and-sticky raspberry pudding
I like the flavor of raspberries, but generally, I don’t like raspberries. I hate the seeds. I hate when raspberries are sour rather than sweet. I hate how expensive raspberries are. I hate how fast raspberries go bad. I hate dishes made from whole raspberries. I hate when recipes call for raspberries. more »
cube de bœuf cru
raw beef cubes
Recipe names have been a problem for me since the days that I started cooking from cookbooks. So although the problem isn’t new, it has become exasperated by current cooking trends where a modern dish is named after the dish that inspired the new version, but the link is tenuous. I’m guilty of the practice as much as anyone. more »
magret de canard mariné
pickled duck breast
Universal education is the cornerstone of democracy. And the recognition of this fact may be called the great American contribution. But in our society the fullest self-realization depends upon a well balanced knowledge of scientific facts, upon a rounded culture. Thus education, properly conceived, is a preparation for intelligent, ethical, and contented citizenship. more »
petite crêpe de hollandais
Dutch baby
My mother was out of her mind. She never acted this way before. It was so unlike her. I was just turning twelve when it happened, and I didn’t understand the significance of the event. Today, everything is much clearer. I think I now know why she did what she did. more »
quenelles de foie
liver dumplings
Berta Guggenheimer was born in Munich on March 4, 1887. In 1904, at the age of 17, she was sent to Vienna for a year to learn how to be a “proper young women.” While there, she recorded what she learned in a series of bound notebooks. Some entries were just private thoughts and a few were pen and ink drawings. more »
animelle d’agneau frîte
fried lamb testicle
“Do you want the testicles, too?” the rancher asked me. Without thinking I replied, “Sure.” Two hand-sized lumps of glandular tissue were added to the black-plastic garbage bag that already held the heart, liver, and kidneys from a lamb that my students would soon name Ludwig. I’d wanted to cook testicles since in 2005. more »
gaufre de Belgique
Belgium waffle
It’s the worst earworm I’ve ever had. Now, a half a century after I first heard the song, it can still haunt me for hours. From what I’ve read, I’m not alone. Songfacts suggests that It’s a Small World is the greatest earworm of all time. Just to write about it now, I have to blare loud melodies through my headphones so I don’t start humming that wretched tune. more »
cornet de bœuf fumé
smoked-beef cornets
A few⁄some⁄many⁄most people of a certain age—mine—can look back at who influenced their early cooking experiences and point to James Beard. He was certainly a part of my cooking in the early 1970s. Long before I was aware that Julia Child was more than the weird lady on my scratchy black and white television—I bought my first color television in 1974 with money from the CIA—I had a small trade paperback book by James Beard called Hors d’Oeuvres and Canapés. more »
omelette japonaise
Japanese omelet
I was mesmerized. I must have watched the woman simultaneously handle eight makiyakinabes for at least an hour. Gazing through an opening in the shutters, I was glued to my spot outside her shop. It was on one of Kyoto’s well-traveled food alleys. I didn’t know if she was aware of me. more »
velouté de pistaches
pistachio soup
“Use the force, Luke. Let go, Luke.” And so the disembodied Obi-Wan Kenobi telepathically instructs Luke Skywalker just before Luke destroys the death star in the concluding moments of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (which I’ll always know as the original Star Wars movie). I often tell cooking students to use the force. more »
poivrons cerises farcis
stuffed cherry peppers
I feel genuinely lucky that my mother only served stuffed bell peppers once or twice when I was growing up. To this day, the thought of her over-baked green-bell peppers stuffed with a dry-tasting and not very flavorful mixture of converted rice, ground beef, and tomato sauce makes my skin crawl. more »
écrevisses rapide
quick crayfish
Do crayfish feel pain? I don’t know. They have a nervous system that controls both voluntary and involuntary movements, but do they feel pain? I couldn’t find an online source that discussed crayfish pain. I have no answer. Why is it important to me? I don’t know, but I began to wonder about it in 1997. more »
« cheesecakes » deux façons
cheesecake two ways
Knees shaking, arms stiffly at my side, I started: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent…” I was in front of my eighth-grade class. It was my turn to recite the entire “Gettysburg Address.” Everyone had to do it. There were no exceptions. About once a month, our teacher, Dr. more »
betteraves demi-secs
half-dried beets
Somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind is a memory of eating strained beets at a very, very young age. Why strained beets? Why not pureed beets? Why beets? Maybe they were called strained beets because in the old days, one of the methods used to puree foods was to force them through a strainer or a sieve. more »
tartare de thon
tuna tartare
I get really pissed off at times when I’m out for dinner. There are a number of things that can foul my temperament such as poor service or unpleasant fellow diners. The thing that bothers me the most is when a dish misses the point so badly that it still vexes me the following day. more »
beignets d’Okinawa
Okinawan donuts
Auntie Miyoko’s andagi are the best, or so my wife claims. I haven’t had Auntie Miyoko’s andagi for almost 30 years. I guess I’m more partial to Mrs. Tomashiro’s, but since she died a number of years ago, there’ll be no andagi shootout. Andagi are balls of fried dough, similar to a plain cake donut, that originated in Okinawa. more »
olives farcies à l’envers
inside-out stuffed olives
It was on another summer trip to the Trinity Alps that I learned about olive groves and Jaguars. Starting in 1953, once a summer my father would pile the family into his Chevrolet, except for 1957 when for some reason he switched to a Buick Special. We would head north from the San Francisco Bay Area. more »
langue d’agneau en saumure
pickled lamb’s tongue
Every time my mother-in-law walked by my cutting board that winter, the first words out of her mouth were, “Is that tongue?” This wasn’t a polite question. She would spit out the question with a wrinkled nose and as much disgust as she could muster. Any foodstuff that she didn’t recognize, and even a few that she did, would provoke the question. more »
gelée d’huile d’olive
olive oil gelatins
The professor flashed an equation on the screen. The audience erupted into applause. Not wild applause, but applause nonetheless. It happened every week. Sometimes the audience would applaud spontaneously, and sometimes they required a little prompting. The occasion on November 26th, 2012, was part of the Science and Cooking Public Lecture Series that was just completing its third year at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. more »
« lollipops » de fromage blanc
cheese lollipops
What do you give a chocoholic for Christmas? In 1981, I selected a chocolate Easter bunny for the occasion. It worked. Three years later we were married. But I’m getting ahead of the story. Earlier in the year, I start jogging three times week with a group at the local YMCA. more »
rouleaux de bœuf avec la sauce fumé
beef rolls with smoked dipping sauce
It was in the early 1960s when my mother “discovered” the concept of marinating meat. For our family, cooking steaks meant getting the broiling pan dirty and smoking up the kitchen. The result usually required a bit of exercise to chew. My mother knew little about cooking and although she often achieved her cooking goal of medium to medium rare, the concept of resting a steak was something she had never heard of. more »
fondant au caramel
penuche
What if we called it a different, not so polite, expletive that starts with an “F”? Do you think people would love it as much? Fudge sounds like a curse imposed by a censor. It doesn’t sound like what an honest person would say when they make a mistake. The first batch of fudge is believed to have been a mistake that happened somewhere in the Northeastern United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. more »
« pastrami » sur pain de seigle
pastrami on rye
My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R. My bologna has a second name, it’s M-A-Y-E-R. I love to eat it every day, and if you ask me why I’ll say, ‘Cause Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A! Twenty years before that commercial hit the airwaves, my mother was sending me off to school with bologna sandwiches. more »
pourpre de patate douce
purple sweet potato
Why would an otherwise normal 36-year-old woman rush out of her hotel room late at night in her nightgown to buy a sweet potato? Here’s what happened. On November 8th, 1985, my wife and I checked into the Kyoto Central Inn for a three-night stay. This was day fifteen of an eighteen-day trip to Japan. more »
les petits gâteaux de nombreuses saveurs
little cakes of many flavors
Cupcakes are the libertarians of the food world. Even if they look the same as the others in the box, each is an individual meant to be the snack of only one person. Cupcakes aren’t team players. Neither are the people who consume them. No one shares a cupcake, especially children. more »
œufs de hareng sur toast
herring roe on toast
Great swirling schools of herring converged in San Francisco Bay this month, drawing fishermen, sea lions, harbor seals, and thousands upon thousands of birds looking to fatten up for the winter. The menagerie of wildlife is a sign that the bay’s once spectacular herring runs, which collapsed four years ago, are returning to their former glory. more »
fromage frit
fried cheese
My love of cheese started during the third week of October, 1999. I was at the Michelin one-star restaurant Hostellerie de Vieux Moulin in Bouilland, France. Before the dessert was served, the cheese trolley, or chariot à fromages, was wheeled to the table. This was no simple cart with a small platter of cheese. more »
sorbet à la mangue
mango sorbet
I hate kitchen gadgets. I like kitchen tools. What’s the difference? Tools are useful and gadgets aren’t. This is my opinion. Most sensible people disagree. Most dictionaries define gadget in a neutral to positive sense. “A small mechanical device or tool, esp. an ingenious or novel one.” I prefer the less than positive, tertiary definition from the Oxford English Dictionary of “an accessory or adjunct; a knick-knack or gewgaw. more »
carottes confit au cumin
carrot salad
The chef motioned me over to the largest plat à sauter I had ever seen. It was made of aluminum and appeared to be about a meter (3 ft) in diameter and 15 cm (6 in) high. It had two handles, but I wondered if it could be moved when it was full of fat, as it was now. more »
gâteau de Savoie au parmesan
parmesan sponge cake
Being that my father couldn’t butter bread, it was surprising that he was excited about going to a new restaurant where the main selling point was that it cooked your meal right in front of you with an Amana radar range. The evening was sometime in the early 1960s and took place at a new, Mexican-style restaurant located about 8 km (5 miles) north of our home. more »
crêpes japonaises
pancake sandwiches
My first trip to Japan lasted less than 24 hours. That’s not much time to see a whole country, let alone a city or two. I saw only one street. In the late spring of 1980, I was on my way to China. My itinerary had me arriving late in the evening at the New Tokyo International Airport—now officially renamed Narita International Airport—and leaving mid-afternoon the following day. more »
oignon rôti
roast onion
The smell was the first thing to alert me: vaguely biological, somewhat antiseptic, but mostly just obnoxious. At first, the source was simply a bundle of heavy-duty plastic which, being dirty and having been folded and unfolded many times, looked cracked and semi-opaque. The guy had pulled it from his trunk where it was buried under a pile of dirty clothes and miscellaneous car paraphernalia. more »
salade tricolore
tri-colored salad
So here I sit with a perfectly ripe Hass avocado and a perfectly ripe fuyu persimmon. As much as I appreciate the flavor of each separately, it seems like they would go super good together. But the pale green of the avocado next to the warm orange of the persimmon is not appetizing. more »
diamants de cristal
crystal diamonds
I could live very nicely if I never again heard some chef or cooking teacher repeat “cooking is an art, baking is a science.” They commonly follow-up the statement with how cooking uses recipes and baking uses formulas, as if the name given to the preparation prescription separates science from art. more »
miso-cuit steak
miso-seared steak
I love food hype, and I’m fascinated by the idiots that believe it. I once heard one type of food hype called the Detroit effect. Take any food item and add a city’s name to the beginning, and it will sound like a better product. That is, except if the city’s name is Detroit. more »
« lollipops » de lard
bacon lollipops
This bacon thing has gotten out of hand. Don’t get me wrong. I love good bacon. It’s just that it seems to be showing up in places other than sitting next to my eggs or resting between some crispy lettuce and ripe tomato. Whether in ice cream, a cocktail, muffins, or a s’more, it seems that bacon, or at least its flavor, is showing up just about anywhere and everywhere. more »
mousse à la menthe
mint mousse
My first choice for a title was mousse de magie (magic mousse). Why so? Because I’ve discovered a recipe that can make a mousse out of any ingredient that can be made into a syrup. Here’s what brought this about. For the past couple of years, I’ve been faithfully watching the public lectures from the Harvard University Science and Cooking Series. more »
poulet et le jaune d’œuf
chicken and egg yolk
In my fifty years of cooking I have mastered many techniques. Topping eggs is not one of them. When I walked into La Folie in San Francisco to stage for a couple of weeks, topping eggs was the first task given me. I never got good at it. I noticed that other workers didn’t seem to do any better. more »
spaghetti au pesto
spaghetti with pesto
Most recipes don’t work! At least, that’s been my experience with recipes from the “molecular gastronomy” genre. Even in their most prescriptive form, recipes are only an approximation of the true cooking process. It is the cook’s good fortune that most preparations have a generous portion of leeway. One cup of flour is never ever exact, and an approximation is usually good enough. more »
caramel à la fleur de sel
salted caramel
Sometimes you just have to. You have no choice. You couldn’t change your mind if you wanted to. You’re stuck. I know I was. Or at least my spatula was. It was stuck to the bottom of the saucepan I had just used for making caramel candies. But I had no choice. more »
cannelés salés au saucisse et fromage
popovers with sausage and cheese
Cannelés can be a mystery. Although there is evidence of their popularity in the southwestern France in the nineteenth century, they seemed to have died out until being revived in the last third of the twentieth century. Now they are easy found in most pâtisseries, and even a few souls attempt them at home. more »
cœur d’agneau
lamb heart
When I first saw him—I would later learn that his name was Larry—he was hanging from a tree by his Achilles tendons. His body was still quite warm. He had only been dead for about an hour. His carcass had been stripped of its viscera, and the main organs lay a few yards away in a metal bucket. more »
petits tartes au ganache
ganache-filled tarts
Ganache is a perfect food both in taste and texture. Made with good chocolate and good cream, it can be appreciated without any other flavors or combined with other ingredients for a different sensation. It can cover the top of a cake or reside hidden in a robe of tempered chocolate and still work its magic. more »
truite fumée
smoked trout
I caught my first fish, an 8-inch long trout, on the South Fork of the Trinity River in Northern California in the summer of 1953. I used a nylon drop line with a salmon egg impaled on my hook. I was five years old. It was my first time fishing. It was my last time fishing. more »
gésier de canard confit
preserved duck gizzard
In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side-dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living. more »
pudding de maïs
corn pudding
Alternate introductory paragraph one: I couldn’t eat corn without those things. They were plastic with two spikes on one end that, when inserted into a corn cob, made it possible for my chubby little hands to hold the hot, buttered cob. The plastic parts were yellow and molded to resemble a corn cob, albeit one that was quite flat. more »
raviolis disparition
disappearing ravioli
As a participant in the 2012 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking, I often found myself at odds with my fellow symposiasts as to what constituted wrapped and stuffed foods, the subject of that year’s event. I held to a narrow definition that interpreted the term only as a verb, whereas others seemed to bend the definition wildly to suit their own needs. more »
gâteau de viande farcies
stuffed meatloaf
The inmate was instructed to combine five pounds of ground turkey with chopped onions, dry breadcrumbs, eggs, and a variety of dried seasonings. The mass was shaped into a loaf form on a baking sheet. It was baked at about 350 °F (177 °C) until the internal temperature, when measured with an un-calibrated thermometer, exceeded 160 °F (71 °C). more »
petite crème au chocolat blanc
white-chocolate custard
Out of control! That’s how I’ve often been described. I’ve been told that I need a filter for my mouth. I think about the cardboard sign that I had on my wall when I was in elementary school: “Be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth into gear.” Regrettably, I striped my gears a long time ago. more »
gnocchi aux trois fromages
three-cheese gnocchi
Although I always tell my students that they should read every recipe three times before starting, I’m definitely guilty of not following my own advice. Case in point, on page 274 of the fifth volume of Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine is a recipe entitled “Crispy Goat’s Milk Ricotta Dumpling.” The recipe is listed as having been adapted from one by Wylie Dufrense of the restaurant wd~50, in New York City. more »
roue de saumon
salmon wheel
Given all the fish in the ocean, it hard to believe that there is such a small variety available at most markets. Even with the limited selection we face today, it’s nothing like it was when I was growing up in the 1950s. I don’t know if the absolute number of fish species available was less back then, but I know that not many of them made it to our family’s dinner table. more »
meringues
meringues
Beat some egg whites together with some sugar. Form into shapes and dry them in a warm oven. What could be simpler? Maybe that’s why meringues have been around for a long time. It may be that the earliest recipe for a meringue, at least in the form of a cookie, can be found in the notes of Lady Elinor Fettiplace. more »
soupe aux brocolis
broccoli soup
I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli. When George H. W. Bush made his now-famous pronouncement at a news conference on March 22nd, 1990, broccoli farmers were up in arms, but I think there were lots a folks quietly agreeing with him. more »
sushi de bœuf
beef sushi
I don’t like teaching sushi classes. It’s not that I can’t, I just don’t like to teach them. Students come with the expectation of being able to quickly duplicate the efforts of their local sushi provider. If their provider is their nearby supermarket, they can often come close, but if they want to produce a result similar to a high-end purveyor, it’s not going to happen. more »
kumquat gazéifiée
carbonated kumquats
It’s been about two years since I bought my ISI Gourmet Whip Plus, or whatever fancy name it had when I bought it. It’s a type of siphon bottle similar to a seltzer bottle. If you frequented soda fountains 50 years ago, it’s the type of container that whipped cream was spritzed out of for banana splits and ice cream sundaes. more »
œuf dans un nid
egg in its nest
This may seem like a skipping record—do people even know what that means any more? This is the fifth time I’m writing about using miso to pickle some food item. The original idea of doing misozuke came from a series of postings in April, 2011, on Playing with Fire and Water. more »
concombre et radis
cucumber and radish
Pickle is a fascinating word. As a verb it means to preserve food in vinegar, brine, or a similar solution. As a noun it can mean the results of the above verb, or the solution the noun was pickled in. As a synonym, the noun can mean plight, predicament, mess, difficulty, trouble, dire⁄desperate straits, problem, quandary, tight corner, tight spot, jam, fix, scrape, bind, hole, hot water, or even a fine kettle of fish. more »
crème brûlée
burnt cream
In front of my cooking classes, I’ve often said that “Life is a custard!” It’s sort of a stupid thing to say, but it gets everyone’s attention. What I mean is that there are so many things that we prepare where we use egg protein to solidify some liquid, either partially or completely, and thus make a custard. more »
œuf diable
deviled eggs
Get a street map of the San Francisco Peninsula. In Palo Alto, find the intersection of University Avenue and Alma Street. Using that as the center, draw a circle with a five-mile radius. Or even better, draw an ellipse with a major radius of five miles and a minor radius of one. more »
travers douce
sweet baby back ribs
In the fall of 1974 and the following spring, I had a peculiar ailment. For a six-week period each season, I has “sick” every Wednesday from 9:30 in the morning until 12:30 in the afternoon. I told my employer that I had a doctor’s appointment. That was partly true. I had an appointment but not with a doctor. more »
cubes des raisins sec et amandes
almond-raisin cubes
Every time I see that red box I get a visceral feeling of hate and loathing. The smaller the box is, the stronger my feelings. I can’t help it. I hate those little red boxes of raisins. It’s not the design of the box, its color, or the image of the ever-cheerful maiden in a fanciful outfit. more »
cocktail aux crevettes rose
shrimp cocktail
During the 1950s, it seemed that every Sunday afternoon my parents would hustle my brother and myself into the family Chevrolet—in 1957 there was a Buick for a year—and make the drive from our home in Redwood City to my father’s parent’s place in San Francisco. US101 was a two- and four-lane road with stop signs and signals in those days, not the multilane freeway it is today. more »
croustillant de pomme de terre
caviar and fromage blanc on a potato chip
They were really too cute to pass up. There in front of me was a small box of fingerling potatoes from Fat Cabbage Farm that were small, even by fingerling standards. I didn’t have any idea what I would do with them, but I bought a handful anyway. They were just so cute. more »
kumquat farcies au fromage blanc
sweet-cheese-stuffed kumquat shells
We’d get up before dawn in order to beat the heat along U.S. Route 99, the old road that ran up the center of California’s Central Valley. For most of the almost 300 miles between Manteca and Mojave, a journey that today still takes almost five hours, we’d fly along at about 60 miles an hour with all the windows rolled down in either a big Chevrolet or Buick, depending upon which brand my father had purchased that year. more »
macaroni et fromage
macaroni and cheese
When I was growing up, few of our family dinners were memorable, at least for the food. My mother was an okay cook, and for the most part she cooked fresh food each day. There wasn’t the plethora of processed, convenience foods available to today’s homemaker. In the fifties and early sixties, TV dinners and frozen vegetables made up the bulk of convenience food on our table. more »
omelette Denver
Denver omelet
Cafés and coffee shops went through a culinary revolution late in the 1960s and into the 1970s. When you ordered breakfast, the selection of bread changed from white, wheat, or rye sandwich bread to house-made muffins, country-style breads, and bagels. Hash browns learned to share a new list of choices with home fries and various roast potatoes. more »
sablée de noix de coco
coconut shortbread cookies
My mother was known for her cookies. By today’s standards they weren’t fancy, but they were always tasty. Whereas as cookies available from the supermarket were either hard as rock and capable of withstanding a nuclear attack or mass-marketed standards such as Fig Newtons, Oreos, Nilla Wafers, and Animal Crackers, my mother’s cookies were soft, crumbly, and handcrafted. more »
champignons mijotés avec de la sauce d’huître
mushrooms in oyster sauce
The only reason that I used to shop at Costco, and its predecessor Price Club, was that my wife had free membership through her work. When she left that job in the 1994, we evaluated the cost of a membership against our modest needs as empty nesters and decided that it wasn’t for us. more »
endive au « miso »
miso-cured endive
Endive—often referred to as Belgian endive to differentiate it from other vegetables called endive—is really a nothing vegetable! It has name problems: both as to what is the proper name and how to properly pronounce it. It doesn’t occur in nature and cannot be sold as a natural product. It is neither widely produced nor widely available. more »
pâte de fruit à la fraise
strawberry gumdrops
I have childhood memories of eating gumdrops, but I don’t remember what they tasted like. They were orange. They were cylindrical with a hemispherical top. They were encrusted with sugar crystals. I didn’t have them very often. Why do I try to remember those gumdrops now? Because sometime in the last decade, my interest was awakened. more »
une petite pomme de terre
a small potato
As he briskly walked by, the guy in slick, dark suit motioned for me to follow him. I’d never seen him in the kitchen before, but that wasn’t unusual. I had only been working there a few weekends, and each shift I saw new guys dressed in a similar manner. He entered via the swinging doors that the busboys brought the trays of dirty dishes through to my station in the dish pit. more »
« lollipops » de banane plantain
plantain lollipops
What the hell are plantains? I know what bananas are—at least the ones my mother used to put in my bag lunch for school. I’ve had banana splits, banana milkshakes, chocolate-covered bananas, banana chips, finger bananas, and food cooked in a banana leaf. Bananas is one of my favorite Woody Allan movies. more »
segment de l’orange sanguine
blood-orange segment
If enzymatic peeling sounds like something performed by a licensed esthetician on your face, you’d be correct. If it sounds like something you could do yourself to citrus fruit, you’d also be correct. In both cases, exfoliation is the happening thing. I was first exposed to enzymatic peeling at the French Culinary Institute in January of 2011. more »
copeaux de poulet
chicken sandwich
Your Honor, I rise to speak on behalf of the much-maligned boneless, skinless chicken breast. For years, people have described it as tasteless cardboard or as the Wonder Bread of protein. I would like to suggest that the problem lies not with this fine piece of galline substance, but with those to deign to denature its proteins and then ascribe their short comings to the basic nature the core material. more »
chips de chou frisée
kale chips
My name is Peter and I steal recipes. There. I’ve said it. I’ve admitted it. I’m now on the road to recovery. Of course we all do it. Some recipes are given to us. Others we copy out of magazines or from the Internet. Some we see on television or in a book. more »
financier aux noix de pécans et chocolat
chocolate-pecan bars
Once each winter, usually around Thanksgiving, my mother would make a kastanientorte, and each year, the whole family would look forward to it. A kastanientorte, at least my mother’s century-old version she learned from her mother, is a cake made from just chestnuts, eggs, sugar, and a touch of vanilla extract. more »
carré de bœuf
beef short rib square
When I staged at La Folie, a Michelin one-star restaurant in San Francisco, one of my daily tasks at the end of service was to fill two 4-inch deep hotel pans with ice. I transferred any prepared sauces that remained on the line into either a one-pint or one-quart plastic deli container, and set the containers in the ice. more »
beignets de maïs
corn fritters
These days, izakaya restaurants are all the rage in Northern California. In Japan, these are drinking establishments that also serve food, generally small plates and often within a single theme, such as yakitori. In California, the food seems to be more important than the drink, which is not always the case in Japan. more »
une truffe d’arachide
a peanut truffle
I am a bit of a hypocrite. I decry people who produce foods items under names that, to me, don’t look anything like what I think the item should look like. Case in point: truffles. There are many commercial candy makers that sell filled-chocolate candies as truffles because, I assume, they think these will sell better than if they called them something else. more »
aubergine braiseée
braised eggplant
When I was young, my family vacation always seemed to involve a road trip. From our home on the San Francisco Peninsula, if we headed to anywhere in the west, we hopped in the car and drove. To Los Angeles, we drove. To Tahoe, we drove. To Crater Lake, we drove. more »
aile de poulet de Buffalo
Buffalo wings
Food trivia is fun. I love the surprises it holds. In the 1970s, German chocolate cake was popular amongst my circle of friends. Everyone thought that it originated in Germany, but the recipe apparently originated in Texas in the 1950s. The original name was German’s Sweet Chocolate cake because it was made with Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate, a brand name for a particular baking chocolate that is now produced by Kraft Foods. more »
suprêmes de satsuma
satsuma segments
All my life I’ve been a collector. I’ve collected menus. I’ve collected matchbooks. I’ve collected English-language Chinese cookbooks. I was once accused of collecting dust. One of my current collections consists of pithy little phrases related to food. One phrase in my thoughts more than the rest is, “Good ingredients, barely touched. more »
salade de coquille Saint-Jacques et d’oignons
scallop and onion salad
Coquilles Saint-Jacques was a French mystery food when I was young. You would hear actors in movies order it in French restaurants. And I can still hear Julia Child pronouncing the words with her high-pitched French accent and the two silent s’s. I do not recall ever seeing the full-sized version on any menu at the fine San Francisco restaurants in the 1950s. more »
pementos de Padrón
padron peppers
Thursday night, June 23rd, 2011—my wife and I land at Aeroport del Prat and head for our hotel in Barcelona. For four nights, we’ll be based near the eastern corner of the Barri Gòtic, where Barcelona originated and where today tourists throng. This is our first trip to Spain, and we’ve come to see the highlights and eat. more »
chocolat noir et blanc
black and white chocolates
With a myriad of shell-molded chocolates available from multiple sources in most towns—they certainly are popular—why go to the bother of making your own for a mignardise plate? For the challenge? To increase your personal skill set? Quality control? Flavor? Personalization? Customization? To kill an hour or two? To snack on the rejects? Satisfaction? Kudos? Illegal fillings? Unusual flavor combinations? Bragging rights? For me, the best answer is probably “satisfaction. more »
roulé de porc séché
dried pork rolls
It all started with bresaola. I had arrived in the old Swiss village of Gruyères to stage with my friend Frédéric Médigue. He was in his new position as chef⁄manager of the Hostellerie Saint-Georges. I think the year was 2003, but it may have been a year later. The set-up here was much different than his previous position where he was the chef⁄owner of a small hotel and Michelin one-star restaurant in the village of Amondans in Eastern France. more »
mousse de foie d’agneau « Ritz »
lamb liver mousse on a “Ritz” cracker
“Everything tastes better on a Ritz,” or so the advertising slogan goes. When I was growing up, that certainly was the case in my home. There were only two types of crackers found in our kitchen pantry, Ritz and Triscuits. In those days, there wasn’t the various flavors and sizes of Ritz Crackers available today, or if there was, not in my mother’s kitchen. more »
flan coco
coconut custard
As a cooking teacher, I’m given at times to spouting aphorisms. One that I’ve said on multiple occasions is, “The whole world is a custard.” Think about it. It’s true. There are oodles of dishes in many of the world’s culinary traditions that involve solidifying some liquid with eggs, or parts of eggs. more »
pâtes de Parmesan
cheese noodles
Did you know that there is an International Culinary Tourism Association? Until a few years ago, I didn’t even know I was a culinary tourist, let alone there was an association for the likes of me. I think without realizing it, I’ve been a culinary tourist most of my life. I’ve never passed up an opportunity to visit a food processing facility—it was about fifty years ago that I visited my first cheese factory in Tillamook, Oregon. more »
tomate verte frite
fried, green tomato
Starting in the early summer of 2011, my visits to jail became regular. Prior to then, I was occasionally called upon to teach the inmates some knife skills, but a new grant arrived that provided enough funds so that each week there could be one class for the men and one for the women. more »
petite poire avec écume de vin douce
poached pear with sweet-wine foam
I starting cooking when I was eleven, but I didn’t know how to cook until I was past fifty. Those thirty years in between were spent faithfully following recipes. If I changed the original recipe, I carefully made notes so I could repeat my changes each time. Cooking always started with selecting a recipe before buying the ingredients. more »
ravioli de porc
pulled-pork ravioli
Mom emigrated from Germany at the age of 17. Dad was born in San Francisco to German immigrants who had met and married in San Francisco. Both my parents were Jewish, but their diet was totally secular except during Passover when matzos replaced bread on our table. There was no attempt by my mother to keep a Kosher kitchen, and except for the first night of Passover, one night was no different from the next. more »
huître au « miso »
miso-cured oyster
My history with oysters is rather brief. By the time I was 35, in the mid-1980s, I had had just a few encounters. All with cooked oysters. All in the South. My first encounter was Oysters Bienville and Oysters Rockefeller at the lobby bar of the Hotel Saint Louis in New Orleans. My boss, the host of the evening although the bill probably wound up on my expense account so he could sign off on it without oversight from above, did the ordering. more »
tarte chocolat-noix de pécan
chocolate-pecan tart
Sometimes a new dish lays at the end of a single line of thought and other times it’s at the intersection of many. In the case of tarte chocolat-noix de pécan, the lines of thought converged without quite crossing. One of the standard items on the mignardises plate at La Folie in San Francisco is a sort of soft, crunchy, chocolate-toffee base with an equally thick layer of ganache on the top. more »
choucroute d’oignons
fermented onions
I wonder what went through the heads of a mid-18th-century, Bavarian nobleman’s children when they recited their catechism and came to the parts about sauerkraut, or what went through the minds of British sailors later in the century when they were told that they would eat sauerkraut to help combat scurvy. more »
salade des échalotes et fraises
shallot-strawberry salad
Other than maybe when I was a teenager and eagerly followed the misadventures of Little Annie Fanny, I’ve never been a fan of comic books or graphic novels. Likewise, I’ve never liked Australian aboriginal art or certain works by Jackson Pollack. What’s my problem? I like white space. White space is sometimes referred to as negative space, a term I don’t like because it sounds so … negative. more »
biscuits d’anis
anise cookies
As a cooking teacher “for hire,” I now find myself often teaching someone else’s recipes or curriculum rather than my own. When I started at the cookware store years ago, the classes I taught were based on my recipes. In these classes I could choose recipes that allowed me to sneak in lots of technique. more »
le gibson
the Gibson
My cocktail of choice is the Gibson. It is a libation often described as a martini with an onion instead of an olive. The International Bartenders Association official recipe has it also drier than a martini and shaken rather than stirred. I like mine even drier, only a drop or two of vermouth, or maybe none. more »
moules au sauce thaïlandaise
mussels in a Thai-inspired sauce
Fifty years ago, the tide pools at Moss beach were unregulated. Anybody could visit them and treat them however they wished. We would go as a family. My older brother would bounce between the rocks, stepping on all sorts of marine life. My father would wander elsewhere on his own. My mother, always at her paranoid best, would keep me close to shore where only the shallowest of tide pools were located. more »
gelée de « lemon drop »
lemon drop jelly shot
There’s a short exchange in the 1951 movie The Lemon-Drop Kid between the notorious gangster Moose Moran, played by Fred Clark, and the swindler Sidney Melbourne, played by Bob Hope. Moran: Now that you’re feelin’ better, let’s talk about the ten grand you owe me. Melbourne: Oh, look Moose, all I’ve got is fifteen cents and a box of lemon drops…have one? more »
artichaut et mayonnaise
artichoke and mayonnaise
Artichokes are really an adult food. Their intense, earthy flavor is not something we pop out of the womb craving. The flavor is so strong it can effect everything else being eaten at the same time. And eating them can take a bit of patience when presented with the whole, immature flower. more »
salade de magret séché
dried duck-breast salad
In 1994, my wife and I made our first trip to Paris. It lasted seven nights, and one or both of us have returned, if only for a couple of days, every year since. On that first trip we were tourists attempting to hit all the main sites in a single trip. more »
sphères d’amandes
almond-date balls
My father used to describe himself as a pen and pencil salesman. This being the 1950s, it would have been easy for people to imagine him destitute on some sidewalk with a tin cup full of pencils, except for the fact that he wore a well-pressed business suit, lived in a nice house in the suburbs, and always drove a late-model Chevrolet or Buick. more »
lait de fenouil et gingembre
fennel-ginger soup
“Is it soup, yet?” is a famous line from a now almost forgotten soup commercial of the 1970s where a child comes into the kitchen, obviously coming from a chilly outside, and asks the afore stated question. The commercial implied that Lipton’s dehydrated soups were better than Campbell’s condensed soups because they took a bit longer to prepare. more »
cube de blanc de volaille
chicken cubes
Once or twice a year, I’ll teach the same class I’ve taught for years at the same local cooking store. Sometimes the class is called “Advanced Knife Skills,” sometimes “Basic Butchering,” and once it was called “You Be the Butcher.” No matter what the store calls the class, the curriculum has been the same. more »
raisins avec sauce au vin Marsala
grapes warmed in Marsala wine
Grapes are a like⁄dislike food for me. Not love⁄hate, just like⁄dislike. As a child in the 1950s, I ate grapes as Thompson Seedless table grapes (like), Sun-Maid Raisins (dislike), and Welch’s Concord Grape Juice (strongly dislike). Nowadays, I have extended my fresh grape eating to the red flame variety in preference to the Thompson Seedless variety. more »
spaghettis de courgette
zucchini salad
My mother never met a zucchini she couldn’t turn into mush. My brother and I still talk about her tomato-zucchini casserole, and not fondly, even though neither of us have lived at home for more than 45 years. There were certain vegetables that she just couldn’t cook, at least not more than necessary. more »
fumet de gambas au curry
curried-flavored shrimp broth
As a society we tend to remember where we were when major events happen that effect all of us. We know where we were when the World Trade Center came down, or if old enough, when JFK, RFK, or MLK were shot. Parents remember when their children took their first step or said their first word. more »
pyramides de breton
pyramid-shaped cookies
In the early autumn of 2000, my wife and I took a little trip, driving through the Loire Valley, Brittany, and Normandy. I had planned the trip so we would stay in hotels in cities located about 2 hours apart. We would spend a few days at each one while we saw the local sights. more »
filet mignon de canard
duck tenderloin
Every domestic bird has two. Without one for each wing, the wing wouldn’t work. When we open a package of chicken breasts, these maybe included, or maybe not. What is it? The m. pectoralis profundus, or as sometimes called, the pectoral minor muscle. In a chicken, it is sometimes marketed as a “chicken finger” or a “chicken tenderloin. more »
crème de pois chiches et pétoncle
chickpea puree and a scallop
On almost every trip I have made to France since 1997, I’ve purchased cookbooks and or cooking magazines. My trip in the summer of 2010 was no different. On this trip I bought a whole pile of little, inexpensive books, each with a few dozen recipes. What made this shopping trip unique was that all the books were on the same subject: apéros. more »
sorbet à la tomate
tomato sherbet
The one thing I miss in a modern dentist’s office is the old-fashion spit basin—the one where the water constantly ran around in a circle, washing down the porcelain base, until it vanished into a black hole in the center. I intently stared at the basin for the most of each visit. more »
aile de poulet farcies
stuffed chicken wings
Last summer, when I was videoing the various steps required to cut up a chicken, I wound up using four or five dismembered chickens from the shoot. As each was cut into various portions, I had to decide what to do with the results of my knife work. Unlike professional shoots I’ve worked on, I didn’t want to just toss the chicken pieces onto the trash heap after their “15 seconds of fame. more »
« sandwich » au poitrine de porc
pork belly “sandwich”
I find the current pork belly craze both curious and bewildering. It’s curious because normally fat-adverse people are eating this fatty morsel in fancy restaurants like it’s something exotic and unusual. Bewildering because this portion of the pig that was in the past reserved for the poor is now on the plates of the rich. more »
gingembre confit
crystallized ginger
As a young child, my impressions of San Francisco’s Chinatown were garnered from the back seat of a ’55 Chevrolet while my father would drive up Grant Avenue with out-of-town family in tow. There was also one cold winter night where my uncle took me to the annual Chinese New Year’s Parade. more »
millefeuille de crabe et pomme
crab and dried apple napoleon
Try as I might, I haven’t been able to find the French word for crabapple, which is what I wanted to call this amuse-bouche. There is a the French-Canadian pommetier, but my French friends would say that that’s not really French. Lacking a translation, I have to settle on a more traditional naming convention for this dish of nothing more than layers of dried apple topped with crab salad. more »
tartare d’agneau
lamb tartar
I’ve always liked the flavor of raw meat, and when given a chance to taste some muscle I haven’t had before, I will. When I butcher, I’ll sample bits of meat from different parts of an animal to see how different muscles really do taste differently. At times, the opportunity to taste has come in other ways than standing at a butcher block. more »
ghrieba aux amandes
North African-style butter cookies
During the ten-year period I was traveling a lot to France, I routinely purchased the latest cooking magazines from the kiosk near my hotel in Paris or whatever city I was in, and for years, these magazines have been a major source of recipes for me. (Today, I’m stuck with a four-foot high stack of old magazines in my office. more »
« lollipops » de pieds de porc
pig’s feet “lollipops”
Continuing with last week’s theme, if we can make a lollipop out of a disk of smoked salmon and cheese by inserting a paper stick into it, why not make one from a pig’s foot? I can’t think of a good reason why not. Especially since I was given three feet and a hock leftover from some super heirloom breed of pig that meant nothing to me—they were just feet. more »
« lollipops » de saumon fumé
smoked-salmon “lollipops”
The OED shows usage of the word lollipop back to the 1780s with a definition of something sweet on a stick. Since in modern times the wooden stick has been replaced by a paper one, I think the definition can be expanded to mean any edible item on a stick. I think it’s perfectly fine if we mound some fish and cheese on a paper stick and refer to it as a lollipop. more »
petits pavés au chocolat
brownie bites
I think my mother baked brownies occasionally, but I don’t have any definite memories of it ever happening. As an adult, I remember the brownies sold by a bakery around the corner from my house called Chocolate Tidal Waves. Those were so big, rich, and dense that they took two days to eat. more »
haricots verts au wasabi mayonnaise
green beans with wasabi mayonnaise
Haricots verts is French for green beans, but it also refers to a particular variety of green beans. Sometimes, my local produce vendor sells them as French beans. There’s a similar bean sold at a nearby farmer’s market as the filet variety of green beans. Whatever they are called, there is a world of different between haricots verts and a Blue Lake or a Kentucky Wonder green bean. more »
hareng mariné
pickled herring
One of the memories I have from my many trips to the Netherlands is standing outside on a very cold morning and eating raw herring filets. It was from a vendor that worked out of a small trailer by one of the waterways outside of Amsterdam. I purchased a paper plate with two very fresh filets on it. more »
tartes dattes
date tarts
When I staged at Le Château d’Amondans (Amondans, France) for 5 weeks in 2000, I quickly learned how much work it was to produce 4 pieces of mignardise for each guest each day. On the weekends, there would be wedding banquets for 200 to 250 people and each person had their share. One of the standard items on the mignardise plate in those days was a small tart that measured just 4 cm (1-1⁄2 in) across. more »
dofu d’arachide
peanut tofu
During the 25 years I almost exclusively cooked Chinese food, when it came to tofu, I always received a wide range of emotions from potential guests. Those who found it disgusting seemed to have no awareness of the myriad types available and methods of preparations. They would refer to tofu as flavorless with a yucky texture and explore the subject no further. more »
pâte de guimauve
marshmallows
I wonder how many kids being born today will have a memory when they grow up of eating marshmallows heated⁄melted⁄burned over an open fire? When I was a kid, everyone was either a Boy Scout or Girl Scout and you could build open fires almost anywhere. Today, Scouting, if kids partake in it at all, it is more about technology than the outdoors. more »
soda au gingembre
ginger ale
In 1960, as a 12-year old Boy Scout, I travelled to Colorado Springs for the 5th National Jamboree. I wasn’t really sure what a Jamboree was, but my brother had attended one three years earlier in Valley Forge, and he seemed to enjoy himself. We travelled between California and Colorado by air in a United Air Lines DC-6. more »
agneau à la mayonnaise
cold lamb with mayonnaise
Of all the muscles in all the barnyard animals that we commonly eat, the tenderloin is, at the same time, the best and the worst piece of meat that these animals have to offer. The best because it is the most tender, and the worst because it either lacks flavor or sometimes even has an off flavor. more »
huître et perle
oyster and pearl
One of the coolest things I ever saw was in the kitchen of Restaurant Patrick Jeffroy in Carantec, France. Chef Jeffroy took a handful of oysters, threw them in a device that looked like a steam autoclave from a dentist’s office, set the timer for 30 seconds, and pressed the start button. more »
petits madeleines
Madeleines
“And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine…” With that one little involuntary memory of a time forgotten, Proust forever associated himself with these traditional, French sponge cakes. Or so I’ve been told. Because for me, when I hear the name Madeleine, what comes to mind is Ludwig Bemelmans’s 1939 children’s story Madeline. more »
essence de tomate
tomato essence
At the 2009 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking, Raymond Blanc of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons prepared the Saturday evening meal for the attendees. It was quite something: eating 4-star food sitting at the long tables of an Oxford University dining hall. The first course was a demi-tasse cup of a clear liquid. more »
granité de citron « Meyer »
Meyer-lemon ice
I first became intrigued with fruit syrups when I started reading 19th- and early 20th-century French cookbooks. It seemed that every book included a number of recipes for the variety of fruit available in those days. Then one day, I was “blessed” with a couple of shopping bags full of Meyer lemons. more »
magret de canard
duck breast
You’ve heard the saying, “When one door closes, another opens”? Many of my amuse-bouche ideas have a relationship to that saying. Case in point, I was getting ready to leave the job training center where I teach periodically when the chef in charge of culinary studies stopped me and asked if I’d like a package of half duck breasts. more »
betteraves, caviar et crème
beets, caviar, and cream
The inspiration for this dish came from a recipe that I found at the Elle à table website called “Coco sushis de betterave et avruga.” The picture indicated hefty rectangles of purple toped with a layer of black caviar and two green chive sprigs. Reading the recipe I found that it was a beet aspic topped with imitation herring caviar. more »
amuse-bouches, intermèdes et mignardises
culinary doodads
To say that I intentionally intimidate people is to misunderstand my intentions. I invite friends for dinner in order to spend time with them in the manner I enjoy the most: over a shared meal. My guests know that dinner at my house will be a four- to five-hour event and there will be more time spent in conversation than eating. more »