jgarner53

I have some gooseberry patch type cookbook that someone gave me -- you know, homey recipes from some local women's group or something like that. Not as bad as having things like 7-up cake or the 7-layer salad that sits overnight in the fridge, but bad enough. I did get Bourdain for Christmas and haven't made anything out of it yet, but that doesn't mean I won't. I'm afraid if I make it wrong he's going to come knocking on the door and grab the skillet out of my hand and bash me about the head with it, spouting a fountain of obscenities excoriating my cooking skills (or lack thereof)

I love traditional Breton crèpes. Here in San Francisco Galette on Fillmore and Ti Couz are my favorites. Ti Couz is wonderfully cheap and serves pitchers of hard apple cider. I'm partial to ham, mushrooms and gruyère cheese for savory and for a sweet one, you can't beat Nutella!

I'm not crazy about the texture of fat on a piece of meat, so I'll leave it on the plate. I love bacon (who wouldn't?), but I prefer it well cooked so that the fat gets crispy. Chicken skin on a nicely roasted bird? Bring it on. But there's something about the chewiness of a hunk of fat on something like a pork chop or steak that just doesn't work for me. Many kids don't like spicy foods because kids have more taste buds than we do, which means that foods are generally more intense to them. Or so I've read. So yours not liking spicy things isn't really that surprising. Your wife, OTOH, is a freak. Give me home braised short ribs over TJ's taquitos any day.

I'm with Anne. I like pink (love it, actually), but that color says cheap bakery to me. The woman I work for buys white boxes for all her deliveries. So it's not that white boxes aren't available, but at someplace like Restaurant Depot, or a cake decorating store, that's all you see. I'd love a really pale, blush pink box. With chocolate brown satin ribbon.

I love eating on the couch in front of the tv. I didn't grow up this way; we always ate at the table-no tv allowed. But I like how relaxed it is at the end of the day.

Wendy, it's been so long since I used one of their baking recipes that I can't remember which ones I liked. My palate has also changed in the last few years so that what I might have liked or found acceptable then I might not now. With that in mind, I hesitate to recommend any specific recipe except to suggest that you try one of two to see what you think.

Merci beaucoup, Lucy! Votre blog est vraiment magnifique. Your first blog came on the scene about the time I first discovered eG last year, at a dreary, lonely, "just sit in this chair and occupy it until the regular person comes back" sort of way, and it was just breathtaking. This one also makes me ache to visit France again. It's been 17 years, and I can't believe it's been that long.

Wendy, have you looked at any recipes by Cooking Light? Granted, a lot of the time, especially with their desserts, they tend to go short on the portion size to reduce the calorie count (like a 9-inch cake yielding something like 20 servings), but they do have some lighter recipes, sometimes using reduced calorie versions of traditional ingredients like sour cream, sometimes focusing on an ingredient like fruit and cutting back on the fat elsewhere. I haven't done any light baking in a long time, but I have had pretty decent results with their recipes. I like the idea of a "flight" of dessert teasers - giving the customer a chance to pick three or four (or you selecting it for them) of your desserts. "Bite-sized selections of three of our dessert menu favorites"

I use crumbled short dough cookies for my cheesecake crusts, though I've also used gingersnaps when I've done lemon. I agree that the gingersnaps would be great with the lime as well. I bake my own cookies, but then again, I'm like that. When I bake sugar cookies (same recipe), I save out the ones that break, aren't perfect and beautiful, freeze them, and those become cheesecake crust. Ergo, leftover Valentine's cookies became crust (with some pistachios) for a lemon/ginger cheesecake for the Oscars.

I'd add a bench scraper (metal blade with a plastic or wooden handle) and a large flexible bowl scraper. The bowl scraper makes it even easier to pull dough out of a mixing bowl than a spatula. The bench scraper you will use to divide dough, scrape off and clean your work surface, lift up and handle very wet bread doughs, etc. I'd also throw a digital instant-read thermometer in there and an oil/candy thermometer. As you get into more advanced things, both will be come indispensible. Any hands on classes (be they at a community college, ICE, or even some of the classes at a store like Sur La Table) that interest you - go for it! There are some things that are easier to learn when you're shown, like pie crust or laminated doughs, than trying to figure it out from written instructions and photos in a book. Ice cream scoops in various sizes make scooping cookie dough and truffles (with the very small ones) quite easy, and will give you uniform results, very important when you're baking off a sheet of cookies. And get in there and bake! And bake some more! "How to Bake" is an excellent book; Nick Malgieri is a great teacher (if a little idiosyncratic in person). The advice to start with what you like to make is great. Friends, work colleagues, neighbors, most will be more than happy to help you dispose of your creations, even when they might taste great but look less than perfect.

I'm in the start without them camp. I don't have many friends/relatives who are chronically late, but I'm not gonna rearrange my life just to accommodate theirs. If you're more than 15 minutes late, I'm either leaving or taking the table and starting without you. If I'm hosting and dinner's ready, we're eating, whether you are there or not, particularly if you're so rude that you couldn't bother to call to let me know. I'll be glad to see you when you show up, as long as you don't mind that I'm eating my entrée by the time you order. Fortunately no one I know is bad enough that they would be hours late for an event, certainly not without calling or without extenuating circumstances (car trouble, trip to the ER with a sick kid, etc.)

Though if your brulée does go over and curdle, you can bring it back with a burr blender, and it makes a LOVELY tart filling. You can even still brulée it in the tart shell.

Friday night: leftover stuffed eggplant and salad, sliced mango for dessert Thursday night (after working a full day): stuffed eggplant, salad, work pastries for dessert Monday (and Tuesday and Wednesday): A simple tomato and bean stew over polenta (hey, I was beat after the whole pastry wrap up last weekend and didn't feel like slaving. Wednesday night I also made a chocolate caramel pecan tart

I love rugelach! I may have to jump back into this thread again with the rugelach mention.

Man, I thought I lived in a food nirvana! What a great blog!

Well, at least you had a chart. I hate trying to track down in a cookbook how they calculated their measurements, which may or may not be there.

Spring desserts always make me think of lemon and strawberries. The first desserts I usually make for the season are for Easter. Lemon curd tart covered with sliced strawberries. Puff pastry shells filled with pastry cream and topped with strawberries. Lemon cheesecake. Lemon charlotte (ooooh -- I'm very much in a charlotte mood these days). Of course, I'm spoiled here in San Francisco where it's supposed to be 80 today. But before you poor snow-bound sorts get too out of sorts, while you're basking in warm summer temps, lingering in back yards and porches in balmy twilight, I'll be shivering here in the fog.

Wow - who knew there was iodine in all those common foods? Butter? How does it get there? You are a good, good woman.

It's all about the warm pudding. Warm and creamy.

For the record, I'm not in the habit, but there are some recipes, usually quite old, that call for "2 3/4 cups flour, measured after sifting," or some such thing. I think the idea was to aerate your flour so it wouldn't be so compact in the measuring cup. I will get briefly up on my soapbox in favor of weight measurements vs. volume. I think that most of us here can appreciate the increased accuracy when dealing with weight. Pam, any way you could have included weights along with the volumetric measurements in your cookbook, for those of us who do use a scale? Say, "1 Cup (5 oz.) flour?" Thinking of it in production terms, who on earth would want to measure out 37 cups of flour? I'd lose count before I got halfway through!

My absolute favorite things were made by See's. Little jelly eggs covered in white and matching color (pink, yellow, or green) nonpareils instead of a hard jellybean type coating. Occasionally, I would also get a See's bordeaux egg. My favorite See's flavor in a much larger size! Also loved the Hershey's foil covered eggs in those lovely pastels and plain ol' jelly beans.

I have generally good results with Trader Joe's butter. Though if I were doing shortbread, I might get out the more expensive butter.

For me it's doughs. While for most of my breads, I'm mixing and kneading in my Kitchen Aid these days, I do have my hands in a floury mixture several times a week. I love the smell of the flour, the soft feeling as it coats my hands, the loose, sticky texture as I start to mix in the water, and the beginning of the feeling of cohesion that I get as it comes together. I do it 3x a week to mix up the feed for my sourdough starter, and just did two batches of puff pastry, mixing the détrempe by hand. Then I get the pleasure of mashing some butter into the flour before adding the water. Rolling out the dough and doing the turns or shaping bread loaves is just the icing on the cake. Soft, pillowy dough, pliable, more flour on the hands. Watching the puff dough stretch out, knowing there are those layers of buttery goodness inside...

A freshly baked chocolate crinkle (no nuts, thanks), though I suspect that they will be topped by the croissants I'll be baking off in class tonight. What's better than a croissant, fresh out of the oven?

I completely agree. I hate sweeping the floor at school. You can never get the flour out of the ultra-wide grout lines. And I've already said what I think of my tile counters. I'd think that even if they were the original 1923 tiles, too. If you want tile, put it in the backsplash.