TheFuzzy

Folks, Of course, this thread immediately made me think, "So if I'm a man, and have a boyfriend, who cooks?" (if my friends are anything to go by, nobody ... ) Anyway, me and my sweetie have achieved a division of labor. I do 80% of the cooking; she does mainly desserts and brunches. Whomever didn't cook does dishes, unless the other one helped substantially or unless I do Indian food, in which case we split them. Also, she does laundry but I do trash/recycling/home repair/biohazards. So it works out. A friend of mine who's one of the top catering chefs in San Francisco used to tell me about his agony of eating at home. You see, since he cooked for 11 hours every work day, he didn't want to cook if he was home for a meal. But his wife was -- well not a terrible cook, but a rank beginner and improving very slowly. One notable meal she used WAY too much salt, and he just sat there and choked it down, knowing what would come if he complained.

If you haven't read Jaque Pepin's auto-biography, you need to read his description of the "new guy" prank at the Grand Hotel in Paris, where he worked as an apprentice. I won't try to describe it here, I wouldn't do it justice.

LT, Foodie: I prefer my sweetie's family recipe, with lemon zest and sugared lemon juic e applied after baking. And Oh! we have meyer lemons now, I should ask he to make some. Good idea! For not sticking, we butter, then flour the pans with a sifter. Works great, and easy. One note, though. Madelaines are 100% better when they're still warm, and they get stale within 12 hours in my experience. So they're best eaten straight out of the pan. I can't stand packaged madelaines ...

Mr. Jenkins, I recently visited a tiny cheesery in Southern Oregon (the Rogue Valley Creamery) that had taken steel-tank, injection-started blue cheeses to an international contest in Britian, and took home the prize, beating out many French cave-aged blue cheeses. It seems like American cheesemakers are following the same trend as American winemakers; proving that superior technology, properly applied, can yield a project actually better than centuries-old methods. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but the cheese sure is good. Do you see things the same way? Are cheesemakers getting modernized in Europe as a response to all of the prizes going over the Atlantic? Or am I totally off-base here? (and if you haven't visited the Rogue Valley Creamery, you might want to)

People: I continue to find it astonishing that people can't seem to grasp the concept that a cooked meal which costs less than $5 is unlikely to be healthy, and I certainly hope that this gets thrown out of court as soon as the MSJs are due.

Folks, For a while I was a professional baker in the morning (3am to 11am) and a potter in the afternoon. You could pretty much count on me having an average of 2 first- and 1 second-degree burn, any day of the week. Actually, all bakers I've known have a series of thin burn scars across their inner arms, perpendicular to the arm. These are "tray burns" from mis-balancing hot full-sheet pans as they come out of the baking oven. Then there's the smaller ones, on the back of the hand, that come from not being fast enough with the baker's paddle and catching the back of your hand on the edge of the oven as the rotating racks push the end of the paddle up. One of the worst burns for my fellow bakers was from what we called "baker's napalm": the caramelized liquid sugar that you had to scrape out of the sticky-bun trays. And you had to scrape it out hot; if you let it cool, you'd be scrubbing that pan for an hour to get it clean. The little blobs of sugar would drip or flick on your skin, and most bakers couldn't scrape the burning sugar off without losing the skin too. Fortunately for me, I'm naturally resistant to burns and heal without scarring. Most of the time. One really bad experience is when I fumbled at pie coming out of the oven and caught it with my bare left hand. Oops. However, none of the bakery burns even came close to the burns from ceramics. Once I got an "instant" 3rd-degree burn when the sleeve of my asbestos jacket tore off while doing Cone 07 Raku (which means you pull orange-hot pots out of the kiln). I had that scar for 6 years before it faded.

Walt, To be frank, I'm pretty lukewarm about Bistro Clovis. My office for 3 years was about 1/2 block away. I had several opportunites to go there. The wine list is pretty good, but I found the food uninspiring. The menu seldom changed despite being quite short. What I ate there was good but not excellent. And the couple of times I did ask for help with the wine list, the server was not much use (mostly I did the wine flights, which I did very much like). Admittedly, my diet does restrict what I can order somewhat -- possibly Clovis' red meat dishes are their only real strength. I wouldn't know. But overall, I'd far rather go to Chapeau!, Cafe Bastille or that one on Geary with the funny name than Bistro Clovis. Sorry not to share your indignation!