melkor

I get about two dozen double espresso shots out of a pound of coffee, I've got no idea how many tablespoons that is.

I think you're sort of right. Freshly dried herbs are great for a lot of things, they are often better than the wilted nastyness available at the supermarket. I use dried herbs when I make a rub for any sort of meat that is going to see high heat. Pick some fresh herbs, stick them on a papertowel and microwave them until they are dry. I send some freshly dried herbs home with my relatives when they visit from colder climates during the winter. If I lived somewhere that I couldn't grow herbs year round, then I'd use dried during the winter.

The white castle stuffing may qualify as the least appealing recipe I've ever seen here. I think I'll stick with the wild mushroom stuffing I had planed to make.

Head up to Rutherford and do the truffle dinner at La Toque. They are under rated while I think you're right that Oliveto is wildly over rated.

There is a starbucks 100 yards away from the nearest safeway and another starbucks inside the safeway, they share a parking lot. Apparently there can never be too many starbuckses.

I would think if you were planning to do mashed potatoes in advance that you'd want to bake the potatoes and leave them in the fridge until you were ready to use them. When you are finishing them up, I'd melt butter and cream together on the stove over low heat with a metal bowl sitting on top of the pan to preheat. Use a ricer to mash and skin the potatoes into the hot bowl then pour the hot butter and cream over the potatoes, season and serve. The texture of steamed potatoes will suffer overnight, baked potatoes are able to absorb so much liquid that you need to worry less about the texture changes and keeping them in the skins overnight will help protect them from getting gummy.

Cyrus is neither simple nor casual. The food isn't bad but the space is more formal than the wine country norm. If you are heading over to the northern parts of Sonoma you should check out the farmhouse inn - they fit the simple and casual bill perfectly.

That and a fondness for bacon.

They are usually zapped in the head with a taser. Clearly a much more enjoyable experience. Meat comes from animals and they don't just decide on their own to be wrapped in plastic and put out in the display at your local butcher shop. People have to accept that animals need to be killed before we can eat them. Live cattle for example aren't very easy to braise. One of the most important culinary lessons in life is that the cuter an animal is the more delicious it tastes. Ducks, rabbits, and lamb are prime examples of this. Get over it or eat nothing but salad.

So when Fat Guy or any other civilian cooks at the James Beard house they too should be called chef? Honestly, I'd call your role part personal chef and part babysitter. If the group you were working with were actual cooks who had any idea what you were talking about should you have asked them to sear, mince, dice, plate, or saute something, that might be a different story. At the end of the day I don't see why there is a need to merge the definition of the word chef and the phrase 'personal chef'. There is no shame in being a personal chef. Anyone who can make a living behind a stove is taking advantage of a serious talent they have. Restaurant chefs are what people think of when they hear the word chef, personal chef brings to mind something else - the reality is that you should call yourself whatever you think you are.

It's a matter of semantics. They are two completely different jobs. I'm thrilled that people are able to make a living works as personal chefs not only because it's a good thing to be able to support yourself doing something you love but also because it means people who don't have time to cook are able to eat well. edit: Incidentally, the personal chef I've hired to cook for my mother in the past has prepared the meals offsite.

I am at a loss to see where this comes from. According to Merriam Webster, a chef is the head of the kitchen; a skilled cook who manages a kitchen. Can you point me to some authority to support what qualifications you believe are necessary to call yourself a chef? ← m-w.com says: 1 : a skilled cook who manages the kitchen (as of a restaurant) The guy slinging hash at a neighborhood diner while bossing around the dishwasher isn't a chef. The same goes for some random guy standing in his home kitchen wearing a Bragard jacket and a toque, not even if he's doing his best Ramsay impression throwing pans and swearing at his friends while they do prep work. I fail to see the difference between a personal chef and a caterer, but it's abundantly clear that there is a difference between a restaurant chef and a personal chef.

Sure but that makes you both a cook and a personal chef. To call yourself 'chef' without qualifying it would be implying you were something you are not. A person who does exactly what you list for a wedding or other large party would be called a caterer. No one is going to hire a caterer to cook dinner for their family so people such as yourself use the term personal chef.

I'm not sure if 24 hours is better or worse than 48. I haven't tried salting two days in advance.

Salting the turkey is the way to go if you've got the fridge space to leave the bird uncovered for 24 hours in there. If you brine the bird the texture of the meat suffers, not so if you just salt it. After the bird comes out of the fridge, pat it completely dry then add a light rub - I dry some fresh herbs in the microwave and make a salt rub with them (oregano, parsley, sage, and a touch of mint), bash that up with some salt and peppercorns in a mortar and pestle. Dried herbs don't taste awful when they blacken the same way fresh herbs do. The drawback to salting the bird is the same one you have when you brine the bird, the drippings are too salty to use as the bulk of the gravy - I add some of them but most of the gravy is made from stock and glace I've made previously.

Yes. The personal chef title exists purely so that cooks can market their services. A personal chef may be a spectacular cook, but rarely is that person actually a chef.

Kermit Lynch offers different mixed cases of wine each month, they are often interesting well made wines at good prices.

I order all my wine from places that will hold the bottles until the the weather gets cold. The rest of it I pick up in person. I don't mind paying shipping, I do hate those big styrofoam shippers but there isn't a good alternative - packing in those peanuts is far worse. During shipping season (now) I have my wine shipped on Mondays and they always show up by Friday. The only exception is wine purchased at auction, then I have it sent overnight.

By either definition, the knuckleheads who call themselves 'chef' because they are more comfortable in the kitchen than the stove-top-stuffing cooking people next door are still absurdly off base. Culinary school doesn't make a chef, some of the best haven't gone, and countless people who can't cook an edible meal have graduated. I'm not a bad cook, but that in no way makes me a chef.

I rarely if ever eat in a moving car. I had lunch in the car today though - chicken salad sandwich while parked on the side of highway 1 in northern Sonoma watching it rain into the ocean.

I save the occasional birth year bottle and recycle all the rest.

I think you miss my point. I agree with Chef Patterson that the Chez Panisse style cooking is very common in the bay area, but I don't find that to be a bad thing, he apparently does. California grows more rice than most rice producing countries nevermind the other states. I think the place to draw the line on the local vs shipped in debate is around things that travel well and things that don't. I wouldn't ship a ripe tomato to florida nor would I ship a fresh loaf of bread, but why not ship dry goods or sturdy meats? Niman is far from my favorite purveyor of meats, and their animals are raised all over the place, but they are a fair example of a producer that gets (got) a lot of menu placement. Salmon outside the pacific states is a tough example, sure you could pay for it to be shipped overnight or eat farm raised salmon, one is expensive the other an inferior tasting product - its your call. So Robyn, that dish you had as your main at Chez Panisse, could you make it at home given a few containers of leftover meat? edit: holy crap is this post incoherent.

The cooks at Chez Panisse may be better cooks than those at your home and the homes of people you know, but the fundamental dishes aren't difficult to reproduce without a recipe. The dishes may not be as good when you or your friends make them, but they will be identifiable. The same isn't true if you were to attempt the foie gras custard at Manresa without a recipe or Thomas Keller's oysters and pearls.

First let me thank you for coming here to discuss your article. Your point that Chez Panisse style cooking is common in the bay area has some merit but I believe that without Chez Panisse the bay area restaurants would eventually get to the same place they are now. I think that if simple rustic cooking is to be attributed to Alice Waters then the tyranny of Chez Panisse extends past the local restaurant scene and into the homes of most people who shop at the area farmers markets, those who fish, forage, hunt, and grow the ingredients they cook with. Food doesn't need to taste good for a restaurant to succeed - look at the Olive Garden and all the other chains that pollute our suburbs. If you've got a perfect frog hollow peach, do you eat it out of your hand or do you cook it into a cobbler? Those dirty girl dry farmed tomatoes... do they get cooked into tomato paste or served in an arrabiata or rubbed on grilled bread? I know when I pull a wild salmon out of the ocean it gets stuffed with fresh herbs and some sliced citrus and thrown on the grill. In the middle of the winter when I'm eating salmon from the freezer, I get more creative with it. There is a place for cooks who are making interesting and creative dishes, but rent is already astronomical, good ingredients are expensive, how much labor can go into a dish and still make it to the table at a price people are willing to pay? The reason there aren't more restaurants like the French Laundry and Manresa is because there aren't very many people able to cook at that level even though there are a lot of people happy to charge those prices. Success at that level requires not just creativity, amazing ingredients, a well trained brigade, and a lot of luck, but it also requires the food to taste better than what is available down the street at half the price and that's where most of the more creative restaurants in the bay area fall flat on their face.

I treat it the same was as making risotto - you want the pan to dry out enough to create a nice fond but you don't want it to burn. Try to add enough stock that you can make it 30 minutes without bad smells coming out of the oven. Opening the oven too often screws things up also. You need less stock each time you add it since the bird is going to contribute some fat and liquid as it cooks but you want to be sure the pan gets dry enough for a good fond to form at some point during the process.