amazing apricots 1

I remember the first time I ate an apricot. It was my first time in California, I was visiting family in Woodside, and I bought an apricot at the local market because it felt so California to me. And also because I'd never seen a fresh apricot.

I experienced what many people experience when they bite into a fresh apricot. The flesh was mealy, the flavor underwhelming, the skin spongy. I did not eat another fresh apricot for about six years and I gave them another try only grudgingly.

If you've ever thought these apricot things are so mealy and yucky...i contemplate eating them because i really want a fresh peach and the peaches aren't ready, well then, this post is for you. see, apricots deepen in flavor when cooked, and the mushy complaint of their texture turns soft. How, exactly, you say?

image by max xx

Close your eyes and think of a peach pie. You know how the peaches are bright, how they taste like you think yellow would if yellow had a taste? How they're probably one-dimensionally sweet from all the sugar added in the pie? When you cook apricots like this, don't be surprised if you turn down the next piece of peach pie someone offers you.

Pit and halve a bunch of apricots. Put them in a pot with some sugar and a splash of water. If you have a vanilla bean, you can throw one in. Apricots and vanilla really sing. If you've got a good honey, you can use some honey. What else could you use? Chamomile, dark brown sugar, brandy, lemon. This is not a list of ANDs, however. It's a list of ORs. Any item on this list will complement the apricots, but so that you understand the beauty and complexity of an apricot once it's cooked, choose sugar plus one, or even a rich type of sugar like muscovado or maple or demerara. Something special.

Cook the apricots plus sugar plus water (plus extra) over medium heat. Let's say you have six to eight apricots. I would add 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar. You can always add more sugar but you can't take it out. The fruit will start to break down and release its juices. Continue cooking until the juices thicken. I'm not going to give you a more exact recipe than that, but I will answer questions. You will be left with a delicious compote that I like to serve warmed over vanilla ice cream.

Learning how to cook apricots will change your life. If you're lactose intolerant, spoon them over soy yogurt with granola for breakfast, and if you hate sweets grab a nice cheese and good bread because this compote is versatile, easy, cheap and delicious. Promise. If you get inspired to try this and make a new, fun combo, let me know.

vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit

I used to be a little snot (used to be, you say?). One day during the course of my stage at Oleana, I told the pastry chef, Maura, that I wasn't a fan of bread pudding. I hadn't yet learned that you don't tell this to cooks; that claiming not to like something ends with you being prodded or strong-armed into trying their adaptation of it. Sometimes, when we say "don't like," what we mean is don't understand or aren't impressed by or, as my french chef used to say, "it is not very interesting."

I worked at the time at a bistro in Boston that served chocolate bread pudding with whipped cream (side note: it really irks me when people call it chantilly on menus...it's whipped cream people). We made four hotel pans of the stuff, using leftover house bread (baked by me & my boss) plus the supplementary bread we got on the weekends. The night guys usually cut the bread for us, two large fishtubs, but occasionally we'd have to top it off, then make the custard. I'd be up to my elbows in the stuff, tossing the bread, letting it soak. Then I'd have to portion it into the four hotel pans, bake them in barely-there hot water baths consisting of the 1/2-1 inch of water I could pour on the full sheet pan and, when baked, pull these same suckers out of the oven without spalashing hot water all over myself and burning the mitts. So I was usually pretty clumsy and usually made a mess (big surprise, right?). Suffice to say I'd had it with bread pudding and I felt that I was pretty well informed on the topic.

Well it only took a couple bites of Maura's bread pudding to change my mind. Hers was made with homemade brioche, pretty standard, and I had excellent results baking it with Acme pain de mie as well. Maura soaked her bread in a mixture of custard plus simple syrup; her theory was that the simple syrup prevented the bread from getting too heavy and resulted in a lighter final product. I'm not sure whether that's true but I know the results are certainly delicious.

This version below features stone fruits, with cherries just coming into season! We don't have peaches yet but we do have apricots, which are delicious baked or roasted. As promised a long time ago, here is the bread pudding recipe adapted from Maura's supremely wonderful brown butter bread pudding with mulberries and milk jam at Oleana.

vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit:
{makes 1 lg. deep dish pan (9x13) +/- a few extra ramekins}


custard base:
eggs 9
sugar 2.5c
cream 4c
milk 2.5c
vanilla bean 2, split and seeded

for soaking:
simple syrup: 1c
cubed bread: 8c
custard base above

fruit, to add:
pitted cherries: 2c
peeled, sliced peaches: 2c

Warm dairy with vanilla beans and infuse 30 minutes. Whisk eggs and sugar together. Add cream and milk. Place bread in large bowl, coat with simple syrup and then with custard base. Let soak 1 hr or until most of liquid is absorbed, tossing bread every so often. Add cut fruit to soaked bread and mix. Pour into baking pan, using ramekins for any overflow. Cover with foil and bake at 325 for 35 minutes. Remove foil and bake 15 more minutes or until top is lightly browned. Center should be set. If not, keep baking.*

*I worked somewhere where we baked bread pudding FOR THREE HOURS once.

in other notes:
*huge burn blister on my finger with goo bubble the diameter of a caper. it needs to go away.
*valrhona cocoa powder, how i have missed you.
*i should do a post on ways to infuse vanilla beans, maybe i will.
*i ate the second half of my burrito for dinner and now i have nothing to look forward to at work tomorrow.
*claudia fleming is still awesome.
*i've been reading a book a day, about.
*my car is not dead and gone forever. hell yeah! road trip seattle anyone?
*i'm contemplating a series of podcast essays. main problem: i'm not interested in the sound of my own voice, unless i'm pretending to be claudia gonson. second main problem: that just sounds gimmicky and slightly pretentious.
*i need to learn to say no, sometimes, and stop doing everyone a favor all the time.
*i chopped orange peel for a long time today and it was really theraputic and zenlike. i recommend it.

lists.

1.
persimmon budino
chocolate torte
spiced espresso truffles
cocoa nib iced milk
brown butter-chestnut filling
chestnut crepe batter/make crepes
sage sable breton
huckleberry sauce
frozen white chocolate
chocolate sformato
migniardise: orange cardamom truffles, marmalade financier, orange-rosemary pdf, amaretto macarons, chocolate fleur de sel cookies

2.
am bake off
focaccia
vacherin almonds
coffee ice cream base
vacherin meringues
mango & coconut tapioca pudding
chocolate pot de creme
b/o anise biscotti

3.
blossom bluff hachiya & fuyu persimmon
fhf quince
foraged huckleberries
pears
pink lady apples
meyer lemons
buddha's hand
kishu tangerines
satsuma mandarins
navel oranges
pomegranates
first crop walnuts
chestnuts
///

canning sundays

The last of the Apple Farm apples (and pears) made their way into a pear-apple chutney today after a lazy Sunday spent walking on Ocean Beach with the dogs.

Finally checked out my closest convenient local farmers market, on Divis near Alamo Square. It was tiny, but they did have some organic growers, a flower guy, some boutique olives and spreads, and a bread stand. I came home with some extremely aromatic basil, tomatoes, snapdragons and poblano peppers. The basil (and tomato) made their way into basil simple syrup and into bruschetta as part of an improptu dinner with chicken salad. As much as I adore the big markets, like Berkeley and the FPFM, lately there's a part of me that feels like I really need to get to know my community markets to the extent that my schedule allows. Sometimes I feel like certain growers get this huge rep around town cause their on everybody's menu and every time I automatically nab a peach from this guy or that guy, there's some newer farmer or equally worthy farmer getting ignored because his stuff isn't on the menu at Chez Panisse or wherever. And it's hard because there's so many great farmers, and I'm not about to trip over myself buying hard stone fruit from some random orchard just to go against the grain. There are always products not worth buying (and a particular example sticks heavy in my mind) from the most established and most obscure vendors. I am also ridiculously spoiled in getting my hands on excellent produce. I may not be able to make it to the FPFM Saturday market for some Knoll figs, but I'm eating the occasional fig at work...am I splitting hairs? Am I alone in this issue?

Anyway, after the market, and after the beach, and after a trillion loads of laundry, C convinced me we needed to make the chutney we'd discussed. So she peled and sliced apples and pears while I mised the brown sugar, garlic, lemon, ginger (fresh and crystallized) and golden raisins. Having never made chutney before we were going by a pretty basic recipe. When everything barely fit in the stockpot we added some of the Apple Farm's extremely potent cider vinegar, and a dash of water, and let it cook. We tasted it halfway through for seasoning and added a touch more vinegar and a couple handful more salt but otherwise it was delicious. When the chutney finally cooked down it was this amazing combination of caramelization-sugary and vinegar-spicy that I don't know I've ever appreciated in chutney when it's service temp. Pretty much the first thing I thought was, damn, this would be really good with apricots.

where/what

yes, it's true, I did take long disappearance from blogging. new and less desirable work schedule to acclimate to, family in town, getting newbies settled, etc. etc. I haven't checked my email or gotten any writing done for the better part of two weeks. bah.

Another garden bbq this weekend and my part will be, I think:
rancho gordo yellow eye beans

watermelon salad with garden cilantro, radishes and greens, red onion, balsamic redux. or something in that vein.

We're also having the infamous veggie kebabs, grilled corn, meat of some sort and goodness knows what else. And I think I'm being called on to make myself look pretty and go to the Presidio Social Club, and I must say, the menu they have on their website looks extremely undelicious. Although they do have mac n cheese. Which would of course then be what I would get.

Maryusa asked what I have been doing with myself and it's been pretty much this: watering the garden, painting the kitchen, entertaining various family and friends, working, making homemade marshmallows for the boys, cleaning, working my way through a stack on slightly overdue library books. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the parade of visitors seems to KEEP COMING as I've got a college friend and fellow ice cream addict flying into town for a wedding next week. dios mio!

keep my head down and work, keep my head down and write.

rhubarb

It wasn't strawberries this year that made me kick-start giddy into spring. It was rhubarb. We were tasked to come up with a dessert special, maybe a crisp, and suitable ice cream was made. We all brought cookbooks...rhubarb the great unknown, the pinkish vegetable, the first blush of spring. I was the only one who'd used it before.

I had never thought to peel rhubarb before but my coworker (who must've read it somewhere) told me to do so, and I had another stupid moment as I chopped the peeled rhubarb, a body memory return to last spring and the mountains of rhubarb I used for crisps and whatnot at Frog Hollow. The slices would always stick together by this fibrous membrane, and I'd curse it out and hand-separate them (or not, mood depending). But it never, ever, occurred to me to peel the thing. Genius.

So it was the body memory that got me, and then the smell. A rough earthy smell, a green smell. Not a perfume, nothing sexy. A smell of spring and beginning. It took me back to the Oakland days, to when I knew nothing and no one here. To how great it felt to finally be on my own in a kitchen and playing with whatever produce was on hand, plus the flip side of that, ignorance, the thousands of unanswered questions and uncertainties and things-left-to-learn.

Rhubarb...it smelled so new again. And like a thousand old things I'd left behind.

Maybe because of the rhubarb, maybe not, but the rest of the night was great. I was working both stations and getting enough garde manger tickets that the board was getting filled up and I needed to work quick and clean and wipe...and when the intermittent pastry ticket it was time to turn around and tend to the cakes, custards, sauces. We had a good number of dessert sales, too, and though I gave my coworker a 20 minute shot at the station because she missed it (and went off to consolidate walk-in stuffs), on the whole I was into service and had a really good rhythm going.

The whole night was like a gift. A reminder of what I am here for. I love working with food. I love the excitement and possibilities of a new dish. Especially a dish like crisp is so fraught with memories for me. I thought back to all the FH crisps that were too soggy or too stiff, the parade of peach and nectarine varietals, the experience of making 9 months' worth of crisp and having to guess the right amount of starch to balance out the liquid from the fruit. I love my coworkers. It feels like we've all been here for so long, but really it's been the blink of an eye. In September, I stood in the Oleana kitchen nervous to go back to SF and start a restaurant job with serious people and Maura said to me that all restaurants weren't like the ones I'd worked in. She promised me there were good restaurants and good people, and when you see it? It's seductive. You can try to explain it to the other people in your life, those who aren't in the industry, but they won't get it.

CUESA Sunday Supper: the pear tasting

I was in a room in the top of the Ferry Building last night and everybody else was there, too. Well, almost everybody. The first and last course were prepping in the same room and the main course chefs were somewhere else. Fifty plates per team. I had no idea what my new boss was doing, but I met her by the FH shop, and ran into my old boss on the way. She was dropping off cupcakes, and acted quite happy to see me, but she must have gotten her table partners to plate them up for her because she never returned.

How's Your New Job Going? my boss asked. Your Chef Is Kind Of A Minimalist.
Really? I wrinkled my nose, reflecting on it. I wouldn't have picked that word.
Upstairs, as we unpack the coolers and I see the extent of what we've got to plate, I laugh and say I Understand Why You Think She's A Minimalist. We served the following eight components:

Vanilla-Tokaji poached Warren pears with pear sorbet, plum-raspberry sauce, raspberries, gingersnap cookies, candied fruit (lemon and orange), FH figs and frozen muscat grapes. The figs and grapes were FH; the berries were Ella Bella.

We lent some figs to the Slow Club boys who were prepping a salad. I watched Mourad Lahlou slather cheese with tomato jam and Elizabeth Faulkner work the room. Dessert got pushed back. The CUESA volunteers and assorted chefs kept stopping by to pop frozen grapes into their mouths. They were so sensual and a blessing in that hot room. My boss got all tense. I started plating. I've done enough banquet FOH stuff that they don't really make me all that nervous...I was more nervous-excited to be elbow to elbow with all these wonderful chefs.

When my boss oohed over the Aziza plates and said how she wanted to go I told her she needed to. And Go Somewhere Else For Desserts, I said, after explaining the loveliness of the food.
You've Been To Aziza? How Have You Been To Aziza? she asked, slight frown.

When the apps went out, we reclaimed the table and got to work laying down plates, taking the grapes off the stems. Apparently my boss put the recipe in the Bay Guardian and she was telling me about her process. Very funny how they wanted that recipe because it was basically: 1. wash grapes, 2. freeze them. I said she should have lied about a fabulous technique. But they were good. Really good. Reminiscent of those Alfieri grapes I got for about a month, the ones that were my reason for living.

The plates went from crowded but orderly to fairly cluttered what with the addition of more sauce, more grapes. The dessert time got pushed back and then pushed up. Clusters of assistants trailed behind chefs quenelling frantically. I tossed grapes. We lured the Slow Club boys into helping us because when someone tells you you've got twenty minutes and they says you've got five, well, what do you do? Sauce, wipe, grapes.

Afterward when the chefs went out to greet the public, the CUESA volunteers, the expediting chef and I conducted a dessert tasting. Almost everyone turned to pears. Elizabeth Faulkner's were poached and then bruleed with a sexy sugar crust. There were some tasteless components and then a nice, surprisingly salty pistachio pesto. Someone else's pears were poached and set on insanely dry cake. It just exuded moisturelessness {yeah, not a word}. Downtown Bakery had poached them and set them in a lattice crust but there was something unsatisfying about the texture of the pear, and something salty and not sweet enough about the overall dish. The Ritz placed apple compote in tidy squares on cake, the covered the whole thing with a pink peppercorn meringue {they used a foam cannister and I missed it}, huckleberry compote and a dried apple chip. Gorgeous but the flavors didn't mesh. Rubicon had large quenelles of mousse? pudding? chocolatey goodness, with the smallest eights of pears poached in honey syrup and orange peel.

The cupcakery, plain old chocolate cupcakes with a mint leaf garnish. It made me sad and it surprised me--because my friend had been telling me they were going to do an apple cupcake and they'd been testing it all month--but not entirely. They talk a good game on using sustainable ingredients and locally sourced everything. It's what attracted me to the job. But in the end it's a decision between which is more expensive, or expedient, or whatever. They were supposed to make the apple, but they got the apples too late and it got lost in the shuffle or a normal day. The Sunday Supper was a celebration of harvests, food, farmers. We didn't just all do pear desserts because we love them. We did them in the spirit of the event. The chefs at the Supper didn't need the publicity. They're already the top game in this town. Will the cupcake shop move slowly toward seasonality and using farm-fresh goodies? I don't know. But it's time to let go of them. Good things this new job is taking all of my time.

Sometimes you put what you want out there in the universe and it comes back to you in all kinds of ways. Saturday night there were fresh doughnuts, warm and adorable and redolent of my doughnut plant love.

how i got my new job and other stories

It's all starting to come full circle. It rained today in San Francisco. At FH, we've still got the gamut of summer pastries but the winter staples are starting to trickle in...pear frangipane instead of peach. Get your stone fruit while you can. Today at the market I bought quince from Farmer Dan with the two apple trees, Black Missions figs from Knoll and dry-farmed tomatoes from Ella Bella, and was given an onion by my coworker. The last two are getting turned into tomato sauce tonight. The quince, I'm not sure yet and the figs are just for eating out of hand.

Last night I went to Chow, where the waiters are just all so cute. It helped that we were starved after a day of eating only desserts, but my wood-oven spinach and cheese lasagna was yummy, and then I polished off my friend's mashed potatoes as well. We split and analyzed dessert: a ginger cake with whipped cream and pumpkin ice cream. The ice cream was appealingly orange but not properly pumpkin, the cake was dry, the caramel made it slightly better.

I have such an uneasy relationship with writing and cooking. One is always being done at the expense of the other. I told my friend last night that the day I opened up my secret shop would be the day I was never going to write a book. It Doesn't Need To Be That Way, he told me. Sure, I'm getting lifetimes of great material and I've already used some of it. Sure, I'll one day be too old to cook. I Would Love To Go On Book Tour In Like, Three Months, I told him (an impossibility for sure). Y'Know, Just Take A Break From Work.

Would You Give Up Cooking In Three Months? he asked. And Never Go Back To It?
I sighed. I pouted. His question was an impossibility it seemed. Something laughable and off the map. No, I said.

You know you're in it when you come home from working your sixth day in a row and cook dinner and make sorbet. You know you're in it when you read cookbooks for fun, and when you order more than one dessert after dinner. When you get up before dawn and everyone asks you how you do it, and you don't know how you do it, but you don't even complain about it anymore really. It is what it is. When you let kitchen words seep into everyday life and suddenly you want to yell Behind at all those slow walkers. When another burn on your arm is just that: another. When you agree to spend your one day off helping your boss plate desserts. When the farmers at the market know your name, give you the good stuff, when you know their names.

I have a new job. This means I'm now working six days a week, since I still have the old job. Details? Not tonight. Tonight I want to tell you about how my job offer came to me.

Last month I was in Marin working as a prep cook. I was at George Lucas's ranch. I was dealing with meat and cutting up vegetables and pretending I knew how to make sauce. I worked with these two guys who started campaigning for me to get a job there. The head chef was filling in until the current pastry chef could find a replacement for her position and move across the hill to the other ranch. Maybe I said on day one. On day two I started getting the specifics: when would I work, what would I do. It was tempting to work making muffins in the middle of Marin County for Mister Star Wars and his people. Even though I *still* have not seen Star Wars. It would have been Monday through Friday but I would have had to get up every day at 430, and quit FH. We were still all just talking--which is usually nowhere near getting a kitchen job--when I got the phone call. Let Me Think About It. I'm Working Right Now is what I said. The rest of the afternoon I floated around plating food, breaking down the barbecue, busting out dishes, having the guys urge me again to please apply, thinking all the while about the new thing that had come my way.

When I got back to the city I called back, said yes, and quit my job the next day. I'm still in that post-relationship phase with the cupcakery. I miss certain of my coworkers. Occasionally I miss the cupcakes. I don't miss the screaming, the tension, the back and forth, the one who lied. I sort of want to visit but only at certain times. I want to hear the news. I wish them all well, certainly, and I didn't really get to say goodbye since my boss basically gave me most of my last week off. The weight of it all is still on me. While I worked there sometimes I'd wake up in the morning and my hands would be frozen. Clenched open. I'd force them to move and think about what I was doing to my body with all the piping and with only eating cupcakes and perhaps a carrot during an eight hour shift (and I didn't even pipe that much).

The new job is new and exciting. I get the feeling it's all ready to burst right open. It's giving me all this writing energy.

But I got sidetracked and what I wanted to say was how it's nice to have people to talk to. Especially when you can't stop talking--and you get going on a half hour digression from the original question so that by the time you think you might be done you're still so far away form the original point so you've got to talk your way back. So you walk around some, eat a horrid cookie, resist telling the cookie-seller that you know it's underbaked because you're a pair of bakers, dammit. Then you've walked everywhere and you're still not done talking so you go up to Bernal Heights. You point out the landmarks in the city below, map its geography. You stay up past the hour when you should reasonably be in bed and then you get up in cold darkness, bike to work, stand in the rain and buy quince and tomatoes and muscle through the exhaustion because what else is there to do.

My flash fiction is up here. The editor says "the piece sure does have atmosphere." Tell me what you think about the ending.

Oh, & hell yeah. Baseball. Postseason. Do you know what I"m talking about?

local eating 2

I went down to Rainbow last week to get some supplies for locally-made pizza. Really just an excuse to play with some yeast. It was actually my first time using active dry yeast so it was a little intense and I ended up throwing out the first batch because I wasn't sure why the yeast wasn't blooming. By the second batch my internet was working enough for me to understand it really would take ten minutes, but anyway, the groceries...

organic heirloom tomato (cherokee purple)
organic scallions
bulk bread flour at last (and you'd think the Berkeley Bowl would have gotten on that long ago)...which may or may not have been local but I went with it anyway cause I've been wanting to play with breads for a while.
It was the cheese that posed the problem. I intended to just go to the FB and hit up Cowgirl but they were closed, so I wandered in the Rainbow cheese aisle for a while reading the little signs and trying to gear myself up because I don't even like cheese anyway. I try it raw and it makes me gag. I was sad and frustrated in the cheese aisle knowing there's all these little Sonoma county cheese maker people and wondering why Rainbow didn't have more of an emphasis on their products. Thinking whether I wanted to go with goat cheese, which I tend to be ambivalent toward or not like at all, or non local fresh mozzarella. I had the mozz in my hand and was going to leave, but rounding the corner of the cheese aisle I caved and went back. I picked up some Redwood Hill goat cheese that looked oozy and unappetizing and said fuck it. I'm buying heirloom tomatoes and I don't like tomatoes really. I'm making pizza dough. I ate goat cheese last week in the new Frog Hollow turnovers (summer squash, corn and goat cheese, yum!)This is the only night I have to give this project this week and I'm not pussying out in the cheese aisle.

I can't pretend anymore about food. I can't claim any relationship to vegetarianism when I eat fish and fowl and just had bacon and foie. No matter how much I love tofu. I have to own up to it now:I eat mushrooms and I eat tomatoes in things and I make grilled cheese and zaatar sandwiches and I can't speak anymore about the way that I eat in those terms that I used to, which is to say: egg whites only, all vegetables except mushrooms and olives, no tomatoes raw, no meat except for chicken, no cheese except cooked and then only some kinds, no food cold that could or should be eaten hot. No cold pizza, no cold leftovers, no picnics, no things. Oh! And no sandwiches, except pbnj.

Why? I didn't really have a reason, except "I don't like it." And still cold cheese makes me gag and un-warm food I'll choke down if I HAVE to but I won't like it. But those rules are all bent.

I moved out here for food (yes, it's ridiculous, but it's also true). I want to eat locally one time a week because it's a commitment to the culture of food and the values I try with my meager income to support. It's easy to say that you support farmers and farm markets. It's easy to tell everyone you love about the farm bill. But it isn't easy for me to go to the market once a week and put a meal together out of food that's traveled to me in an hour or less.

How, incidentally, was the pizza? The dough was ok. I used my recipe from school because it was in cups not ounces. It wasn't amazing but it was fine and I've got three balls frozen for later use. The goat cheese smelled bad in that funky cheese way. It wasn't great alone. When mixed with the tomato, the scallions and some parsley I had kicking around from the Berkeley market the week before, it tasted very good indeed.

On Saturday I stole ten minutes to shop the FB market. I zipped around in my Sox hat and got nods and smiles, picked up a few more heirloom tomatoes from Eatwell (Pineapple, Green Zebra) and some divine looking leeks and basil from Ella Bella, bread from Acme, and was back to tend the ovens without too much chaos in the Frog Hollow system. A little chaos, of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job.

Tonight I cooked up a sauce with the tomatoes and basil and some shallots and ate it with the remainders of my local vegan whole wheat pasta (sheesh).

How do you support the things you value? The things that are so entrenched within you that you don't quite see how other people don't hold them close the way you do? I've worked at farmers markets and I work for farmers now. I've worked on farms. I still hope one day to own some land in the Hudson Valley where my best farmer friend can farm and grow me some fruits and berries for pies and such, even though at this rate we'll never be able to afford to live there unless we live in the boondocks reaches of Ulster County.

Tonight while I made pretty use of the things that smelled of summer, I cut three tomato pieces and reserved them from the sauce. As a child I'm told I used to eat raw tomatoes, but never (and quite vigilantly) since, except in salsa (and just now I'm making the connection that it's rather odd to eat salsa, or pico de gallo, and not tomatoes, but if you know me then you know how I'm often odd that way). I popped them in my mouth to taste the difference. Green Zebra, you win. I'm taking you home again one day soon.

On my mind:
thyme-ginger shortbread
peaches...and rosemary? good or bad?
divine soft nectarine cake
whether the panna cotta should stay or go
what to do with rose geranium
when shall there next be good plums
why my dreams have been so intense lately
cinnamon ice cream, or oatmeal, if i can find some freezer space to chill the bowl

Keeping lots of secrets at the moment. Went back to Oakland tonight and going back again next week, I believe.

local eating part 1

Wow. To my newest reader and oldest friend {like, ever, seriously}, welcome! Zaatar, wicked addictive, so tell me where do you get yours and what do you do with it? I live in California now...my accent blends right in.

My oldest friend and I used to make cookies at my house, and answer the phone as if we were the only bakery we knew in the next town over {Quincy} making cookie orders for people. And we used to write books together too. And here I am, still baking and still writing, though not as much {of the latter} as I should be doing. Holding off for one more week until the visitors leave.

Today my mother and I went to the Tuesday Berkeley market and got fresh whole wheat pasta made with Vital Vittles flour, crimini mushrooms from the mushroom people, and a whole of of vegetables (summer squash, zucchini, salad greens, tomatoes, shallots, parsley and garlic) from the farmers (including Dirty Girl and Full Belly, though I'm not sure who else because we were in a foodie haze).

We were actually looking for that new heartthrob of mine, lemon verbena. In the July Gourmet there's a special section on ice cream and it features lemon verbena, and my mother became enamored with the idea of making lemon verbena ice cream...which of course I supported because lemon verbena is my new reason for getting up in the morning, and because this meant I'd have some birthday ice cream, which is half of the ice cream + pie equation. So after we stalked the market unsuccessfully for lemon verbena, I discovered she actually thought we were looking only for verbena leaves to blend with lemon flavored ice cream! Which made sense, after all, because she was seriously after this taste experience she'd never encountered and I wasn't sure how to react to that. How do you decide to want something you've never had? How does the initial obsession take root, and is it really worth the bother? Like foie, for me, or now, like the idea of making violet ice cream (which in reality would probably not taste like much of anything at all unless mixed with other ingredients, or would probably just taste flowery in that lavender sort of way, but which right now has got me craving).

After the veggie explosion, we went to the Berkeley Bowl for some Acme bread, morel mushrooms and more unsuccesful attempts to get some lemon verbena (the produce guy we asked had actually never HEARD of it and wanted to know if it was the same as lemon thyme).

We made a salad with the salad greens, shallots, parsley and carrots from an earlier Berkeley market trip and used some of that Stonehouse aged Balsamic and olive oil to dress it...their Balsamic doesn't have that syrupy pine tree taste that,come to think of it, mastic has. So I like it. Then we sauteed up the veggies, added some red wine from an earlier Napa trip and read about the farm bill while we waited for the whole thing to come together. It was tasty. Not very adventurous or unusual, but local and quite seasonal and easy.

Ici this afternoon was crowded. I got one scoop of the Santa Rosa plum sorbet and a scoop of the rose pistachio. The pistachios were candied, which was a nice touch, and the ice cream was very much rosewater...but were there actual roses, and if not, what made it pink? That one evoked a comparison, of course, to the Oleana days and the mastic ice cream, and the nougat glace. The Santa Rosa plum sorbet was a little tart, perfectly plummish, and the ideal consistency. The kind of sorbet I am never able to make myself. I made my happy ice cream eating face for a very long time, on the way there, and on the way home. I think I'm beginning to accept that ice cream is my thing. Perhaps at times I wish chocolate were my thing, or cakes (and I always thought cakes were more my thing than they seem to be),but I'm okay with it. Cookies are not my thing. Muffins, no. Pie, sort of,although fruit is not my thing. Ice cream, though? It always inspires.

apples, big and otherwise

Did you listen to Fresh Air on NPR today? Russ Parsons was on and it was all about seasonal fruit! I learned that Red Delicious apples are made so red by the very thing that makes them taste bitter and not at all how an apple should taste. And new apple breeds (heirlooms or hybrids?) started coming into popularity--beginning with the Fuji, bred in Japan and then trans-atlanticized to our shores so we could grow them and sell them to Asians, in the day before anyone cared about local food--and people could really begin to taste apples again. Apples that tasted like apples.

I think my first trip back east will be in time for apple picking. But my cute new dogwalker just sent me this article which made me want a different sort of apple. New York New York, the bitter apple. My love-hate relationship's been turning sweet lately as I miss the idiosyncrasies of that city.


This morning my friend Dale invited me to join goodreads.com. Because I am a sucker for books and literature, I did, and invited many of my friends to join, thinking it would be really sweet if they did but believing none of them would. Over half of them did! And many sent me emails or called me. One even accused me of writing about all of these incomprehensible things here--blah blah blah buttercream, blah blah blah chef-name-drop, blah blah blah pate sucree. But then we talked about maybe meeting up...in New York.


Today I connected with my friends through literature. Wouldn't it be wonderful if that happened every day?

nuts and bolts, and yeast

(I used to live on a farm).
I say that I don't like fruit, but this is not the case. For years I've naturally gravitated toward a locally-grown fruit policy: I don't eat much fruit because most fruit, when you live in the Northeast, tastes like crap most of the time. I have always adored a few things: cherries, Maine blueberries, raspberries and apples. Apples I'm very particular about. They're more of a memory-fruit, a ritual. My mother always made apple pie (and she still does, but she does not make her crust). Every year we'd go picking, which when you're little is an excuse to climb apple trees and when you're big is an excuse to act little. It was only in college when I worked at an orchard that I really got to figure out what kind of apples I prefer, and now I'm loyal to a fault. I'll make do with Cortlands for eating or baking but it's Northern Spy that I prefer, both for the poetics of its name and for the reserved beauty of its delicate colors. Pale pink meets spring green. Winesaps are a different breed, small and dark and painful to the teeth on first crunch.

The other thing my fruit farmers taught me well were plums. They'd been a confusing fruit, sometimes bitter and sometimes sweet, and I think I feel about the plum how most people feel about the peach. There's something deliciously sexy about its juiciness, its softness and its earnest nature. I tried long ones and skinny ones, small ones and red ones and blue ones, and I never learned the name of the plum I liked best, but they're small, blue-ish and matte.

While plucking peach leaves at work this weekend I made a resolution to go deep with stone fruit this summer. I'm going to try everything Farmer Al puts out until I understand peaches, nectarines and pears the way I understand apples. I'm going to go slow, and I'm going to be thorough. It may require lots more trips to the Berkeley Bowl (currently I've got Santa Rosa plums and Blenheim apricots in house). I'm going to take fruit apart. Give me a hammer and I'll crack open pits, make noyau ice cream. The peach leaves are frozen, cooked down into simple syrup, infused for custard, but what else? What next?

The knowledge I want may not come this summer, and that is okay. But it's going to start and it's an education that's long overdue. I don't really know fruit. While I follow the incorrect crisp recipes at work and come out with watery, weird cherry crisp, the guys eyeball tapioca flour by the handful and get rock-hard crisp. It's all ratios, baking. AP or cornstarch or tapioca. I asked my boss what to read, because she'd know. She makes jams and crisps and puff-pastry-filled concoctions, and she was vague. How do you transfer a lifetime of knowledge? How do you give someone what your hands have learned? How can you teach them to go by sight, instinct, educated guess? She suggested I read the pie bible. So yes, we'll hit up the library this week and take a walk around Lake Merritt (hit up bakesale betty's or ici or cafe fanny while we're running around, perhaps).

There are cultures and yeasty concoctions brewing around the cupcakery this week. Lavash ferment for crackers I'm baking tomorrow. I started the ferment Friday with some bread flour and water, today we added honey and prepared the dough, and after a long slow rise in the walk-in tonight she should be good to bake tomorrow with some malden salt and pepper. There's also a sourdough starter we're working on with raisin water, and cake flour (for now, till we get something with more gluten).
Michael Ruhlman has some great things to say about bread in "The Making of a Chef." I miss bread. Most of my fellow bakers at the cupcakery are disinterested. They'd rather decorate cake. Bread is so calming. Reliable. Sexy, if you know what you're doing. Bread responds to the weather, the air, the hiss of steam or water in a hot oven. Bread is about controlling your variables and adjusting for time. I love the ritual of kneading, waiting for first rise, shaping. Patience. I miss the sour smell of yeast and the feel of risen dough, the way it turns under your hands as you ball it. I love how the dough responds to my bread knife (I love that knife) when it's scored. I may be in the pleasure business but bread's practical, economic, never expensive.

I wrote a story about bread as ritual. It's in need of a redraft, but as it stands:

Eleven o’clock that night Leti banged on the door to my room. She showed me her bread, which was lumpy, misshapen and rock hard. I rapped it with my finger, and the crust tore into my skin. "Um, nice," I said. "I’ve got to get up early, though, just make sure you clean the kitchen before you go to bed, si?"
"It’s awful," Leti said. "I followed everything Henry told me. This looks like shit." Leti’s eyes threatened to overflow with tears. She wanted my friends to like her, she said.
"I want to have something for the party, you know, something nice. Everything’s so nice up here." She gestured with her hands at the air around us. "Your apartment, she added, your job, your friends, you have such a nice life, Junior," she continued. "Dios mio, be happy with it!"
"I see how you look at him," she said. "Your Will. I know how you feel, baby, I’m sorry."
I told her I’d need to take some of her sourdough starter. Will was not fair game for conversation. "I’ll take it to Stephanie." Stephanie was Abeille’s patissier and her breads were legendary. "Let me take the bread, too. I’ll help you fix it."
I didn’t want to help Leti, not at all. I wanted my house back and I wanted my friend back and I wanted a man in my bed.
"There’s something I want to tell you, about Ramon," Leti said. The no-good.
My capacity for compassion was exhausted, and I told Leti to save it. I shut the door on Leti and tossed her ugly bread on my dresser.

notes from the kitchen sink

Information is the currency of every kitchen.

Apparently I understand enough Spanish to be drafted to help the dishwasher ask a question about his schedule to the boss (but really, I don't).

There's always a secret code of glances, a reason behind the style of walk or tone of voice or measured pace of work. I get in trouble in these kinds of systems because I don't like to play the game. Information=currency (but food=love, right?). I try hard. I voice concerns. Even if they're not always welcome. Today someone tried to convince me my concerns weren't welcome but then apparently that wasn't the case, but check back with me next week because I might have a different opinion about the matter then.

It's just food, people. Some famous chef or other once discussed never sending out a plate you weren't 100% satisfied with, that didn't represent your best. No half-assed adequate food, nothing you weren't proud to put your name behind. If it wasn't good enough fix it. Replate it. If it's too salty bake another batch. If it isn't right, don't bother. I'm trying to work up to that standard. I'd love to one day be there. Sometimes I am. Go have some bread pudding. Or cupcakes. Do it right, and quickly. In the workplace, I require two things above all: discipline and communication. And the secrets (the secrets of bakers, the secrets of managers, the secrets only the Mexican guys know, the secrets that don't translate from English to Spanish or back around) just fuck with my mental mise.

I'm doing lots of cleanup duty at the cupcakery, being the last baker there. I'm cleaning out the dishwasher, organizing the walk-in, writing the inventory count. I'm learning the nuts and bolts of its daily grind, the kind of things you only assimilate by doing over and over, thinking each one is beneath you. Until it hits you how they accumulate. How you know things that others probably don't simply by being aware and by cleaning up every day. If you want to know the politics of a kitchen, ask its dishwasher. So every task is education, if you approach it the right way.

I'm getting all sorts of crushes lately. Inappropriate and silly crushes. Perhaps because it's warm and the fruits are crashing into each other, peaches old news by now since plums and nectarines are sighted (but the new peaches are better, and I grin slyly while I eat small bites but save my enthusiasm for the Jade nectarine, so juicy I thought it was a plum). Maybe it's the bounty of the earth. Maybe it's having a home in the city at long last. Likely it's a phase, but I avert my eyes lest I blush. Too many crushes. It makes me giddy. I want to bake them all cupcakes. I want to make them all pie. I want to keep wearing a stupid smile while I work twelve hour days and figure out how to keep my mouth shut, how to make less of a mess of the powdered sugar, how to make a peach gelee, how to end a story so it resonates in the white space of the page.

Think about fiction with me. Eat plums with me. Recite Wallace Stevens though and I'll bake you anything you might ask for. The weather is bounty and I want to get out and play in it. Go camping. Biking. Hiking. Sit around and eat lots of ice cream, with or without cupcakes or pie.



(These, apparently, are the best cupcakes I ever made. I made them last 4th of July for a BBQ. Coconut buttercream (one of Cheffy's perfect recipes). Dyed-pink cake from some crap Nigella Lawson recipe. Decorations. These cupcakes were gone in under five minutes and some folks were two-fisting them. I'd like to think I could do better now...)

cake testing, yet another batch of ice cream

Today I went to the Berkeley Farmers Market. It was interesting. Someone gave me blueberries (I think it's the same people who do the Ferry Building market) and they were different. Which is to say, they weren't really like Maine blueberries, which is what the reference point should be. It's possible they just really weren't all that ready to be picked yet, because they weren't very sweet. They rolled around kind of funny in my mouth, more tart than sweet, less like something I think of as blueberry and more like something strange.

While buying up carrots and onion for my excellent dinner, I was persuaded to buy some lovely looking basil from Full Belly Farm, as well as a bunch of lemon verbena. And I noticed they're actually selling lamb's quarters. Making a profit off their weeds. Seeing that made me nostalgic for farm living, and coupled with the blueberry interaction I pouted for the East Coast for a little while.

When I got home, I stripped the verbena leaves and infused a milk-cream mixture for ice cream base, to be made and possibly churned tomorrow. I used the veggies for a really excellent dinner courtesy of one of Rick Bayless's cookbooks. Chicken thighs with pickled jalapenos, onions and carrots. The colors were kind of flat, adn it smelled rather strongly of vinegar, so I was unenthused, but the food turned out to be great. Not perfect chicken, but damn good chicken. The broth was all oily and fatty, the veggies were tender. I'd only used oregano, allspice, salt and pepper but with the jalapenos it was all very spicy and flavorful in a nice, organic way. I picked two thighs apart. They were really well with the crispy skillet-fried zaatar potatoes I made. I ate until I was stuffed and happy and then I set about cleaning my room.

I also whipped up a batch of the troublesome polenta cake, using half semolina and half polenta. This cake was on the menu twice at Sonsie during my tenure there and I'm not sure where my boss got it, only thatit always gave him--or me--a lot of trouble. In his blueberry version, we could never get it out of the pan. In the orange version, it also sucked getting it out of the pan, but the cakes were shriveled and anemic looking and generally ugly. Here is the 9 inch polenta-semolina cake, a hybrid. I spent so many days stirring that pot of milk over the tiny range in the prep kitchen, getting in everyone's way while I waited for the flour to thicken. Now I like my version better. It's grittier, and when unadorned almost breakfast-like. I'm serving it, currently, with anise cream and candied rhubarb but I can see re-introducing it with blackberries or stewed stone fruits. I like how it cracks in the center, how serious it looks while baking, big belly puffed up before falling. It's an eggy, light cake with an unexpected corn grit, and it isn't very sweet. It's a good basic for something a bit unexpected, a bit homey. It's incredibly moist and goes well with loads of things. For some reason Michael always paired it with panna cotta but I really don't think I'd do the same.

Semolina Cake, Revised
2 c. milk
1 vanilla bean
1/2 c. sugar
3 heaping T semolina
3 heaping T polenta
3 eggs, separated
2 oz. butter, soft

Bring milk + vanilla to boil. Stir in sugar, semolina and polenta and cook over high heat until mixture thickens considerably. Best if it pulls away from the side of the pan in a clean motion. Remove from heat and temper into egg yolks. Add butter. Cool over ice bath. When cool, whip the whites and fold these into the batter. Pour into 9 inch pan and bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until tester is clean.

I can feel the weather changing but let's enjoy spring

cherry pitting time
Originally uploaded by the_jade_greene.

All of a sudden there are cherries everywhere. Last week brought the first flush of Al's cherries to market, and this week, as I was lazily thinking of ways to fix my polenta cake and wondering if I really wanted to do anything with cherries other than eat them raw, the cherries just started piling up. This morning, a 6 qt. pan slowly molding. By the end of the day, thirteen pounds more. I made a small batch of Cheffy's clafoutis base and used up scant handfuls making cherry financiers.

I have always though it funny when those big-shot savory chefs (like Tom Colicchio, in "think like a chef," among scores of others) discuss eating and cooking seasonally. Inevitably they mention the anticipation and excitement of spring's first blush(oh, ramps are coming! we've got the first snap peas!), which means something quite different on the east coast than in California no matter how locally you're sourcing your food. Maybe it was jealousy, or maybe just the pastry chef's suspicion of the ego of the rest of the kitchen world (so often it's their haughtiness that reconciles us to the background, and it's the rare chef who appreciates adequately her patissier). This Frog Hollow gig has always been intriguing because the one stated goal of the job was to use the fruit, and so I would be forced to rely on what the market brings in each week. With citrus and rhubarb there hasn't been much, but now we're talking maybe peaches next week and I'm already feeling the pressure of cherry season, the excitement of something new so tasty and the real urge to present it at its best.

My boss, Becky, came by today. She watched me scoop financiers and wash strawberries. According to my supervisor she was also going to work with me for a while, but this didn't happen. She seems content to let me do whatever, but I know she knows this fruit, as a baker, better than I ever will, and she used to work at Oliveto. She's got skills. When she tells me how to cook down the cherries in syrup to preserve them, I can sense the knowledge differential and I'd like to see sometime what she would teach me if she got into the kitchen.

This Thursday is the Cherry Festival! Free cherry granita at Frog Hollow and who knows what-all else. I really do love the Ferry Building.


Last night I had pasta with fiddleheads and garlic in a white wine butter reduction. It was good. Fiddleheads remind me of cold, almost wintry upstate New York weather, the day Jes and I went driving and got the maple syrup. I tried to epxlain fiddleheads to my french friend but apparently there's no translation. So I found pictures, which only left her completely flummoxed as to why I would eat plant buds, but not bacon.


Pigs are salty, I said, in reply. What I mean by that is that bacon is salty, but I have no memory of what pork as meat tastes like. I ate tuna tonight, for the first time. Shocking, I am.