Pizzaiolo: beautiful dining room, beautiful people, but the pizza part?

I went to Oakland's Pizzaiolo for dinner recently with old FH friends. We got there around six and the room was hopping, but there were still a couple of tables left so we didn't have to wait.

I absolutely loved the space. The adorable retro touches, like the vintage lights above the line that probably don't offer much in the way of light. The buttery yellow tiles on the wall, the red oval tiles on the pizza oven, the hardy wooden tables. It was clear that the chef, Charlie Hallowell, had put a lot of his time and his self in that room and it was clear watching the cooks on the line that it was a place people--not just customers, but cooks too--wanted to be.

I started with a glass of the housemade vin d'orange, a fortified wine with vanilla, vodka, seville orange and warm spices. The wine was indeed strong, and the seville orange and vanilla dominated the promised black pepper flavor, but overall I was happy with it.

We split two "antipasti" and a pizza:

Star Route lettuces, burrata with olive oil and Acme bread toast, pizza with stinging nettles and pecorino

The lettuces were sweet baby leaves lightly tossed with oil, salt and pepper, simple and refreshing although a couple of whole or nearly-whole peppercorns snuck past the garde manger cook and onto our place.

The burrata was actually my favorite course. Maybe it's almost time to revise that oft-used phrase I utter (you know, the I don't like cheese one). Perfect slices of lightly charred Acme levain and a chunk of burrata drizzled with olive oil. The consistency was strange, sort of like the first spoonfulls of cream-topped yogurt, slighlty resistant but then all creaminess. It was great to have the lettuce and the burrata at the same time for the textural and flavor contrast.
this is the burrata. photo by inuyaki.com

Our pizza came streaming hot with a blistering crust. Given that, I would not have expected the center crust to be soggy and slightly wet, which made it impossible to eat out of hand without resulting to all kinds of New Yorker folding strategies. There was something sweet--distracting because I couldn't place it--and there were (unmentioned in the menu listing) slightly crunchy red onions on the pizza. The nettles were wilted nicely and well cooked, except the long stems had ben left on and those were stringy.

I really wanted to like the pizza. I have the feeling if we'd ordered a different (read: nettle-less) pizza, it would have been better (no stringiness). But we were dining with a vegetarian and that was the one that leaped out at all of us. What we ordered was enough food to feed three people comfortably, which was nice. We walked out of there happy and not too full.

We actually didn't get dessert. Fairly full on what we ate. It was clear from the menu items, the menu language, the presentation and the dessert that Pizzaiolo is one of those ex-Chez Panissey places. The servers assemble the desserts themselves, on the restaurant floor side of the line. Drizzle of verbena anglaise, puff square, sauce with apricot compote, dust with 10x. Interestingly, most tables did seem to order dessert and the ice cream was a popular choice.

frolicking

Running around the town. Chez Panisse last night, Aziza tonight followed by an Ocean Beach bonfire and home to peach crisp that's currently baking. Frog Hollow Summerset peaches with some Woodleaf Blue Diamond plums tossed in for good measure. Running through the streets of Berkeley with a battered takeout box carrying the rest of my perfect eggplant pizza from CP, getting hit on by drunken boys (boys!) on BART, falling asleep standing up with my head resting on burned-up arms, trying to make it to Ici twice in one day, not being able to get there, eating gelato instead which just isn't the same as ice cream, even if it's violet flavored, cuddling the cutie pie, making BBQ plans for next week, having brunch and hanging out with normal people because it's the weekend and I'm not working for once, getting an open invitation to play with an ice cream machine(!!), spying on someone else's new ice cream machine(?!?), staying up until mid morning and being very un-bakerly, and of course, gossiping, for the last time perhaps, with the cupcake makers, about why the boss was surprised to hear I was leaving...I mean, really, surprised...and what I'm going to do next.

editing process, and fruit

Is it important at all to come out in my review of The Hours? To say that Michael Cunningham is a queer author and he writes good books, but hey, I like them also because I am queer.

Cunningham tells compelling stories about queer lives, and as I was figuring out my own sexuality I found solace in his work. I took out the last part of the sentence. The review will be up soon.

My friends are getting nectarine and blackberry crisp tomorrow. I followed the proportions in the Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook but changed the AP to tapioca flour and upped it by 2T, so we shall see if it is rock hard or watery or just right. And since my eggs and dairy are going bad, I should make more ice cream before this weekend.

I'm working on editing this piece I've been editing since June, I think. I've written about this piece before.It's almost done, but I'm not satisfied with certain elements of it, and while rereading it last night I realized the narrator spends a long time alone wandering around the kitchen giving pertinent backstory and revealing character information. And while I'll follow pretty much anyone around a kitchen, most people aren't me. And I think the tone of the end needs to change. Darker. Bleaker. Because I am no fun and I don't smile and life is just so bleak (oh wait, it's not 5 a.m.)

I've got to get more of my work out there, but it's a struggle (do I want it in print or is online okay? how do I feel about this piece? what's it worth to me?).

There is this one paragraph, a recent addition. I really like it. This paragraph tells the complete story of The Story. It's evocative and sad. This paragraph is why I like exposition so much more than scene, and that is my weakness as a writer (too much exposition. but the prose can be lovely.). This paragraph, if I expand it or extrapolate out of it to action, to scene, probably stands a better chance of being published than the seventeen page story it is from. When I think that I forget how to create sentences that are haunting or evocative, I should pull up this paragraph among other things.

If you are reading this, who or what inspires you?



And for the paragraph, here we go:

When Erin left, Rachel almost sawed through her hand, I got cleanup duty, and I could only get Rachel out of the house with booze. We were pretty much always drunk, and we worked drunk, and if I sneaked into the staff bathroom with Rachel to slug back tall boys of Bud and stroke her hair while she kicked the wall, how else could we have coped? I’d overhear the messages she’d leave begging Erin to come back. I’d spent my Sunday off cleaning Rachel’s dishes, washing her clothes, walking her dog because it had taken to peeing on the bathroom carpet, because she couldn’t get out of bed. Afterward in bars I’d space out with a pint glass, come back later to find a row of empties, have no idea how many I’d drunk only that everything felt so inessential. I’d go to sleep hungry, smoke on the walk to work to avoid Rachel’s chronic moping, and after a month, I started looking for a new job without telling anyone. I knew it was either Abeille or Rachel that I would have to let go of.

Lastly, I can't stop reading the Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook. I interrupt my friends to tell them that papaya trees are ambiguously sexed and that the lemons we spend so much on have probably been stored in a basement and picked while green.

I bought some nectarines at Safeway for the crisp (1.99 per pound as opposed to 3 or 3.90 at the FB). They were Arcticwhite or something like that. It felt surreal to be buying them in a supermarket no less, very much removed from what a fruit experience should be. I just knew they'd be bad. Not because they were rock hard (I was picking riper soft ones). I could tell somehow that they'd have no flavor and that they'd probable be ok fo baking and I didn't have an alternative if I wanted to give crisp tomorrow to the cupcake slingers. It hit me then what leaving SF would do...whenever I leave this town for wherever else I go I will probably have to say goodbye to fruit. Let me come to terms with it then while I am here, even though that only invites more sorrow in parting.

confessions, or "It's a POT show...and this is the nicest pot!"

1. My "I" key has been sticking for days. This is very annoying.

2. I'm really sick of making upside-down cakes. I have been making them every week since March, and I don't like them. They always sell really well at the FB market. Whwn I frst started making them, I tried David Lebovitz's recipe, was unenthused, *did not* try the FH recipe because it was basically the same as DL's recpe, tried a recipe that was in a recent Gourmet, and tried (with most success) the recipe from Chez Panisse Fruit. I've adapted the CP recipe and that is what I have been using since, oh, April, and I've been okay with that until this week. I tasted one this Saturday to make sure it was all right since I had to trek over to the cupcakery before they were finished, and I took one bite and threw the rest out. There's nothing I shouldn't like. Brown sugar caramelly ooze. Pluots and nectarines. The cake part is always disappointing bad, tough enough to endure fruit without getting soggy, kind of bland, the sort of cake that makes people say they don't like cake. And I'm frustrated because I thought I solved this. It makes me wish I were still staging at Oleana, because every single time I told Maura I didn't like something (bread pudding, meringues), she would show me a version of it that would change my mind completely about the item in question. How do I reinvent this cake? It takes a lot of time to make it and I don't want to put the tme into something I don't like. And why don't I like it when it's got everything I should enjoy?

3. I ate pepperoni grease yesterday. The pizzeria across the street sent us over a free pizza, half cheese half pepperoni. And the slice of cheese I picked up had somehow been infected with meat grease, because during the first bite my mouth flooded with that flavor, which I haven't eaten in probably 13 years. I ended up eating about half the piece, because I was hungry, and *minded* the meat flavor, but wasn't really *eating* the meat. Eventually it got to me, so I just pulled off the crust. On the long walk back to my car, I felt the grease all slick on my tongue and that was uncomfortable. I had to endure until I got home. What is pepperoni, anyway?

4. I took one dozen cupcakes from my job and brought them to the Slideluck Potshow. I am allowed to take as many cupcakes as I want, whenever want, but it's kind of mean to do it when it's the last dozen cupcakes and the store is still open and customers want cupcakes. And I could have stickered the box so potluckers could see where the cupcakes that were gone SO fast came form. But I didn't. I also brought lavender walnut shortbread cookies.

5. And I thought for a good ten minutes about stealing the big Le Creuset from the potluck table. That's terribly, horribly wrong and immoral. Yes, those things run about two hundred dollars, and yes, really I want one but I'm not a thief. My friend said he'd take it if I wasn't going to steal it, because he wanted one too. The getaway car was around the corner. t would have been so, so easy especially once they turned off the lights. I always think about stealing things I really want.

6. Did I confess already to having a plot to steal my favorite cookbook out of the Boston Public Library. This plot was hatched in May I guess, and Leah was going to join the BPL, check out the book, and mail it to me. even told her specifically where it was and that it was hard to find, but should be there. She couldn't find it, and the plan never proceeded. At that time, the book was going for about 100 on used book sites. Now it is up to $474.00. Retail cost of $40. I'll never find it. Not even at the Strand.

7. Something odd happened to 2 of the 4 buttercreams I had to make yesterday. I have made a lot of buttercreams and by now I know what they look like when you have whipped your whited with sugar for plenty of time before adding cooked sugar, what it looks like when you add the sugar before the whites have really peaked, how it takes longer or shorter to firm up, and so on. n both of these instances I added a small portion of granulated sugar while shipping whites but they never got to soft peaks. The liquid whirled around in the Hobart bowl looking like skim milk. The first time poured the hot sugar. The next time I just dumped it out. The bad batched settled into white foam on top and yellow white on the bottom. I used a mixture of Eggology whites straight from the jar and some whites cracked in-house for the 4 buttercreams. am kind of glad it happened twice even if it was a waste of product and time, because t makes me feel more like the whites were contaminated (or the bowl was dirty or something) than that I personally fucked it up.

8. I don't enjoy decorative work. Even though my piping skills are now adequate.

9. I'm feeling really sensitive to sugar lately. I'm trying to east less processed sugar and more fruits (!?!?!?!). This is pretty much against my philosophy of living. So I hope this sensitivity goes away soon.

10. This whole week (last Sat. market, Tuesday market, and yesterday's market) I have bought nothing but fruits from the FB market. Yesterday delicious grapes again and some figs from my Sox fan at Knoll Farms.

I manhandled a ton of figs at the Slideluck Potshow, because I wanted to eat one but only if they were really ripe, plus I was afraid they weren't going to be as good as the ones from Knoll. I ate peanut noodles and homemade noodles and a really sexy key lime tart. I met my first food blogger and he was wearing leather suspenders and he loved my shortbread. When I fessed up to having a food blog myself, he said he'd blogroll me. I was also made to try a vegan{no dairy/no fat} broccoli soup. This man came up to me and my friends and sad to me (and only me) "Hi, how are you, I made this soup, no one's eating it, you should try it." So I did. I told him it needed butter and cream (such a pastry chef), and pepper. Then I told him he needed to try my cookie. We had the most San Francisco conversation, the three of us, it was all about sustainability and markets and not at all about art.

About the art, it was really refreshing to see an art show. It made me a little sad for the artist I used to live with who once made me a cowboy drawing on a lightbox and who had a wall full of drawings of cutie pie. I have such a crush on visual artists. It has always depressed me that I'm not talented in that way (not that being a writer isn't thrilling in its attention to detail and long, lonely hours--kind of like being a chef). Photography has been on my mind a lot since the Leica dream. These days I feel like everyone things they're a photographer because they know how to compose a shot and they've got a digital. If they're one step above that, they can play with the color balance or saturation in Photoshop (confession: I first started playing with Photoshop back in 97, 98...back when digital photography was a little amusement on a day when the darkroom was crowded). What was so refreshing about the slide show for me was the little things that get lost in the automatic digital age...the color balance, the precision of focus, proper use of lighting, nightshots or blurred shots that say something and don't just look cool (and if I said "cable release" would you know what I meant?). I was always drawn to photography because it was a visual art I could do, and I put in enough time to be ok.

What I actually never realized until last night was how narrative photography is, or can be. This despite the fact that I have actually had so many narrative photo projects myself. I must have known instinctually (it's a writer's art, just like pastry cheffing is, and foil-fencing), but until I saw on the cement gallery floor with my knees up and watched the slide show, feeling like a kindergardener at nap-time and about that tired, too, it wasn't anything I could have voiced. My favorite photographers are even narrativists (Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Nikki Lee, Mary Ellen Mark (though she is less), and for old time's sake Dorothea and Ansel). It was a nice realization to come to, even though haven't touched my SLR in two years (it's got an undeveloped roll of California pictures in it, of all things). It made me feel more comfortable with something I have grown so distanced from. And it made me feel like my favorite art still has merit, authenticity and fun. Photography isn't dying in the age of digital. The book isn't dying in the age of internet. {But what of darkrooms and publishing houses?}

I'm totally going to make dinner now and work on some writing. I have so much to do before the Alabama trip including somehow go to Oakland to return my library books (I was happy to realize that if I do this I can use the free printers at the Oakland library instead of the expensve ones at SFPL), go to the SFPL to pick up a book I should have read a long time ago but is now impossibly trendy, made Chez Panisse reservations, get a haircut so don't look like a scruffy teenaged boy in a dress (though that would be a new sight for Alabama)...

jam-time!

I figured out what I want to do with those pluot-plums in the freezer, and the wad of rose petals I ganked from the Albany shoreline trail and my old Fruitvale house. Plum-rose jam!

I haven't made jam in a long time, not since culinary school when we made buckets of jam, any and all flavors. Some of them are still sitting around my Somerville house. Some were given away as presents. Not sure when I will get around to this jam, but likely I'll try to get a sourdough starter going so that my the time I'm jammed up there will be good toast. I am such a bread-brat these days; I only eat Acme.

My favorite jam excursion is from my days on the farm, when I went across the river to my favorite farmer EVER's house and we had gallons of strawberries from the PFP and we made jam all day long, some with pectin and some without. I'm sure we talked about love, and why we love the wrong people or love too soon, too long, or without giving away all of ourselves. But now I only remember the jam.

I've got three fresh burns from last week as a reminder not to work distracted, and worked distracted all day.


I just got to say to a friend Autumn leaves and apples!

This is why I'm going to Boston in October (and hopefully NYC, the city I love to hate, as well). I make up little lists that go something like apples, apple cider, apple cider doughnuts, apples, ICA, Oleana, East Coast Grill, Lydia Shire stories, Herrell's, Harvard square, crunch of leaves
or
finding the Doughnut Plant for real, McNulty's, Bklyn, Grand Central, the 6 train, my two favorite places on Broadway ever, will I ever eat at Gramercy Tavern, I could go to Babbo, maybe I'll go be a line cook like Bill Buford, still haven't been to Cafe Lalo, or the Cloisters, Spuyten Duyvil, did I really ever live here.

God I love apples and I'm so nervous they won't have my apples here.

Thinking of doing utterly crazy things, specifically two, but they are secrets.


No more cooking with herbs. Get over this lavender, rose geranium, lemon verbena, slight thyme kick. Find something else and it better not be a spice.

Ai, forgot to make Chez Panisse reservations. I'm gong to have to put Chez Panisse in my cell phone and that is kind of sad. Determined also to go to another fine restaurant while Leah's here...Where I have been in this town: A16, Delfina, Frisson, Jardiniere.

I know how the story goes!

She hasn't been telling it to me very well. She's shy, a little passive, good at hiding things, and working too many doubles for something like sanity. It was meant to be a story about food and power and how you might do something you don't want to do (because you are a nice person who doesn't have the bad habits many people in this industry do, and because you are in a committed relationship you don't really realize you're fucking up by working as hard as you do) for someone you respect a lot. A story about how fame fits into a knife kit, about unintentional sex (if that isn't an oxymoron), about two good people making bad choices for different reasons.

(It's not a good story, yet. The chef is too flawed and she has no redeeming qualities. I should reread Kissing in Manhattan and see how he makes Patrick Rigg a likeable character. Because if she isn't at least a little desirable there's no story.)

What it ended up becoming, thus far: a story about how you cover up love as it's leaving. About how you might have to let go of what you never thought you could lose. It's still about the impossible choices, the recklessness of desire, but it leaves the kitchen a lot, with hands smelling of garlic, and it sleeps on the sofa conflicted between two woman. I'm relieved, because at least I know now where it wants to go, and it's just a matter of following it down those dark paths.

I'm going out in a bit. I think. If the cupcake slinger calls me. Until she does I'm going to work on finishing draft 1. Then another story to get out to the writers group next week, dios mio, I just want to take another look at it before I send it, and by that time my writing buddy should be finished with the story I want to submit to Bloom next. Writing versus the real world.

I bought more of those sensational grapes today (and I found out what kind they are). The tiny green ones (early muscat? something muscat) remind me of the most wonderful dessert wine I've ever had (Naravvo late harvest riesling). I'm taking a friend to Chez Panisse (the cafe) when she comes and I'm hoping they'll still have it on the menu then, so she can taste it, although by then the grapes will be gone, probably. Can't have everything. But will I EVER have decent plums again? Last year they had my favorites at the time when I came to SF. And that time is almost here. I'm growing impatient for my favorites.

comfort food

Feeling a bit better today. Went out for lunch with my old buddy Brandon who just moved to SF from the Sacramento area--he's a Californian and we've been friends for five years more or less, and I am at this point one of his oldest friends. He took me to a Chinese restaurant on Ocean Ave called Emmy's where they gave us a big table for 8, because it was all they had. Perched in between large groups of older Chinese men we ate sesame chicken (for him) and orange peel chicken (for me) which wasn't all that spicy. In fact it was so not-that-spicy that I kept eating pieces of the jalapenos (and wondering why they didn't use fresh or dried red chilies) and ate the piece with all the seeds still attached. And then ate lots and lots of rice.

Man, I miss the Millhouse Panda and their spicy orange tofu. Sigh.

I used to always wonder in places like that if the chicken is really chicken, and if not what it is. I used to care much more but these days not as much. Lots of rice and watery tea and discussion of various girls and crushes and jobs. It's nice to be with someone whose patterns you know. And who knows yours. Eating warm, greasy, crispy food and lots of fluffy soft rice and feeling hemmed in by the low-lying fog--but in a safe and comforting way--is good. I don't have many connections here in SF, but I do get little bits of what I need from various people out here and so it's nice to have something like an old friend. Brandon is the one who drove with me here, and the only person I think that I know who would help me travel three thousand miles to change my life.

After Emmy's we drove out to Ocean Beach and scuffed through the sand, and then back to his apartment in sunny Visitacion Valley, and then he left for bartending and I came home to take the cutie pie to Bernal Heights park.

We went blackberry picking and I came home with enough to make wild blackberry ice cream courtesy of Chez Panisse Desserts, which I am a little skeptical of because it contains all cream and no eggs. If I were a better pastry chef I'd know how to cut down the cream, add some milk, and supplement the fat with yolks. But ice cream experimentation usually ends in ice crystals and not silky-soft perfect ice cream. Lucky thinking ahead, I put the cuisinart bowl in to freeze this morning. Also considering using up the rest of my cornmeal dough (if it's any good) and making some pies even though the berry seeds tend to annoy me. The dough's less than a month old (just barely) and came over here from Oakland with me. Meditation class tonight, good for the stressed out baker.

Cornmeal in the fluffy, soft sweet nectarine cakes, maybe? What is my recent obsession with the grit in things?

my mother used to call it "piggy meat"

Yeah that was me this morning at Cafe Flore. EATING BACON. just a bite, but oh, I'm slipping, I'm not me anymore, I'm down the rabbit hole.



There was SO MUCH foodie gossip at the cookout last night in an East Bay suburb. FB gossip too. My boss gave me some more background information on market stuff, the Slow Food fight was discussed, chef ventures rated, farmers markets in many towns discussed. We had many offers, for instant reservations at Quince, job hookups for me at ice cream joints, vacations, dinners, whatnot. Wild times were had.

It was really great to see the family of a dear family friend, which so happens to include my boss (whom I never see) and her husband. And it made me want to be the next Jonathan Franzen so I could write about how an interest seeps its way through one generation of a family, how its roots grow. How the children marry cattle farmers and fruit farmers and become the sort of people who covet reservations at The French Laundry, how the generation after that becomes chefs and bakers and coffee-makers. My own family is fairly small, and no one is quite sure where I got my passion for sweet things or voracious appetite for bookishness.

I'm not doing a very good job of keeping out of the East Bay. Chez Panisse two nights ago (upstairs, this time). Rocket salad with pickled onions and warm figs on toast. Morel ravioli in pea sauce. Warm fig and raspberry tart with honey ice cream (the most well matched flavors I've had in a long time in dessert, though it could just be I'm in a figgy mood). Tomorrow we're walking cutie pie at the Albany shoreline, going to the Tuesday market, hitting up the Berkeley Bowl and stopping by Ici so we can compare it to Bi Rite. In other words, doing all the day off things I normally do.

Bi Rite tonight was better than the Bi Rite we had at work (honey lavender, salted caramel, cookies n cream, all with those Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel chocolate things). The honey lavender was too much lavender for my taste. And I don't like honey ice cream unless it's that amazing honey lavender candied pistachio ice cream I made for my Chez Panisse dinner party. And their salted caramel ice cream is not Claudia Fleming's. Ici, however, does not inspire me to make comparisons to recipes I prefer. It only inspires me to eat ice cream and lots of it. Tonight, though, was a banana split with vanilla ice cream, caramelized bananas, hot fudge sauce, lightly whipped cream and walnuts, made slowly and carefully just for me!

It's my birthday soon and I really want some homemade pie and ice cream. Perhaps the rosewater mastic ice cream, or sweet corn, or oatmeal to go with something yummy and fruit. However I don't actually think I'll have time to make myself something for candle-wishing and growing older. I may very well be in Santa Cruz looking for the most perfect beach ever or in Monterrey communing with the fish

(my last birthday actually was also spent at an aquarium and, ahem, if you were with my on the last birthday, this one is sure going to be better). Should we make ice cream next week? If so what kind? Pie? Or would you rather just hit up my favorite spots, go zaatar tasting and remember those perfect desserts?

the joys of home baking

Are there better things to do than come home from your 48 hour work week, take your dog grocery shopping, and pick blackberries from your backyard? I think not. I've got perhaps 2 cups of ripe berries, which means tomorrow I get to make cornmeal dough from the Chez Panisse Fruit book and do tartlettes. I'll even give them to the writers on Wednesday if they turn out well...I've still got last week's pie kicking around and that Clover half and half the fridge is really just an excuse to make more custards since the peach leaf custards from last week didn't turn out so well. I took the proportions and infusion instructions from the peach leaf parfait and used them for creme brulees and the resulting custard is so bitter only my Persian mananger at Frog Hollow would like it :( (but the panna cottas and peach leaf syrup were flavored perfectly. hmph.)

The peach leaf custard itself, though (courtesy of David Lebovitz rather than Cheffy for the small batch size), is so smooth and sexy and eggy-perfect despite only needing 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven and not the 50 minutes the recipe suggests.

My old boss would be nodding gruffly and pleased to see me covering my custards tightly with foil and making sure they don't curdle. I'm pleased, but I want edible, sweet custard...ginger-lemon, perhaps, or plain vanilla bean with blackberries?

The roommate requested the chocolate cherry tart I was never than pleased with for her birthday present. She said she tried to think of all the things she'd had she'd liked the best recently and came up with that. I shrugged and asked pastry chef questions pertaining to which version she liked best, how she felt about the winey taste of Scharffen Berger 70% (she wants me to mix some with the E. Guittard 62% kicking around the house), discussed how I have to candy my sale bin cherries from last week's Berkeley Bowl trip. Still got my Blenheims which ideally I'll roast and think about how I want to roast my apricots for the vanilla babycakes (butter, pepper, honey, nada mas?). I'm very VERY happy I'm making vanilla cakes because I adore that recipe. And look forward to snacking. I'm happy to make her the chocolate cherry cake...but I wish I liked it better.

Cupcake craziness over for another week. Sometimes it gets daunting, looking at all those cupcakes. Thinking about all those cupcakes. I'll make 30 L of batter, or bake two Cambros and frantically make more. De-pan in quick 2x2 succession. The boss liked my piping technique this morning--I'm happy.

Dinner now. Mushrooms, zucchini, onion and roma tomatoes sauteed with pasta. Got them all at Mi Ranchito for a dollar. Soon, I'll get to go to the Thursday night FB market...but no mas Mi Ranchito. Add it to the things to miss about the East Bay.

chez panisse, the update

Monday night dinner at Chez Panisse downstairs.

We started off with almonds and olives. As usual, my mother suggested I try olives. On my last SF vacation, I tried olives at least twice, and grimaced each time. Since then, I've tried other olives--and had tried them again twice this weekend--but these were olives I found myself unable to stop eating. They were slightly warm, slicked with oil and salt, and tasted like good olive oil had solidified and grown strangely shaped pits. We ate our way through the helping of olives and then we ate more. They brought bread (Acme, of course). First course was a warm onion tart with a little salad of microgreens and egg, pancetta for my mother's but not on mine, mild flavors but very fresh. I think you'd like the pancetta, she said.

I don't eat bacon. But I've been thinking about it, I replied. I remember enjoying bacon, especially dipped in maple syrup. It's been on my mind, lately, bacon, and it's one of the only meat products I actually have a taste memory of. Probably because I keep accidentally eating it.

The second course was chicken with morels and hand-cut pappardelle with peas and spinach. I'd like to hope they make their own pasta, rather than cut the pappardelle from strips as Sonsie used to do. Being Chez Panisse, I'm sure this is the case (although I was surprised to lean my lovely olives were sourced from Provence via NYC, rather than locally). They look like little brains,I said, and my mother warned me. I proceeded to eat every scrap on my plate, from the perfectly moist chicken (perfect chicken #3, and again something that inspired me to make perfect chicken, though of course I wouldn't know where to start). What I liked about the morels was that they lacked that slippery mushroom texture that gets gummy in my mouth. And then I began thinking of getting some ramps, peas or fiddleheads and morels from the mushroom store at the FB, and learning to cook.

Finally, (and thank heavens it wasn't plain fruit with dessert) bing cherries in syrup with toasted almond ice cream. An unsightly, not-great S shaped cookie garnished the dessert. But everything else was perfect. Down to the half bottle of A. Rafanelli Zin we shared in homage to last August's trip to Healdsburg (and SF, before it became my new home).

gastronomic weekend

I'm glad I read this post on Eggbeater the night before I go to A16! My mother's coming into town this weekend and we're going to:

A16
Jardiniere
Chez Panisse

In return, I have to go shopping.
My cutie-pie gets here, too ;)

Tired baker tonight. Worked doubles, pulling shit together for the craziness of the weekend at both Frog Hollow and the cupcakery. Walking into messy sitations and cleaning them up get stiring. Time for dinner, beer, sleep, waking at 430.

(n)ice milk

The peppermint cookie ice milk turned out a lot better.

Still a little iciness/graininess to the texture, but it scoops really well and the creaminess dominates the ice taste. I'd like to try someone else's ice milk, because I feel like by its nature (having the same sweetness as ice cream, but less milkfat) it's got to be grainy. Ice cream depends on milk, yolks and sugar in order to have a smooth and creamy mouthfeel. Taking away one of those while not altering the others, doesn't that have to mean grainy? You know, that frostbitten taste...

Sweet Adeline looks really good. I might try to go there after my appointment in Berkeley today. That or head over to the gourmet ghetto and the cupcake place upstairs on the corner where the Peet's by the Chez Panisse is (love the vagueness of directions from my boss), and pick up some nice bread from Acme so that I can make sandwiches to take to work for lunch.

Vietnamese food in Oakland tonight with the roommates.

I miss Maura

I really miss Maura. From a story I'm writing about food and girls:

Maura gave me shredded phyllo dough for the kunefe. She knew I was trying to impress this girl, and another also, and my car had gotten stuck in a massive snowbank on the street outside my house. We’re not paying you, so here, she said, rummaging in the walk-in for a box of phyllo. It was the next-to-last time I’d be in her kitchen, and I knew it then, so I was stuck on trying to memorize every detail of what we did in the hopes that one day I too would be able to put together dessert half as complex, flavorful and heartfelt as everything she did. In one week, she’d finished putting together two new desserts for the menu, and she fed me samples: a brown sugar frozen chiboust with black walnut strudel, and tiny profiteroles with Arabic ice cream made from ground gum mastic and rosewater. The ice cream was minty and warm in my mouth, with the rose flavor. Another thing I’d come to crave. I lingered, offered to bring things downstairs, tried to stay with her, because she was the only person I’d worked for in the industry I liked and admired, and because I still thought she had so much to teach me.
I made other Lindsey’s kunefe the night before our date, shredding the phyllo in my roommate’s under-powered baby Cuisinart and soaking it in milk and butter. I opened a bottle of French champagne I’d had from New Year’s, popped my old cardamom pods in a baby mortar and pestle, and tore strips of lemon zest with my paring knife. The syrup simmered. The phyllo concoction baked, two layers of dough swaddling a mascarpone center, a sandwich I’d soak with syrup when it finished baking. Hungry, I read Chef Ana’s introduction to the recipe in the restaurant cookbook. Chef Ana described the perfect kunefe as a caramely, hot toasted cheesecake, and I thought I knew how it would taste just from reading her words. I could barely wait to cut myself a slice of kunefe, after I’d doused it with the syrup.
Mine wasn’t crunchy. The syrup was lemony, with the aftertaste of cardamom rolling around my mouth. Cardamom was a spice I knew I didn’t understand. I could describe it, I could taste it, but I knew that I had no control over how to use it. I could only mimic other’s suggestions, the mark of a weak chef. My kunefe was limp, and the mascarpone center no more than a schmear of cream cheese. I’d baked the dish for the time listed, and having worked with Maura to batch test recipes for food magazines I knew her process was perfect, but there was no crunch. The caramelization wasn’t as deep as I expected. I wrapped my sad kunefe in plastic. I’d wanted to give Lindsey more.

Learning by myself is fun. Having a boss who says, go, do whatever, just use the fruit, it's amazing. Especially less than a year out of culinary school. But I miss being inspired by someone I'm working with. Miette, not so inspirational. Interesting. Frustrating. Useful, I hope. Fun at times. It's very realistic. But I need to be in some kitchens for a while. Maybe Alice's kitchen (if Alice ever is in there), zesting fruit for the Chez Panisse kids. Or Elizabeth Falkner's artier-than-thou, tongue in cheek mecca of perfect lemon squares. Somewhere in this city I'm just getting to know. Maybe I just need someone to talk about food with.

David Lebovitz saved me

Emergency cake-making for people who've invited you for dinner is REALLY, REALLY challenging when you don't have a kitchen aid or electric beaters or anything to either cream butter and sugar really well, or to beat egg whites. it also makes the buttercreams and other frostings pretty impossible. Luckily I borrowed David Lebovitz's Room for Dessert from my new boss, and figured I could at least make Orbit Cake.

Orbit Cake: 2 sticks butter, 12 oz. bittersweet, i cup sugar, 6 eggs

Mix together eggs and sugar, melt chocolate with butter, add chocolate to eggs, bake in a water bath. What could be easier, and still taste like dense, rich, high class chocolate that you'll devour so fast you won't know for hours you've got chocoalte on your mouth?


Granted, it would have been a lot better if I'd used Scharffen Berger chocolate. But, Albertson's doesn't carry a lot. This was 2/3 62%, plus 1/3 Guittard semisweet. Well, next time, if it's only for me, I'll splurge ;)

Also made some vanilla pastry cream for a kiwi-strawberry fresh fruit tart. I bought a gallon of organic milk, since it was only a dollar more than then non-organic, and only found out when I got home it was fat free! Skim milk has no presence in a baking kitchen. I freaked out about how the texture of the pastry cream would be and if it would taste fatty enough or if it would be too watery and ditched Delphin's recipe for something I found online crafted specifically for skim milk. It ended up tasting okay.

skim milk pastry cream, for eemrgency use only:
2 c. milk
qs vanilla
4 T starch (I used AP flour here)
6 T sugar
4 yolks

Cook milk, vanilla and half sugar to boil. Ribbon remaining sugar and starch with yolks. Temper yolks into milk mixture and bring to boil, whisking vigorously. Strain--that is if your house has a strainer--and chill. May need more vanilla or butter if you like fattier things. But it is acceptable.

Today at work today I made Chocolate Cherry cakes (also a David Lebovitz recipe, on my boss's request), and Banana Date bread (bastardized Hi Rise recipe) and pastry cream for blood-orange kiwi fresh fruit tarts. It was a pretty good first day in the I-get-to-do-whatever-I-want school of baking.

Cyrus

Oh, wow...Just found out the Cyrus pastry chef went to my little culinary school! How very impressive. They're all up for a beard and whatnot.

My pineapple rum compote is really good. It could be better-things could pretty much always be better-but on the whole I'm satisfied and I'd like to have it with cakes or shortbread and custardy things.

My friend Tara wants me to make her some tiramisu. I don't understand why people like tiramisu so much. I mean it's okay but there are ways I'd rather have my coffee and chocolate fix...like in an opera, or in Chef's Alhambra. Umh, the alhambra. Chocolate-rum goodness.

The kitchen aid and ice cream maker are coming Monday and I can't decide what to make first...dark chocolate ice cream, strawberry ice cream, all my doughs, upside down cake.

I got the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook in the mail today. And the Scharffen Berger cookbook from the library.