October 2008 archives

I feel like I deserve a majority of the credit (or blame…depending on how you look at it) for the cupcake craze. I was eating them decades ago, when no one gave them a second thought. And now, as someone who teaches baking told me, making and selling cupcakes in America is like printing money.

I’m not much for trendy foods, but for some reason, mid-day yesterday, right in the middle of my Japanese bento box lunch of chicken katsu and seaweed salad, I was seized with the overwhelming desire for a cupcake.

Continue Reading Citizen Cake Cupcakes…

Stop the presses!

Although I think in this day and age of online publishing, what do we now say—stop the downloading? Somehow, that doesn’t have the same sense of urgency to it.

Still, this is important.

I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but my search for the perfect burger was not to be resolved in Paris.

Continue Reading Joe’s Cable Car Restaurant…

Is PPQ the best Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco?

I used to be in the camp of Vietnam II for the longest time, mainly because when I worked at a Southeast Asian restaurant, that’s where almost all of my co-workers ate.

That is, until I discovered Pho Phú Quôc, otherwise known as PPQ. Which is funny: I always guessed that they had to shorten their name since I’m probably not the only one that doesn’t know how to really pronounce “pho“.

Continue Reading Bun Bo at PPQ…

After a couple of too-lengthy flights, I finally landed in San Francisco. I arrived with a full agenda of things to do, and fortunately got all the not-so-fun stuff completely out of the way by the end of Day #2.

So now I have nothing to do for a whole week here—except eat!

Continue Reading San Francisco, CA…

One of the least expensive, and most effective, things you can do to improve the taste of your cakes, quick breads, cookies, and muffins is to switch to aluminum-free baking powder right away.

Baking powder a leavening agent, and it’s usually called for in recipes where there are alkaline (as opposed to acidic) ingredients. In actuality, baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is one of the ingredients in baking powder, which, when moistened, releases carbon dioxide, which causes baked goods to rise.

Even though no definitive correlation has been found regarding health problems arising from using regular baking powder and cooking with non-anondized aluminum pots and pans, I use it for the taste.

Continue Reading Why You Should Use Aluminum-Free Baking Powder…

If you want to see a normally placid French person go into a crazed frenzy, you don’t need to watch their reaction to me mercilessly butcher their language.

One just needs to utter a single word—cheesecake.

I’ve never met a French person whose face didn’t soften and melt at the mere utterance of the word, and le cheesecake is always spoken of with a reverence normally reserved for the finest cheeses and most exclusive wines.

Although can you find Philadelphia cream cheese here at various outlets in Paris, when you do find it, it’s prohibitively expensive. If you were to make your own cheesecake using four packages of the stuff, it’d run you about €20, which is nearly $30. Holy mother of Bristol Palin!

Continue Reading Cheesecake Brownie Recipe…