I’m somewhat of a grump about bread pudding. It’s not that I don’t like it, but to me, bread pudding is something you eat at home, like fruit salad. I don’t need someone cutting up a bowl of fruit for me nor do I need someone tearing up leftover bread and serving it forth. (And handing me a bill for it.) Bread pudding is home…
In the winter, we often turn to the tropics to get our fruit fixes. Bananas are the most popular fruit in America, and they’re quite popular elsewhere, too. I’m happy with oranges, grapefruits, and chocolate (yup, cocoa beans are fruit – great news for fruit-lovers!) but sometimes it’s nice to throw something else in the mix, and I’ll grab a pineapple, some kiwifruits, a few…
This year, for some reason, fig season just refuses to end this year, which is fine with me. Figs have two seasons; the first is usually late summer and the second begins mid-fall. The second crop is better-tasting and toward the end of the season, the prices drop as the bounty increases. I was at the market the other day, planning to buy some figs, when…
It’s been an interesting year, hasn’t it? I’ve been on a bit of a bender lately, getting rid of (or at least, reducing) paperwork that’s been piling up and holds little interest for me. I have so much that I had to buy more paper (as in, paper file folders) to store all that paperwork in which seems redundant, but living in a place where paper…
There’s a lot of “stuffed” stuff that goes viral online and it wasn’t my intention to do a caramel-stuffed chocolate chip cookie. Yet there I was, faced with a few batches of caramels leftover from recipe testing that didn’t quite make the cut, and wanted to put the caramels to good use. So why not?
Welcome to 2021. We had sort of, um…an abrupt beginning to the New Year. After a punishing 2020 where the pandemic pretty much upended everything in our lives, a lot of us were looking forward to some stability, seasoned with some optimism about the virus, but things took a decidedly different turn in a direction not many of us could imagine. I stepped away from…
Peach Cobbler has become the most requested dessert around here this summer. I don’t think Romain had ever had a cobbler – I usually make crisps, which the French call crumbles. But I’ve been revisiting some cookbooks on my shelf that I hadn’t used for a while and pulled down The Pastry Queen by Rebecca Rather, who was the owner of several bakeries in Texas….
Depending on your point of view, I’m either the best or the worst person when it comes to shopping for fruit at the outdoor market in the summer. I tend to buy way, way too many fruits; since they ripen at different rates, I want to have my pick of the crop when I feel like eating a peach or nectarine. On the other hand,…
I could probably name about a dozen people who could be called baking legends. One of them is Claudia Fleming, who was the pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern, and whose book, The Last Course, became a cookbook classic. Claudia was known for desserts that managed to balance seasonal fruits, as well as chocolate, spices, herbs, grains, and even vegetables, not by using fancy techniques, but…
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