Food, Photography and Bon Mots
This is the easiest vanilla ice cream recipe ever. You should make it now before you are priced out of the vanilla aisle! During normal times, vanilla, approximately 80% of which is produced in the hardscrabble African island-nation of Madagascar, is the second most expensive…
For the love of plums… I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold –“This is just to say” by William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams…
It is turn-on-the-air conditioner hot here in Huntington Beach. Even tiny Juliet who thrives on two long walks a day just stares at me in disgust when I pick up her leash. Here she is giving me some too-hot-to-walk side eye. It’s certainly not cooking…
Yotam Ottolenghi. <sigh> This Ottolenghi recipe was featured recently on the NY Times food site and it is wonderful. The crumb is light and the almond flour gives this little cake a delightful texture. This cake is so good, in fact, that it is almost…
Wow! Just wow! What do you get when you combine a shortbread crust, a frangipani custard base and beautiful just-in-season apricots from the farmers’ market? This tender and absolutely stunning tart! Take my advice and eat this tart just warm from the oven when the warm apricots…
Apparently Queen Elizabeth is a foodie. She loves raspberry jam cookie sandwiches, white peaches, Dubonnet and gin, and chocolate biscuit cake. Scones are a constant at her tea table where she reportedly crumbles some of them up and slips them under the table to…
Olive oil in a cake? Yuck. Don’t get me wrong. I love olive oil. I regularly drive to Los Alamitos’ Antica Olive Oil store to buy the best olive oils I can find. There, I enthusiastically swirl, sniff, sip and swallow the various offerings freshly poured…
Did you know that if all the strawberries produced in California in one year were laid berry to berry, they would go around the world 15 times? I didn’t think so. Did you know that ninety-four percent of households in the United States consume…
Do the words five ingredients and gourmet dessert go together? Throw in the word fast and you have this gorgeous strawberry tart. Your guests will rave (in a good way). You may be unfamiliar with mascarpone cheese, the main ingredient in this tart. Mascarpone is a mild-flavored…
Joseph Campbell famously wrote: “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” Good advice but not always easy to do. The bliss I’ve been following at the moment happens to be a cake, and it is a wonderful cake…
