I want to start this post with a big thank you to Jennifer Schmidt, a fabulous interior designer, owner of JWS Interiors and blogger. She highlighted my blog and favorite blueberry pancake recipe yesterday in her blog, Affordable Luxuries! If you love to look at photographs of beautiful rooms (many that she designed), photos of how Continue >>
Pastry chefs in training at L’Academie de Cuisine use a book called “Advanced Bread and Pastry: A Professional Approach” as a reference guide. It’s an enormous 1,000-page book, with an overwhelming amount of detailed information for the average baker. It does however, have lots of great step-by-step pictures on how to make complicated pastry like Continue >>
Last year, I took a weekend writing seminar at the Bethesda Writer’s Center led by Kathleen Flinn, a Seattle-based food writer and journalist, who authored two best sellers Kitchen Counter Cooking School and The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry. The books are about her adventures at Paris’s famous cooking school Le Cordon Bleu Continue >>
I’ve been encouraged many times by friends to write about my baking mistakes. It’s fun to read about how someone screws up in the kitchen and then what they learn from it, right? So, I decided this weekend to make something at home that I had learned at L’Academie de Cuisine. I thought Quiche Lorraine. Continue >>
On January 15, I began my adventure at culinary school in Gaithersburg, Md. I’m taking a 20-week advanced recreational course in pastry arts on Wednesday evenings at L’Academie Cuisine, the best-known cooking school in the D.C. area. It’s a crazy 1-hour drive from D.C. because of rush hour traffic, but I hope it will be Continue >>
As I was reading Mark Leibovich’s “This Town,” a semi-delicious take down on Washington D.C.’s media and political culture, I started thinking about parallels to one of the many Woody Allen movies that I grew up watching called “Bananas.” In the 1971 comedy, Woody Allen’s character tries to impress his social activist girlfriend by visiting Continue >>
Cook’s Illustrated, my consistent go-to source for baking recipes, published a book last year called “The Science of Good Cooking.” The book has all kinds of great information about what actually happens to food in cooking and baking, why things can go wrong, and how to fix it. I’m such a geek about understanding how Continue >>
OK, I love pop-tarts. Almost any flavor will do, but I am partial to the brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts made by Kellog’s. Stick them in your toaster oven for 4 minutes. Yum! Molasses tasting sugar and warm, crunchy tart dough. Unheated, however, they are terrible. They taste like cardboard with some sugar. If you look Continue >>
My friend Jenn was recently stocking her new kitchen with cooking tools and she asked me to give her a list of “must-have” items for baking. As I began writing the list, I realized I have collected a lot of baking tools. I always feel like I’m getting a new toy when I buy one! Continue >>
Avid reader that I am, I love the food and literature blog “Eat This Poem,” authored by Nicole Gulotta, an LA-based writer who finds inspiration for recipes in poetry. She has such a great a idea.. put a poem in your mouth, chew it, enjoy it, swallow it, make it a part of you. Poems Continue >>
