Speaking of fruit soup, do you remember the first time you had it? I do, back in about 1987. It was the closer of a late lunch I was having…outdoors, on the sun deck of a little hippie restaurant on San Juan Island, just a few miles offshore from Seattle. I remember tasting my first […]
READ ONThe National Restaurant Association Published their annual Restaurant Industry Forecast recently, and while I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet (like all industry pubs they ain’t cheap, so it’s better to mooch off a friend) I have seen some of the highlights. The most hotly anticipated new trend is bite-sized desserts, which have […]
READ ONI’m very grateful to a recent visitor from Austria who goes by the name of “Cooky”, who was kind enough to convert all the quantities on the “What Things Weigh” page into grams. This is an invaluable service since I am inherently lazy and would never have taken the time to re-measure all those items […]
READ ONBut since when did the Almighty ever ask for my input? Ze life, she has been a little nutty as of late, my friends. The very afternoon I left you, ten or so days ago, I received an urgent phone call that the wife was being rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Her pregnancy was […]
READ ONWith so much bakery yet unbaked, and so many presents yet unbought, I’m going to have to sign off a day early this week. But never fear, I’ll be back with bells on after the New Year, rarin’ to write some new crazy thing-or-other. For all the hard working bread and pastry makers pulling 18-hour […]
READ ONThis is a question that perplexed me for years, especially after several disappointing attempts to substitute powdered ginger tablespoon-for-tablespoon for the fresh stuff in stir-frys. The flavor difference was surprising, though not half as surprising as the “heat” blast that practically gave me brain damage. Indeed, a little goes a long way where powdered ginger […]
READ ONSo why does my humor seem to be turning to the morbid? I guess it was that reference to Hansel and Gretel. It brought to my mind one of my favorite gags from the faux-newspaper The Onion. It was just an illustration and a headline. The cartoon was a panorama of blood-spattered elves, wolves eating […]
READ ONIt’s not a sugared plum, in case that was your guess. Historically, sugarplums were just little sugar-coated whatsits (what were known up until the early 20th century as comfits). Maybe a caraway seed, a nut, a bit of a cinnamon stick, a raisin, or other little piece of dried fruit. Candy makers would cover these […]
READ ONHistory buff that I am, I can’t pass up a reference to sugar beets, especially since I was blathering about the Napoleonic wars only Friday. While chemists knew that it was possible to extract sugar from beets as far back as 1747, large-scale production of beet sugar didn’t occur until about 1813 in France. Why? […]
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