It’s a gumdrop tree. Favorite of little old ladies everywhere, except most of those are made of cheap green plastic and have had gumdrops stuck on them since 1959. This one is a deluxe mirror-finish aluminum model, given to us by my aunt for Christmas this year (her own auntie had one of the originals). […]
READ ONThis week I’m planning to make what may be the ultimate Pastry family Christmas treat: petits fours. I know what many of you are thinking: huh? What can I say? Ever since I was a tike, there has been a box of Nieman Marcus (alternately Marshall Field’s) petits fours under the Pastry tree. It’s a […]
READ ONLast week I mentioned briefly that while ginger was known to the Romans, they didn’t actually eat it, preferring to use it as a medicine. It turns out they weren’t exactly crazy in that regard, since modern science has proven that ginger does indeed have medicinal properties. Now, I should insert here that I’m not […]
READ ONYou can, though you probably don’t want to. It’s not that fresh ginger is more pungent, it’s not. The reason: because fresh ginger contains more gingerol compounds, which, even though they are closely related to the capsaicin found in chillis and the pepperine found in pepper, are what are responsible for fresh ginger’s bright, enlivening […]
READ ONAs longtime readers of joepastry.com know, politics is about the last thing I like in my food. Today the Wall Street Journal has a good essay on the rise of activism in the world of celebrity chefdom. Check it out. You’ll be agog, like I am, at the things Anthony Bourdain is willing to say […]
READ ON…was a success! Lots of solid entrants this year, including an office-casual Santa in a green sweater, a number of fine snowmen, avante-garde ornaments and a virtual forest of decked-out trees (notice also my little gingerbread baker on the bottom right in full kitchen attire). They’ll be tough to give away, especially if little Josephine […]
READ ONSo let’s say you’re a councilperson in Los Angeles and you’re planning to ban all quick service restaurants in South L.A. in an effort to fight fat. What about quick service restaurants that serve only healthy food? Tough one. They didn’t contribute any excess calories or fat to the problem. But then what precisely consititutes […]
READ ONAT&T. And is that Steve Buscemi as the voice of the ginger-dad?
READ ONIt’s impossible to know. Humans have been making ceremonial breads in all manner of shapes (especially and including the human form) since time immemorial. And even though gingerbread is a fairly recent innovation, there’s really no way to tell who might have fashioned that particular bread into a person-shape first. Even so, more than a […]
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