I’m having so much fun teaching at Love Apple Farms’ gorgeous teaching kitchen space I’m adding more classes to fill up the summer schedule. Check them out.

Mid-summer Jamming, Saturday, July 23, 12pm-4pm

White peaches, yellow peaches, nectarines, plums, pluots, mid to late summer is the time for stone fruits. In this class we will cover the fundamentals of stone fruit jamming. This includes the best method for coaxing natural pectin out of the fruits (so that we won’t have to add commercial pectin), safe uses of the delicious noyaux (the “stone” part of the fruits), and how to infuse herbs and spices to your jams (so that you can experiment with unique flavor combinations).

Plus, you’ll get to take home the jams we finish in the class, like the five in the picture above. Those are the jams we made in the Early Summer Jamming class in June, they were (clockwise from top) apricot-vanilla, whole strawberry compote with rose geranium, whole cherry compôte with lemon verbena, raspberry-ginger, strawberry-tonka bean.

Sign up here.

Thai Curries: Sunday, August 28, 11am-3pm (sorry, sold out)

Do you adore Thai curries?  This class is definitely for you. Learn the secrets of making fantastic curry pastes from scratch. (Plus, learn how to tell good store-bought pastes from bad, just for rainy days.) We’ll acquaint you with ingredients that may be foreign to you so you know how to shop, use, and store them properly. We’ll be making three different curries from the pastes, discuss wine choices that would go with them, and sit down to enjoy them together after class. Toss your Thai take-out menu right now, once you had a taste of your own curry you’d never order out again.

Sign up here.

Macaron Madness Workshop: Sunday, August 7, 11am-3pm (sorry, sold out)

This upcoming workshop will be the fourth one this summer! Yes, it’s an incredibly popular workshop at the farm. If you’re ever interested in learning how to make proper, dainty, delicious French macarons, this workshop is for you. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the photo right above this paragraph. They’re pretty, aren’t they? And you know what? I didn’t even make them. The students at the last workshop did! How cool is that, huh?

This is not a demonstration class, by the way. The only way to learn how to do macarons properly is to feel it and make it yourself. You’ll be getting your hands dirty and learning how to make perfect macarons just like they do in fancy French pâtisseries. You’ll also learn how to do three types of fillings: chocolate ganache, buttercream (with and without fruits), and caramel, Once you master the technique, you can go totally crazy with your own combinations. The limit is your own imagination! Plus, you’ll leave with the macarons you’ve made in class to share with [read: show off to] your friends and family afterwards.

Sign up here.

Ingredient: tomato, Saturday August 20, 11am-3pm

Cynthia over at Love Apple Farms calls this class Master Tomato Cookery. I think it sounds all too official. I prefer calling it tomato in all its beauty, or forms. Tomates dans tous ses états if you want to sound artsy and French. Either way, this class is about all tomatoes. If you’ve taken one of Cynthia’s famous tomato growing classes, your backyard garden will probably rain tomatoes later this summer. Even if you’re not a gardening type, come August and September our area farmers’ markets will be awash in tomatoes. Come and explore new ways to cook, savory and sweet alike, with this fantastic fruit. Yes, don’t forget, tomato is a fruit!

You’ll learn how make a simply spectacular tomato-parmesan tart, how to preserve your season with a savory tomato confit and a sweet tomato jam (or two). You’ll finish with Alain Passard’s famous stuffed tomato dessert: tomates confites aux douze saveurs.

Sign up here.

Now, here’s a timely recipe to try out my One Pie Dough to Rule Them All recipe I gave you last night.  Try it before the fleeting cherry season is over.  Do try, even if you’re one of those who couldn’t stand the generic, gloopy cherry pie – I’m looking at you Matt. Because this recipe, this ain’t your usual, generic cherry pie.  It might even be the best cherry pie you’ll ever tasted.  You try it and tell me.

The secret to this pie is the spices.  When I was tinkering with my cherry pie recipe, I thought adding some spices to it would be fun.  So I went to my spice rack and found a blend that I made for my French spiced bread, Pain d’Epices.  It’s got the usual cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove, but also with a generous amount of ginger powder, giving it an interesting, unusual character.  It turned out beautifully in the first cherry pie I baked for the season.  Now I won’t ever bake my cherry pie without it again.

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Is it hubris to call this a perfect pie dough recipe?  Well, it is perfect.  And do you know what’s perfect about it?  You can do it too.  Yes, YOU.  I don’t care what kind of sordid, tragic past you’ve had with other pie dough recipes.  You can forget it all and start anew with this one.  It will become your One Pie Dough to Rule Them All: pies, tarts, galettes, pop-tarts, you name it.  It will be the easiest and most forgiving dough you’ve ever handled.  It will be flaky and tender, yet somehow possess the strength of character not to crumble under pressure like other wimpy doughs.  Your slice of pie or galette will stay beautifully in tact to serve, only to surrender into tender, flaky, buttery, delicious crumbs as you bite into it.

Forget all the pernickety details everyone tells you about how to make a pie dough.  You won’t need to keep all the ingredients at precisely five degrees below zero.  You need not coddle it like a new born kitten.  You’ll put on your fiercest dominatrix attitude and you shall beat this dough into submission.  And, yes, it will like it too. Read more »

Here’s an easy, delicious and totally adorable dessert to do this weekend, fromage blanc cheesecake, baked into cute little jars.  You can make it even lovelier by topping with roasted fruits.  In this case I use tangy sweet nectarines scented with lemon verbena.  Nothing stops you from making this your own by using a combination of fruits, herbs, and even nuts of your choice.  What makes this cheesecake truly special, besides its oh-my-god-this-is-adorableness quality, is the luscious texture, like caressing you with satin, and the fact that you can make it by pretty much dumping all the ingredients in your food processor.

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I guess I should just come out and admit it.  My name is Pim, and I just made a vegan an almost-vegan dessert – peanuts/sesame/rice puffs/palm sugar caramel bars, to be precise.  And I dipped them in chocolate – Valrhona Araguani 72%, because there’s nothing good that’s not made better by a dip in Valrhona Chocolate.  The results?  They are totally crack.  I tell you, they are.

Like many great discoveries in this world – Columbus discovering “India” par example – I came upon these morsels of unworldly deliciousness entirely by accident.  Last weekend being Chinese New Year and Valentines day all rolled into one, I was looking some kind of traditional, celebratory sweets to make for the parties I was attending.  For the New Year celebration in Thailand, we make a sort of caramel we learned from the Portuguese, probably in the 16th century.  We call it ga-la-mae, a telling bastardization of the word caramel.  Galamae was, however, not my favorite dessert, but it got me thinking about another celebratory sweets that is also a caramel base, but this one, called Grayasat in Thai, has added nuts, puffed rices, and sesame seeds.  Crisp, chewy, nutty, darkly sweet, and ever-so-slightly salty, all at the same time, now this would be the perfect dessert to celebrate with this weekend.

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Let me start this post by saying I’m a madeleine snob.  A bona fide, unrepentant madeleine snob.  Don’t talk to me about those nasty little packets of “madeleine” by the cash register at your Starbucks.  They’re awful, with texture seemingly composed, somehow, of paraffin.  Those buckets of shell-shaped stuff masquerading as madeleines at Costco are not much better.  They taste as though they’re made of Twinkies – oddly spongy, overtly sweet and redolent of fake vanilla.  I don’t know what those pretenders are exactly, but I assure you they are *not* madeleines.

The perfect madeleine is elusive.  It’s hard to find even in Paris.  The problem is not that it’s hard to make.  As you will see after this post (and a little time in your own kitchen playing with the recipe) it is not the case.  Madeleines, even the perfect ones, are really quite simple to do.  The problem, rather, is that its perfection is fleeting.  It’s one of those things that are perfect minutes out of the oven, and then the quality erodes as the minutes tick by.  The nearest specimen to a perfect madeleine I’ve had was a plain madeleine, the classic, baked to order and served warm and crisp at the edges with coffee to finish a hearty meal at Alain Ducasse’s Aux Lyonais in Paris.  It’s been years, but it could’ve easily been yesterday.

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I could also call it the easiest fig tart, ever.  Really.  It has an astonishingly small list of ingredients: a pie crust*, some luscious figs, with a hidden layer of frangipane, which, despite the fancy-sounding French name, is simply a concoction of toasted almonds, sugar, butter, and egg that you can make easily in a food processor.

The key to the magic here is the frangipane.  It’s one of those things that sound far more difficult and fancy than they really are.  My frangipane recipe came from the one in Michel Bras fantastic Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts. It’s basically equal quantity (by weight) of almond meal, butter, and sugar, with one egg to bind it all together.  That’s a truly fantastic recipe, and one so versatile I find a use for it in practically all my fruit tarts, from the summery stone fruits to the fall harvest of pears and apples.  Right about now, with melting soft and tantalizingly sweet figs make an appearance all over the place, you can make a fig tart with a base of this frangipane and it will turn even the most ardent fig hater into a lover. Read more »

Sorry to have kept you waiting a while for this recipe.  I’ve just been a bit busy.  But better late than never, yes?  So, the ragu I made to go with my heretic pasta the other night was made with pork, because, as I said before, why offend only one religion when you can do three at once.  Ha.

The recipe came from Paul Bertoli’s amazing book, Cooking by Hand. This is not a book for the faint of heart, I should warn you.  The Ragù alla Bolognese recipe alone is over 1,500 words–but who am I to complain about long winded treatise on a traditional dish, you’ve seen my Pad Thai recipe, right?

The recipe calls for beef, ground chuck, skirt, or hanger steak to be precise, but I made it with ground pork butt instead, because my friend Beccy doesn’t eat beef.  (Yeah, you can choose your friends but you sure can’t choose what they eat!)

So, here’s my slightly bastardized version of Paul Bertoli’s Ragù alla Bolognese.  Hey, if you want the real thing you could always go buy the book.

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Keeping the romance alive

What do you do when you’ve been blogging for the better part of a decade? You take a break, a breath, and then find a way to refresh and renew the love that inspired you to do it in the first place. That’s what I just did. Welcome to the new Chez Pim.

Moving to WordPress

Change is tough, changing blogging platforms even more so. I was with Typepad for pretty much the entire life of the company Sixapart. That’s a long, long time, and it’s been a great collaboration. I cannot thank the Typepad team enough for their attention and support in those years. I send my best wishes to them on their new path at Say Media. I cannot tell you what peace of mind it’s been, to know that no matter what my Typepad blog was always there. It ran how it should no matter how crazy my traffic spike and valley. I still recommend Typepad wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to start a blog without knowing or ever caring about what’s under the hood.

As comfortable as I was with Typepad, I’ve long outgrown the platform. I pretty much single-handedly built and tweaked the old Chez Pim templates by myself. With my scant skills, it’s like building a house with the help of duct tapes and gorilla glue. It wasn’t pretty, I can tell you that. Plus, as a hosted platform, Typepad wasn’t flexible enough for me to do what I wanted to do. It’s time to move on. Say hello to my shiny new WordPress blog.

Not just a new coat of paint

The new design is not just a new palette of colors and some nifty graphics. It reflects a fundamental rethinking of where online publishing is today. “Blogging” is breaking away from the stranglehold of chronology. Content is no longer just about what’s new and fresh and MORE. Now it’s all about relevance.

So, the new Chez Pim is no longer calendar-driven series of blog posts. Old contents that are relevant today are given just as big a lead-in as the newest post I wrote this morning. That’s what the picture carousel of top of the main page and each category page does. It features not only new content, like the video post of La Mamma’s braised rabbit that I shot in Italy, but what’s useful and relevant now. Chanterelles are coming into season again, the recipe post on pickled chanterelles from last year is welcome back on the main page.

Visual storytelling

The picture carousel is also about telling stories visually, which has become a real passion of mine in the last few years. I love going to cliché places but not bringing you back the same cliché frames everyone else sees. I went to Tsukiji market in Tokyo, but if you expect that shot of rows of frozen tuna at the famed auction, you’re in the wrong place. My Tsukiji is a bloody cutting board, a rusty scale, a bucket of tuna bones, and an old proprietress in her cubbyhole “office”. And I hope you enjoy this Tsukiji as much as I do.

More focused content

Breaking from the chronological mold to one that’s more subject driven will also help me better focus my storytelling. Pulling out the wine and drink posts onto their own page made me realize how little I’ve done on the subject I love so much. So expect to hear more, a lot more, from me on that. Also expect to hear more on the Travel section, you’ll be seeing handy city guides by me and my trusted friends from around the world.

Dinner @ 8

Perhaps what I’m most proud of, and the one we’ve worked the hardest on, is the new feature Dinner @ 8. I wanted to find a way to break from the norm of cooking blogs. Instead of presenting single recipes one at a time, Dinner @ 8 takes a holistic approach to cooking a meal.

The step-by-step guide takes you through the process of the entire meal, with steps from all the recipes woven and arranged logically and efficiently so you can put dinner on your table on time. And I’m not talking a semi-home-cooked silliness. I’m talking a proper debut menu of Dorie Greenspan’s recipes from her latest book, Around my French Table: 3 courses, 4 dishes to cook, all in 3 hours. Yes, you heard me the first time. Three hours. You don’t believe me? Here’s what Dorie herself said about this new feature..

“I’m thrilled any time Pim wants to cook from my recipes, but I’m thrilled and honored that she’s kicking off Dinner @ 8 with a meal made from my new book.

Pim explained a little about her site’s redesign to me when we met in San Francisco last month and it sounded pretty terrific, but nothing prepared me for how terrific it really is.  This morning she sent me a link to the site and I clicked through just as my husband walked past my desk.  He did a double take as he exclaimed: “What happened?  You’re sitting there with your mouth wide open!” What happened was Pim’s site!

It’s beautiful, of course – Pim only does beautiful– but it’s also chockfull of great information and tips, and it’s so sensibly and helpfully laid out, and so logical that it makes everything really doable and doable in 3 hours sharp.  I love this!

I know that I’ll be cooking along with Pim and I hope you will too.  I can’t wait to hear about your adventures.”

– Dorie Greenspan, 10/13/2010

There is, of course, wine pairing suggestions for the meal. It wouldn’t be a holistic look without including the wines.

I didn’t do it alone

I couldn’t have done it alone. Meet my friend Ryan Wilke, pixel-pusher extraordinaire and véritable WordPress wiz. I cannot recommend Ryan enough. He’s fast, responsive, and crafty in some very astonishing ways. I should also mention how patient he is. I’m not an easy client to please. I knew precisely what I wanted and I wanted it precisely that way. And he managed it, every time. To Ryan, you amaze me. Thank you ever so. (Check out his site to see his take on the work he’s done on Chez Pim.)

And a giveaway, of course there’s a giveaway

This is, however, not one of those easy giveaways that you just need to leave a comment and then you’re eligible. Sorry. It’s a big prize, so you’ve got to work for it. What’s the prize, you asked? The winner will get a copy of Dorie’s new book, Around My French Table, and a copy of her last pastry book, Baking: From My Home to Yours (both courtesy of Dorie Greenspan). Plus, there’s more. From me, you’ll also receive two of my favorite pastry books, Desserts by Pierre Herme, and Paris Sweets, both also by Dorie. That’s $150 worth of books, and they will be priceless once they are signed and personalized to you by Dorie herself.

To win them, you must go to Dinner @ 8 and cook the Dorie’s French Supper menu. You don’t have to serve it at 8, eat at 7 or whenever you want, by all means. Just make sure you follow the steps and see if you could do it within the 3-hr time frame, more or less. You know, even if you’re 15-20 minutes behind schedule, you would still finish that meal faster than if you were to go at it by yourself.

So, go forth and cook, and don’t forget to enjoy yourself. You have until Monday December 6 to post evidence of that meal somewhere online. Your blog, your Foodbuzz, your Flickr, your Facebook page, anywhere you want. Go start a thread on Serious Eats if you must. Just post about it somewhere online, and then leave a comment and a link on the Dorie’s French Supper post to let us know. Dorie and I will pick our favorite 10, and will draw the winner from those 10 names.

It’s not easy to cook a hot meal in 5ft of floodwater. This Sunday November 13, my friends at the Picnic Basket, the Penny Ice Creamery and I will take the time to appreciate our warm, dry kitchen by making a delicious Thai curry to benefit the people of Thailand who have been struggling with catastrophic floods and unable to cook a meal of their own for some time.

Come join us in a bowl of Khao Soi, a curry noodle dish from the Northern region of Thailand. Picture a piping hot bowl of tender egg noodles, smothered in fragrant, warmly spiced curry, topped with squiggles of crispy noodles, pickled mustard greens, shallots, and a wedge of lime. The cilantro on top is optional. As are the fried chili and the smoky, spicy chili oil that you can add if you like it super spicy. Sounds good, no? Even better, the curry will be made entirely from scratch, and with no shrimp paste (so no need to worry if you’re allergic.) There will be two versions of the curry available, one with Mary’s free range chicken, the other tofu (and no fish sauce) – because vegetarians love people too.

All proceeds go directly to people on the ground in Thailand working to feed those in need. And if you’re on Facebook you will be able to follow our progress and see directly how your money goes to help.

Now you’re interested? Good! To make sure things go smoothly, and that we have enough food for all of you, we’ve set up a ticket system on EventBrite. You can buy a bowl of curry now (for $10, $20, or $50, your heart and/or pocketbook may decide), and tell us which block of time you’ll be coming for your curry (5-7pm, 7-9pm, or 9-11pm). There will likely be curry for walk-ins that day too, but the priority will be given to those who bought the tickets. There will also be other refreshing and delicious items to purchase too, and the proceeds from that go as well to feed those in need in Thailand.

I hope to see you all there. We’ll have a great time and make some good karma together. Thank you ever so much!

P.S. Even if you can’t come, you can still help us by buying a ticket. You’ll get a virtual bowl of curry and a very huge thank you from us! And did I mention extra good karma too? (We’ll bring all leftover to a local shelter so your virtual bowl of curry won’t go to waste but instead will go to help feed those in need right here in Santa Cruz.)

What: Curry Night with Pim at the Picnic Basket

Where: The Picnic Basket, 125 Beach Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060 (right across the street from the Santa Cruz Wharf)

When: Sunday, November 13, from 5pm – 11pm

Buy your curry ticket(s) here: http://currywithpim.eventbrite.com/

P.P.S. Julia Hartz, Co-Founder & President of Eventbrite, who also happens to be a homegirl here in Santa Cruz, just told us that Eventbrite will waive their fees on the tickets so that more money we raise goes to support the relief efforts in Thailand. This is awesome, thanks so much Julia and Eventbrite. You’re awesome!

Edible Holiday Gifts: Dec 3 (sold-out), Dec 2 (just added)

Learn how to make delightful salted butter caramels, perfect madeleines, luscious chocolate truffles with armagnac prunes, New Orleans pralines, French gingerbread pain d’épice, alfajores and other delectable, edible gifts that’ll make you the toast of the town come this holidays. We’ll also show you some great packaging ideas so your gifts are as delicious outside as they are inside!

Macaron Madness Workshop: Nov 5, Dec 10 (sold-out), Dec 9 (just added), Jan 14

We keep adding new dates for this incredibly popular workshop, and they keep filling up just as soon as we add them! If you’re ever interested in learning how to make proper, dainty, delicious French macarons, this workshop is for you. Go and sign up now. If you’re still thinking about it, take a look at the photo right above this paragraph. Pretty macarons, aren’t they? And you know what? I didn’t make any of them. The students in one of the previous workshops did! How cool is that? They did it, and so could you.

This is not a demonstration class, by the way. The only way to learn how to do macarons properly is work on it yourself. You’ll be getting your hands dirty and learning how to make perfect macarons just like they do in fancy French pâtisseries. You’ll also learn how to do three types of fillings: chocolate ganache, buttercream (with and without fruits), and caramel, Once you master the technique, you can go totally crazy with your own combinations. The limit is your own imagination. Plus, you’ll leave with the macarons you’ve made in class to share with [read: show off to] your friends and family afterwards.

Pâtés, Rillettes, and Terrines: Dec 17

Many home cooks think that pâtés, rilletes, and terrines are daunting recipes best left to the professional chefs. Je vous dit contraire, I beg to differ! They are so simple to do in the home kitchen, and the results are so spectacular you might never look at another store-bought pâté again. We’ll be making the robust French country pate (pâté de campagne), a classic rillette (which we’ll make with a local, sustainably-raised rabbit in class but you could do with a chicken if preferred), plus a beautiful vegetable terrine that’ll be a great accompaniment to any meal. We’ll also make a scrumptious foie gras terrine. (Yes, foie gras. And, no, sustainably raised foie gras is not cruel. If you’re wondering about it I’ll invite a discussion in class.)

If I were on a midnight infomercial I’d tell you this class will pay for itself after three pâtés de campagne!

Pad Thai and other Thai stir-fry favorites: Nov 12 (sold-out)

You’ve always loved Pad Thai but felt too intimidated to try them at home? Come take this class with me. We’ll not only make the best Pad Thai at home, but we’ll also cover other Thai stir-fry favorites like Pad See Ewe, Pad Kee Mao, Pad Kaprow, and more. At the end of class, you’ll get to make one (or more) of these noodle dish and eat the results. So come hungry! Oh, and go ahead and throw out your take-out menu right now. You won’t need them anymore, I promise.

Thai Curries: Nov 19 (sold-out), Nov 26

If you adore Thai curries, this class is for you. Learn the ins and outs of shopping for the essential ingredients and how to make curry paste from scratch. You’ll learn how to make authentic, delicious Thai curries with the very best ingredients, at the same time demystifying the spice cabinet. Learn how to tell good store-bought pastes from bad (for a rainy day) and the best sources in the area to find what you need to make a great pot of curry from scratch. We’ll also be talking about wine pairing with curries, which is a fascinating subject in itself. At the end of the class we will sit down and enjoy the fruits curries of our labor together.

Artisan Marmalades: Jan 28

In this workshop, I’ll teach you the fundamentals of marmalade making and my unique take on it.  From start to finish, you’ll learn three different styles of marmalade: the classic, bitter, English-style made from sour oranges; a sweeter marmalade made from sweet citrus such as Mandarin or Clementine, and spice-infused marmalade. You’ll get three master recipes to work with and build your own repertoire of marmalade recipes. Plus, you’ll get to take home the marmalades we make in the class. This class is a repeat from the popular and much loved class from last marmalade season. Don’t miss it this time.

The Perfect Pie Crust (+other tarts without tops on), Feb 4

Few things are as intimidating to home bakers as pie crust can be. Take this workshop and we will together demystify the art and science of baking tender, flaky crusts. We’ll be playing with a basic pie crust, a sweet tart crust, a chocolate crust, a nut crust, and even a cheese crust. We will You will gain the confidence to experiment with different fillings and crusts, just in time for holiday baking! This is a hands-on workshop so bring your rolling pin and be ready to get down and dirty!

Check out more classes offered at Love Apple Farms here.

Macaron Madness Workshop – October 15 & November 5, 11am-3pm

There are two upcoming macaron workshops to add to our super popular series at the farm this Fall. (One is coming up this weekend, and there are even a couple more spaces left if you want to join us.) If you’re ever interested in learning how to make proper, dainty, delicious French macarons, this workshop is for you. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the photo right above this paragraph. They’re pretty, aren’t they? And you know what? I didn’t even make them. The students at the last workshop did! How cool is that, huh?

This is not a demonstration class, by the way. The only way to learn how to do macarons properly is to feel it and make it yourself. You’ll be getting your hands dirty and learning how to make perfect macarons just like they do in fancy French pâtisseries. You’ll also learn how to do three types of fillings: chocolate ganache, buttercream (with and without fruits), and caramel, Once you master the technique, you can go totally crazy with your own combinations. The limit is your own imagination! Plus, you’ll leave with the macarons you’ve made in class to share with [read: show off to] your friends and family afterwards.

Sign up here: Oct 15, Nov 5

Pies & other tarts without tops on – November 26, 11am-3pm

Few things are as intimidating to home bakers as pie crust can be. Take this workshop and we will together demystify the art and science of baking tender, flaky crusts. We’ll be playing with a basic pie crust, a sweet tart crust, a chocolate crust, a nut crust, and even a cheese crust. We will You will gain the confidence to experiment with different fillings and crusts, just in time for holiday baking! This is a hands-on workshop so bring your rolling pin and be ready to get down and dirty!

Sign-up here: Nov 26

Looking for fun projects to do this summer? Come join me in a class (or two, or three) at Love Apple Farm’s awesome teaching kitchen, on the grounds of the-even-more-awesome Love Apple farm in Santa Cruz. This summer I’ll be leading a workshop to make the dainty French macarons, teaching you how to make a killer Pad Thai and other wok goodness from the Thai street food repertoire, and how to make lovely, delicious summer jams with the bounties from your backyard and our farmers markets.

Want to learn how to make the dainty (and, yes, fickle) macarons? Come join my workshop. This is not a demonstration class, the only way to learn how to do macarons properly is to feel it and make it yourself. You’ll be getting your hands dirty and learning how to make perfect macarons just like they do in fancy French pâtisseries. Once you master the technique, you can go totally crazy with your own combinations. The limit is your imagination! Plus, you’ll leave with the macarons you’ve made in class to share with [read: show off to] your friends and family afterwards.

There are two class dates for Macarons Madness workshop: May 29 and June 25. Go sign up here. (Note: May 29 is already full, so be quick and sign up for the June 25 class before it’s sold out too.)

You’ve always loved Pad Thai but felt too intimidated to try them at home? Come take this class with me. We’ll not only make the best Pad Thai at home, but we’ll also cover other Thai stir-fry favorites like Pad See Ewe, Pad Kee Mao, Pad Kaprow, and more. At the end of class, you’ll get to make one (or more) of these noodle dish and eat the result! So come hungry! Oh, and go ahead and throw out your take-out menu right now. You won’t need them anymore, I promise.

Pad Thai and Other Delicious Wok Dishes: Sunday, June 19, noon-4pm. Sign up here.

Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cherries, plus our famous local Blenheim apricots; these early summer bounties are here today and gone tomorrow. Come and learn how to preserve the sprightly flavors of early summer with me. We’ll start with a basic, straight-up berry jam without using commercial pectic. Next, we’ll spice it up by making a herb-infused berry jam. Then, we’ll craft a berry conserve with beautiful whole fruits. And finally, we’ll make the best Blenheim apricot jam, ever. After the class, you’ll get to take home a jar or two of the jams we made in class.

Early Summer Jamming: Saturday, June 11, noon-4pm. Sign-up here.

Just in case you haven’t heard, I’m teaching a bunch of classes over at the new Love Apple farm, which moved last year to Santa Cruz from up the hill in Ben Lomond. The new farm has teaching kitchen that’s well-equipped yet intimate enough to create a cozy learning environment. You really get to see, smell, taste, and even get your hands little dirty in the process. So far I’ve taught classes on Thai curries, a produce-centric class about Meyer lemons, and a bunch of others. One upcoming class you might be interested in, especially if you’re a fan of my marmalade, is the “artisan marmalade” class.

Citrus season is not over yet, there’s still plenty time to try your hands at making your own marmalade, so come to my class! We’ll be making three different styles of marmalade: the classic, bitter, English style made from sour oranges; a sweeter marmalade made from sweet citrus such as Mandarin or Clementine, and a spice-infused marmalade. With these three different techniques, you can adapt them to just about any citrus you could get your hands on. This class will be just as fun and useful to both beginner and experienced marmalade makers alike.

This class will be on Sunday March 13, and if you’re coming, remember to bring your own very sharp knife and a small cutting board. You’ll be getting your hands dirty in this class! (Plus you’ll get a jar of marmalade to take home!) Go sign up here.

Another upcoming class is a part of a series we call “Day-off Dinners”, which I co-teach with my boyfriend David Kinch. Even though we both work in food – me here and David at his 2-Michelin-star restaurant Manresa in Los Gatos – we still love cooking together on our days off. What we make are often simple (ok, sometimes only deceptively so), relying on the fresh, seasonal ingredients we’re so lucky to get here in the Bay Area and Central Coast. The first of this series took place early in February, and not only did we not kill each other during the class, our students seem to have had a grand old time in it. Ha.

The next date for the Day-off Dinners series is March 6, and there’s still a couple spaces available there, then the following ones are March 27, and April 17.  Go sign up here if you’re interested.

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So, you heard me going on and on about how to make the perfect canelés. You got all excited and about to roll up your sleeves and head into your kitchen to play. Then you got to the part about how you’d need these precious little fluted, tin-lined, copper molds made specifically for these babies. And the part about how it’s $20 a piece. A single piece. To make a single canelé. Albeit a potentially perfect one. And you’d need 6 or 12 of them to do this properly. That’s when you stopped. The idea of selling your current or future firstborn so you could afford them didn’t appeal to you too much. I have good news for you. It is possible to make (nearly) perfect canelés using the inexpensive (ok, not so expensive) silicone molds. Read on.

This all began after a pretty spirited discussion with some friends, when they told me, in no uncertain terms, that, unlike me, they would indeed not exchange their firstborns for culinary achievements, I decided that I would give these silicone molds a try. In the spirit of research. Ok, actually, mostly to prove myself right.

I started googling around to see what others have done with silicone canelé molds. The resulting canelés I’ve seen are not so inspiring. I don’t need to name names or link links here, but I’m sure you all have seen them: oddly blond canelés with brown or black spots, with a crust so wimpy they don’t even hold the fluted shape of the pastry. If that’s all silicone molds could do I wouldn’t want anything to do with them.

After I got my hands on a couple silicone molds I began to see one reason why. Most canelé recipes supplied by the silicone mold producers just didn’t look very good. They seem to treat canelés as though they’re just another cake, suggesting baking temperature absurdly low and baking time ridiculously short. Most also suggest not coating the molds at all, or at best with only butter. That didn’t sound right. So I began treating the silicone molds with the same method I’d been successful with for my regular copper molds, resting the batter and baking at high temperature first then lower the temperature. The results turned out quite a bit better, I was able to make canelés that were crisp outside and properly custardy inside, but I still wasn’t fully happy.

Another problem with many silicone molds are the shape. Canelés baked in proper copper molds have pronounced fluted shape, but the first few I tried on silicone molds turned out oddly cylindrical, with hardly any fluted edge at all. They look so odd they might as well have been baked in popover pans or muffin tins. Part of the problem there is how flimsy some of the molds are. Most of them have very vague fluted edge to begin with. Once the batter expands in the soft molds as it bakes in the oven, there goes your hope for beautiful, characteristically fluted canelés out of those molds.

The silicone mold I ended up liking the best is the one from de Buyer. (In case you’re wondering, no, they’re not sponsoring this post. I bought it off of Amazon.) I already own a de Buyer silicone mold, for mini rectangular cakes. (That one, just for the record, I got in a swag bag from the Omnivore conference in Deauville last year.) I like the heft and the general quality of the pan I have, so I thought I’d give their canelé molds a try. The de Buyer molds turn out the nicest fluted shapes and generally the best looking canelés, so that’s the one I now recommend.

But I still had one last puzzle I wanted to solve. I already knew that the combination of beeswax and butter (or a neutral-flavor oil) was indispensable for canelés made in copper molds, but what about for silicone molds? Would they make a difference? So that was one last experiment to try.

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“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Yes indeed there is, and it nearly drove me mad on the way to it. If you followed me on Twitter or Facebook, you couldn’t have missed the past few weeks of furious ravings, fleeting triumphs, and befuddled exasperations. Yes, I have been working on the famously fickle canelé (sometimes also spelled cannelés). And not just any canelé, mind you, but the Perfect Canelé. The one that has the perfectly, evenly baked crust the color of mahogany, perfectly, darkly caramelized but without even a hint of burnt. The one that’s crisp and shiny from just the right application of beeswax (yes, that’s what I said), contrasted with the creamy, custardy, sweetly addictive interior. The perfect canelé is what a crème brûlée wants to be when it grows up.

No, I wasn’t inventing a new recipe for it. And I surely didn’t invent the pastry itself. The Bordelais did it ages ago. Though how exactly it came about is still subject to debate. In fact even the name, and how many n’s precisely in the correct spelling is subject to passionate debate. I could recount the whole story, but I know you could google just as well as I do. So why don’t you just go read it yourself over at Wikipedia?

If you’re looking for a canelé recipe, the interweb is littered with them. Blogs have done it. Chow made a video about a search for one. The Chowhounds got a madness-inducing yet oddly mesmerizing thread on it. So did the discussion forum eGullet. Paula Wolfert, who could be called the goddess of the canéles herself, has a SIX-page recipe on it in her fabulous book The Cooking of Southwest France. She also generously published a truncated version of it on her website. My personal God of All Things Pastry Pierre Hermé has no fewer than three recipes published in his various books, including one made of chocolate (in his chocolate book with another one of my favorite authors Dorie Greenspan.) You could even watch a French (French-Canadian?) pastry chef make the canelés on YouTube. Though frankly judging from the results at the end of the video I wouldn’t recommend it.

The problem is, not one, none of it, worked for me reliably and perfectly. Not even when I followed each to the letter. Canelés are famously tricky to make, but it’s not until I tried that I realized how befuddling they truly were. All the recipes are deceptively simple, and not even that different from one another. Basically a sort of custard made of scalded milk, eggs, sugar, flour, and flavored with vanilla and rum, which is then bake in special tin-lined copper molds made specifically for the pastry.

One rather odd recipe, originally attributed to Michel Roux then later to Nick Malgieri, calls for condensed milk and milk powder, which made me suspect that it’d been created during a rather lean time in France, the war perhaps? Living now in time of abundance, I prefer fresh and less processed ingredients. I gave it a try anyway, just for the sake of research. It turns out pretty canelés, though strangely cakey rather than properly custardy. I also didn’t particularly like the flavor, so that was the end of that. Now I need to figure out what to do with all this non-fat milk powder I have left over!

The problem I had with the rest of the recipes was not so much the flavor. How could you go wrong with milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and especially the rum? But it’s in the consistency of the baking. I had the darnest time trying to produce the “perfect” canelés every time. The problems are also not recipe specific. I’ve had the same “soufflé” problem, for example, on pretty much all the recipes I tried – that’s when the batter expands too much during baking that it rises up and out of the molds, only to collapse into a royal mess the oven.

So I began to focus more on the method rather than the recipe. I tried changing the eggs to equal amount in yolks only, but found the results too eggy to my taste. Belinda, the pastry chef at Manresa cautioned me not to whisk the batter, despite what most recipes said. That made a huge difference, I now stir, and very gently. By accident I also discovered that even the age of the eggs made a difference. In the end, I settled on a slight adaptation of the ingredient proportions in one of Pierre Hermé’s published recipe, but tweaked the process rather heavily, borrowing from Paula Wolfert’s sage advice and also from that maddening Chowhound thread.

Perhaps the toughest part to work on was the heat. I found that baking at a very long period at a very high temperature produced canelés that were so burnt the crust was practically carbonized. Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with different variables, producing canelés in all shades of a rainbow, making so many befuddling mistakes it drove me to the brink of insanity. But I stuck with it. Whether it was stubbornness or madness, I stuck with it. And you know what, I got it. Finally. Allow me a minute to bask in my own personal glory. C’est moi qui l’ai fait!

I’m going to try and explain my method to you the best I could. And let me warn you I’ll be wordy. This is going to be my Pad Thai for Beginners tutorial all over again. And just like the Pad Thai recipe, I hope that this canelé recipe will prove to be useful to just as many of you.

So, are you ready to give it a try? I hope I haven’t scared you off from making canelés all together. Really, please don’t. As you could see success is entirely possible! Just do it!

Let’s begin with a few important things you need to keep in mind in your quest for the perfect canalé.

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My very own artisan jams and marmalades

Some of you probably already know that I make jams and marmalades. If you follow me on Twitter you might have even bought some. If this is the first you’ve heard of this, let me tell you a bit about this little adventure of mine.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been making very small batches of jams and marmalades for sale. I’m inspired by the beauty of the products I have access to in this area, like stone fruits from Andy Mariani’s legendary orchard and exotic citrus from a secret garden atop a scenic hill in Watsonville. The secret citrus garden belongs to our good friend Gene Lester, a retired engineer who has dedicated his life to his passion. He’s cultivated a magical garden of at least a couple hundreds varieties of exotic citrus. For years I’ve been visiting Gene’s garden to help David harvest citrus to use at Manresa, and one day I gave in to the mesmerizing calls and started making my own marmalades. I’ve been doing it each citrus season since.

You won’t find an “Orange Marmalade” in my collection, instead, you’ll find ones with poetic names like Bouquet des Fleurs, Sanguinello, and Rangpur. Each batch is made in the classic bitter marmalade style, from a single varietal of citrus to showcase its own unique flavor and perfume. Jeffrey Steingarten, an early (and loyal) fan of my jams and marmalades, calls them “unparalleled”.

My jams are made in much the same way, inspired by the amazing heirloom stone fruits from Andy’s Orchard. I make them in very small batches, with only pristine fruits, minimally processed sugar, and never with commercial pectin. Pectin is just for the meek. Where acidity is called for I use fabulous Meyer lemons from Gene’s garden. Each season Andy keeps some of his best heirloom fruits for me, like my favorite local plum the Elephant Heart and the heirloom white peach Silver Logan, which dates from the time bright acidity hasn’t been bred out of them. Andy also has French varietals otherwise difficult to find, such as the little-plum-that-could Mirabelle and the fantastic Reine-Claude.

All my jams and marmalades are made in small batches, in my treasured copper bassines à confiture I hauled back from France.  I only have very limited quantities, no more than 40-50 boxes (12 jar each) each year, I usually sell them out at the end of each season. This holiday is the first time I still have them for sale, because I was so busy at the end of summer I didn’t get around to putting all of them up for sale. So, if you’d like to try some, or give some away as gifts to your jam loving friends, you still have a chance, just mosey on over to my Etsy shop and get some while you can.

If, by the time you read this post, I’m already sold out of the jams – sorry – I have two local jam makers I adore and highly recommend, June Taylor Preserves and Blue Chair Fruits. Try them!

Because a food lover is never complete without wine

And now, to round out my gift guide this year, I’m adding two fun gift ideas especially for the wine lovers. When one of my readers asked me why I had no wine gift ideas on my list, I had no good answer for him. I supposed it’s because if I were to start on wine I’d have to write an entire list for them alone!

There are so many fantastic ideas for wines. You could give your wine-loving dear ones a fine Burgundy she or he couldn’t normally afford. You could sign them up on a fantastic wine voyage known as the Dooniverse. But then two ideas came to me and got me so so excited I had to add them to my gift list this year.

One is some great value and lovely wines at Dee Vine Wines. David and I are very good friends with the owner Dade Thieriot (read:disclosure) so I follow him on Twitter. Lately I’ve been seeing some wonderful deals he tweeted about, so I went to check his online store. There I found 7 pages of lovely Rieslings, all under $20! Dade imports wines directly from the producers, and he only brings in wines that fit his taste. Knowing Dade, I can tell you his taste is fine indeed. So, this is a personal recommendation. Try some of those fantastic value Rieslings from his list, I’m sure you’ll love me for it. (If you’re planning on cooking Dorie’s French Supper from my Dinner @ 8, the wine I recommend for the meal is a Riesling Kabinett, and you can find some lovely ones right here at Dade’s shop.)

The second wine recommendation also came from a friend. Our dear friend Keiko Niccolini brought two of these ingenious Govino wine glasses to our pig roast (for which we asked friends to bring their own eating/drinking vessels, long story) and forgot to take them home. Instead of returning them to her I greedily kept them for my own use (read:busted). David and I love to sail, and these shatterproof Govino wine glasses are perfect for our sailing trips. Gone were the days we drank good wine out of cheap supermarket plastic cups. Now we drink them out of these stylish Govino glasses – they’re like your usual stemless wine glass but with an indentation that fits your thumb so you could grip the glass (without having to cup it like you’re a wine heathen or something.) I think they’re just brilliant. Back then they were only sold to wine professionals to use at tasting events, but now you could get them at your local stores or on Amazon. I think a set of these glasses will make just about any wine-lover among your dear ones very happy this holiday season. (read: dear my own dear ones I could use more of these!)

So, that’s my list. What about yours? What fun holiday presents are you planning to give or hoping to get? Do share!

(Please go back to the original gift guide to leave a comment so we have them all in one place.)