Kitchen Travels

Easy, Homemade, Beautiful Burger Buns (with love)

It's Valentine's Day, and most food bloggers have been posting all kinds of sweet and beautiful treats on their blogs for the last few weeks. I know lots of people make a big deal of this "holiday" every year, and for many, expectations are high. There will be chocolate, heart-shaped confections, expensive dinners, champagne... or at least the hope for these things.

Not for me. Valentine's Day doesn't hold any particular magic or allure for me. Don't get me wrong -- I am not one of those people who hates Valentine's Day. It's nice, and the sentiment behind it -- a day dedicated to love -- is, well, lovely.But my husband and I have never been the type of couple who get starry-eyed simply because the calendar says February 14. Maybe it's because he worked in the bar and restaurant industry for so many years. Kind of hard to plan a special date on one of the busiest nights on the year.

Foraging and Roasting Fresh Chestnuts

This is the third in a series of "catchup" posts. xo

Chestnuts! For me, like many Americans, they are woven into the fabric of fall and winter holidays. In a way, we all grew up with chestnuts, or at least the idea of them. Each year when the weather turns cold, we know we'll hear Nat King Cole famously crooning about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. We'll be singing the songs we love to sing, at the fireplace as we watch the chestnuts pop. Pop! Pop! Pop! If we find ourselves in one of New York's five boroughs (or any number of European cities) around the holidays, we might be lucky enough to snag a cone of freshly roasted chestnuts, hot from the corner vendor. 

And if we're fans of those gorgeous holiday magazines - aren't we all? - we'll be reading about chestnuts and dreaming of ways to cook with them. I'd bet money that every single November issue of the now-defunct Gourmet magazine included at least one chestnut recipe. It's a tradition that I sorely miss.

Wordless Wednesday: Chocolate Rosemary Truffle Cake with Rosemary Sea Salt Caramel

Autumn Leaf Cake, Scharffen Berger Bakery Crawl, and a Contest

Recently, I was fortunate enough to snag an invitation to a special event in San Francisco: a bakery crawl hosted by Scharffen Berger® Chocolate Maker. Scharffen Berger® was kicking off its latest contest: Elevate a Classic Dessert with Scharffen Berger® Chocolate (more on that later). As part of the launch, they challenged some of the city's best pastry chefs to elevate a classic dessert using Scharffen Berger® chocolate, and I was to be among a lucky group of food bloggers and writers to taste their creations.* An afternoon in the city, tasting chocolate and hanging with famous pastry chefs? Yes, please.

We met at the Scharffen Berger® Chocolate store in the Ferry Building Marketplace on a beautiful Friday afternoon, then boarded the trolley car which would take us on our Bakery Crawl. I knew from some pre-event Twitter exchanges that a few familiar food blogger faces would be on the trolley with me, including Irvin from Eat The Love and Benjamin from You Fed A Baby Chili?, 

Irvin and Ben photos courtesy of Scharffen Berger® Chocolate Co.

along with Catherine from Munchie Musings, and Sheri and Larry from Pork Cracklins.

Wordless Wednesday: Fruit Tart

Sugar Cookies

My childhood memories are, for the most part, happy ones. Skating on a freezing cold pond in Minnesota, then warming up with hot chocolate from a Thermos. Dancing with my mom and siblings around our living room, while The Beatles and Three Dog Night records played on our Hi-Fi and we laughed and laughed. I remember camping in the Arizona mountains, where my dad taught me how to shoot tin cans with a rifle, and where - after ditching our family tent in favor of sleeping on a boulder under the stars - I once awoke at dawn to find a squirrel sitting on my chest, eating a pine cone.

Of course, I have a couple of not-so-happy memories, too. One in particular stuck with me over the years. I was about 6 or 7 years old, I think, and my parents had taken us out to Baskin Robbins for ice cream. It was busy. As we waited for our turn, I remember trying to get a peek through the crowd at the big tubs of ice cream, then feeling a little overwhelmed by the grownups blocking my view. Without looking, I instinctively leaned against my dad, hooking my arm around his leg. A voice said, "Oh, hi there," and I looked up to find that I was hugging not my dad, but a strange man, who was smiling kindly down at me. I backed away, panicking for a second, then heard my dad laugh as he realized my mistake and gently pulled me close to him. Dad held my hand, and a few minutes later I was happily eating my single scoop on a sugar cone. Thinking back, it wasn't really anything so terrible. It was just a mix up, a fleeting moment. I was never in any danger. But in that exact moment, I learned what it was to feel fear.

Potato Bacon Quiche Tart

A couple months ago, I wrote a post about Berry Cobbler. We were on the cusp of summer, school was out, and our garden was just beginning to blossom. Then I turned around and the next thing I knew, it was September. September? It's practically fall, the kids are back in school, and our garden is putting out the last of its late-season tomatoes. And - as those of you following along may have noticed - I have posted not a single recipe. Not. Even. One. How did this happen?

I'm still cooking and baking. Still taking (a few) pictures. As the summer slipped away, I mentally composed dozens of posts, even started and stopped a handful, but I just could not seem to follow through. It's a long story, one that involves jobs lost and found, kids troubled and recovered, relationships torn and... well, if not yet made whole, let's say on the mend. Those last two have been the toughest. On an intellectual plane, I rationalized that things weren't that bad. I mean, comparatively, things could have been a lot worse. We were surviving. But all that rationalizing wasn't making me feel any better. Because I didn't want to just survive. I wanted to thrive.

Sounds pretty easy, right? Maybe it should be. But lately, I've been so busy surviving all the little and big challenges of life, I've sort of lost sight of the simple joys of life. Most people probably haven't noticed a difference in me, but I've noticed. When the hell did I become so serious? Honestly, I just don't know.

Berry Cobbler

This post is dedicated to my mom, and to the memory of my maternal grandmother, "Mama" Prella.

My mom has been out visiting us for the last two weeks. The bad news is that - bless her heart - my mom's visit could not have come at a more stressful time in our lives. We could not have know when we planned her trip a month or so ago that both my husband and I would be going through a time of professional turmoil at our respective jobs, just as my mom was to arrive. To add to the stress, our twins just started the summer program at the school where they will attend kindergarten in the fall, and the transition from preschool has been more difficult for them than we anticipated. My poor little girls have been experiencing almost daily meltdowns, not sleeping through the night, crying at the drop of a hat... It's been a tough couple weeks for all of us.

The good news is that this is the longest visit my mom has been able to have with us in quite some time. And my kids have been loving it.

Happy Birthday Dessert Table - Twins' 5th Birthday Party

My dear friend Yvonne and I have known each other for more than twenty years. We went to college together, we lived two blocks away from one another in San Francisco when we were young and single, we're both lawyers... and we both love to cook. One of my favorite cooking-related sayings, and activities, comes from Yvonne: "reverse engineering." Whenever one of us has a meal at a restaurant that we really love, we like to see if we can reverse engineer the recipe at home, based solely on taste, intuition, and educated guesses. It's fun, and each of us has actually been pretty successful at figuring out what goes into some of our favorite restaurant dishes.

I recently tested my reverse engineering skills again, only this time, a recipe was not the goal. A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a wonderful blog from a woman named Amy Atlas. Have you heard of her? Ms. Atlas is a New York City event planner who has gained national recognition for her stunning dessert tables. Depending on the event, the finished table of sweets might be whimsical, elegant, or modern, but always impeccably and beautifully executed. After seeing another mom's adorable do-it-yourself version*, I was inspired to reverse engineer Ms. Atlas' dessert table formula, and attempt one myself. My twins' 5th birthday was coming up, they each wanted a different flavor of cake, and since we were expecting a crowd for our backyard party (fifteen kids, their parents and siblings, plus our own family of five), it seemed like a good opportunity to give it a shot.

Wordless Wednesday: Vanilla Oreos