You may remember last summer, when I staged at WD-50.  What I didn’t tell you was that I rushed home for cherries.  Not just any cherries, Montmorency sour cherries, picked fresh from a tree in my neighborhood, by one of my favorite people on the planet, Iris.
Iris came over with the cherries, and her parents, [...]

I once read that concerning haute cuisine, texture is the final frontier. The showiest developments in cuisine lately have certainly been textural. While many of the new textures are coming from knowledge of hydrocolloids, old (like corn starch) and new, we can still be attentive and creative with our textures without specialty ingredients.
My [...]

Top chef brings a parade of amazing guest judges each season. Most I know by name, many I know by sight, all make me nod with respect.
But last night I just about jumped when they brought out Johnny Iuzzini.
Iuzzini is on my team, the dessert team. He is the pastry chef at Jean [...]

A student of writing learns early on to avoid using the same word too many times in a paragraph. Thus when writing about food, we look for various words to describe taste.
For example, I could write, “The strawberries I picked yesterday at Berringer farm tasted exactly like I remember them.”
The second sentence would avoid saying, [...]

It is a fact that color has a drastic effect on your perception of flavor. The information received from our eyes will lead us to anticipate a flavor based on the color of a food or beverage, and that initial assumption can over ride the information we receive from our taste buds and olfactory system.
At [...]

Work hard, play hard, is one of the mantras kitchen folk live by, and it certainly seemed to take effect here in the cycling house today.  At the halfway mark, today brought with it a feeling of jubilee.  Perhaps it was the crystal clear sunrise, the 75 degree weather, the 80 miles the cyclists rode, [...]

I grew up on Bisquick, as I am sure many of us did. Much of the baking my mom did came from a box. Cakes came from no where else, and as April 23rd neared each year my tiny mouth salivated in anticipation of my birthday cake, always cherry chip with pink cherry [...]

Like Forrest said about those chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. This one size fits all bit of wisdom can stretch to fit anything, really. The sale rack at Urban Outfitters, that guy you started dating, the produce from your local grocery store. But when I feel this [...]

I wish with everything in my little cooks heart that Harold McGee wrote for the NY Times every Wednesday.
This week we are treated to an introduction to an ingredient every cook uses every day with very little understanding. In this weeks article, he talks about heat.
Having been in the kitchens I have been in,  I [...]

It seems every publication is all lists this time of year. What to gifts buy for this person or that, what to wear for holiday gatherings here or there, and finally, the “best of” lists.
We all have them, and personally, I love talking about them. Do you agree, disagree, what would you add [...]