A component in a dessert at poppy, I have been keeping my pantry well stocked with buttered pecans.  It’s harder than one would think, what with the dessert they accompany being ridiculously popular.  The dessert is a play on sticky toffee pudding. Cubes of warmed date cake are drenched in hot butterscotch sauce, covered with [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I know there are many of you, like myself, who drag ourselves through the stalls of the farmers market rain or shine. As the season turns from summer to autumn and finally into winter, it takes a real effort to patronize the farmers markets this time of the year. Especially here in Seattle [...]

A little birdy once told me that all these modern techniques boil down to the simple act of controlling water molecules. Well, it wasn’t really a little birdy, it was Alex Stupak, but he dropped this bombshell in my ear with the casual effect of a little bird chirping their daily song.
With no prompt, [...]

Panna Cotta is one of those desserts that can be spotted on almost every dessert menu, in every city. After a surge of recent popularity, this once “it” girl has proved her staying power. A chic custard with a little shimmy Gordon Ramsey calls the “chi-chi-lina”, the panna cotta won hearts in the [...]

Earlier this year, a couple of friends and I gathered to make soup. Not just any soup, but “smoking soup”.
You see, while my friends are varied and many, these two friends are a chef and a food writer. This soup was an early summer version of a dish my friend Becky Selengut collaborated [...]

I spent a bit of time in the bay area in the middle of April, and was treated to strawberries. Not the kind of California berries we think of up here in Seattle. Not those hard puckery strawberries white in the middle from being shipped half ripe. No, these were the beginning [...]

If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I am back working in pastry. Actually, for about a month and a half now, since Easter really. I had been working in Banquets, exposing myself to parts of the kitchen I never seen, making soups and stocks, butchering, and working with copius amount of salt.
A lot [...]

An announcement of one’s profession often comes with a predictable series of questions. A mechanic in given various vocal interpretations of engine noises. A doctor is flushed with descriptions of odd body functions. And I, upon announcement of working as a pastry chef, was most commonly asked how to peel hazelnuts.
No joke.
A [...]