Cypress Grove Cheese Cake

For weeks we had been gearing up for it. We watched our diets and talked about how our palates would experience a symphony of flavors in a matter of days. We eagerly entered Moscone and immediately were giddy with anticipation, our mouths drooling like Homer Simpson eating jelly doughnuts. As we went down the escalator our eyes twinkled with excitement — Italy, Spain, France. Right around the corner were 1,300 exhibitors from the U.S. and 45 other countries. The Fancy Food Show was before us. Or, as we’ve coined it, “Adult Trick or Treat.”

Personally I’m all about the chocolate and desserts. My husband is all about the cheese and wine. In fact, my husband was salivating over the thought of goat cheese. His wish came true when we stumbled upon this cake of goat cheese in the above photo. Moscone was transformed into a culinary adventure, and we had to strategize. My mission was to go down every aisle of the North and South Moscone buildings. I didn’t want to leave any crumb unturned!

This was my second year attending so I knew exactly how to pace myself.  You can’t eat too much right away. You have to plan your samples and how fast you eat. Otherwise, you are completely full and disappointed that you can’t sample other goodies. It was my husband’s first year, though, and despite many warnings not to eat everything right away he just didn’t listen. He felt uncomfortably full after a few rows and was disappointed about not being able to try almost everything. Men!

As we strolled down the aisles sampling cheese, wine, antipasto, gelato, pizza, peanut butter, chocolates, snacks, and more, we were amazed by the vast tracts of land and uncharted territory we still had to discover.    We literally were on our feet for five hours. Perhaps we burned enough calories to make up for our intake. My guess is probably not, but it was an unbelievable experience. I am amazed and delighted to see so many creative culinary minds — the vision for new food products and packaging blows me away.

The Fancy Food Show was enjoyed by approximately 17,000 attendees enjoying 80,000 products including confections, cheese, coffee, snacks, spices, ethnic, natural and organic foods. While I can’t say we enjoyed everything we sampled, I can say that it is an ultimate culinary experience. We can’t wait for next year’s Adult Trick or Treat.

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Yeah, I'm not sure what they were thinking with that chili pepper.

Valentine’s Day is less than two weeks away. Do you know what you’re getting for your honey?

I hate to be a stereotype, but I do like my chocolate. And if your honey does, too, drinking chocolate might be something worth considering. It’s not that expensive — typically less than $20 for 8 oz., which will yield anywhere from five to ten servings. Plus you’ll get points for buying something that is actually for your honey. Unlike lingerie, which, let’s face it, isn’t just for your honey.

The first time I had drinking chocolate was about five years ago. I was in Manhattan and strolled in to La Maison du Chocolat. After noting how impressively snooty the sales staff were, I decided on the drinking chocolate as a way to fend off the chilly air both inside and outside of the store. I’d never had it before and after the first sip it was obvious that this was not the Swiss Miss Cocoa Mix with Marshmallows I was raised on.

Drinking chocolate is basically chocolate pieces (pearls, shavings, chunks, etc.) melted in water or milk. That’s it. You can dress it up with spices or mini-marshmallows, but in its purest form it’s simple and delicious. It’s also deceptively rich. I struggled to finish that cup from La Maison and that I had to struggle to finish good chocolate was really quite absurd.

The last time Rourke was in Las Vegas, he happened by a Vosges store and bought a box of their drinking chocolate mix for me. I’ve long been a fan of Vosges, with their interesting truffles and spicy chocolate bars, so was pretty excited to try the drinking chocolate (I think it’s technically a cocoa, but I’m not going to get in to the finer points of that here).

If you like the taste of Mexican Chocolate, I think you’ll like the Aztec Elixir. While rich, the chocolate is not at all sweet, and the spices add a subtle kick that helps with the richness. The only thing that was a little surprising to me was the inclusion of yellow maize in the mix. The bits were weird at first, but after a few sips it grew on me. Similar to how people like chewing on tapioca pearls as they drink bubble tea, but on a much smaller scale. This is what it looked like as I was drinking:

See the little bits of yellow maize clinging to the side of the mug?

If you’d rather forego the spices and focus on a good drinking chocolate mix, though, I could vouch for:

• La Maison du Chocolat: Tasse de Chocolat
• Richard Donnelly: Hot Chocolate Mix

There are a plethora of drinking chocolate mixes out there, though, so if you or your other have a favorite chocolate it’s worth doing a quick search to see if they also sell a mix.

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I guess since we started this food blog people think I’m into cooking or something. Craziness! So I’ve been perusing these lovely tomes, marveling at the pretty photos and just how heavy these books are. Together, they weigh 16 pounds. For a few days I had left them in a stack on an ottoman before my worry that they would permanently compress the foam got the better of me and I relocated them to a stiff surface.

Truth be told, I’ve been a bit intimidated by The French Laundry Cookbook so I’ve barely looked through it. So far, between the Bouchon and the Ad Hoc at Home cookbooks, I’ve been drawn to the former. I’ve made a couple of recipes from it and I have to say, I’m hooked. I don’t think I’m familiar enough with these books right now to say much more than I have, but I was so excited by the cauliflower gratin recipe that I needed to share.

The one rub, though, was that the recipe in the Bouchon cookbook calls for cream and I’ve declared January a “no cream month.” So I substituted evaporated whole milk and no lie, Rourke thought that I had used cream. hahahahahahha! I fooled him! I also tweaked the recipe a bit by steaming the cauliflower instead of boiling it.

Cauliflower Gratin
Adapted from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook
- serves 2 to 3 as a side -

1 head cauliflower (mine was about 2 lbs)
1 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 Tbsp minced shallots
1 thyme sprig
1 bay leaf
1 italian parsley sprig
5 oz. of evaporated whole milk
1/4 – 1/2 tsp prepared horseradish
1/3 cup grated emmentaler cheese
1 Tbsp panko or other toasted breadcrumbs
pinch of curry powder
kosher salt
black pepper
grated nutmeg

1. Remove and discard the green leaves from the cauliflower. Cut the florets into 1-inch pieces, reserving the core and the stems. You should have 4-5 cups of florets.

2. Cut away and discard the exterior of the core, then cut the core into a fine dice. Cut the reserved stem trimmings into a fine dice as well and combine. You should have about 1 cup. If you don’t have enough, dice enough of the florets to make 1 cup.

3. Steam the florets until you’re able to pierce them easily with a knife, but while there’s still a small bite to the cauliflower. You can steam them until they’re completely tender if you like, but I like my veggies with a little bite to them. Steam in batches if you need to. I steamed the florets for about 4 minutes per batch.

4. Reserve approximately 1 cup of the steaming water. Put the steamed florets aside and season with salt to taste.

5. Add the butter and shallots to a saucepan over medium heat and cook until the shallots are translucent, 1 to 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, add the bay leaf, thyme, and parsley.

6. Add the finely diced cauliflower (stems and core) and 2/3 cup of the reserved steaming water and cook gently for 5 to 6 minutes, or until most of the moisture has evaporated and the cauliflower is tender. If all of the water evaporates before the cauliflower is tender, add more.

7. Add the evaporated whole milk and heat for 2 minutes. Do not let the mixture simmer or boil. Remove from the heat and discard the thyme, bay leaf, and parsley.

8. Pour the mixture into a blender and puree. As a precaution, place a towel over the lid before you puree and do not fill the blender more than 1/3 full. Puree in batches if necessary.

9. Add the horseradish and curry powder to the puree and blend to combine. At this point, sneak a taste of the puree and marvel that it doesn’t contain any cream.

10. Toss the puree with the florets and season with nutmeg, salt, and pepper to taste.

11. Transfer the cauliflower to an ovenproof dish. The cream should come about one-third or halfway up the florets. Refrigerate for 30 minutes to allow flavors to mature. The book says that you can refrigerate this for up to a day.

12. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Sprinkle the gratin with the cheese and the panko and bake for about 15 minutes, or until bubbling and the center is warm.

13. If you’d like, broil the gratin for an additional 2-3 minutes to brown the top, but be careful when you do this not to let it burn. Burnt cheese smells gross. Serve!

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I’ve made a handful of shu mai and wontons before, but with all of the various Chinese cookbooks floating around our place, I never really had a go-to source for recipes. So when we set about to make a mountain of dumplings for a Chinese New Year party, I needed a reliable resource. Or, at the very least, I needed an excuse to pick up a copy of Andrea Nguyen’s Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More. 

Now that I’ve got the book, I can’t say enough good about it. The recipes are fantastic. The illustrations and instructions make every recipe easy to follow. And the pictures are quality.

Last weekend, we spent the day making a hundred and change dumplings to fill the freezer. We started with a big batch of the wontons from the recipe for Vegetable and Pork Wontons in Spicy Oil (page 72). We deep fried a handful based on the recipe a few pages earlier. (Fried Wontons, page 69). Outrageous. Then we did a double batch of the Japanese Pork and Shrimp Potstickers (page 41). We pan fried a few to sample right after we made them, and later in the week, we made a cheat’s version of the Gyoza in Smoky Chicken Soup (page 43).  Easy and incredibly satisfying.

Finally, we made the Char Siu Pork (page 224), which will find its way into what has to be the world’s favorite dim sum, Char Siu Pork buns. (Steamed Filled Buns, page 95; Char Siu Pork Bun Filling, page 100). The pork rocks. I can’t wait for the final product, which will be showing up here in the not too distant future.

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So why do I have cupcake on the brain now? In 2010? Which is supposed to be the year of the macaron (or something)? Because I was in Williams-Sonoma and saw that they carry a pre-packaged mix for Sprinkles cupcakes. And then the voice inside my head said, “Noooooooooooooooooo.”

You see, one lazy day a friend and I decided to do a cupcake taste-off between Kara’s and Sprinkles. Based in San Francisco and Beverly Hills, respectively, they’ve both inspired cult-like followings and have an eerily similar aesthetic. Sprinkles was started before Kara’s, so in my head that was a nod in the Sprinkles column, but Kara’s was started locally in the Bay Area, so there was an equivalent nod in the Kara’s column. There is both a Sprinkles store and a Kara’s store a mere 5 minutes apart in Palo Alto, so this taste-off was just begging to happen as far as I was concerned.

This is what we sampled:

• From Sprinkles: a red velvet, a lemon, and a vanilla with chocolate frosting.
• From Kara’s: a chocolate velvet, a meyer lemony lemon, and a vanilla with chocolate frosting.

We lined up half a dozen pretty little cupcakes, carefully sliced each one in half, and then attacked them all. Poor things didn’t stand a chance. The verdict: Kara’s, hands down.

This is how we broke it down:

Sprinkles

• Texture: Moist, but also mushy in a way that suggested it was undercooked. Fell apart too easily.
• Taste: Great flavor in all cupcakes sampled.
• Icing: Very sweet, with a kind of texture reminiscent of canned frosting.

Kara’s

• Texture: Moist, cooked just right. Cake held it’s shape and didn’t make a huge mess.
• Taste: Also great flavor, though the runaway hit was the meyer lemony lemon, which had a dollop of lemon curd in the middle. Yum.
• Icing: Airy, light, and less sweet than Sprinkles.

I hear that restaurant critics are supposed to visit a place several times before writing a review, each time sampling different items. The undercooked texture at Sprinkles could have been a fluke, maybe the Kara’s icing tasted less sweet because I had tasted the Sprinkles icing first, etc. Personally, I don’t think my blood sugar could handle another cupcake taste-off.

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Rourke and I have this agreement, where he cooks Sunday breakfasts for me. Isn’t that sweet?

Since I cook dinner most nights, I decided to broker this deal long ago so that a) I’d get a break from cooking, and b) he’d be keeping it real. He’s a pro at it now and I get to choose from a rotating set of “specials” like french toast, french omelets, waffles, etc., but it was not always such bliss. When he first started cooking breakfasts for me, it was very stressful. For both of us. Rourke had never learned how to crack an egg. And I physically had to restrain myself from making comments by clamping my hand over my mouth the entire time he was cooking, and afterward while surveying the wreckage that he left in the wake of all that cooking. I wasn’t always successful.

Enter pre-packaged waffle mix. Easy-to-follow instructions and everything is mixed together in one bowl, minimizing mess. Oh yeah, it tastes good, too. Lightly spiced and with nibbles of candied pecans, it helps to satisfy the ridiculous pumpkin cravings that I get this time of year.

This waffle mix is one of Williams-Sonoma’s seasonal items so it’s only available around the holidays, i.e. now. Rourke has a few waffle recipes that he’s put into the rotation, but he still gets excited whenever this shows up in the stores. In the top photo, the canister on the right is the current packaging, and the one on the left is last year’s. Yes, I’m such a sucker for packaging that I keep empties of the ones I like. It also helps me notice things, like that the new container holds 6 oz. less than last year’s, even though the price remained the same. I’ve got my eye on you, Williams-Sonoma!

This year, Rourke misread the instructions for the first batch and ended up making Belgian waffles instead of regular waffles. The difference? DOUBLE the butter (1 stick vs 1/2 stick)! No wonder Belgian waffles are so tasty.

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So inevitably I asked myself if I could replicate these dishes or for that matter anything as intricate as the delicious sauteed pig feet and sweetbread terrine on a bed of thyme poached lentils. After leaving the restaurant and reflecting on the experience I decided to approach my next blog post with the following challenge:

Ask our readers what they want ME to cook. The more intricate and obscure the better.

Let me know by posting a comment.

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