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San Francisco is currently going through a chocolate renaissance – new artisan chocolate makers and chocolatiers are popping up at every food festival and in every neighborhood. One of these chocolatiers, though, is actually a Bay Area classic making a welcome return – Charles Chocolates. I’ve been a big fan of Charles Chocolates ever since [...]
Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there! This post doesn’t have any recipes – I just really wanted to write something for Mother’s Day. So if you feel like seeing some baby pictures of me, read on… On my first Mother’s Day as a mom, there are a lot of thoughts running through [...]
This last weekend was my birthday, and I have to say it was one of my most memorable ones, despite the fact that I practically forgot about it until it was upon me. I had a lot of other things on my plate like Isabelle’s red egg and ginger party, and getting ready to go [...]
Success! Last weekend we threw a red egg and ginger party for Isabelle! This is a Chinese tradition where the new baby is officially introduced to relatives and family friends, and the baby’s name is revealed. Historically the red egg and ginger party was held when the baby was one month old, as high infant [...]
Fun fact: I finally had a dream where my baby was in it. I guess it took a while for my subconscious to catch up, but I suppose now I’m a mommy through and through. One of my biggest fears when I was pregnant was that I would never have a free moment again. Would [...]
Along with all the lovely growing, blooming things that herald spring is the baby in our home! Isabelle is three months today and I think she may have hit her growth spurt early. She’s a chubby bundle now! The whole, “I swear she grew overnight” thing happened to me – last Monday I looked at [...]
The days are starting to fall into some semblance of a schedule, albeit a very flexibly-written one. For example, baby is in her best mood in the morning, which means I usually spend that time interacting and playing with her, since she’s at her most adorable and responsive. Afternoons are more of a mixed bag: [...]
Ok, this post is going up a little later than I wanted but at least I made it before Easter – why is it when you *have* to get a post up on time that things invariably go wonky? I wanted to share this cake that I picked out from Martha Stewart Living’s special Cakes [...]
Pineapple carpaccio with lemon sorbet, cilantro granité, pineapple chips, and crystallized cilantro from Souvenirs. Isabelle is two months old! I can’t believe how much she has changed in eight short weeks. It’s like the saying, “The days are long, but the years are short.” I’ve always been a nostalgic person. Even though I know there [...]
Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s post with their favorite pie. I have about a hundred pie ideas to make now! The two winners of a copy of Pieography are: Commenter #3, ladywild and commenter #6, Sarah! Congratulations! For the rest of you, remember my pie recipe is available on my site. I’ve [...]
I’m excited to announce the release of Pieography: Where Pie Meets Biography by WWC Press. As the title implies, it’s a collection of pie recipes both sweet and savory from 39 women who love food – myself included! I was approached by WWC to contribute a pie recipe and an essay that explored how this [...]
Happy Year of the Snake! I know this looks like a Valentine’s themed post, but I thought I’d deliver the Chinese New Year greeting first. The first day of the year of the snake was on Sunday the 10th, meaning there was very little time to recover from the New Year dinner gluttony before Valentine’s [...]
Three weeks into motherhood and I’ve noticed how time has taken on a particularly elastic quality. I spend literally the entire day at home: I’ll go through several rinse-and-repeat cycles of feeding, changing, and lulling baby to sleep, and yet somehow it’s always a surprise to look outside and see the sky darkening already. Has [...]
Hi all, Thanks so much for all your kind wishes and congratulations. These last two weeks have seemed like a lifetime in a completely new reality. We’re learning more about Isabelle and how to be parents to her every day, and every day she seems to have grown a little more. It’s hard to believe [...]
Hello. We’re so happy to announce the arrival of Isabelle. She was born on January 15, at 12:57 in the morning, weighing 6 lb 1 oz. My OB was out of town over the weekend and told me, “I want to deliver your baby. Try to hold on until I get back on the 13th.” [...]
Happy 2013! Remember how in my last post I was mentioning that everything I do these days happens a little later than I originally planned? Yep…well, it’s four days into the new year but I can still send out wishes and good thoughts, can’t I? Thank you to all of you who have sent me [...]
photo from SFBI Hello dear readers, I was working on my next post when I received this message from SFBI, one of the pastry schools in the Bay Area that I have attended and highly recommend. It appears SFBI has been in the process of renewing its license to operate, but is being held up [...]
Happy Monday! I hope you are all enjoying the holidays with your family and loved ones. It’s been ridiculously rainy and windy here – it won’t be a white Christmas here, but it’ll probably be a wet one. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to finish sated issue 2 before the end of the year – you [...]
Thanks to all who entered the minted giveaway! The winner, chosen by random number generator, is: Fork and Whisk! Congratulations, and I hope everyone enjoyed browsing through the holiday cards! So I’m basically a week behind everything. I finished my Christmas cards over the weekend, when I should have sent them out a week ago, [...]
As we’re heading into the final stretch of the year, as I’m hitting the final weeks of my pregnancy, I realized I’ve been feeling different for the last few days. As I’m counting down the days to week 39, I suddenly wondered whether I’d spent enough time enjoying my pregnancy. It’s a funny thing. I’ve [...]
Is everyone in the full swing of the holidays? I want to say I am, but in actuality I spent much of last weekend trying to finish off the new nursery, and writing thank-you notes for the baby shower. Right after I finished the last thank-you note, I realized I had to do Christmas cards [...]
Happy December! Hope you had a good Thanksgiving holiday! I spent it in the company of hubby’s extended family, who are as lovely and welcoming as a Norman Rockwell painting, and who threw us a wonderful baby shower. Our baby now has clothes! And a car seat and stroller! And toys and books! I’m grateful [...]
Hello dear readers, Hope you are all ready for the holiday season to begin! Stephanie of Desserts for Breakfast and I have a happy announcement to kick things off: the second issue of sated is just about ready to hit the printers! We’re excited to share the (double) theme of issue 2: Flours and Flowers. [...]
One of the things about social media is that at any given time someone in your social circle is doing something fun. I’ve noticed that no matter what time of year it is, there always seems to be someone in my Facebook feed going to Hawaii. Maybe it’s self-selection; after all, I live on the [...]
Well, a little good news for me and for the blog: my sweet tooth has returned! It was truly disconcerting not craving sweets for a while (although I’m sure my doctor was happy), but I found myself wanting dessert again in the last few weeks, just in time for Halloween! Actually, I have a dentist’s [...]
I’m working on a full-size post (with Halloween around the corner, is everyone automatically thinking of candy in “full size” and “fun size”? and how when you were a kid, you always knew which houses gave away the full size candy bars on Halloween night?), but in the meantime here’s a little update. I was [...]
A few months ago, I was invited with some other bloggers to go on a three day trip to Sonoma County by Wine Road. The Wine Road is an association of wineries in the Northern Sonoma county, near the Russian River, centered roughly around Healdsburg. Although I always love going up to wine country, I’ve [...]
Thank you to all of you for your well-wishes and e-mails. It means a great deal to me to know there’s so much support coming from all over the web. I go between excited and nervous, often within the space of minutes, and oftentimes simultaneously, so it’s definitely never dull here. I also didn’t mention [...]
Things have slowed down here a bit here lately on the site. The reasons are myriad: summer vacation distractions, working on sated magazine issue #2, but really there’s one main reason I haven’t been able to show up as often as I like. I’ll let Snickers help me make the announcement: Yes, there is going [...]
While the macaron craze may have have subsided slightly in the blogosphere, they’re still popular here in the Bay Area – no self-respecting patisserie would be without a rainbow-hued selection of these little sweets. My choice for satisfying my macaron cravings is Chantal Guillon – a little shop tucked away in San Francisco that featured [...]
This post was meant to go up earlier last week, but disaster struck – we had a freezer malfunction at home and the ice cream I made all melted! Fortunately we were able to salvage most things, but it delayed photo-taking for a couple days. Not that melty ice cream can’t be just as delicious, [...]
Olallieberry is just such a fun word to say. Their rarity and relatively short season also mean there are few chances to utter the word. So when it gets to around this time of year, Mike and I take great delight in saying to each other, “Do you think the olallieberries are in season yet?” [...]
When a great deal of your personal and professional life revolves around baking, you forget how much of the vernacular you’ve absorbed over time. When I taught a few enthusiast classes at Tante Marie’s, it was a reminder of how easy it is to take all I’d learned in pastry school and over the years [...]
Lounging in the sun, eating ripe fruit until you’re sticky-fingered and satiated, is one of the loveliest indulgences of summer. I’m going through peaches, nectarines, and cherries like there’s no next summer, but there is one fruit that will distract me away when nothing else does: apricots. Is it their sadly short season that makes [...]
So I disappeared without leaving word, and came back without making a peep as well. I thought about hanging up a “Gone to BlogHer Food” sign here, but didn’t get a chance to do so before I flew off to Seattle. For those of you that didn’t know, I went to BlogHer Food a week [...]
Since it’s just about pie season, I thought it would be a good time to review a cookbook that’s been on my to-do list for a while: Gesine Bullock-Prado’s Pie It Forward: Pies, Tarts, Tortes, Galettes, and Other Pastries Reinvented. Bullock-Prado wrote the charming Sugar Baby last year, a cute ode to all things [...]
Well, it’s finished! Stephanie and I have officially sent off the first issue of sated magazine to the printers! I can’t tell you what a big sigh of happiness we heaved when we finally reached that milestone. After months of long nights, intense work (and re-work), we can say we accomplished the first step of [...]
Thanks to all of you and your support of sated magazine! As a reminder, there are couple days left in the giveaway to win a free copy of the first issue. We will also be announcing pre-order information very soon, so please keep checking back! I apologize for the late post; what with trying to [...]
Thanks all for your support of sated! And now, a quick diversion: I’ll be providing cookies for a book event tomorrow: the authors Improv Sewing: A Freeform Approach to Creative Techniques will be doing a demo and book signing at Britex Fabrics in downtown San Francisco. I was approached because they were looking for a [...]
Dear readers, It’s been a little while since my last cookbook was published. Some of my friends have been asking me what my next project would be, and I’m so excited to finally be able to announce it to the world: I have been collaborating with Stephanie of the beautiful Desserts for Breakfast to create [...]
Before I finish off my mousse experiment, I want to remind all you faithful readers that this Saturday is the big Food Blogger Bake Sale! We have had a location change since my first announcement: the bake sale will be this Saturday, April 28, at Omnivore Books from 11-4. Omnivore Books was the location of [...]
Remember back with mousse #1, where I discussed how eggs enriched a mousse like nothing else? The only issue was that the eggs in the classic French style mousse weren’t cooked, so it should be avoided by those with health concerns. However, the next two mousses use eggs that are cooked, so you don’t have [...]
Apologies for falling behind on the mousse recipes – I wanted to add on a review of my latest kitchen gadget, one that’s very apropos for mousse-making. The photo above is of the Tovolo Quick Hand Mixer. I picked mine up on sale from a kitchenware store – I’ll confess that normally I would have [...]
Thanks for the feedback on my mousse project! As I anticipate typing the word “mousse” about a hundred times in the next couple days, I am totally waiting for “mouse” to slip into one of these posts and elude both the spellcheck and my mousse-addled eyes. If only I could blame Autocorrect when that happens… [...]
Sometimes you find yourself in an inspiration drought. I know that seems practically impossible these days, when Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest means there’s all sorts of inspiration for the taking, all the time, but sometimes I find the reverse happening. When you’re surrounded by everyone else’s cool ideas, and it seems like everything original [...]
It’s been raining a lot over here. April showers have come early, or maybe they’re winter rains that lost their way. Normally I like rain, especially after a dry winter that made me think I’d forgotten the sound of rain on the roof. In typical be-careful-what-you-ask-for-fashion, I am totally re-familiarized with rain. I still like [...]
It’s almost spring, and that means that it’s almost time for the San Francisco Food Bloggers Bake Sale! For the last two years, food bloggers across the country have banded together to hold bake sales in their hometowns in support of Share Our Strength, a national organization dedicated to ending childhood hunger. I had the [...]
Apologies for not posting last week, as I was getting ready to teach a cookie class at Tante Marie’s and prepping for the 2012 SF Blogger Bake Sale announcement. As amends, I hope you enjoy the extra-abundance of photos in this post, where I share a few snapshots from my trip to Vietnam. While I [...]
Note: this post is pretty much about my dog. If you’re not a dog lover, be forewarned. There is a recipe at the end of the post, but it’s for a dog birthday cake. Again, you’ve been warned! It was just over a year ago that a little 20 pound ball of fluff came into [...]
So I was leafing through the latest issue of Donna Hay and came across this nigh-irresistibly named-and-photographed Caramel Crunch Brownie. A brownie covered with a crunch-filled caramel and a layer of chocolate ganache sounded like something that needed to be coming out of my kitchen posthaste. Aside: I’ve been making a lot of brownies lately. [...]
