I’m thrilled to have a recipe today from my good friend Jeremy Bernard, who knows a lot about hospitality. His recipe for chicken with rainbow chard is beyond delicious; we were all scraping our plates. Jeremy left the White House, where he was Social Secretary to President and Mrs. Obama, and well – I’ll just let Jeremy tell his own story: Having left my position as White House Social Secretary, I arrived back in California to the cool mornings and […]
Everyone’s on the matcha green tea bandwagon, and it really is a fresh, cleansing flavor that makes cooks want to put it into everything from Beef Wellington to strawberry cheesecake. Since it’s late on a Wednesday afternoon, I’m opting for a matcha cocktail, muddled with mint, bourbon, a little sugar, and a lot of ice. Very zen… Matcha Mint Julep
These cakes would make an amazing hostess gift if you really want to show someone how much you love them. They may look like they took hours, but this recipe is all about the shortcuts. I used a box cake mix and canned frosting, adding fresh fruit and sugared flowers to keep it rustic and simple. There are also shortcuts on sugaring the edible flowers; I started by painstakingly painting each petal with egg white, and then dipping each petal […]
This is summertime in a cake, a cornucopia of fresh berries (and sugar plums) from the farmer’s market: blueberries, strawberries, gooseberries, currants, cherries, sour cherries, sugar plums, and black raspberries. Black raspberries! I was so excited to find them at the market. They’re my favorite berry and very different from a blackberry. If you have the chance to try some, don’t hesitate because they have a short growing season. I used these fruits on a Victoria sponge, with some strawberry […]
They had beautiful golden yellow tomatoes at the farmer’s market yesterday and I went a little crazy. There’s nothing like the smell of a real, grown-in-the-earth tomato. It brings back childhood memories of going out to the garden to pick tomatoes for supper, standing barefoot in the rough ground, and brushing the dirt off a sun-warmed tomato to breathe in that pungent tomato smell. The scent of a tomato is unique – it reminds me of geraniums, or maybe rosemary, […]
