Not Your Mother's Cookbooks

When Chez Panisse restaurant opened a café upstairs from the main dining room, it quickly became one of my watering holes whenever I went to shop or visit friends in Berkeley. Since it was always so jammed, it was best to show up for lunch just after the doors opened at 11 a.m.

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An Italian version of a flour tortilla or Indian chapati, piadine is one of the oldest hearth breads made in the world today. It hails from the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy on the Adriatic Sea, the site of old Etruscan cities, and the most fertile wheat-growing area in the country. This was a staple of the tenant farmer’s diet.

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Quinoa translates to “mother” in Quechua, one of the main languages of native Andean peoples and Incan descendants. It was a staple highland grain of equal importance as maize, and considered a premium food source of strength and endurance for working in the thin mountain air.

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Wills and Kate are back from their honeymoon already (and their first official state duty of greeting the Obamas in the palace behind them and a visit to Los Angeles with dinner prepared by Giada De Laurentiis. What was on the menu? Pea pesto crostini, California chopped salad, and chicken Milanese.) and I haven’t even made my statement on their wedding cake yet! Soooo here is my spring/summer 2011 royal wedding cake extravaganza recap…

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Here is the recipe for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s vintage glamour wedding cake, which includes the instructions by Fiona Cairnes for making the tamarind fruit cake batter, icing, cake decorations and assembly, so now you can recreate the royal wedding cake in your own home.

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Pepper is one of the other most important spice seasonings in the kitchen because of its enormous popularity in Western cooking. I love pepper and just about every recipe in my recipe collections has some pepper in it. If you’ve never tried a high quality black peppercorn, you’re in for a treat.

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It used to be that to have a luscious seafood roll, you had to travel to New England for this regional seashore specialty. Nada no mas.

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If you love to bake bread and are a gardener, chances are you’ve wondered about growing a small patch of your own grains. An increasing number of avid home gardeners are growing, reaping (cutting stalks and binding into sheaves), threshing (shaking the grain from heads), winnowing (separating the grain from chaff and straw bits), and grinding their own grains from a small backyard patch.

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Just ten years ago, Indian-grown basmati white rice was virtually a culinary secret to American cooks unless they had traveled in India or had a palate for ethnic world cuisine. Basmati rice is the preferred choice of Indians everywhere in the world.

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There are an entire world of rustic ethnic breads that are easily reproduced in your modern home kitchen. These are breads that were once only available regionally, tasted by the adventurous traveler. But no more. The invisible family boundries are down and the light is rushing in. What is old is now new. What was hidden by geography and religion, is now open to interpretation. Bakers are pushing the envelope. They want to master the techniques.

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