Not Your Mother's Cookbooks

Potato Leek Soup is the workhorse of the French kitchen and has sustained many a soul on a cold night. What is quite remarkable is that you put a potato, a leek, cover with water and it just cooks up…

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Everyone thinks that just because I was trained as a professional pastry baker, worked in a host of bakeries, was a caterer for close to 20 years, and write about baking, that when I want to make a little something…

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This fruit cobbler is certainly one of the simplest coffee cakes to make.  The cobbler is low in sugar, baking up into an appealing fruit-laden cake that is as flavorful as it is tender.  Based on traditional German everyday coffee-time…

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I remember one lunch catering job where my client was having lunch negotiating a contract with a tennis pro. He looked at me and asked, so what is your opinion on all of this on eggs not being good for…

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My dear friend Norma Golobic, who knew every excellent place to eat in the city, told me about a great little bistro in San Francisco off Union Street. It was called Balboa Cafe. One trip there and I was hooked;…

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When I was still in college, my boyfriend and I spent every Sunday with his grandparents, Granny and Grampy Weick, after Grampy retired from working on the Union Pacific Railroad line. Their Saratoga, California, home was a suburban corner lot.…

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Once a local restaurant asked me to do a private cooking class and streamline a fresh- tasting fruit crumb cake for them that would serve a large amount of people at brunch. I made this fresh pineapple crumb cake with a yeasted sweet dough, cheese layer, and fresh pineapple filling in a half sheet pan. It was a smash hit.

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Popular in all the cuisines of the hot regions of the world, the juicy, tart-sweet pineapple fruit is really showcased when used in sweet breads.  Most coffee cake recipes call for canned pineapple, but here the colorful fruit layer is…

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A salad is a dish of raw or cooked foods, seasoned and dressed with a sauce of some type. Salads are divided into three main categories: The tossed garden greens include baby lettuces and spinach salad; many salads feature one type of lettuce…

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Invite anyone from France to dinner and they will be horrified if you take out a bottled dressing for the salad. Ohhh mon dieu! It is part of the dinner preparation ritual to have someone at the counter mixing the vinaigrette.

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