Tag: bread

Seared foie gras with baby kiwi and almonds at Valette in Healdsburg. (Photo / Heather Irwin)

30 Best Restaurant Dishes of 2015 in Sonoma County

From our food blogger, Heather Irwin of BiteClubEats. As the year comes to a close, it’s always fun to look back at the best dishes of the year — or at least my favorites. Choosing the best from hundreds of meals isn’t easy, and admittedly is rather subjective, but a few dozen rise to the […]

“Parker House” Dinner Rolls

Somewhere, in a squat little cardboard tube, lies a row of Pillsbury dinner rolls, mashed into one another as if caught in some evil baker's version of airline seats... and each of those rolls, as it pays its Karmic debt to the gods of flour and water, thinks of one thing only: Please, please let me come back as a Parker House roll, baked from scratch in somebody's kitchen, pulled apart by the chubby little fingers of happy little children.

My Favorite $5 Kitchen Gadget

I buy too many kitchen toys, and I suspect I'm not alone. Admit it: Anyone who watches Food TV, buys cookbooks, or owns an up-to-date Zagat's, to say nothing of the hardcore amongst us who actually read blogs about food and cooking in our spare time, owns an extravagant number of culinary gadgets. That many of them go unused is a virtual certainty, strange, medieval-looking devices that seemed so indispensable in the Williams-Sonoma catalog, but which turned out to be hard to clean or - worst of all - to require more work than the task they were originally meant to simplify...

Make-Up Bread

My eldest daughter is one of my very favorite people in the world. Really, that's not just a parent talking: The child has an innate happiness, a fullness of heart, and a spontaneous grace that simply disarms everyone she meets. Like her good looks, I take very little credit for any of that, but I cannot abdicate her Mr Hyde self, so we have to find ways to make up with one another, and this is what we've found: There is no better splint for fractured family love than the baking together of fresh bread.