When Tess sent me the copy of Secret Suppers she also sent a fascinating book called Cooking with Les Dames D’Escoffier.

This is more of a cookbook/who’s who list than anything.  I really enjoyed it.  The book is broken into sections as any cookbook would be but then each section is broken down into recipes by certain Dames d’ Escoffier…Julia Child, Dorie Greenspan,  Joanne Weir, Marcella Hazan…the list goes on.

But it doesn’t stop there. There is a little triva about each of these amazing ladies to go along with the recipes.  I did not know, for example, that Dorie Greenspan was in a doctoral program for gerontology when she abandoned it in favor of becoming a food writer!

This is not a small book with twenty pages of recipes.  This is a serious work, a fantastic anthology if you will, of some of the best in the history of food.  320 pages!

Some of the recipes are:

• Winter Minestrone with Butternut Squash and Kale from Abby Mandel
• Phyllo Fontina Cheese Bites from Linda Hopkins
• Scandanavian Cardamom Braid from Beatrice Ojakangas
• Catalan Pasta with Garlic Sauce from Marilyn Tausend
• Burgundian Spiced Caramels from Jennifer McGlinn
• Gingered Sweet Potato Parsnip Puree from Lee Wooding

I have made a few of the recipes, and I have played with a few of the recipes.  The Anise & Vanilla carrots were based on the Anise carrots in the book.  The recipes are easy to follow and interesting but not so unusual that you would not actually make them.  This is real food, stuff the husband and kids will eat without making weird jokes and odd remarks..and fixing themselves peanut butter and jelly instead.

So, what do you think? Is this something you think you would want to add to your collection?

Feel free to ask questions about it and I will try to answer…

Image:MaryeAudet

Post from: Baking Delights

We had friends celebrating their anniversary one day and the hubby’s birthday the next, and I volunteered to make the surprise birthday cake. Unlike Anita though, I had to put things off ’til the last minute because of other things that came up that week. NOT a good thing at all. What I SHOULD have done was change gears at the last minute and picked a different recipe, but since I already had all the ingredients, I thought I’d give it a try anyway. Big mistake. The cakes turned out great, but I couldn’t wait for them to come to room temperature before slicing in half, and cut them while they were still slightly warm. Then I had to go run for an emergency errand, and left them hurriedly, so by the time I came back, they had dried out a bit. Sigh…. but talk about disaster-in-the-making. When I got back, I only had a couple of hours left to complete the task, so I tried to cook dinner WHILE preparing the cake. Now the way my kitchen is set up, I do my baking tasks on one side of the peninsula and cooking tasks on the other. (We’d like to remodel at some point but for now this is what I have to work with . )

The chocolate cream came out perfectly. It was time to make the white chocolate cream. I turned on the mixer to whip the cream while filling a pot of water for pasta on the other side. Took 15 seconds to turn off the faucet and put the pot on the stove, went back to my mixer and found that the cream was more than halfway to becoming butter. I was ready to cry. I had used up all the cream so I couldn’t even try to salvage it (usually done by adding a little bit more unwhipped to try and get it back to the right texture). And there was no time to run to the store again and get more ingredients. I eventually frosted the cake with it. Then took a last look, glanced at the clock, decided that I still had 20 minutes to run to the bakery and get a nice one for them. There was just no way I could hoist this disaster on a couple celebrating their 10th anniversary! Fortunately, as I said, this was to be a surprise birthday cake, so the couple was none the wiser and enjoyed their store-bought cake very much, thank you.

Fast forward 4 days later. The cake is still in the freezer, and 16-yo daughter is having a little get together with friends, but the question of what to serve for dessert was still open. Daughter and friend had the brilliant idea of serving the cake, perhaps with a raspberry sauce if the first bite determined it to be necessary.

As it turns out, the cake was delicious, especially the chocolate cream filling, which would make any fruity red sauce superfluous. We sliced it up, served it up to guests who gobbled it down happily, and I was left with this last piece to celebrate last-minute decisions that somehow work.

The Last Bite — but if you really want to see how it should look like, hurry on over to Anita’s blog or get yourself a copy of

No. You cannot hurry baking, just like you can’t hurry love. Over and over again this is the lesson I’m being taught. You’d think by now I would have learned this. But that’s also the great thing about it. The pretty, yummy results are always a triumph, but even the disasters have enough going for them to make you want to do it all over again. And I will… one of these days. Dorie’s book will join the ranks of dog-eared, butter-marked baking tomes on my shelf yet.

Post from: Baking Delights