“I made your recipe, but I changed it and now it’s better,” said a customer. How so?
“Well, I didn’t read the recipe, but just put all of the ingredients together in a pot and cooked it. So I didn’t realize until later that I was supposed to roll the nuts in sugar.”
Ah, the challenge of writing […]

French foods are back in style, finally! Our historically-French city now has several French restaurants: Brasserie and Chez Leon (their chefs teach cooking classes at Kitchen Conservatory), plus Atlas, Cafe Provencal, Franco, and Pomme. Julia Child would be so happy that we are rediscovering her favorite foods (only two spots are available for our Julia class […]

Say what? Banh xeo! These irresistable Vietnamese crepes, pronounced bunn SAY-oh, are a crispy thin pancake filled with flavor. Although no one in the cooking class had ever heard of them, banh xeo was the favorite recipe in our recent crepe class. This crepe is made without the traditional ingredients of eggs, milk, or flour, but tastes […]

Crepes are sunshine: round, yellow, and hot. On a dreary February day, think of the sun and eat crepes! My first taste of a crepe au Grand Marnier was taught to me by an eight-year-old French boy, who declared them to be his favorite! Crepes are street food in Paris and the kiosks always have a bottle of […]

The “Let’s Eat” section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured an article by Shirley Corriher about pound cake, which drew a lot of attention.
She calls for baking the cake in a pullman bread pan, because the right-angle sides (most bread pans have slanted sides) produce a pretty dessert when the slices are cut on the […]

Hot air is dramatic, especially when caught in a web of custard. This beautiful, thrilling sweet souffle is the easiest and fastest dessert to get a “wow” response.
First, make a sabayon sauce (egg yolks, sugar, and alcohol cooked in a double boiler). You could stop there and just eat the delicious sauce on berries. But […]

A simple, well-designed tool can make kitchen prep easier, faster, and better. In addition to a sharp knife, there are probably ten tools that I use every day: Microplane grater, garlic press, lemon press, bench knife, dishers, Swiss vegetable peeler, the amazing ginger grater, the thin-and-flexible “fish” spatula, and, my all-time favorite, ”the blue-handled spoons.” These two […]

The best food to bake on an icy-cold day is bread. The hot oven helps to heat up the house and the aroma of freshly-baked bread is irresistable. I know, you should let the bread cool after baking, but I can never resist diving into the hot bread and slathering with butter, jam, or cheese.
To achieve the […]

At 5 degrees outside (and a balmy 59 degrees in my bedroom), I long for soup. Rather than venture outside, I’m using the vegetables I have on hand (butternut squash in the drawer, broccoli in the fridge, peas in the freezer, or canned tomatoes in the pantry).
This generic soup recipe illustrates the seven steps to superior soups:

stock […]

The worst part about New Year’s Day is the resolutions. People go on diets. They stop eating food that tastes good and try to eat food that tastes bad (so that they won’t eat too much of it). They say no when I offer tastes of delicious food. Every morsel of food that you put […]