A few years back, The Orange County Register had one of the most horrendous advertising bloopers I’ve seen to date. There was this campaign called “Take Back the Morning,” which in itself was genius because it encouraged people to carve out some quiet morning time to read the newspaper. I can get behind that.

But then the message was paired with a whole broadsheet page dedicated to the words “GO AWAY” printed larger than any headline that’s ever run in the paper’s recent history. The idea was that a newspaper reader would be sitting in a chair with an open paper shielding him/her from view, with the back of the newspaper facing the rest of the world and telling it to “GO AWAY.” But instead of the morning distractions going away, I heard of a few cases where offended subscribers did instead. 

The idea was quickly whisked away and replaced by better and more successful ads. The “Take Back the Morning” message faded with it, but it shouldn’t have — I really think the advertisers had something there. Why don’t we take back our mornings from the rituals of rushing to work on time? Waking up a tad earlier on weekdays wouldn’t hurt, I think, especially if you filled your newfound time with some baking. Because then, not only would you be taking back your morning, but you’d also have something to take to work with you to remind you of the time you stole from the snooze button. (more…)

There once was a Le Creuset pot,
Whose insides were blackened a lot,
When a cook disregarded
To stir constantly when prompted –
Please learn from her: stir more often than not!

You and I both know that candymaking requires way more attention than say, a casserole or whatever you cook in that Set-it-and-Forget-it Ronco thing you got for Christmas. I don’t have to tell you that. But I do have to tell me that.

It’s what I like to call Recipe Performance Fatigue. After making a recipe a dozen times, you start to get a little lazy with it. Ingredients are skipped, corners are cut. The beauty of cooking is that most of the time, your dish will still be fabulous despite the RPF tendencies you gravitated toward while making it. But candymaking doesn’t have room for all that corner-cutting. This is especially true when you’re making caramels and are dealing with sugar that boils and bubbles like the contents of an active Hawaiian volcano.

RPF is how I skipped the part about “stirring constantly,” ultimately leading to the stubborn black circle of carbon lining the bottom of my beloved enameled pot.

But I will say that the Le Creuset pot’s demise wasn’t in vain. For one, I’ve been scrubbing and soaking it for a couple of weeks and it seems to be slowly helping in lifting out the blackened mess. And to my surprise, the batch of caramels set up beautifully, glistening and cracking in all the right places when you cut them. And they were lacking any foul taste that would hint at my kitchen debacle. It was a Christmas miracle, so much so that I had to sprinkle them with fleur de sel — delicate flakes and tiny cubes that would come as close to snow as Southern California would allow. RPF, eat your heart out! Now, back to scrubbing my pot.

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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You know what I like about Thomas Keller’s recipes (aside from everything)? His simplicity. Yeah, he’s got intricate recipes with ingredients not readily available to many home cooks, but when he gets the chance to be simple, he’s good at it. Especially when we’re talking about recipe titles.

For the most part, Keller takes a no-frills approach when naming his recipes. His brownie recipe from ad hoc at home is simply titled “brownies” — minus any capitalization and all the other things you can add to a title (i.e., “double chocolate brownies” or “best brownies in the whole freaking world”). Things many of us do to try and make our recipes stand out from the rest of the pack. He doesn’t need all that.

ad hoc at home, Keller’s latest installment, is by far my favorite.  It’s also the first Keller book that I’ve seriously cooked from, unless you count the time I made Bouchon’s onion soup. Though fantastic, it came at a steep price: Cooking the required 8 pounds of onions for 4 hours made my tiny apartment smell like I had a Funyun party the night before. With each passing day the intensity of the onion scent diminished, but the actual scent got worse. It went from smelling like sweet caramelized onions to the inside the mouth of a halitosis sufferer. But I’d spend another 4 hours of my life stirring a stock pot full of onions for that rich, buttery onion soup.

The wafting aroma of baking brownies is much easier to stomach than that of 8 pounds of slow-cooked onions. And in winter, a house smelling of chocolate and warmed by an oven is one of life’s pleasures. A simple pleasure, just like Keller’s brownies. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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