This post is out of order chronologically due to editing issues and holiday mayhem. Also, it was the first time I used my new Kodak zi8 camera so some of the photos reflect that.
]]>I made these for a friend’s birthday party after the caramel layer I was planning broke and started burning and spitting clarified butter all over the stove — very unattractive. After chucking that mess, I rushed to whip these up and ran to the party leaving them behind! There is a lesson in there. I believe it is: If you forget to bring the dessert with you, you get to keep it all for yourself. YIPPEE!!!
]]>Somehow I got the job anyway and at that time Dan Budd was the extremely talented and very hard working pastry chef. I think he left to be a pastry instructor at CIA right around the time I quit before I got fired (long story). I could barely look at CIA in the distant views yesterday during my harrowing (vertigo induced) stroll across the Hudson, but after we were back on terra firma and I calmed down, we zipped up route 9G to Dan’s cafe, Taste Budd’s Chocolate and Coffee Cafe, in Red Hook, New York for some medicinal pastries.
]]>Divalicious Chocolate! is setting up a chocolate farmers’-market stand on the set of J-Lo’s upcoming movie, The Back Up Plan, tomorrow. Very glam!
]]>My favorite works of eat were from Homespun Foods on Main Street in Beacon.
]]>The next morning I was toast. Is there such thing as a food hangover? Or was it wine flu from the foodparty.com event the night before? Duty called so I dragged myself back for the love of cheese and smoked, fried, cured, marinated pork products that was my day three and it seemed to “cure” whatever was ailing me. Last night, I had a huge salad to ward off the scurvy and today I bring you my fancy food finds (if not necessarily faves).
]]>This post is inspired by last Sunday’s brunch at Melt, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Service: BAD. Bad service is usually blamed on the waiter, but my experience is that it always trickles down from the top and usually stems from poor hiring practices, little or no training… yes, poor management.
]]>“I decided if people wanted a ‘dinner show,’ I would give them one. And the critical difference between my show, and the dinner shows and dinner theater I’d been to in the past was the food. It was not going to be the churned out, mediocre slop masquerading as food that you get more often than not at this type of show.”
]]>“Australia is inundated with American fast-food chains. Their concept of American food is totally corrupted. But they love great food, so I decided to do what I could to teach them about our cuisine.”
]]>“I was frightened a bit in the early days. I originally arrived in Far North Queensland. Rain forests. The Great Barrier Reef. Visually stunning, but the ‘sticks’ food-wise.”
]]>