eggbeater

i scream...

We are very lucky in Northern California. For too myriad a reason to list here, but today in particular, because the weather was exceptional for an easy day adventure. A little scared to get in the blue car and leave the city on the day when everyone would be returning, we took our chances and ventured out at 1pm.

Only one thing was on my agenda, the rest was up to  whim and chance. Ice cream. Not just any ice cream, but the cold creamy stuff made with local organic ingredients. A waiter I used to work with was from a tiny town in Marin County and jotted down this place's name on a table check slip. Today, over one year later, I pulled it out and went looking for exact location and phone number on Google. Nothing.

Fairfax Scoop is a tiny slip of a thing on Broadway, ( 63 Broadway, Fairfax. 415 453. 3130) under the canopy of young tree. It's very Californian in style, meaning that much of the signage is hand-painted, and there's a large amount of self-explanatory text on the walls inside to explain the experience you are having there. A little sign tells you the utensils are biodegradable. A sign on the top of the garbage can warns you against throwing away things that are not, in fact, garbage. A happy, long poster tells you cheerily what a "community business is." And there is a very thorough explanation about why you may not see "your favorite flavour" at  Fairfax Scoop, (They operate Organically, and not all flavours, like alcohol and candy cane for example, are thus.) Underneath this is a little Alice-In-Wonderland type shelf with a bowl of recycled scrap paper, a pencil and a tiny treasure chest where you may place a request for ice cream flavor ideas.

At Fairfax Scoop they keep 4 flavors as constants: chocolate, strawberry {above photo}, vanilla and honey-lavendar-vanilla {just to the left photo.} After tasting Mexican chocolate, brown sugar pecan and something I cannot seem to remember, I chose a cone with strawberry. They make all of their cones and although it is a decidedly wonderful candy-factory smell, J. & I decided it was too thick and clunky, especially by the end of the ice cream cone. It got in the way of the wonderful texture and subtle dairy flavours.

When we were there it was constantly busy and really fun to sit and watch all the children come and go. There are heavy mosaic tables and matching chairs in the small space and the cute small people additions were a rainbow plastic bench for children to wait and a long bench for them to stand on in front of the i.c. case so that they could peer down into the case as well. A children's cone is $1.50 and two flavours is $2.35.

Although I tried three of their non-constants I was most pleased with the strawberry. So I got back in line and got "for here" chocolate and strawberry together. It came in a nifty metal bowl that felt good to hold. I like that the strawberry is a little icy. It means that they are making a coulis and adding it to a base which I appreciate as an ice cream maker myself. And the chocolate was strong, not too sweet, and really hit the spot.

A mark of home-made ice cream is that many flavours will display many textures.

Which brings me to Sketch. Also made with local dairy, Strauss Organic milk to be exact, Sketch provides a completely different flavour, texture and graphic profile. Located on the very posh 4th Street in Berkeley, Sketch is sandwiched between one of the most expensive and eclectic women's clothing store in the area and one of the oldest and most well known bakeries.

The ice cream is not your standard recipe. There are no egg yolks, no cream and no emulsions. Just fantastically  fresh infusions, a few incredible take-away desserts, seasonal sorbets & granitas whose color and pungency might knock your socks off.

They have a policy where they offer tastes for two new flavours only, and have a few rotating constants. Although one of the owners, Eric, explained this new system to me, it did not work out so well with my mother, an outspokenly loyal customer since their beginnings a year ago. She wanted to taste something new and was told that only the marked new ones could be sampled. So she took a chance and ordered the coffee granita but handed it back after one spoonful. In the end she got a raspberry granita and I ate one of the new ice creams: arroz con leche.

I have a thing for the concept of rice ice cream. The best rendition I have had of this odd concoction is the one at B44 in Belden Alley. Sketch's was light on the cinnamon which was pleasant but the raspberry granita was so barely sweetened that it was difficult, if you can imagine, to get through an entire scoop. (too intensely acidic.)

The owners of Sketch, Eric and Ruthie have a missive on one of the glass doors explaining what ice cream means and represents to them. Their graphic designer, Ruthie's sister, did an amazing job with how the space looks and feels. It's filled with soft buttery light, hand selected antique ice cream wares are spaced nicely on floating shelves, and new to the space are chalk drawings of a jar of milk, a dozen eggs and others in that realm.

In front of Sketch is an old frozen desserts cart circa 1920. Amazingly it is not just a prop, but a working object. I had the good fortune to be at an event where they came with it and handed out tiny scoops of their frozen ice cream all day.

What I love about where I live is that within a half hour I can access the most expansive grand nature, sit near a roaring sea, walk through a small quiet town, and eat ice creams that are re-defining themselves, therefore surprising, delighting and educating me and countless others.

custard class notes & photos

Although I should be going to sleep right now I wanted to write a snippet about my custard class last night, but moreover post the incredible photos generously taken by my friend Dana and the host with the most, Sam.

My longest class to date at 2 1/2 hours, I was a little worried about time because I had a lot to do and I get carried away talking about eggs and custards. I love them fiercely.

The pot de creme elegant, the brulee simple & classic but very difficult to perfect, pastry cream basic but also surprisingly adaptive to innovation, the stove-top pudding Americana and comforting, citrus curds that capture the high notes of sun with translucent beauty, creme caramel and flan the molded milks and burnt sugar topped wonders of pure simplicity, the sabayon a feat of whole egg, air and sweet wine whisked until the author is wet with exhaustion, creme anglaise the Zelig of the family demure disappearing chameleon then ice cream, and the pannacotta a modern work with a raw canvas to taste the pure sweetness of cream.

Who will say that custard is not wondrous, mythical, beguiling? Silk velvet on the tongue, single kiss on the neck, a tiny bite to astonish.

Custards require patience and skill. It's rare that I eat one in a restaurant where I trust the {pastry} chef understands and loves eggs enough to treat them as gently as they need to be. The truffle custard canape at The French Laundry remains one of the most exquisite in texture and presentation I have ever had. Baked in a hollowed out egg shell cut perfectly at the egg's small end {with an egg cutter!}, it is unmatched  perfection.

The egg, in painting, architecture and cookery is considered a perfect shape. It is the shape the quenelle is modeled after.

The space for the class was perfect. One gray building with a red door, tall ceilings and the challenge of an electric stove and  oven. This is what I like about the traveling kitchen private classes--- the space I'm teaching in could be yours. I was there for the first time as was everyone else. It's spontaneous, improv theater learning.

And the inspiration to make at home what I demonstrated last night? Taking home the recipes and eating the results:

  YOUNG GINGER POT DE CREME  &  SUAVE CHOCOLATE

To benefit the Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust

A few months ago a person whom I deeply respect and admire sent me and many other chefs an email asking us for our help in any way that we could give it. She was organizing the first Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust benefit.

Her name is Kristie Knoll. She is a woman with boundless energy, strong embraces, genuine smiles and great connections. We all love knowing her because the fall-out of her dedication is contagious and real. She and her partner Rick Knoll have moved their farm courageously to the "beyond organic" neighborhood of agriculture and have been passionate, opinionated and outspoken about their 'whys and hows' of such a bold move.

The Brentwood Agricultural Land trust exists because Brentwood is fast becoming a bedroom community for San Francisco and so paving over farms to replace them with tract housing. Some of the Bay Area's beloved farms call Brentwood their home and need help reminding everyone else that they want to stay.

For the dinner amazing produce was donated to the chefs who needed only to  prepare delicious courses with it. The challenge was the kitchen. There was none. No refrigeration, no sinks, no ovens and no walls.

The most incredible thing about working benefits is that a certain kind of camaraderie ignites, and chefs of all stripes come together to help each other out. Working for fundraisers reminds us why we do what we do after service has beaten the hell out of us night after night. It changes our perspective, literally, and forces us to do what we do best---think on our toes, collaborate to solve problems, surprise diners with our inventive selves. 

Chefs, although many are "celebrities" now, do what we do behind doors. It's rare we make contact with our diners as they are eating our food. And it's rarer still that diners have the opportunity to come into the kitchen while the cooks are cooking.

When I received Kristie's missive I wrote back immediately telling her that I definitely wanted to help but that I was un-employed so I thought I should be a chef-helper. But a few weeks & emails later I somehow metamorphosed into a dessert maker. Go figure. I saw that Knoll farms had (their extra ordinarily aromatic) verbena on the list of herbs being donated, ollallieberries somewhere else, and said, "I think someone needs to make ice cream with that verbena." You can guess who that someone turned out to be.

Instead of going into a really long description of the menu I will let  the many photos I took speak for themselves. I met new chefs and chefs I had been wanting to meet. I worked with people who are my heroes and heroines and I even learned about a new green that I had never heard of: pissenlit. I partnered up to help run the kitchen, expedite and organize the 5 course menu's service with someone so organized and helpful I nicknamed her a goddess by the end of the night. A personal chef whom I had never met before turned into my right hand and we were finishing eachother's physical sentences by the end of the night. And lastly I must say that the Future Farmers of America high-schoolers made me proud and honored to work with them. They turned out to be the "waiters" and were stellar.

This benefit was raw. We were cooking outside and it was challenging. The systems that were created to make it all happen and come together happened on the spot with those who were willing to put heads together, make compromises, quit whining, make do and be grateful for the profound gift that we were all there in a beautiful warm place doing something pro-active for local and sustainable agriculture.

butter makes it better

I used to work in a restaurant where there existed a lot of little sayings.

"butter makes it better."

"color is flavour."

"consolidation is consideration."

"you can sleep when you're dead."

"we're not afraid of a little fat."

Notice that I put the one about butter at the top. Butter is really yummy. And like the new salt fad, there are now more butter choices than ever. At Trader Joe's a person can just walk right in and buy Irish butter. I recently had creamy and bright goat butter. There's butter with salt from Brittany, butter made only with the butterfat god of cows, the Jersey cow, and even some really good non-dairy butter made without any trans-fats that is the #1 choice for vegan bakers. {I went to a pumpkin pie contest where the best pie was made with this stuff, I kid you not.}

Mmmmmmmmmm butter. Vehicles for butter include baked potatoes, bread, lobsters, shortbread (think of how tall it would be without it), veal stock, buttercream, financiere, corn-on-the-cob, and cookies. Of course there are many more, yes.

One of the strange and extremely nerdy highlights of my business is that I can call a dairy scientist to ask a question if I want to. A coveted position in the world, because how often do those white coated people talk to us who are outside their lab, who are really really interested in the mechanics of the butterfat and water molecules and percentages of said product?

SO! I have a secret to share! CLOVER Stornetta is working on an organic cultured butter whose butterfat percentage will be around 83%!! Right now their unsalted butter is at 81.5% {with 1.3% serum solids} and slightly cultured. She couldn't tell me when it would be unveiled but she said it might be ready for summer on the supermarket runway.

I don't know about you but I am really excited. It's one of the perks of this business I must confess: getting ahold of whispered you-know-whats and so forths. It makes me look forward to putting butter in everything, on everything, and making everything better.

silky smooth sexy sensuous custard {the next class}

**2007 For a calendar of my current classes, click here.**

When people ask me what my favorite thing to make is, I say custards. I like to make something someone finds daunting making at home. It's like giving someone a home-made marshmallow, or even something as frumpy as bread. Because we are wowed by the person-made delicacy that sounds simple. And because eggs are delicate, deceiving, daunting and difficult, not to mention tricky when it comes to applying heat to them.

Custards are the basis for much dessert making. Citrus curds, ice cream, pot de creme, pastry cream, & cheesecakes are just a few of them. What eggs can do, if you understand them, is a solar system of possibilities. And what they won't do, if you mistreat them with ignorance or gruff handling, is as vast. How come some creme brulee is wonderful but many are not? Why do so many baking recipes state that eggs should be at room temperature? How are subtle infusions achieved? How come my scrambled eggs aren't tender? What is a bain-marie and why is it so important for baking custards? These are questions I will answer in my next class.

I am offering two sections and am hoping that all who love and are mystified by the egg, will come.

THE EVER ELUSIVE CUSTARD CLASS

two sections:

WEDNESDAY MAY 25 7-9:30 pm

or

SATURDAY MAY 28 1:30-4 pm

Fifth in a series of in-home private classes taught by eggbeater's Shuna Lydon {bio at the bottom of "are your knives dull and neglected?" post}, this custard class will give you an introduction to the elusive and seductive custard family. Silky smooth, delicate & tricky, custards have become relegated to professional kitchens or given up at home save for pre-packaged mixes. Learn  how to tell when a custard is set, why eggs need to be relaxed before baking, and taste delicious results! To see photos and descriptions of Shuna's other classes, visit:

any posts in the CLASSES category of this blog.

SPECIFICS:

SECTION ONE:

Wednesday May 25 7-9:30 pm

The "Dogpatch" loft of Sam of Becks & Posh http://becksposhnosh.blogspot.com/

{exact location to be sent upon confirmation}

$60

SECTION TWO:

Saturday May 28 1:30-4 pm

The Castro District, SF

{exact location to be sent upon confirmation}

$60

Send me an email and let me know which section you are interested in & I will send you information about how to send your payment in.

Thank you for your interest and enthusiasm, I look forward to hearing from you!

Shuna Fish Lydon

Pastry Chef

Navarre. Portland, Oregon

I am really in love with Portland. I get that totally crushed out feeling when I'm on the plane coming here. I just look around and say the same dumb thing over and over, "the trees are so wonderful." Portland and Ireland have something in common: green is not enough of a word to describe the density of foliage. Trees are content and their canopies stretch and stretch with big wide soft leaves. The air smells good, people are friendly to the point of worrisome, (I find that flirting with   d.  o.  g.  s is easy and their humans are good too) and the food gets better and better every time I visit.

Portland has incredible qualities for a city. Ones I thought I might never experience. Because I am from NYC I have very un-realistic views on how cities should look and operate. For example I will never understand that downtown San Francisco is not south or that during rush hour the MUNI is really slow and the trains are small. On the other hand it is also weird that SF is pretty and the air is clean, or that very close to the city there is real nature, not just a well designed park.

This is what my good friend Mark said, "Manhattan is a city with a park in the middle and Portland is a park with a city in the middle."

If you admit to being a real tree lover, Portland is ravishing. (Just so you know I have quite a thing for trees but I won't wear Birkenstocks.) It's an easy city to get around in: there are bike lanes over most of the bridges, parking can often be found right in front of where you want to go, the neighborhoods are unique and bold in style and flavour, and, as one other NY transplant said, "the city's green politics are infectious."

Eating and cooking from Oregon's rich fish, plant and game resources is encouraged and is fast producing exceptional restaurants and chefs. I have had a few outstanding meals here that were reasonable and relaxed.

One of my very favoritest things about Portland is that, unlike many other cities I have lived in, small and specialized "boutique" businesses feel possible and are supported. This seems like a distinctly Pacific Northwest trait, having produced the Riot Grrl movement as well as a massive DIY culture.

Tangent: I like to think of my blog as a computer produced 'Zine. When I started cooking I wanted to do a 'Zine called "The Line" that would be reviews of jobs and restaurants from the perspective of line cooks: the inside-out. Line cooks could create a network among their peers and talk about the real deal, not just the one that Food & Wine reports to the public. The Line would be passed around and line cooks from all over would write in and share their experiences, therefore mentoring those coming after them and inspiring a "knowledge=power" force of cooks often overlooked in a celebrity-chef producing machine. Line cooks could candidly, and possibly anonymously, talk about their chefs, staff meal, hours and pay. It could be used as a source to find jobs, answer questions and continue the life learning that exists once school is over.

A small and very special restaurant is NAVARRE. Considered a wine bar with food, Navarre is truly wondrous. The long and tall raw space is warmly lit with antique candelabras, specials are handwritten on a gilt frame mirror, hand jarred veggies and fruits share space  on shelves with big cookbook tomes, and the chef-owner might be cooking or waiting depending on the night. There's a communal table (something that always affectionately sways my opinion about a restaurant), and sparse expressive black and white photographs hung high on the walls. Navarre is someone's private dream and you get to eat his food hand picked from the recipes his grandmother's repetoire, produced well but without the sentimental, ego driven, self-referential, smarmy attitude. Prune might be the only other restaurant I know well, whose food is both excellent and down-to-earth.

The experience starts with the menu at Navarre. Lanky and possibly hand-written, it looks like a graphic design class assignment. General food items exist grouped and two prices are preceded by one small box and one large. Different colored magic markers are given to the table and there's space at the bottom for writing in specials. The top item is radishes with butter 2/5, the next group has bread alongside olives and it goes on to include such disparate classics as country pork pate w/prunes 5/12.50, potato pancakes 3/7.50 and trout baked in parchment 5/12.50. Bird 6/15 was a favorite of our table and it came in large family-style bowls braised in a complex sauce that was Portuguese at it's core but played with in a respectful manner to produce a delicious and intriguing result. We had a clean tasting beet salad with romesco, chard braised in a vinegary broth, and the surprise home-run at the top of the eighth inning was the lamb cooked to tender and succulent perfection with a strong sauce-garnish of black olives, fresh rosemary and what felt and tasted like a light beurre noisette and olive oil base.

At the top of its game Navarre's individual dishes are rich in flavor and history, transporting you from one ancient Mediterranean culture to another, but magically meld well on a share plate. I have had three or four meals at Navarre and this one missed less marks at the bull's eye but the lamb made up for it. We were a large group that walked in with no advance warning and the owner asked a slew of table to regroup and made an eight top out of a six. Five of us were there first and we were allowed to sit and begin the table's order.

This is the small friendliness of Portland. It seeps into your pores like the mist that rests lightly on your eyelashes. People who know my need of sunshine were surprised at my giant crush on Portland in the beginning. But last weekend the air was warmer than SF's and the mossy trunks and dense canopies of Elms (Portland has worked hard at keeping it Elms from sudden Dutch Elm disease death by inoculating the trees and planting more Elms bred resistant to this terrible sickness) and Maples make up for the constant impending drizzle and rain. It's like if you know that all that rain makes flowers and gardens and trees grow more generously, and that because the air is sweet and clean because of this cycle, the cloudy rain skies become more bearable. I would be hard pressed to feel that all the dirty slush in New York is worth the occasional pretty snow storm, for example.

After dinner we went to a little gelato place. It was a perfect ending-- just down the street and open late.

Portland's neighborhoods have nooks and crannies that make discoveries feel personal and intimate. It promotes a desire to share what treasure I've come across because, like the Portlanders, it is in my interest to support and make flourish these singular brave dreams.

Big food (large scale production.)

{you know what? today is 05 05 05!!!!}

For the past week I have been working at a catering company. A big one, with a grand reputation and a city of a kitchen. There’s a saying in the restaurant business, “if you want a vacation, quit your job.”

The restaurant business, in fact, has many sayings. Or many voices and rules,  some whispered, many silent. One of them is that catering is for the weaker cook. Catering is (considered) fast & easy money, akin to some of the messages that come with the sex industry. But I say that catering is just another breed of cooking professionally. It needs a different thought process, a way with math and memory, like playing bridge, and the ability and stamina for large scale production.

Just to give you an overview, here are some of the projects I was assigned to in the last 5 days.

Day one: scooped 1100 coconut macaroons, sheeted about 5# of gingersnap dough, cut out 140 gingersnap stars, in the 80 quart mixer made a 4 sheetpan sized batch of blondies and baked, (what was really hard about this was that this mysterious recipe had very few eggs making it more like a gigantic chocolate chip cookie that resisted spreading and had to be forced into submission), scooped and rolled 25 truffles and whipped up a small batch of banana pastry cream.

Day two: spent the entire day from 7am to 1:30 pm egg-washing puff pastry rounds, scooping caramelized onions onto them, patting onions into perfect circle with a good sized border for pastry rim, baking & packing them. I think the count was 3000. (these were for Sisters of Mercy, a foundation, not the band as I had asked.)

Day three: cutting sheetpans of blondies and frozen brownies into 2”X2” squares: 96 per pan, sheeted about 7# of extremely sticky chocolate and walnut dough, (ahhh the joys of sheeting dough with chunks in it…not), and then cutting tiny flouted circles—69 per sheetpan. The cutter had no edge so I went home with flouted bruises on my palms. Pretty.

Day four: Sheeted tons more gingersnap dough, cut about 300 stars, & cut chocolate sandwich cookies, (always remembering that if you need 300 sandwich cookies, 600 need to be cut.) To be honest I don’t really remember day four because even after one day of being away it is all starting to blend together.

Day five: Best for last? Starting at 7am, trayed (= took once frozen cookies all packed together and arranged them orchard style so that in a convection oven they will bake evenly), and baked coconut macaroons until 9am, then melted “coating chocolate” and dipped my fingers into this warm liquid, sprinkling Jackson Pollack-style, these little mounds. This took 6 ½ hours. In the end I had a speed rack with 2800 packed coconut macaroons. Before lunch I was more than half way there and I thought I would pass out from seeing and doing the same thing for too long.

The food at this company is stellar. {I'll give you a hint: the back of the T shirt says, "Perfect is just fine"} The kitchen is tight: light, open, clean, organized and efficient. Learning how to make food in massive batches is a skill set unto itself. I saw really nifty things. Yesterday the starter table made hundreds of beautiful green pea ravioli, the sauce table created about 50 gallons of Caesar dressing, and I saw tiny little taco shells being fried in racks I wish I had a picture of. One day a fellow cut asparagus on the bias for 8 hours.

I have worked at all sorts of catering companies. One was an illegal storefront on the Lower east side of Manhattan and they told me in the interview their standards were high. This was a lark, as I witnessed people cutting raw meat on the same cutting boards as fish, and one day I came to my table (pastry only) and it was covered in scales.

Two years ago I worked for a big SF caterer and the company itself was smooth running but I was scared for the people who had to eat the food. It smelled icky and wasn’t treated well. We “banged it out,” as the dreadful kitchen saying goes.

I have enjoyed working here. I have seen all sorts of interesting tricks and it’s been great to watch a company that is so serious, friendly and organized. The other day the pastry chef was asked how long it would take for us to bake the 2800 macaroons. She pulled out the calculator and entered in how many cookies, how many racks are in the oven, how many minutes it takes to take to bake them and came up with an answer. It was intriguing. Everyone knows how many pieces each batch/recipe makes and there is a huge system that figures out the cost of each item. You’re lucky in a restaurant if one person understands numbers! And it’s incredibly important because many places fail because the chef him/herself has no comprehension about how all the percentages need to fit together.

In the cooking world one silent saying is that restaurant work is at the top. Catering, hotels, teaching, cookbook writing etc. all fall to the bottom and cooks who are trying to be chefs are warned against these fields. Years ago at an event where Carlo Petrini (the leader of The Slow Food movement) was speaking I met Judith Ets-Hokin (sorry, exact spelling unknown) the woman who owns the Home Chef cooking school empire. She said that she believed that the machismo and army/ military-like mentality of restaurant kitchens exists because the work is in desperate need of something that makes the cooks overly proud of what they do so that the hard work, long hours, dangerous conditions and little pay will have an ego reward.

Although I have enjoyed the adrenalin of service, the push from a hard and demanding chef, the rush of hearing the tickets come out of the machine continuously, the insanity of feeling like you won’t be ready for service, cooking delicious food with beautiful ingredients can be done in any setting. My home, catering kitchens, my aunt’s house in Florida, and restaurants. I have enjoyed opening up my own options for other cooking and baking possibilities. For me it has been important to find and define my own personal Shuna Lydon definition of success because the one that works for Thomas Keller or Andre Soltner (the chef of Lutece who stood at his stoves for 45 years) will not and has not worked for me.

Like I’ve said before, an open mind can fit more in it.

Royal Blenheims and the start of stone fruit season------

Happy May!

I like that May is a little pause before all the stone fruit arrives. I have seen the beginnings of cherries at the market, but I know that they won't be in their full flavour until 3/4's of the way into the month and I can enjoy them alone before the rush of plums, apricots, peaches, pluots, plumcots, and nectarines come. Who needs a lover during stone fruit season?

Living in Northern California means that no matter how many seats are in the restaurant I might be working in, I can't make enough splendid edible ideas or see and smell and taste all the varietals of stone fruit there are.

But we  aren't there yet. No. It's only May 1st. We are in the whispering stage, a quiet warning for all to ween ourselves from citrus, eat baskets of strawberries still warm from the farmer's market stand, {a strawberry refrigerated loses it's sun- infused je ne sais quois,} and get that nervous like a blind date funny feeling before tasting our first of the season cherries.

Simultaneously apricots arrive. Cherries get to the market first, as apricots need to be perfect before being turned out. Like a debutante, the apricots are primped and a grand show is made of their arrival.

Or maybe it's that the perfect Apricot is shielded from an unappreciative public. So shielded that it's made it onto the endangered fruit list.

The Royal Blenheim apricot is delicate, exquisite, shy and now endangered. It is the apricot essence of apricotness. Liquid languid musky oily perfume elusive slow kiss on the back of your neck. The soft fur baby bird down that is barely visible on the skin of the apricot is your first touch and its sticky trail on your wrist and fingers, your last.

Because the dried apricot is the way apricot growers can make the most from their crop, the cheap Turkish dried apricot: a clear, rubbery, tasteless, embarrassing stand-in for something that might resemble a fruit that grew on a tree, has taken over the market, rendering the California grown Blenheim hidden from and/or expensive beyond the sight and reach of most mortals.

In the winter, when most chefs who love working with fruit that was recently living and picked ripe, dried fruit and nuts are relied on heavily. Dried apricots deliver color, flavour and acid, not often found in something passed through an unbearably hot chamber and then stored in plastic bags in cardboard boxes in warehouses. I love that with a little re-constitution, a dried apricot puree can pack a vibrant punch in ones mouth. One only need use a dash to create a wondrous surprise with meat, pastry, ice cream, cake or salad.

On May 14th The Baker's Dozen will hold its Third Annual Royal Blenheim Apricot Summit. We will convene at a ranch, eat BBQ and taste loads of treats made with this doyenne of stone fruits. We went the first year just for fun and were struck by what the very few farmers who are still growing this complex fruit said to us about the dwindling orchards and their struggles in a cut throat market where how well the fruit ships unripe is it's best selling point.

If you have never had an apricot that struck your fancy or seduced you, you probably have never had a Royal Blenheim at the height of her season. If you are in a part of the world whose climate is neither friendly towards this ancient fruit, {they don't ship well}, nor allows for its production, I suggest ordering June Taylor's apricot conserve or The Apple Farm's apricot jam. The Apple Farm adds the noyeau, the internal kernel of the apricot pit, {all stone fruit has this-- it is the "almond-like" seed that reminds you all these fruits were once the bitter almond's kin}, as this enhances the well rounded flavour of the fruit. With stone fruit the leaves, the fruit and the noyau all produce aroma and flavour. A peach sorbet made with poaching liquid enhanced with the leaves and cracked stones can be intoxicating just because the source of the perfumes is mysterious.

Never one to be afraid of being corny or sentimental I would like to encourage you to think about how you shop for, feed your family and friends with, educate and learn from those around you about seasonal and local eating. It can begin with starting a rapport with your butcher, produce person, seafood buyer or even one farmer at your farmer's market. I engage waiters at restaurants because I know/hope that they will go back to the kitchen with my questions and therefore start a conversation about a point I inquired about. Food is delicious and political. As easy as it sounds in this complicated world, we vote with our dollar and our mouths. Restaurants serve raspberries and asparagus in winter because many of us order and eat it.

This early summer I hope that you can become newly acquainted with or have a short lived but intense love affair with a fruit that makes me happy I've waited for her all year, the Royal Blenheim apricot.