Category Archives: Recipes (Sweet)

Cabernet Wine — In Flour

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Cupcakes made with flour milled from Cabernet Sauvignon grapes skins.

You can find flour milled from most any grain these days.

Now, you also can find flour with red wine in it. Cabernet Sauvignon, to be exact.

Earlier this year, when I was strolling through the Tyler Florence Shop in Napa, I spied bags of Cabernet Wine Flour and Cabernet Cocoa Powder, both of which I just had to buy. After all, it’s pretty hard to resist their striking reddish-brown hues.

They’re made by Marche Noir Foods of Irvine, CA. The wine flour is made from the pomace (skins) of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes after they are crushed. The skins are dried, then milled into a powder, which apparently is high in iron, fiber and Resveratrol (a natural anti-oxidant). The Cabernet Cocoa Powder is just dark cocoa powder mixed with the Cabernet Wine Flour.

The beautiful color of the wine flour.

A 10-ounce bag of the Cabernet Wine Flour was $14.95 at the store; a 10-ounce bag of the Cabernet Cocoa Powder was $9.95.

I couldn’t wait to try baking with them. The Marche Noir Web site is a good place to start for recipes. I zeroed in on the one for “Cabernet Velvet Cupcakes with Ganache Glaze,” which incorporates both the wine flour and cocoa powder. The recipe also calls for red food coloring, but I left that out.

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Pumpkin Pie of A Different Sort

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Not your average pumpkin pie. No, siree.

This is my kind of pumpkin pie.

Indeed, it’s made for folks like me who don’t really feel the love when it comes to traditional pumpkin pie.

I dunno, but the time-honored one has always been a little too one dimensional for me.

But “Pumpkin Swirl Ice-Cream Pie with Chocolate-Almond Bark and Toffee Sauce” is anything but that. It’s from “Bon Appetit Desserts” (Andrews McMeel Publishing) by Barbara Fairchild.

It’s a decadent graham cracker crust filled with vanilla ice cream swirled with pumpkin puree mixed with autumn spices, then topped with a mound of whipped cream and craggy pieces of dark chocolate studded with almonds. Serve big wedges with a warm toffee sauce.

Seriously, does plain ol’ pumpkin pie even compare to that?

I think not.

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Two Pals and One Pan

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A taste of friendship.

Friends come in all shapes and sizes.

Sometimes, they even come bearing sleek rectangular tart pans with a grin.

That would be Lisa H.

It’s often said that making friends is harder to do later in life. We have no time, we have less patience, we have too many other friends already, and we get too set in our ways to accommodate newcomers of any sort.

I never expected blogging to throw open wide the doorway to new friendships in this phase of my life. But it certainly has. As a consequence of posting about food and family for these past three years, I’ve made quite a few new friends who have grown fond and dear. Ones who have opened their home to me for dinner. Ones who have hiked with me on lazy afternoons. Ones who have lent untold moral support in my new endeavors. And ones who have opened their vast pantry to me, knowing my predilection for baking.

The latter would be Lisa H.

A regular reader of my blog, Lisa H. would often send fun comments about my posts. She’d also thoughtfully send story tips and job listings my way.

Yet, we had never met. Not until late last year.

Thank you, Lisa H.!

She was moving out of the Bay Area. As a result, she was cleaning out her house, and specifically, her kitchen that held a trove of specialty baking pans from classes she had taken long ago. Would I want any of them, she asked in an email, since she planned to donate them before relocating.

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Cookbook Party Feast at Town Hall in San Francisco

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Jars of pickled veggies decorate the table at the cookbook party at Town Hall.

It’s easy to see why Chef Mitchell Rosenthal would want to throw a party to celebrate his upcoming new cookbook.

After all, the 272-page book took him two years of hard work to put together — all the while running three very successful restaurants in San Francisco.

Last week, he hosted a summer feast to end all summer feasts for a small group of food writers, including yours truly, at his Town Hall establishment. It was a huge spread with all the dishes featured from his new cookbook, “Cooking My Way Back Home: Recipes From San Francisco’s Town Hall, Anchor & Hope, and Salt House” (Ten Speed Press). The cookbook, which he wrote with Jon Pult, will debut this fall.

Chef-Proprietor Mitchell Rosenthal chats with guests.

The entrance to the lively Town Hall.

The cookbook even features a rare forward by celeb Chef Wolfgang Puck, whom Rosenthal worked on and off with for 18 years at Postrio in San Francisco, Granita in Malibu and Coco Pazza in New York. The recipes in the book reflect the arc of his career: New Orleans specialties from his time cooking with Chef Paul Prudhomme, whom he called every Friday for six months straight until he snagged an internship at K. Paul’s; a deft array of global cuisines from cooking at the Four Seasons in New York; and classical techniques from Le Cirque in New York.

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Bodacious Biscuits

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Best. Biscuits. Ever!

When flipping through a new cookbook, you spy a recipe called “Ginormous Biscuits.” You’re going to stop in your tracks completely breathless, aren’t you?

I mean, who wouldn’t with that temptress of a name?

The folks behind the new cookbook, “Tupelo Honey Cafe” (Andrews McMeel), sure knew what they were doing when they coined that name for these bountiful butter behemoths.

The book, of which I recently received a review copy, was written by Southern writer, Elizabeth Sims, and Brian Sonoskus, executive chef of the Tupelo Honey Cafe, which opened in downtown Asheville, NC in 2000 and now has a second location on the south side of the city.

I actually had the pleasure of dining at that adorable downtown cafe years ago, while touring the South after attending a journalism conference. Asheville is a thoroughly charming city. Like so many college towns,  (it’s home to the University of North Carolina at Asheville), it is imbued with youthful energy, culture and artistic spirit. It’s also got one of the best self-guided walking tours around with iconic sculptures marking each significant landmark. One of the most famous ones is the restored boarding house that was run by the mother of American literary giant, Thomas Wolfe, where you can sidle up to his bronzed size 13 shoes at the entrance.

After working up an appetite from all that walking, head to the popular Tupelo Honey Cafe for down-home Southern fare made with seasonal ingredients from Sonoskus’ farm, Sunshot Farm.

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