Whipped cream cake that tastes as rich and buttery as you imagine.
Would you believe that this cake contains no butter and no oil?
Just heavy cream — a lavish amount of it.
“Whipped Cream Cake” is from the newly revised and updated, 35th anniversary edition of “The Cake Bible” (William Morrow, 2024), of which I received a review copy.
It’s a beautiful golden-hued Bundt cake with a tender, moist crumb and a taste so rich that it needs no embellishments.
First published in 1988, it’s by baking expert, Rose Levy Beranbaum, who has been nicknamed the “diva of desserts.”
The revised book is a whopping 684 pages, with 150 pages and 30 percent more recipes than the original.
Roasted turnips and radishes, plus their green tops, in a delectable sauce.
My cousin’s wife, Mayjane, is a true sauce fanatic. So much so that’s she’s been known to ask a server to scrape up the last tablespoonfuls of sauce from a seemingly-empty restaurant dish to deposit in a doggy bag to savor the next day at home.
As such, I have no doubt that she would got nuts for the buttery, tangy, umami-bomb of a sauce that triumphs in “Miso Roasted Turnips and Radishes.” Without question, the rest of you will, too.
This easy side dish is from “Warm Your Bones” (Union Square & Co., 2024), of which I received a review copy.
It was written by Vanessa Seder, a food writer and culinary instructor, who was a long-time teacher at the Stonewall Kitchen headquarters in Maine.
Although the book’s subtitle is “Cozy Recipes for Chilly Days and Winter Nights,” most of the recipes can be enjoyed year-round. That includes “Nutty Homemade Sourdough Parmesan Crackers with White Bean, Sun-Dried Tomato, and Sage Dip,” “Roasted Cauliflower Steak Sandwiches with Hard Boiled Eggs and Herby Olive Oil Yogurt on Flatbreads,” “Spicy Fideos with Seafood,” and “Banana Maple Bundt Cake with Creme Fraiche Glaze.”
It’s always an occasion when a “Top Chef” champion opens a new restaurant. Even more so when it’s Stephanie Izard, arguably one of the most successful winners to emerge from the Bravo TV show’s 22 seasons (and the first woman to win). And especially when she chooses to do so in Silicon Valley.
After opening her original Girl & The Goat in Chicago in 2010, Izard was named Food & Wine “Best Chef” in 2011. When she opened Girl & The Goat in Los Angeles in 2021, she gave up the Windy City for Tinsel Town, moving there with her family. Valley Goat is her first Northern California restaurant, and what she told me is the first of several planned restaurants she will open with Treehouse Hotels.
Chef Stephanie Izard, who has spent the past six weeks in Sunnyvale, to oversee her Valley Goat restaurant.
Quirky and playful, the hotel is like a glamping playground gone wild for Gen Z. There’s a beer garden with picnic tables set with Jenga towers, rubber duckie floats in the pool, and a fence cleverly painted with tree trunks to blend in and create the look of a lush forest with real trees.
It may look Italian. But this pasta dish is Greek all the way.
Italian bucatini goes Greek when tossed with a tomato sauce imbued with the warmth of paprika, cumin, nutmeg and cloves.
Nestled with a tender chicken thigh simmered in the same sauce, it’s a hearty dish that transports you to the sunny Mediterranean from the get-go.
“Chicken Stew over Pasta (Pastitsada) is from the cookbook, “Yassou” (Artisan, 2024), of which I received a review copy.
It was written by Shaily Lipa, a best-selling cookbook writer in Israel, who is of Greek and Turkish heritages.
In Greek, “yassou” is a customary way to wish one good health. With the Mediterranean diet long touted for its healthful ingredients, the recipes in this book make it ever so easy to include more such dishes in our everyday eating.
Kyoto, JAPAN — In Japanese, Ima means “living room.”
If only my own living room in the Bay Area were filled with the relaxing fragrance of cedar, the warmth of a crackling fire, and such tantalizing aromas as this one.
Tucked away on a quiet street that once housed kimono shops, this newcomer opened barely two months ago in a renovated 110-year-old townhouse.
With a small team of three, it is overseen by Chef Kiichi Imai, who trained at Michelin-starred Hotel de Yoshino in Wakayama, before going to work in several Tokyo restaurants. He later worked on the opening team for Michelin-starred Txispa, a wood-fire restaurant in Spain, before returning to Japan to cook most recently at Noma Kyoto.
The restaurant is inside a 110-year-old former townhouse.The restaurant is all about live-fire cooking.
One of the restaurant’s investors will surely be familiar to anyone with a sweet tooth in the Bay Area: Charles Chen, founder of Basuku Cheesecakes.
Ima is all of 10 seats at the counter, which affords a clear view of the live-fire grill fed with oak firewood from Miyami forest in Kyoto. From start to finish, the hearth plays a major role in the dishes, blending Japanese and French influences that meld with sure-handed searing and charring.
