New Premium Organic and Humane-Certified Pastries & Food Gal Giveaway

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Mushroom-thyme savory scone from Pastry Smart.

For the past five years, Pastry Chef Mark Ainsworth has been crafting organic pastries, breads and cookies for a number of San Francisco Bay Area hotels and restaurants, including the Carneros Inn in Napa and the Lodge at Pebble Beach.

Now, you can enjoy his Pastry Smart products in your own home by picking them up at Mollie Stone’s, Real Food stores, Piazza’s and Shokolaat restaurant in Palo Alto, where he is the CFO.

Ainsworth was previously executive pastry chef at the Lodge at Pebble Beach and the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. His Pastry Smart company is thought to be the first pastry producer in the United States to be American Humane Certified. The company also works exclusively with organic dairy Clover-Stornetta Farms.

Recently, I had a chance to sample a variety of the baked goods, which are made in a commercial kitchen in San Mateo.

Just reheat these in the oven for a few minutes and you're good to go.

The retail line includes par-baked rolls that only need five minutes in a warm oven to enjoy at home. The challah slider rolls baked up crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, and buttery tasting, but not overly rich. They’d be great for dinner rolls for company or to stuff slices of ham into for Easter brunch. The multi-grain rolls had a nice nutty taste and a crunchy texture from the sesame and sunflower seeds that cover their exteriors. A package of six is about $6.99 each.

Lemon cookies that you'll never guess are vegan.

The cookies are fist-sized and perfectly round — like lunch-bag staples from childhood. My favorite — surprisingly — was the vegan lemon shortbread. Made with vegan shortening, the cookies are very crumbly with a delightful topping of crunchy, crystallized sugar. Take a bite and they just melt in your mouth.  I’m not even vegan, and I couldn’t stop eating these. A box of six cookies is $6.95.

Pastry Smart also makes three types of savory scones, which would be perfect for lunch or dinner with a salad and soup. The curry scone is full pungent cumin seeds, curry powder and paprika.  Like the curry one, the mushroom thyme scone has a fluffy, light crumb, but with a more herbal, earthy profile.

Each square-sized scone is perforated into fourths to divide it easily into four bite-size pieces. But most folks, I’m sure, will see it and think they’re meant to eat the entire square. Just realize, though, that the calorie count on the back of the package is 130 calories for a fourth of that scone in your hand, and not the entire thing.

Cheddar corn cake with the kick of jalapeno.

Same is true with the corn cakes — tender, cakey, corn bread squares that are about half an inch in height. The calorie count for these is 170 per quarter cake, though, few people are going to stop at just a quarter of one, especially when they come in flavors such as blueberry, and cheddar jalapeno.

Contest: One lucky Food Gal reader will win a sampler of Pastry Smart goodies, which includes rolls, cookies, corn cakes and scones. Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight PST April 9. Winner will be announced April 11.

How to win?

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Three-Hour Polenta

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Heritage corn polenta, now available for sale at Oliveto Restaurant.

You might think I’m playing an April Fool’s joke on you when I tell you I spent three hours cooking polenta on the stovetop.

But I kid you not.

That was part of the careful cooking instructions I was given when Oliveto Restaurant in Oakland gave me  a sample bag of Floriani Red Flint Corn Polenta to try at home. The medium-course grind polenta is made from heritage red field corn that was originally developed in Northern Italy. It is whole-grain milled, meaning that the entire grain — including all the germ, bran and endosperm — is milled without separating any of those components out.

Because of that and because it’s a harder corn, it takes three  hours to cook.

I was ready to start lifting more weights at the gym for this polenta workout that awaited me. My husband half-jested that he was going to hire a legal day-laborer to help me.

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Oliveto Keeps On Going Strong

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Crudo of local halibut with shaved purple artichokes.

Twenty-five years is a very long time in restaurant years.

But that’s just how long Oliveto in Oakland has managed to not only survive, but to flourish.

A parade of talented chefs have manned the kitchen over the years, including Paul Bertolli (who went on to found his fabulous Fra’Mani salumi company in Berkeley), and most recently, Paul Canales, who was at Oliveto for the past five years.

In December 2010, Jonah Rhodehamel took over as head chef, after previous stints as sous chef at three San Francisco establishments:  La Folie, Zinnia, and Americano.

He’s already started putting his stamp on the rustic, Italian fare here. He started a new dry-aging program to age rib-eyes for three weeks to concentrate their beefy flavor.

Recently, I had a chance to try his menu as a guest of the restaurant.

Enter the doors, and to your right will be the cozy, more casual cafe. If you go up the stairs, you’ll find the warm, inviting restaurant with its bank of windows that overlook lively College Avenue.

My husband and I started with a crudo of local halibut ($13), clean and bright tasting, with the slight bitterness of puntarella chicory and shaved purple artichokes.

The prettiest salad ever.

Rhodehamel also sent out a roasted root vegetable salad ($11.50) that was as gorgeous as a still-life painting. This seemingly simple dish was spectacular, with the carrots, beets and turnips roasted in salt to concentrate their flavor and sugars, and render them tender-crisp. Even an avowed vegetable hater would have a hard time not eating every last bite.

Oliveto has long been known for its house-made pastas, now made with local flours, so we just had to indulge.

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New Cupcake Bakery, Food Truck Gathering in San Jose & Much More

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A chocolate cupcake from Sinful Bliss. (Photo courtesy of the bakery)

Who’s Hungry for Cupcakes?

Downtown Pleasant Hill welcomes a sinful addition in April — Sinful Bliss Cupcakes, to be exact.

Owner Tammie Parnell believes in celebrating life’s everyday moments with something sweet. After surviving breast cancer, being laid off from her banking job and watching her husband lose his own job, she decided to bet the future on her love of baking.

Her cupcake shop offers a dozen flavors, including chocolate peanut butter cup, Nutella, raspberry and Red Velvet cheesecake. Mini ones are $2 each; regular size ones are $3.25 each. Parnell also does custom designs upon request.

Sinful Bliss Cupcakes will celebrate its grand opening at 10 a.m. April 17 with a ribbon-cutting and free tastings. The event is also a fund-raiser for the Pleasant Hill Middle School Art Department, which will receive 100 percent of that day’s cupcake profits. The students will be creating inspired artwork, which will be displayed at the bakery.

Morever, during the grand opening, children are invited to make their own cupcake design. Fifty of the winning designs will be made and sold on April 23, with profits of the sales going to Pleasant Hill Elementary School.

Custom cupcakes from Sinful Bliss. (Photo courtesy of the bakery)

A Food Truck Meet-Up in San Jose

Aren’t you tired of hearing about all those great food truck gatherings in that city to the North and that other one to the East?

Well, South Bay foodies, you don’t have to feel left out anymore. Here’s the event you’ve been waiting for –  SJEats: A Moveable Feast, noon to 8 p.m. April 2 in the Fallon House parking lot at Saint John Street and Almaden Avenue in San Jose.

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There’s A New Citrus in Town — and It’s a Sumo

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The luscious Sumo is a breeze to peel and bursting with super sweet juice.

Nope, there’s no wrestling required to enjoy this new citrus known as the Sumo.

A hybrid, seedless mandarin-orange, it’s as effortless to peel as a tangerine. It’s enormous — about the size of a large orange. With a knob on top like a tangelo and quite bumpy skin, it probably won’t win any beauty awards. But it will floor you with flavor. Its plump segments are loaded with concentrated juice that’s quite tangerine-like, yet with a far higher sugar content. Biting into one is so quenching that it’s like eating a glass of orange juice, if you can imagine that.

Also known as the “Dekopon” in Japan and “Hallabong” in Korea, the Sumo originated in Japan, where perfect ones can be found selling for a staggering $8 a piece in Tokyo gift shops.

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