The International Association of Culinary Professionals will unveil its picks on April 4, handing out top honors in various categories for the best cookbooks of the past year.
You can weigh in with your opinions, too, at ProjectFoodie.com, where yours truly is an advisor.
Through April 2, that online recipe site will let you cast your own vote for top cookbook of the year.
 
After six years of meticulously crafting sophisticated dishes at Marche in Menlo Park, Chef Howard Bulka turned his back on that last year.
He walked away — for the lure of pizza.
Bulka, 50, is still a partner in Marche. But his passion, energy, and creativity aren’t focused on high-end dining anymore. After years of working at white-table-cloth restaurants, Bulka has refocused his sights on down-home eating. It’s all about pies, Pecorino, peppers, and pancetta now.
Howie’s Artisan Pizzeria, presently under construction, is expected to open in the Palo Alto Town & Country Village this summer. For those keeping track, it’ll be in good company next to Sur La Table and two doors down from Kara’s Cupcakes.
Bulka, who lives in Redwood City with his wife and their 7-year-old son, proudly showed off the site to me, with its beamed ceiling, and tiered, 50-seat dining room. He pointed to where the gas oven will be installed to cook the pizzas that will be topped with his own housemade sausage and mozzarella, as well as Fra Mani artisan salumi, and Florida Gulf shrimp. And don’t forget the Straus soft-serve ice cream that will be swirled inside home-made waffle cones.
We talked about why this former executive chef of Silks in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in San Francisco, who had cooking stints at La Toque in the Napa Valley, Square One in San Francisco, and Chez Panisse in Berkeley, got so seduced by flour and water.
Q: This is too funny, but you and I share something in common. We both received economics degrees from San Francisco State University. Of course, I never ended up using mine, opting to use my journalism degree instead.
A: Here’s something even funnier. I started as a journalism major in college. I wrote for the high school newspaper. But in college, I lasted all of three days doing it. I really can’t write. It’s a horrible chore.
In high school, you might get two weeks to write a story. In college, they sit you down at a typewriter and tell you that you have 15 minutes to write something. It was never going to happen.
I went from that to something really practical. (laughs) That was another huge mistake. Economics is not practical.
Q: So in this day and age, with our generation experiencing the likes of an economy we’ve never witnessed first-hand before, you don’t ever regret you didn’t become an economist?
A: Sometimes I regret I wasn’t a venture capitalist. (laughs)
In my senior year in college, I just knew I wanted to be a chef.
Q: You’re not antsy about opening a restaurant in this sickly economy?
A: I’m not scared. Because of the location, and the type of restaurant I’m doing, I think the economy will actually work in my favor. If people are indeed trading down, I think I’d be a good trade-down option.
Q: So we have David Chang in New York going from working at Cafe Boulud to doing modern Korean street food at his mini Momofuku empire. We have Dennis Leary in San Francisco leaving the elegant Rubicon to open his own little diner, Canteen, and an even teenier sandwich shop, the Sentinel. Now, you. Why are so many fine-dining chefs turning to super-casual instead?
A: Part of it is the economy. Clearly, you’d be foolish to open a fine-dining restaurant now or next year, as these things tend to run in 10-year cycles.
It’s also changing tastes. Someone once said to me that the more sophisticated one becomes, the simpler your tastes become. The older I get, the more enamored I am of finding that great bowl of noodles or that great pizza, not some great foam.
 
There are dainty cookies. There are itty-bitty cookies. And there are delicate cookies you nibble while holding your pinkie finger in the air.
These Orange Butter Cookies are none of those things.
Indeed, if this cookie were on a playground, it would be the big, hulking bruiser you’d have to make way for fast.
As my husband’s co-worker Kathryn likens, “It’s a monster cookie.”
These cookies measure about 3 1/2 inches in diameter when baked. And I actually made them smaller than the recipe called for. Really!
You’re supposed to form them into balls, using a scant 1/2 cup measure. Me? I used a scant 1/4 cup measure instead, and still they came out pretty ginormous compared to most cookies I bake.
But the flavor is nothing to be afraid of. Buttery, and citrusy, these cookies are crispy on the edges and tender, cakey within. They have this old-fashioned quality about them, reminding me of cookies I ate as a kid that were so big and soft they made for the perfect after-school snack. Of course, the fact that you use your fingers to flatten the dough balls, leaving an impression of your digits after they bake, just adds to the kid-like charm.
The recipe is from “The Sweeter Side of Amy’s Bread” (Wiley). The book is by Amy Scherber, who launched Amy’s Bread bakery in New York City in 1992, and her Executive Pastry Chef Toy Kim Dupree.
When I tried this recipe, I took the opportunity to try three new products I had on hand. Instead of freshly grated orange zest in the dough (I lacked a fresh orange in the house, if you can believe that), I used orange peel granules from the Spice Hound, which sells at my local farmers’ markets and online. Even though the recipe didn’t call for it, I added 1 1/2 teaspoons of King Arthur’s Orange Emulsion, a concentrated orange flavoring stronger than regular extract. And instead of sprinkling the cookies with regular granulated sugar, I used Nielsen-Massey’s Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Sugar. The results were fabulous.
You don’t have to doctor the recipe with those extras like I did in order to have a soul-satisfying sweet. Indeed, in the recipe below, the only changes I made were to the size of the cookies and the baking time because I made them smaller. The original recipe makes 12 cookies; I made 15.
Monday night’s James Beard Foundation dinner at the swank Fifth Floor Restaurant in San Francisco featured a who’s who of chefs behind the burners: Laurent Manrique of the Aqua Development Corp. of San Francisco; Ariane Daguin of D’Artagnan Foods; Jean Pierre Moulle of Chez Panisse in Berkeley; Gerald Hirigoyen of Piperade and Bocadillos, both in San Francisco; and Jennie Lorenzo and Lionel Walter of the Fifth Floor.
But it was another chef who was merely a guest that night who received another big round of applause: David Kinch of Manresa in Los Gatos, whom everyone in attendance that night put their hands together to honor his triumphant victory the night before on the Food Network’s “Iron Chef America” show.
For those who missed the televised battle that was filmed months ago, Kinch trounced Iron Chef Bobby Flay by a whopping 10 points, mesmerizing the judges with his creative, elegant dishes spotlighting the secret ingredient of cabbage.
I guess you all like your mystic, mythic spirits with the green glow.
Because when I posted about my first experience tasting absinthe (St. George Spirits’ Absinthe Verte, to be exact), boy, did you guys have a lot to say about it.
Quite a few of you wrote in, touting yet another absinthe — this one with the irresistible name of Le Tourment Verte (“The Green Torment”). Maybe we should nickname it the “absinthe to the stars.” After all, it’s made the rounds of Oscar parties, the Sundance Film Festival, and Virgin America flights.
With that kind of cache, I had to try it. And what better day to partake of the Green Fairy than on a day made for green — St. Patrick’s Day?
Le Tourment Verte was kind enough to send me two tiny (airline-size) samples to try, packaged in pretty etched bottles. The regular 750ml bottle retails for about $47.
The color really grabs you. Unlike the St. George one with its green tea-like color, Le Tourment Verte is a bold emerald green. It’s only when you pour the contents into a glass, though, that you realize the bottle is tinted dark green. And it’s only on closer inspection when you read the label that you see the spirit contains artificial coloring, too. Hmmm….
In a shot glass, this 100-proof spirit is almost the color of Scope mouthwash. My husband took a whiff and even declared that it smelled a little Aqua Velva-ish. Hmmm….