Enjoy the flavors of Nantucket without having to fly to the East Coast.
Menlo Park’s Marche restaurant brings the impeccable seafood of that region to you for a special dinner on March 20. This will be the restaurant’s sixth annual “Taste of Nantucket” soiree.
Nantucket fisherman Stephen Bender will be flying directly from Nantucket with just-harvested Nantucket Bay scallops, Polpis Harbor oysters, freshly dug clams, and a wealth of other fish and seafood.
Yes, it’s what you think it is: A Red Velvet cupcake shaded green instead.
It’s a special St. Patrick’s Day cupcake that will be featured at Sprinkles Cupcakes for the holiday. Priced at $3.25, it’s available now through March 17.
For even more St. Patrick’s fun, Sprinkles also is offering an Irish Chocolate Cupcake at the same price. It’s a Belgian dark chocolate cake topped with Bailey’s Irish cream cheese frosting, and a green shamrock.
At Kara’s Cupcakes in Palo Alto and San Franciso, all the cupcakes will get a dash of green.
San Francisco’s only bean-to-confection chocolate factory is at it again with new goodies.
This time, TCHO has unveiled a Hot and Cold Drinking Chocolate. Its the latest from the company founded by a former space shuttle technologist, Timothy Childs; and overseen by CEO Louis Rossetto, former co-founder of Wired magazine.
A 300-gram tin of the dark chocolate crumbles is $10.50. Put a few teaspoons into a mug, pour hot water over, and stir. Or mix with warm milk. Add brewed coffee or not. You can enjoy the drinking chocolate cold in water or milk, as well. You also can make a simple chocolate sauce from it to drizzle over your favorite ice cream.
The drinking chocolate is a precise blend of three of TCHO’s chocolates: “Chocolatey” from cacao beans from Ghana, “Citrus” from beans from Madagascar, and “Nutty” with beans from Peru.
I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.
You know how you always seem to have leftover hot dog buns after cooking hot dogs, and leftover hamburger buns after grilling burgers?
Somehow, I always seem to have leftover ricotta after baking, too.
My new favorite repository for excess ricotta is Mark Bittman’s mind-blowingly easy “Penne with Ricotta, Parmesan, and Peas.” It’s from his classic book, “How to Cook Everything” (Wiley).
It’s so easy that you can make it blind-folded, while chewing gum, reciting the alphabet backwards, and patting your stomach in counter-clockwise strokes as you balance on one leg.
OK, maybe not that easy. But almost.
Whenever I bake, my husband’s co-workers are usually the lucky recipients of the goodies.
I load him up with the fresh, sweet treats to take to the office. And when he comes home in the evening, I await to hear what verdict has been rendered upon them.
Usually, they get the thumb’s up. But for one co-worker, there has always been a qualifier associated with them.
Ramin will happily nosh on one of my muffins or cupcakes. Then, he’ll tell my husband, “This is good. But when is your wife going to make that pound cake again?”
Apparently, this happens with regularity.
It doesn’t matter if it’s chocolate-chunk cookies or cinnamon-sugar dusted banana bread that I’ve made that week. Ramin will enjoy it, but deep down, he’s longing for the ricotta pound cake.
Since I can’t stand to see a grown-man in pound cake-pain (definitely not a pretty sight), I made him his beloved pound cake two weeks ago.