Introducing the Food Gal Hat for Fashionistas with Stupendous Taste

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Is this too cute or what?

Just in time for your holiday gift-giving comes the new rockin’ Food Gal military cap with signature embroidered logo. It’s the perfect accessory for all your food-loving pals, as well as for yourself. Natch!

Choose mocha, olive or black.

Don’t forget, there’s also a wide range of other Food Gal items, including aprons, tote bags, and girly T’s.

Guys aren’t left out, either. Find manly Meat Boy aprons and T’s, named for my carnivore husband.

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Exceptional Chocolates in Berkeley

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Bright, bold, and beautiful chocolates from Chocolatier Blue.

Artisan chocolatier Christopher Blue has elevated the art of chocolate making to a whole new level at Chocolatier Blue in central Berkeley, which opened earlier this summer.

Blue, who has worked with the likes of Chef Charlie Trotter of Chicago, is the only chocolatier in the United States to use Amedei chocolate from Tuscany that’s made from 100 percent Venezuelan sun-dried cacao beans. He also uses Five Star organic butter, which has the highest fat content of any butter in the world.

His chocolates are organic. What’s more, the fillings are made using such techniques as grilling, roasting, and sous vide. The packaging is all biodegradable, and much of it made from recyclable materials.

Christopher Blue (Photo courtesy of Jessica Steeve)

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.

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Sweet Sisterhood Grows Even Sweeter on Wednesdays

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Woo hoo for cake and each other.

(Today’s post is dedicated with graditude and admiration to my dear gal pals — Joanne, Lisa, and Elizabeth.)

If only we owned enough couture to be part of the “Lipstick Jungle.” And sorry, we’re far too prudish to boast the boudoir high jinks of “Sex and the City.”

What we are is the “Woo Hoo Wednesday Club.”

We are four women of color _ two of us married, and two of us single. Two of us are in our 40s, one is in her 30s, and one is in her 50s. Once merely friendly acquaintances, we are now true bosom buddies, drawn tighter into sisterhood by circumstances beyond our control. Each of us was laid off from our jobs. From the same newspaper. On the same day.

Layoffs are nothing new in Silicon Valley, where life changes in a nanosecond. One year a company is soaring stratospherically; the next it’s plummeting in freefall off the NASDAQ.

Yet for three of us, this was a brand new experience. All of a sudden a pink slip was not a girly, silk undergarment we donned to feel pretty, but something ugly and demeaning thrust upon us that we were forced to wear.

Joanne is a photographer. Elizabeth is a features designer. Lisa and I are writers. For years at our former company, that is what we were. Now, together, we hope to find what we can be next.

For anyone who has been summarily dismissed from a job they not only loved but were damn good at, there is shock, there is anger, there is sorrow, and there is more than plenty of fear.

We lugged all that to the table for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon, as we sat together at a cushy, red banquette over morsels of dim sum and icy glasses of Thai basil lemonade.

It wasn’t long before something surprising happened: As we began devouring dumplings, we also began filling up on collective strength.  It was lunch — girl power-style.

Lisa dubbed it “Woo Hoo Wednesday” for how cathartic and empowering it proved to be. After all, nobody really knows what you’re going through except someone else going through it, too.

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Her Majesty’s Secret Flour

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Italian doppio zero flour

That’s ”00” to you.

And yes, you can shake it or stir it, but you might get very messy in the process.

Sorry about the James Bond 007 pun, but I couldn’t resist. Doppio zero flour is also known as “OO” flour. The numbers refer to the grade of flour. The “00” is the finest milled available.

I was induced to hunt it down after making the pizza dough recipe in the “A16 Food+ Wine” (Ten Speed Press) cookbook by Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren. The first time I made it, I used all-purpose flour. It turned out incredible. But of course, wondering if a good thing could be made even better, I was curious if “00” would produce an even more spectacular dough, since A16 restaurant uses that regularly for its pasta and pizza doughs

While in Wine Country recently, I happened to find bags of Italian doppio zero at Sunshine Foods Market in St. Helena. I loaded up on it.

The “00” flour is very light and powdery to the touch. Following the A16 recipe, I mixed the “00” flour with a smidgen of yeast dissolved in water, olive oil, and salt. I covered the bowl and put it in the fridge for two days to ferment and slowly rise.

A16 pizza dough made with doppio zero.

When I pulled out the dough, I noticed it was stickier than the one I had made with all-purpose flour. It might be that the “00” is so fine, you need more of it. But because the recipe gives the flour measurement only in cups, not in grams, it’s hard to tell.

This dough also was more elastic. Indeed, it was easy to stretch the dough very thinly so that the pizza baked up with a very crisp center.

Before putting the pizza on a baking stone in the oven, I layered on my own combination of paper-thin slivers of garlic, truffle cheese, and fresh basil leaves. When it emerged blistered and golden from the oven, I draped prosciutto over it.

Pizza topped with garlic, basil, truffle cheese, and prosciutto.

It was one mighty fine pizza. I can’t say that the “00” flour imparted any more taste necessarily to the pizza. But it made the dough a pleasure to work with, and perhaps even crispier.

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