chez pim

Chez Pim Gift Guide: for the coffee lovers in your life

Having trouble finding a gift for the coffee lovers in your life? Chez Pim is to the rescue!

Let's begin with beans. What would be a better gift for the discerning coffee lovers in your life than great beans? If you can find great artisanal roasters near you, give them a visit and buy a pound of their freshly roasted beans. Do it just a day or two before you plan to give it the coffee lover in your life, for a serious coffee afficianado, it's fresh beans or nothing at all. If you don't have one in your area, there are a number of sources you could order online - Stumptown, Intelligencia, and my personal favorite, Blue Bottle, will ship your coffee just about anywhere. Even the best beans from these artisanal roasters will cost you less than $30 a pound, usually with shipping.

If you are willing to spend serious money for that serious coffee lover, why not sign him (or her) up for a coffee delivery program?

Intelligentsia in Chicago has the Roaster's Choice program, sending a lucky recipient a pound each of three different types of beans, chosen by the roaster, hence the name. The initial package includes an Intelligentsia mug, a French Press, and even a measuring spoon, all to get your coffee lover on his way to coffee nirvana. Intelligentsia's Roaster's Choice program begins from $180, for four months to $350 for 12 months.

Blue Bottle Coffee Company - whose beans I use to turn the resident grumpy, sleepy ogre in my house into my wonderful, cheery, happy boyfriend I know and love every morning – has many subscription programs you can sign that coffee lover in your life up for. He can get his beans once a month, twice a month, get a particular beans you know he'd like, or get a rotating roster of wonderful blends, all designed for a particular coffee making method. The subscriptions start from as low as $18 a month.

Chez Pim's Gift Guide: for the cooks who have *everything*

Jessica Seinfeld once found herself in not a dissimilar dilemma. She had to buy gifts for Oprah Winfrey – what does one buy for a woman who has everything? I feel your pain, Jessica, many of us are faced with that very problem every day, and worse so come holidays time. No, not that we had to find stocking stuffer for Ms.Winfrey herself, but we have friends who are nothing if not Oprah-esque in their foodiedom. And, like it or not, $10K worth of Jimmy Choo's – what Jessica allegedly ended up sending to her pal Oprah - aint gonna do for them.

So, to help you find that ultimate of ultimate gifts for the cooks who have everything, I've put together a list for you. Fret no more, Chez Pim, as usual, is coming to your rescue.

Here's the list, in not so particular order.

Give them a few thousand dollars' worth of gift certificates to Korin, about ten would be a good start. I don't care what you think $10K would buy you in shoes, it's just not that much in the ultimate world of cutlery at Korin. And, yes, even the cook who has got everything will never have enough knives. No foodie worth their fleur de sel would ever have enough knives.

Happy turkey day, hey, will it blend?

I had a root canal yesterday. Unfortunate timing, I know. But one doesn't schedule an emergency dental surgery - it's, as the name implies, an emergency. So my bad tooth is now fixed, and I'm no longer in acute pain, but I won't be chewing anything for another day or two.

We are going to thanksgiving dinner chez our friend Laurent up in Marin. He called yesterday to say he's stuffing foie gras into a capon for our dinner tonight.

Sounds great, Laurent, but the real question is, will it blend?

Happy chewing, everyone!

Porcini (cèpes), persillade butter, and fried egg - or the lunch that wasn't

Freddy Fungus walks in the door..
No, no, this is not the beginning of a joke. There actually is a guy here called Freddy Fungus, he's something of a legend in town. I don't need to tell you what he does exactly, do I? His name alone is quite evident.

Well, Freddy didn't actually walk through the door this time. Instead, we woke up one morning and found a box on the front porch, filled with gorgeous, plump porcini – cèpes as they are called in French. There's a note inside, tiny scribbles declaring the value of the treasure within. This is Santa Cruz, the honor system still works here. Freddy will be by eventually to pick up his money. He clearly knows where we live.

What would I do with a box of porcini mushroom? I could think of a few things. Alas, the fungi – like many good things around here – were destined for the restaurant. I am feeling more like a step-child every day.

I managed to snatch one. Not the prettiest, but it would have to do.

Chez Pim is now at chezpim.com

When I started blogging with Typepad eons ago, they still got their training wheels on. And so did Chez Pim. Since then, Typepad has grown into a force to be reckoned with - Mena on the cover of Time Magazine and everything. And Chez Pim? Well, Chez Pim hasn't made it there (yet), but it's time I drop my training wheels too. I'm still using Typepad -and loving them as much as ever- I'm just dropping the typepad bit from my url.

So, from now on Chez Pim is going to blogging from her own domain at chezpim.com. All incoming links to chezpim.typepad.com will continue to work, but if you have to a link to here, I'd appreciate it if you could take a minute or two to update it to the new url: chezpim.com.

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Menu for Hope 4, it's that time of year again

I can hardly believe that a whole year has passed since we raised the whopping $62,925.12 to support the UN World Food Programme last December. Time really does fly.

Anyway, it's that time of year again for me to remind you that Menu for Hope is approaching, this would be our fourth annual campaign, and we do hope you join us.

You don't know what Menu for Hope is? What, you've been living in the mountains somewhere, cut off from the food blog world? Well, fret not, here's a list of frequently asked questions to answer your every query. Read it and join us! (If you're on Facebook, join us there too.)

What is Menu for Hope?
When will this year's campaign take place?
Who is the beneficiary of this year's campaign?
Who collects the money?
How can I help?
I'm a blogger
I'm a restaurateur, author or food/wine producer/seller
I'm a food blog reader or a food lover

Quince Caramels - Caramels aux Coings

I am going a bit mad for caramels, can you tell? I'm blaming it all on Heidi who instigated this round of my caramel lust. So, what did I do this time? I made quince caramels. Isn't that such a pretty-sounding name, quince caramels? And let me tell you they taste just as lovely. Actually, before you read any further, I should warn you that if you didn't like quince, you should just stop now. Because what we are about get to is one of the quince-y-est of quince flavors, so if you didn't like the taste to begin with you might as well not waste your time, or mine.

Last weekend, after our visit to that hidden citrus grove somewhere in the hills above Watsonville, ostensibly to pick some fruits for a special dinner at Manresa this week, I somehow came home with two big bagfuls of quince. I know we were there for the citrus, which were wonderful and quite worthy of a post on their own soon, but what also caught my eyes, and my nose in fact, were two giant quince trees bearing the most fragrant fruits. Even the sticky and thorny underbrush around them couldn't deter me. Kendra, the new pastry chef at Manresa, and I fought over the choice fruits. She turned hers into delicious Membrillo - that's for another day and another post too.

The fuzzy, fragrant fruits stared at me from the countertop for a couple of days. I thought I would poach them in simple syrup and keep in the fridge. The sweetened quince and the poaching syrup make a wonderful topping for my morning yogurt. The batch that my neighbor Beccy and I made a couple of weeks ago is running out, so this would be a good time to replenish. Then the real inspiration struck, caramel! I could use the sweet poaching liquid to make quince caramels, combining two of my favorite things to eat in the world, caramel and quince – I just love quince, I even love a restaurant named after it. How wonderful would that be?

The best ever salted butter caramels, what a delicious mistake!

I've had a few near disaster in the kitchen lately, and that's not counting this morning when I nearly sawed off my index finger with a bread knife. Blood and gore aside, I've also had a few great accidental "discoveries" as well. One of those resulted in the pretty caramels wrapped in parchment that you see in the picture above.

My friend Heidi recently wrote about her espresso caramels, which got me craving one of my favorite sweets, the salted butter caramels, caramel au beurre salé, from Brittany. A great balance between salty and sweet, chewy and meltingly soft, those caramels are the stuff of foodie dreams. I buy an arm load every time I come across them, but somehow they are never on hand when I crave one. Heidi's post inspired me to make some caramels of my own.

I have some homemade salted butter left – made from the milk from our Normande cow share - but I wasn't sure if I wanted to part with that. Luckily, I also had a quart of cream (from the same cow, Nutmeg) left in the fridge. Conveniently, Heidi's recipe calls from cream instead of butter, so that's what I planned to use.

There was one little kink in that plan. Heidi's recipe also calls for cooking the cream and honey (which she uses in place of sugar) to temperature together. That wouldn't do for me. I'm always complaining that caramels in America are cloying sweet and lack that bitter edge you get from burnt sugar caramels in France. So I would adjust the recipe a little. I'd cook the sugar first, get it burnt enough, then I'd add the cream and make my lovely caramel candies.

Should the search for the next Iron Chef have a "Sudden Death" rule?

That Next Iron Chef thing is hot! Did you see Sunday's episode? I'm having so much fun watching that show, and even more so now that things are really heating up leading to the final round in Kitchen Stadium. It's been great watching these chefs having it out, and the closer to the finals, the more seriously they are taking the competition. Ok, the knives are not exactly out for the other chef-testants à la Top Chef, but the happy-go-lucky tone of the early shows are wearing off. Now you've got Chris Cosentino trash talking Michael Symon spending big money on Lobster, or John Besh calling Chris's cooking style erratic- or did he say erotic? A couple shows before this you also got Symon pooh-poohing everybody else's Berry Gastrique. It's all fun for us watching from the other end of the tube.

One thing that kept popping up in my head as I watched each episode is that there should be an out-by-technicality or a Sudden Death rule. Alton, in his constant improv narrating should swoop in and send someone home on technicality the minute he saw one of the golden culinary rules broken. I know it's in the heat of the competition and whatnot, but some things are just too outrageous to let pass. And I am surprised the judges have been so easy on the chefs!

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.....not!

I'd like to think I'm pretty handy around the kitchen - and perhaps elsewhere but that hardly concerns you. I'd like to believe that I could cook pretty much anything. I might have to try a few times, but eventually I would figure it out.

I guess I was wrong. There is at least one thing that failed me time and time again. Chestnuts. These pesky little nuts. I love eating them, but I am at a complete lost when it comes to cooking them.

When I was growing up in Thailand, I looked forward to these every winter. As soon as the weather got a bit cool, around this time of year, chestnut merchants in Bangkok's Chinatown set up their stalls along Yaowarat road. It was quite a sight, scrawny merchants standing in front of their imposing woks - big enough to deep fry me at that age - filled with tiny pebbles, blackened with soots, and so hot they were nearly molten. Strewn in with the pebbles were plump chestnuts. Each merchant would stir their wok constantly, ensuring even heat to properly cook the chestnuts to perfection. Chestnuts cooked that way were amazing, you could almost pop them out of the shell by simply opening it. Your fingers tips - or your whole hands if you're not careful - would turn black from the soot on the shells, but who could care when the morsels within were so delectable. I for one didn't.