Almost 15 years ago, at the beginning of my career, I worked at Lulu (SF). Unbeknownst to my very naive self at the time, I would never work at another restaurant that would make all its own table bread. At Verbena (NYC), under the tutelage of Diane Forley, the pastry department was responsible for a number of breads, especially on the weekends when we would produce gorgeous ficelle, brioche and any number of elegant quick breads for the toast cart.

But no other kitchen would be like Lulu. With two stacks of bread ovens, a full time bread baker (who came in at 10 pm and left near 8 am) and custom designed wooden shelves to display and sell the massive pain de campagne (looking much like Poilane’s signature loaf) Lulu’s bread program was serious.

So serious, an entire walk-in was devoted to the bread’s starter, loaf proofing, and our overstock of dairy. A separate refrigerated room for ingredients lacking in strong scents. Except the time when I backed into whole lambs hanging, waiting for butchering. But that’s another story.

Because the restaurant made so much bread, our starter was kept in a plastic rolling garbage can sized container. Massively huge. Lets call it 50 gallons for the sake of a good guess. Whoever arrived first thing in the morning was required to roll it out of the walk-in, pull a few gallons for that nights bake and feed the monster. The last duty meant we had to lean over the lip, reach into the sticky abyss, and stir the gloopy gurgling mixture with a large wooden spoon.

No matter how much we rolled up the sleeves of our chef’s jackets, some of the starter would creep into our uniform. But this wasn’t the worst of it. Natural starter is stickier than glue. When we were done with our duties, we held out our arms like surgeons and entered the dish room, tackling skin with hot water and the high-pressure sprayer.

Even after countless showers, little teardrops of dried starter stuck to my arm hairs, eventually rendering me as soft and hairless as a Tour De France cyclist.

One day I arrived in the kitchen earlier than anyone. I turned on ovens, flipped light switches and then noticed something very weird. The 2nd walk-in door was slightly ajar. Walk-ins come equipped with self-closing doors and, for safety, door handles on the inside as well as the outside. Doors do not stay open, as they are pressure sealed and close with the fwooop! to prove it.

I was alone in the kitchen.

I stood in front of the door. I held my breath. Listened very closely. Nothing but the whir of the fan.

Then I tried the door. Although it was ajar I had a hard time getting it more open. I tried to peer inside. Nothing. Pulling as hard as I could, the door flew open, throwing me on the ground. Recovering just in time to catch the door before it closed again, I stepped inside.

Someone had not sealed the starter’s lid. Usually we closed the lid and weighted it with a few half gallons of dairy. To keep the bears out.

Starter grew out of the 50-gallon bucket. Crept down the sides. Grew across the floor like lava. Scaled the cold box walls. Spread its wings, traversing 90-degree angles, and defied gravity by covering the ceiling. Starter dripped on my head, plop. Starter was everywhere. Alive, happy, wet, sticky, growing. I looked down. Like the first man on the moon I saw my shoes disappearing into foreign goo. Starter naughtily walked out the door.

The starter was having a party.

And I would spend the next many many hours cleaning up after it.

Lesson number 1:
Never leave a starter unattended. Never assume it sleeps a deep dormant sleep in a cold box. Never question the power of wild yeast you’ve wrangled in, microscopically, from the air. Never forget that day. Never say pshaw to a Californian sourdough.

Part 2: Monday April 23.

My birthday is tomorrow. Depending on whose age you look at in my family I am either not yet approaching middle age or will die in about 20 years. Supposedly this means I am to look at where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Up until very recently much of who I was, was one thing. Pastry Chef. The title, the position I’d been working for the last fourteen years, although much of the time unbeknownst to me, towards this goal. I identified myself with the restaurant I worked for. Which is a very good thing, because the second question people ask me, after learning how to pronounce my name, is, “Oh really, where do you work?”

I worked as a pastry cook and assistant for almost 8 years when I was given my first pastry chef job. Many of the assistants I worked alongside went on to be famous pastry chefs themselves. And I watched many cooks and sous chefs become chefs of their own restaurants. From my point of view one worked themselves up in the ranks before being given or holding a chef title.

In the last few weeks I have consumed more desserts at restaurants (A16, Campton Place, Rubicon, Two, Delfina.) than I did all last year. And this week I’ll be eating more. In part due to birthday dinners, but also as research for a position I’m interviewing for. The object is to find out who is making what in San Francisco. The goal is to assess the palate of the person I may work with, and for him to see what I might make or what sweet things inspire me. We are both looking at where our foggy city, one of the most food and restaurant-centric in The United States, stands on the platform of pastry chef hiring.

I have even called upon the Chowhounders to help me track down the best sugary courses within these forty-nine miles. Sadly, it’s been like getting a straight answer out of a lawyer. One dessert here, another there. Some have even been so bold as to tell me about the artificially-flavored butterscotch pudding at Town Hall. (An article about real butterscotch in The Washington Post here.)

I’m not looking for all the sweets to be the same. One dessert at Chez Panisse will be like another at Zuni, Quince or Oliveto. (In fact, if you look at the lineage, these restaurants practically trade pastry chefs like baseball cards.) I want to try the homey American desserts at Salt House as well as Citizen Cake’s kooky innovative concoctions or straightforward, simple, seasonal creations like those found at Delfina or Foreign Cinema.

My hope is that I will be eating a pastry chef’s creations. I’m not so interested in restaurants that buy their desserts from an outside source. (Think I’m making this up? Read this short article about the disappearing restaurant pastry chefs in NYC.) I’m also a little biased against the chefs who say they’re not only the savoury chef of their kitchen, but also the pastry chef. I realize this saves them a lot of money, but I’m really tired of eating warm oozy chocolate cake, creme brulee and tough crusted out-of-season fruit tarts or dishes that look like they just stepped out of the pastry and baking program at CCA.

It sounds like I’m hard to please doesn’t it? I’m actually the biggest fan of delicious food you might ever meet. Give me simple, complex, hole-in-the-wall, humble, bold, a quiet ice cream cone, standard traditional fare, technically seamless, fussily plated or a cookie on the go.

Just let me taste the taste of skill, perhaps a dash of inspiration and/or innovation, a love for my craft, tiny sprinkles of deference, whiffs of hope for mastery, half cup of practice, grams upon ounces of question-asking-inquisitiveness, and, although not absolutely necessary: when I close my eyes I’d like to taste that that person’s hard work over the years that they’ve read and worked and asked questions and eaten and tasted helped them land a job where they were taken seriously, and give them the chef title they deserved.

Might you have a favorite pastry chef whose desserts I must have on my extreme dessert-eating spree this week? Any and all suggestions taken into consideration!

Between Meals: SF Chronicle’s Michael Bauer blog on desserts in the Bay Area.

In this age of Google and Wikipedia, it’s easy to forget the joy of getting lost for hours deep in the stacks of a three-dimensional library. To entice you back to these important anchors of our community, here’s a short list of culinary exhibits and events worth adding to your list of food adventures:

READING AMERICA: Reconstructed Books by Mary Marsh

“Snack.” Mary Marsh, 2004. Coffee, ink, gouache on found book.

Head to the airy, sunny sixth floor of the San Francisco Main Library to find a wonderful exhibit of new work by artist Mary Marsh. Using comfort food as an analogy, Marsh explores the intersection of eating and reading. Discarded books and old library catalog cards (remember those?!) find new lives with bits of linen tape, layers of gouache and coffee as ink. Marsh explores issues of privacy, consumption and narrative with these evocative creations. Her artwork will be on display at the library galleries though April 5, 2007.

While you’re at the top of the SF Main, visit one of my favorite local resources: the Koshland SF History Center. If you can’t make it there in person, it’s almost as fun browsing their amazing photo collection online. Their “Picture This” series includes a line of serious-minded, long-aproned butchers at the Stadium Market in the Sunset District (1935), a proud baker at Dianda’s Bakery in the Mission (1980); and a birthday party in the Western Addition, when Japanese-American families still flourished in the neighborhood (1938).

San Francisco Main Library, 6th Floor
100 Larkin Street, San Francisco
(415) 557-4400

TASTE MATTERS: The Role of Food and Drink in Jewish Culture

Detail of “Pesach” by Mary Thorman

The Magnes Museum, a stately building tucked in the foothills of Berkeley, has launched a series of cross-disciplinary presentations of gastronomic narratives in Jewish culture. These intimate gatherings are open to the public ($8 for nonmembers) and offer a valuable resource both for those attempting to understand their own heritage and those trying to learn more about the history of an important but largely invisible group. Last week’s conversation with Eleanor Kaufman from UCLA highlighted Eastern European homesteaders keeping kosher under harsh conditions on the plains and utopian farming communities, such as Petaluma’s chicken and egg producers, that succeeded for a brief period in the early to mid-20th century.

On May 31, Alisa Braun from UC Davis will discuss the depiction of Jewish foods in films, and on August 16, Benjamin Wurgaft from UC Berkeley will show how food writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, shape perception and identity.

In addition to its ceremonial, decorative and modern art collections, the Magnes houses an excellent research library for scholars of Jewish history and culture.

Judah L. Magnes Museum
2911 Russell Street, Berkeley
(510) 549-6950

ALICE STATLER LIBRARY

The menu cover from a 1930s “Bohemian” restaurant near Coit Tower.

To support its stellar culinary arts and hospitality program, City College maintains a reading library of books about food, restaurants and anything remotely related to the history, culture, science, politics and business of cooking and eating. Their periodical collection alone could occupy a dedicated cook for years.

Though nearly everyone in the Statler Library is wearing chef whites, it’s open to the public. You’re welcome to read for hours whether you’re browsing for random discoveries, honing a research topic or filling up on glossy food mags.

You can also enjoy the library’s beautiful menu collections online. With their covers and inside pages lovingly scanned, the menus highlight restaurants across the nation as well as concessionaries at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco.

Alice Statler Library
City College of San Francisco
Room 10, Statler Wing
50 Phelan Avenue, San Francisco
(415) 239-3460

It’s that time again: time for teaching, inspiring, educating, and eating delicious Spring and Summer produce. Who’s not looking forward to rhubarb, strawberries, cherries? Besides the obvious: eating them out of hand, fresh from the farmer’s market, wouldn’t you love to know how to whip up some Pavlovas, Angel Food Cake, creme anglaise, pannacotta and smooth, silky pot de creme to go with those long awaited warm weather fruits?

I’m teaching two classes this month that may be able to help you with these, and many more sweet projects. By popular vote, the first class on Sunday March 11 will be on the subject of Egg Whites. Understanding what egg whites can do, as well as knowing how to get them to do it might pose a daunting task. Perhaps you’ve already attempted egg white based desserts? A short, but incomplete, list of confections where egg whites play a starring role: buttercream, mousse, Angel Food Cake, meringue, cupcake frosting, Pavlova, French Macarons, and sponge cake.

And, by perfect reciprocity, the second class on Sunday March 25th will be on the subject of Custards. On that day we’ll learn how to use and get to know the whole egg. Achieving light, gorgeously smooth, rich custards is no easy job. But pastry chefs and Jell-O shouldn’t have the corner on the market. Learn why water baths are necessary when baking custards, how to get the most out of infusing various flavors and scents, just how rapidly to whisk pastry cream, and more.

I am a student of the egg and have been studying it for almost 15 years. For a post written about my classes from the perspective of some of my previous students, check this one out on pate a choux.

My hope is that those who take my classes will go home and have the confidence and foundation knowledge to not only replicate what we made in class, but more importantly, to understand enough of the “whys” to be able to correct mistakes and experiment further. My hope is that my love and my passion for sweet things will be infectious, touching you with the bug to make beautiful desserts at home.

Future classes include, but are not limited to: more Knife Skills classes, seasonal fruit desserts, chocolate, caramel, and whatever you’re in the mood for… Many of the class subjects come from past and future students’ requests.

These classes will take place in North Berkeley (exact location disclosed upon registration) on Sundays from 12:30-4 PM. They are $100 per person with two spots in each class for “assistants” at 1/2 price. The format is a mixture of lecture, demonstration, hand-on, and eating the end results. Classes are small, usually no more than 12 students.

If you’re interested in signing up for my March classes, or just want to learn more, head over to Eggbeater. There’s both an email link for correspondence as well as the Paypal link for direct registration.

Come One, Come All. Come Hungry To Learn!

There appears to be no end to the amount of emails through Eggbeater I get on this subject. The irony is not lost on me. I am a self-taught chef. Trained on-the-job, my resume is my only certificate. It’s rare I meet other people like me in my age range. More rare still that I work in a kitchen with anyone who has not gone through a culinary program at all.

And yet, I have been training culinary students for almost 15 years. Whether it’s side-by-side training to get them familiar with my station and the kitchen at large, or as their supervisor through an extern/internship (culinary schools use either nomenclature for the same thing: sending students out into the field for work experience before they graduate) or as their direct boss after they’ve graduated.

The specific, name-brand culinary school students I’ve worked with and trained have depended on the geographical location of the businesses or their respective fame. Because of this, I have strong opinions on specific schools. I’ve come to learn their strengths as well as their gross weaknesses. I have become opinionated about a form of education I myself could not afford, time or money-wise. I have been working since I was 14, and have not since had the luxury of learning without pay.

For these reasons, when I receive email missives all over the world on the subject of culinary school advice, I dole out well thought out and experiential words. I have lost count of the people who wish they’d listened to me when I attempted to talk them out of culinary school.

It is not that I think all culinary education outside of the workplace is a waste of time. But I think one should know all their options before signing a check for upwards of $60,000 for two years of education, or less.

I know for a fact that few, if any, culinary schools, lay out all the facts and possibilities for prospective students making bright eyed inquiries on their shiny doorsteps. It used to be that culinary schools required their future students to have at least some experience in the field before even being able to apply. Now the only skill a future cook needs to possess is the ability to sign a check.

When I receive an email the first thing I do is ask the person a number of questions. I realize each person coming to me has a different agenda, various hopes, specific goals and has bravely put forth an inquiry to a complete stranger. It’s vulnerable to ask for help, but an amazing resource the www offers anyone trusting enough to think there’s someone out there who can answer seemingly impossible or overwhelming questions.

I began my career from a similar place. A friend of a friend of a friend was a chef in New York City. Soon after she graduated from CCAC I took a trip there and contacted her. She did not hesitate to say yes and within hours of arriving I was sitting across from an accomplished chef taking notes on what she was saying. After thanking her profusely for making the time to see me she said something I hope to never forget. I have said it myself more than once and always credit her.

“I always say yes to helping other women in the field because professional cooking is a Men’s Club. What we are doing here is the only network for female cooks. If I don’t pass it on to other women, no one else will.”

Almost a year later, the late Barbara Tropp spoke strikingly similar words at a fundraising dinner announcing what would be the first women’s culinary professional organization, Women Chefs and Restaurateurs.

I’ve written a fair amount on the subject of culinary school advice. My most “Googled” piece is “What is a Chef’s Responsibility?” Recently I wrote a piece, so transparent I’m practically naked, about the pastry chef glass ceiling I’ve hit, especially in the Bay Area since both the Dot Com Bust and September 11th.

It’s not easy these days to be excited about my profession, my specific field and the industry I love. But I believe deeply “we keep what we have by giving it away,” and I honor those who apprenticed, mentored and educated before me when I answer these missives. As well, I’ve recently fallen in love with teaching culinary classes myself.

Here are some excerpts of emails I’ve sent to various people who have asked me for culinary school advice:

“Know why it is you want to go to culinary school, what specific needs and desires you have, and then the education you go after will fill these. The other option is to go after a specific restaurant for on-the-job training.

Some important attitude hints: Be humble. Start at The Bottom– peeling apples, doing prep, learning to butcher, tempering chocolate by hand, etc. Do not take a job where you’re considered “the pastry chef” for at least 5 years. Employers love to give titles to people to entice them, but it only works out for the business in the end– because you’re a lot cheaper than me and it’s easier to stroke your ego with a title than the learning that you need to do along the way. Bad habits are formed in those cooks with little or no direction.

It takes more time to unlearn than it does to start off training under the best people you can find. Not every chef is a great teacher. Most chefs do not have the time to teach. A lot of the learning is on you. Supplement your hours in the kitchen with articles, books, library visits, magazines, and eating out whenever you can afford to. Develop your taste memory by using all of your senses when you eat and go to farmers’ markets.

You’re not going to make very much money in this field, but most especially at the beginning. So it’s of utmost importance you work with the (pastry) chef you want to. In the kitchen/restaurant you want to. Whose desserts/food do you love? Do you love the classical or modern stuff? Do you like big kitchens or the small ones? Asian food, French, North African… think about this.

Do a little research: collect (dessert) menus from a bunch of local restaurants. When you go in and ask for the menu, have a pen and write down the (pastry) chef’s full name. Then take your resume into each place whose (dessert) menu calls out to you and (make sure to find out when is the best time to go to the restaurant: if they serve lunch visit betw 3-4:30, if they only serve dinner, visit @ noon) go to each place asking for the (pastry) chef by name and ask if they have any positions open. They don’t? Would they be willing to have you come in one or two days a week for free? Tell them how much their (dessert) menu interested you and say you are coming there to work for them specifically.

INTENTIONALLY CHOOSE YOUR EDUCATION, YOUR TEACHERS, YOUR MENTORS.

If you are going to make $10 hour working anywhere, work at the place you want to learn the most. Just like school, just like life: your education is up to you! You will learn a lot from someone who knows a lot. From someone who has a lot of suggestions, can brainstorm, knows the history of food and food science. Is able to teach, to mentor, and to be patient enough to grow a person from seed to sprout, at least.

Don’t stay at a job unless you’re learning. But don’t put any job that you haven’t been at for at least 6 months on your resume. Buy and read the SF Chronicle (or your local paper) and the NY Times Every Wednesday. This is the cheapest way to start your regional restaurant education.”

But patience on your side is necessary. Chefs who think you’re in a hurry will most likely view that attitude as disrespectful. Not a single craft is learned overnight. Few chefs I’ve worked for have taught me by saying, “Here let me show you a better way.” Or, “Take all the time you need to get this right.”

Learning on the job has often meant that I learned under fire. It meant I had to pay close attention when chefs and sous chefs didn’t teach in an empathetic way.

Learning how to cook professionally is about doing it. It’s repetition, teaching all five senses memory. It’s about deference and humility, respecting those who have been cooking/baking longer. It’s stamina, and a passion so deep and strong it can feel delusional. Professional cooks are best when they are a precarious mix of humble and cocky, and knowing the balance is important. Something besides external validators like money, the public’s gratitude or a normal life must drive you.

And lastly:

“There should be thousands of things YOU should look for in a professional cooking job! Is the kitchen clean? How are the Spanish-speaking workers treated? Are the sous chefs helpful? Is the chef absent? The food delicious? Is there a staff meal and is it edible? Are the appliances clean and working properly? Are people caring for themselves and their surroundings? The cooks tasting their food? How many cooks have been there longer than 6 months, a year? Is the sous chef a person who has been promoted, and if so, from what position? Are the cooks happy to be there? Are they learning? Is the pastry chef experienced? How long has the kitchen management been baking/cooking professionally? What’s the style of the management team?

School gives you a foot in the door. But that’s all. Now the real work is ahead of you.”

I am currently mentoring a few people, some of whom have chosen culinary school, some who are going alternate routes. It’s thoroughly inspiring and rewarding. No matter what a person chooses, my hope is that my industry will continue to thrive and expand the envelopes and glass ceilings I’ve been straining against for the last 15 years.

And if more people begin learning a craft that takes a lifetime plus to master, the more wonderful food there will be to appreciate.

Every year you have the same holiday dinners. Turkey for this, ham for that. An odd crown roast or duck and maybe cedar plank fish if you have a house in the country. You like the same side dishes to go with these main proteins. With some meals a mixture of sweet and savory gracing the table is important, but sometimes it’s all about the salt. Certain holidays are about being American and then there are the ones that remind you of the culture in which you grew up or flavors your grandmother introduced you to.

Each cavity stuffed with a different set of aromatics.

Goose, bound.

You’re married or belong to a community or every year you go to a different house for these holidays. Every year is basically the same, except that everyone’s a little older, or every other you do what your partner wants. Sometimes you volunteer at your local synagogue or church or soup kitchen and make more food than you thought possible. When you sit down to eat after these days your exhaustion is deeply soul-satisfied with a varied plate of food you let yourself (finally) eat and enjoy.

Elise Bauer makes her famous cranberry-orange relish at the event.

During the year you make dinner parties or bring what the host asks you to make. You shop at the farmers’ market differently for these special nights. You pull out your favorite cookbooks and try a new recipe or finesse a favorite from the tried-and-true box. You proudly unfurl your food and wait nervously for people to dig in, hoping beyond hope that what you’ve made will pass muster and maybe at the end of the night someone asks you for your recipe. You go home feeling warm and full in ways you generally don’t after dinner at home.

Basting.

One day you realize you sorely miss a particular holiday dinner you went to year after year. It was German affair complete with goose, red cabbage with chestnuts, a most exquisitely rich pan gravy, lebkuchen and bite-sized marzipan shapes from Berlin. The person who you went with has died, and now every year, at the same time, you miss that goose. Even though you didn’t grow up with anyone who ever cooked a goose.

Cookiecrumb and Cranky’s bright and tangy sauerkraut crockpot.

Prepping the innards for gravy. (The goose is dense and rich and the gravy begs to be drunk from a glass!)

You have a food blog, or you date someone who has one. You used to cook professionally, or are going to culinary school, or are a professional food writer, or you live in a house the size of a private airplane hanger because you’re the most amazing photographer, or you’re a meat cooking expert or you have a wine cellar or you’re not working right now. You organize a goose making dinner because you realize, in order to satiate this goose-eating-taste-bud appendage you’ve acquired and now must acknowledge, albeit late in life, you must learn how to cook said animal yourself.

Jessica Wilson taking the temperature of the geese.

You start talking about the possibility of a German Holiday Feast near actual holidays to your food blogging friends. You plant the seed.

A brilliant idea comes to you one night late. February! It’s the perfect time for such a dinner. Although you won’t get your geese warm from a fresh slaughter as you might near Christmas, you’re told all your Bay Area options for goose buying. You’re not working much or you’re in need of organizing a grand food event. You’ve recently been to a number of massive community food gathering undertakings for which you only showed up as a guest and now it’s your time to kick it into gear. You go to you local meat expert, fellow blogger, someone you refer to sweetly as your personal Meat Angel. You know he’s the person to make your first goose with.

You channel the most organized, bossy side of you. You want to eat what you want. You make a list, asking for people to choose from a list and “call” a dish. It reads: “spaetzle, red cabbage with chestnuts, a green salad (for me what constitutes a salad, in, Feb. is head lettuce, cucumbers and radishes), baked potatoes, something sauerkrauty, steamed broccoli or greens or squash something, raw celery root something, something leeky, cranberry sauce/chutney something, chocolate, marzipan tinted dessert and Marc, can you make that Orange Cake?”

Paul Hendry carving with Guy’s lucky carving knife.

At the last minute you have to change locations. People you’ve never met offer their industrial palatial estate. In between dinner and dessert one of the hosts, a distinguished professional photographer, takes portaits of all the guests! The kitchen crew of three gets shot jumping in the air. (All photos from the session will be made public shortly; link will be posted on Eggbeater.)

Molten hazelnut-cocoa nib brittle garnish for pot de creme made on site by Shuna and David Byron.

Marc’s orange cakes & caramel sauce plated with David & Shuna’s gianduja pot de creme.

“The Kitchen Crew” Jessica Wilson, David Byron, and Shuna Lydon (not pictured) at the head of the table happily eating dessert.

Even though the event tires you out you would do it again. Twenty-four people gather, make the seasonal side dishes you were craving, and bring wine and beverages from all over the map. You make new friends, have a number of inspiring conversations, banter and laugh, navigating a foreign kitchen, and everyone eats the German Holiday Feast of your making, from your heart and imaginings.

I’m new to TV watching. But I have taken to it like a parched and thirsty fish. In the last few years it has saved me from my head, often a bad neighborhood to inhabit alone. Armed with an inherited television set equipped with an internal VCR and DVD player, this brain drug of a machine has kept me company a lot in the last few years. To this end I have joined other Americans in following a number of series’ and caught up on movies that have defined my modern cultural generation.

For years I have been repeating this sentence, “Oh no, I didn’t see that, I haven’t heard of that, I wasn’t aware of that, because I have been working.”

My mother said years ago I could have made the best jury member on the OJ Simpson case, because I knew absolutely nothing about it.

A few months ago I was given an innocuous little shiny disk labeled, Escape To River Cottage, and only remember the odd tidbit about what it could be about. Good thing I did not start watching it until just the other night. A person has to have a life which includes leaving the house, making supper, taking the legs out for a stretch, and interacting with other live human beings.

If you like to eat, are interested in where your food comes, have ever entertained the idea of forsaking city living and planting a garden from which you will plan meals around, enjoy the feeling your face gets when an unplanned smile emerges, like a dash of English humor, and think a show involving cooking and eating could be something other than staged, perfect, indoors, and inane to the point of “lowest common denominator” script writing, you must get ahold of any part of these series now and watch it with someone you like!

The liner notes from TV.com:

“Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal has decided to quit the bustle of London and take on the life of a smallholder at River Cottage, a former gamekeeper’s cottage in Dorset. The aim is self-sufficiency; to grow his own vegetables and raise his own animals for food.”

It is addictive in the best sense of the word!

The word on the street is that I have only just begun. A quick perusement on the www comes up with a fantastic interview with Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstal himself. Then there’s the River Cottage website, complete with appropriate page links and a whole page devoted to those behind the delicious scenes. Channel 4 talks up their baby as well, and then there’s the dangerous list of all the titles.

It’s still winter, even in the Bay Area, go ahead, get a few disks and hole up for the weekend. But be sure to have some farmers’ market snacks around. You may not be hungry for bridge mix or chips and salsa after watching an episode end with recently culled and butchered pidgeon in B’steeya, cold pike en gelee, or Hugh’s first hen egg whipped up into a quick courgette souffle.

If you’re one of those new fans for whom doing things halfway is not an option, you may choose to cook up some of this fellow’s food right away by heading over to our own local British Gourmand, Sam, of Becks and Posh, as she has cooked up one of Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstal’s recipes, from his most recent River Cottage Meat Book.

Feel free to come back to Bay Area Bites and let me know if I have steered you right!