Dried California dates
I admit, the delicious dried California dates are a loose connection to the main point of this post.
If you have read my tweets for the past few days, especially this afternoon, I’m heading out to California, namely San Francisco.
Desserts made of dried California dates: Coconut, date purses and Date and walnut rye rugelach
I will be flying out West tomorrow morning and will be back in a week. This trip is a significant for myself (and my family) for four reasons:
- It’s been nine years since I’ve last visited San Francisco with my family. Back then, I remembered the city was awesome, beautiful, laid back compared to New York City – and I needed to come back. Well, this is now my family vacation and we’re excited…
- Which leads to another monumental event in my life – my graduation from graduate school! A huge weight has lifted off my shoulders for the past two grueling years of academia and I’m a free bird. Relatively speaking.
- My father’s birthday falls not too far from our travel dates.
- And finally, my younger brother, who is a CPA accountant, purchased his first apartment in New York City!
As the list indicates, this trip is symbolically an epic event for my family and I. I’m restless but I should be sleeping now since my flight is early in the morning.
I have planned this trip for the past few months and I’ll name you two restaurants (of the bunch) that I’m planning to eat at: Chef Dominique Crenn’s Atelier Crenn and Chef David Kinch’s Manresa. If you want to know where I’m visiting around, just follow my Twitter (@twanderingeater).
Until then, I’ll eventually write up posts of my visits to various restaurants and food related venues. Stay tuned…
P.S. Of the date desserts I’ve baked seen above, I’ll post up the rugelach recipe when I get back.
This is irrelevant to the post, but I have a question about the Pierre herme Pastries book you did a review on. many reviews on Amazon have said there are many mistakes in terms of components in recipes going missing and poor translations in grams to cups conversions, etc. I was just wondering if you have noticed any of these and if you could tell me how many recipes are affected in the book. Im sure if it’s small things I can easily move past but if they are in a lot of recipes I won’t bother buying the book.
During the time of my review of that book, I did not face issues with translations, instructions or even measurement issues since I’ve always used the scale in gram weights.
When I’ve attempted a few other recipes, namely the croissant as of recent, I did see a gap of sorts on the instructional part about laminating the pastry. Granted, it helped with my years of baking experience and reading many baking cookbooks I could push on through to complete the project. I know of another friend who attempted a red pepper cake (the Tango recipe) and it was a failure.
I do not know how many recipes totaled up have flaws but if you are an experienced baker, you can overlook most of these flaws. If you are a beginner/novice, I do not recommend.