“I want you to be pie makers, not recipe followers.” That’s how Kate McDermott opened the first of two Washington, D.C., pie making workshops today. As you probably already know from reading in this space, Kate agreed to leave behind her scenic little pie cottage on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula to give two workshops here in my kitchen. She’s blogging about them in her Art of the

I’m lucky to have Kate McDermott, piemaker extraordinaire and mistress of the Art of Pie blog, as my guest in Washington D.C., this weekend. She’s giving two workshops in my kitchen to a handful of lucky bakers. But yesterday, as we got ready for all the action to begin, I got a great fringe benefit: a one-on-one tutorial from Kate in gluten-free piemaking.

I’m thrilled to tell you that we here in D.C. are about to have a pie guru in our midst. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I was able to persuade Kate McDermott to leave behind her lyrical little perch in Washington state and join me here for a few days so she can offer pie-making workshops in my kitchen. Yabba dadda doo! I pick her up at the airport in a couple of hours! In addition to runni

After six months, pastry class is over. I already miss those big industrial kitchens, with their gleaming stainless-steel and marble-topped tables, those rows of brave white KitchenAid mixers, the endless supplies of bowls and wooden spoons and ladles, the amazingly powerful little Butane burners.  But much more, I miss my fellow students, and Chef Claude Perdriolat and his assistants, who shepherded us through

From West Hollywood, Ca. Nice little pies. That about sums up our experience at Simple Things, a cute little pie shop in a hip little strip of Los Angeles.

We didn’t suck at it after all. That was Chef Claude’s conclusion after our second session of tempering chocolate in our pastry techniques class at L’Academie de Cuisine. He waited until the three-hour session was over to tell us that given what he had seen last week, he figured we’d be a total loss when it came to tempering chocolate. But our second whack at it revived the optimist buried dee

What a day CurvyMama had at her very first farmer’s market!

The good people who teach our pastry techniques class at L’Academie de Cuisine warned us way back in January that tempering chocolate would be tedious and frustrating. Maybe that’s why they waited 17 weeks to make us do it. It lived up to everything they promised us.

CurvyMama took her beloved “Sweetie Pie Sara” and a couple of friends to a local pie contest the other day. My little pie didn’t win anything, but we humans had a ton of fun meeting new people and tasting all the pies that jockeyed for attention on the table. It was all for a good cause, too: bringing people together to talk and think about local food sourcing and new ways to get healthy foods into

It was a very meringuey night at pastry class at L’Academie. Chef Claude thought our meringues were piss-poor the last few classes, and since so many desserts involve meringue, he decided we needed a whole evening of them. Here was one of the Baked Alaskas we made: And here are some of the raspberry macarons: