let us know as your memory returns; you are charming.

it’s a trick to make a big crepe, but fun,and then you love that it’s light and tender.

We had this discussion yesterday at the Studio - the what do you eat when it’s not berry season discussion. Berries are a source of pride in places like Oregon where they grow. We get them in season, they are incomparable, and we wait until they come around the next year. The idea of eating those fruit objects, dyed red on the outside, and white and under ripe on the inside always leaves us in the same place, deceived. In winter, in the absence of the real thing, we take a mix of all the dried fruits, raisins, figs, prunes, pineapple, dry apples and pears, and the list goes on. We cut everything to the size of the raisin so when mixed in the bowl, they look like jewels. They are tossed first with some orange juice, then some wine and left simply to absorb and revive in those fruit juices. When they are soft, we serve them garnished with segmented oranges or tangerines. To gild the lily,sometime we sprinkle them with minced juniper berries to hive a haunting perfume of the forest. And finally in a burst of exuberance, we might on occasion, prepare a wine custard sauce flecked with finely grated blue cheese from the Rogue Creamery. And while we eat that we know the berries will return. One season raspberries are our favorites. In another it’s huckleberries unless the Hoods or Pugets or some other local berries completely seduce us.

I also like what Hank has to say that a recipe is an idea someone has put time and thought into. It represents someone’s good thinking and we can all benefit from that; it means we don’t need to re-being at zero each time we stand at the stove. That’s way too daunting. But there is something else. Behind every recipe, there is a formula, a construct of how a dish works. How to begin, how to go through the steps to the conclusion. When you grasp that, then like teaching someone to fish, they eat fish for a lifetime. Once you understand the formula you are better able to feel when you should add your signature and how.

Julia Child and Madeleine Kamman provided us with an introduction to this sort of thinking when the subject is French food; Marcella Hazan and Ada Boni have given us the benefit of their thinking on Italian food. Elizabeth David succeeded in plain English, and Thomas Keller lays it out, a little more elaborately, in his work on Bouchon. The lovely thing about food is that it is a life long engagement that permits us to bring pleasure into our lives on a daily basis.

Remember to breathe deeply, relax, and have fun.

regarding weights on the spongecake (genoise). You can make a cake with 2, 4, or 6 eggs per cup of flour, so weight is not essential. I use 3/4 cup sugar per cup flour. If 4 cups equals a pound, then each cup weighs 4 ounces. What makes spongecake work for me is beating eggs and sugar 2-1/2 times their volume; a light touch, and not over folding the flour. In a 350oF oven, they are done in 20 minutes.