Happy Foods Blog

I just picked up the latest from Maestro... A culmination of 60 years of cooking in a beautiful collection of his best recipes... with a DVD of instructions: how to make chocolate leaves, and how to put an apron on, and.... I love Pepin and look up to him. I learned A LOT from him. In fact, to relax, I usually go to YouTube and watch some of his KQED episodes... I really do. You go Jacque, and for many more years of health and cooking shows....

Yes, it is that time of year where you see tons of beautiful orange pumpkins sitting around anywhere you look. Apart from being aesthetically pleasing to look at, a pumpkin is a good -in fact great- source of yummy things. The top on mind -blame my upbringing- is the seed... pumpkin seeds: roasted and salted make a wonderful snack and perfect accompaniment to a good ale. There is also that thick orange skin -or is it fat, or muscle- that you can make pumpkin stuff out of: pumpkin pies, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin kibbeh, -and in our family- pumpkin PANCAKES! Ever since we got that okido issue, we -meaning all of us- have been hooked on it. The recipe is below (pics to follow). Please make it, and make it often. Thanks Okido issue 6: Ingredients: 1 cup of flour, 2 tbsp of brown sugar, 1 tsp of baking powder, 1 tsp of cinnamon (or other mix of spices), 1 cup of milk, 1 cup of pumpkin puree, 1 egg, and 2 tbsp of oil (I usually skip). What to do: Mix above ingredients together. Warm a p

This is a brief post about what we ate on our recent lovely trip to Paris. We have made it to unbelievable restaurants, sampled amazing chocolates, saw beautiful art, walked romantic streets, and just had a great time. The restaurants we ate at are all in the nouveau French cuisine where the emphasis is on fresh, local, healthy,... and amazing. Arriving to our hotel, we head immediately to lunch at Ze Kitchen Gallery ... a funky and hip restaurant in St. Germain right a block from the Seine. The appetizers we chose were a play on raw fish. These dishes to me are as good as the fish you get, and they were wonderful (with a unique presentation): Asian flavors, mixed with slightly sweet and crunchy peels of cucumber, some radishes marinated green papaya and mango. Dora had the (raw) sardines, tomato and a ginger like sauce. It is slightly challenging to eat raw sardines as the fish is a little tough. Trout from Banka.... Sardines Cod... Rabbit! Desert... Ch