Last night, legendary New York City pastry chef François Payard headed from his lavish Upper East Side Payard Patisserie & Bistro to the Hans Christian Andersen Complex, an elementary school in Harlem, to give a vegan cooking demo to kids and their families. The event was sponsored by the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food. Yes, the French chef seems like an unlikely proponent of animal-free food, but his marketing director (and now girlfriend), Fernanda Capobianco, is a devoted vegetarian, and since they've started working together, he's been cutting back on meat in his diet and experimenting with vegan dishes.

For the easiest pizza ever, he showed everyone how to spread tomato sauce (store-bought is fine, he said) on whole-wheat pita and topped it with ribbons of basil and crumbled tofu to mimic the cheese. Then he made a quick chocolate mousse with soy milk, whipped silken tofu and melted chocolate while batting away excited little fingers. Even I, as a dairy lover, thought the mousse was delicious and even more intensely chocolaty than a milk-based version. Through next month, François will donate $1 from every Soy Chocolate Mousse sold at New York City's Payard to the Coalition. 

 

Chicago star chef Rick Bayless recently toured India, Tweeting constantly. Last week, I shared his best Mumbai and Kerala Tweets; now, his top Tweets from Goa:

Mapusa food market n Goa. Stellar, teeming. Chile stalls, fab masala/spice stalls, fresh/dried fish, beans (bl-eyed pea family). Almost Mexico

Chef Rego teaches us Goan shrimp curry with tamarind and kokum

 

Drank nice bottle of Grover La Reserve from INDIA. Cab/Shiraz blend.

Star chef Rick Bayless just came back from an eight-day food tour through India with his family, Tweeting all the way. Yesterday, I shared a few of his best Mumbai Tweets; today, highlights from Kerala:

Headed to Kerala spice plantation. First a quick stop to help Mahout [elephant trainer] wash temple elephants in river!

Cooking class meal: chicken curry, cabbage thorin, tamarind fish curry w manioc, yogurt curry w Kerala rice, paratha [Plantation Home Stay, Mundackal Estate; 011-91-485-257-0717]

Kochi airport security: chiles are contraband, could be used as a weapon. Lost all my chiles from Mumbai market.

Check this blog on Monday for Bayless's Tweets from Goa.

I've always wondered what it's like to be an ambitious, charismatic and kleptomaniac chef. Last night I lived out my fantasy by playing The Sims 3, the newly released version of the popular life-simulation computer game The Sims, now with special features for the virtual foodie.

Using the Create-A-Sim tool, I came up with an avatar that has the above-mentioned personality traits. My Sim self reads cookbooks (such as Cooking Vol. 2: Why You Need Baking Soda), takes cooking classes at the local grocery store and practices making everything from mac and cheese to sushi, all in an effort to move up from Kitchen Scullion to Celebrated Five-Star Chef at Little Corsican Bistro.

So far, things are going pretty well in my virtual life: I’ve eaten pancakes and waffles for breakfast every day, gotten promoted twice and "acquired" new furniture for my home (OK, so I stole lamps and chairs from the bistro, but kleptomania is an acceptable mental disorder in The Sims 3). I just hope my stealing habit won't derail my culinary aspirations.

I like making candy in a saucier ( a round-bottomed sauce pan) because it's easy to stir into the corners. The only problem, and this exists for candy-making in all sauce pans, is that the candy thermometer gets in the way while stirring, even if it's clipped to the side. Making toffee yesterday (all day, I might add) I cursed a blue streak stirring with my right hand while holding the thermometer with my left. Boiling sugar is NO fun to mess around with, I can assure you.

I finally gave up on the spoon and started stirring with the thermometer-practical, but not completely effective-and thought, someone should invent a spoon/thermometer hybrid. Then, with the magic of Google and a little dumb luck, I found the FMP Spoon Thermometer.
While I haven't yet used this example of American ingenuity (yes, it still exists), I can only marvel at its potential place in my kitchen.

My favorite new book on cooking has no recipes. "Notes on Cooking" by Russell Reich and Lauren Braun Costello, is like the food version of the essential writing manual “The Elements of Style.”  The concise, witty compendium includes 217 bits of wisdom, outlined into sections like “meat,” “bread & pastry” and more abstract topics like “the cook’s role.” Some highlights:

#38: Be wary of single-use gadgets.
#84: Command the heat.
#114: Stock is its own ingredient.
#150: Chicken is the test of a cook’s versatility.
#217: Always be cooking.

In my home state of New Jersey, the strawberry season is short—from the last week in May through early June. With this in mind, I decided that the only berries worthy of Mark Bittman’s almond crème anglaise in the New York Times last week were those that I could pick myself. My sister and I drove to Terhune Orchards, a 200-acre pick-your-own farm in Princeton that I’d found on LocalHarvest, a website with nationwide directories for small farms and farmer's markets. A week of rain had left the plants a bit droopy, but there was fruit galore and scrambling children competing to see who found the biggest strawberry. I chose only the darkest, most petite berries, which tended to be the ripest, while my sister preferred anything big and bright as a fire truck. I know my berries will be fabulous in a Melon-and-Strawberry Salad with Spicy Lemongrass Syrup or in a Warm Strawberry Crumb Cake from one of my favorite chefs, Gerard Craft of Niche in St. Louis. Or I might go the super-simple route and just top the berries with barely-whipped cream.

A day after my lunch at Manhattan’s fantastic wd-50, I’m still thinking about the spicy pulled pork served on cornbread toasts, the smoky corn chowder and the rich Grand Marnier chocolate fondue. Not just because they were all delicious but also because, remarkably, they were all prepared in a Panasonic microwave. Panasonic recently partnered with the Culinary Institute of America to develop these and more than a dozen other recipes. The purpose of the lunch was to introduce the recipes to editors and to talk up Panasonic's patented Inverter technology. While other microwaves turn energy on and off when working at lower settings (creating that distinctive whirring noise), Panasonic units maintain a constant energy flow for better cooking. If you try one of the new recipes (all available online), shoot me an email to let me know what you think.

When I told my colleague Ray Isle that I rely on tofu for one of my favorite “I don’t feel like cooking but am too tired/cheap/busy to go out” meals, he declared, “Anything with tofu just sounds depressing.” Not so! In our June issue, Top Chef’s Lee Anne Wong convinced me that tofu was way sexier than I ever thought.  My secret to making admittedly tasteless tofu delicious in minutes: kimchi, the garlicky, chile-flecked Korean pickle. When I have only 10 minutes to cook, I stir-fry minced garlic and ginger for 1 minute; add tofu, patted dry and cubed, and stir-fry for 2 minutes; add frozen shelled edamame with a spoonful or two of water, cover and cook just until tender, about 2 minutes; add kimchi and stir-fry just until heated through; then season the dish with a few drops of soy sauce and sometimes a little salt. The result: a satisfying, healthy and even pretty dinner that tastes just as good cold on the second day.

For more great tofu recipes, try these.

And for ways to use up your jar of kimchi, try one of these dishes:
Kimchi Noodle Soup
Stir-Fried Pork Belly with Kimchi (pictured)
Kimchi Fried Rice

“Well, of course the Obamas went to Blue Hill,” writes Frank Bruni on the New York Times's Diner's Journal blog. As Amanda Hesser points out in her excellent Times op-ed, Michelle Obama has been extremely on-message in promoting locally grown foods, a cause Blue Hill ardently supports. Hesser believes Michelle should go further, however, and more fully embrace cooking, rather than implying that it’s a chore. (She was recently quoted as saying, “I don’t miss cooking. I’m just fine with other people cooking.”) “Terrific local ingredients aren’t much use if people are cooking less and less,” Hesser writes, citing several disheartening trends, including this one: “Americans ate take-out meals an average of 125 times a year in 2008.” In an effort to change that sad statistic, we offer our Top 10 Best Fast Recipes Ever.