25.5.09

silicone valley

Yaron David, a friend who lives in Amsterdam, is now working on putting up a line of pastries for sale through restaurants and other venues.
I wish him luck. There are many occasions where my own pastries got rave reviews. One of the best recipes comes from my grandmother who remembered it from her childhood in Czechoslovakia and passed it on to us, her grandchildren. Somehow I turned out to be the master in our family for this one. Some other recipes, I've picked through the years and turned them into signature masterpieces of my household. This hobby-on-the-verge-of-obsession is as far as I'm willing to go with cooking for others.
Food is such a treacherous field. We all need it. "Anyone can cook" as Chef Gusteau testifies. Not everyone wants to bother making the effort. (for those of you who haven't seen the movie, please do yourselves a favour: Ratatouille). So when you want to turn food making into a business, you deal with satisfying no other than the human mouth. When I make a good cake and serve it to friends, they usually feel obliged to compliment. When you make a good cake and sell it to people, they expect to be entertained. My brother, Erez, seems to have struck the right balance between fine cooking and amiable entertaining. His home based dining service has been steadily gaining more clients since opening his business a few years back.
My own cooking stays non business oriented with an appetite for fun and playfulness. A while ago I came across a bunch of silicone muffin pans with various simple shapes. They reminded me that our pan at home was becoming a little rusty and needed to be phased out. The thought of using a muffin pan is not a compelling one to say the least. Therefore, when I saw the silicone pans, they looked like the perfect toy to inject some fun into the muffin making chore. Since then it seems like the market for silicone baking products has expanded considerably. On my recent visit to Israel I came across a shop (4 chef) that holds a nice variety of Silikomarts. Initially it was hard to choose between them but I could't take them all. I still haven't used the two new pans I had bought but they already make me smile whenever I see them waiting patiently on the shelf.
This is probably the right time to get into the kitchen and work.
Bon apetit!

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