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Bariatric Medicine
Bariatric Medicine, Bariatric Surgery
Bariatric Medicine, Athletic Training, Chiropractic
Bariatric Medicine, Chiropractic
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Pavé Black Diamond Stud Earrings
Genuine Pavé Black Diamond
14K White Gold
Make a bold statement with these majestic stud earrings featuring two square shaped gemstones of your choice in a solid gold setting. Along with the earrings, a matching pendant is also available for a set that is modern, chic and classy, and will surely not be forgotten about in your jewelry box. and These stud earrings feature deux 5mm square-cut gemstones.
- Type: Pavé Black Diamond
- Quantity: 2
- Size: 5 x 5 mm
- Gem Carat Weight: 0.6 tcw
- Quality: AA
- Clarity: opaque
- Origin: Canada
- Color: H
- Clarity: I1
- Cut: Round
- Quantity: 0
- Diamond Carat Weight: 0
- Conflict Free: Yes
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Shop early, take your time. If the gift doesn't go over well, you have 3 months to return it - not 30 days like most retailers.
Always free, regardless of the size of your order. Shipped by UPS 1-3 day shipping - reliable and insured.*
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We've specialized in gemstones for over 15 years, and we use the best gems available. All of our gems are AA quality or better. Can you get that from other jewelers? Sure, as long as you don't mind paying 2-3 times as much.
We have complete confidence in the quality of our workmanship and materials. If there is any problem with your jewelry - we've got you covered.
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Not sure of her ring size? Not a problem. We will resize the ring for you whenever you're ready - at no charge.

subset: commoncrawl


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The VFW Post 1051 Hall on West Ripon Road is always in a celebratory mood whenever members gather. But the party on the eve of Valentine's Day was even merrier than most. The reason was obvious. Gatherings like it happen very rarely at the hall.
For elected leaders, the City of Ripon featured on a television series is nothing more than an intriguing thought.
The Almond Blossom Festival carnival opens Thursday with $1 rides from 5 to 10 p.m. at Mistlin Sports Park.
His wood-headed golf clubs haven't seen the light of day in nearly a decade.
The restoration of the old 1925 vintage Ripon Jail is soon to be completed through the efforts of Ripon Historical Society President John Mangelos and Harrison Gibbs along with countless hours of donated labor to its roof and foundation.
The Ripon Cyclones were again granted free use of the Ripon High varsity softball field.
Since 1992, elected leaders have been eligible for health benefits as part of their perks.
Ripon High grad Janet Dyk has a daily schedule like none other. It includes running her antique shop, organizing her third consecutive Manteca Quilters' quilt show, overseeing Ag Venture for third graders throughout San Joaquin County, and serving as a trustee for the San Joaquin County Office of Education.
Ripon Rotarians gathered at the school district's warehouse where they tackled cases of dictionaries intended for the Ripon third graders.
It's not like John Mangelos doesn't have a plentiful supply of almonds to cook with.
David Alger is a proud resident of Bethany Home's Assisted Living facility, fondly known as Beth Haven.
It hasn't been a natural transition for the superintendent-turned-councilman, but a welcomed one.
Two gun shop operators – one in Ripon and the other in Manteca – share the same stories about gun and ammunition shortages.
The Ripon Christian High mock trial team will be back in the courtroom come Tuesday.
Mary Carigiet turned 101 years old on Friday, but the Ripon resident remains as spry as someone 20 years her junior.
Micheal Tate wears a hardhat on Wednesdays.
Come November Stouffer Field is in rough shape.
Barbara Van Tol kicked off the Thursday Senior League at the Manteca Bowl and Family Fun Center by rolling a strike.
Colony Oak School is in full production for "Vegas in Ripon."
Immanuel Christian Reformed Church will host their annual bake sale from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 22, as part of the Almond Blossom Festival.
Allen Davis is the man responsible for the American flags being posted up and down Ripon's Main Street for some 20 holidays during the year.
California is currently going through a drought.
Four Ripon high school students competed in the Rotary Club's annual speech contest at the Spring Creek Golf and Country Club taking home $350 between them.
Construction on Weston School can begin once the last classroom has been cleared.
Ripon Police Department's 2013 crime report showed slight increases in some areas and minimal drops in others.
Lauren Bitters knows what it's like to walk down the runway of the Ripon Almond Blossom Fashion Show.
Three unrelated auto burglary suspects have been put behind bars.
The installation of the proposed all-weather Ripon High School track is virtually a certainty with a $300,000 donation from an anonymous community resident on Tuesday.
Cakes, cookies and pastries – all homemade confections – are once again part of the upcoming Almond Blossom Festival
It's a Valentine's dinner dance for the benefit of Ripon High School's student body completely organized by the RHS Leadership Class under the direction of activities instructor Jill Mortensen.


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*****With our agenda and list of participants still evolving, please note that new speakers and participants will be added as they are confirmed*****
Zeynep Bulutgil, Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Bhaskar Chakravorti, Senior Associate Dean, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Malik Mufti, Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department, Tufts University
Soli Ozel, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Istanbul Kadir Has University
Elizabeth Prodromou, Visiting Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Arthur Sculley, Senior Fellow, Council on Emerging Market Enterprises, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Ibrahim Warde, Professor of Islamic Finance, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
The Honorable Ali Babacan, Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey (invited)
Daron Acemoglu, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics, MIT
Bekir Ağırdır, Middle East Technical University
Solen Altop, Director, Yatas Furtniture Company, Kayseri
Alexander Christie-Miller, Correspondent in Istanbul for The Christian Science Monitor
Nusret Comert, Advanced Leadership Fellow, Harvard University (invited)
Steven A. Cook, Council on Foreign Relations
Kemal Kirisci, Brookings Institution
John McCarthy, Chairman, ING Bank Istanbul
Mehmet Ogutcu, Chairman, Global Resources Corporation
Ambassador & The Honorable Francis J. Ricciardone
Cenk Sidar, CEO and President, Sidar Global Advisors
The Honorable Dr. Ali Sindi, Minister of Planning, Kurdistan Region, Iraq
Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Dean, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Gunes Murat Tezcur, Associate Professor of Political Science, Loyola University
Gönül Tol, Founding Director, Middle East Institute's Center for Turkish Studies
Ibrahim Turhan, Chairman & CEO of Borsa Istanbul
Kadir Üstün, SETA Foundation
Haluk Unal, Professor of Finance, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland
Joshua Walker, Director of Global Programs, APCO Worldwide
With our agenda and list of participants still evolving, please note that new speakers and participants will be added as they are confirmed.
Daron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Economic Growth Program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Performance, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and Microsoft Research Center.
His research covers a wide range of areas within economics, including political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, innovation, search theory, network economics and learning.
He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He was also awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, given every two years to the best economist in the United States under the age of 40 by the American Economic Association, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Utrecht.
Acemoglu's work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics.
He is also the coauthor of the the book Why Nations Fail with Harvard University professor James Robinson.
Acemoglu received a BA in economics at the University of York in 1989, an MSc in mathematical economics and econometrics at the London School of Economics in 1990, and a PhD in economics at the London School of Economics in 1992.
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Bekir Ağırdır is the general director of Konda, a prominent Istanbul-based research company.
Throughout his career, Ağırdır has held numerous high-level positions in various organizations. Prior to Konda, he worked at the History Foundation of Turkey first as coordinator, then as director general between 2003 and 2005. He also served as CEO and board member at PMB Akıllı Kart ve Bilgi Teknolojileri A.Ş. between 1999 and 2003. Before that he spent three years as Vice CEO at ATILIM Kağıt ve Defter Sanayi A.Ş.
Ağırdır is also a founder of the Democratic Republican Programme and an active member of several NGOs. He graduated from the Department of Business Administration at the Middle East Technical University.
On August 29, 2007, Ali Babacan was appointed as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the 60th Government of the Republic of Turkey.
Babacan was first elected to Parliament in 2002 and appointed as the as the Minister of State in charge of Economy, a cabinet position he retained throughout the 58th and 59th Governments of the Republic of Turkey until August 2007. He is also a founding member of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Prior to joining the world of politics, Babacan spent eight years running his family business in Ankara from 1994 to 2002, returning to Turkey after spending two years working at a Chicago-based company providing financial consulting services to top executives of major banks in the United States.
Babacan earned a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Industrial Engineering from Middle East Technical University in Akara in 1989, finishing tops in his class. Following graduation, he attended the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on a Fullbright Scholarship, earning his Masters of Business Administration (MBA) in Marketing, Organizational Behavior and International Business in 2002.
He is married with two children.
H. Zeynep Bulutgil is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University from 2009-2011. Her general research interests include mass ethnic violence, comparative state formation, and civil wars. Her book manuscript, Territorial Conflict and Ethnic Cleansing: Europe and Beyond, develops a theory that explains the conditions under which states decide to deport or exterminate ethnic groups living in their territory. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2009.
Bhaskar Chakravorti is the executive director of Fletcher's innovative Institute for Business in the Global Context and Center for Emerging Market Enterprises (CEME) and a professor of practice in International Business. Prior to Fletcher, he was a Partner of McKinsey & Company and a Distinguished Scholar at MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. He also served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Over his 20+ year career as consultant and educator, he has advised more than 30 companies in the Fortune 500, policy-makers, investors, and entrepreneurs. His work has spanned multiple geographies: the Americas, EU, Asia, and Africa. At McKinsey, he was a leader of its Innovation and Global Forces practices and he served on the Firm's Knowledge Services Committee that oversees McKinsey Knowledge Centers, a 1,200 member group of researchers and analysts based in China, India, Belgium, and the US, among others. At Harvard, he taught innovation, entrepreneurship management, and new venture formation. Chakravorti's prior appointments include: partner and thought leader at Monitor Group; game theorist and member of the technical staff at Bellcore (formerly Bell Labs); assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and officer of TAS, the executive cadre for the Tata Group. Chakravorti's book, "The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World," Harvard Business School Press -- selected as one of the Best Business Books of the year by multiple publications and an Amazon.com best-seller on Innovation -- has been influential in many client and policy recommendations. He has published widely in both academic and widely read publications and has been invited to speak before academic, executive, and policy audiences and to the media around the world.
Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist, writer, and photographer, based in Istanbul since 2010. He serves as Turkey correspondent for the Times of London, the Christian Science Monitor and Eurasianet.org. His work has also been published in The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, The Middle East Report, and Vice.
Nusret Cömert is a Senior Advanced Leadership Fellow with Harvard University's Advanced Leadership Initiative. Previously, he was the Managing Director, Royal Dutch Shell Group's Exploration & Production and Gas & Power activities in Turkey.
Having started his career in 1984, at Shell Company of Turkey at the Samsun Region Directorate, worked his way up through the company. In 1998, he had become the General Manager of Shell EP and Gas Turkey BV, where he was appointed to be the Executive Director in 2002. Cömert then served as Chairman of Shell Energy A.Ş, which was founded by himself.
His responsibilities included business development activities in the fields of natural gas and petroleum exploration and production in Middle East and Middle Asia and supply of natural gas to Turkey and Europe. He was responsible for Middle and Eastern Europe for a period.
After graduating from Çukurova University, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Cömert completed his graduate education in Management at Istanbul University in 1983. He also received his Leadership Education at IMD Business School in Lausanne in 2006.
Steven A. Cook is Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy. Dr. Cook is the author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square (Oxford University Press, Fall 2011), which won the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's gold medal for best book on the Middle East in 2012, and Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Dr. Cook has published widely in a variety of foreign policy journals, opinion magazines, and newspapers. He currently writes the blog, "From the Potomac to the Euphrates."
Prior to joining CFR, Dr. Cook was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution (2001–2002) and a Soref research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1995–96).
Dr. Cook holds a BA in international studies from Vassar College, an MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and both an MA and PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. He speaks Arabic and Turkish and reads French.
Kemal Kirişci is the TÜSİAD senior fellow and director of the Center on the United States and Europe's Turkey Project at Brookings, with an expertise in Turkish foreign policy and migration studies.
Before joining Brookings, Kirişci was a professor of international relations and held the Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. His areas of research interest include EU-Turkish relations, Turkish foreign policy, European integration, asylum, border management, and immigration issues in the European Union, ethnic conflicts, and refugee movements.
His first paper for Brookings is entitled Turkey and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: Boosting the Model Partnership with the United States. Kemal Kirişci is the author of several books on Turkey including Turkey and Its Neighbors: Foreign Relations in Transition (co-authored with R. Linden et al; Lynne Reinner, 2011), Turkey In World Politics: An Emerging Multi-Regional Power (Co-edited with B. Rubin; Lynne Reinner, 2001) and The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of a Trans-State Ethnic Conflict (co-authored with G. Winrow, Frank Cass; 1997).
Kirişci earned a Ph.D. in international relations from the City University, London, an M.A. in international relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England and a B.A. in finance and management from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Kirişci has also extensively published articles on Turkish foreign policy, EU-Turkish relations and immigration in academic journals.
Following his Army service, John T. McCarthy commenced his forty-two year international banking career with State Street Bank in Munich. Starting in 1976, he held senior executive positions at American Express Bank in New York, London, Bahrain, Dubai, Seoul and Istanbul. Since 1991 he has been CEO of ING Bank's corporate, investment and consumer banking operations in Turkey and the Mideast Region. In 2007, he lead ING's $ 3.0 billion acquisition of 100% of a major Turkish bank. McCarthy has served as ING Bank-Turkey's chairman since.
Married to a Turkish woman, Aylin, he has one son, Sinan ( BA 2001 ). He has resided in Istanbul for twenty-eight years. McCarthy is also chairman of the US Fulbright Commission for Turkey, having been a boardmember since 1994.
Malik Mufti is a Professor of International Relations and Chair of the Political Science department at Tufts University. He teaches courses on international relations as well as the politics of the Middle East.
He received a Ph.D. and an M. A. from Harvard University, an M.A. from Yale University and a B.A. from Middlebury College. He is the author of Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (1996), and Daring and Caution in Turkish Strategic Culture: Republic at Sea (2009). He has also written shorter pieces on the domestic politics, international relations, and political thought of the Near East, including his latest two journal articles "Jihad as Statecraft: Ibn Khaldun on the Conduct of War and Empire" (History of Political Thought, Autumn 2009), and "The Many-Colored Cloak: Evolving Conceptions of Democracy in Islamic Political Thought" (American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Spring 2010).
His current projects include a study of Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiyya, and a larger research project on realpolitik in Islamic political thought. He is a recipient of the Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Distinguished Teaching and Advising.
Mehmet Öğütçü has more than 30 years of successful track-record in government, diplomacy, international organisations (NATO, IEA, OECD), banking, and energy business. Currently, chairman of Global Resources Corporation, a senior advisor to BG (British Gas) Energy Holding Group (UK), chairman of Invensys Plc Advisory Board, and an independent non-executive director on the board of Genel Energy Plc, he also serves on the boards of Windsor Energy Group, European Policy Forum, The Oil Council and Beijing Energy Club.
Öğütçü previously served as the head of OECD's Global Forum on International investment and regional outreach programmes, principal administrator for Asia-Pacific and Latin America at International Energy Agency, Turkish diplomat in Ankara, Beijing, Brussels and Paris, inspector at Is Bankasi, NATO Research Fellow, EU's Jean Monnet Fellow, and advisor to late Prime Minister Turgut Ozal.
Soli Özel is currently a full time Professor at Kadir Has University. He is also a columnist at Habertürk Daily newspaper. He has been an advisor to the chairperson of TUSIAD for the last 16 years. He is a regular contributor to German Marshall Fund's web site's "ON Turkey" series and writes a bimonthly column for Italy's Espresso magazine.
His writings have been published in international newspapers and academic journals. His latest published work is co-authored with Serhat Guvenc and entitled "NATO and Turkey in the Post-Cold War World: Between Abandonment and Entrapment"
Elizabeth Prodromou is a Visiting Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution at the Fletcher School. A retired US diplomat (Vice Chair, US Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2004–2012), she taught international relations at Boston University. Her research interests center on religion and security, democracy, human rights, and religious freedom. A regional expert on Southeastern Europe and the Near East, she has published widely in academic journals, including Harvard International Review, European Journal of Political Research, Social Compass, and Journal of Democracy. She co-edited Thinking Through Faith: New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars (2008). Currently, she is writing on Orthodox Christian contributions to freedom in politics and human rights.
Ambassador Ricciardone was appointed by President Obama to be the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Turkey on January 1, 2011. His previous Ambassadorial appointments include Deputy U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, Ambassador to the Arab Republic of Egypt from 2005 to 2008, and Ambassador to the Republic of the Philippines and the Republic of Palau from 2002 to 2005. Prior to that, Ambassador Ricciardone served as Director of the Department's Task Force on the Coalition Against Terrorism and as a Senior Advisor to the Director General of the Foreign Service. From March 1999 until early 2001, he served as the Secretary of State's Special Coordinator for the Transition of Iraq.
Ambassador Ricciardone was born in Boston and graduated from Malden Catholic High School. Upon graduation summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1973, he received a Fulbright Scholarship for teaching and study in Italy. He went to Iran as a teacher in 1976, traveling widely in Southwest Asia, Europe, and the Middle East until he entered the Foreign Service in 1978.
Ambassador Ricciardone's Foreign Service assignments include two tours in Turkey, most recently (1995-1999) as Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d'Affaires; and service in Cairo, Amman, and London. He served in two multinational military deployments: as chief of the Civilian Observer Unit of the Multinational Force and Observers in Egypt's Sinai Desert, and as Political Advisor to the U.S. and Turkish commanding generals of Operation Provide Comfort, based in Turkey and operating in Iraq. In Washington, DC, Ambassador Ricciardone has served in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, and in senior management positions under the Director General of the Foreign Service and of Human Resources. He has won high awards for policy and program management and for political reporting.
Mr. Ricciardone speaks Italian, Turkish, Arabic, and French.
Arthur Sculley is a Senior Fellow at The Fletcher School's Council on Emerging Markets Enterprises, covering Turkey and Northern Iraq. His focus is on the impact of investment, trade and commerce on Turkey's foreign policy. He is a former international banker, technology executive, lecturer and consultant to governments and major corporations.
He was a Managing Director at JP Morgan where he spent 25 years until 1995. His jobs included Head of JP Morgan's Middle East and South Asia Department following Turkey in the 1980s when he got to know Turkey's Prime Minister, Turgut Ozal. He later was CEO of JP Morgan's Private Bank.
In the mid 1990s as an entrepreneur, he became a leader in B2B technology for financial services, co-founding and chairing the first known B2B financial services cloud company, IntraLinks (NYSE:IL) in New York in 1996 and later CreditTrade, Ltd in London now part of the Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE:ICE).
Cenk Sidar is the founder and managing director of Sidar Global Advisors (SGA), a Washington, DC-based global macro research and strategic advisory firm that has been assisting top financial institutions and multinational corporations investing in emerging markets since 2009. Sidar successfully developed the firm's client base, building a broad range of experience assisting Fortune 100 companies, hedge funds, and private equities in their overseas operations and investments.
Prior to starting SGA, he served as the director of the American-Turkish Council for four years and oversaw the defense and energy programs of the Council. He worked as a liaison for various business and national security issues among companies and the US and Turkish governments. Before moving to the United States, Sidar founded a political organization in 2003, the SU Hareketi/Politicial Vision Movement, which under his leadership became one of the largest and most active independent, youth-focused social democrat & liberal movements in Turkey. As a strategist, businessman and politician, Sidar is a print and TV commentator in Turkey and in the international media on economic and foreign policy issues.
Sidar holds an MA degree in international economics and international relations from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, a postgraduate degree in European studies from SAIS's Bologna Center in Italy, and a BA degree in business administration and international relations from the Istanbul Bilgi University. His academic awards include the Bank of Austria Scholarship, the Jean Monnet Scholarship, and the Johns Hopkins Scholarship.
Dr. Ali Sindi was appointed Minister for Planning in the sixth KRG cabinet in October 2009, following the July 2009 Kurdistan Region parliamentary elections. He was reappointed in the seventh cabinet, on 5 April 2012.
Dr. Sindi's previous position was as an Adviser to the KRG Prime Minister.
Born in Zakho in 1965, Dr. Sindi gained a bachelors degree in Medicine from Mosul University in 1990, and a masters in General Surgery from Salahaddin University in 1998. From 1996 to 2001 he served as the Deputy Minister of Health and Social Affairs in the KRG's Erbil Administration. In 2002 he was awarded a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University and the same year was appointed as an Adviser to the Prime Minister. In 2003 he gained a Diploma in Administration and Leadership from Yale University.
James Stavridis is the 12th leader of The Fletcher School since its founding in 1933. A retired Admiral in the U.S. Navy, he led the NATO Alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 as Supreme Allied Commander. He also served as Commander of U.S. Southern Command, with responsibility for all military operations in Latin America from 2006-2009. A Fletcher PhD, he won the Gullion prize as outstanding student and has published five books and over a hundred articles. His focus is on innovation, strategic communication and planning, and creating security through international, interagency, and public/private partnerships in this turbulent 21st century.
Gunes Murat Tezcur (Ph.D. University of Michigan - 2005) is an Associate Professor at the Political Science Department of Loyola University Chicago. His research focuses on themes such as political violence, politics of Islam, judicial activism, and electoral politics. He is the author of Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey: The Paradox of Moderation. His current main research project examines the motivations of ordinary people who take extraordinary risks and join armed groups with a focus on the Kurdish insurgency. His research has been supported by major grants from the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, and currently the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches courses on the Middle East, political violence, democracy, globalization, and politics of energy.
Dr. Gönül Tol is the founding director of the Middle East Institute's Center for Turkish Studies. She is also an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Institute for Middle East Studies. She received her Ph.D. degree in Political Science from Florida International University where she was a graduate fellow at the Middle East Studies Center. She previously worked at the U.S. Representative Office of the Turkish Industry and Business Association. (TUSIAD) She was also an adjunct professor at the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University.
Mr. Ibrahim Turhan was appointed as the Chairman and CEO of the İstanbul Borsası on January 1, 2012.
Mr. Turhan is also a member of the Leaders' Circle as well as the Advisory Board of the Global Economic Symposium organized by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Prior to his appointment as Chairman and CEO, Mr. Turhan has served in a number of capacities with the Central Bank of Turkey. Mr. Turhan was elected as Board Member by the General Assembly of the Central Bank of Turkey on April 1, 2004. Mr. Turhan was elected as member of the Monetary Policy Committee by the Board on June 7, 2006. He was appointed as Deputy Governor on May 8, 2008.
He also served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Contemporary Turkish Studies Chair at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) European Institute until the end of 2011. He has also lectured at various universities in Istanbul and served as Managing Editor and Editor in Chief in sectoral journals published on banking, finance and finance technologies.
Mr. Turhan earned his undergraduate degree in economics and administrative sciences from Boğaziçi University. He then enrolled in the Institute for Banking and Insurance Studies at the Marmara University in Istanbul, where he received his MA degree in International Banking in 1995 and his Ph.D. degree from the same university in 2001.
Haluk Ünal is a Professor of Finance, at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, Special Advisor to the Center for Financial Research of the FDIC, and Senior Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. He is also the Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial Services Research.
Mr. Unal holds doctorates in finance from Ohio State and in economics from Istanbul University, where he did his undergraduate work as well. Mr. Unal also earned a MS degree in accounting from Ohio State. He previously taught at the Ohio State University and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches corporate finance, management of financial institutions, and fixed income securities courses.
His current research focuses on executive compensation, corporate bonds, bank mergers, pricing default risk, risk management, and mutual-to-stock conversions in the savings and loan industry. He is published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Services Research, Journal of Money Credit and Banking, Journal of Banking and Finance, Review of Derivatives Research, and Journal of Financial Economics.
Mr. Unal has been a consultant to the World Bank, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Department of Justice. He is also on the academic council of Standard and Poor's. Internationally, he delivered invited lectures in Portugal, China, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Switzerland, and Turkey. He also held executive training for Fannie Mae, Hughes Network Systems, Oracle, SAIC, and Wharton's Executive Masters in Technology Management program.
Kadir Ustun is the Research Director at the SETA Foundation at Washington, D.C. He also serves as an Assistant Editor of Insight Turkey, an academic journal published by the SETA Foundation. Mr. Ustun holds a PhD in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University and a Master's degree in History from Bilkent University. Mr. Ustun has taught courses on history, politics, culture, and art in the Islamic World as well as Western political thought at Columbia University and George Mason University. His research interests include civil-military relations, social and military modernization in the Middle East, US-Turkey relations, and Turkish foreign policy. Mr. Ustun has contributed to various SETA reports and his writings have appeared in various publications such as Insight Turkey, Al Jazeera English, Hurriyet Daily News, and Cairo Review of Global Affairs among others. He is also co-editor of an edited volume – History, Politics and Foreign Policy in Turkey – published by the SETA Foundation.
Dr. Joshua W. Walker, director of global programs, is based in APCO Worldwide's Washington, D.C., office and specializes in business diplomacy, international affairs and public-private partnerships.
Before joining APCO, Dr. Walker served as an international affairs fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, where he was senior adviser to numerous officials in U.S. federal departments and agencies. He served at the U.S. Department of State in Secretary Kerry's office of the chief economist and previously served in Secretary Clinton's Global Partnership Initiative as the senior adviser on the Middle East and North Africa. He has also worked for the U.S. Embassy Ankara, Turkey Desk at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
Dr. Walker's accomplished career has helped him to create deeper connections between the worlds of academia and public policy. Prior to the State Department, Dr. Walker was a transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, responsible for its Turkey program and Japan portfolio of the Asia team. He also co-founded the Yale Journal of International Affairs; Young Professionals in Foreign Policy in New York; and the Project on Religion, Diplomacy, and International Relations at Princeton, in addition to being a Foreign Policy Initiative Future Leader and Truman National Security Project fellow.
He has taught at Brandeis University, George Mason University, Harvard Kennedy School, Middle East Technical University, Istanbul Sehir Merkez, Tokyo University, Transatlantic Academy, Princeton University, University of Richmond and Yale University.
Dr. Walker holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Richmond, a master's degree in international relations from Yale University and a Ph.D. in politics and public policy from Princeton University. Raised in Japan, Dr. Walker is a native English speaker and speaks both Japanese and Turkish fluently.
Ibrahim Warde is a consultant and adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, where he teaches courses on Islamic Banking and Finance, Business in the Islamic world, Informal and Underground Finance. He has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management.
He is also a consultant specializing in international finance and a course director for Euromoney Training. He holds an M.B.A. from France's Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. Warde's book Islamic Finance in the Global Economy (Edinburgh University Press 2000 and 2010) is now in its second edition. His other books include The Price of Fear: The Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror (The University of California Press 2007), which has been translated into French (Agone), Italian (Neftasia Editore), Japanese (Sankosha) and Czech (Deus), and was selected by Foreign Affairs as one of the best books of the year about economic, social, and environmental issues, and Islam and Economics (Edinburgh University Press 2014). He is also a writer for Le Monde diplomatique where his articles have been translated into 30 languages.
"Turkey is a critical regional actor with enormous global potential as a diplomatic, economic, and security force in this unfolding 21st century."
Admiral James Stavridis, USN Dean, The Fletcher School, Tufts University Former Supreme Allied Commander, NATO
Institute for Business in the Global Context
Master of International Business
Council on Emerging Market Enterprises


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Updated May 8, 2013 - 11:04 am
Moos sees rise for WSU in Year 3
Originally published: May 6, 2013 - 5:20 pm
AP Sports Writer
YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) - Washington State athletic director Bill Moos believes Mike Leach's third season will be when the Cougars start winning.
The Cougars may have finished with a dismal 3-9 record, but Moos' secondary goal of invigorating the Cougars' apathetic fan base was accomplished by all the hype that came with his decision to hire Leach, even with the losing record.
"I'll take the blame for getting the feverish pitch of our fan base. We needed that," Moos said. "We had tremendous apathy and it worked. Largest donor base we've ever had, most money we've ever raised. ... The guy is a great football coach, he's not the Wizard of Oz. "
Moos spoke Monday at the Associated Press Sports Editors Northwest region conference and said he believed the Cougars may be hard-pressed to win six games in 2013 – Leach's second year – with a difficult schedule that opens with road games at Auburn and USC.
But Moos believes that Year 3 will be when Leach's teams start winning with the regularity he sought when he hired the colorful coach in late 2011.
"I don't think I would forecast that we are assured of six wins this year," Moos said. "We've got a tough schedule. We've got to open on the road at Auburn and then at USC, but we'll be better. I don't know if the scoreboard will show it. We're setting the foundations for what I believe will be a very strong program. Year 3 is when I believe it will show."
One of Moos' missions since taking over at his alma mater has been upgrading facilities. It started with a new $65 million press box/luxury seating complex at Martin Stadium that opened in time for the 2012 season.
The next phase is currently under construction, a football operations center that Moos expects to be ready for opening next spring. From there, Moos wants to build an indoor practice facility that can be used by football and another programs.
"I've been known through my career as a builder. I believe facilities attract the talent and then you are able to develop it when they get there," Moos said.
Along with the football upgrades, Moos has plans for improving the baseball and soccer facilities at Washington State and eventually work in improvements to Beasley Coliseum, the Cougars basketball arena.
Moos also touched on the one controversy that came up during Leach's first season with the dismissal of wide receiver Marquess Wilson, who left the school amid claims of abuse that were later dismissed by a school and Pac-12 investigation. Wilson was drafted in the seventh round by the Chicago Bears last month.
"Very neat kid and a very talented kid," Moos said. "But I believe had been pampered with the previous staff and didn't want to toe the line effort-wise in practice or games and so he benched him and then you get the attitude stuff and all of that."
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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The participating DI companies are presenting their complete range of products and services at the exhibition. Dubai Investments (DI), a leading investment company listed on the Dubai Financial Market (DFM), has announced that 11 of its nearly 40 subsidiaries are currently participating in the first 'Made in UAE ' Exhibition at Expo Centre Sharjah. At the exhibition, DI is showcasing the leading-edge capabilities of the company and its subsidiaries including Glass LLC , Emirates Building Systems (EBS), Globalpharma, Emirates Extruded Polystyrene (EEP), Marmum Dairy Farm , Dubai Cranes, Emirates Extrusion Factory (EEF), Lite-Tech Industries , Labtec , Gulf Dynamic Services and Gulf Metal Craft (GMC). Being held under the patronage of His Highness Dr Shaikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qassimi , Member of the UAE's Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah , the 'Made in UAE ' Exhibition runs till December 12 and has brought together over 100 exhibitors from different sectors, including industrial products, foodstuff, building materials, furniture and home decor. The participating DI companies are presenting their complete range of products and services at the exhibition. Revenues from the DI's manufacturing and contracting business touched Dh1.71 billion ( $465.56 million ) as on December 31, 2012 , primarily driven by the growth achieved across its subsidiaries. At the exhibition, Glass LLC is showcasing its entire range of glass products for applications across various industries, while EBS is presenting an overview of its steel building products in the UAE . Globalpharma is presenting its pharmaceutical manufacturing capabilities; EEF is providing a glimpse of its aluminium extrusion knowhow, while Labtec is presenting its laboratory furniture solutions. Marmum Dairy Farm is presenting its local production overview, while Lite-Tech is showcasing its lighting fixtures capabilities. Gulf Dynamic Services has on show its expertise in interior design while GMC is presenting its production knowledge in steel enclosures for electrical products. EEP is providing an overview of the extruded polystyrene insulation board materials; while Dubai Cranes is showcasing its specialisation in advanced overhead lifting solutions and maintenance services. The 'Made in UAE ' exhibition is an important platform for SMEs, which account for 92 per cent of the country's total registered companies, 86 per cent of the workforce in the private sector and 40 per cent of the GDP. firstname.lastname@example.com
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Researched for hours on www, then decided to just drive the 450 miles from Canada to OOB and take a drive around to check for any vacancies for a 3 night stay from Sat. 11th.
East Grand Ave., is clearly older the West grand Ave. in the downtown areas.
We picked the Gull Motel (they also have cottages, apartments and an Inn).
Everything one needs is here at the motel, of course if someone in ya party wants to just stay in and watch TV, leave them at home.
It is a 5 minute stroll to the pier area, passing a small convienience store.
At night one is far enough away not to hear the fun fair at the pier.
Our room with kichenette and balcony was fine for the price of $150 per night.
On site owner operator is very friendly and organized.
This is our first time in OOB, three nights is enough to see it all.
Anyone who has been to a Greek Island and spent a week, dining, drinking, walking on the beach and sleeping would recognize OOB, as the US east coast version.
Plus if you are from the UK (like my wife and I but now reside in Canada) you might recognize it as a similar kind of seaside town to Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, England.
Glad we came to OOB, probably call in again in a few years.
- Also Known As:
- The Gull Motel, Inn And Cottages Hotel Old Orchard Beach
- The Gull Motel, Inn And Cottages Hotel
- The Gull Motel, Inn And Cottages Old Orchard Beach, Maine
- Official Description (provided by the hotel):
- The Gull Motel, Inn, Cottages and Apartments offer four affordable and unique places to stay in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Our Inn and Cottages are located directly on the beach and our Motel and Apartments are steps (75 yards) from Maine's Best Beach! Please read on to see which lodging option works best for you, our Motel, our Bed and Breakfast Inn, a Beachfront Cottage or a spacious Apartment. ... more less


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Articles in Baking
The chimney top peeks over a fence just off the main street of downtown Point Reyes Station, Calif., wisps of smoke drifting out. The smell of burning wood is accompanied by the aroma of freshly baked bread on the morning air, as the cottage housing Brickmaiden Breads churns out the day's loaves.
Where to eat and buy Brickmaiden Bread:
San Rafael Civic Center Farmers Market
Palace Market, Point Reyes Station
Bovine Bakery, Point Reyes Station
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Inside, the yawning mouth of the wood oven is filled with dancing flame, warming the room while owner Celine Underwood measures out ingredients for the next batch of dough.
"Bread is my passion," she says. "I started baking it when I was a teenager."
And her passion has become a thriving business with a dedicated following of restaurant accounts and customers throughout the Bay Area who look forward to Brickmaiden's flavorful crumb and chewy crust. The process that creates the artisan loaves is at once old-fashioned in technique and thoroughly modern.
Wood-fired oven at work all day
All the loaves are levain leavened, meaning a starter is used instead of yeast. The starter is a living thing, sometimes called wild yeast, which needs to be fed everyday and picks up the terroir of the area in the form of bacteria, imparting a flavor and texture that is particular to Point Reyes. The starter is the very beginning of the bread and contributes to Brickmaiden's characteristic texture and flavor.
The dough is mixed up, shaped and then left in a retarder overnight, where it slowly rises. The retarding process encourages fermentation, which helps break down the proteins in the flour. This makes the bread easier to digest and the nutrients more readily absorbed by the body.
Meanwhile, the vast oven is heating up. It is an imposing structure that is faced with brick and takes up most of the interior of the cottage. Through its wide opening, the brick-lined ceiling is visible, as is the fire that's building the heat for that day's bake. It takes 12 to 14 hours to get the oven fired completely, a process that starts with getting the temperature up to 900 F (measured with a thermocoupler buried in the oven as well as a "heat gun," a type of laser thermometer).
At this point no more wood is added and as the fire burns down to coals, heat saturates the bricks and the temperature begins to drop. When 600 F is reached, the oven is ready for baking. The coals are shoveled into an ash can and the surface stone is brushed and cleaned off. Now the first batch of loaves goes in.
It seems tricky to depend on such a temperamental, time-consuming device, but Underwood loves baking with fire.
"I'm attracted to the simplicity of it, working with the fire element," she says.
It is a dance of coordination to have the dough ready at the same time the oven is and to get the temperature to hold long enough to bake the supply for each day.
The Brickmaiden crust and flavor
The oven can hold 70 loaves at a time. Brickmaiden does about six loads per day, baking more than 400 baguettes, rolls, Pullman sandwich bread, and several types of round levain. During the busy summer months, the bakers make as much bread as the oven heat will allow.
"There is a finite production capacity with this type of oven," Underwood says, hinting that she has been looking at other wood oven systems that aren't as limiting.
The first couple of loads of bread are more caramelized because the oven walls and dome are the hottest. This creates the signature crust that Brickmaiden fans long for, very dark with a deep flavor and rustic texture. The starter and long rise add a slightly sour flavor and impart a moist, almost fluffy interior that stays fresher longer than other breads.
These initial loads bake in less than an hour due to the high temperature the oven still holds. Gradually that starts to decrease causing the bake time to increase so the last load takes 1½ hours to finish. After the bread is done, there is still plenty of heat left in the oven, giving the bakers a chance to cook off all their other products, which include granola, cookies, crackers, biscotti, scones and croutons.
Great bread is made from great ingredients. Brickmaiden gets most of the flour it uses from Central Milling, the well-regarded artisan flour company, including California-grown whole wheat, kamut and spelt. They have also been experimenting with some of the wheat being grown in Mendocino County and are in the process of forming a Sonoma Marin grain-growers group. With the goal of getting things as local as possible, the group hopes to grow, harvest, mill and bake with different wheat and grains in the near future.
Underwood is looking down the road and has many goals and dreams for her operation.
"I hope to have a retail shop soon, house a stone mill and gardens on the property, provide a place for growth and development of young bakers, and create a place that perpetuates building connection to our environment, sense of place, self and community," she said.
Once you've had your fill of fresh bread slathered with butter or dipped in olive oil, here are a couple recipes to help use up the loaf.
Wild Mushroom Bread Pudding
Makes 7 or 8 puddings
I found an assortment of wild mushroom at the Far West Fungi booth in San Francisco's Ferry Building. Farmers markets offer good mushroom options. You also can use whatever your local grocer has in the produce section. The puddings make a tasty side dish for pork or poultry and a satisfying brunch or lunch entrée.
2 eggs
1 cup half and half
½ teaspoon salt
5 grinds of fresh pepper mill
⅛ teaspoon nutmeg
2 packed cups ½-inch Brickmaiden bread, including crusts, cut into ½-inch cubes. Their levain breads are especially tasty for this recipe
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 green onions, both green and white parts, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
¼ pound fresh, wild mushrooms, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon parsley, finely chopped
½ cup shredded cheese — blend of Italian varieties like Parmesan, Fontina, Asiago is delicious, but any sharp, hard or semi-hard cheese will work
Olive oil spray for greasing muffin cups
1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease 8 muffin cups well with olive oil spray.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, half and half, salt, pepper and nutmeg until combined. Add the bread cubes and submerge. Set aside while you get the veggies ready.
3. Heat a 10-inch skillet over medium heat. Add the olive oil and when it shimmers, add the green onions and garlic. Sauté until the garlic is aromatic, then add the mushrooms. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Stir and cook until any liquid mushrooms give off has evaporated and they are golden and tender. Stir in parsley and cook 2 minutes longer. Set aside to cool slightly.
4. Add shredded cheese to egg mixture then stir in mushrooms, mixing well until all ingredients are evenly distributed.
5. Spoon mixture into greased muffin cups, mounding bread cubes slightly and adding liquid to just under the lip of each cup.
6. Place muffin tin on a sheet tray to catch any drips. Bake until tops are golden and crusty and knife inserted in center comes out clean, about 30 minutes
7. Run a sharp knife around the edge of each cup then allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Remove and serve warm. These puddings can be reheated in the microwave for 30 seconds.
Garlic Bread
Fresh chives add a springy note and the crusty goodness of the Brickmaiden levain style breads work well in this recipe.
Serves 3 or 4
1 large clove garlic
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon chives, finely sliced
¼ teaspoon Gray Maldon sea salt
2 (1-inch) thick slices artisan bread
1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
2. Rub garlic clove on both sides of each bread slice. Set on a small sheet tray.
3. Mince garlic clove and combine with butter, oil and chives in a flat, microwave-safe pie plate.
4. Microwave on high in 10-second bursts until butter is fully melted then stir to combine ingredients.
5. Dip one side of each slice of bread in the butter mixture, scraping garlic mince into the nooks and crannies of the bread. Sprinkle each slice evenly with the salt.
6. Bake for 5 minutes until slightly crisped. Cut each slice into three pieces and serve.
Top photo: Bread at Brickmaiden Breads in Point Reyes Station, Calif. Credit: Brooke Jackson
Danish is famous. It comes in many forms and with a lot of things that are copied but have no resemblance whatsoever to the real thing.
In Denmark, Danish pastry is called wienerbrød, meaning "bread from Vienna." That is the general term, but there are individual names for each particular kind. When you go to the baker in Denmark in the morning, there will be a variation of Danish — all sweet and never savory. We Danes do not do savory and Danish together.
Danish is mostly sold in the mornings. Many kinds will be sold out before afternoon, as bakers don't make new ones because Danes eat different cakes in the afternoon. A Danish is really a morning pastry, just like the croissant in France. People tend to buy wienerbrød from the baker and not make them at home because it takes time, particularly to make the dough. Most Danes have one or two favorites they always eat, so when sent to the baker on weekend mornings it's a big responsibility to get your family's wishes right.
Eating Danish is part of Danish culture
Wienerbrød is really embedded in Danish culture and remains very popular. It's not eaten every day; it's mostly reserved for weekends or special occasions. At work, it's common to have Friday breakfast together with colleagues, and wienerbrød is often part of that. Sometimes it is exchanged for a multigrain bun, for health reasons.
Excellent wienerbrød in Copenhagen:
I recommend you try to make wienerbrød yourself. The results are worth it. If you happen to travel to Copenhagen, below are a few of the best places to buy wienerbrød.
Visit Brød for the cinnamon bun called kanelsnegl.
Try Lagekagehuset, a bakery chain with an outlet in Copenhagen Airport, among other locations, for chokoladeboller, spandauer, frøsnapper and tebirkes.
Café Europa, located in central Copenhagen, has excellent cinnamon Danish, or kanelsnegl.
La Glace, which is a time capsule where you can get a sense of old Copenhagen and have morning coffee, makes terrific wienerbrød.
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Wienerbrød is similar to a croissant; it's a yeast dough folded with butter three times. Some bakers use margarine because it's easier to work with, and they claim it gives a better texture. I don't agree. I like butter best.
It's important to make Danish in a kitchen that is not too hot; otherwise the butter melts. With a basic dough you can make all the varieties of wienerbrød. The variation comes in the remonce, which is a mixture of butter, sugar, sometimes marzipan, custard, jam and different nuts and seeds.
Different types of wienerbrød have names like spandauer, tebirkes, frøsnapper, snegl, rosenbrød, tryksnegl and chocoladebolle. The baker who comes up with the idea for a particular type usually also gives it a name.
If served in the afternoon with coffee, the cake has different names and is bigger. The most common name would be wienerbrødsstang, where the last part of the word, -stang, means "long piece." Borgermesterkrans is another variant: borgmester means "mayor," and -krans means it has a circular shape. They are cut out and eaten in pieces with your fingers, so they're very handy. Often they are part of a bigger cake selection, like cream cakes and butter cookies.
Many stories exist about how the wienerbrød started in Denmark. The stories probably all have some truth to them, but it is difficult to pinpoint who was the first to bake wienerbrød. The inspiration most likely came from Vienna. One of the stories goes that the tradition started in 1843 in Copenhagen by a local baker who had visited Vienna and learned how to make croissants. Knowing how the locals loved sugar, he added some remonce, that is the sweet paste made of sugar and butter. It was an instant success, and the pastry's local name became wienerbrød after the origin of the recipe. It was sold from the baker's bakery in central Copenhagen, and initially, only the originating baker had the right to sell wienerbrød. However, in 1850, the magistrate allowed five conditors (bakers that only bake cakes) to bake wienerbrød.
Makes 25
For the dough:
1 ounce fresh yeast
⅔ cup lukewarm water
1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon superfine sugar
½ teaspoon salt
2⅓ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup cold butter, thinly sliced
For the filling:
1 vanilla bean
1 cup light cream
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons superfine sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
For the icing (optional):
1½ cups confectioner's sugar
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
Hot water
For the dough:
1. In a mixing bowl, dissolve the yeast in the water.
2. Stir in the egg, superfine sugar and salt. Add the flour and stir until the dough comes together and leaves the edge of the bowl.
3. Turn the dough onto a floured counter and knead for five minutes, until it is shiny but not sticky.
4. Put the dough back in the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise in the refrigerator for 15 minutes.
5. Roll out the dough into a 20-inch square. Spread the thin slices of butter over the dough about 4 inches in from the edge, so the square of dough has a smaller square of butter on top.
6. Fold the corners of the dough over the butter to meet in the center, making a square package.
7. Carefully roll the dough into a 16-by-24-inch rectangle, making sure it doesn't crack and the butter stays inside the dough package. Next you want to fold the dough so the butter becomes layered within it: Fold the bottom third of dough over the middle third and fold the top third down over that.
8. Roll out the dough again and fold the same way.
9. Put the dough in the refrigerator for 15 minutes, then repeat the rolling and folding process three times, remembering to let the dough rest in the refrigerator for 15 minutes each time.
For the filling:
1. Cut the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape out the seeds with the tip of a knife.
2. Put the vanilla seeds and cream in a pan and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks and superfine sugar together until the mixture is pale and fluffy, then stir in the cornstarch.
3. Pour a little bit of the hot cream into the egg mixture to temper it, then pour all the egg mixture into the pan.
4. Return the pan to a decreased heat and whisk until the custard starts to thicken. Take care not to let the custard boil, and beat continuously to avoid scorching. Remove from the heat and let cool before use.
5. Roll out the dough to a 20-inch square, then cut it into five rows of 4-inch squares. Place 2 teaspoons of the filling on each square. Take each square's corners and fold them into the middle over the filling, pressing the edges together to seal. Turn each pastry upside down and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover with a dish towel and let rise for 20 minutes at room temperature. Pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Brush the pastries with a little beaten egg and bake them for 12 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown. Let cool on a wire rack.
For the icing:
1. Mix the confectioner's sugar and cocoa powder together in a bowl, adding a little bit of hot water, and whisk to make a smooth, dark brown paste.
2. Place a spoonful of the icing on each pastry and let set for 10 minutes before serving.
Top photo: Danish, or wienerbrød. Credit: Trine Hahnemann
Lime ought to show up more often in cakes; that's my philosophy. Lemon is great, sure. But there are already plenty of lemon cakes and lemon frostings. No doubt lemon is a cheery and optimistic flavor. But lime is rich and exotic.
Following this line of thought, I ended up with a cake with a lime butterscotch cream cheese frosting and a filling of fried bananas. The palate just wants what it wants.
The evolution of cake experiments
My first step down the lime path was obvious — coconut cake with lime zest and a bit of lime juice in the frosting (because I believe fruit-flavored frostings should be sweet-sour). Lime in the coconut, get it? I'm referring to "Coconut," that 1970s hit song about a woman who mixed lime and coconut juice, got a stomachache and called her doctor, who surprisingly prescribed drinking more lime and coconut.
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The doctor in the song sounded a little peevish because she'd called him in the middle of the night. Still, everybody in the song seemed fine with this prescription, and so did everybody who tasted my lime in the coconut cake.
Next I made a lemon poppy seed pound cake substituting lime juice and zest for the lemon. It was a big hit, because people who love pound cake love it passionately, and because I'd topped it with a cream cheese frosting. I'd noticed that people who love pound cake passionately also have a thing for cream cheese.
When I frosted a cake with lime butter cream and filled it with lime curd, it struck me that I might be binging on limes. Meanwhile, I'd gotten interested in ways to use bananas in cake, but not as banana bread, of which I'm not a big fan. However, I am a big fan of butterscotch, an unjustly neglected flavor in my book.
Finding flavors that complement each other
So I decided to make a lime butterscotch cream cheese frosting, just to check off all the possibilities. It was pretty good because this butterscotch cream cheese frosting takes other flavors, such as ground instant coffee, beautifully.
Cream cheese frosting is mostly used on dense cakes like carrot cake, rather than on butter cake, and the recipes tend to make just barely enough to frost a cake. Here was where my banana experimentation paid off, apart from the fact that banana and butterscotch go together beautifully.
Fry some bananas soft with butter and brown sugar, and they make a terrific filling, suavely giving you more cream cheese frosting to cover the outside of the cake.
In retrospect, this was all obvious, so obvious. I'm almost embarrassed to mention it. But just almost.
Lime Butterscotch Cream Cheese Banana Cake
Makes 1 two-layer cake
For the cake:
3 cups flour plus about 2 tablespoons for flouring the pans
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup milk
2 sticks butter, softened, plus more for greasing cake pans
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
For the banana filling:
3 ripe bananas
About ½ stick butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
The juice of ½ a lime
For the lime butterscotch cream cheese frosting:
½ stick butter
1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese
¼ cup brown sugar
1 pound confectioner's sugar
Juice and zest from ½ a lime
For the cake:
1. Turn on the oven to 350 F.
2. Mix 3 cups of flour, salt and baking powder and set aside.
3. Add the vanilla to the milk and set aside.
4. Grease two 9-inch cake pans. Put the remaining 2 tablespoons of flour into one pan and shake around until the interior is floured, then pour the remainder into the other pan and repeat.
5. Beat the butter until light and fluffy, then pour in the sugar in a thin stream while beating until the mixture is light and the mixer's motor has reached its highest speed.
6. Add the eggs one at a time, beating 20 seconds after each addition.
7. Add 1 cup of the flour mixture and beat at medium slow speed, encouraging the absorption with a spatula, just until the flour is absorbed.
8. Add half of the milk and repeat, then another cup of flour, the rest of the milk and the rest of the flour.
9. Divide the mixture equally between the two cake pans and bake until the layers are lightly browned and pulling away from the sides of the pan, about 35 to 40 minutes. The tip should spring back if touched and a toothpick inserted in the cake should come back without any damp crumbs on it.
10. Set the cake pans on a cooling rack for 10 minutes, then remove from the pans and return to the rack until cool.
For the banana filling:
1. Peel the bananas and slice each in half lengthwise.
2. Melt the butter in a large frying pan and arrange the slices on it. Cook over medium low heat until the bananas soften, about 15 minutes. Turn them over with a spatula, sprinkle with the brown sugar and fry another 5 to 10 minutes.
3. Sprinkle with lime juice and leave to cool.
For the lime butterscotch cream cheese frosting:
1. Melt the butter in a small pan over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium and cook until most of the foam has settled and the butter has a cooked, but not browned, flavor. Pour the butter off into a bowl and return to the refrigerator until solid, about 10 minutes.
2. Whip the cream cheese in a mixer until quite fluffy.
3. If you have a mortar, grind the brown sugar as fine as possible. Add the brown sugar to the cream cheese and whip until the mixture looks smooth. Add the butter and beat until smooth. Add the confectioner's sugar and beat at the lowest speed until the sugar is incorporated. Add the zest and juice of the lime and beat until smooth; you may add more zest or juice to taste.
To assemble the cake:
Set one cake layer upside down on a plate. Spread a very thin layer of frosting onto the exposed side. With a spatula, transfer the fried bananas onto the cake layer, then top it with the other cake layer, right side up. Scoop all the frosting onto the top of the cake and work down over the sides with a spatula.
Top photo: Lime Butterscotch Cream Cheese Banana Cake. Credit: Charles Perry
I almost skipped my first chance to visit Valley Malt, New England's first malthouse in a century. Although I love learning about people who are using grains, I don't drink anymore, and I never made beer. What use could I possibly have for barley malt?
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Lucky I reserved my reserve, and met malt pioneers Andrea and Christian Stanley. They showed me their first malting system and how they germinated grain — mostly barley — for brewers and distillers.
I stuck my nose in a bag of malted barley and I smelled Grape Nuts. Criminy. Let me at the kitchen. Here was an ingredient I could use.
Grape nuts is quick bread made in a sheet pan, baked, crumbled and baked again. I'd only used whole-wheat flour in my experiments, not the cereal's mainstay, malt. That ingredient just isn't on the market. Bakers use active and inactive malt powder for sweetening and to help boost yeast performance. Barley malt flour, however, is a DIY deal.
So there I was, in a garage that had once been a potato processing site, in Hadley, Mass., sniffing cereal. "Grape Nuts!" I said to Andrea. "You can use it in pancakes, too," she said. If I wasn't already sold on the stuff, that was the kicker.
I have long had an obsession with pancakes. Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix ushered me into my love affair at the stove. Decades later, pancakes were the first meal I made the man who would be my husband. Ages ago, I calculated we had them about 250 times a year. The serving ratio went up to daily when I found malt.
The best of brewing makes baking better too
Malting is germination. The same stuff that happens in the ground when you plant a seed, or on your counter when you make sprouts, is what maltsters like Andrea or Christian seek. Steeping grains in water starts the growing process. Kilning stops it once the seeds reach a certain point.
What brewers love about malt is that the process loosens up the starches in the grain's endosperm and readies those them for conversion to sugar. That makes the starches available to feed the yeast in fermenting beverages.
Malt is often used in the food industry as a sweetener and sometimes as a flavor. Ovaltine takes advantage of both properties, the sweetness and flavor. In bagels and other breads, however, malted barley is added in tiny amounts to take advantage of malt's enzyme activity and make yeast more muscular.
I am still figuring out exactly what properties I'm using. I know that malt is a boon to my pancakes, adding flavor and helping the whole grain flours I use rise a little bit.
I don't make sourdough or yeasted pancakes, so I'm not certain all the chemistry that the malt is achieving. I just know I see a marked difference.
Experimenting with pancakes and other baked goods
The pancakes are such a hit that I started making mixes for Valley Malt: malted cornmeal with rye, spelt and buckwheat with malt, and of course, whole wheat with malt, my absolute favorite.
When Andrea and I were making mixes in December, she asked me to make pancakes and snacks for the Farmer Brewer Conference she and Christian organize. I love to spread the gospel of what malt does on the griddle. Plus any excuse to play in the kitchen is great.
So I've been fiddling with malt in more than pancakes. I've figured out how to use the pancake mixes to make biscuits. They take tons of butter and less milk. I added cornmeal made from malted corn to shortbreads, cornbread, and pie crusts, all with fine results.
Adding malted barley to whole wheat shortbread stumped me, though. Fresh from the oven, the cookies were adored. A few days in, I opened the tin where I'd stored them, and I could smell the butter was going off. Had I used bad butter? Was the tin a funk fest? Help! I'm still not sure what went wrong, but I managed to make my recipe work by not refrigerating the dough, and by freezing the cookies immediately after baking.
At the conference, I found people to help me figure out what's happening in that recipe, and in my other experiments. While the presentations focused on malting for brewing, people who study malt are also curious about what it does in baked goods.
The snacks I made — crackers with malted barley, almonds in a barley meringue, and those shortbreads — went down just fine. The biscuits and pancakes for breakfast were a hit, too.
As I mentioned, this is real DIY territory. If you want to play with malt, and you are lucky enough to have a local maltster, get a little bit and start experimenting. If you don't have a maltster to befriend, you can use malts from a brewing supply place. Either way, grinding is the way to go. I use my blender for the first grind, and a milling attachment on my Kitchen Aid to finish the job.
You can't use malt like flour, because the enzyme activity changes the gliadin and glutenin in the grain, interfering with their gluten-forming capacity. But you can add bits of it for flavor and sweetness. Here's a recipe to get you going.
Making your own malt flour
To make your own malt flour, start with a pound of barley malt from your maltster or from a home brew shop. Your maltster might have a mill that will make flour. Ask her or him to grind it as finely as possible, husks and all, for your baking fun.
Home brew stores are used to grinding grain, but not into flour. They crack grains for brewers, who only need the starches released for access in the brewing process.
If this is your scenario, ask the store to crack the malted barley, and bring it home and put it in a coffee grinder or sturdy blender and go to town. Sift off anything chaffy with a strainer.
In my house, I grind the malt first in my blender, and then put it through the mill attachment for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Otherwise, the malt gums up the works and I don't get flour. Other types of table top flour mills should handle the challenge better.
Based on Laura Brody's multi-seed crackerbread recipe from "King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking"
3 cups (12 ounces) whole-wheat bread flour
3 ounces home-ground barley malt flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoon olive oil
1 cup water
1. Preheat oven to 450 F.
2. Mix together the dry ingredients, and stir in oil.
3. Add water gradually. You may need more or less than 1 cup, depending how much water your flours absorb. If you're using local flours, the moisture content of the flour can vary a bit. Add enough to make a stiff, but not dry, dough.
4, Knead a bit until the dough is smooth. Cut into 8 sections. Roll into balls and, on a barley-malt-flour-dusted surface, roll very, very thin. I shoot for something like thick paper, less than the width of a cereal box.
5. Bake for 5 to 7 minutes. Watch carefully, as edges darken easily.
6. When cool, break into pieces and serve. Store in a container that closes tightly.
Top photo: Barley germinating. Credit: Amy Halloran
Making a healthy start to 2014, I went into the kitchen on New Year's Day to cook with olive oil. Now I know there are all sorts of people, chefs among them, who will claim "you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil."
Where they get this from is a mystery, but it's a myth that's passed around with great regularity. (I have my suspicions as to its origin, but I'm not free to issue a j'accuse just yet.) And the charge against olive oil simply is not true — as I've seen over and over again in kitchens large and small, domestic and thoroughly professional, all over the Mediterranean world, where chefs and cooks alike use nothing else.
It's fine for your spaghetti with clam sauce, your ratatouille, your paella valenciana. But pastries? Cakes? Cookies? Don't they fall apart? Don't they taste peculiarly of olive oil?
Olive oil adds rich dimension to brownies
Not at all! You might detect the taste of extra virgin in the raw batter, but I defy you, once they're cooked, to tell me from the flavor which fat has been used. And there's an advantage too, which was most prominent in the olive oil brownies — a lush, rich, fudgy, almost gooey texture that is such a delicious hallmark of brownie perfection. I found agreement from Leslie Revsin, a wonderful cook and chef who died almost 10 years ago at much too early an age. Writing in the magazine Fine Cooking about her experiments using vegetable oil or olive oil, she said the olive oil versions of classic chocolate and carrot cakes had a strikingly richer, deeper character: "The olive oil seemed to act like an invisible helper," she said, "somehow coaxing superior savor and clarity from the ingredients, weaving them together to create a richer, more alive whole."
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I'm not going to tout chocolate brownies or cranberry almond cookies as health food, but certainly they are minimally better for us if we use olive oil. And the walnuts in the brownies add a powerful quotient of Omega-3 fatty acids, while the almonds in the cookies are demonstrably heart healthy, loaded with vitamin E and other beneficial nutrients. Truly, though, forget about health food for the moment and just enjoy these luscious treats for what they are, made even more delectable with olive oil.
What olive oil should you use with these recipes? Stay away from aggressively flavored oils and especially from fresh, new oils, which are naturally more pronounced in aromatics than older oils. This is one time when you can look at the date on a bottle and happily use a 2012 or even a 2011 harvest oil — just so long as it has been handled properly and not subject to anything that would develop rancidity or off aromas. If the oil smells good but is perhaps a little bland, if it tastes good but without any immediately discernible flavors — that's the oil you'll want to use.
The source of the oil is not so important. It could be from California or Chile, from Spain or Greece or anywhere in between, and it could be made from a single cultivar like arbequina (noted for its soft flavors) or from a mixture of oils carefully blended by the producer to make an unassertive oil, much as a winery will blend softer, sweeter varietals with rougher wines to create a pleasant assemblage. (And note that I unashamedly use butter for the brownie pan — olive oil just doesn't stick to the sides in the same way.)
Olive Oil Brownies
Makes 16 brownies
Butter for the pan
4 ounces dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa)
⅓ cup fruity olive oil
2 eggs
¾ cup sugar
½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup chopped walnut meats
1. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter an 8-inch-by-8-inch square pan.
2. Break up the chocolate in small pieces and set it in an oven-safe dish, then put it in the oven to melt thoroughly. When it is completely soft, combine it with the olive oil, beating with a fork to mix thoroughly. Set aside to cool, but do not refrigerate.
3. Beat the eggs until they are thick and foamy, then beat in the sugar, about ¼ cup at a time. When the sugar is thoroughly incorporated and the chocolate mixture has cooled down, combine the two, stirring them together with a spatula or wooden spoon (do not beat).
4. Using a rubber spatula, stir in the flour, vanilla and walnuts. Spread the mixture in the prepared brownie pan and transfer to the preheated oven.
5. Bake 25 minutes or until the edges start to pull away from the pan. Remove from the oven and set on a wire rack to cool completely before cutting into squares.
Mrs. Fancelli's Olive Oil Cookies With Almonds and Cranberries
Feliciano Fancelli runs an oil mill, or frantoio, in the hills behind Assisi in Umbria, Italy. It is one of the last old-fashioned, crush-and-press mills still functioning, and it has been in his family for umpteen generations. Mrs. Fancelli gave me this recipe for a simple cookie that is typical of Italian country sweets. For sweet wine, she uses a local sagrantino passito from nearby Montefalco, but a sweet moscato will do very well instead; I sometimes use a Tuscan vin santo, one that is rather drier than sweet. If you don't want to use alcohol, you could substitute a not-too-sweet apple cider.
Toast the nuts in a 350 F oven until they are golden; when they are cool enough to handle, chop or process briefly in the food processor to make a coarse mix, not at all pasty.
Makes 34 to 40 cookies.
2¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
Pinch of sea salt
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1½ cups chopped toasted almonds or hazelnuts, or a mixture
1½ cups raisins, coarsely chopped
2 eggs
⅔ cup extra virgin olive oil
⅔ cup sweet wine
1. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Spread sheets of parchment paper on two or three cookie sheets. Have ready a wire rack for cooling the cookies.
2. Toss together in a bowl the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder, then stir in the nuts and raisins.
3. Whisk together the eggs and combine, whisking, with the oil and wine. Pour over the flour mixture.
4. Stir and knead slightly with your hands to mix the liquids thoroughly into the flour.
5. Drop the cookie mixture by tablespoons onto the prepared cookie sheets and transfer to the preheated oven.
6. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cookies are lightly golden. Remove and transfer immediately to the wire rack to cool.
Variations: Use dried cranberries in place of the raisins. Make olive oil Toll House cookies by substituting walnuts and chocolate chips for the almonds and raisins and adding ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract. Or make lemon drops by omitting the almonds and raisins entirely and adding ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract, the grated zest of a lemon (organic, preferably) and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, then top each cookie before baking with 4 or 5 pine nuts.
Top photo: Brownies and cookies made with olive oil. Credit: Nancy Harmon Jenkins
"A Commonplace Book of Pie" is anything but common. While some cookbooks may help you make poetry with food, this cookbook is poetry, and more. It is a collection of facts, real and imagined, about pie.
"I created these prose poems that are this imaginary zodiac," Kate Lebo said of the writing in the book that leaps beyond the expected instructions. These are not anecdotes about your aunt's legacy bubbling up in sunny syrup each time you make peach pie. Rather, these lyric narratives are gripping slices of dreamed lives.
The pumpkin pie fancier befriends bartenders. "People who love chocolate cream pie move through the world in a swarm of music," Lebo writes. OK, sure. Or maybe not. Maybe you believe other things about these people, and that's just fine, because this book makes room for discovery within accepted standards.
"We're both really attracted to obvious things and finding things that are not obvious, shaking people out of their complacency with that object," Lebo said of Jessica Lynn Bonin, who illustrated the book and accompanied her on tour this fall.
By Kate Lebo
Chin Music Press, 2013, 120 pp.
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The paintings of pie and its many component parts, Lebo said, are not just renderings of physical objects, but images that have their own stories. The poet is working in a similar fashion with her subject.
"I'm doing that in the pie book by taking something as commonplace as pie and using a form, using poetry, using language to talk about it and break it open in completely new ways," she said. "We owe allegiance to surrealists because that's what they do as well, but it's not surreal."
"This is not a pipe," the painter René Magritte said of his painting of a pipe. This is not a cookbook like one you've known, but yes, it is a cookbook, and from it you can learn how to make pie.
The poetry of pie instruction
"Position your hands palms up, fingers loosely curled, the same way you relax your hand above your head while falling asleep," reads the instructions in a recipe for crust. When a pie master suggests a shape of supplication for handling flour and fat, even those with deep attachments to pastry cutters will try to leave them in the drawer.
Like pie, the book has quite a life beyond its crust, or covers. The project started as a collaboration between Kate Lebo and artist Bryan Schoneman. In 2010, the two did a gallery show that involved a pie safe and people clamoring for the pies cooling teasingly inside it. "A Commonplace Book of Pie" appeared first as a zine and part of this show. Lebo sold 2,000 copies of the zine, and expanded the cardboard-bound booklet into a book, just published in October by Chin Music Press.
Here are some ingredients of Lebo's life that are not inside the book. She was not interested in cooking until she was in her 20s, when she had a kitchen with a view of downtown Seattle and the Olympic Mountains. She baked her way through the "Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook," and recalls that era as her "cool lady in the city time, singing Doris Day."
After she got her master of fine arts from the University of Washington, she sold at a stand in her front yard to raise rent money. Her pie stand traveled to places like the Sasquatch Music Festival, and begat Pie School, which let Lebo pass along the fine qualities of pies by teaching people to make them.
Connecting with "A Commonplace Book of Pie"
"Pie is warm, inviting, a symbol everyone is connected to in this culture," Lebo said. "I can talk to anyone about pie. It's like football except I actually know something about it. So that kicks the door open for further discussion about something that is less approachable, something that is less familiar."
Discussions on the book tour have covered a lot of topics. Seattle events drew a lot of literary folks. At a cooking school in the Midwest, people came who love pie. Questions ranged from what's the secret to making the perfect pie, to how do you revise the manuscript?
People are reading the book to each other, which is something Lebo heard with the zine, too. She has a picture of a child — who attended a reading in Milwaukee, Wis. — reading the book to her family while they were making pie. Another fan is giving the book, along with a letter about what pie means in her family, to her children.
"Pie is a gift and that's something I'm trying to evoke with the book," Lebo said.
Top photo composite:
"A Commonplace Book of Pie" jacket cover and author Kate Lebo. Credit: Amy Halloran
The Greater Los Angeles area hasn't had stone milling for more than a century, but bakers Nan Kohler and Marti Noxon are addressing that lack. The partners held an open house in November for family and friends at their new enterprise, Grist & Toll, in Pasadena.
Kohler and Noxon, who also is a screenwriter and producer, are part of a larger effort to rebuild regional American flour mills. As artisanal baking becomes more popular and bakers become more sophisticated about quality, locally sourced ingredients, the mills contribute to America's baking renaissance.
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The afternoon was a celebration of flour. In the parking lot, baker Michael O'Malley fed loaves into his mobile bread oven. He belongs to the Los Angeles Bread Bakers, a Meetup group with 800 members, some of whom prepared dough for the event with flour that Kohler ground on a small mill at her home.
The breads vanished more quickly than they baked, sitting on a table under a tent just long enough to be cut and devoured. While cooling is acknowledged as the last and some say crucial phase of cooking in artisan bread baking, there was no waiting this day.
Inside, plenty of snacks gracing the small retail space disappeared, too. The flour, however, sat quite still. As the Osttiroler, a type of pine-planked Austrian mill that is quite beautiful, took its first turns and ground California wheat berries into flour, people stared in reverent interest. Some walked up to the bucket of flour and touched the light red stuff, running it between their fingers and over their hands. But mostly people just looked. How often do you get to watch this ingredient get made?
Getting back to our local flour roots
All flour used to be local. Before advances in transportation and technology centralized grain production in the United States, if you wanted flour, you got it from the local miller. During the 1800s and 1900s, milling centers shifted around the country, following the paths of waterways and railroads. At different points, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Buffalo, N.Y., held the crown for flour production. Currently, the U.S. milling industry processes 900 million pounds of wheat a year, but it is too soon to predict the output for Grist & Toll.
However, demand for fresh flour is evident. The mill is part of a nationwide trend to re-regionalize grain and flour production. There are a lot of reasons why these staples are crucial as people rebuild local food systems. In an interview at Jones Coffee, around the corner from the not yet open mill, Kohler considered why.
"For so many years, flour has just been a filler ingredient," she said. "It gives something body and structure, and helps your cookies and cakes rise, but we haven't had the ability to think of it as a texture building block or flavor building block until very recently."
The conversation about alternative grains, she said, is fairly recent. Maybe only the last five years, the baking community has started to think of flour as a potentially influential flavor player.
"The most important stuff was your butter, your chocolate, dried cranberries or nuts," she said. "No curious baker said why, and does it matter, and how can we find out?"
Now, however, the ball is rolling. Last year at the MAD symposium in Copenhagen, Denmark, Stone Barns chef Dan Barber asked more than 300 of his peers to consider the potential of wheat.
For much longer, a number of projects around the country have been working to promote the use of local grains. Skowhegan, Maine, has an Osttiroler stone mill, too. The Somerset Grist Mill is in the former county jail, making flour and rolling oats from grains produced in Aroostook County. Some farmers there are shifting from potatoes to grains to provide raw ingredients for the enterprise.
That Maine project is community driven, started by people who wanted their area to be known for more than New Balance sneakers and logging. Central New York has a farmer-miller-baker partnership serving artisan bakers and consumers in the region, as well as the New York City market. New York's Farmer Ground Flour is a farmer driven enterprise undertaken by Thor Oeschner as he saw the land he rented gobbled up for real estate.
Grist & Toll fits into the list of baker-driven ventures, like Wild Hive Community Grain Project, Don Lewis' mill in New York's Hudson Valley, and Carolina Ground, the mill started by Jennifer Lapidus that uses grains from North and South Carolina.
Conversations about grains
Most baker-initiated projects, though, center on artisan bread baking, and Kohler's focus has been pastry. A home baker who used to work in the wine industry, she turned her passion for pastry into a farmers market operation. That passion took another leap, and she ran the bakery for a restaurant.
Grist & Toll also plans to make education a part of its mission. "The beautiful thing about flour is I'm not just creating this product for a select consumer or group of people," Kohler said. "Flour, even though it's been missing from this farm-to-table conversation, it touches everybody, every household, every restaurant, school."
Grist & Toll will be open for limited hours during the holidays and plans its full grand opening for after the first of the year, but the pallets of organic wheat grown in Santa Barbara County ready to mill hint at what this operation means: more control over what types of wheat are being planted, fresh flour hitting local kitchens, and conversations about grains that go beyond the big fat fear of gluten.
Top photo: Homemade bread. Credit: Sue Style
Fast-and-easy puff pastry, known as "rough puff," is one essential recipe to put in your holiday bag of tricks. Homemade ready-to-bake rough puff pastry in my freezer has saved me many anxious what-to-make moments each December.
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With this one technique, I can make any savory appetizer, including Parmesan-black pepper twists; ham, cheddar and red pepper quiches; blue cheese, pear and walnut mini-tarts; and a host of other buttery, light creations ideal for serving with any holiday libation.
Classic French puff pastry's laid-back relative, rough puff requires no culinary degree. In fact, it's what pastry chefs make at home because there are so few steps and big payoffs. And while rough puff is less lofty than the laborious puff pastry, it performs perfectly for every use from palmiers to empanadas.
In this video, French pâtissier and baking book author Michael Roux demonstrates how to make rough puff by hand.
I prefer to use my food processor based on a method I learned from pastry master Nick Malgieri. In this series of photos, I'll take you step by step through the process for making your own rough puff pastry. This is an unbeatable substitute for any recipe calling for store-bought or homemade puff pastry without the premium cost or the time investment.
Once you have rough puff, the options span a world of appetizers using any cheeses, marinated or cooked vegetables and meats (leftovers, too) you have. In fact, with rough puff on hand, the only other item I need to stock for an impromptu festive gathering of friends is a stash of something bubbly.
Rough Puff Pastry
Makes 1½ pounds of dough
½ stick (2 ounces) unsalted butter, chilled and roughly cut into small pieces
2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter, chilled and diced into ½-inch pieces
½ teaspoon salt
⅔ cup cold water
2 cups (10 ounces) all-purpose flour
1. Make sure you divide the 10 ounces of butter necessary for this recipe into two groups. Two ounces should roughly chopped and 8 ounces should be diced into ½-inch pieces.
2. Dissolve the salt in the cold water. This will allow for better distribution in the dough. Keep the saltwater chilled until ready to use. Cold ingredients are the key for easy to handle pastry that comes out flakey.
3. Put the flour into the bowl of a food processor. Add the roughly cut 2 ounces of butter and blend with 4 to 5 pulses until well combined. Add the 8 ounces of diced butter and pulse 2 to 3 times for 2 seconds each until the butter is the size of hazelnuts. These larger pieces of butter are what make the dough puff up when baked.
4. Dump the mass of crumbly dough onto a smooth work surface. Use a dough scraper to collect it into a rectangle. Dust a rolling pin and roll into a rectangle about 5 inches wide and 14 inches long. Use your dough knife to keep the edges straight.
5. Use a dough knife or spatula to lift the dough and fold it in thirds, like a business letter. Match the corners and side up as evenly as you can. Turn the dough "letter" 90 degrees so the folds are facing you and roll it out once more into a 5-by-14-inch rectangle. Now, roll up the dough like a scroll and then use the palm of your hand to flatten it into an even, wide log shape.
5. Chill for at least 30 minutes.
6. Dust the work surface and the rolling pin lightly with flour and roll out to ¼-inch thick, turning the dough and dusting underneath with flour to prevent sticking. Brush off any excess flour and use a pizza wheel, biscuit cutter or a knife to cut the dough into any shape you desire. (Gather any scraps of dough and re-roll or chill for future use. They will not be as airy but are perfect for tarts, quiche or pizza.)
7. Place the pastries on an ungreased baking sheets or in tart pans or muffin tins. For immediate use, top or fill the pastries (an egg wash helps ingredients stick and makes the pastries pretty, but is optional) and chill for at least 15 minutes for best results.
Or, for future use, freeze the unfilled pastry shapes on their pans. Once firm, transfer them into labeled freezer bags. Fill them straight from the freezer with the toppings and fillings of your choice and bake right away.
8. To bake the pastries, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Bake until golden brown (frozen pastries will take a few more minutes than chilled) and serve immediately.
Top photo: Parmesan-black pepper twists and mini-tarts with blue cheese, pear and walnuts made with rough puff pastry. Credit: Lynne Curry


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