For September 11

I will not be in town on Thursday night; instead, I will be at Tassajara again. This is the last weekend of guest season, and it has become something of a tradition for me to go this weekend. I think this is the 5th year I have been there for the ending weekend. Three of those years I have been in a workshop titled "Cooking with Big Mind" (sound familiar?) but this year they moved the workshop to June and I could not attend. The workshop participants take over the kitchen and make the last dinner of guest season. The last two years, I was assigned to make the dessert, which was a chocolate hazelnut cake. It is a lot of work, but actually pretty fun, to make 22 cakes to serve 88 people! (Well, rubbing the skins off of so many hazlenuts was not much fun, but that isn't even fun when it is for a cake that serves 4.) Any recipe that starts with melting 7 1/2 lbs of chocolate is just fun! This year, no class, just relaxing.

Anyway, given a fairly hectic schedule this week, I started my cooking early, and will finish it tonight (thanks to the assistance of my partner Andrew, who will probably take care of slicing the dough and baking the cookies that are chilling right now).

Here's the Thursday night lineup:

Golden Kamut Pound Cake
Extra Bittersweet Chocolate Wafers

Both from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert.

This is my first time cooking with kamut. Kamut (pronounced like you were French Canadian, "ca-moot") is an ancient grain, apparently a precursor to modern wheat. The word kamut is from the ancient egyptian, and was their word for wheat. This is also the first time in decades that I have made a pound cake recipe other than my standard one. So we'll see how it goes.