Hi Everyone,
I’m glad to have all of you here. This newsletter is a new and exciting adventure for me. It’s an opportunity to share the well-honed and proven recipes that I have collected for years as well as new recipes that I will create for this newsletter.
As many of you know, I spent fifteen years as a restaurant pastry chef in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. I worked at Wheatleigh, a small luxury hotel near Lenox, and then at The Old Inn On The Green in New Marlborough. The Old Inn is a historic venue with a fine dining restaurant and was once a stagecoach relay.
Some of you know that I had a completely different career before all the baking started. In Houston, I worked in the retail fashion business, as a buyer and a merchandise manager at a major department store called Foley’s. Later, Macy’s bought and discarded all the Foley’s signs. It was a sad time for many of us.
In between merchandising and pastry I went to cooking school in New York at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), which was formerly Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School.
Sometime I will write about how hard it was to start over in a new career. But never have I had any doubts or regrets. I have a passion for baking and pastry and I hope that will show in my work.
You will see all kinds of baked treats, from easy and homey to more complex and fancier. There will be recipes for pies and cakes, muffins, scones, brownies both plain and gussied up, summer cobblers, berry tarts, oh and I can’t forget cookies. There will also be special surprises for holidays. And I hope you’ll give me feedback on what you would like me to write about.
This introductory newsletter is just to introduce you to what’s to come. You will receive the first newsletter on Friday, November 18, and every other Friday after that. There may be a few exceptions to this rule but that is the plan. It will come to your email inbox. Also, you can download the free Substack app to your phone and read it there.
To those of you who graciously sent me your email address, thanks and consider yourself already signed up. For everyone else, please click on the “Subscribe” button below.
I will be writing to you from Port Saint Lucie, Florida, where I now live. That’s it for now. See you on the 18th. And I welcome your comments.
So excited to continue learning from you Shirl. I don’t know which pic is better … you or those lemon bars!!!!! Congrats on this project, and I’ll be looking forward to reading each week!!