A Note from Nancy

A few years ago we lived in a tiny basement apartment while Ryan finished his undergrad at BYU.  An interesting course of events made this home our only option and upon returning from a summer internship we re-discovered how incredibly small the place we'd rented actually was; a minuscule living room- barely the size of a regular bathroom, a postage stamp bathroom, and the piece de resistance: a kitchen that required merely lifting your arms to touch the two walls and ceiling all at once.

Ironically, in this ridiculously small kitchen I cooked and baked and experimented like a crazy woman, and as a result fell even deeper in love with it all.  I read Julia Child's My Life in France, and, following her example, mounted my equipment on the one empty wall.  I harvested my sister's zucchini and burned up my first food processor trying to grate it all.  I came home from our weekly library trip with enormous stacks of cookbooks and stayed up late turning pages, drooling over gorgeous plates, and plotting the next recipe to master.  I made Moroccan tagines, lavender butter scones, sour cherry & shiitaki-stuffed pork tenderloin, and sweet sugared palmiers.

Through the course of it all I became infatuated with a myriad of cookbooks as well as their authors, and most likely irked the local librarians with my constant renewals.  One of those glorious and inspired works was Nancy Silverton's Pastries from the La Brea Bakery.
Her tart dough melts in your mouth, her croissants alone are worth living for,
and if you've never had one of her Lemon Turnovers, well,
there's a hole in your soul that needs filling.

Fast-forward to today.  My cookbook wishlist continues to grow, but I finally indulged enough to purchase Nancy's pastry bible from Amazon.  It arrived today, and, as an extra, squeal-inducing bonus for a girl who's long been on a first name basis with Ms. Silverton (in my mind, that is), she inscribed it.

I don't even care that I'm not Mindy, or that I didn't marry Jordan in May.  

What matters is the message she penned with a flourish just above her own signature: 

 "Bake!"

And bake I shall!