Winner of Your Best Recipe with Fresh Ricotta

Congratulations to SML Office, whose Louisa's Cake won this week's contest for Your Best Recipe with Fresh Ricotta, earning her a handsome Provence Hand Painted Serving Bowl from Williams-Sonoma, plus big prizes from Viking, OXO and Tiny Prints, and a spot in the next food52 cookbook!

 

Q&A with SML Office

• Describe an early food experience that has influenced the way you think about food and/or cooking. 
• That is such a great question and I wish I had a definite answer because baking and cooking started very, very early for me. Like my son, I believe it was age 4. And I remember obsessing over and organizing recipes in the second grade. But where it came from is a mystery. I remember seeing the Julia Child parody on SNL in the 70s and feeling bad for her, thinking that I felt the same attachment to the kitchen and wondering why people mocked her attention to detail and enthusiasm.

• What's your least favorite food?
• Coconut

• What is the best thing you've made so far this year?
• Eggplant Parmigiana. It's all about The Aubergine these days for some reason. Mostly grilling it with a brush stroke of olive oil and sea salt at the end.

• Describe your most spectacular kitchen disaster.
• Every buttercream for the kid's birthday cakes has ended in disaster. Without fail, year after year.

• What is your idea of comfort food?
• Spaghetti Bolognese with Coca-Cola in a glass bottle.

• Apron or no apron?
• Apron!

• What's your favorite food-related scene in a movie?
• Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton), eating a plate of prawns in I am Love.

• You prefer to cook: a. alone, b. with others, c. it depends on your mood
• C. It depends on my mood

• When it comes to tidying up, you usually: a. clean as you cook, b. do all the dishes once you've finished cooking, c. leave the kitchen a shambles for your spouse/roommate/kids to clean.
• The answer used to be C. but now after living in Switzerland it's become A. cleaning as I cook.

 

• 

• SML Office's son in the kitchen; the lovely Provence Hand Painted Serving Bowl she's won from Williams-Sonoma!