Do you bake with sugar substitutes? We’d like to know your favorite tips and recipes, even your disasters, comment below!

To read our about our experiments with sugar substitutes and get tips from professional bakers who use the stuff, visit www.insidebayarea.com/food.

Make miniature fritattas for a nutritious grab-and-go breakfast

Not a morning person? I’m right there with you. I’ve whittled my morning routine down to a paltry 20 minutes between bed and backing out of the driveway, and that usually means I skip breakfast. But no more — I pre-bake miniature fritattas in muffin pans and then keep them in the fridge for the week. They’re a great grab-and-go breakfast that’s packed with protein and, depending on what you stir in, all sorts of nutrient rich veggies.

Stir together eggs and your choice of vegetables, herbs, cheese, even bacon or sausage and pour into lightly oiled muffin tins. Bake until puffy and slightly dry-looking, about 20 minutes. Mini-fritattas are good cold, or re-heated in the microwave. Slip between two halves of an English muffin for a quick breakfast sandwich or just eat out of hand. Watch me make them at www.insidebayarea.com/food — scroll down to video food tips. _ Jenny Slafkosky

Mini Southwestern-Style Fritattas
Recipe by Jenny Slafkosky

Olive oil, for brushing muffin cups
4 eggs
¼ cup milk
3 scallions, chopped
1 ½ ounces goat cheese, crumbled
¼ cup frozen corn kernels, thawed and drained
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
½ roasted red pepper, chopped
1 roasted green chile, such as poblano or Anaheim, chopped
½ teaspoon cumin
¼ teaspoon cayenne (optional)
¼ teaspoon coriander
Salt, to taste

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Using a pastry brush, lightly grease the cups of a muffin tin with olive oil. Set aside.
Crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk vigorously with the milk until well combined.
Gently stir in the scallions, goat cheese, corn, cilantro, red pepper, green chile and spices until well combined. Season with salt.
Fill muffin cups 1/3 of the way up with the egg mixture – the mini fritattas will puff in the oven and need room to expand.
Bake approximately 20 minutes until the mini fritattas are puffy, slightly golden and no longer appear wet in the center.
Cool (fritattas will deflate slightly as they stand) and store in a large plastic container in the refrigerator for easy breakfasts on-the-go.

Makes 12 mini fritattas.

Per Serving: 50 Calories; 3g Fat; 3g Protein; 2g Carbohydrate; trace Dietary Fiber; 67mg Cholesterol; 112mg Sodium.

This is the first post in an occasional series I will call EatGeek — that is, geeky food things I do in the kitchen when no one is looking. Are you an EatGeek too? Message me!

EatGeek n. A person who thinks and talks about and/or obsesses and experiments with food to a point that may ,or may not, be healthy. An EatGeek’s ability to cook is also imperative.

My friend Arlette and I have been talking a lot about duck fat lately.

Arlette is a true EatGeek, she once invited me to an entire evening centered around the inagural use of a deep fryer. We christened it Julia Child and burned our fingers repeatedly. That’s how we roll.

Anyway, we’ve been discussing the culinary glory of duck fat — its ability to make potatoes oh-so-crispy, its key role in confit, its succulent work in cassoulet — and the appropriate ways to render, save and utilize the stuff.

I know, I know, this is icky to some of you. But here’s the thing: If we’re going to eat things like ducks and chickens and cows and pigs, it makes sense to have an intimate knowledge with all the parts of that animal, no? Otherwise we should stop eating meat entirely. Right? Maybe I’m wrong…

Anyway, anyone who’s ever cooked a duck knows there’s copious amounts of fat involved. While duck meat is fairly lean, all that ducky’s warmth comes from a thick layer of fat under the skin. Cook it nice and slow and the fat renders (to be poured off and saved for later) and the skin crisps deliciously. But any mistreatment (cooking too quickly, failing to score it) of the skin can lead to a rubbery, unpalatable disaster.

In the spirit of using every part of the animal, Arlette and I have been experimenting with ways to best extract and utilize the fat. She recommends using a garlic press to squeeze out every last bit of fat from a cooked duck. She even gifted me a container of the stuff after she did it.

But the other day I reached duck fat nirvana.

While testing recipes for the Food and Wine section I had to simmer a whole duck, with the skin OFF. This not only meant wrestling the skin off a duck — which is another story altogether — but also figuring out what to do with it because it wasn’t utilized in the recipe. Should I make “duck rinds”? Save the skin for a gallantine (a fancy rolled terrine-like thing that requires duck or chicken skin)? Render it slowly over a low flame?

Obviously I chose the rendering. After an hour of slow, slow rendering the skin was about a quarter of its size and I’d poured off 2 cups of fat. I chilled it overnight in the refrigerator until it was solid then used a melon baller to scoop it into uniform pieces. Then I lined them up on a rimmed baking sheet and froze those suckers until they were really, really solid. They’re now in a bag labeled “Duck Fat” on the top shelf of my freezer, ready to be used in small, or large amounts whenever I need them.

The problem is, now I don’t want any duck fat, I’m all ducked out. Time to geek out on something else for a while. Suggestions?

– Jenny Slafkosky

Just in case you can’t figure out how to spend that tax refund, Napa Valley’s Poetry Inn and Cliff Lede Vineyards have a plan _ you can invest in your next birthday party.

For just $60,000, you, your significant other and four other couples can celebrate in style: Three nights at the luxurious Poetry Inn, a birthday dinner personally cooked by Chef Thomas Keller and his French Laundry staff. The dinner will be a 7-course chef’s tasting menu paired with Cliff Lede Vineyards wines selected by Master Sommelier Paul Roberts, served right there at the Inn.

On another night, each couple can choose to have dinner at either Bouchon, Keller’s French bistro, or at the latest addition to his restaurant collection, Ad Hoc. The next day, in between the group’s wine tasting excursions, the party will be treated to a picnic catered by Bouchon Bakery.

Each couple will go home with (or drink, their choice) six bottles of Poetry Cabernet Sauvignon, Cliff Lede’s sold-out flagship wine, which normally retails for $120 per bottle. This sought-after wine is crafted from the steep hillside portion of the estate.

Your $60,000 also includes a bottle of wine for the birthday celebrant of first-growth Bordeaux wine from their birth year, plus limo service to and from all the restaurants and wineries you will visit during your stay.

If this sounds like an offer you can’t pass up, give the folks at Poetry Inn a call: (707) 944-0646 or go to www.cliffledevineyards.com or www.poetryinn.com.

So far we don’t know if they’ve had any takers yet…

_ Jolene Thym

Mmm! Eat me!

If you read our story on the Bay Area’s Best Hot Dogs in the Food and Wine section, you may have a few more places to add to the list. Leave your comments, questions and general thoughts (haikus welcome!) about hot dogs below. We can’t wait to hear from you.

I have a normal blender at home — one that twists apart into three pieces, with the little rubber thingie to prevent leaks. It will mostly crush enough ice to make a decent margarita and has mostly enough capacity to whir up a small batch of soup. It works fine. I guess.

But a few weeks ago my co-worker, who is usually busily embroiled in reporting business news, leans over the little half-wall that separates us and tells me he’s got a Vita-mix.

“OOO! Isn’t that one of those fancy-pants blenders?” I say.

“Don’t even call it a blender,” he says with just a hint of sarcasm.

This Vita-mix thing, he says, can whip up a smoothie so smooth that, well, it makes a person understand why they’re called smoothies in the first place. It whirls at a whopping 240 miles per hour, he says. It spins so fast it will actually heat your pureed soup for you — no pans required.

I am curious, intrigued, maybe even thrilled by this news. “I must learn more, NOW!” I tell him.

He brings in his Vita-mix cookbook one day for me to flip through. Recipes for salsa, smoothies, soups, fondue, even bread dough crowd the pages. I’m amazed. I’m also a little amazed by the price — around $400. Like a fast car, a fast blender requires big bucks. Oops, sorry, I called it a “blender.”

Apparently there’s a whole Vita-mix community out there, whirling and whirring away with their high-tech machine, making the world a smoother place. Are you one of them? Comment below, I’d love to know about your Vita-mix escapades.

_ Jenny Slafkosky

I don’t know who came up with the idea or why, but I don’t like it. Never have, never will. I hate to be gross, but quite honestly seeing foam on my food makes me think that someone has spit on it.

Just in case you don’t get what I’m complaining about, let me explain.

Some number of years ago, the idea of pumping air into various liquids and spraying them on top of food was introduced. The foam does not look like beaten egg whites, but tends to have rather large-ish bubbles. The idea, as I understand it, is to infuse the food with flavor, with a bit of texture, and to tease the eye with a little added decoration.

The problem is that it doesn’t work for me, mainly because anything with foam on it loses on eye appeal before I ever taste it. Infinitely better, I say, is to put away that atomizer in favor of a good, old fashioned spoon.

I realized just how much I dislike the stuff when I glanced over the menu for a most elegant Women Chefs & Restauranteurs feast I would be attending. Second course: Beet Salad with Chevre Foam and Walnut Paper. I love beets. I love goat cheese of any kind. I adore walnuts.
Just keep your bubbles to yourself! Thankfully, when this salad was placed before me, it was foam-free. Thank you Elizabeth Falkner, the creator of this particular dish.

As I enjoyed every last tidbit on my foam-free salad plate, I wondered who could possibly smile at a plate overtaken by unappetizing bubbles. Anyone?
- Jolene Thym