Galley Girl – She's in Your Kitchen

Chef Celeb cook books are useful as step stools, for pressing flowers, or, for the ones with especially compelling photos, cocktail table status symbols. For cooking? Meh.  Just because so and so can wield a behemoth immersion blender with the proportions and decibel output of a  jackhammer doesn’t mean it’ll work in my humble galley. Then there’s the issue of practicality. Storing not to mention brandishing a butane torch the size of an airport runway fire extinguisher seems downright risky.

No special equipment required.

There is also the issue of patronage. I don’t frequent many of the legions of chef celeb-driven restaurants, and in many cases, neither do the chefs themselves. Hence, there’s no feeling of loyalty, of confidence borne from knowing the chef is there overseeing the mundane with the  kind of quotidian regularity that breeds staff rapport, community and, in the right hands, near flawless food.

Zov Karamardian could be off gallivanting on Bravo’s reality show, Top Chef Masters, but she turned them down. She can actually be found in her eponymous restaurant day in and day out.  Better still, she cooks in it, and I really like what she cooks. Hence, I thought I might like to use her new cook book, Simply Zov for more than a doorstop.

I picked up three copies of the book while eating dinner at Zov’s last month. It had just come out, and our server had them all inscribed and autographed by Zov while we had a beautifully executed  prix fixe and sipped Vouvray Chenin Blanc. It’s a lovely volume, with a full page picture for every recipe. It’s budget minded with no outlandish special equipment required, and very user friendly.

How so? I found out at 5:00 a.m. yesterday. Neglecting to prep my bake sale items the night before, I decided to whip something up at the last minute in The Test Galley, which  is about as organized as your local soup kitchen. I chose Apricot Shortbread Bars substituting strawberry preserves.   A simple dough grating technique (after freezing it) resulted in bars that had all the shortbread richness, but with a flaky, light, buttery crumb, softer where the dough met the sweet tang of the preserves. The bars sold out in minutes. The bedlam they created at the bake sale table is better left out of this piece. Let’s just say it wasn’t  what you would expect of church ladies.

Zov’s Bistro, Cafe and Bakery 17440 E. Seventeenth Street Tustin, CA 92780 (714) 838 8855. http://zovs.com