Jenn Garbee

When you're young, beautiful and Billy Joel's ex-wife, apparently you can get away with sitting on the stoop of your four-story Greenwich Village pad, casually nibbling peanut butter cookies while pretending to read the newspaper. And offering authoritative statements about the holiday cookies in your latest cookbook such as: "I......

'Tis the season of office gift pools, when your boss' darling minion starts blasting emails with a "suggested" donation to get the big cheese something invariably tacky. Should you care to remain employed, you can't exactly refuse to participate. But you can take charge of the gift purchasing decision to......

Ya, ya, Laurent Tourondel trained at Saint Vincent Ecole de Cuisine in France and did several stages at Michelin three star restaurants before building the BLT empire. But this time of year he's more likely to rifle through family recipe cards to find a comforting holiday dessert than dust off......

Thank goodness for hair gel. Now we can all finally get over our Sideways "I'm not drinking any f#cking merlot!" complex. Of course, we all know that celebrity hairstylist Ted Gibson makes a mean cocktail party chignon (a fancy and expensive name for your grandmom's bun). Now he's added a......

Still hoping your crazy banjo-playing cousin is going to bring over something a little more useful this Thanksgiving, say, a pastry chef? According to this week's Name That Pastry Chef Zoe Nathan, having a pastry chef in the family doesn't mean the Thanksgiving table is going to be filled with......

Need to learn how to make a really good pie -- and fast -- but don't have $80 to $150 to spare on those fancy cooking classes around town? Neither do we. Enter Jennie Cook, this year's Best Of LA penny-pinching caterer. Cook is hosting her second annual Thanksgiving "Make......

In honor of next week's pie, tart and butterhorn roll binge, this week's Name That Pastry Chef is a stellar baker. She's the kind of person whose eyes light up at the sheer mention of King Arthur (the flour company, not the Medieval knight) and actually looks forward to rolling......

Ladies and gentlemen, a polite reminder. The quintessential dinner party dilemma is not whether to risk veering from Mapquest directions, but what to take as a host/hostess gift. If you regularly arrive at the door without a small token of thanks, such as a bottle of wine, you need to......

Tomorrow will be the third, and final, Friday the 13th in 2009 (the next triple play won't occur until 2015). On Saturday, we suggest you celebrate surviving yet another night of horror flick marathons by driving to Paso Robles for Firestone Walker's annual Anniversary Ale release party. It also happens......

Any residual high school class-cutting guilt can now been assuaged by a fantastic modern invention: podcasts. The Culinary Historians of Southern California (CHSC) has launched a new website that includes podcasts of recent lectures. That means you can catch Jonathan Gold's recent talk on regional cuisines in the San Gabriel......