Dianda's Pignoles

I have a coworker who is seriously the biggest foodie anyone will ever meet. She cooks and experiments with recipes A LOT, she works as a wholesale organic produce sales person (selling to the best small, gourmet grocers in the city), she geeks out on new restaurants and goes to them before the ink dries on their menus, and she really spits out the mouthful of wine while wine tasting. She loves food. And she's very cute and generous and experiments on her coworkers. Once, she baked a chocolate bread pudding in the oven at work (she has assembled it at home, but baked it at work) and the smell of the pudding baking was so amazingly delicious that I thought for a moment I was dead and in heaven. (I thought, "Somehow I didn't think I'd be at WORK in heaven, but maybe this is just a transitional moment immediately after death, and I just died at work and I don't know it yet.") She also made an herb salt blend (she washed, semi-dried and chopped fresh organic herbs like rosemary, sage and thyme and pulsed them in a processor with fresh garlic and natural salt) that was coarse, moist and delicious on everything and gave little tubs of it to us for Christmas. If you sniff the salt, you get the scent of all the herbs and it smells so good. Finally, she's close to age 60 (so I hear, thought I'd guess her in her 40's had I not seen a baby picture of her which explained the time period by the cars on the street and the way the nearby businesses looked). And a foodie who has been around longer is naturally going to be more super-foodie than a younger foodie. She's had more time to taste more things!

Her favorite cookies are pignoles (or "pignoli", but the bakery just says "pignoles") from Dianda's Bakery in San Francisco (leftmost cookie). They are made with almond paste and are light and chewy on the inside and crisp outside, with pinenuts all over the tops. Dianda's also makes the cookie without the pinenuts, but pinenuts are delicious, so get the pignoles.

Diandas Italian American Pastry Company
2883 Mission St (between 24th and @5th, but nearer 25th)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 647-5469