Last night, we had a few friends over for a lovely, figure-friendly repast of the final, perfected version of the cuban pork roast sandwiches I’ve been making, bacon-wrapped-bacon (a nice artery-clogging dish we came up with years ago that consists of Chinese-style red-braised pork belly, wrapped in bacon, crisped in the oven), and grilled ribeyes. [...]

I spent the afternoon with Chef Shannon Galusha, the talent behind Bastille, a stunning 200-seat Parisian-style bistro opening in Ballard next month. I’ll be working on a blog post for Seattle Magazine this weekend, but here’s a teaser photo of one of the astro arugula beds he has on his 5000 square foot rooftop garden.
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Need [...]

I woke up early this morning to make a blueberry pie for my Key Ingredient column in Seattle Magazine. This recipe will be appearing in the August issue, and I also threw in a bonus recipe for buttermilk ice-cream, the perfect tangy-sweet accompaniment to pretty much any summer fruit pie. The crust recipe, made with [...]

In an earlier post, I mentioned how I had put the pork in the oven at 6:30 a.m. and went back to bed, only to discover when I woke up at 9 a.m. that I hadn’t turned the oven on. Five hours later, we were finally able to assemble our first batch of cuban roast sandwiches [...]

I got two 3.5 lb. pork shoulders yesterday and marinaded them overnight. Both marinades contained orange juice, lime juice, and olive oil, and then I proceeded to experiment. One was rubbed with garlic salt, one contained 10 cloves of garlic. One had twice the amount of fresh oregano as the other. One had bay leaves [...]

Apologies for the picture this morning–this picture was snapped hastily this weekend when we were outside grilling, and I was too impatient to eat to set up a proper shot.
Here are the USDA Prime ribeyes we bought from Costco this weekend (only $9.99/lb.!) Each steak was just over a pound. Here’s mine–grilled ultra rare, with [...]

A couple days ago, I was looking over the recipe list for the cookbook and thought I should include another sandwich to the section. And then I got to thinking about the best sandwich in Seattle, which is undeniably the Cuban Roast (the #2) at Paseo. I’m not alone in praising this great sandwich–it’s earned a [...]

This long weekend, my husband and I spent hours demo-ing our basement, ripping down walls, hacking away at the old ceiling, and carting heavy pieces of wood and drywall to the huge dumpster we rented. We also brought our first grill, and cooked the juiciest ribeyes and local asparagus two nights in a row. (How [...]

I’ve had a wretched weekend trying to come up with a decent, super simple, no-bake cookie recipe for the cookbook. Now I do love cookie dough, but for some reason, the recipes I wrote simply didn’t taste right. There was a peanut butter, marshmallow, oatmeal no-bake cookie that drove me crazy. No matter how I adjusted [...]

Two years ago, I had burrata for the first time–that luscious fresh mozzarella with a core of cream. I was eating the lobe of burrata like a steak–sawing into it rather indelicately while standing in the kitchen, stuffing each creamy bite into my mouth after I doused it with my favorite Cherry Gold balsamic vinegar. [...]