 Watermelon Salad with Goat Cheese A few months ago, while we paying our bill at Art Restaurant, the host told us about the Celebrated Chefs program. There didn’t seem to be much of a downside. You register your credit card with them, get a cookbook, and whenever you dine at one of the participating restaurants and use that credit card, 5% of your purchase price is donated to charity. We spent a couple of minutes looking through the cookbook and it sounded good enough. Local chefs from the participating restaurants contributed some of their signature recipes. The photos were lovely and the recipes we perused were well written. Five minutes later we walked out with a cookbook and plans to cook from it very soon.
But, alas, as often happens, the cookbook came home with us and immediately got shelved and forgotten about. I pulled it out a few times, and discovered a fatal flaw (at least for cookbooks). There’s no index. Little known fact about me: in a previous life, I wrote four technical books. I know that an indexer is expensive, and so a missing index in a charity cookbook doesn’t totally surprise me, but it does make the cookbook a little difficult to use. You can’t just pick up the cookbook and see if there are any tomato recipes in it. You need to page through the entire thing to see what recipes use tomatoes. So although the recipes in the cookbook are fabulous, the cookbook is just a bit hard to use.
Oh, and Celebrated Chefs… if you’re listening, I’ll happily index your next cookbook in exchange for a couple of meals at participating restaurants.  Continue reading Watermelon Salad with Goat Cheese
Pasta with Broccoli, Sausage, and Sun-dried Tomatoes
Most nights, we don’t cook elaborate meals. In fact, some nights, it’s all we can do to boil water and make pasta. You see, unlike a lot of food bloggers, this isn’t what we do to pay the bills. We blog because we love it, but we also work other jobs. So when we get home at 6:30 on a Wednesday and nothing’s been chopped, sliced, minced, or roasted, we default to easy, quick, and fresh meals with whatever happens to be in the fridge. Quick, easy, and largely unplanned [...]
 Mostly Plants Egg Squares We took a little mini-vacation to San Francisco this weekend and my book of choice for the flight was Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I’ve read parts of this book before, but this was the first time I’ve read it cover to cover. The seven words that he believes are the key to reversing the negative side effects of the Western Diet are these: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
This weekend at the Seattle Area Farmers Markets, we had an abundance of plants. Here’s just a sample of what we were treated to at the markets. Miners lettuce, nettles, chickweed, spinach, salad greens, leeks, sunflower sprouts, and kale. Well, we’ve got plants springing up all over the place! So to ‘plant-ify’ our breakfasts for this week, we switched from the Eggy English Muffin Samiches to these Mostly Plants Breakfast Squares. We’ve still got a good amount of protein, a nice hit of carbs from the English Muffins, and some rich, delicious, and pastured pork sausage. Plus, PLANTS!
Continue reading “Mostly Plants” Breakfast Squares
 Sausage, Egg, and Cheese Breakfast Sandwiches … also known as handheld breakfast sandwiches.
We’re in marathon training mode these days, counting down to the Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon in June. So not only are we working out more and more every week, but we’re also trying to make sure we have the optimum nutrition for training while still eating locally. Long distance running is very much about cardio training, but it is also very much about strength training, requiring core, hip, and leg strength. So protein is incredibly important for us these days. We’re trying to start our mornings off right with a high protein breakfast and while we love our frittata-a-go-go’s, sometimes we need a little variety.
Luck and a trip to Bill the Butcher’s new shop in Laurelhurst this past weekend left us with half a pound of Mexican mole sausage. My English Muffin addiction left us with a bag of homemade Momofuku English Muffins, and the University District farmers market left us with a dozen Skagit River Ranch eggs. Well, now doesn’t that look like the fixings for some sort of breakfast sandwich? Of course it does!
Continue reading Eggy English Muffin Samiches
 Tender, creamy Brussels sprouts On Twitter this morning, just about everyone was longing for spring. Even though it has been unseasonably warm in January and February this year, and salad greens are returning to the markets, people were yearning for asparagus, snap peas, beans, and even corn. Honestly, I’m perfectly content to wait. Don’t get me wrong, we love asparagus. When it comes back to the market, we do a little dance and jump up and down with joy. But this year, we’re having so much fun discovering new and interesting ways to cook winter vegetables that I’m not quite ready for winter to be over yet.
Take Brussels Sprouts for example. After John’s success with Sesame Brussels Sprout Saute, I’ve been longing to try new Brussels sprout recipes. A quick check of the fridge revealed Sea Breeze Farms pancetta, horseradish, buttermilk, and cream (along with the Brussels sprouts of course). I’ve seen recipes for Brussels Sprouts with Horseradish Cream before and though most of them called for sour cream, I figured I could improvise a bit and come up with something that worked without having to go to the store.
Continue reading Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta-Horseradish Cream
 - Sweet Potato Chorizo Mole
Going meatless, or nearly meatless is the thing to do these days. Not only is it healthy to get lots of fruits and vegetables in your life, but eating less meat can help the environment as well. You see, CAFOs (confined or concentrated animal feeding operations) are not only horrible for the animals, they are horrible for the environment as well. I won’t go into detail on this post, because this is after all, a recipe and I hope that you’ll be hungry enough after reading it to actually make the dish, but let’s just say that on average, we eat a lot more meat than we need and a lot more than we used to 50 years ago.
So one of our goals at Cook Local is to find ways to enjoy ethically raised meat in smaller amounts. We love our meat. Heck, we have half a cow in the freezer right now and we’ve been enjoying said cow immensely for lunches in our homemade burritos for the past few weeks along with mass quantities of beans and kale. We’re not vegetarians and we have no plans to be. However, we do believe that for most meals, meat should be the garnish rather than the main dish.
Continue reading Sweet Potato and Chorizo Mole
 It is finally November. Well, ok. Who am I kidding. Finally isn’t the right word. It is ALREADY November. I’m still not sure where July went and already we’re into November. But since it’s now November, we can start talking seriously about Thanksgiving recipes.
I love Thanksgiving. What can be better than a day centered completely around food? Well, how about a day centered completely around local food? I hope you’ve ordered your Thanksgiving turkey already. If not, there are still a few options, including Bill the Butcher in Woodinville.
Continue reading Emmer Bread and Sausage Stuffing
The Mrs. is doing good with making the shellfish that is still in the shell, but, when it comes to the stuff not sold in the shell, she’s still giving it to me to come up with a recipe.
As you may have guessed, here comes another recipe using some of Oyster Bill’s fare, this time: shucked oysters.
Taylor Shellfish has preshucked oysters in a sealed plastic cup, very conveneint and easy to work with.
We know that we’ve needed to do some more appetizers, so I wanted to find a little recipe that you could use as [...]
Thanks to Michael Pollan, we’re trying to have more meals that either don’t include meat or include very little meat. However, that doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice taste or protein content. Dried beans are plentiful at the Farmers Markets, so we’ve been buying a container every other week or so. A few weeks ago we picked up some black beans and I’ve been looking forward to making soup out of them ever since. This recipe was very much an experiment, but it turned out fabulous.
Black beans topped with feta cheese
Before we begin, a few [...]
When you move into a new house, there are things that have to happen before that new house becomes your home. Everyone has their own definition of what makes a house a home. For me, there were two moments that really made our new house a home for me. There was the first time I walked barefoot over the hardwood floor. It felt natural and somehow, just right. Then, there was the first meal that I cooked in the house. I was nervous about cooking in the house. Why? Well, I’ll show you.
That’s our antique gas [...]
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