 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
 Halibut with Blueberry Sauce Sometimes we get lucky. We start out with one ingredient and end up with a dish that is so flexible, it turns into two, three, or even four different dishes before the night is over. This is one of those recipes. Start with a nice fresh piece of halibut. Clean out the fridge and find two pints of blueberries that you forgot you bought last weekend and a head of lettuce. Presto change-o and you’ve got blueberry jam, blueberry sauce, and blueberry salad dressing!
Before we get to the recipe, a few caveats.
1) This recipe is incredibly flexible. Feel free to play around with the level of hot pepper, vanilla, and bourbon. Add more or less sugar depending on your taste and the quality of your blueberries.
2) This recipe IS NOT DESIGNED FOR CANNING. While it makes excellent jam, I haven’t added any acid to the mix, which is one of the key elements you need for safe canning. While the resultant preserves will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks and in the freezer for a couple of months, it’s not safe for canning. Please follow established canning recipes if you’re planning on making blueberry jam or jelly for long term storage.
Continue reading Blueberry Sauce for EVERYONE!
 Bean Salad with Roasted Vegetables Even though we both love meat, we have our share of meatless meals. Since we workout so much though, and since John’s diabetic, we have to make sure those meatless meals have a significant amount of protein in them. One of the ways we do this is with liberal use of dried beans. We get our dried beans from either Alvarez Farms, Alm Hill Gardens, or Stoney Plains. Alvarez, in particular, has a wide variety of beans nearly every week. We love picking up chickpeas and making our Spicy Roasted Chickpeas and we regularly cook up some black beans with some pancetta and rosemary.
When thinking about what we could make for our cooking demo at Queen Anne Farmers Market, we wanted something with beans for several reasons. First, I think beans often get overlooked. They aren’t glamorous and on’t have a tremendous amount of flavor on their own. Not to mention there’s the time they require. You’ve got to soak them overnight and only then can you cook them. Second, we wanted to make a dish that was vegetarian. You never know when you’re cooking for a crowd how many people will be vegetarian or vegan.
Continue reading White Bean Salad with Roasted Tomatoes and Fennel
 Roasted corn and blueberry salad Once sweet corn comes into season, there is one go-to salad that I make whenever I need to bring a dish to a party or when I’m low on time and still want to impress guests. It’s simple, can be thrown together in under 30 minutes and only requires about 5 minutes of active preparation time.
We first heard about this recipe from The Chef in the Hat, Thierry Rautureau. The esteemed chef often appears on our local NPR station, KUOW, in a show called “What’s in the Fridge“. You can listen to the podcast on their website or download it. We heard this recipe on an edition of What’s in the Fridge last year and it has been a staple in our house ever since.
Continue reading Roasted Corn and Blueberry Salad
 - Beet and Radish Slaw
We’re getting to the time of year when I occasionally am filled with dread at seeing my CSA box. Don’t get me wrong. I love my CSA. However some weeks it has been hard to use everything up. Particularly if the weather has turned hot, cooking just isn’t appealing. When the mercury is in the high 80′s or 90′s and it has been a long day at the office, I just want a simple old salad and maybe some smoked salmon from our friends at Wilson Fish.
Even though summer in Seattle isn’t always that warm, I hope you’ll give this cold salad some consideration. The prep work is quick and easy and though our photo isn’t the best, it really does make for a stunning presentation.
Continue reading Beet and Radish Slaw
 - Spicy Salad Mix and Sweet Onion Dressing
We love salads during the summer. Whether we pick some leaves from our salad table or buy some spicy mix from Alm Hill Gardens or our Growing Washington CSA, we love salads. The challenge with salads though is figuring out a local dressing.
With the heat over the past week, we definitely haven’t wanted anything creamy or heavy. So for our dressing this week, we stuck to simple, light ingredients. Continue reading Sweet Onion Salad Dressing
When Michelle Obama was creating such a buzz over the White House organic vegetable garden, one of the quotes that was mentioned often was this:
“And when you’re dealing with kids, for example, you want to get them to try that carrot. Well, if it tastes like a real carrot and it’s really sweet, they’re going to think that it’s a piece of candy. So my kids are more inclined to try different vegetables if they’re fresh and local and delicious.”
This is a stunning salad
Well, I couldn’t agree more. Sweet fresh carrots can taste just [...]
The history books say that ricotta cheese came about when there was an excess of whey in Italy. The word ricotta comes from the Latin word for recooked and it is typically made by reheating whey, during which time the proteins rise to the surface, are skimmed off, and set to drain. Ricotta isn’t actually even technically a cheese. It is a dairy product. In order for it to be a cheese, either a starter or a rennet would need to be used in the process.
Herbed ricotta fritters with creamy yogurt dressing
Before I started shopping [...]
We’ve really been enjoying the chickweed from Nash’s Organic Produce. We’ve munched on it raw, blanched it and blended it into soup, and made amazing chimichurri that just tonight we slathered on chicken breasts before grilling them.
Triticale and Bourbon Salad
The other day, though, John came across this recipe from 101 Cookbooks. Whiskey? Check. Goat cheese? Check. Spicy stuff? Check. All of the ingredients sounded great individually, so why not together? The way the recipe is written, it’s not overly local, however with a few tweaks here and there, we were able to make a [...]
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