 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
 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
 Tequila Shrimp with Cheesy Polenta One of the benefits of living here in the Pacific Northwest is the amazing abundance of good, fresh (or flash frozen) seafood purchased direct from the fisherman.
Whether we’re buying from Cape Cleare, Loki Fish Company, Wilson Fish, St. Jude or directly off one of the boats down at Fishermen’s Terminal, the bounty is just incredible, fresh or frozen.
Last year, the fishing vessel Hat Trick started selling their frozen prawns at the U-District Farmer’s Market for a month or so during the winter.
And what a month.
The prawns flow like…
like….
Well, like frozen prawns, so not really flowing at all.
But still, prawns are good, right?
We had a box in our freezer, a need to cook, the want for something cheesy.
Off to the shelf to find a good recipe that we can use to go with the prawns. I don’t know why prawns and grits go together, they just do. Trust me.
Continue reading Tequila Shrimp and Cheesy Grits
 Gouda and Garlic Cornbread With all due respect to one of our readers, I love playing with cornbread. Adding flavors into the corn bread, making it a bit more savory, or a bit more sweet, I just like seeking out what cornbread can do.
Heck, that’s what led us into the cornmeal biscotti.
So, when it came to thinking of a grain/bread dish that anyone, any non-baker, non-cook could make that would match up to this menu, cornbread was the first thing that came to my mind.
But not just any cornbread, I immediately thought of the cornbread we get at Joule, a preserved garlic and cheese topped cornbread that takes 20 minutes from when you order it.
Going back, though, I wanted the non-bakers to know that you can, in fact, easily bake a bread. I consistently call myself a non-baker, despite the fact that I regularly make biscotti and cornbread.
There is a downside to cornbread, and it goes back to my apologies to the reader who knows who she is. Cornbread is personal. I have a rule where I never recommend a pizza place, a chili place or a BBQ place. Sure, I’ll say what I like, but I won’t say ‘You must try….’ because people have religions based around these three foods, and that religion is such a personal choice that I’d never try to suggest what they might like. Cornbread is very close to that. Some want moist, some want dry, some want sweet, some want savory, some want grainy, some want chunks of corn kernels.
I’m not about to say that this recipe is the be-all, end-all recipe. Nor will I say that Joule’s cornbread, incredible tho it is, is something you must get. I will say it is, to me, beyond incredible and I’ll always pick it if I can. Continue reading Cast Iron Garlic and Cheese Cornbread
 Frittata-a-go-go There’s very little I don’t love about my job. I get to buy fresh, local ingredients from farmers I respect and admire. I get to cook those foods in new and interesting ways all the time, and I get to eat dishes that are, by and large, great successes. There’s one downside though. I don’t often get the luxury of repeating dishes whenever I please. Most of the recipes we post get play maybe a couple of times a year. Other than the burritos we’ve been making for lunch (recipe as soon as we’ve perfected it), and the dumplings that we make for quick weeknight dinners, we rarely cook a recipe over and over again.
This recipe, however, we’ve been making off and on for three years. It’s our go-to breakfast dish for weekdays when we’re constantly seduced by the snooze button and tarried by traffic. It’s simple to make, extremely portable, and ultimately flexible. It’s also great for those who need a higher protein breakfast, like Mr. Cook Local, who’s diabetic.
Continue reading Frittata-a-go-go (or handheld breakfast frittatas)
Mr. Local here.
I have a problem. I like spicy food. Not necessarily hot, but I like my food to virtually explode with taste sensations.
 A mix of chipotle honey sauce, bread crumbs, squash and cheese. I want the food I make to be like a party in my mouth, and I want EVERYONE to be invited.
It is one of the reasons why I make savory desserts.
And it is because of this that I looked at the Pan Roasted Delicata with a Kick and thought ‘I’d like to make that even better.” And what would make it better?
Cheese. And crunch.
I have another problem. I have a bizarre love affair with ramekins. Or those Staub cocottes. Or the … err…. item pictured in the pictures here, since I can’t find it on Staub’s site for some reason.
I like the idea of single serving dishes that go from the oven to the placemat (more or less, anyways). It is so… compact, handy, utilitarian. One of my favorite things, really, utilitarianism. That would be my religion, if it could. Utilitarianism.
Anyways, back to that Pan Roasted Delicata. I wanted to take it and turn it into a gratin, some cheesy, crunch goodness.
Continue reading Spicy Delicata Squash Gratin
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 [...]
We have an abundance of amazing local cheeses in the area. Estrella Family Creamery, Port Madison Goat Cheese, Sammish Bay Cheese, Golden Glen Creamery, River Valley Cheese, and of course Beecher’s.
One of my favorite local cheese vendors is Mt. Townsend. Their signature cheeses are Cirrus , Trailhead, and Seastack. The Cirrus is very much like a Camembert, Trailhead is a semi-hard mellow cheese, and the Seastack is a gooey, pungent, salty Puget Sound favorite.
This weekend at the University District Farmers Market, I found a new cheese from Mt. Townsend – New Moon.
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On this snowy Sunday morning, I have a story to tell you. Last year, on Thanskgiving, we brought a plate of appetizers to friends’ house for dinner. When we unwrapped the plate, our friends exchanged this “look”. The look that says “There’s no way that can taste good. But we have to eat one or two just to be polite.”
Fifteen minutes later the plate was empty. Every single appetizer had been happily, almost greedily consumed. These were a huge hit. Enough so that we actually made them for our wedding! What were these amazing little morsels? Well, [...]
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