I enjoy the occasional cup of good coffee, but I have a daily craving for the perfect espresso machiato— a shot of espresso topped with just a bit of milk foam. (sorry Starbucks, but I’m not talking about you) There is one place in Portland that makes such a drink— Arabica. And if I had unlimited funds I would go twice a day. With out any exaggeration, Arabica makes THE BEST espresso machiato I have ever tasted, and Karen loves their cappuccino which comes out looking like this. Now Starbucks makes a decent, strong and slightly bitter cup of regular coffee, and any espresso drink with milk in it is very drinkable there. But once you taste real espresso with its rich almost terracotta colored crema and thick bitter-sweet, velvety goodness, Starbucks espresso just feels like burnt, brown water in your mouth. My problem now is that I have had this miraculous machiato I crave it daily and the espresso I make at home doesn’t even come close to satisfying me.
I must find the best beans for eliciting the ever elusive rich, reddish crema and the sweet side of espresso, so that I may quench this thirst from the comfort of my home—
I wonder if they would sell me the beans they use at Arabica…
Filed under: eating, food., life, portland., thoughts
The growing trend towards smaller portions in our house has lead us to take the top off of our turkey burgers and make them with a skimpier bottom. But we don’t quite leave them naked and exposed, we layer them with carmalized Vidalia onions and melted goat cheese and set them on a toasted slice of whole grain oatmeal bread instead of a bun. This is one of those recipes that tastes like it takes a lot of work to make but actually doesn’t.
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Filed under: cooking, eating, food., life, pics, recipes
One of the most simple, quick and delicious grill recipes I have ever come up with is this Portabello quesadilla served with grilled asparagus. The prep work for this recipe is simple, all of the cooking is done on the grill, the whole thing takes less than 15 minutes to pull together and it is healthy. We end up eating this a lot in the summer as a light lunch or dinner (with grilled corn on the cob) so I thought it was worth sharing. If you try it let me know what you think …
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Filed under: art+photography, cooking, eating, food., pics, recipes
Beyond the pure joy of watching two chefs battle to create haute cuisine within the 60 minute time limit, and despite the at-times-extravagant ingredients, ICA (Iron Chef America) serves as an culinary inspiration for me. I love watching the cooking techniques that are used and each week I take away some new ideas in this regard. But for me, I am most interested and inspired by the way that each chef pairs flavors and textures and the way they finish their dishes (plating + saucing). These are the things that I feel like are often overlooked when it comes to home cooking— these are the things that take a meal from expected to exceptional. I love to eat as well as cook so I guess its not surprising that I have become increasingly interested in creating more that a mere meal. Favoring the fabrication of phenomenal eating experiences at home. It doesn’t even mean that the meals take more time to create, just more thought, care and attention to the three Ps: plates. presentation. portions.
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Filed under: cooking, eating, entertainment., food., iron chef america, personal., reality tv, thoughts, tv
This is my own, original crab cake recipe. It has been receiving rave reviews from all who have had the pleasure of indulging in their lilliputian lusciousness. The secret to this dainty and delectable dish is to use fresh crab meat. I happen to live in Portland (ME) and have access to amazingly fresh local crab. I use Portland Lighthouse crab meat. It is available in local groceries and is fresh (never frozen) and has no chemicals and no preservatives and the taste is sooo buttery and sweet. The other thing that has made my petite, piquant crab cakes so popular is the mango and avocado salsa that I serve on top of them. I think I have sufficiently hyped up this dish so with out further ado here my recipe…
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Filed under: food., life, pics, portland., recipes
I am a huge fan of non-new-york, flat-bread style pizzas and have been dreaming about creating a version of a BBQ chicken pizza for a while now. I kept putting it off because I like to make everything from scratch and that makes this meal a very time consuming endeavor. I regularly make home-made chicken nachos and figured I could borrow the chicken and sauce from that recipe— I just needed to come up with a dough recipe and a way to marry all of the flavors. Last night I finally gave it a try and it came out amazing!
Now that I have figured it out, here is the recipe…
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Filed under: cooking, eating, food., life, pics, recipes
There are not many shows that I feel I need to watch on the night that they air. This season American Idol roped me in with the whole Sanjaya drama and the obnoxious New Jersey girl with the slutty internet pics. (who incidentally, represented all that is wrong with the state we successfully fled from last year) And Idol is a show that you have to watch the night that it airs so that you can be part of all the conversations the next day. But on Sunday nights, my television belongs to foodtv. That’s right the ultimate food geek showdown based on the classic Japanese show— Iron Chef America. It lacks the poor over-dubbed voices and the overly-dramatic theatrics of its Japanese counterpart but still delivers about 35 minutes of intense cooking action.
For me this show signals the end of the weekend and is the last opportunity for self indulgence before the work week officially begins. The show requires little-to-no-thinking and is a great show to vegitate intfront of. Usually our DVR clicks on as the show is beginning and we prep ourselves a snack and a grown-up drink that usually involves lime juice; Belvedere gimlets, or margaritas with Herradura tequila are the most commonly consumed Sunday night cocktails. So, drinks mixed and snack-less we sit on the sofa to fire up this weeks episode of ICA and skipping the Iron chef intros to get straight to the action.
To our surprise the challenging chef is José Andrés the head chef at our absolute favorite DC restaurant Jaleo. This is the restaurant that I give credit for opening up my palette and truly beginning my love/passion for food. Now the illusion of the show is that the challenging chef gets to pick who they will face in kitchen stadium (in reality they are picked weeks before the battle takes place) I thought for sure that he was going to ‘pick’ Mario Batali but instead calls out Bobby Flay— our favorite NYC restauranture and the person whose cookbook taught me some of the best cooking techniques for pairing and extracting big, bold flavors. We are sitting on the sofa hot with anticipation and the affects of the gimlets and for a fraction of a second we were in food geek heaven— head chefs from 2 of our all-time favorite eating establishments are about to face off. And then the words that provoked a simultaneous “what the fuck?”—
“the secret ingredient is… Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: american idol, entertainment., food., iron chef america, life, reality tv, tv
Karen and I spent last week in NYC— she had to go for the NAEA conference and I went along for the chance to spend a week alone in the city for our 8th anniversary. it felt like going home— we both worked in the city for almost 6 years and spent most of our pre-daughter-free-time there.
We decided to avoid the crowd of art teachers, tourists and parade-goers in mid town and stayed at the Gershwin— in a part of town that is much more our speed.
ood.
For me one of the best things about nyc is the food. We hit— Mesa grill (our favorite [Iron chef] Bobby Flay’s restaurants), Mexican Radio and also tried a new-to-us sushi restaurant- Sushi Twist. This place was amazing, some of the most unusual specialty rolls I’ve ever heard of, quiet, sexy and both the food and drinks were out of this world. We were originally going to go to Morimoto’s newer new york venue but after reading some horrible reviews online we opted to try something new and were pleasantly rewarded— we ended up eating here twice
visual stimulation.
The surprise bonus of the trip was the fact that our event badges gave us free admission to all of the city’s best museums. The conference was being held at the Hilton on 6th and 52nd around the corner from the MoMa so we went together once and I went beck by myself while the St. Patrick’s day parade boomed outside. There was one exhibition at MoMa that we almost didn’t check out—comic abstraction. It actually ended up being one of the highlights of our visit. There was one artist whose enamel on canvas paintings had a really sleek surface that were incredible Inka Essenhigh’s website has some other paintings done around the same time as the ones from the exhibition.
Filed under: food., life, personal., thoughts, travel
