Carrot cake is a quintessential dessert of spring. This recipe is moist slightly sweet, and perfectly spiced. It is paired with a rich and velvety cream cheese frosting.
Asparagus is so beautiful this time of year, so I wanted to create a recipe around it. I made some basil and pumpkin seed pesto, and drizzled it on toasted bread with asparagus, avocado, and shaved Parmesan.
Because his family is a true-to-the-bone pancake family, I really wanted him to share with me the secrets to making a good pancake, thin and delicate, perfectly browned on the outside, soft on the inside. He gave me a recipe, one that he has memorized. A set of very specific instructions, the right temp, the right amount of time for frying. I followed it to a tee, and sure enough, the pancakes came out the way I had always dreamed they would.
Last Friday night, on one of the rare occasions that I actually left the house, I went out for dinner to my new favorite restaurant on Capitol Hill - Omega Ouzeri. The food is Greek with a Pacific Northwest flair.
After my last trip to the grocery store, where I impulse bought way too many oranges (don't know what I was thinking, how many oranges can one person eat?), I have been trying to come up with inventive ways of using them in recipes. After my failed attempt at making beet pasta, I was now left with a big bunch of beets. Clearly, the beets and oranges were meant to be together, tucked away in the vegetable crisper by themselves.
Last weekend, while on our biking island tour, we stopped to pick some blueberries. I get pretty excited about picking most fruit, blackberries are the exception. Although, it was a bit different this time around, picking large juicy blueberries from a farm, instead of the tiny ones in Ontario, the ones that grow along the railroad tracks - and I was quite pleased that I didn't need to keep looking over my shoulder for bears.
These beets would not be served as a side, like so many fancy pickles. I wanted these beets to be the lead character, so I roasted them with some olive oil, which brought out their flavorful earthiness and then peeled off their skins with my fingers. I paired them with a few simple ingredients: arugula, goat cheese, and cashews.
