Vino Fly Trap

Sorry it's been a bit between posts, our internet is being a punk and making me angry.

I love this time of year in Seattle. It's beautiful, maybe one of the prettiest places in the country. Everything is green and lush with flowers hanging off of fences and porches, exciting landscapes and views. I love living here. I'm in a city and yet I have a view of a lake and trees and a city from my front porch. Heavenly.

The one thing I don't like about this time of the year are all the damn fruit flies everywhere. They annoy the crap out of me! I went to have a glass of red wine the other night and as soon as I placed the glass on the coffee table, a fly landed and started swimming in it. I took it as a sign that I did not need to have any wine that evening and decided to turn the glass in to a fly trap. I left the wine out over night and by the morning there were eight flies in the glass. So if you hate fruit flies I recommend leaving a small amount of red wine (no sense in wasting too much) out to collect them all.

Bacon is the new power food

You've heard of sweet potatoes and blueberries as power foods, but what about bacon? Sure the first two are power foods because they are healthy and do wonderful things for your body, but bacon, BACON can be added to anything! Even sweet potatoes would be more powerful with bacon.

I have been a bacon lover for, let me think about it, FOREVER. I can't get enough of it. And even though I usually start disliking things once they become trendy, bacon is a whole other story. I'm down with bacon appearing as a star in every restaurant. The more I see people using bacon in interesting ways the more inspired I am to use it. In Portland, OR there is a donut shop called Voodoo Doughnuts that makes a maple bacon bar. It's a delicious, spongy yeast donut (my favorite doughnut texture) with a strip of bacon on top. So good! After eating that doughnut for the first time I was inspired to come home and make maple bacon ice cream. I used a David Lebovitz recipe for the maple ice cream and added tiny pieces of crisp bacon at the end of the churning. The bacon adds the salty/sweet factor without being overwhelming. There is a lovely bit of smokiness that really compliments the maple flavor.

I spoke of bacon brownies and eventually there will be a recipe for them, once I find the brownie recipe that works the best. I will also be adding many bacon enhanced recipes to this blog as they are concocted. I have many many ideas forming. For now, I will leave you with the idea of BACON S'MORES RICE KRISPIES TREATS. They will make you happy.

Why being lactose intolerant sucks

Cheese. Ice cream. Pizza. Lasagna. Do I really need to explain further?

I believe that I was 11 or 12 when it finally became clear that I was lactose intolerant. I know I cried about it, but I also remember being really happy that I finally knew why I was always sick. I had horrible stomach cramps probably since the age of 7, and we could never figure out what it was from. My mom also had the same symptoms, and it wasn't until a woman at church told her she must be lactose intolerant that she was able to figure it out. Once we knew about my mom we were able to figure out that I had the same problem. Of course this was after years of doctors appointments, tests, upper GI's.

Being a lover of food it is really difficult to have dietary restrictions. I hate having to check labels and having to tell people if I'm going to eat at their house for the first time. It's always super awkward. I don't know why but I always feel like such a whiner or something. I hate being that person who says "Yes, I would love to eat your dinner as long as it is free and clear of this list of things" (insert handing list here). For a good while I stayed away from gluten, but have luckily found out that it's not that bad of an issue for me. I think most people have a hard time with gluten, but luckily I don't have celiacs. I would shoot myself if I couldn't eat dairy and wheat! I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that I love cake!

Lucky for me there is Digestive Advantage to allow me to eat dairy. I don't take it on a regular basis because it's kind of expensive and I need to double up the dose. So I save it for special occasions and then I binge on dairy until I.....well, you know what cheese does.

I LOVE goat cheese because I can eat it whenever I want. Being lactose intolerant just means that I can't have cow's milk but I can have goat's and sheep's. YAY! I could live off of goat cheese, red wine, bittersweet chocolate, bacon and avocado. It's that good.

Recently I have been hearing a lot about halloumi cheese. I had never come across it (or maybe I just didn't notice it) until I bought Nigella Express. She has recipes using halloumi and since then I've been seeing recipes all over the place using it. Halloumi is a greek cheese that is a blend of goat and sheep milks. It has a very salty flavor and is super cool and fancy because you can grill it and it won't melt. We had it for dinner the other night when we made hamburgers, yet again. I really liked it. I also happen to enjoy salty food so for people with a distaste for the salty, it might not be your thing. Another reason I like it is because it kind of squeaks when you chew it. As if there was a mouse in your mouth, but that would be a different texture....gross and very unnecessary. Please don't associate that with the cheese. The cheese doesn't deserve that.

Anyway the moral of the story is dairy is good/amazing so if you aren't lactose intolerant have an extra scoop of ice cream tonight in honor of me!

More Cake

I hope you have a bag of cheetos handy whenever you read a food blog. I know that I have to have some kind of snack within reach as I dive through the endless supply of decadent recipes and mouthwatering photos that can be found on internet food blogs. I mean, if you thought that Food Network was food porn, the internet has once again revolutionized the porn industry (food porn that is).

I am a big fan of food porn. I read cookbooks and food blogs all day long. I prefer them to food shows because I often find the hosts obnoxious or boring and it takes away the pleasure of the food. The only two hosts I truly enjoy watching on Food Network are Paula Deen (I don't care what you think haters, I love her because she is bat s*** crazy and is everything I long to be when I'm old) and Nigella Lawson (Again, I don't care what you think haters, she is beautiful and her recipes are easy and tasty and she has one of my favorite brownie recipes ever). Paula makes me laugh and Nigella makes food look sexy. These are also two women who are not ashamed to dive into the food before it's even cooled, they love food like I love food and they look like they will eat what you put in front of them. I like that in a woman. Stop pretending that you only eat salad ladies! Eat a piece of cake!

I found this delicious cake while reading a favorite food blog of mine called The Town Tart. It's a vanilla cake with a creamy frosting, yummy. The cake looked and sounded dreamy , so I whipped it up as part of my 4th of July celebration (I cooked a lot that day and didn't want to put it in one post, no need to overload you). I made a few changes to it, mainly in the frosting. The recipe she used called to add some strawberry preserves to the frosting which I declined to do. You can by all means try it, but I found without it I had one of the most amazing frostings in front of me. It's a combination of cream cheese frosting and whipped cream so it has all the joys of cream cheese but with a lighter texture and flavor. it really could go well with just about any cake, but the combination of vanilla cake and strawberries was to die for. The strawberries are sandwiched between 3 very moist, thick cake layers that had a very delicate vanilla flavor. I think the addition of some vanilla bean would be killer. The moistness is in thanks to the sour cream that's in the batter, which I adore. I know I will enjoy a cake when the recipe calls for either buttermilk or sour cream in the batter.

I could eat this cake every day for the rest of my life and not tire of it. You will love it to and I really think you should try it. You can find the recipe here. Go forth and enjoy!

Roslyn likes cake too.

I will not eat you. You are gross.

I am a big fan of simple and quick meals. None of that Rachel Ray 30 minute meal stuff (I am not a fan), but good delicious things that I can have on the table in a jiff. Let's face it, after a long day of Bravo TV, I am not always in the mood for something labor intensive.

Monday night I made a stir fry for dinner. I love me some stir fry, and usually I do a good job. My typical recipe involves soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic, a little honey and some kind of spicy something tossed with some chicken (I am rarely fancy enough for beef or pork in a stir fry) and veggies. This time around I had bought a store bought package of stir fry veggies from Trader Joe's. It looked good with cabbage, carrots, and some peas. I added onion, broccoli and red bell pepper. I was excited. I was hungry. I was dumb and didn't read the veggie packet. Had I , I would have realized that hiding behind the label was a mound of celery. Blah! Gasp! Not celery! I hate that stuff. I didn't discover it until it was too late, it was already stirred. So instead of enjoying my meal I spent the whole time picking out celery and cringing when any accidentally made it's way in my mouth. Bummer!

Now I will admit that I don't always hate celery. Smother it in peanut butter or cream cheese and I will eat as much as I can get my hands on. I enjoy the texture variety of ants on a log. But if you even think about giving me cooked celery I will eat your children. Cooked celery always brings up memories of Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup. I am not a fan. Partially because with that memory also comes the memory of pouring my squeeze it (remember those amazing beverages? kids of today are being robbed!) into my soup to see what that would taste like. Celery also reminds me of diets, which I abhor.

Along with celery there are other things that I refuse to eat. Mushrooms. I can't do it. I can't in good consciousness eat fungus, especially when it smells like a moldy towel (I can't in good taste tell you what I really think it smells like) and can't be properly washed because it will absorb the water. Cauliflower. Get it out of here. How dare anyone make cauliflower mash when there are perfectly good potatoes in this world. Cauliflower just tastes bad and you can't convince me otherwise. Beets. Sick. They taste like dirt. If I wanted to eat dirt I certainly wouldn't pay for it. I've tried them candied, in salads, in many ways (generally to be polite) and each time I want to upchuck. I'm pretty easy going about food and am willing to try many things, but I cannot and will not eat another beet, even if it means death.

Frenchy frenchness

I am far from posh and trendy. I rarely brush my hair and my clothes consist of items priced, generally, around $5. You will not see me at any of the hip bars on the hill or dining at any of the fashionable restaurants. My blog is certainly not the sheekest on the web, I don't have pictures for every step of the recipe (what a bitch if you ask me!) and I don't own plates and place settings simply to decorate my photos. I have no swank and I like it that way.

So why I am I trying to be fashionable in making a french pastry called canneles? Because every time I hear about them or see pictures of them, I want to put them in my mouth. I choose things to cook and bake based on how desperately I need to eat them when I hear about them. If food evokes a kind of a panic within me, a panic that says "eat or die", that's when I know I've found a winner.

I've come across many recipes for canneles and it took me a while to discover the recipe I needed to try. The recipe I decided on for my first venture was one that appeared to be pretty straight forward. It had rum (yum) and vanilla bean (yummer) in the batter and sounded pretty easy. I bought some great little molds at Sur La Table using a gift certificate I had (thanks Jinnah!) and prepped my soul for this adventure. The canneles take between an hour and a half and two hours to bake, so I needed plenty of time for them. I'm glad I took the time. These are so good. Chewy on the outside (I didn't get them as dark as they should be) with a creamy custardy middle. The flavor was not as intense as I would like, so the next time I will add more vanilla bean and rum, maybe even whisky in place of the rum.

I will link to the page where I found the recipe once David is home and can teach me how to do it. If it hasn't become aware yet, besides a ridiculous problem with punctuation I also am computer illiterate. Whatever, I'm funny as hell so that's all that matters.

You can now find the recipe here at a wonderful website called Lottie + Doof.

My favorite cake

So I have decided that I will be making no more promises. Like tempting you with the idea of bacon brownies and not following through, or saying that I will write about the 4th and never doing it. I think that, just maybe, if I don't make any promises about it, I will actually post the things that I am thinking about. You just won't know what they are ahead of time!

I've decided not to post much about the 4th. I ended up in a pretty bad mood most of the day and I know that I if I start writing about it I will start venting and that is not what this blog is about. It's about the greatness that is food.

Many people I know are under the assumption that I am much more of a baker than a cook. Some are even surprised that I cook (which is silly because I can't even count the amount of times that I have had them over for dinner, where no dessert was involved!). It's true that I bake more than I cook but it doesn't mean I love it more. I love cooking just as much, maybe even more than baking. The thing is, cooking is truthfully only appropriate 3 times a day. Nobody wants, well I can't speak for everyone I guess, a roast with fingerling potatoes and green beans for a 4 o'clock snack. But people will eat a cookie. Baked goods can be appropriate at any time of the day and people seem to be less discriminating about them. Darn near anyone will eat a chocolate chip cookie if you put it in front of them.

I think my favorite thing to bake are cakes. And my favorite cake of all times is red velvet. The first time I heard of red velvet was while watching "Steel Magnolias" and the crazy aunt at the wedding had made a red velvet armadillo grooms cake. I found myself intrigued. Although really you can't say the word cake without my interest being perked. I think that the first time I had red velvet was at a restaurant in Hollywood with my friend Vanessa, but I can't remember which one. Since then I've tried many recipes to figure out the exact ingredients to make a perfect, rich slice of red cake. My stand by recipe for the longest time came from "Sylvia's Family Soul Food Cookbook", the first cook book I ever bought myself. The cake comes out amazing, as does everything you make from that book. Every time I used that recipe I have gotten nothing but raves. For the 4th I decided to try a different recipe, this time from "Bon Appetit Y'all" (I have an endless amount of southern cook books in my collection). I'm sorry Sylvia, but I think I have found a new favorite. This cake was AMAZING! My friends dug into it right away calling it their
"appetizer". I even converted a red velvet hater.


AUNT LOUISE'S RED VELVET CAKE adapted from Bon Appetit Y'all

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 tsps cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp distilled white vinegar
2 cups vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 large eggs
1 (1 ounce) bottle red food coloring

CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
8 ounces cream cheese at room temp
1/2 stick unsalted butter at room temp
1 box (16 ounce)confectioners sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp milk


Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter and flour three 9 inch round cake pans and line bottoms with parchment paper. Sift together the dry ingredients into a bowl and set aside.Combine the oil and sugar in a stand mixer on medium speed. Add the eggs one at a time. With the mixer on low add food coloring. Add the flour mixture alternating with the buttermilk, beginning and ending with the flour, scraping down the sides as needed. Mix until just combined.Divide the batter between the pans and bake for 25-30 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes, then invert the layers onto rack to cool completely.

To make frosting, beat the cream cheese and butter together in mixer until smooth. Add the sugar and beat until fluffy. Add vanilla, if the frosting is to stiff, add the milk a little at a time. Frost cooled cake and enjoy!


I wanted to say that yesterday was my father in law's birthday! I'm really lucky in the whole father department because he is a great guy!

Excuse me, your pancakes are making faces at me

I have plenty to say about the good ol' 4th, and will write about it most likely tomorrow, but first I must tell you about a wonderful brunch I had yesterday with dear friends.

My buddy Finn, who is the coolest five year old I have ever met, has been promising me for months that he would make me pancakes. Apparently his family has a tradition where they decorate their pancakes with fruit and whipped cream and he felt that I could never truly know them until I sampled their pancake breakfast. He told me that he would "draw, you know, whatever you want. I could draw a bomb or a sword or I guess something girly if you want that". How in the world could I turn down an offer like that?

So yesterday David and I headed on over to Finn's house for pancakes. I was stoked to see the layers of pancakes stacked high on a plate in the oven, delicious crispy bacon, and a variety of fruit. Mr. Finn got to work right away, creating pancake art with his nimble fingers. Blueberries for eyes, a strawberry slice for a nose, and a piece of apple cut in the shape of a smile. Amazing! David's pancake had bucked teeth and Finn's had fangs. (We opted for faces instead of pictures seeing as I forgot to take my digestive advantage and would not be able to eat the whipped cream.) It was a glorious breakfast that inspired me to create pancake faces for my own kids one day.

Finn you are a gem and your pancakes are magnificent.

Happy Birthday Dad

Yay! It's my Dad's birthday! He's the coolest Dad ever and you know you are jealous because he's mine and not yours.

burger joy

So it has been a while since I've last posted a blog promising bacon brownies. Well I'm sorry but you will just have to wait. The brownies I made, though covered in crunchy yummy bacon, were far too cakey for me. In brownie terms (my brownie terms anyway) cakey=fail. Brownies must always be dense gooey fudgy happiness. Always. I would have posted about the fail last week but I ended up sick. Boo.

Today I would like to tell you about the joys of a good burger. I heart burgers in a big big way but am very picky about them. I believe that a burger should be able to stand up on it's own without any condiments. Bacon and bbq sauce are an amazing mask for a dry flavorless burger, not to say that I don't put that on my burger every time because I totally do. You just can't expect the condiments to do all of the work. Last night I made a killer burger. So juicy and well seasoned that I would have been happy with just patty and bun. David did the actual grilling because he likes to think of himself as a grill master in the making, but I combined all the ingredients. So I win.

I always like to start a meal with a pre-meal snack. This usually involves whatever I can reach while I'm cooking. Recently, however, I have been seeking out marshmallows to fulfill this need to nosh. In the past few weeks I find myself smelling marshmallows every where I go. Glass blowing smells like marshmallows (David and I went to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma last weekend), wood sanding smells like marshmallows (the neighbors are revamping their home), even the air smells like marshmallows. So after being tormented by the sticky sweet smell I marched myself to the store and bought three bags of them. And I tell you, I am not ashamed! You know, most people seem to have a marshmallow limit. They can only eat 2 or 3 before they feel ill. I, on the other hand, seem to have no limit. I can eat a whole bag and feel like taking a jog. (LIES. I never feel like taking a jog.) I can also eat brown sugar mixed with butter like it's nothing.....maybe that should stay a secret?

The one thing in life that I can and do OD on is cherries. The little bastards get me every time! They sweep me away into a world of cherry bliss and before I know it I have eaten an entire bowl and feel like I'm about to birth a gremlin. Then the next day I get up and do it again. I guess I have short term memory problems? Or a crazy addiction.

Was this supposed to be about a burger? I think so. I ate cherries with my burger if that helps tie together tangent with actual story. I made the burgers with a little over a pound of ground beef, adding about a tablespoon of soy sauce, probably 3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder (I usually like to roast garlic for the burger but I ran out of time last night), onion powder (or chipped shallots but I had none), and dried basil. When the patties were formed I sprinkled the tops with seasoning salt and sent them on their way to the grill. I made them into two patties so they were quite the hefty burgers. So good and so worth the future cardiac arrest.

Look how crazy big that patty is! We topped our burgers with lettuce, tomato, avocado, and gorgonzola. I put bbq sauce on mine while David had his with ketchup and mustard. I hate ketchup and I think it's a horrible thing to do to any food, but I don't judge.

Yes, I ate the whole thing. And?