Hot & Buttery

You voted and the results are in! Hot Buttered Rum is your favorite hot boozy bev. HBR's are the best because they're basically like dessert in a mug, and they can be made with rum, brandy, bourbon, whiskey (wait, are those the same?)…you name it. You can even leave out the booze and just have a hot buttery virgin mocktail. 

Full of warm wintery flavors like nutmeg and cinnamon, HBRs are the perfect drink for a cold night or a warm fireplace. And, believe it or not, the mix is a total breeze to whip up. Vanilla ice cream, brown and white sugar, spices, and buttah. Lots and lots of buttah. 

When you're mixing it up, you can taste as you go, and add other spices or flavors, like pumpkin pie spice or ginger…and then gift it! Just pour some mix into little jars, and add a tag with instructions. 

PS. My dad supplied the wood pile for the photo shoot. Thanks dad!

Hot Buttered Rum Mix

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup butter

pinch salt

2 cups old fashioned vanilla ice cream

2 teaspoon cinnamon

1.5 teaspoon nutmeg

Combine both sugars, salt, and butter in a saucepan. Heat over low until butter is melted and mixture is smooth, stirring occasionally. Combine warm buttery sugar mix with ice cream in a large bowl (of your stand mixer, if you have one). Add spices and mix /beat at medium speed until smooth. Can be stored in refrigerator or freezer. 

To serve, fill a mug 1/3rd full with HBR mix, add 1 oz. rum, and fill the rest of the way with boiling water. Add more mix (or rum) if desired. And whipped cream… whipped cream is always desired. 

Thank YOU!

I'm so, so, so, so over the moon thankful for all of you: family, friends, readers, fans (fans?!?). I hope you all have an amazing Thanksgiving. Draw some hand-turkeys, make a few celery cars with carrot wheels, curse at the yams, watch football (or the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade...we won't judge), drink too much "cider," try a new recipe or two, get up at 4AM for Black Friday shopping, buy 800 pairs of socks because you only buy them once a year (half-off on Black Friday!), relax and stop thinking about work, and be with people you love. 

PS. See those little gourds...the ones with tea-light candles in them? Yeah, those ones. They're unbelievably easy to make...and you'll totally have the best looking Thanksgiving table out there. Just carve (using your pumpkin carving kit, or a little drill, if you're Martha Stewart) a hole big enough for your tea-light, and voila, instant centerpiece! 

Quiche Cups!

I worked from home last week, so you would think I might have had tons of extra time for cooking and blogging (considering I saved myself nearly an hour and a half in commute each day, not to mention 'getting ready' time). But, I was so busy taking care of my sick man-child, that I barely had time to cook anything other than chicken noodle soup. 

Turns out Evan has pneumonia, and it also turns out that pneumonia can be contagious, so my boss asked that I stay home, to avoid potentially wiping out my entire office. Quarantined! It was probably for the best though, since Evan was far too sick to even get out of bed. Sick men are more helpless than babies! After a couple days on antibiotics, he's finally on the mend… and that means I finally have time to do more in the kitchen than heat up soup and pour orange juice. 

After being home all week in this chilly fall-meets-winter weather, all I want to do is bake! (These pumpkin pie scented candles aren't helping, either). But, since I can't share potentially germy goods, I didn't want to make treats that I would have no choice but to eat all by myself.  So, instead of dessert, I made breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Quiche! And not just any quiche… individual quiche cups! 

Quiche is amazing, because you can add anything to it, and you can eat it warm, cold, or room temperature; next to a salad, or alongside a hot cup of joe. What was once reserved for fancy luncheons can now be eaten for any meal of the day, and these little individual cups pack up nicely for work (that is, if you're not quarantined at home). I use a press-in tart crust dough, so you don't have to chill and roll it—making these little cups of deliciousness even easier than a traditional quiche. I didn't pre-bake my crust, and though they still turned out great, for a flakier, crispier crust, I would recommend popping them in the oven first.

PS. My hot winter drinks poll is now closed, and I see rum in my future! more on that later!

Quiche Cups

Makes 12 cupcake sized quiches

Crust

1 cup flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons cold butter, cut in small cubes

1 egg yolk (save white for filling)

Preheat oven to 425 (if you choose to pre-bake crust). Whisk together flour and salt. Using a pastry blender (or a fork or your fingers), cut in butter until mixture resembles small peas. Whisk the egg yolk and 2 tablespoons water together, and add to flour mixture. Blend (again, using pastry blender or hands) until combined and can be formed into a ball. Separate dough into 12 balls, and press into bottom and sides of 12 greased cupcake/muffin cups.  Poke each one with a fork, and bake for 8-10 minutes (until golden). Remove from oven and cool.

Reset temperature to 325.

Filling (inspired by The Grand Central Baking Book)

5 eggs (plus 1 white from dough)

1 cup half and half

1 cup grated swiss cheese

salt and pepper

1 large leek, thinly sliced and sautéed in a little bit of butter and olive oil, sprinkled with salt

Whisk together eggs, half & half, salt, and pepper. Mix in grated cheese.

To assemble:

In each crust, add a spoonful of leeks, and top with egg mixture. Bake for 20-30 minutes (at 325) until egg mixture is set in the middle. 

Hot Cup of Democracy

I'm trying out something new! A poll...where you can vote! We all love voting, right? Look over there, to your right. See the poll in all its shiny, democratic glory? Go ahead, try it out! Vote for your favorite hot winter drink, and then I'll make it... and I'll blog about it!

On the Bandwagon

Just because everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean it's a totally lame cliché . Clearly main-stream is in for a reason. Duh. Because it’s cool, that’s why everyone loves it.  You’re not a hipster for following the trends, you’re just hip! So, jump in line, join the club already, and make pumpkin gnocchi. And if you really want to follow the in-crowd, toss those pillowy clouds of goodness in sage brown butter sauce. 

You're pop.u.lar. Own it, honey.

Want to be an even bigger deal, hot stuff? Try this recipe (but add a little grated parm to the dough, a la this recipe), and toss with this sauce, plus thyme. But, word to the wise: you should maaayybe avoid serving buttery-rich pumpkin gnocchi alongside cheesy-rich Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good...or at least throw a little something green and leafy on the plate, for good measure. You're on top now, but those in-crowds, they're ruthless! 

Everything Good

That's a pumpkin. It's stuffed with everything good. But before we get into that, are you ready for some heartbreaking news? Are you sitting down? Here it is...I bailed on Halloween.

Amanda and I are kinda legends in these parts when it comes to Halloween, and we both skipped it this year… much to the shock and dismay of everyone in Seattle. Ok, so maybe we're not that big of a deal, but for reals… we're really, really good at Halloween. We put together amazing costumes (not to brag or anything, but I mean, prizes have been won). We don't mess around with the store bought costumes or the slutty pandas.

No, we spend hours making our costumes...and the gnarlier, the better. Read: zombie 1950s housewife, roadkill, Bonnie & Clyde after getting shot up (with a cameo appearance by Evan), and the gal from The Birds after the bird attack. We also aim for total realism, because we're real serious about Halloween like that. Last year I was Mrs. Lovett (with meat pies), and I guess everyone hadn't seen Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, but everyone did say "let me guess… you're Helena Bonham Carter?" And Amanda was Edward Scissorhands. I don't mean she dressed like him… I mean, I think she really was him. She may have actually been JD's stunt double (and trust me, I know Johnny Depp, I was writing the man love letters in crayon on Lisa Frank stationary back in the Cry Baby days). She looked so much like him, that I almost had a crush on her that night. Is that weird to say? 

This year, however, we chose to skip it. This is my first weekend home since… August? And Amanda has grad school midterms coming up. We're exhausted. In our 20s, and no energy for the best holiday of the year. I'm tellin' ya, it's a fat shame. Instead of lazily pulling together half-assed costumes, we stayed in. When it comes to Halloween, we go big or we don't go at all. So this year, as swarms of inquiries about our costumes came in, we had to tell the disappointed masses "sorry, we're not doing Halloween this year." Rob Zombie himself may have shed a tear over the news. 

We ended up having our own Halloween party, and dressed up like couch potatoes (read: stayed in, cooked, watched a movie… and wore sweat pants). Costumery aside, we had a great night…with lots of pumpkin. We cooked a very unbalanced meal of really heavy pumpkin dishes, for just the two of us. Including something geniously named "Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good."

I like pumpkins, and I like "everything good" so it was a given that I would jump all over a recipe for Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good. How could you not fall head over heels for a dish with a name like that!? Oh man. Dorie Greenspan isn't lying… her pumpkin really is stuffed with everything good: bacon, cheese, bread, and cream. The filling bakes up like a gooey stuffing, and the pumpkin gets all soft and delicious, and practically melts into the filling. And it looks pretty impressive.

It's also fun, because you can adapt it any way you like. Want sausage instead of bacon? Do it. Have a hankering for sautéed mushrooms? Stuff 'em in there. Want to go sweet instead of savory? Get it, girl! Amanda and I even talked about goin' all southwest on our pumpkin, and using rice, ground beef, tomatoes, and peppers. Go wild, people! Stuff that pumpkin! 

Dorie's recipe can be found at Epicurious. But you should also buy her book… it's full of everything good—page after page of everything good.

Restaurant Week and Cacio e Pepe

Seattle just wrapped up another successful (for me, at least) restaurant week. Restaurant week—actually spanning 2 weeks—is when tons of local restaurants offer 3 course menus for $30. I happen to love restaurant week, although, I read in Seattle Met that a lot of local chefs don't feel so hot about it, and basically think they have to dumb down their food for cheapskates. It's really too bad they feel that way, because a bad restaurant week experience can tarnish my opinion of a restaurant from that point forward. And I throw down on good food… I just don't usually do it 3 times in two weeks. With restaurant week, I can try out a lot of spendier joints, so that I know where I want to go back to for nice dinners, and what places I want to recommend to friends.  If I get a dumbed down, half-assed meal during restaurant week… well, sorry, you may have lost one future diner. And a lot of her friends…who also like to throw down on good food. 

After last week's "try-outs," I'll definitely be going back to Andaluca and How to Cook a Wolf—two restaurants owned by Seattle 'celeb chefs.' The kitchen of one local celeb chef, however, delivered a pretty…underwhelming experience. I hate to say it, because the guy is pretty much a god among men in these parts, but sorry Tom Douglas, my meal at Dahlia wasn't too impressive. I loved my cocktail, a rosemary/blueberry shrub, and of course TD's famous coconut cream pie was amazing, but the entrees were bland, and came out so fast that it was almost like they had a line of restaurant week plates stacked up and ready to go, a la Micky D's. The whole thing felt rushed, something I don't want to feel at a nice restaurant, no matter how much I'm paying. I'm not giving up on Tom just yet (he has about 6 restaurants in Seattle), but I doubt I'll be doing dinner at Dahlia again. Andaluca and How to Cook a Wolf made up for it though. 

Andaluca's executive chef, Wayne Johnson, competed on Iron Chef…and makes a mean bowl of clams. The restaurant is a mediterranean-spanish-northwest-tapas type place, and seriously had the best clams I've maybe ever had. And I've had a lot of clams. Clams are one of my go-to dishes. Andaluca's were swimming in a bright orange, slightly creamy, garlicky bath of white wine and harissa butter, and were surrounded by big, salty, spicy chunks of chorizo, and topped with cilantro. They were salty and spicy, and seriously amazing. The sherry-almond scallops were also incredible, and weren't dry or overcooked, like a lot of restaurant scallops I've had. Aside from how delicious everything was, it was just a great experience. We were served a ton of food (which isn't typical with restaurant week), and the waiter was super nice, even though we did have a loud party of 10 that shut the place down. 

How to Cook a Wolf is one of Ethan Stowell's restaurants. Ethan is another big-deal chef around here, with a lot of big-time restaurants under his belt (don't tell him, but I may have stalked him at Burning Beast, just a little bit). How to Cook a Wold (named after MFK Fisher's book) is a fun, small space in Queen Anne, with simple, rustic Italian-style food, meant to be shared. Everything was delicious, from the burrata with grape mostarda, to the beef carpaccio, to the simple but fabulous pasta dishes. My favorite dish was the semolina gnocchi with pork sugo. The gnocchi were almost like big, fluffy polenta cakes, but made with semolina, and were covered in cheese, and sitting atop a salty, savory tomato sauce with shredded pork. To. Die. For. And, if the amazing meal wasn't enough, they sent us home with little bags of fresh-raw pasta. 

I wanted to do something simple with the pasta, so I played homage to another local celeb chef of sorts, and made Mario Batali's pasta with cacio e pepe (Batali is from Washington, and his family owns Salumi, the unbelievable salumeria in Pioneer Square (right below my office)! Cacio e Pepe (cheese and pepper) is just that—pasta tossed with cracked pepper, butter and oil, and nutty parmesan cheese. That's it! And it's so good! You don't really need to follow a recipe—boil pasta in salty water, and in a separate pot, toast cracked black pepper, and melt in equal parts butter and olive oil, then mix that with pasta water, the pasta, and a hearty amount of grated cheese. There you have it. A dinner for far less than $30, that's sure to impress. 

PS. I'm not a restaurant critic or even a "restaurant blogger," and the reviews above are strictly my opinion... though you should really get the clams at Andaluca, just sayin'.