If you’re feeling like doing a little trendy dining in Seattle, now’s your chance to save at least a buck or two. The annual New Urban Eats deal lets you try dinner at one of 17 restaurants opened since 2006. For $30, you get an appetizer, entree and dessert, which isn’t bad for most Seattle dinners .

Two of the restaurants are within walking distance from the downtown ferry terminal:

Read the rest of this entry »

Two plates of yakiniku being fried up.

Sitting around a table making yakiniku has to be among my all-time favorite eating experiences. The word itself describes it: yaki, meaning grilled or fried and niku, meaning meat.

It’s a meal where everyone joins in to cook (or should, but usually one person ends up taking charge of things), adding pre-cut veggies and thin-sliced meat to a table-set grill or hot plate. When the veggies and meats are done, , dip them in a savory sauce and eat.

It’s pretty simple, and the act of everyone gathering around trying not to burn themselves makes for a pretty fun time. It’s something my family has done every New Year’s Day for as long as I remember.

The prep work of cutting up the veggies is the hardest. Onions, mushrooms and cabbage and zucchini are good, but any grilling vegetable works. For the meat, ask to have the meat sliced very thin, about the width of deli meat, and guess about a half pound to a pound of meat per person.

Yakiniku from the sauce to the rice.

Oil up a hot plate, turn on medium high and start with the onions and zucchini, or other items with long cooking time.Add the rest when the onions are half done, and add more as you feel like. Pick what you like, dip in a small bowl of sauce, maybe get a bite of rice to go with it and eat.

You can purchase yakiniku sauce at various Asian Grocery stories, but you also can make your own sauce. Here’s one I found on About.com

1/3 cup soysauce
3 tbsp mirin
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp white sesame seeds
1 tsp grated garlic

Preparation:
Grind sesame seeds. Put all ingredients in a bowl and stir well.

I like Christmastime and all, but the thing I look forward to the most is the week after. That’s when our family kicks into gear for a New Year’s Day celebration.

My grandma and I go on a big shopping trip to the wonder of an Asian grocery store that is Uwajimaya in Seattle, buying all the little foodstuffs we’ll eat on New Year’s Day to celebrate our Japanese heritage and be all together as a family again. I’ll blog more about that later.

This week also begins the glut of gooey goodness: mochi. For those who’ve never had the stuff, it’s rice that’s been mushed and mashed into a glutinous mass, made into patties and either eaten plain or formed into a variety of little goodies.

When I was a kid, my grandma and other Japanese ladies from around the peninsula would get together a few days before New Year’s and sit around someone’s kitchen.

They’d wait for a machine to grind and mix up the mochi rice, and when it was done, the hot steaming, glutinous blob would be plopped on a floured spot and, as if they had no feeling in their hands at all, they’d grab little blobs and form them into row upon row of little patties. Other times, grandma just rolls it out and cuts it into squares that you can eat right away or freeze. Read the rest of this entry »

With only about a day left, I thought I’d put my little two cents in on that oft-written about bubbly beverage of choice for New Year’s Eve bacchanalias.

With so much out there about what champagne to get, I’m not going to go there, but if you need help picking a bottle, the Seattle P-I ran a decent primer on sparkling wines . And your local wine proprietor can definitely help.

What I’m blogging about today are champagne cocktails.

You can stick with one recipe for the night, or try what I did for a party a few years back: let your guests mix a variety.

I searched out a bunch of champagne cocktail recipes and picked out ones that matched the contents of my liquor cabinet. With each recipe, I created little drink stations around the house. I created standard-sized paper recipe cards for each, pasted it on nifty-looking stock paper, colored little pictures on it (I was in some kind of weird crafty mood) and stuck it up on the wall above a collection of ingredients, cups and napkins.

It worked out perhaps a little too well. One thing to note: definitely have your guests get a cab or a designated driver or they’ll be sleeping on your sticky floor or in odd, uncomfortable positions on your living room chairs.

Here are a few of the favorite cocktail recipes from that party:

Read the rest of this entry »

I ran across a posting on Chowhound.com awhile back of a somewhat new Kitsap resident asking for restaurant suggestions.  Some of the usual (with good reason) suspects were there: La Fermata in Bremerton, Sawadty and Four Swallows on Bainbridge, Mor Mor in Poulsbo and a lot more. Some places new in the past few years, such as August Wynn in Bremerton, Agate Pass Cafe in Suquamish, Blue Agave Mexican Grill in Port Orchard. There are some pretty thorough lists on there.

Kitsapsun.com readers also had some good suggestions in the comments of Bernard Jacobson’s roundup of Kitsap eateries article.

I’ll be trying a few of those places out. So as the year closes out, any suggestions for the best of 2008?

In the past week, I’ve found plenty of folks are using all that time at home, stuck in the snow, as a good excuse to take in a nip here, and a nip there. The couple times I passed by a liquor store, one in Seattle and one in Bremerton, people have definitely decided a bottle is among their necessary snow provisions. I’m not judging, I’ve had my own share of hot-buttered rum and cocoa spiked with peppermint schnapps.

I tried calling the state liquor control board to see if there was any spike in sales, but I haven’t heard back yet. So, I decided instead to share a few warm drink recipes I found online.

Plus, I felt this was a good excuse to share a really cute snow/drink photo I saw in our reader-submitted photo gallery.
Misty Winter Warmer

(from cocktails.suite101.com)

It makes four quarts, and brews up in a 30-cup coffee maker

1 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp. whole cloves
4 cinnamon sticks
2 quarts cranberry juice
46 ounces pineapple juice
2 cups Canadian Mist whisky
4 1/2 cups water

Place the brown sugar and spices in the pot basket of a 30-cup coffee maker. Add juices, water and whisky to the pot. Brew like coffee and serve hot, right from the pot. How easy is that?

Bourbon Furnace

(From Forbes.com)

After you’ve been out romping in the woods, and while the kids are slurping up hot cider, here’s a little concoction that the grown-ups can enjoy.

Ingredients:

6 oz. hot apple cider
three whole cloves
one stick of cinnamon
1 1/2 oz. bourbon

Pour cider and bourbon into a stemmed mug. Garnish with cloves and cinnamon. Serve immediately.

Hot Baked Apple Toddy

(from About.com)

2 oz apple whiskey
1/4 baked apple
1 tsp honey
hot water
cinnamon stick for garnish

1. Place the baked apple into a warm Irish coffee glass.
2. Add whiskey and dissolve sugar in the mix.
3. Top with hot water and stir.
4. Garnish with a cinnamon stick.

An NPR story reveals the secret to perfect cookies: it’s in the gluten. Adding a tablespoon of water to a cup of flour helps it out. Who knew? Chemists, apparently.

They interviewed the Shirley Corriher, a food scientist with a new book, Bakewise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking.

There also is a good-looking recipe for Chocolate Crinkle cookies. The story’s worth a listen and read.

Not that anyone’s likely to go out for dinner in the snow over next couple days, but Bernard Jacobson recently wrote about two area restaurants that serve a very indulgent dish, duck confit.

I was lucky enough to timely volunteer to take half the photos (at one restaurant) for August Wynn in Bremerton. (The other restaurant was Amy’s on the Bay in Port Orchard.)

I’ll not talk about the taste of the dish, Bernard does well enough. But during my photo session Chef Chris Bortisser taught me a little about the dish.

"Confit" comes from the French for "preserved" (I looked that up myself). In this case, the duck thighs, not breasts, not other parts of the duck, are cured, cooked in herbs and duck fat and stored - or preserved -  smothered in duck fat and refrigerated until needed. This is part of what makes this dish so rich.

But don’t think that makes it too fatty of a dish. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned a few places to get local gift-type foods, such as CBC Chocolates in Poulsbo.

But I learned about a new one on a recent post on the he Buy Local Food In Kitsap blog: Aunt Billie’s Chocolates near the Bremerton Airport.

I’ll start making a list of some of the local candy/fod gift makers in the area in case any of you are looking for ideas.

UPDATE: A couple more suggestions from a friend:

Carter’s Chocolates, brand-new place in Port Orchard’s Town Square (formerly the South Kitsap Mall)
Amy’s Decadent Chocolates in West Bremerton

This weekend was cooking madness at my house. I cooked up goodies for a party on Saturday and a cookie exchange on Sunday.

Knowing that I’d be having people over and a cookie exchange the next day, I set out making a ton of cookies. In planning, I wanted to do at least a couple little fancy cookies and some things that were far simpler. So when I started baking Friday night, it was with a recipe I knew I could make a lot of, and I wanted it to be fairly simple and freezable so 1) I could make extra and freeze them to put in Christmas cookie plates for other friends and 2) just in case no one ate them.

So I hit up the basic chocolate chip cookie recipe, but decided to liven it up a bit for the holidays. I took a basic cookie recipe and swapped out the semi-sweet chips with white chocolate chips, added pecans and dried cherries.

They turned out OK, but I realized after the fact (always after the fact) that I should have bought more pecans to really bulk up the cookie (which I accounted for in the recipe below) and shouldn’t have tried to make the batch all at once.

My new cooking lesson is that the baking soda reaction is only good for so long. It apparently starts reacting soon after it mixes with the other wet ingredients, and if you wait too long, like when you’re baking 7 dozen cookies, the cookies get kind of flat and crispy.

What these cookies did do right, however, was jazz up a basic recipe in a way that made it a little different from the norm. I’d love to hear some of your suggestions for ways to make a basic recipe better.

Cherry, White Chocolate Pecan Cookies

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 large eggs
2 cup dried unsweetened cherries, chopped
2 cups white chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 375-degrees.

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl.

In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugars with a mixer. Add eggs and vanilla, and beat until well-mised. Gradually beat in as much of the dry mix as you can, and stir the rest until well-combined. Fold in cherries, pecans and chips.

Drop by spoonfulls onto nonstick cookie sheets or sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake  a dozen at a time for 10-12 minutes. Cool on sheet for two minutes and finish cooling completely on wire racks.