VDP: Paella

Our most recent Virtual Dinner Party was an incredible success.  Not only was it one of the most well-attended, but we also were cooking with authentic Spanish and Portuguese ingredients.  The end result was Paella, and it was one of the best meals we've made!

We were extremely fortunate that our co-hosts had recently traveled abroad, and they brought back some incredible authentic ingredients, including Spanish saffron and paella seasoning, and Portuguese olive oil and port!

With this recipe as my guide, I added calamari, mussels, prawns, Spanish chorizo, and chicken thighs to pull together this flavorful and spicy dish.  I purchased the fresh seafood from the local store, Mollie Stone's (similar to Whole Foods); Spanish chorizo can be found near the meat counter, but it is not refrigerated (it's similar to dry salami).  

The three-city dinner party was a success, and this meal made us feel as if we had all traveled to Spain with our co-hosts.
This meal will definitely grace our dinner table again in the future!

VDP: Chicken Tacos with Pineapple Salsa

I have an awesome summer recipe for you: chicken tacos with pineapple salsa.

Last month Meredith said summer temperatures were heating up her home town, so we decided to take that theme and run with it by serving a cool and summery recipe at our a virtual dinner party.  

Using this recipe for inspiration, we built our tacos around a refreshing pineapple-avocado salsa with red peppers, red onions, cilantro, lime juice and zest, jalapeno, salt and pepper.  

After putting together the salsa, we let the flavors mix together, while I cooked a marinated chicken breast on the grill pan with some taco seasoning spices, and she cooked a filet of fish.

Some sauteed red onions and red peppers lined the corn tortillas, and then we layered the chicken/fish and pineapple salsa.  This meal was so fresh and delicious!

Drake's dry-hopped 1500 is one of our current favorites (local too!), and it paired perfectly.  Enjoy!

VDP: Blackened Fish Tacos

I have a few remaining photos to share from the end of our trip, but in the mean time, I wanted to share the photos from the awesome Virtual Dinner Party we had with 6 guests a few weeks ago.  

A few days before our party, we gathered ingredients for blackened fish tacos.  The 6 guests came from 3 houses, so everyone had slightly different twists to their tacos.  I used a frozen white fish from Trader Joe's, defrosted and rubbed with a combo of blackening spices. 

Using this recipe as inspiration, we blackened then pan-seared the fish, caramelized red onions, mixed up a cilantro-lime crema to go on top, and put together some amazing tacos!  These are easy and will be making frequent appearances on our weekly menus in the future.

Blackening seasoning: cumin, paprika, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper
Cilantro-lime crema: plain Greek yogurt, cilantro, salt, lime zest, squeeze of lime
Tortillas: corn tortillas are traditional, but I picked up some "truly handmade flour tortillas" from Trader Joe's, and they were delicious!  And one day, I will make tortillas from scratch.
Additional toppings: avocado, cheese, cilantro, salsa, corn salsa, beans, jalapenos, and a squeeze of lime.

An IPA or pale ale is a great match.

Thanks to my cohosts for a great dinner!

Asparagus Risotto

Spring is here!

In all honestly, this is about as warm as SF gets.
So count this as Spring, Summer, and Fall warm weather...

In honor of the delicious Spring produce and warmer weather, M and I hosted a Virtual Dinner Party last month, and we cooked Asparagus Risotto.

Simply Recipes' description of asparagus risotto sounded like a perfect way to welcome the new seasonal produce and try our hand at a more difficult dish, all while catching up over Facetime and planning our next in-person visits.

The result was incredibly creamy, and the asparagus provided the perfect bite to counteract the soft risotto.  We will both be making this again!  Check out the recipe and give it a try.

Another highlight of my night is that M added a cork to her collection.  She has started a cork collection, like ours, with memorable events written onto each experience's wine cork.  I'm honored to have made her collection!

Virtual Dinner Party

I'm a little behind in the documentation of my virtual dinner parties.  It's aways more fun to host than to post about them...

A month ago we had a Chicago - San Francisco dinner party over facetime, complete with a custom cocktail and a satisfying dinner that happened to be on the lighter side.

This cool and fresh-looking drink below is a cucumber-rosemary gin and tonic!  

Our co-host walked us through the muddling of the cucumber and rosemary in a squeeze of lime, we shook that with the gin and built the rest of the G&T on top.  I prefer cocktails on the less-sweet side, and this delivered.  A perfectly fresh take on an old favorite.

While the G&T was coming together, we were prepping the veggies and dressing for Tuscan Bread Salad.  This recipe popped up on my radar a month or so ago, and ever since making it together at this dinner party, it has found its way into our regular rotation.  We even served it alongside Easter dinner last weekend!

This salad is a standout.  The roasted bread drizzled with olive oil and cut into croutons, the salty olives, and creamy goat cheese (which we used in place of mozzarella) added a unique flavor to an otherwise standard salad base.  The homemade dressing called for basil and thyme from my herb garden and a shallot, that ingredient that always brings such great flavor to savory dishes.  We made a double-batch of the salad dressing, storing the remainder in a jar in the fridge, and we used the dressing on salad greens the rest of the week!

Click here for the full recipe.

This was a great one.
Cheers to more VDPs!

Cohosts

Focaccia Bread

After gaining some confidence with other bread recipes, I was ready to try something a bit more challenging, and focaccia bread seemed like a fun experiment last month.  Following this recipe, I completed the rising steps throughout the afternoon, and by the time dinner was ready, we had perfect focaccia bread.

The fresh bread was perfect next to pasta with tomato cream sauce.

I probably could have cut the recipe in half, considering it was just the two of us, buy the leftovers were just as good.  The next night, we used up some leftover flank steak and made steak and arugula sandwiches on focaccia bread.

If you've ever been inclined to try to make bread at home, I highly recommend you give focaccia bread a try!

Winter Minestrone Soup

Winter has hit, and we have been freezing in our wintry San Francisco mid-50s :)
I've been hungry for comfort foods, but I was also looking for some lighter recipe inspiration.

This is an adaptation of Ina Garten's Winter Minestrone Soup from her cookbook Foolproof.  It's easy to adapt this recipe to make this soup vegetarian--just omit the pancetta and replace the chicken/beef stock with vegetable stock.

We baked up a fresh loaf of French bread, which was so tasty dunked into the broth.  I've posted about the simple homemade bread method I use here.

Winter Minestrone Soup

Olive oil
4 ounces pancetta, diced
1½ cups chopped yellow onions
3 carrots, chopped
3 celery stalks, diced
1 russet potato, diced
5 cloves minced garlic
5 sprigs chopped fresh thyme leaves
5-6 cups chicken stock (I combined chicken and beef stock)
1 parmesan cheese rind (if you have one)
1 14.5oz cad of fire roasted diced tomatoes
2 bay leaves
1 can cannellini beans, drained
1.5 cups small pasta
1 cup frozen spinach
½ cup white wine
2 tablespoons pesto
salt and pepper
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, for serving

Brown the pancetta in a bit of olive oil in a big Dutch Oven or soup pot.
Next add the onions, carrots, celery, potato, garlic, and thyme and cook until softened, about 10 minutes.
Add 5 cups of stock, the can of tomatoes, the bay leaves, and the parmesan cheese rind (if you have one).  Salt and pepper the soup.  Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.  Cook 30 minutes, with the lid cracked.
Stir in the cannellini beans (also called great northern white beans), uncooked pasta, and frozen spinach.  Allow the pasta to soften (about 8 minutes).  You can add additional stock if the soup is looking too thick.
Stir in the white wine and pesto.
Remove the bay leaves and rind, season with salt and pepper again to taste.


Serve with a sprinkling of parmesan cheese and a few pieces of crusty bread.

VDP: Pumpkin Penne Pasta

I know it is past Thanksgiving, but since it is still Fall until December 21st, I think it's fair game to post this pumpkin recipe from a Virtual Dinner Party several weeks back.

I found this recipe for Pumpkin Penne Pasta a couple of years ago on the great blog The Culinary Couple, and it has become my favorite Fall recipe to make!  Not only that, this recipe is so good that it changed Juanita's mind about pumpkin flavors, too.

Another reason this was a momentous occasion is because it was the largest Virtual Dinner Party we've hosted yet: seven hosts/guests across three kitchens!  That's three pounds of pasta, and I can report that the few leftovers didn't last long.

The creamy pumpkin sauce is made with pumpkin puree, typical fall spices, sage, and spicy sausage, which give it a satisfyingly savory flavor compared to the sweetness you often associate with pumpkin (dessert) recipes.  The substitutions I usually make to the recipe are to use spicy Italian sausage instead of sweet, and to use just a bit of half-and-half instead of the recommended heavy cream.  It seems to be plenty creamy this way, and it's a bit healthier.  I'm sure you could even use Greek yogurt, which I often do in pasta to give it a creamy texture.

I think our dinner party lasted at least three hours (which is a long time to Google-hangout!), but all guests had a great time, and the meal turned out great in all locations.

Check out the full recipe here, and add it to your list for next fall (or make it this week--you still have eight days!)

And let me know if you'd like to be a guest at a future Virtual Dinner Party!

Virtual Dinner Party

A couple things that have increased in frequency in the last year since moving to San Francisco are:
- days when the weather has been within 5 degrees of 63°
- times I have made homemade pizza for dinner
- times I have seen my family in person

(I feel like I could go on and on right now about other things that have increased in frequency since the move--i.e. times I have smelled pot while walking outside, the number of ironic mustaches I see on a daily basis, times I have wondered if the hills in SF are steeper than the last time I walked up them...things like that.  But those aren't as related to this post.)

Anyway, I see my parents and sisters a lot more now, which I really appreciate.  And part of the reason I see them more often is due to our FaceTime parties.

I've posted before about my Virtual Dinner Parties, and last week I "facetimed" with my sis and mom, so that we could have a dinner party together.  On our menu?  Homemade pizza, of course.  And fall-inspired sweet potatoes, since the weather was the crisp, fall-like 60°.  (I was pretending that wasn't normal.)

The chefs on both sides of the screen got started on onion caramelization, since, to do it right, you caramelize low and slow for 45 minutes or so.  I cooked up red onions, and yellow onions sizzled away in the other kitchen.

We also sauteed cremini mushrooms and chicken sausages.


[Side note: mushrooms are another thing I didn't care for while growing up, but I love them now.]


I reluctantly admit that I got "caught" sneaking samples several times while the food was cooking, and my mom definitely called me out on it... some things never change.

That's okay to do, though, when the dinner party guests aren't actually eating this food, isn't it?


Our perfected recipe involves a very hot oven, a pizza stone that has heated up to the oven temp, a couple minutes of baking the crust before any toppings are added...

 

...using both tomato sauce and pesto, and rubbing a little bit of salted butter along the hot crust before baking the pizza for the remaining 8 minutes.

We both added some greens after the pizza finished baking.  My co-hosts added arugula, and I added chopped basil and oregano from the balcony planter.  Greens add so much flavor.  (Here's where Giada would also talk about how greens add so much color!)  (If you have ever watched her show, please click that link and enjoy!)

Meanwhile, our fall-inspired sweet potatoes, which we created based off this recipe, baked away in the oven.  

And then we sat down to eat together.  The smells on the other side of the screen somehow made my dad materialize, so that was fun!  Wonderful company.

 My co-hosts also wanted to share a photo of their wine pairing.  Well done, D and M!

Our FaceTime evening made it feel like I had real guests in the house.  I loved it!  Hopefully many more to come.  One of these days we'll graduate from homemade pizza to something more fancy for our dinner party menu...though it is SO, SO good!

Zucchini Ribbon Pasta

As we straddle the line between Summer and Fall, I have been trying to get out of the cooking rut I've been in lately.  It's still not quite time for hearty and warm Fall-inspired dishes, but it also seems past patio grilling season (at least here in San Francisco!).



To compromise, I came up with a nice alternative that is still reminiscent of summer's caprese salad and summer squash, but one that is served hot and takes advantage of my indoor grill pan.

Last night I made chicken caprese "pasta" with zucchini ribbons.

I skinned two zucchinis with a vegetable peeler and boiled them for just one minute, while some seasoned chicken breasts grilled away on my stove top grill pan.

Onto my zucchini noodles I layered the grilled chicken, sliced tomatoes, basil chiffonade, goat cheese, and a pinch of salt and pepper.  A drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette over the top pulled this light dinner together.

I hope your weather is beginning to cool off, and that you are enjoying the last few days of summer!

Food Trucks, Street Fairs, and Sunday Streets

This past weekend was a San Francisco trifecta for street festivals.

We started the weekend off with a bang at Off the Grid at Fort Mason, a food truck extravaganza.  As the food truck craze has persisted for a few years now, San Francisco's offerings are plentiful and diverse.

 

In addition to local food, one of our local breweries, Magnolia, was serving their beer.

After taking a preliminary lap around the trucks, we zeroed in on a pork belly bun, grilled chicken banh mi, tamale, and an Asian pork cutlet sandwich with wasabi.

I saved room (well actually, K & D, my whole dessert stomach) for the creme brulee truck we had passed on the way in.  

We chose the El Jefe--It's like Bruce Willis with Hair 

Mexican Hot Chocolate Creme Brulee?  Yes, please.

We plan to return to Off the Grid again soon!

~~~

Our Saturday excursion took us through Japantown, where we hit up the Nihonmachi Street Fair
with game booths, live music, dance performances, and more food trucks.

This ukulele player was rocking out to the Mr. Brightside by the Killers and Build Me Up Buttercup.  He was entertaining!

They wrapped up the Nihonmachi Street Fair with a t-shirt rocket.  I never win those kinds of things, but somehow luck was on our side, and we walked away with a prize.

(Now I just need to find a place to wear my 2XL t-shirt....)

~~~

Sunday Streets was next; more photos to come!