ahhh summer

Summer is finally here in Denver... I am ready for some garden parties and picnics!

from Lonny Magazine

 from apartmenttherapy.com

from Sfgirlbybay.com

picture from maryruffle on tumblr

 Photo from Urban Comfort

 Photo from Livingetc.http://www.livingetc.com/

photo from Kathryn Ireland

My Favorite Meal Ever!

You all know my penchant for Mediterranean cooking, more particular Greek or Middle Eastern foods and this my friends happens to be my favorite home cooked meal.   My friend Walshie always makes this for me on my birthday and it is the best birthday present ever... alas my birthday is far, far away and I had a craving so I made it for myself (oh and for Mac and my Pops too).   Here was the menu:

Yogurt Marinated Chicken Kebabs
Kefta and Zucchini (this is a new recipe I tried out... and is not normally on the birthday menu)
Spanikopita Triangles
Tzatziki
(don't forget the Pita)

All of these have come from my favorite food blog Smitten Kitchen... love her.

Yogurt-Marinated Lamb Chicken Kebabs
From Smitten Kitchen by Ina Garten

1 pound plain yogurt (regular or lowfat)
1/4 cup olive oil, plus more for brushing grill
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (2 lemons)
5 tablespoons fresh whole rosemary leaves, chopped (we use oregano... because I am not a huge rosemary fan... I think it overpowers everything)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds top round lamb (we use Chicken)
1 red onion

Combine the yogurt, olive oil, lemon zest and juice, rosemary, salt, and pepper in a large, non-reactive bowl. Cut the lamb in 1 1/2-inch cubes (you’ll have about 20) and add it to the yogurt, making sure it is covered with the marinade. Cover the mixture plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight or for up to two days.
Prepare a charcoal grill with hot coals. Spread the coals in one tight layer on the grill. Cut the red onion in 8 pieces and separate each piece into three or four sections. Loosely thread three or four pieces of lamb onto skewers alternately with sections of onion. Sprinkle both sides of the lamb cubes with salt and pepper. Place the skewers on the hot grill and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, turning two or three times, until the lamb is medium-rare.
Serve with salad, grilled pitas and tzatziki (below).

Tzatziki
From Smitten Kitchen by Ina Garten

Be warned this is the best Tzatziki ever!!

14 ounces Greek yogurt (Ina recommends Fage Total I used fat free... but on my birthday it is full fat all the way)
1 hothouse cucumber, unpeeled and seeded
1/4 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon minced fresh dill
1 1/2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Place the yogurt in a medium bowl. Grate the cucumber on a box grater (or in your food processor) and squeeze the grated cucumber with your hand to remove some of the liquid. (Pressing it in mesh sieve with a spoon to extract the extra water or wringing it in cheesecloth also work well.) Add it to the yogurt along with the sour cream, lemon juice, vinegar, dill, garlic, salt and pepper and stir. Serve with grilled pita wedges.

Spanakopita Triangles
Adapted liberally from Gourmet by Smitten Kitchen

This might be the real reason I LOVE this meal.   I have made spanakopita before but making it in little portable pockets really, really makes this dish!

Makes about 30 pastries
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/2 cup sliced green onions
1 clove garlic, minced
1 pound fresh spinach (coarse stems removed if ‘grown-up’ spinach; baby spinach can be used in full)
3/4 pound feta, crumbled
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Salt and pepper to taste
Melt one tablespoon butter in a large heavy skillet over moderate heat, add onions and garlic and saute for a minute, then cook spinach, stirring, until wilted and tender, an additional 4 to 8 minutes (less for baby spinach, more for grown-up spinach). Remove from heat and cool, about 10 minutes. Press mixture in mesh colander (or wring in cheesecloth) to remove as much liquid as possible (I find this more necessary with baby spinach than the heartier stuff, which left almost no excess liquid), then coarsely chop. Transfer to a bowl and stir in feta and lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Let filling cool and follow instructions for phyllo triangles (below).


Phyllo Triangles
To make 30 pastries
Filling of choice
10 (17- by 12-inch) phyllo sheets, thawed if frozen
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
Preheat oven to 375°F. Melt butter in a small saucepan, then cool. Cover phyllo stack with 2 overlapping sheets of plastic wrap and then a dampened kitchen towel. [I won't lie, as I got more confident with the phyllo I sorta skipped this part, opting instead to work quickly. Proceed at your own risk, however!]
Take one phyllo sheet from stack and arrange on a work surface with a long side nearest you (keeping remaining sheets covered) and brush with some butter. Top with another phyllo sheet and brush with more butter. Cut buttered phyllo stack crosswise into 6 (roughly 12- by 2 3/4-inch) strips.
Put a heaping teaspoon of filling near one corner of a strip on end nearest you, then fold corner of phyllo over to enclose filling and form a triangle. Continue folding strip (like a flag), maintaining triangle shape. Put triangle, seam side down, on a large baking sheet and brush top with butter. Make more triangles in same manner, using all of phyllo.
Bake triangles in middle of oven until golden brown, 20 to 25 minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool slightly.
Do ahead: Pastry triangles can be formed, but not baked, three days ahead. Arrange in one layer in heavy-duty sealed plastic bags, then freeze. Bake frozen pastries (do not thaw) in same manner as above.


Kefta and Zucchini Kebabs
Smitten Kitchen via Gourmet January 2006; originally published 1980

For zucchini
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/3 cup olive oil
2 medium zucchini (1 1/4 lb total), cut crosswise into 1/2-inch-thick slices

For kefta (lamb meatballs)
2 slices firm white sandwich bread, torn into small pieces
1 small onion, finely chopped (about 1 cup)
1/4 cup loosely packed fresh parsley leaves
1/4 cup loosely packed fresh cilantro leaves
1 lb ground lamb (from shoulder)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/3 cup pine nuts, toasted and finely chopped


Prepare zucchini:

Whisk together lemon juice, sugar, salt, pepper, and oil in a large bowl and stir in zucchini slices. Marinate at room temperature while making meatballs.

Make meatballs:

Cover bread with water in a bowl and soak 10 minutes. Squeeze handfuls of bread to remove as much excess water as possible, then transfer to a bowl.

Pulse onion and herbs in a food processor until finely chopped, then add to bread along with lamb, salt, spices, and pine nuts. Mix with your hands until well blended. Form lamb mixture into 36 balls (1 scant tablespoon each).

Assemble and grill kebabs: (note I grilled these like sliders... I had a hard time with the skewering of the meat... I did skewer the zucchini)

Prepare grill for cooking over medium-hot charcoal (moderate heat for gas; see cooks' note below). Thread 6 meatballs 1/4 inch apart onto each of 6 skewers. Thread zucchini lengthwise onto remaining 6 skewers (5 slices per skewer), so cut sides are on the grill, leaving 1/4 inch between slices. Grill zucchini and lamb on oiled grill rack, turning over once, until golden and just cooked through, 4 to 6 minutes. Serve warm, with yogurt sauce.

Go world

I love this Discovery Channel commercial.

May 2010: Mixed Tape - Covers

Inara George and Greg Kurstin - Bird and The Bee
photo from Daily Beatz

So... I am a little late with my May Mixed Tape post... I am blaming Maria & The Diamonds who distracted me for two weeks listening non-stop to her new album... go get it already.

May's Mixed tape is a collection of covers, which started because last month I fell in love with Florence & The Machine's Cover of  Robert Palmer's, Addicted to Love.   Sadly, I soon discovered that it was an import and not yet available in the US (at least not in the download-able format).   Listen to it here -



You can also listen to a impromptu remake of Borderline...



But, I didn't let the Florence and The Machine debacle derail my plans... I continued the quest for covers.   Lucky, I stumbled across the Bird and the Bee's - Remake of the Masters Volume I (Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates).   Now I am not sure if I would call Hall and Oates the Masters but I do love Private Eyes (probably because of the incessant clapping) and I will admit, I had a hard time choosing which song to include.   In the end I chose Maneater, of course.   I am also excited about the Volume I implication that there is more to come.  I personally hope that they do Def Leppard...Ooooh or how about Loverboy.   Go Inara... I love the children of the 80's, re-working all of the muck we had to listen to as teens so we can now play it during dinner parties.

One other delight... AC Newman's A-Ha cover.

May 2010 -  Mixed Tape: Covers

Strange Condition - Morgan Page
Maneater - The Bird and The Bee
Heartless - The Fray
Yellow - Jem
Take on Me - AC Newman
All You Need is Love - Nada Surf
Girls Just Want to Have Fun - StarFuc#er
First of the Gang - Zee Avi
The One I Love - Rosie Thomas
Just Like Honey - Headless Heroes
Sweet Child o' Mine - Taken by Trees
Rock the Casbah - Solar Twins
Hot in Herre - Jenny Owens Young

Secret Dinner Club

Sometime earlier this year I read an article (below) on a secret dinner club around Denver, hosted by a rotating group of chefs and is by invite only.   Which of course made me sad, because I wanted to go and I really had very little chance of actually ever getting invited to an exclusive food industry event.   Although, now that I think of it I should have tried to see if my dear old military school friend Brian Freeman, owner of Growers Organics could have wrangled an invite for moi... but I really didn't think about it.   But now it seems you can sign up to get an invite... here is the link for those who are interested.

And while we are on the topic of dinner... I also thought I mention this because July reservations are being taken starting Monday (June 5) for the Meadowlark Farm dinners... and they go fast!  Don't miss out on this, I went to one last summer and wished that I had gone to one every single weekend!  So save your pennies and try to make one this summer.  I have heard that they are doing some special mead dinners this summer, but have yet to see them listed on the schedule.


Hush: this new dinner club is a secret - Jason Sheenhan

It's funny to watch the evolution of a restaurant scene from the inside; to track, over time, how the pieces all come together.
The first thing any burgeoning scene needs is a solid groundwork of excellent restaurants and pretty good restaurants. A few is not enough. There needs to be a critical mass so that casual diners can go out for a nice dinner one week, enjoy themselves, then start making plans for their next dinner out a week or a month later, and realize that they have more than one or two or three other places to choose from; that while they weren't paying attention, a dozen or more new places opened that all look interesting. There has to be enough action so that the pretty good restaurants force the excellent ones to be better in order to stay at the top of the heap, and the excellent ones all battle among themselves for what dining dollars are available.
It's a Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest thing. As space becomes short and resources (read: talented line cooks and FOH staff, boutique product and customer dollars and attention spans) grow scarce, a carrying capacity is arrived at: the precise number of high- and low-end restaurants any city can support before circumstance, available assets and shortage begin to determine restaurant lifespans rather than the same being determined solely by talent, smarts and hard work. No matter how friendly a scene might seem on the surface, in the backrooms and accountants' offices, it's all dog-eat-dog.
This, I would argue, is healthy. Stress and competition brings out the best in the cook and his industry, the same as they do in nature.
Once the core restaurants are in place and the carrying capacity reached, a scene begins to thrive and expand. New neighborhoods are pioneered. New styles are introduced. Openings and closings become generational -- a sous chef, training in a good house, going out on his own and opening his own restaurant, hiring a sous chef who will, in five or ten years, go on to open a restaurant of his own. Local foodistas go from being thrilled at having some nice restaurant at which to celebrate their anniversary once a year to being thrilled at having such a wealth of places to eat on a Friday night, to arguing over whether to eat gourmet, wood-fired pizza or Edo-style sushi on a Tuesday. The swells who once counted coup by getting a good table at the newest, hottest French or fusion restaurants now get their jollies by claiming to have "discovered" the little pho shop or Ethiopian restaurant down the street that has been there for ten years, and argue over which of five or six dim sum restaurants serves the best shu mai.
This is where Denver was last year -- a good place, an interesting place, a fun place for everyone where even the misery of losing the occasional good restaurant to the fluctuations of the market or plain bad luck was tempered by the sure knowledge that the next week would bring another opening somewhere of something that no one has ever seen before. And it is at this point in the development of any scene that a city begins looking outward, at the cool stuff being done in other cities, in other food arenas. It is at this point that the well-traveled foodie starts complaining about not having this or that and the smart chef, owner or entrepreneur starts listening.

And now, it looks as though Denver will be getting something that's been a big draw for the hardcore gastronauts in other big food cities: a (semi) secret, invitation-only underground supper club.
I just got off the blower with Phil Armstrong, a veteran front-of-the-house guy most recently of SugarToad in Chicago, who did time as a partner at Seven on Pearl in Boulder and has been in the restaurant industry since he was thirteen. And he told me about scheduling the very first dinner for his new "underground eatery" called Hush.
"It's a one-night playground," he told me. A supper club that will bring together line cooks, station chefs, stagiers and other working white jackets to cook single dinners for small crowds outside of the traditional restaurant setting.
Partnering up with friend and fellow food-lover Brad Fentress of Studio Como at 2590 Walnut Street, Armstrong will be bringing in line guys to cook the food they want to cook, not necessarily the food their chefs and bosses want them to cook. "It'll be a forum," Armstrong explained, "where rising chefs have a chance to develop their cuisine. You know, when you're staging or working for a chef, it's all about doing what the chef wants. Cooking his cuisine. A lot of these guys don't even know what their cuisine would be."
Armstrong got the inspiration for his underground supper club from working with Jimmy Sneed at SugarToad. "He left a lasting impression that there were a lot of really talented line cooks coming up," he told me. "Guys who worked their hearts out for a bunch of thankless chefs. Hush will be their playground."
The plan right now is to hold the dinners (just one a month to start) inside the Studio Como space, using some of the super high-end commercial kitchens on display at the design studio and serving a very limited number of friends, family and special guests. And for the first dinner, scheduled for January 9, he's got some serious heavy-hitters lined up: a bunch of line cooks he's bringing in from Alinea -- Grant Achatz's award-winning molecular gastronomy restaurant and mad scientist laboratory in Chicago.
The next month, though, Armstrong told me he'd be turning to the local community of chefs and line cooks. He's got a few friends in Boulder who are already interested, and he's poking around Denver for up-and-coming line guys as well, looking for the "undiscovered, unappreciated, or rising stars struggling to hit their stride in a competitive market."
Sounds like a brilliant idea, and something I wish we'd had in Denver years ago, since similar, half-secret, invite-only dinner clubs have been up and running in some of the bigger food cities (New York and Seattle, notably) for a long time.
And what does Armstrong plan to charge for the privilege of a private dinner cooked by some of the weirdest and most talented line guys in the country? Nothing. There'll be a "suggested donation," he said, but it's important to him that Hush not be seen as a money-making venture.
"It's not meant to be profitable in any way," he insisted. "We're not looking to make a buck." He's just looking to bring some glory to the under-appreciated white jackets in town -- a noble aspiration if ever I heard one.
Armstrong told me that he'll soon have a (very simple) website up and running at www.hushdenver.com -- but for the most part, he's trying to keep this whole experiment kinda quiet, kinda private and very exclusive. It's more for the chefs than for the people right now. But if it becomes popular? If people start beating down his doors looking for ways to get on the list? Well, who knows?
"That is why we're calling it Hush, after all."

53% introvert and 47% extrovert

Fun personality quiz based on picking your favorite colors.  Here are my results...

 Guess we all know I am not a careful, organized manager and my decision-making is not very dynamic.

How did I miss this?

When did Anthropologie start carrying wallpaper?

This one might just be my all time favorite wallpaper... I cannot even stop looking at it.   But, holy cow... $298 per roll... what did they mill it with gold?

See the rest here.