I'm not sure where the idea for this dish came from, but it has been fermenting in my head for awhile. In promising to eat better this upcoming year, we came up with this really colorful and healthy meal. We bought some beautiful buttery scallops from a vendor at the farmer's market along with a bunch of fresh produce and this colorful,...

In edition number two of "fancy dinner and wine from our trip night," we made peppercorn crusted filets with the most amazing smashed potatoes with just a hint of rosemary. Dustin claims he divided the potatoes equally between us (I claim he gave himself slightly more, which is justified considering how much I normally eat) with the expectation...

This is the fabulous dinner we had that I mentioned in yesterday's post. With fondue in the title, I'm guessing you can imagine why we wanted to eat a healthy, non-cheese filled lunch. When we drove down from Seattle to Los Angeles, we stopped for a day of wine tasting in northern California and picked up several bottles of wine to bring home...

We really like truffle oil. Like a lot. Unfortunately, truffle oil is crazy expensive. We spent $14 on a tiny bottle according to the price sticker remaining on the bottle. We still had half a bottle to use up before the move, so on a whim I added it to the crab macaroni and cheese I was making. We were already going fancy using Dungeness crab,...

This seemingly fancy, but super easy, recipe for duck breast with pomegranate sauce was a candidate for our Valentine's Day dinner this year, but lost out to browned butter lobster risotto (only due to the fact that lobster was on sale that week, not for lack of excitedness for this dish). As you can imagine it was on the menu for the first...

To precede our molten chocolate lava cake, we cooked up a romantic risotto dinner together. You know it was romantic because it had lobster. When I went to Whole Foods to pick up ingredients, at the seafood counter, there were 3 of us all buying lobster tails. I'm pretty creative that way. The recipe from Food Network  was pretty similar to...

For Valentine's Day, Erin bought me one of those "hey why dontcha go make this for me" kind of gifts. This time it was a sushi kit. I'm not upset though because I love sushi, and she helped empower me to create my own! We went on a hunt across all of the Seattle area for fine sashimi-grade ingredients. We were having lunch in Ballard, so we...

At the end of September we went to the Northwest Chocolate Festival here in Seattle. Dustin and I have a good working relationship— I go to beer festivals with him and he goes to chocolate festivals with me. It works out well for both of us. We had a lot of fun watching cooking demos, sampling tasty treats and purchasing chocolates from vendors...

Perhaps this fancy dinner is how to celebrate finally being done with the GRE! This meal is actually from awhile back, but it would have been great to come to after a long and stressful test, that's for sure! I've been pretty obsessed with the idea of making Filet Oscar since I first heard what it was. Basically it's a filet mignon topped with...

It's not like we've been deprived of fancy meals lately, but we still like to make elevated cuisine at home from time to time. I was watching an episode of Kelsey's Essentials on the Cooking Channel all about how to work with chocolate. Kelsey did several cool things, including making chocolate pasta, something we have also done, but I was...