I’m becoming a big fan of shiso since Amy planted it in my garden this summer. It’s minty, grassy flavor is just the thing on a hot spell like the one we are having this week (seriously, 103F in Seattle? I did not move here for weeks like this!) So, I was happy to help out with Design Sponge’s In The Kitchen with this recipe for Ginger Shiso Syrup.

What I really love about this syrup (or really, any herbal simple syrup) is how many different things you can do with it. Add a little to something fizzy, citrusy and if you are so inclined, boozy, and you have the perfect drink too cool you down on a day like today (Ginger shiso mojitos anyone?). Or, stir some into a fruit puree, freeze and you have a remarkable sorbet. Or, if you kitchen isn’t hot enough to bake without the use of an oven, try it drizzle over some fruit on a pound cake. Ooo, mama.

For these recipe, head on over to Design Sponge. And for even more summery herby recipes, check out Summer Fest!

There has been a scheme in the works for some time now to have a day devoted to tacos. We’ve (Cam and I) been sampling various trucks and busses one by one for the past year, but never on a particularly organized basis and it became too hard to decide which one was really the best. Memories quickly fade, and we just end up with vague recollections of what we did or didn’t like. This would not do. We needed hard data to compare and contrast all the tacoy goodness. So, we decided that we’d pick a beautiful sunny day, and just drive around, trying tacos at the various Seattle taco trucks, to try to decide on an ultimate winner of Seattle’s Best Taco. Saturday, October 11th turned out to be that day.

After a morning of planning to find all of the taco trucks online that I could, and organizing a set of directions to most efficiently get us from spot to spot, we picked our targets and headed out. Of the 27 trucks I plotted, we’d try to go to 8 or 9 of them, ordering one carne asada and one al pastor taco at each, and splitting each of them. We were allowed sides but given the number of stops we had ahead of us, we were just going to stick to the two taco rule, at least until the end of the day.

The first stop was our closest truck, Rancho Bravo, in Wallingford. This truck is set up in a Winchell’s doughnut shop parking lot so you can always grab a doughnut if the craving strikes you after your tacos. At $2 each, these were the most expensive tacos we tried (which isn’t surprising given the neighborhood), but they were also some of the biggest. The corn tortillas are full size (but seem store bought), and well filled. The tacos have sliced, fresh radishes in addition to cilantro, onion and lime, and the salsa they have on the table are quite good. I like the salsa verte which has a bit of a kick.

Next, it was over to El Asadero, which seems to be a Seattle favorite. First off, there is something about having tacos sitting on the little stools inside this old school taco bus that really completes the taco eating experience. They also have great pickled carrots and peppers. The tacos ($1.20 plus tax each) are good. They are the usual small, double tortilla shells which seem to be housemade. The meat is good and juicy, with lots of flavor. Cam thought they were a bit heavy on the onion.

We kept heading down Rainier, hoping to find Taqueria Dos Hermanos, but it wasn’t around, so may have either moved or gone out of business. A few blocks further south, we found Los Potrillos, a small truck parked in a gas station parking lot. These tacos ($1.10 each) were drippy juicy with lots of diced meat and salsa. I wished for a bit more cilantro, but the onion balance was nice.

Next up was perhaps my favorite stop of the day, Costa Alegre. This old metro bus (complete with the old Priority Seating window stickers) is decked out with bright red, rodeo-inspired curtains, tables and chairs. It’s red overload, but quite comfortable and feels very homey. The folks that run it are lovely. You even get to eat on real plates! Our tacos ($1.25 each) were super hot and fresh, with a good balance of cilantro (ie: lots), onion and meat with good red and green salsa to add yourself. They also had some sort of non-alcoholic sangria, but we passed on that.

We’re not really sure what the next taco truck was called. The menus all said Tacos Maria, but the truck itself said Tacos Patzcuaro. This truck, parked on someone’s front lawn on MLK Blvd, is going to get swamped when the light rail system is in right across the street. For now, it kept a stead pace of taco eaters happy with its small taco shells heavily loaded with meat and a pile of caramelized onions on the side ($1.25 each). The salsa verde here is a bit on the sweet side and the red is quite hot. It was about this time that I was starting to get pretty worried about how I was going to finish this crazy taco eating extravaganza. We were on truck #5, with 3 more planned to go. The radishes were no longer going to be eaten.

We had made it through all the Rainier trucks we had planned, so then it was off to South Park for a couple of well known stops. El Rincon (which has several different trucks around) on 14th was first. This truck had a line the whole time we were there waiting for it’s super juicy $1.10 tacos. The pork bordered on greasy, but in a lick your fingers clean kind of way. These had just the right balance of cilantro and onion to meat. They came with pickled carrots in addition to radishes and lime, but I was not a fan of them. And, oh god, there are still 2 more stops to go….

Further up the street in South Park is Muy Macho, which used to be a taco truck, but now has a permanent restaurant. Despite lots of seating, we decided to get ours to go to keep with the taco truck theme, so we ate them in the car. Muy Macho probably has the most interesting and best salsa of any of our stops, but on our visit, both the pork and the beef were too dry and kind of unpleasant. They were the cheapest of the day though, coming in at a very odd $1.095 each (how they charge a half-cent we couldn’t quite figure out).

We had one more stop to go. A mystery truck that was supposed to be located in the parking lot of the 76 gas station in Georgetown. At that point, I thought I was going to explode and I was seriously not looking forward to trying yet another taco. I had definitely hit my limit. Seven tacos is too many tacos. As we pulled into the 76, and looked around, I think I gave a little scream of delight. The mystery truck was nowhere to be seen. We were done. Whew.

Instead, we stopped into All City Coffee for a late afternoon mocha as a digestive and shared a cupcake Cam had made earlier in the day at the Edible Seattle event at Metropolitan Market. As we reviewed our carefully taken notes from the day, and I whined about too many tacos, we mulled over who would win the Seattle’s best taco award. The end result? It’s whatever taco truck happens to be closest to you. I won’t go so far to say that they are all the same. But, they are all good enough when the taco craving strikes.

Of course, we still have that whole north Seattle taco loop to do, and haven’t even touched the eastside or the deep south yet. Once I can actually think about tacos again, I’m sure we’ll find another sunshiney day and head out…

A few Seattle taco truck resources:

L’s Taco Truck Google map
Married with Dinner’s Seattle Taco Crawl
NWSource’s Taco Truck Guide
Yelp’s taco truck picks
Los Taco Trucks Seattle
Seattle Taco
Chowhound Seattle Taco Truck thread
Seattle Weekly Taco Truck investigation

A few years ago, if you had asked me what my favorite restaurant in Seattle was, I could have answered without hesitation. This is pretty unusual for me… I’m not one that easily compares things. I don’t have top 5 favorite albums or foods or movies. There are things I like, and things I don’t like, but putting them in order just seems beyond me. There are too many factors to weigh in… my mood, what I’ve been doing lately, who I’m with. So, it was odd that Osteria La Spiga always seemed to strike me as my favorite.

La Spiga was a tiny little, rustic in a kitschy sort of way, place tucked into the corner of shops along the south end of Broadway just before the “pill hill” where almost all of the hospitals in Seattle are situated. Service was always a little hit or miss, but the food, traditional Emilia-Romagna fare, was stunning. Handmade pastas with the perfect tenderness to make me swoon, slow-cooked meats which were fall off the bone tender, an affatatti misti plate with whisper thin proscuitto and other delights. But the one thing that drew me back over and over was the flat bread. Piadina is like a thick, tender flour tortilla, but with more flavor and bite. The little cut triangles of the warm bread are a perfect match for the prosciutto or cheese, or, even better, stuffed with goodies like fresh mozzarella, basil, wild mushrooms and truffle oil, and called a Crescione which in my mind translates to “food of the gods.” I could eat the flat bread, just plain and simple, piece after piece after piece if no one were around to stop me.

A couple of years ago, La Spiga moved from its funky and charming location to a new space that is about as different as is possible. Where the old location was always quite cramped, the new restaurant soars with double height ceilings and huge wooden beams, and at least 5 times the seating. The old place had a faux old world feel, while the new is warmly modern. The old location usually had one waitress or waiter for the whole room, where the new location seems to have staff winding their way around tables everywhere you look. It’s just as crowded as ever, but now there are pleasant places to wait instead of having to loom over the other diners. It’s truly a beautiful work of architecture.

The one thing, luckily, that hasn’t changed is the food. The menu may have grown along with the space, but my taglietelle ragu is as good as ever and I’d be hard pressed to find anyone that didn’t coo over the Filetto al Tartufo, butter knife tender filet drizzled with truffle oil. And then, there is the piadina. Yes, it’s still there and as good as ever.

These days though, when asked what my favorite restaurant in Seattle is, I hesitate. I still love La Spiga. I love the new space, the prompter service and the gorgeous food. But, still, I miss the old spot. I loved how its funky space and slowish service made you step back, slow down and stop worrying about what you were going to do next. You were going to sit there and eat your meal whenever it happened to arrive. And, with food like that, that was always enough. Especially when you could always ask for “a little more piadina please”.

All of that is a very long way of saying that after years and years, I finally got around to making piadina at home. Traditionally, piadina is made with lard, and as you know, I just happen to have a whole lot of lard right now. I’m sure you could substitute vegetable shortening, but I think you’d miss out on some of the flavor and tenderness of the flat bread. I’ve also seen recipes that substitute olive oil, although this would likely make a bigger change in the texture of the dough.

I ended up using a recipe from Food & Wine which was exceedingly simple to make. So simple, in fact, that I have been kicking myself for not making it sooner. The F&W recipe called for baking soda, although many of the recipes I’ve seen don’t add any type of levening. Next time around, I plan on either leaving it out, substituting baking powder or just using less, because I thought that the flatbread had a tiny bit of a bitter after-taste from the soda.

Regardless, the dough, after sitting, takes on this wonderfully smooth texture that is soft and easy to roll out to a nice thin round. Piadina should really be cooked on something like a pizza stone, but I don’t have one. A stove top griddle, however, works too, although getting the temperature right can be a little tricky. Near the end, my griddle was a little too hot in spots and I quickly scorched a few breads. Luckily, I still had plenty already cooked up for a nice lunch and nibble throughout the day.

Piadina
recipe from Food & Wine

Tradition has it that you must not make piadina when the south-westerly wind blows… the warm, damp wind makes the dough too soft. So, best to save your piadina making days for the dry season.

Makes 6 rounds

3 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1/2 t baking soda
Kosher salt
4 oz lard or vegetable shortening, at room temperature
3/4 c water
1 T olive oil, plus more for brushing

Combine the flour, baking soda and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer (or in a large bowl if you want to knead it by hand) and mix together with a fork. Cut the lard into 1 inch pieces and using a pastry knife cut the lard into the flour. You can just use the mixer for this, but I found it didn’t do a great job of mixing in the lard and the pastry knife was just easier.

Next, start to add the water, just a little bit at a time, and mix on the stand mixer with a dough hook on lowish speed until the dough starts to form into a ball. Increase the speed to medium, and let it knead until smooth, about 5 minutes.

Remove the bowl from the mixer and cover with a damp towel. Let the dough sit for 30 minutes at room temperature.

Preheat the oven to 225F. Heat the griddle on medium-high to quite hot.

Divide the dough into 6 pieces, and roll each piece out to 10 inch rounds. The discs should be about 1/8 inch thick. Lightly brush the bread on both sides with olive oil.

Place one or two rounds on the griddle (depending on the size of your griddle) and cook for about 2 minutes on each side, or until you see the little brown spots that mark when it’s done. Wrap in foil and place in the oven while the next round goes into the griddle. The piadina are best eaten warm, the day they are cooked.

When is the last time I posted about a restaurant on this site? It’s been ages. Not that I haven’t been eating out. On the contrary, I think I’ve probably started eating out more since the whole food photography thing started taking off this year. But, my eating out these days tends to be at my usual spots, eating my usual dishes. It’s comfort food, delicious but not requiring a lot of effort. Nothing wrong with that, right?

However, last week, I got to indulge in an epic meal. One of those meals that don’t come along all that often. One that I consider myself stupidly lucky to have been able to enjoy because of some nutty coincidences of time and place, of what I do and an email I happened to answer some 8 months ago. It was about then that I received an email from the PR folks at a little restaurant in Seattle called Rover’s. It’s one of the finest French restaurants in Seattle, and its chef/owner, Thierry Rautureau aka The Chef in the Hat, is one of the most highly regarded in the city. He has a cookbook (of course), has been featured in countless publications, and has even been invited to the White House. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why they would be emailing me.

As it turns out, Thierry (and his PR guy), was starting to get interested in blogging and wanted to know more about the blogging community in Seattle. While I don’t have the biggest readership or haven’t been around as much as some of the other Seattle bloggers, they liked my blog because it was a bit less intimidating, and well, had lots of pretty pictures. I sat and chatted with Nathan, the PR guy, over coffee at Fuel, and talked about blogging from my perspective and some of the trends that I saw going on. It was a fun conversation, and I really appreciated the opportunity I was given… that the folks at Rover’s weren’t going to just jump into to a reactionary debate over bloggers versus reviewers versus chefs… that they were interested enough to dig in an actually talk to someone. Nathan and I had talked about maybe setting up something to let me (and possibly other bloggers) get some time with Thierry, but time moved on, we both got busy and the idea kind of fell away.

Until about a month ago. I got the call. I was going to the big show… getting a behind the scenes look at Rover’s with… get this… dinner included. Not just any dinner, but their Grand Tasting menu, an eight course extravaganza of food. I could bring along the camera, and take shots in the kitchen, shots of the food, shots of the chef. Because I knew if I had a camera, I’d be lame at asking any questions, I brought along Ethan of Urbanspoon who happily chatted away with Thierry about politics, food and his upcoming new baby. And we feasted… course after course of beautifully prepared, seasonal French-inspired Northwest cuisine (or is it, Northwest-inspired French cuisine? I can never get that right).

My meal was created around the new beef menu that is going on through November. Beef is an unusual meat at Rover’s. They don’t do it. No beef, chicken, or pork as the primary ingredient. Meats at Rover’s skew toward the lesser used… oxtail, duck, venison. As Adam Hoffman, Rover’s Chef de Cuisine, notes, “You can get a steak anywhere. Rover’s isn’t that kind of restaurant.” So as a rare treat, this month, they are featuring beef.

Rover’s beef menu is different. To start with, all the beef used is Oregon-raised Wagyu, free from any antibiotics. And, even after eating 5 course of beef, you don’t feel overwhelmingly heavy. Some courses are prepared with a delicate touch, while others are rich and hearty, and unless you knew better, you’d swear that you weren’t eating the same meats.

Rather than describing each course, I thought I’d just share some of the photos with you. Mainly because after about the 4th course with the wine pairings, things start to blur a bit, but also because the photos do a much better job than I could at showing how luscious the food is. I will say I’m amazed that the photos by dessert weren’t a complete blurry mess! But, before I do that, I do have to call out a few of my favorite things… first, the steak tartare with the little perched quail egg was unbelievably delicious. The scrambled eggs with caviar and lime creme fraiche, beautifully served in back in the shell. The Burgundy truffles on the black cod? Heaven on a plate. The escargot with the bacon that is smoked and cured in Adam’s smoker in his backyard… man, that is some good bacon. And, but the most amazing thing on the menu might surprise you… the braised short rib pot au feu with Moroccan sea salt, so tender you could eat it with a spoon.

An amuse of Landjager Salami, Gugeres with Beef Sausage and Romano Beef Consome (left) and Scrambled Eggs with Lime Creme Fraiche and White Sturgeon Caviar (right)

Ethan’s Caviar & Lobster (left) and Rover’s Charcuterie, including house cured salmon, pickled mackerel among other delicious little nibbles (right)

Oxtail Terrine (left) and Beef Tenderloin Tartare (right)

Pacific Black Cod with Celeriac Puree, Burgundy Truffle and Dry Vermouth Sauce (left) and Braised Short Rib Pot au Feu with Fall Vegetables and Moroccan Sea Salt (right)

Did I mention lots of wine?

Escargot with Bacon, Artichoke and Spinach in a Citrus Nage (left) and Filet of beef with Chard Gratin and Potato Galette with Béarnaise and Red Wine Peppercorn Sauce (right)

Persimmon Puree with Lemon Curd (left) and Bittersweet Chocolate Soufflé (right)

Start to finish, the meal took us about 5 hours. We oohed and ahhed over each course, knowing that what we were getting was an experience not many people would get. You can certainly get the same food and incredible service at Rover’s… I’ve eaten here before when no one knew who I was and everything was just as luxurious… but you don’t usually have the chef sit down with you for two hours over dessert, or get to take a whole private room to yourself (all the better for setting up the tripod).

I’d like to offer a big thanks to Nathan, Adam, Thierry and the Rover’s wonderful staff for giving me this amazing evening. I’d also like to thank my understanding husband who had to miss the meal and deal with me babbling about it for two days straight.

PS: For those of you interested in the behind the scenes of the photography for this post, there wasn’t really much to it other than a tripod and really long exposures. The lighting was just standard, fairly dim restaurant lighting. I shot at 100 ISO, which I could only do because of my tripod… something hard to do in most restaurant scenarios. The lighting obviously isn’t great, with fairly out of control shadows and some less than pleasant color casts. But, the food is so lovely, I think that shines through.

Technorati Tags: Food, Photography, Restaurant, Seattle

This is not a pretty cake on first glance. The moment the cherry upside down cake is freed from its pan, the only pretty it could be considered is pretty awful looking. My first thought was “oh my, how am I going to photograph that??” The cherries are all gooped up into a very moist crumble that looks, well, like something you don’t want to eat.
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