Happy New Year! I hope you all had a lovely holiday. I certainly did. It was fun, relaxing and very, very over indulgent. As many good holidays often are. So, like many people out there, I have started the new year with a few new inspirations. The first, to go along with counteracting some of [...]

Happy Holidays! I had visions of posting all 4 of the Christmas treat recipes I made this year (three different cookies from Saveur and some amazing chocolate caramels with sea salt from Pictures & Pancakes), along with the two pies, fingerling potatoes, roast beef (with yorkshire puddings) and brussel sprouts. Instead, I’m going to kick [...]

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 [...]

Do you ever feel just stupidly lucky? I do. All. The. Time. I’m not really sure what I’ve done to deserve all the amazing good fortune I’ve had. So, when my friend Nathan called me up a month or so and asked if I’d be interested in doing a bit of photography work in trade for a weekend at The Inn at Langley, I got to experience yet another one of those moments, and sent a big Thank You to the powers of the universe. The Inn at Langley is very high up there on one of my favorite places in the Northwest. The town of Langley, on Whidbey Island, manages to hit all the quaint buttons without actually turning sickeningly sweet. There’s a good coffee shop packed with as many locals as tourists, a natural food store that you can poke around in for hours, two weekly farmers markets within a stones throw, and a thrift store perfect for cheap-os like me who aren’t into paying antique store prices. But when I think of Langley, I think of The Inn.

Last week, I got the range of my dreams. I’ve been pining away for a commercialesque gas range now for about as long as I can remember. Some people dream about their wedding dress or owning a fancy car. I dream about cooking with gas. I have pretty much always made do with a simple electric range… there was that one span in college when the apartment came with a old, white enamel gas stove from the 50s which put out about as much heat as a few votive candles huddled together for warmth. I’ve managed to cook up some pretty amazing stuff with the electrics too. But always there was a longing for something industrial and packed with BTUs. In April, we had natural gas run to the house. We were just doing the furnace (which like many older Seattle homes was still running on oil). The stove would have to wait. Then, work picked up, and suddenly Cam and I decided, hey… let’s just bite the bullet and get the stove. At long last, my stove was coming home.