Topped with chocolate ganache, a dusting of cinnamon, and a Hot Tamale.

Want the recipe? It’s below the cut.

Ingredients

CAKE

• 1 (18.25 box) chocolate cake mix
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground ancho chile pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 1/4 cups water
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil 3 eggs

GANACHE

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 10 oz fine-quality chopped bittersweet chocolate

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F and line cupcake tray with paper liners.
2. Mix box cake mix with all the cake ingredients until smooth.
3. Spoon batter into cupcake liners, about 2/3 full.
4. Bake cupcakes until they come out clean in the center with a knife or toothpick.
5. For ganache, bring cream to a simmer in a sauce pan. Whisk in chocolate until smooth.
6. Transfer the ganache to a bowl and let it cool for about 4 hours so that it is cool yet still spreadable. If it’s too thick, let it stand at room temperature until slightly softened.
7. Frost cupcakes and refrigerate them so that the ganache hardens. Sprinkle with a dusting of cinnamon and top with a Hot Tamale candy, if so desired.

Made with fresh herbs from my rooftop garden.

Well, let me tell you.

So. I admit it. I’ve been sucked into the vortex that is Kdrama (Korean Drama). And I blame Netflix (though they’re probably happy with this complain in light of all the other complaints they been getting). My gateway drama was My Princess, which was light and fluffy as an angel food cake. (I regret nothing!) Seriously, it’s super cute. I might not watch it and feel feelings like I do when I watch say, Lawrence of Arabia, but I like it for what it is.

Starring Song Seung Heon and Kim Tae Hee

If you allow me to digress further, Mindy Kaling puts to words how I feel about such romantic comedy fluff:

I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

So, all that said, after I finished My Princess, I moved on to a Kdrama called Pasta. As you might imagine, it features a lot of pasta.

And that’s my story about how I decided to make this pasta dish. Good story, huh? Consider making this meal and sitting down to watch a Kdrama! You might or might not regret it! But as I said, I regret nothing, not even sharing all of this with the blogosphere!

Not sure what I think of the show so far, but the food looks tasty!

Now on to the recipe!

Creamy herbed linguine with pan-seared scallops

Ingredients

• 8 ounces dried linguine
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves, diced
• 8 ounces clam juice
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil
• 1/2 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
• 1/4 cup whipping cream
• 6 sea scallops
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Cook pasta in a pot of boiling salted water until tender but still firm. Drain and set aside.
2. In a large saucepan or pot, heat oil and sauté garlic until fragrant (about 30 seconds). Add clam juice, basil, thyme, and parsley. Cook for 3 minutes. Add cooked pasta and cream to the pot. Toss over medium-high heat until sauce coats pasta. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
3. Rinse and dry sea scallops. Lightly season with salt and pepper. In a medium-high frying pan, melt butter and add scallops to hot pan, cooking for about 3 minutes on each side until golden. Remove from heat and serve on top of pasta.

Godzilla’s coming next. You heard it here, folks.

My uncle's dog, Angie, looks freaked out against the menacing clouds in South Carolina. (c) RWS

Anyway, after the earthquake, some coworkers and I made a 4 mile trek into the city (the Metro was Inauguration-level crowded). Our destination? RFD’s! “A world of beer in the heart of the city!” They’re not joking. They have a booklet of beer. Magically, before we evacuated our building, I had enough time to print out 3 So What’s the Deal coupons I previously bought for 5 samplers and 1 full beer EACH! They were mostly delicious.

I saved the list, but man... there's a lot here. Split among 3 of us! 3 more came later; our first choices were tapped.

Ok, in order starting from top right working down:

• Top Right to bottom: Chocolate City 1814 ESB; Chocolate City Cornerstone Copper Ale; Crispin Artisan Hard Cider; Choc City Cervezas Nacionale Black Lager (Dark pint glass)*; Evolution Lot # 6 Double IPA; Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA (Fun big glass); Lost Rhino New River Pale Ale; and Heavy Seas Marzen Amber Lager (Amber pint glass)
• Top Left to bottom: Oliver’s 3 Lions American Style Brown Ale*; Oliver’s Irish Red Ale; Port City Optimal Wit; Starr Hill Double Platinum; Starr Hill Amber Ale*; St. Louis Framboise Lambic; and Stone Sublimely Self Righteous Black Ale

We also had Black Diamond Bourbon Aged Dubbel Grand Cru (holy cow was it boozy!); DC Brau Penn Quarter Porter*; and Heavy Seas Red Sky at Night Imperial Saison*

* table favorite!

It was pretty crowded, though. Our server was overwhelmed, but friendly. And personality goes a long way! Plus, she got our 18 beer order correct and kept them all straight! Amazing. When we were done, I can’t say we could do the same.

Then this weekend, a hurricane swept through the east coast. While it was still pretty far away from the DC area, we lost power for a while and it rained in our chimney. To lighten things up a bit, my husband took up a dare from a friend to grill during a hurricane. Now, we’ve grilled in a blizzard, but this was another animal. We had to light the chimney under our back porch, then rig up a 3 umbrella system to block the wind and rain.

My husband got dared to grill during a hurricane. Don't challenge a Milwaukee man when it comes to grilled, encased meats.

We got this great corn from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box from Great Country Farms! For those who don’t know about CSAs, it’s amazing. You pay a set price, and you get a box of produce each week. This week we got corn, a boatload of tomatoes, an eggplant, some green beans, peaches, a potted plant (it made it through the storm!), and a few cucumbers. You have to be creative, but you’ll get the sweetest of the sweet and the crispest of the savory.

You can't tell from the color of his AWESOME "Hench" Venture Brothers shirt, but he's soaked from head to toe.

So, I have to admit, that before my husband, I didn’t know how to grill corn. That sounds so ridiculous, but it’s true. The key is, apparently, soaking the corn for over a 1/2 hour before you toss it on the grill, then firing it until the husk is charred. Yum! No butter needed.

Not too shabby for grillin' in the rain!

In the end, it was a pretty good day. We didn’t lose power until after we went to bed. In the morning, we took time to read, play cards, and just sit and hang out by our hand crank radio. The sun came out, and we cleaned up the yard. I have to say, I was a little disappointed when the power came back on.

Fresh rabbit cooked with farmers' market fresh vegetables.

When I was a little girl–about seven or eight years old–my parents drove down the street from my Wisconsin home to a nearby far. There my father purchased two bunny rabbits and brought them home. In our backyard he built a hutch from two-by-fours and chicken wire and the rabbits moved in. One was a black rabbit with sleek ears, and I named him Checkers. The second rabbit was a brown bunny, her fur almost like a tabby cat’s, save for a puff of white fur that served as her tail. I called her Cottonball.

My siblings and I would go visit the hutch regularly and drop in offerings of carrots and lettuce for them to eat. Eventually, the bunny family expanded and there were a dozen tiny little bunnys–black, white, and brown–hopping around. For my birthday party that winter, I brought in a box of bunnies into the house and let them hop around inside to entertain myself and my friends.

But then one day I went out to the hutch and Checkers and Cottonball were gone. The bunnies were all there, but where where the original two? I ran inside searching for my parents, but the search ended quickly when I walked into the kitchen and saw my grandmother hard at work at making dinner.

One plus one equals two.

Some people don’t eat vension because of Bambi. I didn’t eat meat for weeks after that incident, and for the next twenty-two years, I never had any desire to eat rabbit. But things change, and, the boy (now the fiance) does enjoy rabbit.

So if you survive this story of childhood woe and are still interested in this recipe, continue reading!

The local farmers’ market has been offering up fresh rabbit as of late, so during last week’s trip there we got one fresh one to go. Because of the aforementioned aversion to eating rabbit, I really didn’t know any recipes offhand, so I went to my go-to website, Epicurious, and found this recipe for rabbit ragu, and it turned out pretty good!

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 (1/4-lb) piece pancetta (Italian unsmoked cured bacon), cut into 1/4-inch dice
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh sage
• 1 1/2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
• 1 (3-lb) rabbit, boned by butcher and meat cut into 1-inch pieces (1 1/2 lb boned)
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 medium carrot, chopped
• 1 celery rib, chopped
• 1 cup light dry red wine such as Pinot Noir
• 1 (14-oz) can Italian plum tomatoes in juice, drained and chopped
• 1 1/4 teaspoons coarse gray sea salt
• 1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

This is a combo of a couple of recipes to make it my own. I did borrow mostly from the Chicken Breasts and Morels recipe from the Mycological Society of San Francisco‘s cookbook. Many people suggest to soak fresh morels to get off all of the grit. Don’t do it! This mutes their flavor. Just give them a good shake and lightly dab them with a moist cloth. MSSF offers other great morel tips, too.

I paired this dish with my homemade pasta, but that's a recipe for another post.

Ingredients

• 2 dozen fresh morels, sliced (I didn’t quite have this many, so I rehydrated some mixed mushrooms in the beef broth below. Save the juice!)
• 4 chicken breasts, skinned, boned, and pounded flat, lightly floured
• 5 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 2 tablespoons Marsala (or more, I don’t judge)
• 1/4 cup beef broth
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 Tablespoon thyme, chopped, to taste
• Salt and pepper

Flour the chicken breasts lightly. Preheat your oven to 250º F. If you’re using dehydrated mushrooms, heat the broth until almost boiling. Turn off the heat and dump in the mushrooms, powder and all. Allow to steep for 30 minutes, depending on the size. Lightly squeeze out the mushrooms and set aside. DO NOT THROW AWAY THE JUICE!!!! It has all the flavor from those itty bitty mushroom bits and you need the broth later.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the butter and the oil in a sauté pan or skillet. Sauté the chicken quickly, about 3 minutes on each side and remove them to a heated pan or heat proof serving platter.

Deglaze the pan with Marsala wine. Pour the pan drippings and juices over the chicken and stick them in the preheated oven.

Melt the the rest of the butter (3 tablespoons) in the same pan (hooray for less cleaning!). Add the morels (or other mushrooms) and cook until they become semi-dry. Add the beef broth and cream and let it cook down into a sauce. Add the thyme and salt and pepper to taste.

Place the chicken breasts on a warm platter and cover with the sauce just before serving.

**Cream wonderfully hides bad dishes. This is not one of them. If you screw something up, just add a bit more.

Caroline: When I first became a vegetarian almost 23 years ago, vegetarians were lucky if a restaurant had a Garden burger on the menu. Nowadays, not only do many places serve their own veggie burgers, but DC has a high-end restaurant serving raw vegan food. I am not a vegan in daily practice, and I am not interested in the raw food diet craze, but I do love to eat vegan whenever I can. And an upscale vegan dining experience? Where do I sign up?!?  The answer, of course, is Elizabeth’s Gone Raw. (Review, pictures, and the word “hooha” after the bump!)

An example of the delights at EGR. (C) Elizabeth's Gone Raw Website

There is one menu at Elizabeth’s – a five-course tasting menu. By “tasting,” they apparently mean “stuffing” because we were already starting to fill up by the “Refresh” course of strawberry lemon sorbet (um, where can I get a vat of that to “refresh” me during the rest of the hot days of the week??). We didn’t care – we kept eating.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. With one menu, there’s nothing to order except drinks. Each Friday they serve a choice of two different fresh, organic cocktails that can be served with or without alcohol. Organic vodka for me, please! Served in nice-sized glasses, these drinks almost took me away to the Caribbean. (Almost. But then I got distracted by the large portrait of a naked Renaissance woman on the wall. A little jarring to me, but as my husband pointed out, you can’t see her hooha, so it’s not so bad.)

The menu offers a choice of a wine pairing for each entree, but I chose against that due to my lack of interest in pinot noir. Our pleasant and welcoming server, Jake, promptly dispatched the sommelier to our table to discuss my preferences. Obviously knowledgeable in wine, the French-sounding man made me want to tour wineries in France. Don’t ask me what two wines he chose for me, but they were lovely and I enjoyed both to the fullest.

Okay, back to the food. They start you off with a basket of kale chips (and they’re not considered one of the five courses!). Two warnings: these will make you moan, and they WILL fill you up! Made in a dehydrator (as opposed to baked or fried), covered in nutritional yeast, cashew paste, lemon, and sea salt, these are some of the greatest things I have ever tried. They do sell bags of them at the entryway; we managed to leave with only two bags to avoid looking like huge gluttons. Plus, it would have been rude to not leave some for others.

The first course was a cold cantaloupe soup with basil “cream.” They leave both a menu and a list of ingredients (brilliant!) on the table for you to refer to as you inhale your food eat slowly and civilly. The cream was made out of coconut water and macadamia nut, with other seasonings for flavor. A lovely, refreshing dish – my husband and I both enjoyed it, but not something I would seek out. That being said, I love the uniqueness of the dish and look forward to trying any and all of Elizabeth’s creative offerings.

The second course was a salad of shaved fennel, beets, onion, and oranges. I am a sucker for a beet salad. Everyone does them, but this one was actually different. Usually, the beets are cubes, or chunks of some sort, but Elizabeth served them in shreds, which was a really nice touch. The flavors were light and just right. A thoroughly appreciated salad.

I’ll move on to the fourth (main) course because I already mentioned the refresher sorbet. (Although, I will say, some sorbets can be icy and rough – not at Elizabeth’s! Smooth and packing a cold punch of happiness right into your mouth.)  Thai noodle salad with coconut milk, cilantro, green papaya, spiced cashews, and chili paste was on the menu for our night. The noodles were made with kelp! How? Not a clue, but who cares!?  Delicious. The coconut milk sauce was absolutely wonderful. The spiced cashews made me happy. The chili paste comes in a side dish so that you can use as much or as little as you want. Having some foresight, I dabbed a little on my plate to test the spiciness (this was some bright red chili paste with seeds throughout). My husband, being overly excited for a bowl of spicy Thai noodles, took more of a “dump it all over my food” approach to the chili paste. Well, I haven’t seen him struggle this much with spiciness since he unknowingly popped a whole chili pepper in his mouth at our favorite Indian restaurant. So, be warned – the chili paste is spicy!! It also, however, has what many spicy sauces lack – flavor. With a base of cashew nut paste, the texture was almost creamy and the combination just made a yummy addition to the noodles in coconut milk.

Lastly, dessert. I often don’t bother with dessert in restaurants these days because I’d rather enjoy my calories in booze and I haven’t found a dessert deserving of enjoying a rent-free home on my waist. Then I went to Elizabeth’s. Upon the arrival of the chocolate mocha mousse cake with chilled pressed espresso, I could only spit out an, “OMG!” and my husband (seriously, I am not adding drama here) shivered in joy while his eyes crossed. There was no speaking while we inhaled savored this dessert.

In all, this was a wonderful restaurant and excellent meal. Elizabeth herself wanders the dining room, helping servers and chatting with guests. All I can say is, well done, Elizabeth. You have done us vegetarian/vegan foodies proud.

Elizabeth’s Gone Raw (Open for dinner on Fridays only)
1341 L Street, NW
Washington, DC 20005
202-347-8349

And I’m a little beside myself with the excitement/nerves. So, what does one do with all that nervous energy? Make ginormous amounts of food, that’s what

Here are some of the recipes I’m preparing today while I watch 12 some hours of football coverage:

• Spicy Vietnamese Chicken Wings
• Blondies
• Pretzel Bites
• Pizza

And I’m going to attempt to fry cheese curds. Wish me luck. Wish the Packers luck (unless you’re a Steeler’s fan, in which case, you are dead to me).

But then I moved away to Tucson, Arizona (and sadly, the restaurant eventually closed so when I go home it is no more) and I wasn’t sure where I’d get my fix. Of course I attempted to make pelmeni myself, but I was still growing as a cook then and it turned out pretty disastrous. Before I boiled them the dumplings were about the size of a Superball. Neat little balls of dough filled with mashed potato season and salted. But a few minutes in a boiling water caused them to go supernova. The potato burst out of the dough. The dough quadrupled in size and suddenly I was faced with a pot full of potato bits and doughballs the size of baseballs. I still ate it of course, but needless to say, it wasn’t the same.

This gnocchi is seriously easy to make, especially if you use potato flakes...yes, potato flakes.

Enter Trader Joe’s. Enter gnocchi.

I spotted them in the freezer section (they’ve recently been vacuum-sealed and moved to the past section) and seeing “potato” and “dumpling,” I went in for it. They were pelmeni, but that day another food love affair began. I served them with curry powder and Sriacha. I combined them with kielbasa and vegetables.  Just last night, I cooked them up and served them with a Boursin garlic cheese sauce with grilled portobella mushrooms.

But last night’s dish didn’t involve Trader Joe’s. I’ve gone rogue, you see. I make my own gnocchi now.

In June of 2009 my boyfriend and I went to Rome. On our last night there, my boyfriend’s brother and his girlfriend (who were living in Trastevere at the time) took us for one last great roman meal. We went to the a restaurant in Rome’s Jewish ghetto, a wonderful, dreamy place called Il Giardino Romano where I watched a man peeling crate after crateful of fresh artichokes (we ordered fried artichoke hearts for an appetizer) while we waited for our meal.

I ordered the gnocchi in a fontina sauce, and the first bite I won’t ever forget. Soft. Pillowy. Delicious. Sorry, TJ’s, I love you, but you just don’t compare. Homemade gnocchi, friends, that what I bit into.

So of course, being me, I went home and went to work figuring out how I could replicate this in my own kitchen. There were plenty of things online, but I felt a little more vigilant: I went to the library. I went to Marcella Hazan, aka, our lady of Italian cookery. What Marcella told me about gnocchi I hadn’t seen online. See, most of the recipes I found for gnocchi added one ingredient too many: a binding agent.  While say, an egg, will keep your dough together a little more, the result isn’t the pillowy goodness of authentic gnocchi.

It’s not hard to make it work, though. Just take your time. If rolling the gnocchi off the tines of your fork to make the little grooves isn’t in the cards for you, you can move on. And for those of you really in a hurry, who still want to have homemade gnocchi but balk at baking and then mashing potato after potato…well, you can cheat. You can use potato flakes. I admit it. I’ve done it, and often.

Easy Gnocchi

• 1 cup mashed potatoes
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1 cup all-purpose flour

If using potato flakes:

• 1 cup potato flakes
• 1 cup boiling water

Elmo gives a press conference

The Capitol Area Food Bank opened its doors to the event. There must have been over 100 people there, including representatives from WIC, governmental agencies, nutritionists, and health department staff, and the families of people working and volunteering at the CAFB. Everyone was pretty excited, especially when Elmo came out.

Here's Elmo with Super Food Broccoli

After the funders said a few words, Art Smith of DC’s Art and Soul restaurant came out to teach everyone how easy it is to make delicious and healthful foods. Chef Art, formerly Oprah’s chef, has been involved with this initiative for some time. Healthful eating is near and dear to his heart, after the James Beard Award winner lost 100 pounds (!). He also runs the Common Threads program, which teaches low-income children how to cook healthfully.

Chef Art Smith and sous chef Elmo make some granola

400,000 Food for Thought kits will be distributed to families by the National WIC Assocation and Feeding America, to healthcare providers through United Healthcare and the Merck Foundation, and by other organizations. Check out the Food for Thought website. It has fun games, HILARIOUS videos (several feature Super Grover!), and fun sketches like Veg Side Story (West Side Story – “I just ate a veg named zucchini.” haha).

See, Elmo thinks it's a great time.