Book Review: 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads: No-Knead, One Bowl
I asked for a cookbook to review, received it in the mail the next day, and then I had to review the thing! That means shopping, cooking and then writing. Hence the mysterious gap in my blog posts. I chose 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads, by Judith Fertig. Remember when Mark Bittman published a no-knead bread recipe in the New York Times? It created a sensation, and since then everyone has been falling all over themselves to produce and publish recipes for such a bread, including

The Life and Death of a Seattle House: 700 West Kinnear Place
A woman, a man, and a teenage girl are eating homemade vegan burgers, sitting on floor pillows. The man and the girl,who are guests, pretend to like the burgers. He forces one down, but she hides hers in a napkin, asks to be excused, and flushes it down the toilet. The girl is enraptured by the house; she had murmured "sweet," as she and the man had climbed the steps to the porch, where they could see the Space Needle, most of Seattle's downtown, and even Mt. Rainier. The woman had loved the man in a previous life, and the man is feeling sad about several things. The girl has been recently traumatized by violence and betrayal. The subtext of the scene is rich.But it's all artifi

In Which the Whole Family goes to Distrito in Order to Save on Babysitting
Distrito has been on our list for a while. The "cheapest" (really?) of superstar Jose Garces' restaurants, and the only one with a pink VW convertible you can eat in. So when it looked like yet another birthday was staring me down, we, and by that I mean I, made a reservation for all four of us. For our birthdays in the past, Mr. Dream Kitchen and I would get a sitter. This time we thought, maybe the boys are ready to appreciate some decent food, and maybe we'll save some bucks? I don't think we did the latter, but the boys loved it, and we all tried a lot of different dishes. My new discovery was pork belly in green mole, the unc

Popcorn, The One True Mennonite Way
Mr. Dream Kitchen's family of origin is Swiss-German Mennonite, going way way back, on both sides. You know those three-way mirrors they have in dressing rooms, and how if you angle the sides close in, and stand a few inches from the center, you can see yourself multiplied an almost infinite number of times? It's like that. There were some Amish too, way back when, and maybe some Amish Mennonite just to add yet more diversity. Thank goodness Mr. Dream Kitchen married Ms. Dream Kitchen to invigorate the gene pool by adding Irish, Scotch-Irish, English, and French. Maybe the next generation will mingle with Italians and Greeks! That would just be crazy.Anyway, Mr. Dre

Biba on Fire: A Pizza Story
Friday is pizza day at the Dream Kitchen.Ever since Biba Caggiano's Trattoria Cooking came out in 1992, I have been making my own pizza crust from her recipe. My book got scorched on the gas stove the day I first made pizza for my husband, who was then a nervous date pretending to like zucchini, and I was a nervous hostess setting my cookbook on fire. I think the book got soaked one other time, but maybe that was just Chris Schlesinger's