Dinner reviews from our Casa SaltShaker evenings
Just a quick look back at last week’s menu. A bit of playing around with past dishes and a couple of completely new ones. A Humboldt squid and sand perch causa – layers of potato with ají amarillo and lemon, and green onion and lime; spiced olive oil poached squid tentacles (jibía), sauteed sand perch… Read More From Tentacle to Ear
No, I’m not combining those two flavors in one dish, at least not yet…. Simply, the new dishes on the menu last week. We started off with our “vegetables a la tahitienne“, and moved swiftly into this new soup – a base of lots of fennel, with onion, garlic, allspice, salt and pepper, all simmered… Read More Fennel & Chocolate
In the scheme of things in the dumpling world, potato gnocchi are a relatively recent entry. If you stop to think about it, the potato is a new world crop, brought back to Europe by explorers sometime during the 16th century, and they didn’t catch on right away. Gnocchi, traditionally, were made from flour, eggs,… Read More Cabbage Flower Dumplings
Recently I’ve gotten a bunch of suggestions to create some videos around what we do at Casa SaltShaker. It’s a bit of a logistical nightmare – during the day, while prepping, I’m solo, which means I also need to do whatever camera or video work is going to happen. During the dinners themselves, we’re just… Read More Focus On… Dinner Prep
Seriously, it was all about the ‘shrooms. Except for the one person who wouldn’t try them because the smell of mushrooms makes her nauseous. Not to be cliche, but I think she’s just never tried them the way I make them. And we’ve had some hits on the mushroom front here at Casa S –… Read More It’s the shrooms, man.
Dan Perlman: Dark Meat Chicken and Celery Kevin Hopp: Potatoes and Cilantro Dan: It was time for round four of our online cooking competition, and we’d just simultaneously tossed off our picks for the challenge ingredients. This one was hard. It doesn’t look like it should be – no weird ingredients, nothing out of the… Read More Top-Master-Chopped-Iron-Chef #4
As the winter draws to a close here tourism is on the rise and business is picking up. Along with more folk from other lands, we’re also suddenly seeing a resurgence of locals coming for dinner. My first thought was that someone must have published an article in which we were included but asking folk… Read More Classic Reinterpretation
With Henry still away, and a mountain of things to catch up on, I’ve limited the number of dinners over the last two weeks since returning. I’ve been spending a lot of time experimenting with recipes, some of which will be showing up over the next few weeks, some of which already have. Given the… Read More A Slow Restart