Culinary Adventures with Camilla

On the weekend between Jake's birthday and my birthday, we grabbed the boys, headed up to the East Bay, and crammed in a quick (just 24-hour) family celebration. I scheduled a few things, but two were musts: one was finally getting to the Donkey & Goat tasting room and another was brunch at Wat Mongkolratanaram, the Thai Buddhist temple in Berkeley. More on that adventure soon. In any case, I emailed back and forth with Jared, thinking that I would finally get to meet the winemaker whose esoteric wines make it on my table at least a couple of times per year. Remember my Tasty Murder Dinner ? Or when I paired their 2013 Meandering with my parsnip dessert for The Feast Nearby ?? I'm a huge fan of their winemaking style...as you can tell. But, our meeting was not to be. However, he did arrange for me to take home a special bottle and assured me that kids were absolutely allowed at the tasting room. Sweet. In the Tasting Room... Erin took good care of...

It's not Throwback-Thursday, but I had to share this. When I was pulling cookbooks off the shelf last night for our April Random Recipe selection , I came across this old binder...and I was floored. At one point I lived with three other girls in a house on the north side of campus and we shared cooking duties. Everyone had one assigned night, except for me; I had two. How that happened, I have no recollection. But I remember starting the binder so that the other girls could flip through and pick recipes that we had all tried and liked. One of my roommates made tuna noodle casserole every single week. Every. Single. Week. And it wasn't a healthy tuna noodle casserole. It had an entire bag of Lay's potato chips crumbled over the top! Yikes. So, the binder was supposed to nudge her out of her comfort zone. I laughed that my recipes were handwritten. I showed the boys and said, "See, at some point, Mommy's handwriting was legible!" I chuckled at my notes....

While we were at Millennium on a deliciously fun double date , we, uncharacteristically, opted to order beers versus a bottle of wine. Jake and Brian ordered two bottles of organic chocolate stout from Bison Brewing out of Berkeley. They craft their Original Chocolate Stout with Peruvian cocoa and describe it as "Barry White’s voice in a bottle." While Bison’s Chocolate Stout is not new to us, it is still as amazing as ever! It's rich with voluptuous flavors of dark chocolate and espresso, with a creamy, dry finish. The new-to-us beer was Uncommon Brewer 's Baltic Porter, an ale brewed with two of my favorite flavors: licorice and star anise. Late in the 18th century Britain's great brewing families were striving to break into new markets. For the Baltic Sea ports they created a version of their traditional British Porter. Styled like an IPA to preserve them for the voyage, those Baltic Porters served to ward off the chill winds of that northern se...