Tomato Watermelon Salad Recipe

I had lunch at Sitka & Spruce (Capitol Hill, Seattle) one weekend where I ordered a wonderfully fresh tomato watermelon salad. I fell in love with it instantly and decided to recreate it on my own. It’s a lovely summer salad because it has a great combination of refreshing ingredients, and the watermelon has a meaty texture so it works great as a quick lunch or dinner option! I’m always a fan of quick and easy meals.

Ingredients Makes 2-3 servings

• Small watermelon*
• 2 tomatoes*
• 1 1/2 cups feta cheese
• 3 sprigs of fresh mint leaves
• 2 sprigs of fresh basil leaves
• Fresh ground pepper
• Salt to taste

Directions 

1. Chop watermelon into bite-size pieces
2. Chop tomatoes into bite-size pieces
3. Mix watermelon, tomatoes, basil, and mint together
4. Serve with LOTS of fresh ground pepper and feta cheese (add salt to taste)

*To add more color to the dish, use some heirloom tomatoes or yellow watermelon.

I also love this dish for dinner parties because it can be prepped and chilled the night before. And all you have to do is garnish with feta and pepper before serving. Your guests will not expect watermelon in their first course… totally more exciting than a green salad!

Mandarin Cucumber Couscous Salad Recipe

Waking up to dark mornings again is a reminder that winter in Seattle is coming, so I decided to make a summer salad and cherish whatever afternoon sunshine that is left. I initially had this salad at a work event and adopted it at home. This is a fresh salad that will brighten your taste buds for sure… and it’s super easy!

Makes 3-4 servings

• 1 cup dried couscous
• 1 1/4 cup of water
• 1/2 of a medium red onion, minced
• 1 can/1 cup of mandarin oranges, minced
• 1/2 cucumber, minced
• 1/4 cup of cilantro, chopped (add more if desired!)

Directions

1. Add the dried couscous to 1 1/4 cup boiling water. Cook until fluffy and set aside to cool.
2. Mix the onion, mandarin oranges, cucumber, cilantro, and couscous.
3. Add salt and pepper to taste.

That’s it! 3 easy steps, and so delicious! Eat it with some protein or veggies and you’ve got yourself a quick meal.

Lion's Mane Mushrooms

I was browsing around the University District Farmer’s Market and stumbled across these giant, white mushrooms at the Sno-Valley Mushroom stand. When I saw these white, hairy things, I really didn’t know what to think of them - these are mushrooms? I had to try it.

The guy at the stand explained that the mushrooms are a great substitute for seafood because they have similar flavors and textures. He recommended the following simple preparation:

1. Heat up pan with butter.
2. Cut Lion’s Mane mushrooms into slices.
3. Once pan is hot, gently cook the mushrooms until its moisture is evaporated.
4. Add salt and pepper to taste, then serve.

Mushrooms in general are pretty simple to prepare. Of course, you can dress the recipe up, but I wanted to taste the natural flavors of the mushroom since I was trying it for the first time.

Like the man said, it had a seafood flavor, and the texture tasted quite different from a typical button mushroom. Tasted kind of like crab. I did end up eating it with some stone ground mustard (which was a surprisingly delicious combination) because the mushroom had a slight bitterness to it.

If you ever shop at the University District Farmer’s Market, please check out these mushrooms. Sno-Valley Mushrooms even has a “Grow Your Own” mushroom kit that sits on your kitchen counter! Seems pretty fantastical to me!

Yam Khai Dao Recipe

After eating at Pok Pok, Andy Ricker’s highly acclaimed PDX establishment, I was inspired to make Yam Khai Dao myself. Yam Khai Dao is a Thai Fried Egg Salad. I thought Wikipedia explained it best -

Yam (Thai pronunciation: [jām]) literally means “mix” but in Thai cuisine it normally refers to a type of salad-like dishes… Yam can be made with a wide variety of ingredients as its main ingredient and nearly any type of protein, vegetable, fruit, herb, spice, and noodle, or combinations… Besides the main ingredient, the basic recipe of a yam will nearly always contain sliced fresh shallots or onions, fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, and fresh or dried chillies. When herbs are used, it is usually Chinese celery, sometimes in combination with other fresh herbs such as spearmint, coriander leaves, spring onions and culantro. Very often, sliced tomatoes are also added in…

I referenced a recipe, courtesy of Food.com (click here), and found it extremely easy to make! Unfortunately, I’m not great at handling spiciness so I omitted the chilies. Overall, it tasted very similar to what I had at the restaurant, and it took only 10-15 minutes to prepare.

The recipe will provide more detailed instructions, but basically just like what Wikipedia said…

1. Mix fish sauce, sugar, garlic, coriander (aka cilantro), and fresh lime juice until sugar dissolves. Expect the dressing to be sweet & savory.
2. Fry (or deep fry) eggs. You can plate them chopped or whole (as I have pictured above).
3. Add tomatoes, greens, onions, or other ingredients to your “yam.”
4. Mix ingredients together and enjoy!

Who knew making Thai food could be that simple? :)

Making Coffee... The Whole Nine Yards

What I love most about visiting Jonathan’s family in Hawaii is his father’s backyard garden. His dad grows everything from Hawaiian papaya, apple bananas, to turmeric and purple sweet potatoes! It’s always a treat to wake up to fresh fruit and vegetables on the table.

One of his newer editions to his garden was a Kona Coffee Tree. Jonathan, being the coffee connoisseur (or snob) he is, wanted to harvest and roast his own beans for the first time. And of course, I was going to tag along for that adventure.

We went to the backyard and picked a handful of ripe berries. I attempted to eat one raw… and boy, was that a bad decision. It was super bitter and clearly not what I expected from a pretty berry.

Once we were done with our harvest, we went back inside to give them a quick rinse, and then the real work began.

Unbeknownst to me, coffee beans are actually the seeds inside the berries. Besides the flesh of the berry, another filmy layer (the scientific term known as “mucilage”) protects the seed, and both need to be removed prior to roasting. Once we had exposed all the seeds, we soaked them in water for a day to loosen the filmy layer.

And then they went out to dry for a few days.

The drying process further separated the husk/parchment layer from the bean, which finally prepared it for roasting!

Roasting required lots of patience. You had to make sure the beans didn’t burn, so every few minutes, we would have to swirl the pan. This process went on for a little under an hour, but even then, the beans were barely roasted (we had lost patience). After grinding and doing a proper pour over, it only produced a tea-like consistency versus a deep coffee hue we were expecting. It was sort of gross so I didn’t even bother taking a picture, haha.

Although our coffee wasn’t as gratifying as we hoped considering all the work we went through, it definitely helped me appreciate the process and respect quality sourcing. Every cup and every brew has its own story and attempting to roast our own beans brought that to life for me. I don’t know if I would do this again (Jonathan is already planning to retry it), but I had a lot of fun and learned a lot.

Side note: must give mad props to whoever figured out how to do all these steps just for a cup of coffee. Who would have thought this process dated back to the 15th century. The Ethiopians, Arabians, or whoever it was must have been pretty bored…