Park City, Utah

We had such an amazing trip to Utah. I'm not sure the picture I took can do justice to how beautiful it is out there. I am not a cold weather person by any means, but there is something about the beauty and vastness of the mountains out there that just have me enamored with this state.










This was my 3rd trip out to Utah with our wonderful tour guides, Zac and Jamie. We stayed right outside Park City and packed 4 days of snowboarding into our week long trip. A record amount for us, and my tired bones felt it by the last day! We were a little nervous upon our arrival, because it seemed like spring was right around the corner in Utah but the snow gods were good to us though, and we ended up getting fresh snow - LOTS of it - twice during the week.







Jamie and I even took a day off the slopes to travel to Heber City to try out a dance trance studio. We had a blast doing 90 minutes worth of songs we had never seen before, and they were kind enough to let us steal the stage and teach them 2 new songs too.



For as many calories as we burned on the mountain, we certainly did our best to replenish them with some of the most delicious food in Utah. We went to one of our favorite places in Park City, Maxwell's, twice. We ate Cafe Rio twice as well (what can I say, we know what we like.) We also had an incredible Italian dinner in downtown Park City at Buona Vita. The two stand outs, though, were High West Distillery and Red Iguana. High West is a whiskey distillery in Park City housed in a old garage with an eclectic menu and of course, a robust cocktail/whiskey menu.



The line outside Red Iguana on a random Wednesday evening was a great indication of what was to come. Their feature was the 7 different types of mole sauce which our waiter allowed us to sample. The meal was incredible, right down to my favorite part - the refreshing and unique pepino (cucumber) margarita.





We had a wonderful time being with friends, and enjoying long, leisurely dinners out to eat and taking naps and sleeping in on the off-mountain days. Both of us were so fortunate to have grandparents keep our babies and keep us abreast of happenings at home with FaceTime, video and pictures. I was admittedly more sad to leave Bo than I thought I would be, and by the time our last day rolled around I was wishing the Star Trek teleported was a thing because I wanted to be home and hold my baby boy IMMEDIATELY. Saturday was a long, long, long day of travel home. I am incredibly indebted to my mom for spending an whole week doing momma-duties to my little guy and taking great care of him.

Happy Birthday, Matt!

Matt turned 31 yesterday and he celebrated by taking an 8-hour long test.

Not fun.

Fortunately, we had a fun evening planned for when he got home. Dinner plans that involved about a pound of melted butter, to be exact.

We had friends Anne + Locke and Kate + Charlie over to be our guinea pigs for a surf and turf. Matt's first time cooking lobster - yes, he cooked his own birthday meal! - and it was a resounding success.

We had a great meal with friends and toasted to many things, including both Matt and Kate celebrating their birthdays and Matt and Locke completing their boards. No more standardized tests for another decade! Now that is prosecco worthy!

I am so thankful for this guy. He's my best bud, an awesome doctor, a doting daddy and now ... we can add lobster chef to his resume. I am so lucky to celebrate another birthday with him and toast to another great year ahead! Happy Birthday, hubs!

Greek Yogurt Based Ranch Dressing & Café Rio Creamy Tomatillo Dressing

I really, really, really love ranch dressing. It’s probably one of my greatest food weaknesses.  And I really don’t care for low-fat or low-calorie ranch dressing, it’s gotta be the real stuff.  One day it occurred to me that it was probably pretty easy to make and that I might feel a whole lot better about eating it if I knew what was going into it. Not only did it turn out to be super easy to make, but after a few experiments with Greek yogurt I came up with a recipe that’s mostly yogurt-based instead of mostly mayo-based.

I win! Pass the carrots and let’s start dipping!

The great thing about this is that you can make it dip consistency or salad dressing consistency, just by adding milk to it.  I keep this recipe hung up inside my spice pantry door now so I can refer to it quickly and easily.  All the herbs as dried, but if you had any fresh on hand I bet it’d make it even tastier! After consulting a few different recipes that were already out there, here is what I’ve come up with:

• 1 container of plain Greek Yogurt (some are 8-oz, some are 6-oz… to be honest, it doesn’t really matter)
• 1/2 cup mayo
• 1/2 t chives
• 1/2 t parsley
• 1/2 t dill
• 1/4 t garlic powder
• 1/4 t onion powder
• 1/8 t salt
• 1/8 t pepper
• Skim milk*, to desired consistency

The easiest way to make this is to put it in a container with a lid and just shake, shake, shake.

If you stopped right before the skim milk, it’s a great consistency to serve as a dip. If you want to use it as a salad dressing, just add a few tablespoons of milk at a time and keep shaking it up until it’s as runny as you’d like it to be.

I’ve been making my ranch this way for about a year now and I’m totally addicted. Today, I discovered that it also works great as the base for one of my other favorite dressings, Café Rio Creamy Tomatillo Dressing. My CSA box came with a whole bunch of tomatillos this week and I immediately knew it was time to make a batch of creamy tomatillo dressing.

Now to be perfectly fair, a Café Rio purist will not find this to be spot on. There’s a lot of great copycat recipes out there for the tomatillo dressing and the ones I’ve had the most success with use the Hidden Valley ranch package. Since most of them are basically starting with a ranch dressing base, I decided to experiment with my Greek yogurt ranch and see how it turned out.

(Spoiler alert: Delicious. Now I need me some pork barbacoa burrito to go with it!)

Again, I just looked at a couple recipes and kind of went with the common theme of what most of them were doing.  I mixed it all in the food processor, which made it super easy and creamy.

• Greek Yogurt ranch dressing
• 2-3 tomatillos, quartered
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 jalapeno, chopped & seeded
• juice from 1/2 lime
• 1/2 bunch of cilantro, rough chopped

If you started with a dip-consistency ranch dressing, you’ll probably want to add the milk to make it a bit runnier and more like a salad dressing. You also don’t need to chop things up really good if you’re tossing it all into the food processor (or a blender) which makes it super easy to make. 

My grocery store sells tomatillos over by the tomatoes. You remove the outer husk before chopping. The smaller they are, the sweeter they are. I still have a few leftover from my CSA this week so I think I’m going to have to try my hand at making some salsa verde next!

Happy Birthday, America!

I must admit I quite like having a mid-week day off from work! Of course, a long weekend to celebrate the 4th is always enjoyable but there was something kind of great about working a few days, having a day off and then having a little mini work week before the weekend showed up again. I vote for Wednesdays off every week, yes? Hooray for freedom!

I was quite lazy with my mid-week day off.  In fact, I didn’t even get dressed until I worked out mid-afternoon and got ready to head over to our friends’ David and Kathleen’s for a backyard barbecue. It was hot, hot, hot out but we made the best of it with cool drinks and lots of time in the shade and – best idea ever – orange sherbet push pops & bonbon popsicles!

Happy Birthday, America!

Dining in the Dash: King’s Crab Shack

Winston-Salem needed a restaurant like this.  A down-home, pretend-you're-at-the-beach seafood place. My husband has said for years Winston needed a "good seafood place" and I think we finally found it.  Yes, there is the one out by the mall but we hate driving out to that trafficy-retaily side of town and there are lots of restaurants that serve amazing seafood dishes - Mozelle's, Milner's and Meridian's come to mind - but this is the kind of place where seafood is the entire point and your meal comes in plastic red baskets with a side of perfect tartar sauce and a lack of any pretense. Basically, the only thing missing is a nearby source of saltwater.

As Anne wrote in her post (she always beats me to it!), we were originally attracted to what we heard was the weekend lunch special - all you can eat crab legs. Turned out that they were $28 per person, which I did not think was very special. (I often get confused by restaurants calling something special - do they mean it's just the only time you can get it or do they mean it's a good price for something they offer regularly? I think this case might have been the former, but either way we decided not to opt for it.)

The good news is, despite the initial disappointment of no endless crab legs, everybody was very happy with their meals when all was said and done. Matt loved his spicy catfish sandwich - he is a catfish aficionado and has been disappointed ever since Village Tavern stopped carrying it on their menu a few years ago!  I debated between a shrimp po'boy and clams and finally decided to go with clams. I love me some clams, and could easily have taken down 2-3 dozen of these suckers but since that wasn't an all you can eat special, I limited myself to a dozen plus a starter salad.  They were excellent - briney and delicious, with the right complementary sides of melted butter, a tangy cocktail sauce and pungent horseradish.  Matt had a Pacifico to go with his meal, and I perused the fun drink menu for future reference.

I liked the set up of the restaurant too - it had a really long bar area, plenty of tables on the inside and lots of outdoor patio seating. (Given it was our 100+ degree Saturday, no one was taking advantage of that... no big surprise.) There were enough things on the menu I'd come back regularly, and there were options for non-seafood eaters as well too. Our meal came to $35 with gratuity and everything, so that included 2 meals, a salad and a drink - which I think is very reasonable for delicious seafood! It was just an easy, laid-back place to have a delicious seafood meal. Definitely a place we will make future visits to!

Oh, and the ego boost in the ladies restroom sure doesn’t hurt either…

A review of our “Dining in the Dash” Project*

• Kitchen Roselli
• The Screaming Rooster
• Goat Lady Dairy
• the Taco Truck
• Sweet Potatoes
• Breakfast Of Course
• Bernadin’s
• Meridian
• Old Salem Tavern
• King’s Crab Shack (7/01/12)
• New Town Bistro
• Muddy Creek Café
• Winston-Salem Prime
• Spring House Restaurant (My Review - 5/11/12)
• Lexington BBQ
• Hillbilly Hideaway
• Mooney’s (My Review - 6/11/12)
• Vin205
• MamaZoe Michael’s
• El Maguey
• Chef Dion Sprenkle 

Shrimp Boil

I saw a photo spread of a shrimp boil (or “low country boil” as they are often called) in a Martha Stewart Living magazine years ago and, since this was before the days of Pinterest, had carefully torn it out and saved it and sworn one day I was going to do it.

So when we were meal planning for the beach trip and Anne said “Let’s do a shrimp boil!” I said “IN!!!” What better place to do it then where fresh shrimp is abundant!

Fortunately for us, Locke’s family had done them before so we decided he was going to be the head chef and then we loosely consulted another expert on all-things-Southern-cooking to refresh ourselves on the timing and order of ingredients into the pot. (I’ve always sworn I’d never use a Paula Deen recipe, but there’s an exception to every rule!)

It ended up being the yummiest, easiest, crowd-pleasing meal ever. The crab boil, listed in the Paula Deen recipe, was easy enough to find at the grocery store – it was a pack of herbs & spices basically in kind of little mesh bag like a tea bag that floated in the boiling water to flavor everything and then was easily scooped out. And then of course, we had Old Bay to put on the table to liberally shake on to everything. Using Old Bay always takes me back to Baltimore and makes me feel a teensy bit nostalgic!

Technically, if you’re going to do this authentically, you’re supposed to dump everything out on to newspapers on a table and just dig in – but since the table at our rental house looked like maybe it wouldn’t appreciate a couple pounds of steaming shrimp, corn and sausage poured on to it, we opted for bowls.  And then we indeed dug in!

Easiest recipe ever. Make it, eat it, share with happy guests.

Dining in the Dash: Mooney’s

Anne & I checked another restaurant off our list of must-try places in our Dining in the Dash project!  I know a lot of people are regulars at Mooney's, but somehow neither of us had ventured down 4th Street to try it yet.  In fact, when I tweeted that I was going at least 3 different people mentioned it was one of their W-S faves (and I even got a recommendation for a dish to try from Miriam.)

I was really happy to see Anne had snagged an outdoor table when I walked up - I love al fresco dining in the summer!  I decided to take Miriam's advice and go with a sampler plate because it seemed like a good way to try out a couple new dishes.  I've eaten a good bit of Mediterranean food but I haven't varied much from a few basic standards that I know I like.  So I decided the falafel as something completely new to me, along with some stand-by favorites like hummus and couscous.  And then I got the cauliflower just because it sounded good.  Anne ordered a moussaka that was a special recommended by the waiter. My biggest problem was narrowing down what to try on my sampler platter - I also really wanted to try the tabouli and baba ghanouj!  Just means I have to go back, right?

General food review: the hummus was excellent - very creamy and tangy.  I loved the couscous - I forget how much I like couscous because I don't cook it at home very much since Matt doesn't really like it.  I loved the addition of raisins in it for a hint of sweetness.  The fried cauliflower were great too - very light, not breaded or battered and they came with a sesame dressing for dipping.  The only thing I didn't love was my new dish, the falafel.  I didn't dislike it - but I was glad there were only two because I didn't find myself scarfing them down.  I also tried Anne's moussaka (and I'll let her review for herself) but I wasn't a fan - there was a spice in it I couldn't identify but I just didn't love.  Something that made it almost sweet... maybe nutmeg?  (Let the record show that I have no idea what moussaka is supposed to taste like though.)

I also thought it was fairly priced for the amount of food we had.  Our bill was $19 with tip for our 2 dinners (no drinks) and we both had leftovers to take home. One of my favorite things about our meal is that unlike a lot of dining out experiences, I didn't feel like the food was super heavy and I left full but not overstuffed.  While we were eating, Zac came by to pick up dinner there which gave me a lightbulb moment... I have a very small list of places that I like to pick dinner up from on nights I don’t feel like cooking because most take-out options end up being so heavy – I’d rather just eat a bowl of cereal!  So I might not race back here in lieu of some other favorites in restaurant (especially with my long list of places to try still), but there were so many other things on the menu I wanted to try I'm going to keep it in mind as a pick-up option for busy nights too.  I'll just have to remember to leave the couscous off Matt's plate!

A review of our “Dining in the Dash” Project*

• Kitchen Roselli
• The Screaming Rooster
• Goat Lady Dairy
• the Taco Truck
• Sweet Potatoes
• Breakfast Of Course
• Bernadin’s
• Meridian
• Old Salem Tavern
• King’s Crab Shack
• New Town Bistro
• Muddy Creek Café
• Winston-Salem Prime
• Spring House Restaurant (My Review - 5/11/12)
• Lexington BBQ
• Hillbilly Hideaway
• Mooney’s (6/11/12)
• Vin205
• MamaZoe Michael’s
• El Maguey
• Chef Dion Sprenkle 

*Yes, we added a few to the original list.  And it’s taking us awhile to get to them.  I anticipate this being a long (although enjoyable!) project.

Hot Dog 30th Birthday

The hot dog party has been months in the making.  Matt and I were watching an episode of Diners, Drivers & Dives last fall that featured a restaurant in Mt Pleasant, SC that had hundreds of different options all for one type of food: the hot dog.  Matt looked at me and said “we should have a hot dog buffet party!”  And the idea was born.

It turned out the perfect time to have it was right around my birthday – with great porch weather setting in, something to celebrate and Matt’s schedule being open – and so the hot dog birthday party was planned.

I can’t speak for our guests, but we both felt like it was a success.  It was an easy party to plan – hot dogs, toppings and a few sides – and a universally loved menu.  Matt added some extra special elements by ordering the delicious pretzel buns from our local hot dog place, Skippy’s, and a birthday cake from Cumberland Café, who made our wedding cake 5 years ago.  I faced my fears of manning the hot oil of a Fry Daddy that my coworker Susan had loaned me and learned that I actually have a hidden knack for frying things.  Who knew!  (I think it’s in our best interest that we return the Fry Daddy asap.)

At one point, I just looked around my porch full of happy friends, adorable babies and good food and just felt overcome with a sense of gratitude and happiness for the little life I’ve been blessed with.  Such a fun and happy night to cap off my 30th birthday celebration! 

Dining in the Dash: Spring House Restaurant

One of the many things I love about living in Winston-Salem is the restaurants.  For a small city, we have so many amazing options for eating out. And as our downtown continues to go through this revitalization process, there seem to be more and more wonderful places to choose from!

So of course that means we end up trying something new every time we go, right?  Of course not.  Like the townies we are, Matt and I had gotten in the habit of going to the same places over and over again.  After discussing this with Anne and finding that she and Locke were doing the same thing, we came up with a plan to make ourselves a list of places that we would try over the next year instead of going back to the same stand-by.  The only criteria was that at least one of us had never been or both of us hadn't been in over a year. And thus, our new project - Dining in the Dash - was born!

Here is the list we came up with:

• Kitchen Roselli
• The Screaming Rooster
• Goat Lady Dairy
• the Taco Truck
• Sweet Potatoes
• Breakfast Of Course
• Bernadin’s
• Meridian
• Old Salem Tavern
• King’s Crab Shack
• New Town Bistro
• Muddy Creek Café
• Winston-Salem Prime
• Spring House Restaurant
• Lexington BBQ
• Hillbilly Hideaway

Of course, Anne has beaten me to the punch with her dining review but I'm going to go ahead and post about it anyways.

The first place we picked was the Spring House.  I had heard about this new place a few months ago via Twitter and then from my friend Teri who raved about their mojitos. I'd read it was a former mansion from the "Millionaire Row" - the downtown 5th street area that was where the turn-of-century big shots had built huge estates - but which was now mostly converted to office spaces.  I love when old spaces are renovated to capture their original charm so I was excited to see what the renovations looked like.

It did not disappoint at all.  The setting is downright charming.  We lucked out with a warm spring night and the front doors of both dining rooms and the library bar were flung open on to a bright green lawn, a patio with more outdoor seating and a small collection of benches around a fountain where I could imagine comfortably waiting for our table with a glass of wine in hand.  (Fortunately we didn't have to wait since we had a reservation.)

The menu was fun and interesting, with lots of creative dishes that provided a twist on what I'd describe as maybe upscale home cooking.  I had the pork tenderloin saltimbocca and Matt had the chicken fried chicken.  (It came with a waffle.  He was pretty smitten.)  My pork dish was delicious and very tender, with an delicious smoky spoonbread for the side.  It didn't knock my socks off so I'd probably try another dish next time I went, but I definitely wasn't disappointed by it either.  I ended with a almond apple crisp that I generously passed around to share with the table, even though I could have easily hogged the whole thing myself!

One of the major features of the menu was their cocktail selections, which of course I didn't partake in, but would easily make me come back for another visit in a few months.  I would have gotten the drink Anne had - the twisted brown trucker.  It looked every bit as pretty as the description sounded and she gave it a thumbs up.  There's a couple different things that would bring me back to try this again: they offer a tasting menu which I think would be a great way to try many of the unique dishes they offer and the first Wednesday of every month has cooking classes.  Both of these are going on my to-do list... but I better wait until I get through our other places to try first.

I thought Anne summarized it well when she said it was on the pricier side if you did appetizers, drinks and dinner but definitely worth it for a nicer meal.  It would also be a great place to come for drinks and appetizers on the patio or the charming library bar.  We'll definitely be back!