Food Maker, Chef, and Traveling Diner
During another evening around Santa Barbara, Brandon and I decided to break his boycott on Mexican food. After working a year and a half in a Mexican restaurant you need a little break from it, but we decided it was time to find some delicious …
Sin City has its alluring qualities and flashy devilish charms, but hidden amongst the countless yards of alcohol and not so flattering clothing choices, are the sweet and deliciously decadent, which my boyfriend and I found on our trip around the strip. Brandon is the …
Cheers
-Unrivaledkitch
I love food. It’s something that always makes me happy, challenges me, enlightens my senses, creates a sense of joy, and never ceases to carry my interest for more. And as you can see, I’m happily immersed in it most of the time. Lately, my …
Brandon and I seem to find our way out to Santa Barbara pretty often. It’s far from where I live, but only 30 minutes away from where he lives, so when I visit him, which is often, we have a tendency to head up there …
My sister-in-law, Viet Linh’s, birthday is just one day before my sister’s birthday. I’m always exhausted and super busy during March, but it’s always fun. For Viet-Linh’s birthday I was happily invited to dinner at a beautiful restaurant called Raphael. It’s located in the very …
Joanna is my Asian sister from another mother. We have high adventures including copious amounts of flowing mimosas or wonderful bottles of wine, delicious food, lots of life chats, and plenty of shit talking. We’ve grown and changed along with one another and made it …
If you haven’t had pork belly, you should eat it right away. Pork belly is brilliant, fatty, decadent and delicious. The sweetness and tartness of the tangerine is a really nice combination with sort of Spanish flavors. I love balsamic marinated steaks. They give that luxurious feeling of tartness and the char that you get when vinegar is grilled is something that is an unlikely flavor combination. I can’t really say anything more about sausage and Swiss chard. It’s probably one of my favorite combinations, though I do love a little rapini as well. But the Swiss chard gives a little bitterness and crunch to the polenta, along with sweet red onions and spicy pork sausage with fennel and other Italian seasonings, you honestly can’t go wrong. If you took the sausage out, and made spicy red onion marmalade with Swiss chard and rapini, that would be delicious as well.
Menu
Balsamic, Honey, Garlic, Parsley and Worcestershire Sauce Marinated and Grilled Skirt Steak
Tangerine, Cumin, Coriander, White Wine and Cilantro Marinated Pork Belly Slow-Braised Then Seared
Spicy Italian Sausage Polenta with Swiss Chard and Red Onion
Grilled Asparagus and Grilled Zucchini
It’s unlikely that you’ve cooked with me, unless we worked together. I have to be in the right mood to cook with others, and since I’ve mostly cooked on my own for the last year and a half, it’s a learning experience to cook with someone else in the kitchen. I love teaching and showing people how to cook something new, but I think it’s a mindset; you need to be in that mode of thinking. If I’m just creating from a space of freedom, it’s harder for me to vocalize exactly what needs to be done. Lucky for me, I have Bistecca who already pretty much knows what I’m thinking anyway and if I have my moments of insanity, he already knows how to deal with them. Like the occasional, “Hey don’t burn my stuff!” Even though he’s cooked a million steaks and grilled a billion vegetables before. I can be quite the kitchen tyrant at times; it’s a territorial thing. He got a pretty amazing meal out of it, so I think it was worth it. I’m sure you’ll see many a brilliant meal from the two of us in the future, but this one was pretty phenomenal.
cheers
-Unrivaledkitch
I have a great love for American comfort food. I know most people tend to think of comfort food as just southern style but what I’m talking about are the dishes that comfort us in our own way. My mom fried chicken that she shook …