Infusing grandeur into otherwise drab Monday mornings with five things/ideas/events for the week: I. Outrageously beautiful parrot tulips I received as a hostess gift. Recreate it with two dozen yellow, pink, and white tulips - or use my favorite florist In Water to brighten someone’s day. II.  One Hope Wine is teaming with acclaimed private chef Scott Spencerto host a dinner at my home Friday....

The “casual dinner” is, for better or worse, a concept that escapes me.  I crave the nuances of a perfectly planned multiple-course menu.  Settling for the straight-forward is painfully lackluster. This sounds excessive, but creativity in the kitchen and the methodical process of changing ordinary meals into the extraordinary keeps me inspired.  And, as I may have hinted before, I’m nothing if not passionate.                          This affliction has intensified over the past year to the point that I rarely make anything that isn’t for a formal dinner party.  It’s either an entire day spent slaving in the kitchen or chinese takeout from speed dial.  In an attempt to inject some gray into my black and white world, I’ve challenged myself to start cooking simple meals once per week.                As my culinary cohort, the Barefoot Contessa says, I’m “getting back to basics.”  And there is nothing more basic than a cheeseburger.  No aioli, no caramelized onion, no truffle oil.  Just meat, cheese, bun, and traditional pub-style trimmings.    The result was to die for.  Tangy danish blue just barely melted into medium-rare juicy sirloin is a combination a girl could get used to!  Even better – it only took me twenty minutes to make.  Though autumn is upon us, I will be keeping summer alive just a little longer by putting this grilled recipe into regular rotation.  I hope you will too!  xx tt         

As a new addition to t+t, I am going to bring a little grandeur to otherwise drab Monday mornings with five of my favorite things/ideas/events for the week: I. Celebrating Indian Summer with Strauss Organic soft-serve at Super Duper Burger II. Halloween tablescape in cream and gold, featuring this dapper gilded-skull III. Heaven is a Creme Brûlée Cart - catch the last Off the Gridof the season...

The raison d'être for Table + Teaspoon is to make cooking accessible for those lacking culinary gumption.  As I come upon the second anniversary of my blog, I realize that in recent months I’ve steered away from this initial goal toward more complex recipes. In an attempt to remedy this, I am bringing you one of the simplest dishes I’ve ever encountered that tastes every bit as good a meal that would take you an entire day to prepare. For those of you who’ve asked me countless times for easy chicken recipes, your wish is (finally) my command – it doesn’t get easier than this beer-braised shredded chicken.  The ingredients are as follows: two chicken breasts, one jar of salsa verde, one bottle of corona, one cup of chicken stock, and olive oil.  It takes a few minutes to prep, then you leave the concoction to brew for a little over an hour.  Once the chicken is tender, you break it apart with two forks.  That’s it! This meal is so delicious and versatile that I make it weekly.  While I’ve presented the chicken embellished with taco accoutrements you can make it even more simple (and more healthy) by serving it over brown rice, quinoa, or fresh arugula. I guarantee your guests will think you slaved for hours over this dish.  Happy easy cooking!  xx tt

  “Chocolate makes the heart race,” my devilishly handsome friend Kimball once whispered in my ear.  “But I tend not to like chocolate unless it’s very light or very thick,“ he warned.  “Soufflés and fudge – yes.  Cake and cupcakes – unequivocally no.”  Unfortunately for Kimball, I find most fudge boring and soufflés needlessly temperamental.   Months later when I offered to bring dessert to a Fourth of July bash, I remembered my friend’s chocolate phobia and decided to take it on as a challenge by crafting a cupcake so perfect that he would drop his unwarranted disapproval of the cocoa-confection. After researching the dry-cake phenomenon, I learned that chocolate cake often fails because recipes either call for less liquid fat than necessary, or require high temperatures that quickly suck the moisture out.  Through a little culinary R&D, I discovered that buttermilk is the antidote to dry cake, and that the oven should be set to 325 degrees, which is 25 degrees lower than I would typically bake cake. I’ve also discovered that non-chocoholics find chocolate cake topped with chocolate frosting daunting.  To remedy this, I made a raspberry buttercream by folding fresh berries into butter and powdered sugar.  The pale pink and slight tartness of the raspberry played perfectly with the rich chocolate cake.  Anxious that Kimball still wouldn’t love the creation, I added a chocolate raspberry ganache filling to ensure that the cupcake would transcend traditional levels of moist.  At first blush, Kimball decided that the cupcakes weren’t worth the trouble and opted to have one of the blueberry cupcakes that I brought instead.  But by the end of the evening when I spotted him reaching for yet another blueberry cupcake, I’d convinced him to share a chocolate one with me instead.  Miraculously, after a single bite Kimball was hooked!  He proclaimed loudly enough for the entire party to hear that the chocolate cupcakes were the moistest he’d ever encountered.  Needless to say, I never got my half of the cupcake.  I don’t think it’s presumptuous to say that Kimball’s heart will be racing a little more often now that he’s taken pleasure in my chocolate cupcakes.  xx tt

On occasion, something leaves an impression so indelible that it lingers with you long after your initial encounter, resurfacing just often enough not to be forgotten.  Chef Scott Spencer’s mushroom soup with truffle foam is one of those things.  Earthy in its complexity and achingly aromatic, this soup is nirvana in a bowl.  Or cappuccino cup, as it may be, because that is how Chef Spencer cleverly serves his fungi concoction. My first rendezvous with this treasure was at a seven-course tasting menu for a friend’s birthday a few years ago.  I’d suggested that the host use Chef Spencer and was delighted when his fare didn’t disappoint.  We were blown away by each course, but none so much as the mushroom cappuccino.  At first blush, I presumed that I was served a fancy morel-infused coffee drink that my taste buds were too plebeian to appreciate.  Luckily, the only part of the dish involving cappuccino is the cup.   The soup is a perfect juxtaposition of heavy wooded bisque and light truffle froth.  I immediately asked for the recipe, but was thwarted by the fact that Chef Spencer doesn’t use measurements.  Though I had the ingredients, I was too afraid to come up with the amounts in order to recreate the dish. As the weather recently turned from summer to fall, the memory of the delicious mushroom soup crept back to the forefront of my mind.  After poring over cookbooks and food blogs I finally reconstructed the elusive recipe for a dinner party.  The morning after my dinner, I awoke to three emails from guests requesting the recipe.  It appears that I will no longer be the only one dreaming of this wildly mouth-watering bisque.  xx tt

In a town of landmarks, Balboa Café is something of a San Francisco institution.  It has been since the year 1913 when those storied doors were first flung open.  Cheekily known for its cadre of cougars, this is where the city’s illustrious movers and shakers strike deals whilst lunching, and local glitterati come out to play once night falls.  The restaurant’s bartenders swathed in traditional pharmacy coats, dark wood and polished brass interior, and crisp white table linens bring a sense of stability to an otherwise fickle city.  And who doesn’t delight in an establishment where everyone knows your name?                         While the walls of the Balboa are utterly jampacked with generations of salacious secrets of the city’s swells, the one secret that isn’t fiercely guarded is its coveted Chicken Paillard.  Every Wednesday, San Franciscans of all stripes flock to the restaurant for the once-a-week off-menu offering of thinly pounded chicken breast breaded in panko and razor-thin shreds of parmesan topped with a Marsala butter sauce and served alongside a bed of arugula and cherry tomatoes.  But when, frightfully, it’s one of the other six days that isn’t Wednesday and your craving for paillard remains relentless, there has been no known cure. (It goes without saying that patience is not a virtue among the Balboa set.) Until now.  After politely inquiring (or begging) the linecooks for a list of ingredients and pairing it with some digital diligence, I came up with a homemade version of the celebrated dish, a version with which even the most discerning Balboa-goer would be hard-pressed to find fault.  As iconic San Francisco journalist Herb Caen (so iconic, in fact, that his namesake cocktail remains a choice libation) famously said, “when in doubt, the Balboa.”  And if you can’t go to the Balboa (or it’s a pesky non-Wednesday weekday), now the Balboa can come to you.  xx tt

It’s an age-old adage that you are what you eat.   But I prefer to think that you are who you eat with.  As my dinner parties have steadily increased (I find an excuse to host one every ten days as of late) the guest-list seems to change as readily as the menu.  This month I’ve counted thirty-two different people come through the revolving door that is my apartment.Last week it occurred to me that of the thirty-two, none were among the group of friends who pioneered the early days of my culinary endeavors.  These were the girls who suffered through deflated soufflés, dry chicken, soupy ice cream, and burned popovers.  Often there was enough time between courses to conduct entire dance parties.  Ah, the good old days… To remedy this, I decided to host a meal in their honor.  My typical dinner fare leans toward the high-end of the caloric spectrum, but for this menu I wanted to expand my gastronomic horizons by attempting something healthy (or at least healthier).   I put together the following: Grilled Kale Salad with Ricotta and Plums in a Honey Balsamic Reduction, Wild Mushroom Bisque with Truffle Foam, Pan-Seared Scallops with Tomato Beurre Blanc, and Chocolate Buckwheat Cake with Burnt Orange Ice Cream. The elegantly appointed scallops paired with rich butter sauce and topped with wasabi microgreens were a highlight of the evening, and certainly a far-cry from the hazardous attempts of dinner parties past.  The best part is that of everything I made that night, this was the easiest.  (In fact, in the milieu of the dinner party I forgot to photograph the final product so I quickly whipped up the dish again this afternoon). As my friends and I ate the opulent meal and sipped our wine, we reminisced about days gone by, shared our dreams for the future, and vowed to make this a more regular gathering.  I couldn’t be happier with my choice of menu for the evening, and more importantly – my choice of company.  xx tt

In a letter to her lover Catherine the Great once wrote, “my heart is loath to be without love even for a single hour.”  I suffer from the same affliction, as I am the most hopeless of hopeless romantics.  My immediately tough exterior prevents (actually, assures) most from knowing this about me, but I am one of those sentimental idealists who wears her heart on her sleeve and is shamelessly in love with love.  Truth be told, as cliched as it may be, I live for that intoxicating, reckless, irrational, drive you mad, can’t get enough, no holds barred, utterly consuming kind of love. Too often people settle for less than, perhaps because they are at a point in their lives where they are ready to settle down, maybe want to have children, are dealing with inherent relationship issues from their parents, or are simply afraid.  And no wonder, when the fairy tale notions that we’ve had since childhood seem somehow less than glittering, and certainly not about any real couple.  But every once in a while a couple comes along who handily defies this unfortunate state of affairs, and makes the very notion of love believable.  This couple for me is Michelle and Jody.                                           Michelle and Jody’s love is unmistakably authentic.  Charles Dickens, himself a painstaking realist, knew quite a bit about this when he opened his best known epic love story with “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  This couple is without pretenses, they know everything about one another – the good, the bad, the in-between.  And yet (or maybe because of this), they unwaveringly love each other more than anyone I’ve ever known.  I once asked Michelle how she knew that Jody was the one for her, and she replied “I’d rather fight with him than be content with anyone else.”   When Michelle called me the week before her wedding and asked me to make the placecards for her 70-person rehearsal dinner, I accepted without hesitation.  For inspiration, I called the wedding coordinator and asked what else was set for the seven tables.  The coordinator informed me that nothing else was planned.  Instantly I knew that I had to take the evening up several heartfelt notches by outfitting the space with complete décor in honor of the couple who inspires me every day. Playing off the color scheme of the venue (Catherine the Great might’ve delighted in the olive-hued velvet drapery just as fervently as I did), I chose a palette of green and gold.  The floral arrangements were without question white hydrangea, green verbena, white snapdragons, and leafy white roses.  For the placecards, I did my signature letter-stamped cream tags wrapped around each napkin with rustic twine.  But I needed that something extra to take the tablescapes to the next level. After a little research on Style Me Pretty and Pinterest, I decided to place a green apple in front of each setting with a hand-cut gold leaf inscribed with “M + J.”  (I was tempted to use an “H” for the couple’s soon-to-be last name, but apparently Emily Post frowns upon this pre-nuptial presumption).  The result was incredible because beyond the aesthetic appeal, it showed the couple just how much their friends love and support them.    Like Michelle and Jody, who unwittingly met on a fateful November evening at the Balboa Cafe, you never know when someone is going to come along, love you for exactly who you are, and change your life forever.  But what you should know is that the unwavering belief in love is a worthwhile venture.  This romantic is absolutely certain: “Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you…” xx tt