Dinner in Seattle

We all met up in Seattle this summer at the Wilson's Phinney Ridge house for another dinner adventure.  The theme?  Grilling!  Our high hopes for grill marks, however, were unfortunately not fulfilled. A mere few minutes into getting things on the grill we realized we had run out of propane, and quickly changed gears and finished everything inside.  The meal still turned out great, just not quite what we had intended.

We made BLT Bread Salad from the July/August Food Network Magazine, and replaced the ricotta salata with queso blanco from Cornerstone Dairy.

For the bread we used Essential Baking Company's Rosemary Diamante

For another non-green salad we made Bobby Flay's Grilled Sweet Potato and Scallion Salad, which recipe was also from the July/August issue of FN Magazine.

Since we were supposed to be grilling, we figured why not make two kinds of meat?  First, grass-fed beef steaks from Cornerstone using the recipe from the July/August FN Magazine for Simple Sirloin Steak with Chimichurri.

The second meat dish was Herbed Grilled Chicken Wings from the July Bon Appetit.

All components of the dinner tasted great, despite the glitch in the plans!  After the stress of the grill not working, Wesley decided to relax in the hot tub for a while...

For dessert we made Miette's Miniature Cheesecake from Hummingbird High.  We encountered a couple set-backs with this as well.  We made it with homemade cream cheese and creme fraiche (for the topping) from Cornerstone, and the batter for the filling kept separating while mixing it.  It also came out much flatter than the photos from the recipe.  Our makeshift hot water bath (since we didn't have a large enough pan to put the springform pan in) didn't work out very well either, and some water got in and made the crust kind of soggy.  The cheesecake still had a nice flavor, it was just less than ideal in texture all around.