FoodFash

Adventure Begins in the Kitchen

Archives for August 2011

Just Another Cafe Hey Day

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Let me just start with…  It POURED today in Tampa!  So much so that I buckled a golf umbrella, spent 45 minutes driving four miles, and considered writing someone of importance requesting that Tampa now be called Atlantis.  And when it came time for lunch, I wanted only two things: something close and something cozy.

I speed dialed my favorite neighbor, Cafe Hey, and placed an order for the VLT sandwich and kale salad.  I butchered the VLT even more than usual (sorry chef!) by adding avocado (duh!) and nixing tomatoes and vegenaise.  The next modification would happen in the privacy of my desk…

I mile high piled the kale salad on my sandwich and went to town – cuban toast crumbs were a flyin’!  I didn’t care though, the dressing on the kale salad and the crunch of the lettuce and sunflower seeds were so darn good!

Here’s to hoping for a dryer tomorrow!

A Celebration

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“Look at you 1960s Tampa!”, I thought when I first saw this newspaper clipping of Jackie O rocking The Gasparilla Cookbook, “look at you…”.  It was 90 percent this photo and 10 percent my love for cooking that drove me to select the Cookbook Special Events Coordinator as my top placement in The Junior League of Tampa this year.  So you can imagine my excitement when I found out that the cookbook committee’s current focus was on the 50th Anniversary Edition of this very book.

On Saturday, we held our first event which celebrated the special edition anniversary reprint while honoring the past 60 years of cookbook committee chairs.  If this room had a head and a toe, it would have been decorated from one to the other in Gasparilla gear.

Gasparilla decorations in August = happiness for a Tampa crowd!

Our committee baked timeless Tampa recipes that perhaps Jackie O herself had prepared at one time or another.  And a fact like that, one that can neither be proven nor disproven, is one that I will kindly convince myself is truth!

Thankyounomoreplease

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Hellooooo last night of take-out!  I was just as excited to see this smiling Urban Thai bag as it was to see me.  I can’t wait to get out of this hotel room!

Ginger broth with mushroom dumplings?  Get in my belly now, please!

Next up was Yum Tofu, which was yum, as advertised.  At first glance, the dish looked super dry and I thought to myself “at least the soup was good”.  But after my first bite it was apparent the tofu was far from dry.  The dish, composed of fried tofu, cashews, red onions, green apples, and spicy lime dressing, was perfectly soaked with spicy lime goodness.  I see a Yum Tofu recreation attempt in my future, for sure.

And lastly, mango with sweet sticky rice, which was… the jam.

These 15 dollar minimums for delivery are killing me.  Somehow the combination of being in a hotel room and leftover takeout staring me straight in the face is pure gluttonous danger.

See you tomorrow Tampa!!!