thank you!

Hello Lovelies!

I hope you’ve been having a great week. Things are looking up over here. The funk I wrote about last week has lifted. Tiny buds and blooms are starting to show up here in Seattle, so it feels like spring is right around the corner. And last Saturday’s Love Trumps Hate fundraising dinner was a huge success!

I got to hang out and cook with some awesome people. I figured out how to make a pretty respectable tamale. I developed a recipe for a smoky, floral mezcal-marigold margarita that is going to be on heavy rotation when the weather warms up. Most importantly, we raised over $3000 for the ACLU! 

Before this dinner, I’d been feeling more than a little despondent about the future of this diverse, boundary-pushing, democratic nation I call home. I know we’ve got a lot more to do to protect civil right here in the U.S., but this fundraiser felt like a great start. We were able to support a great organization while also doing a little community-building here in Seattle. To my mind, anything that brings people together instead of tearing them apart is good news. We need more of that. Especially now. 

To keep this spirit of community and engagement alive, I plan to organize some more fundraising events this year. I’m thinking maybe a community potluck. Or a soup night with homemade bread and wine. Or an old-fashioned ice cream social. Let me know in the comments below what sort of events you’d be interested in! If you’d like to volunteer for future fundraisers, shoot me an email.

I’d like to send out a HUGE thank-you to all the hard-working volunteers who made this dinner happen: Alex, Ellen, Erin, Kaylah, Linda, Marianna, Nicole and my sweet mamma! I’m so grateful to Danielle for shooting the event. It was such a pleasure to have a talented photographer to capture everything so I could focus on cooking! And an extra dose of thank-you goes to Beau, who first had the idea for this dinner, put up with me being a total crazy person while I planned and prepped for it, and who washed a mountain of dishes afterwards. (You’re my hero, Babe!)

I also want to send out a heartfelt thanks to the local businesses who so generously donated to the dinner: Book Larder for allowing us to use their space, Honor Society Coffee for providing us with their amazing coffee, Marigold & Mint for sending over such stunning flower arrangements for the table, and Tieton Cider Works for offering several cases of thier beautiful dry cider, which we transformed into a sangria blanca with pineapple and serrano syrup (recipe coming soon). 

I feel so grateful for the outpouring of support around this dinner. I couldn’t have done it without all you wonderful people!

XO,

Olaiya

All photography in this post by Danielle Elliott. Click here to check out her beautiful portfolio!

P.S. There’s only 1 spot left for the Paris food and photography workshop I’m leading with Yossy Arefi in May! Click here to make it yours.

my kind of summer fun

I’m going to level with you. 

After all my talk about summer fun and more play in the month of August, I’ve been dragging through this week like the walking dead. Last Saturday I hosted the pop-up dinner I’ve been telling you about. It was a huge pleasure to have such a diverse and interesting group of people gathered around my table. And this first big party felt like the perfect way to baptize our new house.

Kyle and I prepared a table for twenty in the back yard with white linens, dahlias from the farmers market and vintage silver and glassware I’ve been collecting for over a decade.

We served radishes with spicy tuna butter and salted watermelon cocktails to start. (We Seattleites are notoriously socially awkward, so I make a point of starting all my dinners with a little kick to get the conversation flowing!)

Then there was king salmon crudo with pickled blackberries and creme fraiche. Grilled zucchini with homemade ricotta, honey and toasted barley. Smoky lamb on a bed of tomatoes and grilled cucumbers with a killer walnut-herb sauce. And we finished the evening with an Eton mess featuring fragrant grilled peaches, peach sorbet and pistachio ice cream. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty proud of the meal. 

But the best part came late in the evening, after dessert had been served and the coffee had been poured. I stood back and just watched our guests enjoying themselves. Their faces glowed in the candlelight as they talked and laughed. I floated around taking photos and catching bits of conversation as they drifted up into the summer sky. 

And felt an immense sense of satisfaction. 

Earlier in the evening my friend Sharon had explained how she feels out of balance if she goes too long without cooking. How returning to her kitchen and the meditative act of preparing food steadies her somehow. I told her it was the same for me.

But later I realized that wasn’t quite right. Cooking does restore me. My kitchen is a space to create and play and nourish myself. But I start to feel a little off-kilter if I go too long without cooking for others. When I worked in restaurants, this was a daily occurrence and I took it for granted. Now that I mainly cook at home, I feel a kind of compulsion to gather people around my table. The longer I resist it, the stronger it gets. Until I find myself planning elaborate Fourth of July barbecues and Moroccan-themed potlucks and five-course pop-up dinners.

That moment standing there watching the smiles pass over our guests’ faces was worth all the planning and shopping and schlepping and prepping it took to make the dinner happen. It was worth spending last Sunday on the couch too tired to do anything more than watch Parade’s End and order takeout. It was it’s own kind of summer fun. 

It may not have been as relaxing as swimming in Lake Washington, eating ice-cold slices of watermelon and working on my napping skills, but I don’t regret it for a minute. 

roasted chicken with smashed peas, rhubarb and aleppo honey

As promised, this week I have a fantastic recipe for you from my friend Kyle. For those of you who don’t know him, Kyle currently runs the kitchen at The London Plane and has honed his skills cooking at Sitka & Spruce, The Corson Building and Le Pichet. He’s the real deal: a first-rate chef, a teller of cheesy jokes, a connoisseur of dope sneakers. In short, an all-around a cool guy. 

He came over last week and cooked this Roasted Chicken with Smashed Peas, Rhubarb and Aleppo Honey. And holy crap was it good. I never get that excited about roasted chicken. Because how sexy can chicken be, right? Well I’m here to tell you this is one sexy bird.

Kyle roasted our chicken to golden perfection, perched it atop a pile of tender English peas smashed with crème fraîche and garnished it with tart roasted rhubarb and spicy-sweet aleppo honey. Gorgeous? Yes. Delicious? Yup. Easy? It came together in under an hour start-to-finish. 

So this weekend, I urge you to go forth and roast up this chicken while there’s still some rhubarb kicking around at the market. (If there’s no more rhubarb where you live, I’m thinking some tart cherries would be brilliant, too.)

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