Back in Washington, so I must be cooking salmon

After our big wedding in Chicago, Abby, her parents, her younger brother Matt, and I all went out to Poulsbo for a more subdued reception at my parents house. I wanted to make the main course and wanted to do some classic Pacific Northwest food, so, of course, I cooked a whole bunch of salmon. 90+ pounds worth, to be exact. One of my favorite things about all of this was that we didn't get the fish at a supermarket. We got it here
from a local fisherman who sold us freshly caught salmon for the bargain price of $3 a pound. In all, I think we got 11 fish. Here I am inspecting the fish in the back of his boat.
Since there was a lot of fish, he just gutted them and left all the fun work of breaking them down to us. That took me a while, but it was fun to do.
Since he didn't just give us fillets, and, instead gave us pretty much the whole fish, I got to keep the best part, the salmon collars, which I roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper. I put the rest of the fish in a marinade of olive oil, brown sugar, parsley, mustard, and lemon juice and then cooked it on cedar planks. To get all of the fish done, we had three large grills going at the same time.

The whole hog

Evidently, Chinese weddings involve a lot of different traditions. One of them, which I thought was really cool, is the tradition of bringing a whole pig over to the home of the bride's family the day after the wedding. Since our new super-family is so big, we actually ended up getting two pigs. Here are some pictures.

MARRIED!!!!!

This will be one of the very few non-food related posts. However, being our wedding and all, I feel its worth breaking from the traditional form of our blog and putting in some non-food pictures.

First of all, I am very happy to say that the day was a huge success, and after various trips to the caterer (blogged about here and here), we got a fantastic meal. Here's that actual menu we went with.
Unfortunately, we weren't really able to enjoy our meals. Everyone we knew who has gone through a wedding said as much. We got maybe two or three bites, but this is more or less what our sweetheart table looked like long after everyone else had finished their meals
the food was pretty much untouched. We were too busy running around toasting each of the tables
and since we had nearly 300 guests, it took quite a bit of time to get around to all of the tables. The wait staff was kind enough to pack up our meals though, so we were finally able to eat at around 2 or 3 in the morning when everything had settled down and we were back in our hotel room
and while we didn't get around to eating any of our cake until about two days after the wedding, Abby did get the cake toppers she had always wanted.
Anyway, now that the food pictures are out of the way, here is a quick, pictorial timeline of our wedding day, if you want to seem more pictures, you can just go to my sister's blog or check out the photo albums on my Facebook page. These are all just snap shots from friends and family, and we are eagerly awaiting the professional photos.

Here are Abby and I walking down the aisle with our parents
A couple of Abby's friends from law school, who happen to be really really good singers, performed the flower duet while Abby came down the aisle. Unfortunately, this video gets cut off when everyone stands up to see Abby, but you get the idea.

Here's the church. Abby and I are seated up front while Father Davitti gives the homily.
and afterwards, with a new set of leis and rings, we walk back down the aisle together and exit the church.
After a couple hours driving around Chicago taking pictures with the photographers, we arrived at the Adler Planetarium for our reception, which started out with a cocktail hour on the terrace
and a lion dance (notice the great view from the terrace in the background!)
After the lion dance, everyone grabbed their name cards
and filed into the planetarium for dinner
which was followed by a fireworks show
A fantastic musical performance by the Gold Coast Orchestra
and lots of dancing on an absolutely packed dance floor.

The biggest Chinese dinner I've ever had

Nearly two years after we began planning, our wedding weekend finally arrived, and with it came massive, massive amounts of food. The night before our wedding, the Kina and Moy families along with the wedding parties got together for a giant post rehearsal dinner at Evergreen Chinese Restaurant in Chicago. This place was a bit of a last second choice. We were trying to find the winning combination of someplace that was affordable (we were feeding 70+ people), clean, close to the church, and had good food, and Abby's mom was able to strike a deal with this place the week before the wedding. It was awesome. Unfortunately, I didn't get many pictures of the food itself, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Here are a couple of table shots though. As you can see, they are pretty crowded.
Normally, Chinese banquets feature a lot of dishes and piles upon piles of leftovers are the norm, but at Evergreen, they went completely overboard (in the best way possible). Abby's mom and I went to the restaurant a few days beforehand to put down a deposit and go over the menu. I didn't want shark's fin soup, which was one of the dishes on the banquet menu we selected, so they gave us three to four different dishes in its place (I guess shark's fin soup is pretty expensive). I don't remember how many dishes we had, but there must have been at least 15, including Peking dusk, spicy whole shrimp, shrimp with candied walnuts and mayonaise sauce, stir fried lobster, fried rice steamed in lotus lead, crispy Jon Dory (a really nice white fish), beef with broccoli, crispy chicken, stir fried green beans, tofu with chinese brocoli, at least one kind of soup...the list goes on.

In addition to eating tons of food, Abby and I also performed a tea ceremony at the rehearsal dinner. Tradittionally, the bride serves tea to the groom's married relative before the wedding, starting with the parents
and then proceeding to aunts and uncles in order of age. In exchange, we get marital advice and red envelopes stuffed with money. By drinking the tea, the relatives signal that they are welcoming the future bride into the family. I am happy to say, all my aunts and uncles drank their tea.

Wedding tasting, round 2

Our first trip to the Food for Thought Kitchens was tasty, but none of the dishes they came up with were quite what we were looking for, so last week when Abby and I were in Chicago for a whirlwind week of wedding planing, we went back to the caterer's for another tasting. We had already picked out our salads and appetizers, so it was just main courses this time. Of the four we tried, three were fantastic candidates. Now we just have to narrow it down to the one or two dishes that we want to serve at the wedding, which will be hard since they were all so good.


First, we tried a seafood dish: Sweet Sake Roasted Wild Striped Bass with Dashi Soaked Soba Noodles, Wok Fried Vegetables, Tempura Fried Shiitake Mushrooms, and a Soy Miso Broth. This one is probably a keeper since (aside from tasting really good) we know so many pescaterians or vegaquariums or whatever you call people that make seafood the one exception to an otherwise vegetarian diet.

The next two dishes out were both chicken. As I've blogged about before, ordering the chicken dish is a good way to see how good a kitchen is. You can go to a lot of reputable restaurants and get a somewhat dry pan roasted chicken. This place, it turns out, does chicken better than most restaurants I have been to. The truffled chicken breast is outstanding.

Here's dish one:

1) Frenched Chicken Breast with Summer Truffle with Garlic-Braised Baby Bok Choy, Black Beauty Eggplant, Tri-Color Carrot, Basil Glace

2) Pan-Roasted Chicken Breast Grilled Fingerling Potato, Asparagus, Marconi Pepper Chutney, Enoki Mushrooms, Sherry-Ginger "Reduction"

Of the two chicken dishes, the first one was a better match with the flavors we were looking for.

Finally, we tried another take on braised shortrib, a dish we had tried at the initial tasting. This dish was a bit on the heavy side for a summer meal, but it was damn good and may be hard to pass up on.

Star Anise Braised Beef Short Rib with Scallion Potato Puree, Cippolini Onion, Sugar Snap Peas, Shitake Mushrooms.

Wedding planning

In early September, Abby and I went to Chicago to go to a friends wedding and get some of our own wedding planning underway. We spent a day running around the city to meet with the photographer, check out a church, a bakery, the venue, and, finally, at the end of the day we went to the caterer's main kitchen for a tasting.

We tried out three salads. Here are two of them. I forgot to take a picture of the third one. We also tried a number of hors d'oeuvres, some good, some not so great. We think we'll go with the last salad pictured. Everyone liked the fresh berries in it, and the flower petals were a nice touch.
The salads were followed by three sample main courses. Fish, chicken, and beef. Surprisingly, the chicken was the best of the three. The fact that they used truffle butter in the chicken probably didn't hurt. I also liked the beef dish, the brussels sprouts in particular, but everyone else seemed to think that a lot of guests would not be as excited about them.




We finished off with a desert plate, which probably won't make an appearance at the wedding.

I don't think any of the dishes will show up on the wedding day menu in their current form, but that gives us a good excuse to go back for another tasting.