To My Dear Readers: Goodbye Eat & Relish…hello The Amused Bouche!

Hello my friends and dear readers — it’s been quite awhile. First, I must offer my utmost apologies; I haven’t been posting much anything here over the past months, and I haven’t really clued you in as to why, either. But I have been furiously cooking, writing, and snapping photos over here, and doing all of those things with the intention of eventually letting you in on a little secret I’ve been keeping.

Eat & Relish has been a wonderful creative outlet for four (!!) years, and I cannot thank you all enough for signing in, signing up, and reading along with my adventures in the kitchen and beyond. I thank you from the bottom of my heart (the very buttery bottom!!); without your support, kind emails and comments, and willingness to read my jibber jabber, cook my food, and share it with your families, friends, and loved ones, this little blog would have never evolved to become such an important and enjoyable aspect of my life. However since I started E&R in 2011, so many physical aspects and intangible parts of my life have shifted, moved, and changed, and this space just wasn’t feeling like quite the right fit to keep up with the pace of those changes.

And so in the spirit of no real endings – only new beginnings – I am a little sad to let you know that I will not be writing here at Eat & Relish anymore…..but I am even more excited to introduce you to The Amused Bouche – a new (roomier!) space I’ve built to celebrate all of the things I’ve been passionate about here, but with the addition of so many more. There will still be an absolute focus on cooking and original recipes, but I’ve worked to create a dynamic space that is more comprehensive, organized, and conducive to growing right alongside me. I really hope you’ll like it as much as I do.

{that’s me! and winnie! and hazel! …oh right i meant to tell you…we got another puppy! we’re clearly insane.}

All of the old content is still right there – but with features that (hopefully) make it a much more pleasurable place to have a browse around. I’ve gathered all of my recipes into an easy-to-navigate Recipe Index that makes it a snap to find what you are looking for, and each recipe is contained in it’s own easy to read box. You can now print just the recipe (without the whole post) by using the cute little button within that box to send a neat and tidy recipe card straight to your printer – no copy and paste required. You can peek at my bookshelf to see a continually updated list of the cookbooks I’m currently cooking from and crushing on, or if you’ve got a trip coming up you can have a gander at my restaurant recommendation database to see if your destination happens to be a place I’ve managed to eat my way through. I’m also thrilled to tell you that you can shop my handmade jewelry line, Celia West, directly from the new site – and if you sign up to receive new posts via email (and clue me in on the month you were born in), I’ve got a special discount (and b-day gift!) coming your way to say thank you.

I’ve ported over all of my current Eat & Relish subscribers (both email and WordPress), so if you were previously subscribed, you shouldn’t see any interruption at all. And if you weren’t on E&R’s mailing list and would like to sign up to get The Amused Bouche updates via email – that would make me so happy! Skip on over to the site and sign up via the pop up, the bar at the top of the site, or at the bottom of one of the posts.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for checking in to this little space and making it such a bright spot for me. I really hope you’ll join me over at The Amused Bouche, and cross my fingers that you’ll like it there as much as I already do.

x0,

Cory

weekend ease: maple miso mustard grilled chicken

We’re going out of town (again!) for a quick snap starting tomorrow morning, with an overnight stop in LA-la land and then continuing on for a few nights spent under the great big Western sky with my in-laws* in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I’m packing my Chacos (yes, I own them, and don’t even think of judging me, remember – I did live in Boulder) and a pair of my favorite tall boots (nights in Jackson this time of year should nestle somewhere comfortably in the mid 40s), and I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t pumped to browse around for a cozy blanket to toss around my shoulders at the Pendleton shop that’s in town.

*I hate calling them this! It has such a negative connotation, like I’m forced to be bound to them or hang out with them only by law. What can we start calling “in-laws” that we love?! I’m formally accepting your suggestions.

I’m not generally a fan of dumping lots of canned this and that together and – look mom! I made a recipe! – but this here grilled chicken “recipe” does pretty much exactly that.  This maple mustard miso chicken (say that three times fast) comes together exactly as it sounds: stir together sweet white miso paste, dijon mustard, and maple syrup as your marinade and ‘glaze,’ season chicken thighs with a little S&P, and grill them up till they’re crisped and charred on the edges and juicy and tender in the middle. That’s it!

the more they change, the more they stay the same: salted dark chocolate mousse with vanilla cream

At times it feels like I just left New York; though it was three years ago (and nearly exactly to the day), The City still holds court as the single place I’ve rested my head for the most nights outside of my childhood hometown on Cape Cod. Just writing that feels odd; for as much time as I spent there, since I packed up our West Village townhouse that sweaty July back in 2011, so much has changed.

There has been a marriage, a new dog, two new cats, a few far reaching vacations, three rather large geographical moves which also spurred career changes, and ultimately times of great self reflection and growth.  Given that we had a professional moving company hired to bubble wrap and duct tape every last speck of our tangible possessions and make them magically reappear (hopefully unbroken) halfway across the country, I left in what felt like a hurry; there was none of the usual ‘packing process’ per say, other than putting some Colorado appropriate clothing into a suitcase and waiting for the twenty-one-footer to show up with her crew.

My apartment remained decorated and fully put together until the day I left, lending a sense of ‘is this really even happening?‘ right up till the eleventh hour. We were lucky enough to manage to finagle a week spent on that dizzyingly busy island onto the end of our recent trip, and even luckier still to have two friends offer up their gorgeous apartment in SoHo – the same friends whose wedding we had toasted just a couple of weeks earlier (the little lucky duckies were still honeymooning in Southeast Asia!). I am so thankful for their generosity, as there is no better way to visit somewhere you used to live than by staying in an actual home.  Being in a hotel would have made me feel like a stranger; a peeping tom creeping around trying to catch glimpses of scenery I wasn’t meant to enjoy. Having called the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, Gramercy, Greenwich Village, and the far West Village all home at one point or another in the six years we spent there, staying in SoHo was a treat, and the moment touched down I was eager to get out and explore.

I’m not sure this it is even possible, but Manhattan felt even buzzier, crazier, and more alive than I remembered. Even though the mercury was busting way up into the high 90s the day we arrived (and the humidity had my hair doing it’s best Medusa imitation – not my best look), the streets were absolutely mobbed, and that same frenetic energy came flooding back in a surge of sweaty excitement. With time, there is a certain way that you learn to navigate the busy streets, and there is a definite art of maintaining that familiar bob-weave-stop-start pace while simultaneously holding three shopping bags and a full iced coffee while sending a text and managing not to be struck by a yellow cab at a crosswalk or an errant bag of Thai noodles waving perilously in the wind off of a bike messenger’s handle bar. My chest swelled with pride and there was a noticeable pep in my step with the realization that I still ‘had it,’ and it felt so good to slide into the backseat of an Uber (because who takes cabs anymore?) and rattle off the cross streets of a restaurant without even consulting the Google.

New York has not entirely removed herself from me.

meet me in muskoka + a mushroom, cheddar, and leek pie, lake style

If you follow me on Instagram you may have already seen various points of the mileage I mentioned yesterday; to be quite honest, I was actually surprised at how little pictures I actually took during our travels, and that goes for most of our adventures as of late.

{captain + first mate}

I’ve been really bad about carting my DSLR on vacations with me lately (partly due to the fact that I desperately need a new telephoto lens – which obviously doesn’t come on the cheap – and I’ve been sticking my head in the sand and pretending my old one works just fine….it doesn’t), and it’s too easy to fall into the habit of snippity snapping away with ye old iPhone.

I yammered on enough yesterday about how wonderful island living is up in Muskoka, but it would be remiss of me not to mention this mushroom pie – even though I’ve got but one photograph as evidence of it’s brief existence.

the whole shebang: 6300 miles and a whole (lazy) lemon tart, iphone edition

My past 28 days have looked something like this:

Santa Barbara, CA –> Baltimore, MD –> Wilton, CT –> Lake Joseph, Ontario (Canada) –> New York City, NY –> Baltimore, MD –> Santa Barbara, CA.

We’ve just arrived back home (we being the husband, the pug, and myself, and home being to the farm) after a whirlwind East-Coast-meets-Canada Summer tour that was packed sardine-tin style with cross country flights and long long drives: a marvelous wedding weekend in a picturesque New England town, two weeks spent on an island in the middle of a giant lake in Canada, and a full week back in The City – my old love – New York, New York.

(An aside: Given that these three locales and disparate occasions demanded quite different attire, you can surely ascertain exactly how nonplussed the look on James’ face was when he saw me attempting to heave two full-sized and at-limit suitcases onto the belt in addition to the tote bags/handbags/saddlebags that I looped over his shoulders like my own personal travel burro. Efficient packer, I am not.)

Having – quite surprisingly – not traversed outside of the Pacific time zone since our arrival on the farm last Winter, we had a veritable laundry list of friends to see, places to visit, and cakes to bake (that’s a normal thing, right?), and in what seems like a relatively long stretch of time (nearly a month), we somehow managed to cram smoosh and shove nearly every single person/activity/baked good in without incident.

The trip was kicked off with our dear friends’ wedding, and we danced under the stars on a horse farm while munching on mini tacos and Polly Pocket sized margaritas housed in tiny Patron bottles. After a weekend full of feting, the car was loaded and aimed North towards the border, and we scanned the crackly FM stations while cruising through upstate New York searching for just the right songs to befit the lush rolling hillsides and endless decorously unkempt farms. A full days drive warranted cooling our jets for an evening at a darling bed and breakfast in Ithaca, and in the most touristy fashion possible we unabashedly chowed down on Buffalo wings at the restaurant that lays claim to starting that whole vinegar-spiked-hot-wing craze.

We drove into Canada and left the US behind for two glorious weeks; this was the fourth year I have accompanied James and his parents for a mid-Summer break at their lake house, and it has quickly become a yearly tradition that we eagerly look forward to as the days grow longer and July 4th approaches. The cabin is on an island – the kind where there are no cars and oh, you better choose your company wisely, as there is absolutely nowhere to hide once you arrive by boat. And, as such, there is nothing really pressing on the agenda save long and lazy afternoons filled with sunshine and novels and time spent in the kitchen tinkering with new recipes and keeping the fridge full for those who’ve worked up an appetite swimming laps around the island.