Spring Happenings in the Secret Kitchen!

Greetings from the Secret Kitchen..er..Kitchen~ 

There are some exciting things brewing, and some upcoming dates of Secret Kitchen dinners that I’d like to share with you. 

First, though, I’d love to say a huge Thank You to those who joined in on Valentine’s Day. It was truly a night of amour! It was also so gratifying to me, as a chef, to have a whole room of guests trust me enough to “just eat the beef heart”! From the sudden silence in the room and the return of empty plates, I was assured that most people actually enjoyed it! (Confession: I ate it raw! Delish!)

I have the dates for the next two Secret Kitchens, including our 4th Anniversary 420 dinner! Get ready to mark your calendars! These dinners are sure to fill up quick, especially the 420, so reserve your space early, space is *very* limited for that dinner! 

Secret Kitchen’s Spring Dates:

March 28th (Thurs)($60): The Passover Meal. All the good stuff without all the religious stuff! Bring your own four questions and four glasses of wine.

*chicken liver pate & matzoh

*chicken soup w. matzoh balls as big as your fist!

*house-made white fish gefelte salad (not your bubbe’s fish from a jar!) 

*rack of lamb w. baby fingerling potatoes, roasted asparagus 

*dark chocolate dipped coconut & cardamom macaroons & meyer lemon sorbet

April 20th (Sat! Be prepared!)($80 “unleaded”/$100 “leaded”) The Fourth Annual 420 Secret Kitchen Anniversary Party! 

menu: Six Courses (tbd) of *ever increasing potency*!! The night will have lots of surprises and special happenings! It’s a Saturday night, so come prepared to stay and play! There will be music! There will be dancing! There will be champagne! There will be  fabulous prizes! 

And now for some more exciting news! Two special announcements for more opportunities to enjoy Secret Kitchen & Chef Eva’s cooking!

First, it looks like I will be making an appearance at the Oakland restaurant Guest Chef (http://www.theguestchef.net/) some time this year! This is very exciting as it will give me a unfamiliar audience and a chance to play in a restaurant kitchen, which is something I have wanted for a long time! When I get the dates confirmed, I will hope that you will join me in a more traditional restaurant setting (ie. you won’t have to sit on the floor! it won’t be a cold warehouse! you can invite friends!) and a completely new menu! More to come!

And second, I am embarking on a new food venture in the form of organic, prepared meals! It only took two years and three different people pushing me to finally realize that doing a business like this would satisfy not only the “chef” in me, but also, and more importantly, the “jewish mom” part of me! So, Secret Kitchen Organics Meals to Go will be starting production in mid-March. I’ll start with a few offerings of soups, entrees, sides & salads. I expect to expand to full five days of meals (including dessert), baking mixes, salad dressings, and condiments by the end of summer/early fall. The meals will 100% organic, with *mostly* gluten-free/paleo/vegan options. All meats will be organic/grass fed/sustainable (in the case of fish). All veggies will be local/seasonal as well as organic.  I’ll be packaging things in glass containers, compostable containers, and minimal plastic. For now, I can only offer pick-up from my warehouse/kitchens, but will expand to delivery as soon as I can! 

If you would like more information, pricing, and the first month’s menu, please send an email to: eva.d.edibles@gmail.com with the subject line “Meals to Go” and I’ll send you all the details and the delicious first month’s menu. Feel free, please!, to forward this to anyone and everyone you think would be interested in some delicious, nourishing meals made for them! 

I am very excited to be embarking on new cooking adventures, and am so glad that you are here to take the journey with me! 

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me. My kitchen door is always open, and there will always be room for one more at my table, 

with love, 

Chef Eva~

Love Bites: part deux

Hello Fellow Food Lovers! 

After a very busy Fall & Holiday Season of private parties, Secret Kitchen is set to once again open the doors to all our members with this year’s Valentine’s Dinner: Love Bites part deux! 

I am a sucker for Valentine’s Day. I love a day dedicated to Love. I don’t think of it as only for romantic love, but for love of family, good friends, and good food.  It’s a day to celebrate sensuality and hedonism and I don’t know any better way to do that than with great food. 

This menu is inspired by silly love songs and the spices of Amour. The menu is geared towards enticing and amplifying all your senses. Love is Messy. Love knows no bounds. And this menu, for better or worse, reflects that. Please join us whether as a couple, single, multiple or all the above for an evening of sensual delights~

details in "This Month's Menu" 

Midsummer's Secret Kitchen~

It's been a hellova Spring! So much goings on in the kitchen that I've barely have any time when I'm not up to my elbows in food so I can blog!
This spring Secret Kitchen turned THREE! It's been three fantastic years of delicious food over lively discussions, birthdays, private events, and the like. Most if this year has been spent doing private events, and lots and lots of time experimenting in the kitchen. I've been learning cheesemaking, producing charcuterie, and pickling everything I can think to pickle!
But I have missed Secret Kitchen! And so, I present June's menu: A MidSummer's Secret Kitchen. Inspired by my daughter's request for fancy cotton candy and my desire to use foie gras in a menu before it's illegal. (not that I'm against black market products, obvs.)

menu and details in "This Month's Menu"

The Valentine's Day dinner

Oh you sexy sexy people.
You deserve to eat sexy food. Food you can eat with your hands. Food you can share with your love. Food that makes your heart race.

I really like playing with the alchemy of food. Not only do I get to manipulate taste, but other sensations as well. The heart races with chilies, chocolate. The mind drifts with mugwort, chamomile, absinthe....you get the picture.

This year for Valentines Day, we have a special tasting menu: Love Bites.
Seven courses sure to excite and tantalize you.

Check out "This Month's Menu" for the deatils

The Folsom Street Edition

Hello Lovely Diners~

Secret Kitchen would like to invite you to the first of our Fall Events! Our summer has been full of private parties and dinners and we’re happy to be open again to anyone who loves good food!

For this edition, we take our inspiration and play from an event that is quintessentially Bay Area: The Folsom Street Fair. As long time participants of the fair, we here in the kitchen didn’t have much trouble dreaming up a menu that delights and arouses the senses. It was fun to come up with a menu, inspired by our favorite aphrodisiac: chilies. Not only do chilies wake up the palate, but they go to work on the nervous system as well, heightening all of our senses, giving us a shot of adrenalin and stimulating us in ways nothing else can. Chilies are the Tango (the original “dirty dancing”) of the kitchen.

This month’s menu will bring you Pain, for sure, but that feeling will diminish with the wash of Pleasure that comes from every bite:

Anticucho y Camarones del Diablo

skewers of beef heart & shrimp rolled in dried chilies & grilled, served w. cumin crema

Ajo Blanco

a delicious cold soup of almonds, grapes and garlic

Codorniz Relleno con Salsa de Higos Picoso

chorizo stuffed quail w. fiery fig sauce served w. patatas bravas & sautéed cactus

Pastel de Chocolate sin Harina con Chilies Candied y con Sorbete de Vainilla

flourless chocolate cake w. candied chilies & vanilla sorbet

Details:

As always, the location of dinner is Secret until 24 hours before service. Dinner will be served at 7:30pm, sharp! Doors open 30 minutes early for schmoozing and boozing. Secret Kitchen is a BYOB event, with water provided.

Date: Thursday, September 29^th

Location: Oakland, CA

Price: $50/person

It's our First Birthday and we wanna Play!

It's been a long, cold, lonely winter, and not just in the country song way. The Kitchen wasn't dark, just in a quiet mode. Lots of preparations. Lots of fun and silly short term projects. I cooked for a reality tv show that was being shot in SF. I wasn't ON the show. NOooo, not my style. I just did the craft services. It was a great learning experience, and I got to see one of the coolest historical buildings in SF. I've got a few irons in a few fires and will be working hard on making them come to fruition over the next year. Some are food related, some not. I'll let you know more as it comes to light.
But here we are, on the verge of an amazing Spring, and it's time to celebrate a year of fabulous underground dining. Secret Kitchen held only private events for the past few months, but it's time again to open the doors to friends both established and new. Look for a new menu and time for our annual 4/20 dinner in "This Month's Menu"!

5136

Let me write that out: Five Thousand One Hundred Thirty-Six. That's how many meals I served in three weeks of building a Temple in the desert. We had a crew of 200. We built a Temple that was 21,000 square feet. And then we burned it, in what was one of the most spectacular Fires I have ever seen.

So yes, back from the desert. I say this often, but The Desert, She is a harsh and cruel Mistress. I don't think I would have agreed to do what I did had I stopped to think about it along the way. Instead I went headlong (as is my oeuvre, it seems) into the unknown, "blissfully unaware of my own peril" as Carlos Amigos would say. I still haven't calculated how much actual food I purchased, cooked and served. But here is what I do know:

1. I have an awesome culinary partner named Taz. Who saved the day more than once. Who battled the Eggtastrophy on the playa, and WON! (We lost 1500+ eggs to bad planning, broken refrigerators, and 110 degree heat in the worst culinary disaster I've ever witness on the playa) Who served with a smile when I couldn't, and who kept me sane when things fell apart.

2. I had the best kitchen team! There were lots of people who came into the kitchen to help. But there were some who stuck around most of the time, and they rocked it! Its so amazing to have people who can all work together like a machine, especially since we hadn't ever worked together before. People asked how long we had all been together, and when we said this was the first time, their jaws dropped. Part of me felt like Tom Sawyer a bit when I was asking volunteers to do things like roll 400 plus matzoh balls, or massage two cases of kale, or make 600 tortillas individually, by hand, in a 30+MPH duststorm. "C'mon, its fun! Don't you want to try"? And people DID! There were usually more volunteers than jobs to do, and I think it was fun for people to come out of the sun and off the project for a while, and do something different. A lot of people said that cooking in the heat and dust and wind made them feel better about what they could accomplish. I think that's what I like most about pre-event: that you are out there to do something, whatever it is, and that it's gonna stretch your limits and push your capacity, but it's also gonna make you a stronger person. You get to prove to yourself just what you are capable of doing.

3. I had the best kitchen out there! Not only did I have a fabulous work space that many hands help create, but we produced the best tasting, healthiest food on the playa. We served meals for vegan, gluten-free, AND nightshade sensitive people! We served raw kale salad with house made dressings. We served quinoa pasta with fresh swiss chard. I made chicken matzoh ball soup for 200 people. We made corn tortillas from scratch, and pressed them in a wooden tortilla press with our Temple's logo impressed into them. We did this in a duststorm of epic proportions. And still dinner was on time (playa time!). I has chefs from other camps coming to my kitchen asking for leftovers. Yeah, you wanna see Top Chef? Come out to the desert, and produce food for 200 people three times a day in that litterbox and we'll see who comes out ahead. Not sayin', just sayin'......

It's been a long road back as well, and re-entry into this world has been jolting for the most part. But all the kitchen supplies, the pots, platters, appliances have all been washed and put away, ready for the next expedition (in a week, when I cater a wedding...camping). I am happy at home here with my dogs. Happy to be at All The Comforts of Home Camp here in my little niche in Oaktown. I am so happy to be back, in fact, that it inspired me to do a All The Comforts of Home Secret Kitchen. So I am gonna do just that, on Sept. 30th, somewhere in the Bay Area. Check out "This Month's Menu" for details........