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It’s been a busy few months of Travel for Ryan in San Fransisco & Portland; and me in LA, New York, Chicago, Vancouver, and New Zealand. It’s hard to say whether the travel was for business or pleasure anymore because my life’s work and pleasure is increasingly merging into one. It’s a good thing that my wife loves good food too, because lately more than ever our trips have become gastronomic tours. Armed with Matthew’s (our food writer’s) custom food scene research, I drag our palates and ourselves on culinary romps of our country’s best restaurants, retail shops and farmer’s markets.

We have added about 150 new products to the store this year and probably have another 150 to go before we have our collection complete for our first brick and mortar store coming this Fall to Seattle. Rather than taste products as they came in as we normally do, we decided to make a little event of it. It’s turned into more of a private trade show for my staff and our guest tasters Baketard & Surly Gourmand. On Friday, we’ll mix some

cocktails and attempt to taste a mountain of products to adjudicate whether they are worthy in our collection.

Friday’s Agenda (and still counting):
25 chocolates & sweet treats
15 jams/preserves/honey
14 mustards and savory spreads
7 Vinegars
7 cracker/bread products
3 spicy sauces
3 syrups
3 salts
4 oils

We’re expanding our inventory and have a ton of new samples to try (we mean it; there must be at least 50 100 items on our shelves waiting to be tasted!) We have everything from chocolate to pickles to hot sauce to walnut oil…but we’re going to need some help tasting it all.

We’d like to invite a blogger or two to taste some samples and help us choose which new products we should carry…and we’ll also pour you some tasty cocktails while we’re at it. We’ll shut down the office early on a Friday afternoon – we’re aiming for June 1 – and we’ll

have our tasting party. Are you game?

Here’s how to play:

1. Bloggers need to be in the Seattle area to be considered.

2. If you’ve got step 1 down: articulate a flavor profile for an ingredient of your choice from the list provided below and post your thoughts in a comment on this blog post by Friday, 5/25 (my birthday) ;). You are free to choose more than one ingredient if you’re inspired to do so.

3. We’ll pick a couple local bloggers with the best flavor profiles to join our tasting party.

4. Come join the Marx Foods staff at our office on Friday, June 1 to sample the goods.

Choose at least 1 ingredient from the list below for your flavor profile:

Eggplant
Asparagus
Mango
Roasted Chicken
Tomatoes
Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese
Almonds
Fresh Thyme
Saffron
Brown Sugar
Shiitake Mushrooms
Peanut Butter
Soy Sauce

If you live in the Seattle area and you’re free on Friday, 6/1, hurry up & leave us your flavor profile comment to throw your hat in the tasting party ring.

Invited to share your voice on the Marx Foods blog via a guest post and wondering how to get us your entry?   Below are our best practices for post submissions, however keep in mind that we’ll take them however you can send them over.  Sure, if they are formatted per the below it will save us some time and we’d be uber-grateful but if you aren’t up to some of the technical specs, don’t worry.  Just send it over the best you can and we’ll take it from there.:

Images:
File Format: Please submit all images for your post as separate jpg or gif files
Image Size: Landscape, 565px wide (or less)
File Size: Ideally 75kb or less per image

Copy:
File Format: HTML or Word Document
Other Info:
1. Please indicate in the copy where you would like the attached images to appear (via basic description note or filename)
2. Please indicate at the top of the copy what you would like your blog post title to be  (40 characters (with spaces) or less)

We will add an italicized intro paragraph to your guest post introducing you to our readers and linking your blog’s main page.  For examples, see past guest posts.

SEATTLE BLOGGERS!

We’ve got game birds looking for a hot and smoky home. Want to adopt devour them? You’ll have to open your kitchen up for 3 pheasants, 3 Guinea Fowl and 3 Poulet Rouge … a little menagerie of fowl.

We want to send these birds home with a blogger who will put them to good use, have fun with them, add some recipes to the blogosphere. Maybe you could have a cook off with a few blogger co-conspirators, do a recipe contest with some fellow bloggers (who knows, we might even throw a prize in there)…you could even have your own mini cooking series for those who are poultry-curious. Help us develop some more recipes for our customers to use.

What would you do with these birds? Tell us your best ideas and we’ll decide which blogger(s) will take some or all home. The catch, besides having to reside in Seattle, is that these birds are pick-up only, no deliveries. We’re holding these birds in our office in Lower Queen Anne and they need to be picked up on Friday, 2/24 (or Monday at the latest). Email your best ideas to Justin at justin(at)marxfoods(dot)com.

Guests in my office often ask me: Why do you have the far back corner of your office draped off in sheets? Any guesses?

It’s a breast pumping station!  Katy recently came back from maternity leave and needs to pump.  The choice was to either carve out a little private space for Katy or let her go make her baby food in the same space where people drop bombs.   The latter was not an option.  So, Katie & I built her a little private place, a milking parlor, hehe.

The bonus is that through those windows is a view of Puget Sound.  Not a bad place to take a break.

It’s that time of year!

Not the time you are thinking of … It’s the time of year to clear out of our sample supplies so we can start fresh for next year.  We’ve got some great Dried chilies, Dried ‘shrooms, some vanilla beans for a lucky few and a whole host of random delicious pantry ingredients.  Want to experiment with some on your blog?

If so, email Katie: kwallace at marxfoods dot com.   Include in your email your address, full name and blog URL.

Supplies are limited, so first come first served.  And, you don’t really have to be a blogger … if you promise to put the ingredients to good use and take your culinary game to the next level, then we’ll send some to you anyway.

What a tough competition. This contest business can be really hard to judge. Case in point, our Fregola Dessert recipe challenge. We have to give a big nod to all of the bloggers, they put up some really delicious recipes. The internal poll for this challenge even resulted in a three-way tie that I had to break. I’ll get to the results of that in just a bit.

First, let’s get to the winner of the reader poll. Congrats to ZestyBeanDog! Your Bacon and Vanilla Fregola Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting were a huge hit. Your spoils are $100 worth of baking ingredients from MarxFoods.com. We know you’ll bake up something delicious again soon…we just wish we could eat the goods.

We also have to give honorable mention to Cook Eat Delicious, who came in a very close second in the reader poll with Creamy Fregola Pudding with Saffron Vanilla Bean Syrup. It’s clear the people love their sweets.

To finish the three-way tie, I called Matthew and Katie up to my office to help me decide. After talking about the three recipes for a while, I realized I couldn’t pick a clear winner. So, the rare occurrence of a tie has happened. The two winners of the internal poll are Adesina’s Kitchen and Okay, Check it Out. Congrats to you both! The Sweet Fregola Arancini with Spiced Blackberry Coulis from Adesina’s Kitchen and the Fregola Doughnuts with Saffron-Grapefruit Caramel from Okay, Check it Out were both delicious and really different. Each of you also win $100 credit to use on MarxFoods.com towards any baking goodies you want.

These competitions just keep getting more fiercely delicious and we couldn’t be happier about it. Thank you so much to all of the bloggers, we loved reading your recipes and we hope you keep ’em coming.

The Virtual Potluck bloggers blew us away with their Thanksgiving-themed recipes from our first recipe adventure together. Remember the deliciousness? Check it out here if you need a refresher.

These bloggers threw down the gauntlet in terms of tastiness, so we upped the stakes after the recipes were submitted by surprising the bloggers with one last twist…we announced we’d be sending another round of special ingredients to one of the bloggers. We asked for feedback to help us pick, and after hearing from readers, fans, and a few of the bloggers’ mothers 😉 we realized we couldn’t just pick one…

So congrats to Food Hunter’s Guide to Cuisine and Farmgirl Gourmet, you’re both just too delicious! And you’re both getting a surprise in the mail for your pantry.  Please email us your address again.

Food Hunter’s Guide to Cuisine created an original recipe for arancini stuffed with a spicy mushroom ragu. Arancini is no easy task in the kitchen, so kudos to you! Farmgirl Gourmet’s Arborio veggie burger with vanilla barbecue sauce sounded uniquely delicious, and she managed to use all of the ingredients we sent her.

We want to give a big thank you to all of the bloggers – it’s so great to read your creative recipes and it is always a fabulous experience to interact with you.

We are officially smitten with the Virtual Potluck…we can’t wait to see what’s next.

The stage is set.

Photo Shoot Day tomorrow.  Seafood edition.

I’m pretty excited about tomorrow.  We’re working with lobster, dungeness crab, halibut cheeks & geoduck.  Plus, our new chef’s specialty is seafood.  It could be epic.

I’m also excited to host our Eaters of Honor, Jenny & Jenny.  We invited them as a thanks for putting on Will Bake for Food.  The 2nd Annual Will Bake For Food raised $2,571 and 828 lbs of food for the Emergency Feeding Program which supplies food banks, churches and other groups who help feed the needy.   We appreciate the work that the Jennys do for our community and they seem like fun, so we invited them to help us eat all the good stuff that’s coming tomorrow.

The test kitchen is ready:

Singapore chili style crab

Salt pepper crab

Crab cake with avocado, grapefruit & blk pepper

Goeduck crudo

Sauteed goeduck & brown butter sauce

Roasted sweet potato soup with Lobster, orange & corn cream

Butter poached lobster

Parsnip agnoloti  & lobster

Halibut cheeks fried w/capers, Meyer lemon & micros

Seared halibut cheeks w/ potato cake, beets & beet buerre rouge

Lemon yeast waffle with Huckleberry sauce

Huckleberry cloufuti with instant huckleberry ice cream

Our friends at Will Bake for Food are back again this year putting on their annual fundraising bake sale and let me tell you, it’s going to be epic. Food bloggers from all over the city will bake their best treats.  Then, you come to the bake sale and trade in either cash or canned food for tickets … and then you redeem those tickets for an unbelievable collection of baked goods.  All proceeds go to the Emergency Feeding Program.   Last year we raised 2,000 lbs of food and $1,000.  This year will hopefully be MUCH bigger.

I put together the raffle this year.    Check out the sign that Matt made.  There are some great prizes.  Check it out:

We also packed up 400 vanilla beans and will be “selling” them like last year (2 for a buck!) at the bake sale and we hope you get there in time to get a bag for yourself.

So Seattleites, stop by the University Heights Center from 11-2 this Saturday, November 12. Indulge your sweet tooth, enter to win some prizes, and pay it forward.  Here’s all the details.

Last year Will Bake For Food raised 1,903 pounds of food and $946 for Northwest Harvest, from whom I just learned that 1 of 7 Washington families struggled to feed their families last year.  Wow, that’s a lot.

Seattle friends … Will Bake For Food is returning this year.  And, it is going to be bigger and badder than ever.  We are helping the wonderful organizers put together the raffle.  If you can donate something for the raffle, please shoot me an email: justin at marxfoods dot com.  It can be as small as a $5 value or as large as you want.  100% of proceeds go to Northwest Harvest.

Props to Bryan Knox from Knox’s Spice Company for seeing this post and donating a super sweet dry rub gift basket.

Dan May, author of the Red Hot Chile Cookbook and his publisher, Sandra Ng, graciously sent us a copy of this cookbook and we really liked what we read, so Katie wrote up a book review.

Dan May’s Red Hot Chile Cookbook is a collection of recipes sure to please any chile-lover. The recipes hail from international cuisines so there is quite an interesting mix of choices. You’ll find Caribbean, Thai, Asian, Spanish, Moroccan, American and European (even a few Scandinavian) recipes in this cookbook.

The difficulty level of the recipes ranges from intermediate to incredibly simple & easy, and his writing style is straightforward and easy to follow for anyone from a culinary novice to an expert. As a native Englishman, May uses traditional British spelling and offers both metric and imperial measurements in his recipes.

The recipes in this cookbook run the full culinary gamut – you’ll find everything you need to throw a spice-filled dinner party. There are recipes for soups & salads, mains, sides, sauces, marinades, drinks and desserts. A few recipes in particular that piqued our interest were: Jerk Chicken with Caramelized Pineapple; Whole Roast Salmon Stuffed with Salsa Verde Piccante; Habanero Marmalade, and Deliciously Boozy Truffles with Ginger & Chili Praline.

May’s cookbook is primarily focused on fresh chiles, so if you are using dried chiles, you may have to adapt the recipes a bit. A few of May’s recipes call for very hot chiles like Scotch Bonnet, Habanero and Aji Limo, but there are also many medium and mild chile recipes, and of course you can always substitute a more mild chile in any recipe.

Each recipe has a heat rating shown in a pictogram ranging from one to four chilies. This is an easy tool you can use to decide whether or not to ramp up or tone down the heat in a recipe, depending on your taste. May also supplies a few alternate chile suggestions for each recipe if you’re having a hard time finding the specific chile variety mentioned in a recipe.

Another nice feature of this cookbook is the photography. The photos are full page images of finished dishes and the presentation is simple, yet enticing. The food is front and center in each photo and the background tends to be neutral, letting the food be the star. Each recipe has an accompanying photo and the recipes are all one page or less – no hassling with flipping back and forth between pages. The recipe layout for the instructions can be a bit text heavy and there isn’t any bulleting to break up large paragraphs; however, the instructions themselves are very well explained.

We think anyone with a love for chiles and the willingness to try something new will enjoy this cookbook. Finally, we’d like to thank Dan May for listing us as a resource for chiles, and thank his publisher for sending us a copy of the Red Hot Chile Cookbook.