Top Favorite Things I Cooked in 2025

In 2025, we hosted six Wine Club Dinners and eight Tapas Nights, and cycled through a lot of our ‘Fresh Sheets’ for weekly offerings. That’s a decent amount of food for not being a restaurant.

Here are my top five favorite things I cooked this year. The metric here is simple: what tasted the best (to me and/or the staff).

Number 5 — Spring Pasta

We have some really great pasta from an importer out of Seattle: La Romagna Stringozzi Fantasia—the tri-color version with red, green, and white strands representing the Italian flag. Tomato and basil give the pasta both its color and flavor. What makes it especially impressive is how it cooks like fresh pasta; guests often assumed (or asked) if I was making it fresh in the back. I’d love to say yes—but I truly don’t have time for that.

To highlight the pasta, we kept things very simple: al dente noodles tossed with sautéed arugula and garlic, good-quality olive oil, green peas, and a handful of grated Parmesan. The pasta is swirled together with a bit of its own cooking water, finished with lemon juice and lemon zest. A pinch of chili flakes—or, in this case, a tri-color peppercorn blend—ties it all together.

This dish quickly became a favorite and paired beautifully with our Chardonnay.

Number 4 — Grape Crisp

I love fruit crisps. Peach cobbler and apple pie may reign supreme when it comes to summer fruit desserts, but crisps have my heart. I love that you can use any fruit, that the topping can be vegan and/or gluten-free, and that it’s not a heavy dessert. For our August vegan dinner, I took a gamble and made a grape crisp using local table grapes from Buggirl’s Garden. It was incredible. There were no added spices, yet it tasted like it was bursting with a perfectly balanced spice cabinet. It was a great way to showcase the complexity of grapes — something we talk about daily — in a completely different form. I topped it with whipped coconut cream seasoned with cardamom. It paired delightfully well with our '21 Professor - a neutral oaked Cabernet that pairs shockingly well with so many things, including sweet desserts like this one.

Number 3 — Mussels

There’s nothing new here, but over the years I’ve really dialed in my mussel recipe, and it remains one of my favorite things to cook. I used to do a very French, traditional style — garlic gently sautéed in butter with white wine and herbs. Delicious. Eventually, I started playing around with Spanish-inspired techniques using chopped jamón and paprika, and now I’ve landed on a version that feels like my own.

This is a great way to introduce mussels to people, as it mellows the “sea” flavor and creates an incredibly satisfying dipping sauce. If we ever have the money to redo our kitchen, we’d love to install a full hood so we can do this properly — with fries. We prefer our Albariño with the mussels - the bright acidity and fruity notes play so well with the very slightly spicy, rich flavor of the mussels broth (and we use white wine to cook them), but we've had so many people comment on how well Lil Inky paris with the mussels, so we need to share that as well!

Number 2 — Lamb and Eggplant Pie

People think they don’t like lamb. People also think they don’t like eggplant. I love proving them wrong (when they’re willing to try). Lamb can be gamey, but that’s part of what makes it great — you just need to pair or finesse it so it’s not the only thing you taste. This “pie” is more like a lasagna, combining fried eggplant, simmered ground lamb, and a spiced tomato sauce into a rich, exciting dish that’s perfect with red wine. We featured this during our October dinner, and it was a lovely way to close out peak garden season with incredibly fresh eggplant. This is also a very wine-friendly food. Usually we like to talk about our food-friendly wine (which it is!), but sometimes it's nice on my end to just make a dish that i know i could throw almost any wine at and it's going to taste delicious. This is one of those meals. It'd work with white or red. Dry or off-dry. Still or sparkling. I chose our 2021 Fork + Spoon, reserve Cabernet Franc and it was beautiful together. The spiced lamb worked so well with the bright berry notes of the Cab Franc.

Number 1 — Fall Salad

Fall salad plated

This isn’t new, but every time I make it, it’s slightly different. The star of the show is a squash called Thelma Sanders (also from Buggirl's Garden - they even sell plants of this squash in the spring so you can grow your own, which i do often). I thinly slice it, roast it skin-on until golden brown, and pile it onto a large salad with mixed greens, seasoned lentils, pomegranate seeds, crumbled blue cheese, pepita seeds, pecans, and a Dijon vinaigrette. I usually only make this once a year, because it’s the most requested dish among the staff — including our winemaker, Jessica. It’s a feast for the eyes and an incredibly wine-friendly salad. It pairs beautifully with reds, whites, and pinks. We chose our favorite, easy-wine pairing - 2021 Professor as it's always fun to pair a salad with red wine as people usually think white, but the earthy lentils and blue cheese, and the sweetness of the squash and pommegranate seeds played well with our little Cabernet. Not to mention a classic dijon vinaigrette is always a winner with almost any wine.

I’m looking forward to a year of cooking in 2026 where I may revisit a few of these favorites (mussels, fall salad), while experimenting and discovering new recipes. We’ve already hosted our first Wine Club Dinner, and our first Tapas Night is right around the corner.