And the winner is...

Hey, kids! It's that time! Time to announce the winner of the Recipe for Love giveaway. (As you remember, our prize is a gift of an apron, a set of spatulas and a signed, hardcover copy of the latest book in the series, On the Steamy Side.

Well, good news, RADgirl...you did win! Email me at megblocker (at) gmail (dot) com with your address in order to claim your prize!

Quality time with Queenie: Lorna Yee.

Today we're spending time with the inimitable Lorna Yee, cookbook author and food writer. I first met Lorna through eGullet, where I spent quite a bit of time drooling over her incredible pastry creations. Since those early days, she's co-written a cookbook (The Newlywed Kitchen) and works as a food writer for Seattle Magazine. (She also has a fantastic blog, entitled The Cookbook Chronicles.) Lorna's passion for food is unmatched, except perhaps by that of her husband, Henry. But even Henry can't match her prize-winning pie.

Without further ado, here's Lorna!

How and from whom did you learn to cook?

I learned to cook Chinese food and bake from watching my mom--an incredible woman who was making her own butter puff pastry back in the 80s, without the aid of step-by-step food blogs, or the Food Network. From a young age, I watched my mom prepare elaborate Cantonese meals at home. She would save up her vacation time and take three days off work before family birthdays, just so she could shop and prepare more than ten, banquet-style dishes for our extended family.

Though my mom cooked fantastic meals for us every night, she gradually cut back on the baking. (Hard to keep up with three kids and a full-time job!) I've always loved sweets, and missed having her scrumptious coffee cakes and muffins around the kitchen. When I was about 10 years old, I took her dog-eared copy of The Five Roses Cookbook and asked if I could start baking from it. My mom kept a watchful eye over me the first few times. But even then, I had already picked up on many of the techniques she unknowingly demonstrated on evenings when I'd stand on a stool and watch her fold egg whites with a delicate flick of the wrist. I remember making a personal goal of trying a new recipe out of that cookbook every week, and I did. That's how I made my first cheese soufflé, coffee chiffon cake, and peanut butter cookies.

Do you consider yourself a baker, a cook, or a hybrid? Why?

I consider myself both a home cook and a baker. I've always had a particular fondness for baking, and the cooking bug bit a little later on--I would say perhaps around 13 or 14, after taking Home Ec. classes at school. Around this time, we also started getting Food Network up in Canada, which meant more exposure to cuisines outside of the Cantonese food we ate at home. I was motivated to learn how to cook so I could taste the food of other countries, though I was often overly ambitious. There was a particular episode of Emeril Live that featured Mario Batali making these incredible goat cheese and radicchio ravioli that I craved for days after seeing that show. I had never made pasta before, and growing up in a Chinese household, we didn't have a pasta maker. I figured I could make my own pasta and roll the dough out with a rolling pin. Four hours later, I was exhausted, covered in flour, but I had done it--a perfectly respectable bowl of ravioli, filled with tangy, creamy goat cheese, the richness counteracted by the bitter bite of radicchio.

If you could prepare any meal in the world, what would the menu be, and who would you invite to join you?

"If I could prepare any meal in the world" is an interesting question, because I'd have to consider whether I would want to cook something I'd have the most fun preparing, or what I consider my best dish--considering there are guests in attendance. I think I would create a menu featuring one signature dish from each region of China. I have never experienced a meal like that. I guess if you think about it, Cantonese dim sum could work as what we think of as "pre-dinner bites"--all those tiny parcels of steamed and fried items! Taro puffs filled with savory minced duck, or chive and shrimp dumplings would be ideal finger food. The bolder, more fiery dishes of Szechuan, like red oil poached fish with preserved mustard greens, and a hearty dish of claypot braised lamb from Lanzhou would work nicely as a main. Hand-pulled noodles with a garlicky pork sauce from northern China would be ideal as your starch component, and I'd end the meal with wafer-thin, crispy fried Shanghainese red bean pancakes.

Is there something you love to eat that you never make at home?

I adore sashimi and many other Japanese dishes, but I never prepare it at home because I don't think the quality of the fish I can get from even a reputable seafood shop is as good as that served in the best Japanese restaurants in town. There is too much I don't know about the art of cutting the fish, or preparing the sushi rice correctly. That's a meal best left to a master Japanese sushi chef with years of experience.

Pick your poison.

I love barman Andrew Bohrer's smoked Old-Fashioned at Mistral Kitchen, and he makes a great whiskey sour, too. Although the first cocktail that really blew me away was The Last Word, revived right here in Seattle by Murray Stenson of Zig Zag. I also love single malt scotches, and big reds.

Describe the best meal you've ever eaten. Where were you? Who prepared it? And what made it so special?

As a food writer at Seattle Magazine, I'm incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to eat extremely well in this city. The greatest dining experience I've ever had, though, was at Alinea in Chicago just this past summer. I was with my husband, and we were celebrating our first wedding anniversary. We sprung for the tour menu and consumed twenty-five courses over the span of a good four hours, at least! Part of what made the meal so memorable was that up until that point, I'd partaken in a few molecular gastronomy meals at well-regarded restaurants, and had been incredibly disappointed. Alinea re-opened my eyes: The meal was entertainment, it was art, but most importantly, the vast majority of what we ate just tasted good.

What's for dinner tonight chez toi?

I just returned home (in Seattle) from a ten-day visit up in Vancouver, BC to see my family. After so many days of eating extravagantly, I am happy to get back in the kitchen and cook something a little lighter for dinner tonight. I'm just grilling some leeks with romesco sauce, and throwing together an easy pasta salad with cherry tomatoes, feta, and arugula. Both recipes are in the cookbook I co-authored, The Newlywed Kitchen. For dessert--I'm going to be honest and tell you I'm just taking a couple balls of homemade oatmeal cookie dough out of the freezer, and baking them off. I frequently make a batch of cookie dough, roll the dough into golfball-sized spheres, space them out on a lined sheet tray, and freeze them. Once frozen, you can put the dough balls into a Ziploc bag and they'll keep for several weeks in the freezer. Whenever you want cookies, just space out the dough on a tray, and bake in a preheated oven. I believe that one should never be more than 350 degrees and 12-13 minutes away from fresh, hot cookies!

Quality time with Queenie: Erin Ferretti Slattery

Erin Ferretti Slattery (that's her on the right up there) grew up in California and Colorado, and has lived in France, Scotland, Israel, and the Czech Republic. She has worked in PR, book publicity, and international publishing, and has written a cookbook, The Ghost in the Pantry: Culinary Travels through Four Generations. She and her husband, Jakub, live in the food paradise of Astoria, Queens, where she is freelancing as a translator and perpetually starting a novel.

Erin and I first met online over at eGullet many, many moons ago - she helped me plan the Prague leg of the journey Louisa and I took in 2006 - and we finally met in real life last year at a fabulous Jauntsetter party in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, not historical).

How and from whom did you learn to cook?
My mother is the biggest influence, and I learned most of what I cook by instinct these days as a result of watching and helping her from childhood onward--like nearly everyone, I imagine. In the constellation of other inspiring people, there are also friends who can throw together a four-course dinner on an hour's notice, a French host mother with a sturdy yogurt-cake recipe, a British host mother who taught me not to fear lard for the Sunday roast, friends who parted with their grandmothers' cake and goulash recipes, and friends whose individual talents and flair for entertaining are things I try to mimic.

Ultimately, I would say I learned from all the women in my life I've been fortunate to call friends, including my mother, who compiled and printed a book of tried-and-true recipes from friends and family as a wedding gift for me. And I'm also grateful to my dad for initiating me into Zen and the Art of the Weber grill. (My dad has been known to happily do steaks on the Weber in three feet of snow, which is Buddhism of a sort I'll never achieve.)

Do you consider yourself a baker, a cook, or a hybrid? Why?

Cooking at high altitude (in Denver, where I spent part of my childhood) scarred me as a baker for life; I always either forgot to read the high-altitude directions, or measured by instinct and was off by a lot. I turned out a lot of bricks and dry muffins. If anything, it taught me to leave any precise measuring to someone else. That said, I have my one standby cake (Marian Burros's versatile Plum Torte recipe) and I like experimenting, but I invariably forget an ingredient or use too big a pinch of something, and the cake is born a mutant. My oven in New York has never been leveled, either--it's so bad that skillets occasionally start sliding to the back--and though I've tried to correct it, all baked goods emerge looking like a raised eyebrow.

The savory baked-good recipe that has yet to fail me (knock on wood) is Delia Smith's Savory Muffins with Two Flavorings . But if it's a family recipe from my side (Irish and Italian) or my husband's side (all Czech), I'll usually keep at it until I get it right; there's something fascinating to me about tasting something that someone long before you (but connected to you) loved, and/or loved to make. What is it about that cake--or that person--that was extraordinary? What sort of crazy line of deliciousness do you participate in by recreating that? (When I wrote a cookbook last summer, I tried to get at that question but mainly wound up buying and consuming staggering quantities of butter.)

If you could prepare any meal in the world, what would the menu be, and who would you invite to join you?
Oh, Lord.

Guest list: Virginia Woolf, Groucho Marx, Shakespeare (I'm sure he's not free, though), Jane Austen, S.J. Perelman, George Gershwin, Madame de Stael, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Wordsworth, Dorothy Parker, and Joan of Arc. (Note to self: seat the latter two apart from each other.)

Menu: Club sandwiches.

No, really, I've never been any good at that kind of thing; for one, I have serious entertaining-induced anxiety (ironically so, since I love having people over) and turn into a basket case, worrying about insane things like botulism and e-coli and the federally mandated internal cooking temperature for pork tenderloin and, oh God, will they like it?, so I'm pretty sure I'd die well before my Imaginary Dinner Party showed up. (Sorry to be so darned literal.)

In all honesty, give me a giant plate of antipasto, a few good baguettes, chilled wine, and fresh fruit, good chocolate, and nuts, and I'm happy. I run out of imaginary steam when it comes to the actual food, I guess.

Is there something you love to eat that you never make at home?
This may be cheating, but we go out so often to eat two cuisines--sushi and New Delhi Indian--I rarely attempt at home that I feel like flipping the question around a bit.

You can't typically find Nakládaný hermelín in a restaurant in the U.S., but we occasionally make it at home. It's Czech camembert marinated in vegetable oil and a heady mix of spices along with sliced bell peppers, garlic, and onions; Czech pubs feature giant, keg-sized jars of it looming at the end of the bar. I made a giant batch of it last summer when I was writing a cookbook, and it brought back memories of warm nights around outdoor tables at a Prague pub, drinking a beer with friends and slathering this cheese on dark brown bread.

Pick your poison.

Well, after two drinks, I slide under the table, grinning like a lunatic, so I usually opt for something nonalcoholic. In Israel, you can order limonana, lemonade blended with whole handfuls of fresh mint and ice; I became addicted to those when we lived there and was delighted to find them all over Manhattan cafes.

Otherwise, I order a good white wine--my heart belongs to the Austrian Gritsch winery's Gruner Veltliners--or a Sangiovese. If I have to order a cocktail, it's a dry martini, but then I take no responsibility for the nonsense that comes out of my mouth after two of those.

Describe the best meal you've ever eaten. Where were you? Who prepared it? And what made it so special?
One of the best meals I've ever had was at a wonderful twenty-first-birthday surprise dinner that my best friend sprung on me when we were both studying in London for a semester, 13 years ago; my parents wired him money in advance and asked him to take me to dinner. Since my best friend was an aspiring man of the world, he picked Bibendum, without telling me in advance, of course. So I showed up in a floral sundress.

Even so, it was extraordinary--a flurry of courses; I remember a duck breast that tasted like what I thought gold should taste like. Aside from that, I remember shockingly little (sorry, Mom and Dad)--only that it was dazzling, sparkling, and everything was crisp and delicious. It was the best birthday ever. But, if I'm being honest, the best meals of my life have always been long, slow, comfortable, wine-fueled things, usually at home or someone else's home, with family and friends, lots of dishes with serving spoons, and that's what I like most.

Whether it's transporting 40 mini-flans across Prague for a friend's surprise California-themed birthday party, or epic holiday dinners with family (or holiday lunches, when we're with my husband's family in Prague), the key elements for me are: well-loved recipes and conversation with people you love.

What's for dinner tonight chez toi?
You caught me on a good night; usually, unless I think about it in the morning, I look up from freelancing around 5 and start to wonder what's for dinner. We live in an amazing neighborhood (Astoria) for food, so whether you want to go out or stay in, you're spoiled. On Fridays, I take the morning off and go get ingredients for the weekend meals.

I think this is a holdover from when we lived in Israel: everything shuts down on Shabbat, Friday evening, so if you didn't grab what you needed, you were out of luck 'til Saturday evening. Now I feel hard-wired to plan weekend meals; by Thursday night, my brain is starting to run through what's in the fridge, what pantry staples there are, what's fresh, and what needs to be used up.

Since today was Friday, I hit the fish market on 30th Ave. and 31st St., which has a great selection; the United Brothers Fruit Market, just down the street from the fish place, for fresh vegetables; and bought a loaf of rustic country bread from an Italian place on our block that seems like what my grandfather's fruit-and-vegetable store would have looked like in downtown Denver in the 1930s.

We had grilled shrimp skewers (and by "grilled," I mean "broiled while fantasizing about a patio") with mango and red onion pieces, plus some sliced tomatoes and bell peppers, and a basket of fresh bread. Simple to the point of bliss. Oh--and a California Sauvignon Blanc. Dessert was a few bites of dark chocolate, although I should've splurged and brought home baklava; the baklava-trays-to-inhabitants ratio is ridiculous here. And you cannot get a bad piece of it. Crazy.

Quality time with Queenie and a giveaway: author Louisa Edwards on her best meal ever, and how to win a signed copy of her new novel!

Loyal Queenie readers know her simply as "Louisa." She's a respected contemporary romance novelist, an accomplished cook, and, most importantly, she's my best friend! Louisa Edwards lives in Ohio with her husband (and two ridiculously adorable dogs, with whom I am certifiably obsessed), where she writes her fabulous novels and cooks in her enviably well-equipped kitchen.

The first book in Louisa's Recipe for Love trilogy, entitled Can't Stand the Heat, debuted last fall to excellent reviews, and the second book (On the Steamy Side - my personal favorite so far) came out in March!

When she's not guest posting here or scribbling furiously away on her next novel, Louisa can be found over at her blog, her website, and her always-witty Twitter feed. (She sometimes posts pictures of Hunter and Oscar, said dogs, on Twitter, which is reason enough to follow her.)

Today, along with her interview, Louisa has a giveaway for you! Read her interview for the details, and follow her instructions to be entered to win a whole bunch of loot. (A signed, hardcover copy of On the Steamy Side, a Recipe for Love apron, and a set of spatulas!)

How and from whom did you learn to cook?

Both of my parents are fantastic, adventurous cooks so we grew up trying lots of different cuisines and ingredients in my house. I moved to NYC after college and got out of the habit of cooking for myself, what with all the fabulous restaurants around, and my kitchen being about the size of a bathtub, but once we moved to a small town in Ohio? If I want something fabulous to eat here, I have to make it myself. So I settled down to figure out how to do that, and realized I loved it!

Do you consider yourself a baker, a cook, or a hybrid? Why?

I find baking very therapeutic and comforting, but I'd be more apt to call myself a cook, since it's what I do far more frequently. Plus, I've grown to love the freedom and creativity inherent in cooking, while I'm not truly comfortable enough with the science of baking to deviate from the recipe, usually.

If you could prepare any meal in the world, what would the menu be, and who would you invite to join you?

This is a tough one! Breakfast is my favorite meal, and my favorite thing is to cook with other people, all pitching in together, so I guess I'd have to invite my favorite cooks to help me come up with a magnificent brunch: my parents, my husband (he makes a mean omelet), my best friend, Meg (some of you know her as Queenie!), and maybe Eric Ripert (for the pretty) and Anthony Bourdain (for the stories.) We'd make cornmeal bacon waffles, Ruth Reichl's buttery pancakes, skinny French omelets filled with roasted potatoes, melted leeks, and sauteed mushrooms, country ham biscuits with red-eye gravy, and a big, gorgeous minted fruit salad. And mimosas! Heavy on the bubbly.

Is there something you love to eat that you never make at home? Where do you get your fix?

I love Japanese food, specifically chirashi, that beautiful jewel-box of fragrant, sticky sushi rice dotted with perfectly fresh, silky fish. There really isn't anyplace in my town where I can satisfy that craving, but whenever I travel, it's always in the back of my head as a major food priority. Most recently, I had an amazing chirashi at Ozumo, looking out over the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Pick your poison.

If I could get away with drinking nothing but champagne for the rest of my life, I'd be a happy girl. I'd miss bourbon and gin, but somehow, I'd struggle through.

Describe the best meal you've ever eaten. Where were you? Who prepared it? And what made it so special?

This is next to impossible, but since I'm here with Queenie, it automatically puts me in mind of two dinners we've had together. And I bet she knows exactly which ones before I even say! The first was a transcendent meal in Paris at a tiny neighborhood bistro called Camille--pichets of house red, perfectly crisped duck breast, juicy lamb chops, and the hands-down best steak tartare I've ever tasted.

The other, slightly more dear to my heart because of the aforementioned cooking-together principle, was a night last summer when Meg and I tried our hands at banh mi for the first time. We'd made Julia's terrine of pork and veal a few days earlier, as well as some chicken liver pate that we tarted up with a shot of cinnamon. Those things went into the split loaves of crusty bread, along with an amazingly savory ground pork concoction with peanuts, fish sauce, and shallots.

Other condiments included chopped lemongrass, cilantro, and mint, grated fresh ginger, thinly sliced green onions, cucumber, and jalapenos, more fish sauce (because who can ever have enough of that stuff?) and sriracha. Oh em gee, they were divine! A harmonious symphony of French and Vietnamese flavors, hot sour salty sweet goodness! We ate them on the deck behind my house in the fading summer light, and I will never forget a moment of that meal.

What's for dinner tonight chez toi?

It just so happens that I stuck a side of salmon in to cure with sugar and salt, fresh dill, and lemon zest a few days ago, so tonight we're having gravlax! I'm itching to try an Eric Ripert recipe from his book A Return to Cooking: Smoked Salmon Croque Monsieur. We'll be using gravlax instead, and I don't have any lemon confit on hand, but I bet our version will still be pretty tasty.

What about you? What's on your dinner table? Answer in the comments below (Don't forget to include your email address!) for a chance to win a signed special hardcover edition of my newest Recipe for Love novel, On the Steamy Side, a Recipe for Love apron, and a set of red rubber spatulas!