Last week I was invited to House Beautiful’s Kitchen of the Year cooking demo at the San Francisco Decorator Showcase. Each year, the decorator showcase selects a home in SF and gives it an insane makeover, assigning a different room to a different local designer to transform. This year’s home was a historic 1907 beauty in Presidio Heights, valued at oh, you know, just a cool $18 million.

Needless to say, I was all about the kitchen. The swoon-worthy kitchen was created by Steven Miller Design Studio and outfitted in Whirlpool‘s sleek Black Ice Collection. The kitchen featured the coolest textured wall paper I’ve ever seen (gun metal grey “fish scales” that caught the light just so), and whoa, can we talk about that gorg herringbone tile backsplash? Also, Miller’s vision was to bring some of the vibrant greenery from the gardens into the kitchen, so there are some living accents…like an indoor fig tree! Ridiculous.

I managed to stop pawing the fig tree for a brief moment to direct my attention to the cooking demo at hand. Robin Song of Hog & Rocks showed us how to make a lovely Quinoa Salad. It’s not every day I get excited over a quinoa salad, but this one is really worth sharing. It’s full of spring goodies like asparagus, fava beans, and snap peas, and has a great balance of flavors and textures, but the game changer for me was his treatment of the lemon in it.