the wine wall

Salumaio update

2010-01-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

not sure how to quantify this, but my first short story, published spring '09, was the third most viewed page on the Contrary website for 2009. Incidentally, the current issue has 3 poems from Sherman Alexie. Here's a link to front page of current issue, which includes top ten most-viewed list from 2009.

http://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contrary/Winter_2010.html

One Bar Food That Is Almost Always Better At Home

2009-09-11T13:05:00.001-07:00

With the college football season upon us, one of the most important times of the year, I would like to turn my attention to a wonderful and much-maligned snack you can serve to your guests that will literally drive them crazy with adoration for your cooking skills. But first things first. When I say college football, what I really mean is Michigan Wolverine Football. Before reading any further, submit yourself to the notion that the Wolverines are the finest college football program in the history of the sport. If you've previously rooted for some other school as a result of your college education or geography, now is the time to make the switch. Start by waking up tomorrow morning and dressing yourself head-to-toe in maize and blue. You'd be surprised how good it can make you feel.

But let's get on to talking about Buffalo wings, my purpose today. We've all had them, we all love them, but the vast majority of the time they are not as good as they could be. By way of background, allow me to state that in addition to cooking professionally or teaching cooking to future chefs, I lived in Buffalo for seven years, from ages seven to fourteen—prime chicken wing eating years as far as I'm concerned. My parents, reasonable folks, would order our family ludicrously large pizzas and buckets of wings on a weekly basis. For a family of four boys this was just what the doctor ordered. It was the eighties, and people didn't worry about all the senseless chatter you hear nowadays about eating local or organic, much less healthy. Not in Buffalo, at least. Incidentally, I still to this day favor the pizza I grew up on. Pizza in Buffalo is really heavy on the sauce, lighter on the cheese, which is exactly the opposite of what most prefer, in my experience.

But on to the wings. One major advantage that a restaurant has over the home cook with regards to Buffalo wings is the use of a deep-fat fryer. If you have a fry daddy or some other such contraption, or are the kind of demented soul who likes to torture yourself with deep frying at home, don't even bother. I've got a technique that will produce the best wings you and your guests have ever had.

First, buy the right kind of chicken wings. There are basically three kinds of wings you can purchase in most grocery stores. First, there is the kind that is frozen that is presauced, in some cases even pre-cooked. Under no circumstances should you purchase this product if you're goal is to serve real Buffalo wings. If you want to serve "Buffalo" style wings that are pre-sauced or coated with barbeque sauce, you might as well root for a team like Ohio State. The second kind of wing to avoid is the frozen, still-raw wing that comes in the five pound sack with some kind of colorful packaging. This is the most cost-effective, but the problem is that these wings are too large. They come from old hag chickens that have run around the barnyard for too long. They are simply too tough to chew on and do not produce a desirable product for you or your Wolverine-loving guests. Here's what you have to do. Go to the fresh meat section and pick up some small styrofoam packages of small fresh, raw chicken wings. They should be about three inches in length. If you're not sure if you're getting the small, tender ones, compare them to the frozen bags of wings. In terms of size it's night and day.

Bring your wings home. Feel a bit of pride at what you are going to engage in. Here's where it gets all culinary. Instead of simply cooking your wings, borrow a technique from classical cookery of duck. Duck, like chicken wings, contain a great deal of fat in the skin. In order to open the pores to allow the fat to run out during cooking, it's necessary to blanch them very briefly in rapidly boiling water. Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Dunk your chicken wings, only a few at a time, into the water for no more than 10 seconds. Any longer and you will cook them, which is not the point.

After blanching, turn your oven up to a ridiculously high temperature—as high as it will go. Lay your wings out on sheet pans, preferably on a rack to allow air to flow around them as they roast, in a single layer. When oven is smoking hot, slide in the wings for about ten to fifteen minutes, or until you're confident they are done. They should have a light golden to brown crust on them. While they are roasting, prepare the sauce!

Here is the only kind of sauce you should coat chicken wings with if you want them to be Buffalo wings. Best case scenario, order some online from the Anchor Bar in Buffalo. This stuff is an almost neon orange, probably toxic and very delicious. Short of that, buy some sauce like Frank's Red Hot, Crystal, or Tabasco. The goal here is not just pure heat, but tang. Mix whatever sauce you buy with equal parts melted whole unsalted butter and place in a large bowl. Keep it warm.

When those wings come out of the oven, slide them right into that bowl with the sauce and toss, toss, toss. Use the bowl to toss so that the sauce sloshes out all over your kitchen counter and your freshly-pressed Michigan shirt. I wouldn't have it any other way. Next, slide your wings onto a platter with celery sticks and homemade blue cheese dressing.

Homemade blue cheese dressing? I thought we were done J Not quite. Never buy this pre-made, it's too easy to make yourself. And never, ever serve Buffalo wings with Ranch dressing. Talk about a tragedy. For blue cheese dressing, buy some quality genuine blue cheese. Make sure you have plenty of store-bought but full octane mayo on hand, more Crystal or Tabasco sauce, Worcesterschire sauce, fresh lemon and salt and black pepper. Basically add blue cheese to mayo until very chunky. Keep seasoning until you can't taste mayo anymore, which is one of the golden rules of using pre-made mayo for a sauce. I can't guarantee that your blue cheese dressing will taste as good as mine, but I've had lots of practice. Most often what it needs is more salt, lemon juice, Crystal, Worcesterschire and pepper.

Take control of your life today. Get your supplies, including Wolverine shirt, Buffalo wing ingredients, lots of cold canned beer and bloody mary fixings. Wake up tomorrow morning, brush your teeth, put on your Michigan gear, fix a bloody mary, make your wings. Take a moment to step outside in the glorious sunshine, beer in one hand, bloody mary in the other. Then retreat into a dark cave, and see how the other half lives.

A Gardening Tragedy

2009-09-04T14:20:00.001-07:00

Each day, like Don Corleone in his old age, I like to go into my garden and spend a little time among my tomatoes. I don't really do much to them while I'm out there, unless I need to water. Partly I don't know what to do to them! Mostly I just walk among them, look at their leaves, examine the ripening fruit—enjoy their company.

But at this time of year the plants are definitely starting to die. It's not so much the wilting and the spotting of the leaves or the reddening of the fruit. It's as if their entire stature has started to shrink. They're a lot thinner through the middle. They seem to be all stem and fruit and less and less leafy liveliness. They're really more of skeletons than anything. I can't help but wonder if I did all I could during this growing season. I'm aware that the answer is, most likely, no. But that's okay. I've committed greater crimes in my garden, one of the more venal of which I will describe at this time. I do this not so much out of a sense of expiation as an acknowledgement that sinning seems to be such a central part of me and my gardening habits.

This story has to do with the Great Snowstorm of 2008 in Seattle, an event so momentous it seems to have cost us our otherwise wonderful mayor, Greg Nickels, as well as shaved several years off the lives of the majority of our citizens. I'm sorry, but coming from Michigan, a few inches of snow in December, no snowplows or not, does not a tragedy make. The story that follows, however, does.

Long before the snow came, around this time last year, my wife and I set out in the garden several types of lettuces, greens, and other winter vegetables. By the time December rolled around, they were doing swimmingly. We had been eating wonderful lettuces and greens for months, picking them one minute, eating them the next. Enter into the picture several inches of snow. Our lettuces became buried under a soft bed of white. We flew back East for Christmas (where there was real snow!), and by the time we returned to Seattle in early January it was the grey, dreary, snowless place we have come to call home.

Before we even got into the house, suitcases in tow, I went straight for where the plants had been. Several lesser varieties of lettuce, such as frilly frisee and that primadonna of Italian lettuces, lolla rossa, were gone completely. Gone without a trace. It was as if something had just zapped them out of existence, wiped them, quite literally, off the face of the earth. Some of the hardier varieties, your more quotidian romaine, were still there, but not long for this world. Imagine a head of lettuce lying completely flat on the ground. It was one-dimensional, each of its leaves spread out like a child's drawing of a flower. I lifted a limp leaf, hoping against hope that I might revive it. There was nothing left to do.

But standing in the back of the bunch were several plants I had all but forgotten about back in the fall. At that innocent time, slugs had all but eaten them to stumps. But there they were now, several sturdy, healthy, proud collard greens. It was a triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. I felt victorious. I monitored their progress for the rest of the winter. They were knee high when we decided to reap their benefits and cut them down. It was early spring, around the time I started to build my raised beds, and there wasn't room for them anyway. I had one very, very full shopping bag of the freshest collard greens I had ever seen.

I proceeded to stuff them into the back of the refrigerator, behind the milk jug and the water pitcher. And there they sat, week after week. That's right. One of the worst things that I do as a gardener is spend time growing things, only to throw them out later after they go bad.

A couple of things should be noted about collard greens. When properly stored, as mine were, they take a long time to go bad. Two, I personally love to cook them. After cooking in New Orleans for a year, where I learned to fix them with lots of bacon, brown sugar, and Abita amber, they have become a household staple several times of year. I've cooked them for parties and even catering events. I've been told on several occasions that they were the best collards that someone had ever tasted. And I knew it. Most collard greens are bland and boring. Mine roared with life, and flavor.

Why did I let them go to waste? I don't know. Each week my wife asked me to cook them. Each week I grew more and more apoplectic about them. I tried to pretend they weren't back there. Finally I took the bag and threw it directly into the trash can, not bothering to open it up and see them in their wilted state, not bothering to honor them with the food waste bin which sits adjacent to our regular trash.

"What happened to the collard greens?" my wife said one winter day, noting their absence almost immediately.

"I don't know," I answered meekly.

"What do you mean you don't know?" she responded rather logically.

I honestly didn't know, and I still don't. I have no excuses. Every time I try to come up with one, it just seems to fall apart, as if buried by you know what.

Will I ever be able to bring myself to grow collard greens again? Let's add that to the list of unanswerable questions. I seem to have a garden full of them at this point.

How to Live the Good Life

2009-08-19T08:44:00.001-07:00

If you do not currently have a garden of any kind, or even a house plant, you should consider doing so. Few things are capable as providing as much nourishment for the soul as helping something grow. Once you gain the confidence that comes with keeping something alive, you will quickly discover that there are things you can keep alive that taste really, really good. For me, gardening is really a selfish pleasure. But, naïve as it may sound, it makes the world a better place as well. It improves our air, and it provides something green for others to look at. Anytime you can make your own selfishness align with the better of someone else you are doing a good thing.

I have only been gardening for a couple of years. For so long it seemed as if gardening was just a vastly complex hobby that offered the newcomer so many different ways to fail. I used to tell people around our P-Patch that hour for hour and ounce for ounce, my wife and I work the hardest for the least amount of actual gain, if such a calculus were to exist.

But no longer. At least when it comes to basil. Our first year, which was really a half year, the summer of 2007, we grew a few basil plants with moderate success. We planted late, didn't fertilize or water enough, and were pleasantly pleased with our results. I don't recall that we had enough even make a batch of pesto that year, but we certainly made our share of caprese salads and the like. Last year, 2008, we got an early start and planted seeds in the spring in the south-facing window of our Ballard apartment. They grew too fast, became too spindly, and amidst the madness of house shopping and then moving, in May of last year, the basil plants never made the transition. I don't even remember exactly what happened to them. But that's probably for the better. I don't even recall being too upset. So accustomed to failure when it came to gardening, we likely shrugged our shoulders, hung our heads low, and moved on.

But then came this year, 2009, the year of the bountiful sun and the somewhat experienced gardening team at the old Redman household. I built raised beds back in February. I ordered shipments of the finest organic topsoil and compost that money could buy. We purchased basil plants from a local nursery sometime in May, just as the sunshine was beginning to blanket our glorious corner of the Earth. We watered. Boy, did we water! By late June we were looking at four waist-high bushes of basil. They were as big as the nascent tomato plants that grew alongside them. I joked to my wife that this was my Italian bed. That basil and tomatoes were meant to be together not just on the plate but also in the garden. I perhaps grew slightly smug at our success.

For the past month or so we have been making pesto once a week. Everytime we go out to cut down some basil, thinking we are going to have to take down a whole plant, only to realize that no matter how much we seem to cut, there is always much, much more. We eat pasta lousy with pesto. We purposefully make too much pesto, and then overdress the pasta with its luscious greenness. No, I take that back. It's not possible to overdress pasta with pesto. In addition to our lovely meals, we have been making pesto and freezing it. Will it taste the same come January, when we are staring outside at gloom and rain and bare tree branches? I don't know.

Our plan for this week is to cut down most of our basil. We plan to make another big batch of pesto, as well as try freezing some whole leaves, which we've heard works well. There's also other reasons to cut down the basil. It's started to flower, and while I love watching the bees gather round, since they seem to take as much if not more pleasure in our basil, it also means that the plants won't produce many more leaves.

There is something else I need to confess to. My gardening is not quite where it needs to be. I planted too many tomato plants—good problem to have!—and they have completely overtaken the basil. My "Italian bed" is a tangle of green. It is more green than I ever could have imagined. It's impossible to tell where the basil ends and the tomatoes begin. I've mistreated my basil in this way. But it doesn't complain. It just does its thing, as it's done for centuries. It quietly goes through life and doesn't seem to complain. We could all learn a thing or two from that.

Grate Your Vegetables

2009-05-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

There is a simple side dish you can make that accomplishes the magical goal of being inexpensive, extremely good for your body and your soul, and ludicrously delicious. Start by reaching for your box grater, that neglected tool you may not have used for since before they started selling pre-grated cheese-- remember when?

Now this dish involves vegetables. Vegetables, that elusive category of food you may have seen once on television. Not only vegetables, but a couple of the most despised species: carrots and beets. You want to choose one or the other. You can serve them alongside of each other, but don't mix them together. Unless you want to.

Begin with that most important first step. Peel your vegetables and baptize them under wonderfully cold water from your kitchen sink- Remember to be thankful for the Cascades and the luscious bounty they give us! A thousand page book could be written on the quality of our public water. Also, cleansing your vegetables in this manner will simultaneously cleanse your soul. Promise.

From here this dish is so simple you might as well open a pre-dinner beverage. But watch those fingers! A grater and its crude edges can do a dandy on the delicate flesh of your finger.

Whether using beet or carrot, simply grate the raw vegetable using the large holes. Now season with the four most important ingredients on Earth: salt, fresh-ground pepper, vinegar and olive oil. What kind of vinegar? Try red wine for the beets, perhaps rice wine or white wine for the carrots. How much of these seasonings? It is too difficult to describe in words. Add each seasoning judiciously, taste, and continue seasoning. One thing to keep in mind is these salads do best after sitting out for a good twenty minutes, and change considerably overnight in the refrigerator.

How should it taste? Like a tangy, crunchy mouthful of soul-satisfying flavor. Munch on this alongside a nice piece of protein--whatever your inclination or your pocketbook calls for-- and watch your body and your soul become invigorated at the table.

1st Work of Fiction Published

2009-05-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

Hello, Wine Wall? How are you? :)

It's been a while. Thought I post links to a couple of other writing projects that have come up for the scant few who visit this quiet little corner of the Internets.

-Salumaio, Paul's first published short story, a work of "food fiction", has been published in the Spring issue of Contrary, a literary journal based out of Chicago. Here is a link if you care to read.

-I've started contributing to the online-only P-I as part of their Seattle Views section. Here is a link to my first piece.

La Vida Dolce Per Tutti

2009-03-21T09:36:00.001-07:00

If your soul yearns for spring, which is literally coming in fits and starts this year, take matters into your own hands. Feed yourself a hearty salad of delicate spring greens without even making a trip to the local grocery or farmer's market. Right now is the time to head out to your backyard, or a neighborhood park if you are a true city dweller, and start picking your own dandelion greens. Get them now before they blossom and their leaves turn woody. It's terribly simple and will make you feel like the most sophisticated eater in the world. Go out and pick your greens this weekend. Stick your fingers into that cold, muddy soil, disregarding strange looks cast your way from condescending urbanites. If you are self-assured, take an elegant wicker basket with you. If audacity is your calling card, wear your floppiest summer hat. Simulate a trip to the farmer's market with all the characteristic showmanship you can muster. Fill your basket with as many greens as you can before modesty takes over and you remember that your original mission was simply to have a satisfying lunch. Take your greens home. Scrub your sink and fill it with the coldest water possible. Fill it to the brim and stop for a moment to appreciate the resources at hand. Now carefully plunge your harvest into the water, stir gently, as if leading an infant around in circles in a swimming pool for the first time, and then let them float. Let them float and let the sand and dirt precipitate silently to the bottom. Cherish your life. Go and sit in a sunny corner chair and read a book, or just gaze outside and think of summer. When you are ready, when your stomach growls, remove your greens from their baptism and spin them dry. A salad spinner is another cheap addition to your batterie de cuisine that will repay itself in innumerable delicious salads over the rest of your life. If you want to elevate your greens to their most noble use, dress them lightly with the freshest, fruitiest olive oil you can afford. Bless them with a pinch of good salt, a turn or two of the mill, and a squeeze from a nice lemon. Toss them lightly. Pile them high on a white plate. Admire them before digging in. If you follow these steps exactly, your reward will be otherworldly indeed.

The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have

2009-03-18T09:46:00.001-07:00

A quick and simple way to add complexity of flavor to your cooking is to always start with a few humble ingredients: sharp onions, firm carrots and crisp celery. Peel the onions and carrots, being careful not to trim away too much. Rinse them under cold water and pat dry. Rinse a stalk of celery, trim the ends, and place all three vegetables on your cutting board. Now chop them very fine. When you go to cook something like spaghetti sauce, a piece of chicken, a pot of beans, or, if you are adventurous, a soup from scratch, begin by cooking these three vegetables. In French cuisine they form a kind of holy trinity, and are used to add depth of flavor to hundreds of dishes. You can almost begin by sauteeing these three vegetables in some fat before you have even decided what it is you want to make!

To experience one of life's countless little joys, take a healthy pat of very fresh butter, heat it slowly, add these three vegetables, stir, and close your eyes. If the whole world could inhale such things collectively, there would be no need for war. Sprinkle in some salt and fresh-ground pepper and then try to contain your animal passions; remind yourself that the good life includes both indulgence and modesty.

Onions, carrots and celery will become your faithful friends if you call on them often, treat them with respect, and don't let them wither away in the reaches of your refrigerator. They will greet you when you come home cold and tired from a long day of work. If you have no work to go to, they will not judge you for it. And, best of all, your dining companions will begin to notice that your food is more pleasant, that it seems somehow different, perhaps a touch more soulful. If someone should inquire directly as to the changes you and your food seem to have undergone, you need not say anything in response. Shrug, smile, and continue quietly on your path to perfection.

Feed Yourself: Bake Bread

2009-03-13T09:28:00.001-07:00

If you are unemployed, underemployed, or just hungry, there is a simple and satisfying way to nourish your soul and your belly. Bake your own bread. It requires nothing you don't own already. Sure, there are lots of ways to complicate it, to make it more expensive, but they are not necessary. First take about four cups of any old flour. Mix it with about two cups of lukewarm water. Sprinkle in a couple teaspoons of large-grain salt and a packet of yeast. Now knead. Knead like you have never done anything before. Knead like you are making love for the last time. Turn and press the dough until your muscles ache with soreness, muscles you might not have known you had. Now knead some more. Don't even think of using a machine to do this unless you have kneaded bread by hand at least one-hundred times before. And remember, later, what it felt like to make something so special, all by yourself. Cooking should always be a solitary pleasure. After your dough is kneaded, form it into a ball and place in a bowl, covered with a fresh kitchen towel. Allow it to double in volume. Knead it gently once or twice, and allow it to double in volume again. There is a delicate gas structure that has developed in your risen dough, and overhandling at this point will ruin it. Form it into the desired shape- round and rustic, long and narrow, or individual rolls. Crank your oven up to five-hundred- so much good cooking happens at high heat! While the oven is warming, let the dough continue to rise, covered lightly with the towel. When your oven is good and hot, take a very sharp blade and put a half-inch gash or two in the top of your loaf, scarring it irrevocably but allowing it to expand further in the oven. Before you slide it in the oven, get a spray bottle of water handy. Slide the dough and its parchment onto your baking sheet, and place in the oven. Close the oven door almost all the way, and spray water on the loaf and into the oven itself (but not the light) before closing the door. Let it bake about a half an hour. While your bread quietly goes about the business of driving you insane with its wonderful aroma, think about all the things you want to do to it. If, upon its completion, you find yourself tearing it apart, piece by piece, ravishing it to mere crumbs while still warm, you would not be the first. But try to stretch it out, make it last. It will be incomparable toasted, buttered, and dipped in hot coffee. A humble sandwich can be elevated to the greatest heights. Should it become stale, all is not lost. Simple things like croutons for a salad, or French toast with syrup, will never be the same. A kind warning: your friends may call you impracticle, whimsical, irresponsible, or worse, for baking your own bread. If you like, keep your little secret to yourself. Rush home for no other reason than to bake bread. One thing is certain. You will be better for it.

Recession-Proof Roast Chicken

2009-03-04T09:02:00.001-08:00

One of the best ways to replicate the flavor and quality of restaurant food at home is to roast a chicken. There are a couple of things you can do to make it truly special. First, buy yourself a humble bird- it need not come from the local farmer's market. Take it home, open it up in your sink, and remove any body parts found in the cavity. Wrap these in plastic and place them in your freezer (more on that later). Now rinse the bird inside and out under the ice-cold water that runs from the Cascades into our taps. Refresh it like your rinsing an infant. Then pat it dry with paper towel, every last crease and crevice. Here comes the important part. Pour a healthy amount of salt into a little bowl. For those who want to measure: your bird should be about 4 to 5 pounds, so measure about 3 tablespoons of large grain salt, less if its iodized or fine sea salt. This is an unseemly amount of salt. Welcome to restaurant cooking! Into your salt grind some black peppercorns, about twenty turns of the mill. If you don't own a mill, go to Goodwill and buy one. Preground pepper is utterly useless. Stir these together well. Now take your pristine chicken and season it inside and out, rubbing your salt and pepper over every last inch of it, even the wings. When your bird is seasoned, place it on a plate lined with fresh paper towel, and set it uncovered in the fridge overnight. This is essential. Sleep poorly while you dream of your chicken. Let hunger gnaw at your sanity the whole next day (but don't starve yourself completely!). Instead of longing for an expensive tryst at How to Cook a Wolf, think of How to Cook a Wolf, M.F.K. Fisher's World War Two meditation on how to "keep the wolf at bay", the wolf of hunger, that is. When you think you are ready, remove the chicken from the fridge and place it on the counter. Look at it one last time before its transformation. Turn up your oven to 450, 500 if you are courageous. Set your cast-iron skillet in the oven to heat up. If you don't own one, go back to Goodwill. It is cheap and worth its weight in gold. When it's hot, pour a little oil in the bottom, tilt the pan to spread it around, and place your chicken in the pan. Truss it first if you know how. Cook it for one hour at high heat, then lower the temperature to 350 or maybe 325 if you are cautious, and bring the chicken home. After a second hour of pure torture, remove it from the oven, let it rest in the pan for 5 minutes, then remove the chicken and let it rest on a plate or board for another 5. Your skillet should be filled with half an inch of liquid gold. Pour this into a small bowl and let it cool. You can relive your roast chicken ten times or more by using this fat to cook your next meals. Try it for scrambled eggs on the weekend! After you devour your bird, freeze the carcass, to be used later with the innards, to make chicken stock. That's the problem with cooking. It never really ends.

Tuesdays with Market

2009-02-27T07:48:00.001-08:00

For this trip to our friendly Pike Place Market, the quirky culinary epicenter of the Emerald City, we visited Café Campagne for their incomparably affordable happy hour. I've always had an affection for French cuisine, starting back in my first kitchen class in culinary school, Skills Development. I'm sure my face took on a glazed look as the chef, Anthony Natale, began to talk about something called fond de veau. That was over ten years ago, and French cuisine is no less interesting to me today, in spite of the way it is sometimes disparaged as overly fussy or old-fashioned. If you go to France you realize it is the food (maybe not veal stock!) that ordinary citizens, working class folks, eat. One of my favorite stories to tell my students is how fascinated I was by reading the school lunch menus posted outside a grammar school in this or that nameless French city, during the two years I spent abroad in Europe after culinary school, chasing the ghostly dishes I was indoctrinated by in culinary school.. "What kind of food do French schoolchildren eat?" I always ask. The entire class always gets that faraway look that is or should be a message to the teacher that what they are saying is not readily apparent. "French food!" I exclaim, to only slightly more recognition. Oh well. It's still funny to me.

Anyways, Café Campagne's happy hour is the cheapest in town. $1 mini lamburgers exploding with juice and perfectly cooked- unlike the raw-in-the-middle burgers I forced my friends to eat last weekend after misreading their doneness while grilling them in the dark after a beer or two. There are also $1 pate sandwiches. Both are served on gougeres, which are the same thing as a cream puff, minus all the sweet stuff. Fantastic. There are also decent pommes frites served with garlicky aioli. Perhaps the highlight was the tarte flambee, which in this case is a flatbread smothered with a thick layer of melted onions, a dab of crème fraiche and a healthy smattering of crisp bacon strips.

Maybe the best part about this happy hour is that there is a selection of a dozen or so French wines of moderate quality offered for $2/3 oz pour! What a great way to sample several regional wines in one sitting for not much money. Granted these are not the prime examples of French wines, but they are tasty and pretty much as they should be. White Burgundy is a touch flinty and utterly lacking in oakiness. Bordeaux is grapey and tannic. There are also two sparkling wines offered.

Just to put things in perspective, when we went to Il Bistro two weeks ago, the happy hour bill came to $50. This time it was $30 and the food was better, the server infinitely more skilled. Campagne is a fancy, top-notch restaurant. Their happy hour is an absolute steal. Go for it.

Food Allergies

2009-02-24T09:39:00.000-08:00

Seattle food blogger Herbivoracious has some helpful advice, and a harrowing tale to boot, about the importance of educating oneself about food allergies.

http://www.herbivoracious.com/2009/02/understanding-deadly-food-allergies-this-post-could-save-a-life.html

Tuesdays with Market

2009-02-03T20:43:00.000-08:00

Il Bistro is quintessential Market - dimly lit, hidden, and cheap at happy hour. We gorged ourselves in style at this classic Market haunt beneath the pig and steps from the gum wall. For a mere $50 (including tax and tip) you can get crostini with goat cheese and roasted garlic, crostini with sausage and peppers, seared calamari in a rich tomato broth, mixed antipasti (cheese, olives, salumi), mushroom ravioli, rigatoni with meat sauce, a couple of beers, two glasses of wine, and some bread to sop up the sauces and soak up your drinks. All of the food was better than good. Not amazing, but certainly tasty. The dry spice garnish used for the ravioli was slightly off-putting, but the cream sauce made up for it. The pasta was almost too al dente. I personally wouldn't be bold enough to serve it that way, for fear I would be accused of under-cooking, but we enjoyed it. And, Let's face it, you don't go to a candlelit Italian restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of the Market for the food. You go there for the atmosphere. Il Bistro has atmosphere in spades. From its warm red glow, to its marble table tops, to its wood bar, this is someplace you bring a date. Plus, from 5-6:30 p.m., it's some place you can afford to bring a date, even during a recession. The are going to be at least a few more months of cold weather and bad economic news. Find yourself someone special, take the steps just past the pig, and indulge.

Date Night - an occasional series

2009-01-27T20:00:00.000-08:00

Yes, we here at the wine wall realize that we've been slacking off. What can we say? You've heard our excuses before (holidays, snow, our "real" jobs getting in the way, etc). But we've made a resolution (better late than never) to begin again. Yes, despite our best intentions, you will never hear about our adventures in Little Rhody (Johnny cakes, both East and West Bay style, latkes, or the exact right cheese and wine to pair with Scrabble), our trip to Mexico, our Christmas party, our Election Night party, or even our most recent dinner at The Herbfarm (although it was amazing and we took lots of pictures). But the future is bright . . .

We are bringing back an old favorite - Tuesdays with Market - a weekly exploration of Pike Place Market's bounty (ie our quest to eat everywhere in the Market that sells prepared foods). And we are starting a new tradition - Date Night - aka "I worked late, got stuck in a parking lot on I-5, and we realized we had better set our sites a little closer to home." That's what happened tonight and it was the perfect excuse for us to hit one of our favorite Greenwood haunts . . .

Gorditos claims to be "Healthy Mexican" but the only thing healthy about it is the portions. They have a burrito there the size of a baby. Seriously, there is a side by side comparison photo on the wall and the burrito actually appears to be slightly larger than the baby. We usually get that burrito's slightly-less-large-but-still-too-big-to-ever-be-eaten (even by the likes of us)-in-one-sitting cousin. I like the veggie one, not because I'm trying to save the planet but because it comes with free guacamole inside, and Paul usually gets a meatier version. We also like them "wet," meaning smothered in cheese, salsa, and sour cream. While, like all Seattle burritos, they suffer from a distinct lack of cohesion and must be eaten with fork and knife, these are certainly some of the most satisfying efforts at Mission-style burritos around. And, after one of these and a Pacifico and some chips, a healthy food coma will wipe out the stress of that meeting that ran over and even the I-5 commute.

The Holiday Season

2008-12-03T12:02:00.000-08:00

One of the strangest parts about going to Mexico for a week during Thanksgiving (yes, it was wonderful!) was coming back to the U.S. to find that the holiday season was upon us. It was strange, like going outside to get the mail and coming back to find a different house waiting for you.

I don't know if it's that or the sense that due to the economy this season will be less jubilant and joyous (code for commercial) than other holiday seasons, but I am getting the sense that we are off to a slow start this year. It could also be because Seattle just had one of the balmier Novembers on record, apparently.

I for one have always loved this time of year. Not that I go in for all the crap that goes along with it, but this is the one time of the year when we can overeat and overdrink with impunity:) Therefore, allow me to kick off the season here at the Wine Wall with a hearty Ho, Ho, Ho. Let's have some fun people. Let's enjoy our friends and family, be thankful, and, yes, let's have a good time and eat lots of stuff that's not good for us.

The ability to self-correct

2008-10-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

In the wake of a recent dining experience at Frasca Food and Wine, perhaps the finest Italian restaurant in North America, located in Boulder, Colorado, I have come to a conclusion about one aspect of great restaurant service: the ability to self correct is of paramount importance.

We were eating a multi-course meal and pairing glasses of wine with each course. On one of the first courses, we were served our food (hot) but not the accompanying wine. We took a few bites before I decided to set down my fork and wait for the wine to arrive. It was a tasting menu, the portions were small, and I decided that if the name of the game is tasting the food with the wine in your mouth at the same time, I wasn't going to waste another bite. It had the potential to be a fairly substantial wrinkle in an otherwise out-of-this-world dining experience. I glanced around for a server, sent out my best something's wrong here vibes, and then the our wine was brought over after only a couple of minutes in the wilderness. We never directly spoke with the server about the missing glasses of wine, but on every subsequent course our wine was delivered before the previous glass was emptied- long before the next plate of food hit the white tablecloth. What it represented to me was a professional institution in which employees are constantly recalibrating their actions on the fly, which is perhaps one definition of five-star hospitality.

Upon reflection, perhaps there is a deeper, more personal reason for my animosity towards a wine- or a plate of food- served after its time, so to speak. While in culinary school I had to do rotations through the school's four restaurants, which, because of the time of my final term in school, which was the holiday period, roughly from Thanksgiving through New Year's, was the busiest time of the year and every table was full from open to close, every night of the week. As a captain, or front waiter one night in the Escoffier Room, the school's classical French restaurant and easily the one with the fussiest service (and some of the most expensive wines), I oversaw a service failure which still haunts me to this day. I was serving a four top, two couples, well-heeled types who came up from the Manhattan area- the bread and butter of the CIA restaurants' clientele, one could argue (tour buses of seniors being another major contigent!)- and they were ordering some serious wines. For the main course, which was rack of lamb, they dropped a bombshell and ordered one of the more expensive wines on the list, a Bordeaux whose exact provenance escapes my memory- and easily the most expensive bottle of wine I sold in a season of expensive bottles of wine during my short career as a server at the CIA.

To make a long story short, since the bottle of wine was stored in the school's vast wine cellars, not in the dining room where most of the wine was stored, it was a twenty minute walk and a pain in the ass to retrieve it. I had to ask the dining room fellow, who was doing an actual fellowship under the tutelage of Bernard, who was the instructor/maitre d'hotel type dude (formerly the captain of the dining room at Daniel in Manhattan). The meal progressed, the food was served, and the fellow and I promptly forgot all about going to get the $200 bottle that needed to be decanted and give time to breath in order to fully open up.

The four guests were served their racks of lamb, and I stood off to the side watching them eat, when, like an idiot staring blankly off into space, I wondered why the person who had ordered the wine had set down his utensils and started looking right at me. I realized my mistake, the fellow went to grab the bottle, it was hastily opened and poured, and the meal carried on without so much as a mild rebuke from the customer- a sign of true good taste and manners.

Now this could be chalked up to me- and the fellow, technically- being students. It was a school, a learning environment, and I certainly learned from my experiences there. But nonetheless. The customer paid market price for his wine but was given less than a great service which is included- and expected- in the price of said bottle, and that's what buggers me.

I haven't spent any time in the ten years since this incident working in a dining room, but I like to think that if I ever do, I will have the ability to self-correct- no matter how much time has past in between.

Gardening Update

2008-10-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

just a quick post to say that we have been working feverishly to put our garden to bed for the winter, and will put up some posts with pictures soon. Part of our problem is that Sunday is the only day (I am currently teaching on Saturdays as well) we have to garden, except that there is lots of other stuff to do on Sundays too- not the least of which is sit in front of a roaring fire drinking red wine or sherry! That's right. We do live some kind of bourgeois life that is over packed with activities. How I long for the simple life of my student days, when I could read for hours and hours a day. Oh well. Now I read a book for a few hours a week and feel lucky to do so. But back to our food life. In addition to winterizing our p-patch, we have been growing several varieties of lettuces (and some feral spinach that popped up out of nowhere) in our front yard. That in its own right deserves a post and some pictures. Wine wall readers, if you are out there, sit tight. We will have more examples of the mixed success that is our eating and gardening life coming soon.

Dahlia

2008-09-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

In addition to our mastery of fruit and vegetable husbandry, we are expert flower growers (cue term for that). Hah. Hardly. Actually, the people who lived in our house before us were flower people par excellence. In addition to all the roses that we knew about, there are tons of various flowers blooming all the time around here. Dahlia, we don't know ye well, but oh do we love thy sexy purple flowers. Baby.

Potato Detective

2008-09-08T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Potato Detective, no relation to Cakespy, has come across a nefarious case of rotten homegrown potato. This is the first one we've encountered, so it's not quite time to cry outbreak, but this is nonetheless disheartening. We don't know what this defection is, but we do know that we will serve no unhealthy potato, homegrown or not. We will hunt you down where you live. We will follow you to the gates-- okay, enough already. We all know who the staff of the wine wall is voting for. That's company policy.

Candy-Striped Beets

2008-09-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the chiogga beet is that the interior of the beet is candy-striped. Quite striking to look at and fun to eat, though they are absolutely the same as a red or a yellow beet in terms of flavor and such. Party! As to why some of our beets are mostly white, I have no earthly idea. They still taste the same.

Peche, Je t'aime

2008-09-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

Really. You are my favorite fruit, by far.

We have two peach trees and one nectarine tree, and they have finally ripened. So far they have been juicy, sweet, tart and floral. Wow. What a treat.

Dude That Is So Beet

2008-09-05T15:28:00.001-07:00

hehe. We take'm where we can get'm around here, especially after a long week. Seriously, we are like maniacal about beets around here at the wine wall. One of our favorite vegetables. Sweet, earthy, versatile- and despised by many. Remember the litte beets we pulled a while back? Well these are what the big guys look like now. They seem to love the black as night soil down at the P-Patch. They are the size of baseballs. Behind the basket in the last picture is the winter kale, which we will explain in a future post. Suffice it to say that the winter garden is already going strong here in Seattle!

BTW, these are the appropriately bourgeois heirloom Italian variety known as chiogga.

When you can't make pie . . .

2008-09-01T19:18:00.000-07:00

So we had 3 pie apples. That's right just 3. When we bought the house, we were provided with a map of our trees and the first tree when you enter the garden was labled "Gravenstein - pie apples." It's a young dwarf tree, shorter than my husband. So we were excited that it managed to produce even 3 apples. But the thing is . . . 3 apples are not enough for pie. And then we realized that 3 apples would be plenty for a dutch baby pancake. Have you ever had a dutch baby? Have you tasted it's puffy, buttery, skillet-baked deliciousness? No? Then you are missing out. The dutch baby goes by many names, but it's basically a puffy pancake baked in a cast iron skillet in the oven in more butter than most folks want to know about. I adapted a recipe off epicurious.com for the Big Apple Pancake, substituting our Gravensteins and almond extract for vanilla (which made it fantastically, subtly, almondy). The result? Probably the best damn pancake we've ever had. Try it. Try it soon. Apple season is upon us.

Cooking Technique: Searing Meat for Stew

2008-09-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

If you plan to make a stew, assuming it's not something unusual in which the meat should not be browned, as in a blanquette de veau, follow these steps to ensure the best flavor:

-season meat with salt and fresh ground pepper and then dredge the meat in flour
-shake off excess flour piece by piece (not doing this diligently guarantees poor results)
-get healthy amount of oil very hot in skillet (choose the right pan: very low and outward sloping sides to give steam a direct route into the atmosphere so as not to steam meat)
-set pieces of meat in hot fat so that there is ample space between each piece and brown on all sides

Note: the pan you make the stew in does not and should not be the same pan you brown the meat in, since the shapes are so different they could never serve the same purpose.

Turn and Burn

2008-09-01T16:27:00.001-07:00

This is a hot compost bin we maintain at the P-Patch. It's filled with weeds and other stuff pulled from the garden, green grass clippings and brown leaves. The deal is, if you mix green and brown you get compost (nitrogen plus carbon equals humus). The beauty of hot composting, which is what this is, is that you can put things like weeds in and the heat will cook the seeds, not to mention that all of it breaks down faster. Compost is about the best plant food you can use. This bin has been hot for over a week, meaning that steam rises from it and it's warm when you stick your hand in it. To keep it hot, it needs oxygen, so I turn it every few days or so from one bin to the other. How do we have brown leaves since it's the end of summer still? They are saved from last year!

Tomato Envy

2008-09-01T16:09:00.000-07:00

These belong to a fellow P-Patch gardener. They are about the size of baseballs. Then again, since fall has already arrived in Seattle, who knows if they will all ripen?

Sauteed Salmon

2008-09-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite ways to cook salmon is to saute it in olive oil with salt and pepper. It's one of those challenging techniques that doesn't involve lots of time or ingredients. Here are the steps:

-Make sure salmon is nice and dry. Sprinkle on both sides with salt and fresh ground pepper (only one side if thin, such as tail piece).
-Heat skillet over medium flame. The best kind of skillets are either cast iron or low-carbon steel. Not only do they function properly, they feel good to use.
-Add oil to skillet. It should become hot very quickly. You know it's hot when it ripples in the pan. If pan is too hot oil will smoke. If it smokes, it's too hot. Let it cool off the flame or dump it out and start over.
-Lay fish into oil. It should not stick. Test it by sliding the pan to see if the fish is loose.
-The best part: let the fish sizzle in the pan and see how long you can go on one side. Check the underside to make sure it's not burning. One of the most beautiful things is a piece of salmon that is becoming golden brown on its underside as the salmon cooks its way up the fillet. Cook it to your doneness. If you want both sides seared, flip it over and let the top side cook briefly, what Thomas Keller calls "kissing". Voila.

p.s. The ultimate tool for cooking fish is what professionals call a fish spatula, shown by yours truly in the picture. I have seen these marketed as "batter stirrers" and other such nonsense. Who needs a batter stirrer? Anyway, if you like to cook fish, buy one. They are anywhere from $8 to $20. Although I as a rule hate overpriced items, I do love that I have a wood-handled fish spatula that cost, if I remember correctly, around $17 at a restaurant supply shop in New Orleans. It has held up well, and every time I pick it up I am transported back to the thousands of other pieces of fish I have cooked with it.

Tomatoes, Tomatillos

2008-09-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

This basket is representative of our tomato and tomatillo harvests this year. We started out early in the spring with countless seed varieties-- heirlooms, romas, cherries-- but due to our own negligence and the turmoil of moving into our house, what we ended up with is three tomatillo plants and three cherry tomato plants. I'd like to say the red tomatoes are wonderful, the best we've ever tasted, the Reason We Garden, but they are okay. Once you get them in a salad they taste more like the vinegar they are dressed with then the tomatoes themselves. Oh well. There's always next year.

Brian Polycn's New Place is Open

2008-08-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

Brian Polycn's new restaurant in Michigan is open. He calls Forest Grill an American bistro and it's located in Birmingham. Lots of non-chef people probably don't know who he is. He is one of this country's foremost charcuterie experts. He has owned Five Lakes Grill in Milford, MI, for 13 years, is (or was) an instructor at the renowned Schoolcraft culinary school, and is the coauthor, along with Michael Ruhlman, of the book "Charcuterie", which came out about 2 years ago and is at the top of any chef's list of favorite professional cookbooks (though geared towards the home user).

Schoolcraft is an interesting culinary school because it's in Michigan, has less than ten instructors, but something like six or eight of them are certified master chefs (CMC), of which there are only something like 50 in the entire country.

In a previous book by Michael Ruhlman, "The Soul Of A Chef", Ruhlman follows the grueling ten-day exam to become a CMC at the CIA. Polycn is one of the star characters in the book, and certainly he and Ruhlman, who lives in Cleveland, formed a friendship over cooking and their Midwesterness. Incidentally, Polycn failed the test, which adds to the drama of the exceptional book. That was his second time taking test.

Maybe Polycn felt he needed to be a CMC to keep up with his peers at Schoolcraft. Ironically, he's the most professionally succesful chef in Michigan, and as far as chef's chefs go, in the country.

We've eaten at Five Lakes Grill and met the man, and he is definitely way cool. Good luck, Brian! Can't wait to try your new place when next back in Michigan.

Life in the Pacific Northwest: Fresh Halibut

2008-08-27T10:16:00.001-07:00

Last Friday we had a handyman out to the house. He was supposed to come at nine in the morning, by three o'clock he had still not shown up, so I gave him a call and found out he had been cutting halibut cheeks all day with his son who just got back from a fishing trip, and that he was running late (Gee, thanks). Though I will never understand handyman time, my ears perked up when he said halibut cheeks. "Can you bring me some?" I asked. "Sure," he said. "How about a whole fish?"

It was fourteen pounds, fresh-smelling if not exactly the most pristine specimen (note fin decay), and a lot of fun to butcher. A halibut is what's considered a flat fish, so it has 4 fillets instead of two. Very easy to cut up and skin, and in addition to eating lots of fresh fish we now have two gallons of fish stock in our freezer. Looking forward to fish stew!

What time did he actually show up at our house, you ask? Six o'clock.

New House Red

2008-08-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

We like to say that Kestrel's Lady in Red is our new house wine. This wine inspired us to buy our first case ever. It's a well-balanced, smooth-drinking red, with a pin-up girl bottle thrown-in for good measure. The winery is in Prosser, but we bought a case from the tasting room in Leavenworth. We've paired it with just about everything and it works. When you buy it by the case, it's only $7.99 a bottle. And, at that price, we have not found it's equal in Washington, or anywhere else.

Nice Rack

2008-08-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

While the staff of the wine wall makes every effort to regularly acquire and drink nice wine, it's not everyday that our rack is full. In case you're interested in what we'll be drinking and blogging about in the near future, here's a list of what's on our rack right now (in no particular order):

Woodward Canyon 2005 Columbia Valley Merlot - I can't wait to open this one. We got on our last trip to Walla Walla and I remember it tasting like heaven. We're holding onto it for a special occasion, but I'm growing impatient.
Kiona 2005 Red Mountain Chardonnay - We were told this Red Mountain winery made amazing reds, and it does, but we liked the Chardonnay so much that we had we had to have it.

Campo Viejo Crianza 2005 Tempranillo - This was a housewarming gift. I'm hoping Paul makes some of his amazing paella to go with it.

Ash Hollow 2007 Columbia Valley Sauvignon Blanc - This was the last wine we bought in Walla Walla. We were inclined to stop tasting. Our tastebuds were fatigued. But this crisp little Sauvignon Blanc reawakened our tongues and, for that, we purchased it.

Dusted Valley 2006 Stained Tooth Syrah - It's no wonder our tongues were tired. We wore them out and dyed them purple at Dusted Valley, where they make (and generously pour) some of the best big bold reds in Walla Walla to a hard rock soundtrack.

Kestrel's Lady in Red and Pure Platinum - we picked up a mixed case of these extremely good value blends and are currently working our way through that case with alarming speed.

Cuvaison 2004 Estate Grown Carneros Merlot - Everything about this wine suggests it's gonna be good, including the friend who gave it to us for our housewarming. She's got great taste.

Terra Blanca 2002 Red Mountain Syrah - We picked this up at our first stop on our last wine trip. If you ever make it out to Red Mountain, don't miss this winery. The facility is gorgeous and the wines are a good value.

Parallel 2005 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon - This is a serious wine. And I'm not even sure it's available to the general public. It's way outside our normal price range, but one of the owners is a friend of my mother's. She bought us 6 bottles and asked that we save one for her next trip out (she can't get wine shipped to her in RI). We have 2 bottles left and my parents arrive in 2 weeks. Whether we make good on that deal is anybody's guess.

Paul Bertolli

2008-08-20T07:08:00.001-07:00

The SF Chron and Michael Bauer, food writer par excellence, are doing a series on influential Bay Area chefs. Today they discuss Paul Bertolli. I am a huge fan of his and had the fortune to interview him for an oral history series on "California cuisine" (we understood it as a loose term) through the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. Here's what the Chron has to say:

His background is impeccable - a decade as chef de cuisine at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, followed by 11 years as chef-partner of Oliveto in Oakland, where his purist approach made national waves. He made his own pasta, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and and charcuterie. He out-Italianed the Italians: He ground his own flour for pasta, for example, and more than likely shot the boar that went into his wild boar sausage. He shared his philosophy in his 2003 cookbook, "Cooking by Hand," which has inspired thousands of chefs and cooking enthusiasts. His love of handcrafted cured meats grew so intense that a few years ago he left the restaurant and created Fra' Mani products in Oakland, recently branching out to produce pancetta, hams and pates. His products are now carried at just about every high-end retailer and restaurant in the city - unless the chefs are making their own, thanks to Bertolli's lead.

I can't recommend his book "Cooking by Hand" enough. Also, get Chez Panisse Cookbook, which came out in the late eighties and was written by Bertolli. It is vastly superior to the other cookbooks by Chez Panisse.

Good Output from the Allium Family

2008-08-19T18:07:00.001-07:00

We picked these on Sunday. Two Italian heirloom varieties of onion, Yellow of Parma and Red Florence, and Blue de Solaize leeks, a French heirloom variety. Not bad!

Why We Garden

2008-08-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

It's moments like these when we get to pluck ripe figs from the tree and eat them without washing them. Now we could engage in hyperbole about how great these figs are and how much better they are than purchased figs, but it just wouldn't be true. They are just good sweet figs. We could also think of millions of things to do with these figs, but for right now we just want to eat them as is. We don't want to do more to them, but less.

Alas, too late

2008-08-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

This was why we bought the house. "Oh look," we said, as our realtor struggled to open the door, "they have an artichoke plant." Before we'd even crossed the threshold, we were in love. All summer we waited, patiently, for our time. And then it came. Two perfect artichokes waiting to be plucked. But we wavered. "Not tonight," we said. Perhaps when there's company, we'll steam them, dip the leaves in aioli, and scrape their newly-garlickly flesh across our teeth, share the bottoms and the hearts. "Too much work," we said. There's furniture to arrange and weeds to pull and new house and garden chores aplenty. But every day our artichokes opened, just ever so slighlty more, to the sun and reproduction. And now, look at them, ruined and gorgeous, exploding in purple fertility.

Abundance

2008-08-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

Our apple trees are amazing. We won't even know what do with them all. So soon they will all be falling off the tree ripe and we will need a plan. Any ideas?

Who Knew Department

2008-08-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

Turns out there is a restaurant in Fenton, Michigan, called The French Laundry. Does Thomas Keller know this? He must. Looks like an interesting place. I think I'll pay a visit next time we're in Michigan and let you know how it is.

Check it out here.

Entertaining Diversion

2008-08-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

On a recent visit to the Ballard Locks in Seattle, in addition to seeing tons of massive salmon working their way to their spawning grounds, we noticed some geese stuck in one of the locks. As the doors to the lock opened they made a break for it. It was great! It's hard to express the amount of incoming water these birds were swimming against. As the lock was getting ready to open, they swam right to the center of the gate is if they were all too familiar with how this works. As soon as it opened they were lifted by the massive rush of oncoming water- surfing!- and paddled vigorously for probably a minute to make it five feet. Off stage left there is a tour boat with maybe fifty tourists on it, all of them cheering. There are maybe a hundred other folks standing on either side of the lock.

A Little Validation

2008-08-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

In the past year we here at the wine wall have taken to growing our own food. The combination of rising food prices with sinking incomes has hit us below the belt. We have had mixed success, and often find ourselves hungry. Not really knowing how to go about it, we have done things like spend way too much money on packets of heirloom seeds from mail-order supply houses, only to allow the seedlings to die from starvation or become too spindly before transplanting them. For example, back in the spring we had dozens of tomato plants. There were special heirloom romas from Italy, big globular suckers from who knows where, and plentiful miniature varieties to keep us content in the meanwhile. Right now we are down to three cherry tomato plants, unhealthy ones at that.

But recently we did pull in a big harvest of potatoes. It looks deceiving in the picture, but this basket probably weighs 20 pounds! Yippee! We have got Yukons coming out our ears, and we only harvested a third of the crop. There are also some baby chiogga beets alongside that we pulled in order to thin them out.

Sunday Morning

2008-07-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

During the week we are all about eating healthy cereal for breakfast. It's cheap, fast, and filling, which are requirements when you lead a busy working life as most people do. When we eat our weekday breakfasts, we pass sections of the Seattle Times back and forth, chewing over the previous day's events and upcoming weather. But when it comes to the weekend, we are all about leisurely breakfasts over the New York Times, which we receive only on weekends. Not only do we eat eggs and read the fancy paper, we have a separate coffee as well. During the week we guzzle a cup of stuff made from cheap pre-ground beans-- the big can we buy on sale at the super for about 5 bucks. It lasts us a couple months. Ugh! Oh well. On weekends we grind beans and sip, often, from our French press.

As for food, Helen is the queen of the "eggers", which are fried eggs (runny yolks, ideally), cheddar cheese, copious amounts of butter (to fry eggs and on the muffins), Crystal hot sauce (the only hot sauce) all squished between a Bay english muffin.

But occasionally I like to whip something up, especially if we have a couple of Russet potatoes lying around. Here are directions for an extremely satisfying and easy to make breakfast which includes two sunny-side up eggs and a potato dish from the classical repetroire, the fabled Rosti.

-Start the potatoes first. The right pan is essential. I used to use teflon. Now I cook exclusively with my two low-carbon steel pans. I can't recommend them enough. Heat vegetable oil over medium heat. Peel two potatoes and grate into a mixing bowl using the large holes on your box grater, as if you were grating cheese. Sprinkle the grated raw potatoes with salt and a few grinds of black pepper and toss well. When the oil is hot but not smoking, use your hands to form a small round cake of potatoes about a half-inch thick in the middle of the pan. They should start to sizzle but not to brown right away. If they don't sizzle, pan is too cold. If they start to brown and crackle too rapidly, you have the opposite problem.

-While this is going on, heat the other pan in the same manner. I cook my eggs using oil since butter will burn. Crack two eggs into second pan and immediately sprinkle salt and grind pepper over eggs (eat your heart out, Harold Mcgee!). The eggs should burble gently in the oil. Same rules apply as with potatoes with regards to heat. It should be "medium". A major challenge of cooking true sunny-side up eggs is to get the egg white coagulated completely without overcooking the yolk, which sets up at a much lower temperature than the white. What restaurants do is stick the entire pan beneath the broiler to cook the eggs from a flame from above as well as from the residual heat from the pan itself below. You can do this. Or you can do what I usually do at home: place a lid over the pan of burbling eggs during the second half of cooking so that steam is trapped, thus cooking the egg.

-Now its time to flip the potatoes. Use a metal spatula to make sure your potato cake is not stuck. It shouldn't be. Give it the old whole pan flip. You can do it! The real way to finish Rosti is to add a pat of whole butter to the pan at this time to brown up the cake during the second half of its cooking. I normally feel too guilty to do this at home.

-By this time, eggs are done and should go onto plate. Slide potatoes onto plate, and Voila!

p.s. I love ketchup, too, but it's not necessary.

What's your favorite homemade breakkie?

Kissing the Lake

2008-07-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

one of the coolest things to happen during our summer vacation in Michigan was watching a hot air balloon touch down on the lake while we were having dinner one night. Everyone though it was an emergency landing-- hence the boats that circled it. But the operator kept waving them away. Apparently it's common for hot air balloons to do this as part of the ride. It was a warm summer night, and Michigan is covered by tiny lakes such as this. How cool would that be to bounce from lake to lake, watching the sky change from day to night?

Burning Beast

2008-07-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

last weekend there was a giant bbq party at a local farm where Seattle chefs camped out for 2 days and cooked various whole animals (pigs, goats, lamb, duck, salmon). Here's a 5 minute video detailing the event.

What Happened to the Wine Wall?

2008-07-09T14:44:00.001-07:00

Why have the editorial offices of this website been so cavernous lately?
A whole number of things of changed in the lives of the principle editors/authors of this site, otherwise known as Helen and Paul (MerPaul to a niece of ours; a story for another time).

1.Helen left her cushy job at a certain Seattle court and became a public defender, a vastly more time-consuming position
2.Paul got swallowed by a spring quarter of teaching that was more work than it should have been
3.Paul's other writing gig consumes more time than it used to
4.Helen and Paul were house shopping like mad people all spring. They now live in what they like to think of as an urban farm in the city of Seattle. They are more or less settled.
5.Paul went to Michigan for two weeks; Helen came for the last weekend of said two weeks.

Excuses, excuses. What are the practical implications for all of this movement? Well, look out for more posting soon. We have tons to write about. We like to joke that our new house is a big garden that happens to have a structure in the middle of it. There are fifteen fruit trees, close to twenty varieties of roses, and massive garden beds. Plus, did I mention that this year we got our own P-Patch plot, 200' square feet? We are gardening maniacs. We also went on a wine tasting trip down to Walla Walla, a shopping trip at the wonderful Eastern Market in Detroit, and a slew of other food-related diversions. Sit tight.

Hope you are enjoying your summer!

Culinary Bibliography

2008-05-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

One goal for this summer is to come up with a culinary bibliography for my students, since I discovered the other day when asking for a vote on which "food movie" to watch for an end of year party that most students had not seen most films. I have long understood that many students do not read food lit, either. They are largely ignorant of your MFK Fishers and your Elizabeth Davids. As a big old book geek this hurts my feelings. I've decided to do something about it, and want to solicit any suggestions from readers of this blog. It could be anything- movies, books, magazines, blogs, newspapers or columnists, journals, anthologies, documentaries, television programs, or just about any published or produced work related in some way to food or eating.

Any recommendations? Shoot 'em this way any time over the next several weeks. Gratzi!

Dale off Top Chef

2008-05-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

As any of you who follow Top Chef know, Dale got the boot last week. Details are fuzzy, and any information in this regard is helpful. As you know, we have been following Dale's run on TC via information gleaned on the Internet, since the operating budget of the Wine Wall does not yet permit cable television access, though as revenue dollars increase incrementally, it appears to be an option for the future.

A message to Dale: You are still the man. Can't wait to try your food sometime.

Trouble at the Top

2008-05-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

New York Times had an interesting story in the food section last week about how students and faculty at the Culinary Institute of America are revolting against the current president, Tim Ryan. Apparently they are upset over outdated equipment, substandard food, unprepared students and the "autocratic" leadership style of Ryan.

I am certainly no inside authority since I graduated from there almost ten years ago (yikes!). However, since I now teach at a small culinary school I can certainly say that the complaints lodged in the NYT piece are unfounded.

First. There are two kinds of kitchens at the CIA (known as "the Culinary" to locals up there). The display kitchens that the public sees are filled with beautiful enamel-plated stoves, copper pots, and the like. Nothing wrong there. The other kind of kitchen, ie, that the public does not see, are your typical wall-to-wall stainless steel industrial kitchens like you would find in any institution or restaurant that lacks an "open" kitchen. The bakeshops and the ovens they use are world class. I can say this with authority since at my school we have ovens so deficient in baking bread I am embarrassed to say that we even teach the art and the craft of bread baking. Bottom line: equipment seems fine.

Second. Substandard food. The article talks about students preparing "frozen waffle fries". This is horrendous, if true. I never cooked anything like that while I was there. We actually were told that back in the seventies the CIA had a class in frozen cookery since it was so big at the time. As for the overall quality of the food at the CIA, I would say it is of an overall high quality. They get fantastic seafood. Much of the produce comes from local farms-- I should know. While a student there I worked on weekends for two local farms, and I think I can claim to be one of the few students there-- the only?-- who had delivered food (organic baby lettuces, Taliaferro Farms) to the school as part of my job.

Third. Autocratic leadership? Has anyone ever heard of Ferdinand Metz? Talk about the most autocratic leader in the history of them. Metz was the previous president. There has been much ink spilled about him (see Ruhlman, Michael).

Fourth (there could be more complaints in article; these are the more salient points). They are letting in students who are not prepared for the intense curriculum. Hello! I for one felt while I was there that many of the kids were schmucks and didn't belong there. I guess who am I to bitch, but when you go to what's touted as the best school in the world for cooking you expect people to have some interest or talent in cooking. There's a lot of shoemakers there who have no intention of ever cooking anywhere of any note.

In closing, I should feel no need to defend my former school. If things are slipping, then they're slipping. I can say that everything said in the article has always been said about the Culinary. People complained left and right while I was there. I wish there was a second, inside opinion on what's going on up there to get a better idea of how on track the NYT piece is.

New Kid in Town

2008-04-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

looks like chef Michael Symon, out of Cleveland, is going to open a fancy new meat restaurant in D-town called Roast. The Free Press is reporting that he will feature multiple wood-fired grills and rotisseries where they will cook whole animals such as suckling pigs, lamb and goat in front of guests. The menu will also focus on hausgemachte charcuterie items.

Might this be competition for meat-heavyweight and charcutier extraordinaire Brian Polycn? And this when I am waiting to hear about the new Polycn bistro that is supposedly opening in B-ham (scroll to second item)?

Looks like Detroit is restoring the roar, baby! Go Pistons! Go Wolverines! Go Red Wings! Go Tigers!

Sheesh. Life for the Michigander is often tough.

Dale's star is rising

2008-04-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Looks like Dale Talde, contestant on Top Chef, is considered a favorite to take the grand prize and win the show, to the extent that predictions such as this can be made this early in the season.

Turns Out Cindy McCain Can't Cook After All

2008-04-15T16:22:00.001-07:00

NYT, Huff Post and others reporting that recipes the McCain campaign has been advertising as some of Cindy's favorite recipes were lifted directly from the Food Network.

What the hell kind of pressure are these campaign aides under? Unbelievable. I wish I would have been there inside that person's head, or at the meeting, or whatever, where someone said let's just grab some recipes and call them Cindy's favorites.

Furthermore, one of the recipes called for "Napa slaw". Isn't napa cabbage a little left wing for the McCain campaign? Might we go so far as to say that this vegetable is un-American?

And passion fruit mousse? Are you kidding? Do we have homosexuals working for All-American John McCain?

the kicker: farfalle with turkey sausage. This cannot stand. If there is a more effeminate food that farfalle pasta (butterflies for christ's sake!) and turkey sausage (turkey's for wimps!) please let me know.

pastry kneading machine?

2008-03-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

I don't understand how this thing works. Croissant dough is laminated, similar to puff. Most people use a sheeter or laminater to build the layers, especially in quantity, which means that there is minimal hand kneading of it anyway. These doughs are not kneaded like bread dough.

any thoughts?

Top Chef, Episode 3: Dale Talde

2008-03-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

There continues to be scant little published about Dale Talde on Season Three of Top Chef. It is, however, refreshing to note that we seem to have moved beyond Dale is Hung. Now I think it's fair to say that Dale is the silent killer. I say this due to the fact that most people say he is talented, cocky, and a good cook, yet they say surprisingly little about his actions on the show with relation to some of the other guests. Lately the only substantive post concerning Dale was highly positive if not terse, saying that Dale has not yet had his moment in the sun, being constantly overshadowed by the work of others. Judging from this example, though, Dale appears to have become an exceptional cook since the days when we slugged it out side by side in the stifling heat of a mid-summer Hudson Valley Skills kitchen (k-14) roasting veal bones and clarifying consomme.

Food Dale has cooked:

soy-marinated tuna taco with avocado-yuzu puree, mango-jalapeno pickle and tequila cream

grilled pork and pineapple skewers with smoked red curry BBQ sauce and marinated mushrooms and edamame

Go Dale. You bad as hell, bro.

Top Chef Episode Two: Dale Talde

2008-03-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

this post is devoted to recapping what blogs are saying about Dale Talde on Top Chef. Dale, to reiterate, is a former classmate of mine who I have not spoken with in years. Not much to report. This week there were six blogs that showed up on my Google search. Dale was mentioned very little, though people seem to group him as mildly annoying though a good cook. As someone who knew Dale quite well, I can say he is an amazingly nice and funny guy.

There were more reports that Dale is the new Hung. In fact, some bloggers seem to think that saying Dale=Hung is all that ever needs to be said about the guy.

My feeling is that Dale is going to make it far on this show, maybe all the way. Let them eliminate the bad cooks, and when it comes down to the good cooks sounds like Dale is more than positioned to fight it out with the best of them.

Here's a list of the blogs who have mentioned Dale with regards to episode 2 of TC.

http://jordanbaker.blogspot.com/2008/03/alright-well-give-this-shot-top-chef.html

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/thestew/2008/03/top-chef-a-bear.html

http://idontknowmuch.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/top-chef-chicago-week-2-lions-tigers-andpenguins/

http://www.seriouseats.com/required_eating/2008/03/top_chef_lions_penguins_bears_et_al.html

http://remote.lohudblogs.com/2008/03/20/top-chef-week-2-animal-diet-challenge-makes-for-great-dishes-little-suspense/

Top Chef Episode One: Dale Talde

2008-03-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

So the first week of the new season of Top Chef has aired and we are going to report on feedback around the Internets concerning former amigo numero uno, Dale Talde. People seem to have a consensus about my former classmate and pal, which is reflected by bloggers here, here, here and here. Since we are not "TV people" in the conventional sense, all reporting will be done in this manner.

Here are some general feelings about Dale:

-Dale is the new Hung

-Dale is overconfident

-Dale is talented

The first feeling means absolutely nothing to me, since I have no idea who Hung is, though apparently Dale reminds them of him. I can only assume Hung was a contestant on TC last year and that this is some kind of put down. Lame way to categorize someone, simply putting them into a box to define them before they can define themselves. Reminds us of a certain political party during an election.

The second point, that Dale seems overconfident, seems like a net plus to me, given that he is on a reality TV show that is very competitive. Not to mention that Dale has reason to be confident. He's a CIA grad, which means he's undergone the best culinary training in the world. After that he gained ten years experience in top restaurants in Chicago and now in New York. Go Dale.

Which leads to the third point. 'Nuff said.

Dale, you rock, baby.

Keep it up.

More on Dale Talde

2008-03-11T14:25:00.000-07:00

an old instructor of mine at the CIA, Bob del Grosso, just put up a post about Dale over at his blog.

Dale Talde: you rock

2008-03-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

a classmate of mine from the CIA is on the new season of Top Chef: Dale Talde.

Dale, you rock!

Can't wait to see you take the cake, baby!

Here's his bio video.

Semicolon Sheriff rides again

2008-03-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

a game like this loses its appeal quickly, I know. However, this example was written by a reader and published in the New York Times of all places. Who would have thought the old copy editors would have let this one slide. Oh well.

We go to Vancouver twice a year. It’s full of wonderful places to eat. Our favorites; Vij’s!!!! Tojo’s absolutely — less expensive but wonderful (Japanese; 1133 West Broadway; 604-872-8050; www.tojos.com); Chutney Villa (147 Broadway East; 604-872-2228); Chambar (Belgian; mussels and beer and much more. 562 Beatty Street; 604-879-7119; www.chambar.com); Phnom Penh (Cambodian, 244 Georgia Street East, near Main; 604-734-8898).

Incidentally, we have eaten at Vij's and Tojo's and agree completely.

True Dat

2008-03-07T17:18:00.001-08:00

here's another one. BTW, if you haven't seen Election, run out and put it in your queue or rent it. It's one of our all time favorites (along with all other Alexander Payne's films).

The Meaning of 'Is' is?

2008-03-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

I am one of those people easily peeved by the misuse of the semicolon. It is the probably the most misunderstood item in our punctuation toolbox. I constantly suffer its misuse at the hands of both my superiors and coworkers at school, as well as by my students in their various papers and writing assignments. I take solace in the fact that I never see professional writers misuse it. Until now. Read this statement by James Fallows, a writer at the Atlantic whose blog I enjoy:

"One of my rules of life is; there are a whole lot of terrible books out there, but many, many books deserve a better shake and wider audience than they receive."

I don't think he did this on purpose; I'm sure he meant to use a colon instead. But since he has no comments feature on his blog, I guess I will never know.

Please don't take me for one of those annoying prescriptive grammarians. I believe that, descriptively, any usage that is spoken by a significant sample of native speakers is "correct", since language is used and created and changed all the time by its users. However, I do not believe that we can change such grammatical rules as the one that states that the verb to be, or "is", must be followed by some type of object. And last time I checked, the semicolon separates two independent clauses, that is, two clauses that could be complete sentences if separated by a period. Fallow's first clause, above, fails this test.

Again, I hope James Fallows did this accidentally. If not, it might mean that:

a. I don't know as much as I think I do
b.the world is more f-ed up than I thought

I will not easily concede either of them :)

The Bridge Over The River Kwai

2008-02-15T09:02:00.000-08:00

The entire writing staff here at the wine wall is taking a much needed weekend off from our busy writing schedule here. The good news: we're going to Chicago! The bad news: we will be tied up all weekend attending a food blogger's conference. Oh well. No rest for the wicked.

We thought we would leave you with something to chew on over the weekend, though.

No, We Have Not Become a Political Blog

2008-02-12T21:06:00.000-08:00

Despite all indications to the contrary, the wine wall has not gone solely political. We just haven't been able to help ourselves what with all the excitement. But, if you happen to be one of our very few readers who actually visit the "wall" on the right side of our blog to see what wines we've been tasting and how we've been pairing them, you'll be glad to know I just updated that section. No, we have not stopped tasting, or cooking, or pairing. We've just been a little distracted.

In fact, we were so distracted by Super Tuesday, that we forgot to post about our very bougie Super Bowl party. For which, alongside our chips, dips, wings, and pizza (everything but the chips homemade of course), we indulged in Olympia oysters (the smaller ones in the photo). Not familiar with this tiny, sweet, briny, heritage species native to Puget Sound? Check out Slow Food's explanation.

gotta admit it

2008-02-11T11:22:00.000-08:00

this one's pretty well done, and from Hillary's campaign, no less. Maybe it's true what they say. She has a sense of humor.

Mildy Entertaining

2008-02-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

it seems politics is hijacking this blog. Check out this new video. I particularly like the line that is flashed across the screen at its conclusion.

More Politics

2008-02-08T08:41:00.000-08:00

since the writing staff here at the wine wall is off this morning to a big history-making Obama rally (can't resist the hyperbole, given the hyperbolic nature of this political season), we can't resist the temptation to inject more analysis of the race into our normally food-centered blog.

If you don't read or watch David Brooks, you really should. He's outstanding. Try his column today, which compares the electorates of Clinton and Obama. I don't know how right he is, but the guy is incredibly incisive and insightful when it comes to America, in my humble and sometimes not so humble opinion.

But if you don't like to read, try watching him. I have developed something of a Friday night ritual. It involves adjusting the rabbit ears sometime after five o'clock so that our local pbs station comes in clear. First I watch Charlie Rose, who is someone I didn't discover until a few months ago and now am in love with. He is one of the most amazing interviewers of all time. Watch his finger movements. When he gesticulates, he means it. I have never seen a more careful gesticulator in my life. We have seen several awesome interviews this year, including the one with Bill Clinton. If you didn't see that you missed one of the greatest non-scripted meltdowns of all time. As far as I know, his interviews are filmed live. This year alone he has interviewed most of the candidates. Another great one is the John Edwards interview. That guy is just unflappable. I could watch his lips move and listen to his voice for eternity. Something about these people and their faces. I could read whole treatises on psychology and pathology into them.

But then the kicker is that at six o'clock the Jim Lehrer show comes on. If there's a chunkier news program out there, please let me know. (chunky is a word that my siblings and I invented growing up in the seventies and eighties. It means something like technical, and funny, a little geeky, and utterly entertaining. It's something of a putdown and a compliment all in one).

Jim Lehrer and his colleagues deliver the day's and the week's news in a professional fashion, culminating in a three way commentary with David Brooks, Mark Shields, and Jim Lehrer. It's simply outstanding. It's like a weekly soccer match for me, and I devolve into an emphatically working class when it comes on. If we have no plans later, which has become increasingly rare, I have been known to put on my pjs, housecoat, UGG slippers and hipster hat just to watch it, and take down a shocking number of beers. I am like the lowest common denominator of sports fan. The moron who shovels in chips and often quite bad cheap beer while staring mindlessly at a the screen. The stupid box it should be called. The difference is, instead of watching people bash heads on a football field (something I reserve for the fall only, when my Wolverines shine), I watch people talk about politics. The intelligence (or lack thereof) for both is exactly the same.

Last week we had plans. They involved going to a wonderful couple's home for a cocktail before going to a restaurant for dinner. At 6:25 my wife was tapping her feet at the door. I was drinking beer on the couch. Brooks and Shields hadn't come on yet. They had rearranged the show such that they were coming on much later. I had to be peeled from the television in order not to be late for our date. When we got to their house, they were watching reality tv on a flatscreen the size of our living room wall! I gritted my teeth and did not request that they change the channel. I couldn't do it.

So today (right now, in fact), I am going to change out of the aforementioned costume (Friday's my day off, all day, people), get on the bus that stops directly in front of our crappy apartment building (life's so good right now it's sickening and I often feel guilt), ride it directly to Key Arena (slap me), and wait in line all morning until Barack Obama takes the stage. I will shout and cry and cheer like the biggest moron in the arena. I will come back home and entertain myself until sometime after five o'clock. Tonight, we have no plans.

Barack Obama

2008-02-05T08:02:00.000-08:00

it's hard not to get caught up in the excitement that surrounds this campaign. Goodbye George Bush, we wish we hardly knew ya!

Tuesdays with Market

2008-01-30T19:50:00.000-08:00

Cafe Yarmarka felt like a homecoming in more ways than one. It's not like we haven't eaten since this fall. Or even like we haven't been to the Market. But we'd clearly lost site of the original plan. To those few loyal readers who have been with us from the beginning (admittedly mostly family members), who know that Tuesdays with Market is supposed to be a weekly exploration of Pike Place Market's bounty, who have been disappointed by our complete and utter failure to blog about the Market since September, we are sorry. We will try to do better. We got too busy with work. We were out of town visiting many of you (And no, as much as we loved them, we will probably never post anything about the Common Grill, Venda Ravioli, Blue Hill, or the infamous chow mein sandwich. We simply don't have the time). And, on those rare occasions that we made it to the Market, we forgot our camera. So, although we very much enjoyed Matt's in the Market, the Alibi Room (happy hour 4-6!), and that Thai burrito (Yes, a Thai burrito, get them at the Thai food stall near the fish throwers, they involve peanut sauce, rice, and veggies in a tortilla, and are surprisingly delicious.), we will not be posting about those places.

Today, I returned to the Market. Sadly, Paul's work schedule is still not conducive to these outings. But, luckily, I have found a fellow Market explorer in the Frantic Foodie. She introduced me to Cafe Yarmarka, saying it was like homecooking. And right she was. Granted, I have never had Russian food at home. But the atmosphere is definitely homey. Watching the cook make piroshky by hand in the tiny open kitchen, I felt as if I had simply wandered into a friend's home for lunch. And the food is appropriately wholesome and warming, perfect for a cold Seattle day. We both got the cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice, which come with a bowl of any of the three daily soups. I had the mushroom soup and it was perfect, woodsy, warm, and comforting. Both come garnished with a healthy dollop of sour cream. As you can see from the picture, it's the same brand of sour cream my mother uses, which really added to the whole experience. And we got all of this for under $8. Almost as inexpensive as eating at home.

Winter Garden

2008-01-21T09:09:00.000-08:00

In many ways, our garden is an exercise in disfunction. An example of people not really knowing what to do or when to do it. If it weren't for the fact that we were surrounded by one-hundred and forty other gardeners who inspire us, we might find ourselves nowhere at all. A purgatory of unsown soil and weeds.

The author whose writing most propels my gardening is Pellegrini, who lived here in Seattle for most of his life. For Helen, it's Kingsolver, who wrote this wonderful book. After she finished reading it it migrated to my side of the bed, where it now calls to me in my sleep.

Even though Seattle is temperate enough to garden year round, this year, our first year of gardening, there is nothing we can eat in four-hundred square feet of soil except one robust parsley plant.

But rather than dwell on what we don't have, here is a catalog of what we do:

Garlic. 57 bulbs planted on 10/21/07. Garlic, you are the only thing that is keeping us respectable right now. You tell other gardeners coming and going from picking their leafy winter greens that in this spot some aspirational gardeners are living out their dreams. You say, in some small measure, forethought, planning, frugality, devotion. Next winter, as your largest offspring fill this same spot and your smaller ones fill our tummies, we will think of you, your inaugural generation.

Artichoke. One plant. Unknown origin. An inheritance from the previous plot owner. Probably ten years old. A heart of steel. Artichoke, in the summer, through no fault of your own save your unruly nature, your expansive leaves blocked the sunlight from our heirloom French leeks and Walla Walla onions, a fatal error of planning (planting?) on our part. True, when you bore your own fruit they were small and ridden with insect burrows, sometimes inedibly so. But your flesh was so sweet and firm that the few small artichokes you gave us made keeping you around worth it. We trimmed you down to bare earth back in September and already you're back for more. Bless you.

Parsley. You defy reason. I thought you liked summer. In summer you were crazy. You looked like Robert Plant, or Slash. Now it's winter and if anything you've gotten bigger. You're like one of those Midwestern kids who can't decide which is better: a frigid snowy winter or a humid sun-filled summer (not that I know what this feels like or anything). I think you'll have to stay in that spot, even if it means this garden will eventually become a mismatch of permanent squatters like your friend the artichoke, leaving no room for actual rows of annuals. This garden is nothing if not a home for misbegotten souls.

Oyster Shells. You move me. You really do. I know that your minerals and nutrients would leach into the soil more easily were I to dig you under. I know that you may be one more piece of evidence of our gardening laziness or ineptness. I don't care. I love looking at your bleached out curves just sitting there, prone to the elements, the salty air that blows in from the Sound washing over you, calling you back home. You represent this garden, a work in progress.

Caramelization: I Love You

2008-01-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

It's Friday and I wanted to write about one of my favorite cooking techniques: caramelization. True caramelization, not the Maillard Reaction that McGee and others describe as the browning of the outside of meats or vegetables. True caramelization is the transformation of sugars. One photo is of some six hour onions I cooked for a french onion soup (they were darker than this by the end). The other photo is a picture of my current favorite dessert: tarte tatin. Caramelization is one of those things I tell my students to take the long way home on- to eschew shortcuts in favor of "long cuts". I think tarte tatin should involve slow caramelization of the sugar with the apples in the pan, unlike many recipes which call for making a caramel, placing apples on top, and placing in the oven. I like the way the apples flavor the caramel and vice-versa. For onion soup, I hate the recipes that call for a half hour caramelization of the onions, because that's really just burning or "Maillard Reacting" them, not caramelizing the sugars that hide deep within the sharp facade that yellow onions show to the world. BTW, I'm trying to take better food pictures by zooming in a lot more, which seems to be preferred by food bloggers and photographers.

When I cooked the onions for six hours, it was last Friday, which for one eleven week span is my day off. It's a glorious day to have off. Today is only my second one, but I am setting a devilish pattern of doing extremely whimsical things. Today I'm thinking about searching out some super wholesome cream with which to make a prune and Armagnac ice cream. (Yes, I have purchased my first bottle of Armagnac. It's going down the gullet every way conceivable).

But back to the onions.

Last Friday I started those little buggers mid morning. I spent the whole six hours in the "other" room, being the single bedroom of our humble (and very cheap! Goodbye San Francisco, Hello Ballard!) apartment. Seattle is a wonderful town to spend the winter in. If I'm lucky I will not get out of my morning outfit (pajamas, thick housecoat, UGG slippers that are oh so cozy, and a fancy new hipster hat I got for Christmas that I will never wear without the housecoat I received alongside it) until late in the afternoon. I love to sit here all day and watch gray clouds move in and out or not, listen to raindrops fruitlessly attack glass, and occasionally stop to see another float plane pulling up off Lake Union as it heads North.

Back back to the beat, y'all.

I sat in the other room writing the whole day while the onions caramelized on the stove. Smelling them as they went from raw and buttery to aromatic, rich, deepening into an apartment-filling glaze was one of the best days I've ever had. I'm used to these things sending all their aromas up into the powerful hood system of a professional kitchen. I could have drowned on the smell of those onions.

When the onions were finished I made the tarte tatin. That was heaven, too. I love the way a light flaky (pate brisee) crust pairs up with the succulent apples. I used Rome. They hold their shape but when you bite into one they melt in your mouth. I also made mock creme fraiche, though just yesterday I read Judy Rodgers treatise on the subject and I wish I would have found better cream. No matter.

All of this Friday cooking was in preparation for a dinner party we hosted last Saturday night. It was supposed to be a dinner party celebrating the pigs we had back in November. I invited over the people I met and became friends with on that project, promising them spit-roasting leg of pork. Like an idiot I didn't realize when I invited them that I teach all day on Saturday and was going to have to rush home just to get cleaned up for the dinner party. Spit-roasting, I love you, too, but you will have to wait. Leg of pork, I guess I don't love you like I should since I sold your succulent meat down the river for a couple of terrines! Oh I how I treat my beloved food. It's a wonder I haven't choked on something yet.

So I cooked on Friday in order to host on Saturday. I broke a basic rule that states that a dinner should flow harmoniously through textures, flavors, ingredients and techniques.

I served two caramelized courses, back to back.
I love breaking the rules.
I hate breaking the rules.
I'm the worse for it.
I'm the better for it.

Sorry, Grendel

2008-01-11T09:11:00.000-08:00

I recently made a pate in which I left Grendel at home in his watery redoubt. Everything (leg of pork, no additional fat) was chopped a mano. I took, as Frost says, the path less traveled. He was right. I'm better for it.

This terrine was the equivalent of a bearded, long-haired, flannel shirt, blue jean, muddy boot wearing dude from Michigan (wait, I just described myself).

It wasn't that I was scared of Grendel, or his Mother, though the last time I brought her out to play she nearly devoured the fingertip of a close friend. They're both ravenously hungry, those two.

I am attempting to describe a terrine's texture. It was something like riding a jeep up a mountain trail of switchbacks and boulders. It was rugged, chewy, a little scary.

And the Armagnac. It was like tandem sky-diving with a tuxedoed waiter holding flutes of champagne.

It was too boozy, but tasty. Guiltily so.

This video is from a Seattle food blogger event last weekend orchestrated by the inestimable Keren Brown.

I will try and post the other videos from this event, though my slow computer crashed my browser just trying to look at the still video on her blog, so bare with me.

Culinary School

2007-12-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

There's something about ice baths that are quintessential to the culinary school experience. Even though the best restaurant kitchens use them, many kitchens do not. The point is to cool down a liquid such as a stock or a sauce as quickly as possible. When you cool a volatile liquid slowly, it gives bacteria a chance to grow and degrades the flavor and life of the the liquid. But when you cool them below 40 degrees fahrenheit very quickly you keep them fresh and tasty.

That, plus the fact that in school we try to teach the best way, equals our students building ridiculously cold ice baths, such as this one. What I have my students do is place two bricks on the bottom of the sink and place the container you strain into on that. Then we build layers of ice and salt and let it sit for a bit before adding a little cold water so that the entire surface area of the container is surrounded by cold liquid, not just the parts that are in contact with the ice cubes.

Then we stir the liquid as it cools to speed it up. It's fun, and competitive, and we cool down large quantities of hot liquid in a matter of minutes.

Night Out

2007-12-04T19:39:00.001-08:00

The Herbfarm is not so much a restaurant as an experience. An experience that has been lovingly and self-consciously shaped by its proprietors from the start. You begin at the fireplace. It is remarkably ornate and warming. Your host tells you that her husband bought it, like so many of the restaurant's vaguely rococo decorations, on Ebay. You are given a glass of spiced cider, adding to the warm fuzzy feelings you are developing for this place, as your host tells you its history and passes tonight's herbs around for scratch and sniff. You are told about the pot-bellied pigs, Basil & Borage, whom you are invited to go and visit between courses. And then you are welcomed into the dining room. With its candles and glasses of varying sizes, the whole place is refracted light set to Spanish guitar, played expertly by the gentleman in the corner. A server comes around with a basket of herbs and asks you to select one for your champagne cocktail. You select the lemon verbena. Your husband picks the rose geranium. Two delicate leaves are plucked, dropped in glasses, and covered in Argyle 2002 Brut that makes you reminisce about your late summer wine trip. You sniff your glasses, quaff, and trade. Amazing how a single leaf can flavor an entire glass of sparkling wine. The theme is Temptations in Spice. The first course, a trio of amuse-bouches, involves a cardamom-plumped Westcott Bay oyster. You think of shucking these oysters yourself only a few months before on San Juan Island. Remarkably, despite your fears, the cardamom has enhanced rather than overpowered the oyster's succulent, briny, sweetness. Golden Alaskan King Crab with shaved nasturtium and kaffir lime leaf is similarly improved. But lavender proves a bit too delicate for pork belly. The second course is called The Black Cod Pines for Mushrooms. It is exquisite. You want a bowl of its jasminey, earthy, miso broth. The third course - a Morrocan-spiced potato brandade agnolotti with grilled WA smelt is good, but not as good as the second. The fourth course, Duck in the Cabbage Patch, is another stunner; a perfect, diminutive duck sausage so tiny it causes your sausage-making husband to question the derivation of its casing, garnished with a savoy cabbage terrine, cauliflower mousse, and lentils, so good they could be served by themselves. And finally, the main attraction: Oregon Wagyu beef done two ways. Your husband, a master of the braise, declares the 16-hour braised short rib the best he's ever had. He wants to know how it's done. He's told it involves a circulator and is invited to the kitchen after dinner to check it out. You know what's going on his wish list this Christmas. The coffee and spice-crusted tenderloin, however, is just not as tender as it should be. But this doesn't bother you because a different delicious wine has been served with each course and all is right with the world. In fact, things are going so well, that you decide to splurge. You order two extra dessert wine flights to split - The Global Nobles (featuring botrytis, the noble rot) and An Affair with Sherry. Each comes with its own handout describing the wines with an accompanying picture - a regal rottweiler for the late harvest botrytis wines and a sexy Spanish dancer for the sherries. Flights at the ready, you move into an artisan goat cheese from Estrella Creamery, then the Spice Cream Cone, a miniature white pepper and saffron ice cream cone in its own perfect little paper holder, that your husband insists on saving to show his culinary students. And then, as if you needed more, there is a final trio of desserts: an apple toffee cake, chai custard, and pumpkin-bay ice cream. You're not sure chai is really the most appropriate flavor for custard, but no matter, the ice cream more than makes up for its shortcomings. You end the meal with miniardises and a splash of 1916 Madeira. You realize you never went to visit the pigs, so you get your coat and totter across the driveway to pay your respects, grain bucket in hand. After this short jaunt across the driveway in your high heels, having had more glasses of wine than you care to count, you're glad you thought to get a room at the neighboring Willows Lodge. As you head for your room, your husband pronounces this his best birthday ever.

The Bellies of the Beast

2007-12-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

after going out of town for Thanksgiving, I finally got around to curing the bellies of the two pigs we recently purchased; it occupied almost our entire refrigerator, which to be honest is not the world's largest. They start with a basic dry cure in my fridge: purified salt, a mixture of dextrose and table sugar, and a dash of pink salt. Here are pictures of my setup, not ideal, but passable. I separate the pieces based upon thickness, rub them with cure, and put them in large plastic bags. I tape the sides and edges so that as the cure mixes with water in the meat and forms a brine, the meat stays as submerged as possible in the brine. The first pieces came out of the brine two days ago, the thinnest of the lot, and I let them sit on a rack uncovered in the fridge overnight to form a pellicle, which is to say I allowed the surface of the meat to dry out slightly so as to make it absorb more smoke (ideally they would hang for this so as to facilitate better airflow), we smoked them over apple wood yesterday for about 3 hours under a relentless barrage of sleet and rain.

Restoration

2007-11-26T19:27:00.000-08:00

After a long weekend in SF, socializing constantly with family and old friends, and an airplane ride full of strangers, we woke up this morning feeling a little under the weather.

Hence the mountain of vegetables (minus spinach and broccoli, which got yanked from the lineup at the last minute; plus a bunch of chickpeas I had cooking on the stove) featured in this picture that became a spicy "Asian" soup for dinner on Monday night.

According to the relevant literature, the first restaurant in Paris, 18th century, was founded by Boulanger. It was called a restaurant because the word was related to another word meaning to restore, or a restorative.

The only thing on his menu was a single soup.

Also not featured in this picture is the duck stock I used for the liquid, which I had frozen after spit-roasting a couple ducks a while back. It was a bit smokey and seriously contributed to this soup's "Asian" flavor.

Seasonings: fish sauce, Lea&Perrin's, rice wine vinegar, lots of salt and white pepper, Tabasco, chili flakes.

This soup had some heat. Can't wait to try it tomorrow.

The consumers of said soup: restored.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-26T11:31:00.000-08:00

Normally I spend Thanksgiving on the couch watching the Detroit Lions "find yet another way to lose" (John Madden during a Thanksgiving day game several years ago). But this year, which we spent at my brother's house in San Mateo, I got to do a large amount of the cooking. My sister-in-law, who normally carries on the family traditions at the stovetop, had her hands full with 2 kids and was only too happy to hand me her apron.

Here's some shots of the bird. I can't help but feel a little smug at my carving, since I and other professional cooks have been carving birds this way for years, in spite of last week's NYT piece on the butcher's secret to carving turkey.

Pig Dinner #1 (the first of many)

2007-11-21T19:08:00.000-08:00

This was our first meal after the impressive effort that was Pig Weekend 2007. Amazingly, just a day after being up to his elbows in pork product, Paul managed to rally and create a gourmet Monday night meal of personally-butchered, organic, free-range pork loin roasted with mixed new potatoes from the Ballard Farmers Market and garnished with a mustard demi glace and organic brussel sprouts. The pork had a fantastically rich, meaty flavor (which, admittedly, may have been given a boost by the veal stock used to make the demi glace), but it was a little chewy for what is typically a very tender cut. This seems to be the one downside to free-range animals, but I think it's worth a little extra chewing to know that your dinner lived a better life. We paired it with one of the wines from our trip to Oregon, a Rex Hill 2003 Pinot Noir (for more details, read the "wall" at right). Delicious!

More Pork

2007-11-20T14:26:00.001-08:00

Here's some shots of a happy sausage maker:

Going Whole Hog

2007-11-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

So I, along with some others, went whole hog over the weekend. We bought two whole pigs that totaled 465 pounds. It was a tremendous amount of work, more than I expected. Some highlights:

-At the end of day one my hand was so tired from cutting I couldn't get my fist to close around the blade of my knife. It was like having a frozen hand. It wouldn't move. It's lucky I didn't seriously hurt myself.

-It took a much bigger village then I imagined. I should have enlisted the help of ten people. It was like being in a pork world. Everywhere I looked in the kitchen there was just pork, pork, and more pork. I told shareholders to pick up their meat at 5.30 pm on Sunday. One friend showed up at 5 with her husband and daughter. The three of them stayed and wrapped meat nonstop for almost 3 hours.

-Broken glass. On day two I accidentally pushed my digital scale onto the floor, shattering the glass plate on top of it. It was dramatic, and loud, sending bits across the kitchen.

-A friend cut her hand on my brand new sausage stuffer. All weekend I prayed someone would not get hurt, and it happened in the most unlikely of ways. She cut it on the lip of the canister where the meat goes. She survived.

-My meat grinder, Grendel (see previous post), worked like a champ. We ground close to 50# of meat through it nonstop and had zero problems: no smear, no stopping to re-ice blades, nothing. It just keeps on going, sucking up meat.

-My new stuffer, from now on to be known as Grendel's mother, was also insanely effective, aside from the lip of the canister trying to take off the tip of Kiersten's finger. It only holds about 6# in the canister, but it just pushes out sausage nice and smooth.

-I learned to be careful when stuffing something bigger than a hog casing. We stuffed 30# of cotechino into beef middles, only to have the casings burst when we tried to twist off the sausages, and had to squeeze it all out and restuff it.

-Pork is awesome. I love it. I may never buy another supermarket cut again.

-I was dead by the end. Every time I bent over or lifted something I groaned. I couldn't help it. My "physical plant" was barely sustaining itself.

-I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Dessert or Breakfast

2007-11-20T08:55:00.000-08:00

I made this Tarte Tatin ("Ta Ta Ta") last night. Aside from not rotating apples one last time, or the uneven nature of my electric burner, or my skillet, or whatever caused it to brown more on one side, this thing was a dream.

Just cover bottom of pan with sugar and scatter about some dabs of butter, cover tightly with apples, cook until caramel forms, cover with brisee dough, and bake until golden brown. Let sit out for half hour to absorb caramel, then turn out onto plate.

Serve with creme fraiche.

"Veal Stock ... "

2007-11-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

The author and television figure Michael Ruhlman came to my work last night to promote his new book and talk with students. It was quite exciting as we are a small culinary school and rarely have guests- and never someone of his star power.

His talk was excellent. He told his life story and talked about his previous books, his experience with cooking.

He was highly motivational. He told the story about the cook at the French Laundry having to throw out a whole bucket of fava beans he had just spent all morning cleaning, simply because he had not blanched them to Keller's standards; he told the one about Chef Pardus at the CIA admonishing him for not wanting to drive 30 miles through a snowstorm to come to school and make bechamel sauce- this being the epiphanous moment when he realized good cooks have high standards- that good cooks always find a way to "get there".

He told stories that should inspire students, and for this I am grateful!

He stressed the fundamentals of cooking.

He read a passage from his new book about finesse: finesse in cooking includes paying attention to every step of a dish, not just when it goes on the plate.

He took questions from students and wrote personal comments in their books.

He told jokes and was funny.

He was enthusiastic about cooking, and, yes, about veal stock.

Saffron in Walla Walla Rocks

2007-11-12T11:50:00.001-08:00

a while back we were on a wine-tasting trip and ate at one of the best restaurants I have ever been to.

It's called Saffron and it's in the quaint but growing town of Walla Walla, Washington, home to the nearly eponymous onion.

Let me just say that this restaurant has amazing food. In one meal we consumed the following:

beef cheek
rabbit
entire squab pigeon
grilled fresh sardines
baby octupus
ground lamb spread on flatbread

This is my kind of meal. I'm obsessed with tasty meat. Not only did they serve such a wide variety of proteins, but they seasoned and prepared them better than I could have myself. Many were cooked over live fires, portions were good, and you couldn't stop smacking your lips.

I dare say this is the best restaurant in Washington state, maybe the Northwest. That's coming from someone who has eaten in very few restaurants here, relatively speaking.

Saffron could compete in NYC or SF.

If you're ever up there do not miss it.

And book a reservation in advance. We went on a weeknight and it was packed.

I don't know how they take the reservations, since there isn't even a host stand.

Grendel Lives

2007-11-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

So I finally busted out my brand new meat grinder over the weekend, starting simple with a couple hunks of fresh chuck that became cheeseburgers cooked over mesquite coals.

This machine is insane. It's a 575 watt motor and it feels like driving some overpowered muscle car that is only happy when churning up the road.

It's insatiable- a beast that demands to be fed cubes of meat.

When it's turned on but not being fed, it whines so loud I thought something was wrong with it. I took it apart and put it back together. Nothing wrong; it's just that powerful.

When happily grinding meat, it hums.

This thing is Grendel, I swear.

I used to use my 325 watt Kitchen-Aid for at-home grinding and sausage making, but got sick of putting my whole body weight into pushing meat into it.

I've separated tasks, and now have Italian tre spade stuffer which I will break in next weekend, and this grinder.

It's possible I'm seeing this thing through rose-colored glasses, but it's first time out with these burgers exceeded all expectations.

I will report more after next weekend, when I will be fabricating two whole pigs and possibly grinding up to 50# of pork and stuffing it into sausage with the new stuffer.

Here's a link to where I bought this machine. It's only $99.

Our Top Ten

2007-10-24T22:54:00.000-07:00

In case anyone was curious about a side by side comparison of our Yakima, Walla Walla, and Willamette winery experiences, we've made a top 10 list, complete with links, so you can check out these wineries for yourselves. The list is in order and we based our ratings on a number of factors - taste, atmosphere, and value. When one of those factors resulted in a deceptively high or low ranking, we included a parenthetical explanation. We also included the state of the winery, for those OR v. WA type of readers. We went to 18 wineries, but only ranked 10 - draw your own conclusions about those excluded. If we missed or dissed your favorite, please let us know, we're willing to go back and try them all again. Without further ado, the wines:
1) Winter's Hill (OR - great atmosphere)
2) Lange (OR)
3) Forgeron (WA)
4) Domaine Druhain (OR - would have been higher but the bar was crowded, the spit bucket was full, and the staff was rude - plus it's pricey)
5) Rex Hill (OR)
6) Woodward Canyon (WA)
7) L'Ecole No. 41 (WA)
8) Erath (OR)
9) Bonair (WA)
10) Alexandria Nicole (WA)

Spit-Roasting Duck

2007-10-24T08:17:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend I spit-roasted a couple ducks on the patio of our Seattle apartment. The fuel was apple wood, the merits of which I'll discuss momentarily, and the equipment I use (pictured) all comes from Weber. It's a 22 1/2 inch kettle grill with the rotisserie attachment, which costs more than the grill itself. It has an electric motor which is quite effective.

On to the duck. I kept it real simple, just a hefty dose of salt and cracked pepper all over the skin and in the cavity. As you can see from the pictures, it browned up real nice. One of the beautiful things about duck is that right beneath its skin it wears a natural wet suit made of half-inch thick fat, a fat I would put up in the stratosphere with back fat from a pig in terms of importance and usefulness in the kitchen. So as the birds turned over the fire, the fat slowly rendered and was constantly running down the sides of the bird to give it a slickness unlike anything I've ever seen; that right there gives spit-roasting a big plus that regular roasting doesn't have, in which the fat from the top would run down the sides of the bird as it sat in the oven or on the grill, but all the fat from the sides and the bottom would just run down into the roasting pan- where it might later be collected and stored in a jar in the fridge by a hungry chef :)

And now for what I would have done differently. First off, apple wood doesn't burn hot enough to render all the fat from the duck, in spite of the pricking of the skin I did before I started. Pricking the skin is part of the preparation of cooking a whole duck- essentially poking tiny holes (I used my sausage pricker, though a sterilized needle would work), all over the body of the duck to give the fat an easy exit. Yeah, I didn't prick nearly enough. I should have pricked the breasts much more. There was still too much fat left on after I carved them. And in terms of fuel, mesquite charcoal would have made a better choice. It burns much hotter and I know it would have rendered much more fat from the bird.

Furthermore, in trussing the duck I kept the large flap of neck skin (peculiar to this animal in its supermarket form) tucked against its back, effectively sealing off the opening to the body cavity from the head area. Then, in mounting the birds onto the spit, I speared through the tail flap of the bird (the pope's beak?) as I always do with chicken so as to keep the bird from jostling around as the spit turns. Then to fit both duck on one spit (tail to tail), since they are so long, I had to push them together. All these things added up, I believe, to a sealed-up body cavity, which meant that hot air couldn't flow through the inside of the bird and cook it from the inside out.

Long story short, I had to pull them a little underdone in order to maintain the flow of the evening, which involved a guest in our home. This meant nice pink juicy restaurant-style breasts, albeit a little fatty for the taste of most (I was the only one at the table who trimmed zero fat, thank you very much, no guilt here). I discretely carved off the breasts, leaving the legs a little bloody, attached to the birds. The next day I carved them off cold, put them skin side down in my cast-iron skillet and rendered them out until they were superbly crisp and well-cooked.

But We Heart Willamette More

2007-10-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

"It's just so green!" We couldn't stop saying it. The Northern Willamette Valley just southwest of Portland is just so green. Unlike Washington's Columbia Valley, the Willamette Valley is a lush natural wine growing region and you can taste it. Almost every wine we tasted here was head and shoulders above the wines we tasted in WA. But the prices, both for bottles and tastings, reflected that. Our first stop was August and, although they didn't charge, it wasn't anything special. Our next stop was Rex Hill and we were blown away. It's a beautiful winery, surrounded by vineyards, bedecked with interesting sculpture. It took us a while to push our way into the bar for a tasting, but wine was worth it and the people pouring it were great. They even let you taste the new wine, before it's aged, just to get an idea of the process. Plus, they let us split a tasting (Many OR wineries will let you do this; they seem to understand that not everyone can spring for two $10 tastings.). After that, it was on to Argyle for some of their celebrated sparkling wine and chardonnay. Then we headed up into the vineyards in search of quality pinot noir. We found it at Lange but we certainly couldn't afford it. The view alone there, atop a hill, at the end of a gravel road, looking out over the valley, is priceless. Then we checked out Erath, it's owned by a big corporation now, but it still owns some of the oldest vines in the valley and their wines are delicious. We got the complimentary flight of 2006 pinot blanc, 2006 pinot gris, and 2005 pinot noir, all of which were very good. After doing a lot of tasting and somehow missing lunch, we decided to stop at just one more winery before heading to the hotel. We chose Stoller because we heard it was beautiful and new and making some very nice stuff. While we weren't all that impressed by their wines, the woman pouring was great. She was so enthusiastic about the AVA that she convinced us we had to pay to check out two more wineries. She sent us to Domaine Drouhaine to check out the high end and Winter's Hill to see a small family winery in action. Frankly, we preferred Winter's Hill. Domaine Drouhaine was pretty and the wine was great, but it was overrun by bus tours and blondes and with men twice their age. There's just something nicer about buying a bottle of Dundee Hills pinot noir from the winemaker's mother-in-law while trying not to wake the winemaker's baby nestled in grandma's arms.

After our big day of wine tasting, it was time to meet up with friends and get back to beer. We went to the Golden Valley Brewery and Pub in McMinnville. Although the organic, local, homemade concept behind the pub was great, the finished product was just ok. I had a burger and it was fine but not as meaty as I might have liked. Paul had the sturgeon special. The fish itself was very moist and flavorful but the accoutrements left something to be desired. The carroway spetzle was poorly executed and the vegetable of the day was an uninspired medley of no-longer-in season veggies. We have a feeling the steaks might be really good but they're also pretty spendy.

Despite the lackluster meal, our day in Oregon finished right with pints and brownie sundae at McMenamin's Hotel Oregon.

We Heart Walla Walla

2007-10-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

Walla Walla, so nice they named it twice. The wineries on the way into Walla Walla blew us away. But, sadly, so did the prices. Our first stop was Woodward Canyon. Every wine we tasted there was top notch. But it was only 10 a.m. and we just weren't ready to spend. If you find yourself on the road into town and looking to splurge, you won't find better than their merlots. Then we crossed the street to L'Ecole No. 41. This winery was by far the most architecturally impressive of our trip. It's in an old school house (pictured), hence the name. They make a nice range of wines - everything from cheaper WA wines to the more expensive single Walla Walla vineyard vintages. Their cabs are fantastic! Experiencing a bit of palate fatigue, but determined to soldier on, we stopped in at Reininger, notable for its uniformly quality wines, very friendly wine pourer, and snail labels. Having tasted at three of the very best Walla Walla area wineries before lunch, it was time for a well-deserved break. And nothing cleanses the palette better than a burger and shake. We headed over to the iconic Ice-Burg Burgers (pictured), ordered a couple of its namesake, fries, onion rings, and a peach shake to split, and prepared ourselves for more tasting. We discovered, to our dismay, that many Walla Walla wineries aren't even open on Thursdays and that a shocking number of the ones that are charge for tastings (especially the ones out by the airport). Having gotten pickier by necessity as the day wore on, we decided to skip those wineries. We checked out Waterbrook's tasting room downtown, but it didn't impress us. Isenhower was nice and their wildflower labels are lovely. But Forgeron was a revelation. Their winemaker is French and it shows. Everything we tried was fantastic. And it was our last winery of the day, so that's saying a lot.

We went low end on our accommodations, but one could do worse than the Budget Inn. It's cheap, centrally-located, and clean, and left us with a little extra cash to blow on dinner. At every winery, we asked where we should go for dinner and the result was unanimous - we had to check out Saffron. It was probably the best meal we've had since moving to WA. They claim to specialize in Mediteranean food, but what's really impressive is their way with difficult animals. Stuff most people wouldn't even consider eating, they make perfectly. In our meal alone a rabbit, squab, and octopus were involved. In fact, Paul loved it so much that he insisted on writing a separate post about it himself. Look for that to appear sometime soon.

Wine Kountry

2007-10-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

Napa it ain't. Yakima Valley is in the desert. It is dry, dusty, and sparsely populated. But the wine is pretty good.

We got off on the wrong foot with the Yakima area. We were told good Mexican food could be found in Yakima. We drove into town around lunchtime and spotted a fairly authentic looking taqueria. But it was empty. So we got scared and consulted the guidebook. This was a mistake. The guidebook led us to Santiago's Gourmet Mexican Restaurant. We were hopeful. People were lining up to get in. There were outdoor tables, flowers, and myriad varieties of tequila behind the bar. But then we ordered. Paul was driving and looking for a refreshing non-alcoholic beverage. He inquired about the availability of licuados or aguas frescas. The waitress looked at him blankly. When our enchiladas arrived, smothered in orange cheese and bland sauce, it became apparent to us that Santiago's was neither gourmet nor Mexican. To add insult to injury, by taking an alternate route on our way out of town, we passed about 30 far more authentic looking Mexican restaurants. We even passed a stand selling aguas frescas. Damn you Best Places Northwest!

On the upside, the "Mexican" food in our bellies was a good base for an afternoon of wine tasting. First, we headed into the Rattlesnake Hills AVA. Bonair was our first and probably most aesthetically pleasing winery visit. The tasting room is lovely and, unlike many Washington wineries, there are actual vineyards surrounding the place. Everything we tasted there was delicious, but the Gewurtzraminer Port deserves a special mention for its syrupy-pear-uniqueness. Next we hit Claar, but were disappointed to discover that it was just a tasting room on the side of the highway. The wines were good but the service was surly. At least the tasting was free. Determined to get at least one bottle of 100% Rattlesnake Hills grown wine, we checked out Tefft. It did not disappoint. The tasting room guy was super friendly and knowledgeable and the wine was quite good, especially the viognier and the merlot. Then it was on to Horse Heaven Hills. To our great disappointed, Prosser wineries tend to be located in strip malls. Which allows you to hit lots of them at one time, but also results in taste bud fatigue. We hit Hogue, Alexandria Nicole, and Kestrel all within an hour. By the end, we couldn't taste much of anything. Hogue makes a number of exceptional wines that can be purchased only in the tasting room or through its wine club. This is nothing like what you get for $6 a bottle at QFC! Alexandria Nicole has a remarkably hip tasting room, especially given its strip mall digs. It's dark and sexy and they pour some tasty wines, especially their viognier. It would be worth joining their wine club just to hangout in the hidden members-only room (hint, the secret door is behind the bookshelf). Kestrel was ok. Like I said, by the time we got there, our taste buds were pretty worn out.

We stayed at the Hinzerling Winery's Vintners Inn B&B. For a mere $79 a night, we got a nice big room with a soaking tub. In fact, we got the whole place to ourselves. There were no other guests and we never saw the innkeepers. It was a little spooky, a little shabby, and it was unclear how long the scones-under-glass had been waiting for us to arrive. But it was a pretty good deal. Prosser is one very sleepy town. It has only one restaurant with gourmet aspirations, and they are, sadly, just aspirations. The Blue Goose looks like a diner from the outside. The inside is a bit dressier and they serve local wine and decent food. But the portions are ginormous (pictured) and the food, loaded with cheese and butter, is a heart attack waiting to happen. I barely made a dent in my pasta with artichokes, mushrooms, and bacon. Though Paul did an admirable job on his pork chops. Since there is nothing to do in Prosser (not even a bowling alley!), we got a good night sleep and were up with the dawn. Dawn is a little early for wine tasting, so we decided to check out the Horse Heaven Hills vineyards. We were told by one winery employee that they were "just on the other side of the ridge." This turned out to be false (see desert photo at right). We have to wonder whether the Horse Heaven Hills AVA is a bit of a Potemkin village. So, disappointed, we made our way to Walla Walla.

We're willing to believe that we missed some real gems in the Yakima area. And we're planning to make a return trip at some time in the future. If you know of somewhere we should go, please comment!

Tuesdays with Market

2007-09-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

I wish I'd remembered the camera. It was one of those perfect late summer afternoons. The sun was sliding westward over the Olympics, turning Elliott Bay to gold. Actually, the camera probably couldn't have handled it. But I would have liked to try. It was a perfect afternoon for leaving work a little early and heading down to the Market in search of an outdoor happy hour. Or two. First we hit Kells, which serves a mean sausage roll and pint of lager for $3 each from 4-6pm. I wish I'd had the camera just for that sausage roll. It's a flakey golden pastry wrapped around perfectly seasoned sausage. Paul's idea of heaven and probably one of the best happy hour items we've tried. And, as those of you who read us regularly know, we've tried a lot. At 5pm, we moved on to meet up with our harder working friends at Maximilien, which not only has one of the best views in town but also some of the cheapest happy hour food. You can get mussels, frites, a pate tartine, merguez, and a delicious little melted brie and tomato appetizer, for less than $3 each. And we did. Plus, you can get a bucket of 6 Kronenbergs for $15. There's just something about installing oneself on a patio overlooking the water and ordering a bucket of beer. We highly recommend doing it while the sunshine lasts.

Trader Joe's Cheese Sucks

2007-09-10T22:26:00.000-07:00

It pains me to say it, but say it I must. Trader Joe's brand cheap CA cheddar cheese really does suck. Like many people, we had come to rely on TJ's for reasonably-priced, good-quality staples. We drank more than a few bottles of 2 Buck Chuck and have picked up specialty items on occasion for far less than one would pay at Whole Paycheck to good results. But the quality is slipping. One cannot judge a store like TJ's purely on its Double Gloucester or Brie. One must look to the lowliest cheese product and see if it passes muster. The answer is a resounding no. This cheese tasted like plastic. Like cheesefood. I checked the label several times to establish that it really was cheese. It was so bad that we couldn't eat it on sandwiches. It had to be disguised in quesadillas, melted and smothered in green chile salsa. And it wasn't even that cheap or that local. Give me Tillamook (from nearby Oregon) any day, or even Safeway brand Lucerne cheese over this stuff. Trader Joe's, you have let us down.

Fair Fare

2007-09-09T18:18:00.001-07:00

We have finally "done" the Puyallup Fair and got the t-shirts to prove it. The fair is over 100 years old and far exceeded all our expectations. We'd read a few articles and gotten some advice from friends, but nothing prepared us for the sheer size of the fair. It's massive. Being from RI, I don't think a fair this big would have fit in my home state. We tried to do all the obligatory eating. We started off with a couple of Krusty Pups (pictured) and declared them better by far than the ordinary corn dogs of our youth. We made the mistake of wandering into the livestock barns with Krusty Pups in hand before noticing the "No Eating in the Barns" signs. Luckily, we avoided the major faux pas of checking out the swine while nibbling on their relatives. In need of a frosty beverage, we split a disappointing (and misnamed) "root beer float." It was nothing more than a 75 cent scoop of low-quality vanilla ice cream and a $3 bottle of Dr. Pepper, which is technically not even root beer. Having been so disappointed, we decided that only a real beer would cheer us up. It took us a long time to locate the sole beer garden in the sea of elephant ear, scone, and burger vendors, but find it we did. This is clearly not a drinking sort of fair. The selection was slim and the prices were high. After two $9 beers it was time to move on. Thus fortified, we headed to the ferris wheel. It gave us a pretty good view of of the attractions, but somehow we managed to just say no to all sorts of take-you-up-very-high-and-drop-you-for-fun rides. Post-ferris wheel, we needed to kill twenty minutes before heading over to check out the mutton bustin'. We tried to spend our time non-calorically, but the Clydesdale driving show wasn't accepting any more spectators and 4-H show cats can only hold one's interest for so long. Consequently, we were forced to split a Bernie Burger. Alas, the only thing special about this patty was its name. We'd heard there are some amazing burgers at the fair, but this wasn't one of those. Then we checked out the mutton bustin' (pictured) and were thoroughly amused by the spectacle of children not yet old enough for compulsory schooling trying to ride a sheep for 6 seconds. We're glad that neither CPS nor PETA has shut this event down yet, but we weren't totally convinced that the helmets worn by these mini cowgirls and boys really made things totally danger-free. Mutton bustin' is a hard act to follow, so we decided it was time to get a couple of t-shirts and head home. Someone had told us that we should pick up a couple of scones for the next day's breakfast and we decided to heed their advice. What we didn't realize was that the scones are served piping hot and stuffed with butter and jam. Screw breakfast! We ate them immediately (as they were no doubt intended to be eaten) and rolled ourselves home.
We will definitely be returning to the fair next year, so if any of our readers have any advice on things we should have eaten or events we should have gone to, please comment!

Island Time

2007-09-06T21:22:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a fantastic four-day ferry excursion in WA's Northwest Corner. The goal of the trip was to explore a new part of the state, take at least one ferry ride per day, see just how cheaply (short of camping) we could sleep, and (naturally) to eat and drink local. We started our tour off right with pastries from Larsen's Bakery up the the street, the line for which almost made us miss the 9:20 Edmonds-Kingston Ferry. We spent the first night at the Tides Inn of "Officer and a Gentleman" fame in Port Townsend. The next day we caught a ferry to Whidbey and ate our way up the island and over Deception Pass to Anacortes to catch a 6:20 A.M. ferry the next day to San Juan Island, where we ate some mediocre food and searched in vain for orcas. The next morning we had to head back home, but not before making a brief stop on Orcas Island (supposedly named for an explorer, not the elusive killer whales), to check out the view from atop Mt. Constitution (pictured).

Naturally, there was a lot of eating and drinking. Here are the highlights.

The Good:
1) Spending a couple hours getting tipsy on local brew and admiring the waterfront view from the balcony at Sirens Pub in Port Townsend while waiting for a Greek pizza that exceeded all expectations
2) Eating Penn Cove Mussels at Toby's Tavern (pictured - yes, the O is a big, and inexplicably red, mussel) while pondering Penn Cove in Coupeville
3) Cooked Local "Pinks" shrimp bought at Sweet D's Shrimp Shack just past Deception Pass and devoured with a bottle of Fair Winds Aligote in our cheap motel room in Anacortes
4) Self-serve oysters at Westcott Bay Oyster Farm (pictured) on San Juan Island
5) Fish & Chips at the bowling alley in Anacortes (where we discovered Paul is a natural bowler)
6) Panini from Enzo's next to the Orcas ferry - take them to go or sit outside, enjoy the view, and get a gelato for dessert
7) WA Ferries paraphenalia featuring Oly the orca - a stylish baseball cap for me (pictured) and a travel mug for Paul that came with one free fill-up of fair trade organic Tully's coffee (yet another reason to love living in WA!)
8) Port Townsend white wines - Fair Winds 2005 Aligote smells fruity but is dry and diesely and perfect for seafood - Sorensen 2006 White Table Wine is easy drinking and fruity but nicely balanced
9) Sunshine and margaritas on the porch at Mi Casita in Friday Harbor (pictured)
The Bad:
1) The food at Mi Casita - I had the quesadilla del mar (which Paul described as "gloopy" and inexcusably filled with frozen seafood) and he had the enchilada suiza filled with beef that was dry, stringy, and tough. This place was recommended to us by a local (further proof the most Washingtonians have never had good Mexican)
2) The Italian place we got lunch at in Friday Harbor, the price was right, but the pasta was overcooked. So mediocre that I have forgotten the name.
3) Pink Port Townsend wines - Sorensen's first attempt at rose missed the mark. It's amber in color and tastes suspiciously like sweet pepper jelly. Fair Winds admits to making its blush by combining red and white wine. Stuff tastes as I imagine the spit barrel in Sideways did. When on the Olympic Peninsula, stay away from the pink stuff.
4) Khu Larb Thai in Port Townsend - recommended by the guidebook and packed with people, we thought it might be a good place to order adventurously. We were wrong. The mussels in the clay pot were way too large and tasteless to have been local (New Zealand?) and the thai-style barbecued Cornish game hen was sufficiently dry to suggest that it had not been cooked to order. We're not willing to write it off completely but, if you go, stick to the pad thai.
5) Loganberry pie at Greenbank Farm on Whidbey - I actually thought it was fine, but Paul felt the Greenbank volunteers needed a course on pie dough (too crumbly) and to add a little sugar to balance the tart berries. But the farm itself is worth a visit to buy their cheese, taste a variety of local wines (I am particularly enamored of anything from Mount Baker Vineyards), and chat with the farm's friendly volunteers (the wine guy told us about Toby's and we love him for it).

The Ugly:
When Paul almost missed the ferry from San Juan to Orcas because some crappy coffee shop next to the ferry line couldn't manage to make 2 breakfast burritos in 20 minutes, forcing Paul to get 2 croissants instead and sprint for it. Turns out the croissants were inedibly doughy, requiring him to get breakfast out of the small ferry's vending machines.

If you have any suggestions for places we should have gone, please let us know! We love comments! Our fruitless whale watching expedition's "100% Whale Guarantee" means that we will be returning to the San Juans next summer in search of the elusive orca.

Mmm Sausage

2007-08-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

As a former vegetarian, I admit to occasionally feeling a little bit guilty about the excessive amounts of delicious meat I now consume regularly in the name of sheer hedonism. Last night Paul made his sausage sauce. Never has guilt tasted so good. We were not greedy. We invited friends over to share. We were civilized about it. We started with some garden fresh heirloom tomatoes, apartment-pickled p-patch beets, slices of freshly-baked artisan Tuscan bread, and a glass of Hogue Fume Blanc. Then Paul served the pasta, extra-wide homemade papardelle noodles smothered in sausage sauce and parmesan cheese. This was no ordinary sauce. We're talking Paul's homemade Italian sausage, San Marzano tomatoes, cream, cognac, and love. We were so busy stuffing our faces that we forgot to take a photo for the blog. Our guests brought over a bottle of Sagelands 2003 Four Corners Merlot, which paired perfectly with the rich sauce. We've had some great WA merlot the past couple of nights and we're beginning to think it may be one of WA's better varietals. Sideways prejudices be damned! And, although we didn't save room for it, there was of course dessert. We each had a very demure scoop of Paul's vanilla ice cream and a glass Claar Cellars 2003 Late Harvest Riesling, White Bluffs, Columbia Valley (just $4.99 during WA Wine Month!). The perfect end to the perfect meal.

The Man Behind the Menus

2007-08-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

Don't hate me because I'm married to a chef. This may be a challenge for those of you who realize that I got blackberry French toast for breakfast, leftover steak and garden veggies for lunch, and am likely to eat and blog again soon. Still, if you're curious about Chef Paul, the man behind the menus, check out his new blog Mayoria Comida. As the name implies, it's mostly about food, but allows Paul to give time to his other loves (politics and beleaguered Detroit sports teams, to name a couple). And maybe, if you ask really nicely, he'll shared some of his recipes.

Coolest Kid in School

2007-08-29T17:34:00.000-07:00

As a budding gourmand, my lunches tended to be fodder for the derision of my elementary school classmates. Apparently, liking salami, olives, and sardines was just not hip. But I'm getting my revenge now. Today my co-workers were appropriately impressed by the leftover goodness in my Tupperware - a little steak with salsa verde, celeriac/potato mash, and grilled zucchini.

Breakfast of Champions

2007-08-29T17:24:00.000-07:00

The berries have gone to his head. It's not every day that Paul bounds out of bed to start working with the poolish for his artisan bread and asks me if I'd like French toast for breakfast. But when he does, it's a very, very good day. The excuse may have been the local blackberries in the refrigerator or the need to get rid of older homemade bread to make way for today's rustic Tuscan loaf. But I didn't need a reason to be very grateful.

It's Washington Wine Month!!!

2007-08-29T17:08:00.000-07:00

That's right. It's that time of year again when WA wine is deeply discounted encouraging all of us to buy local. We moved to Seattle last year during WA wine month and were under the mistaken impression that you could get lots of delicious WA wine for under $6. This turned out not to be true, but we kept buying it anyway and upped our price limit to $8. Nevertheless, we're glad to see that prices have taken their annual dip and, Paul made a pairing feast in celebration. We started out with a pre-dinner glass of Willow Crest 2006 Yakima Valley Pinot Gris and moved on to a bottle of Columbia Crest 2003 Two Vines Merlot. To see what we thought about them, you'll have to check the "wall" on the right. But I'll tell you all about our delicious dinner right now. Paul grilled a juicy tri-tip steak over mesquite charcoal accompanied by a salsa verde of fire-roasted garden-grown tomatillos, onions, and garlic, inexpertly chopped by yours truly. Our sides were show stoppers largely picked from the P-Patch that afternoon: grilled zucchini and celeriac/yukon gold potato mash. It was hard to save room for the homemade vanilla ice cream. But somehow we managed.

Night Out

2007-08-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

Palomino is having an identity crisis. The garlic wreaths hanging by the open kitchen are trying for rustic and veering toward olive garden. The Matisse and Picasso prints are trying for upscale but barely clearing dentist's office. And the Chihulyesque chandeliers are just plain fake. If this weren't enough of a cultural mismatch to make anyone's head spin, they hand out fortunes at the end of the meal. All of this, of course, could be overlooked if the food were fantastic or cheap. It is neither. $95 got me and my dining companion an order of over-fried calamari (which, to our server's credit, he pointed out and was willing to replace), 2 mediocre steak salads (which attempted to make up for in breadth what they lacked in depth) and (admittedly) 6 glasses of wine. The only things that made the experience worthwhile were that I had a $20 gift certificate and the conversation was good.

Fresh from the P-Patch

2007-08-27T22:33:00.000-07:00

Some dinners are just too good to relegate to the wall. Some dinners require a photo. Tonight's dinner was supposed to be about trying out international wines from Trader Joe's, but the dinner really outclassed the wines and required a post all its own. Paul grilled a pork loin over apple wood, creating some of the juiciest most flavorful pork I have ever eaten. The rest of the meal was fresh from the garden: slow cooked Kale with balsamic and olive oil, zucchini browned in a cast iron skillet, and a salsa verde made with grilled tomatillos, walla walla onions, and parsley. Unbelievable. The wine, while pleasant, was nothing to write home about. We finished up half a bottle of La Boca 2006 Barrio Chardonnay from Mendoza Argentina and dove right into a Gaetano D'Aquino 2005 Valpolicella (Italian red). Both had a nice smell, easy drinking flavor, and no finish to speak of. But, for under $5 a bottle, we can't complain.

Tuesdays with Market

2007-08-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

Jasmine bills itself as a Thai Moroccan restaurant, but there are really only two Moroccan dishes on the menu (couscous and something else). Taking our cue from the dearth of offerings, Paul and I ordered Thai, but our intrepid friend got the couscous. She was not rewarded for her bravery. Her first plate came with a hair. Her second was under-seasoned. I got the pad kee mow tofu, which was pleasing to the eye (pictured) but a bit over-seasoned (overly salty, overly spicy, and overly sweet all at the same time). Not inedible or even unpalatable, but not quite right. Actually, it was like the food you get at a lot of chain restaurants - it looks good but it makes up in sauce for what its ingredients lack in true flavor. Paul ordered the green curry salmon, which was the best item of the bunch, but not worth making a return trip for, even at less than $10 a plate.

Happy Birthday Market!

2007-08-13T22:12:00.001-07:00

Pike Place Market turns 100 this year and, in honor of this auspicious event, we decided to blow some serious cash and go to the centennial version of the Market's annual Sunset Supper, a fundraiser featuring some of the Northwest's best food and booze to support the Market's many charitable endeavors. It was a perfect Seattle summer night after a gray day that had threatened rain. The cobblestone street was closed off and the main market day-vendor area was filled to the brim with booths offering every manner of culinary delight. There were too many wonderful restaurants represented to list them all, but here is a representative sampling: Canlis serving a perfect braised beef short rib; Chez Shea serving ahi tartare with avocado, cucumber, & wasabi soy vinaigrette; Salish Lodge serving salmon mousse on petite brioche; Andaluca serving a sweet corn risotto; Matt's in the Market serving a smoked trout salad; and Beecher's Cheese serving their famous "World's Best" mac & cheese. We went with a colleague of Paul's from the Art Institute and each of us had our favorites. I was enthralled with the Fish Club's Coco Lopez mussel shooter, though the others thought it a tad too sweet. Bob favored Cascadia's sweet corn panna cotta, corn gelato, and duck bacon salad, served by Kerry Sear himself, though Paul found it a bit too cold for his teeth. And Paul was enamored of Le Pichet's carmelized rice pudding with fresh blueberries and cream about which we all had to agree.

Out to Lunch

2007-08-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Rays Cafe - This is the more casual, less pricey cafe upstairs from the venerable Ray's Boathouse. We've been meaning to check it out ever since we moved to Ballard and finally got the chance last Sunday, when our friends Simona and Eli were in town (check out their blog Tavola Rasa on our blogroll). It was a perfect sunny day and we greatly enjoyed sitting out on the deck, sipping our well-seasoned bloody marys, and watching the boats sail by. Paul was quite pleased with the salmon burger, which comes with a mound of beer-battered fries. I opted for the lighter, but no less tasty, seared ahi salad nicoise. Simona cleaned her plate of King Salmon and Eli's halibut was so good - delicate and fresh on its bed of pistachio, currant and cracked wheat - that it was hard for me to stop at just the one bite he generously offered. This is a great place to go before watching the salmon run at the Ballard Locks, which is just what we did.