Jun 03

Fish Fry Stand Smackdown

Upstate New York and western Washington have iconic fish fry stands: Rudy’s in Oswego and Ivar’s in the Seattle area. Both serve fried fish and seafood, with a few offerings for landlubbers. So, for the benefit of my friends on either end of the country, here’s my comparison of the two restaurants.

Branches. There is only one Rudy’s, on the shore of Lake Ontario. Ivar’s has numerous branches in the Seattle area. The original Ivar’s is in downtown Seattle, below Pike Place Market. Other outlets include the Salmon House on South Lake Union and fast food stands throughout the region.

Founding and Founders. Rudy’s opened in 1936, Ivar’s two years later. Both founders died in the 1980’s. Rudy’s is still owned by the same family. Ivar’s was sold to a management firm years ago. Rudy let his food do the talking. Ivar Haglund was a Seattle celebrity with appearances on radio and TV. When a truck full of syrup overturned on a local street many years ago, Ivar rushed to the scene with pancakes as a publicity stunt.

Ambience. Rudy’s is a drive-in. You order at the counter and eat in your car or at picnic tables. Rudy’s added a few tables inside the building in an earlier expansion. Ivar’s offers table service at the original and Salmon House restaurants.

Season. Rudy’s opens around St. Patrick’s Day and closes around Columbus Day. Trust me, you do NOT want to be eating at a picnic table near Lake Ontario in December. Ivar’s branches are open year-round.

The Fish. Deep fryers play a big role at both restaurants. The type of fish fried is similar (haddock, pollock). Ivar’s also has fried salmon, which strikes me as very wrong.

Sides and Other Offerings. As you can imagine, French fries and onion rings are served at both restaurants. Rudy’s also has other fried vegetables and poutine. The non-fish specialty at Rudy’s is the Texas Hot, a hot dog with diced onions, mustard, and chili on top. To go full Upstate, you can get a Coney Hot – an all-pork sausage dolled up with the fixings. Rudy’s also has an ice cream bar, presumably to compete with the soft-serve stand down the street. Ivar’s does chowder. Unlike most chowder houses in Seattle, Ivar’s also serves Manhattan clam chowder alongside the cream-based New England style.

Gulls. The ubiquitous flying rats make nuisances of themselves at both places. Rudy’s strongly discourages patrons from feeding gulls. (The gulls help themselves quite well, thank you very much.) On the other hand, Ivar encouraged feeding fries to the gulls.

Personal Preference. I don’t have a strong bias for or against either. I do need to have a Coney Hot on any trip Back East when Rudy’s is open. The Ivar’s quick-serve restaurants are easy places for lunch at home. Whatever’s convenient.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/06/03/fish-fry-stand-smackdown/

Jun 03

Reunion Time

I’m en route to New York to visit family and attend my Cornell Reunion. To my mind, Reunion is the most fun you can have fully clothed and without illegal substances. I see plenty of friends I knew back in the day; in addition I meet new people I never ran across and who become friends. Visiting the campus is always an interesting experience. Sometimes I even see people I knew from grad school. (Most people from my undergrad days are either long retired or dead.)

Another reunion will occur, this time with high school friends. I’d emailed one of my classmates to tell her that I’d be in town. She got hold of two other friends, and a flurry of texts began. Julian brought my phone up from the office while I was making dinner and said, “Your phone is making noise. You may want to see what’s going on.” The texts continued through dinner, complete with snarky remarks about one classmate’s husband being outnumbered by women (three daughters). Julian’s comment: “How many texts does it take for four women to make a dinner date?”

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/06/03/reunion-time/

May 26

Preferred Habitats

Some people are drawn to places similar to where they grew up. Others go for the exact opposite of the environments of their childhoods. The preferred habitats may be natural or human-made. When given a choice, people gravitate to where they can be most themselves and at peace.

Julian grew up in Miami, long before Miami Vice and other developments made the city a hipster magnet. Surfside, the city where his mother lived for years, used to be considered “God’s Waiting Room” before the high-rise condos and hotels oozed onto that barrier island. He escaped as soon as possible after high school. After a year at Georgia Tech, he finished his bachelors’ degree at the University of Wisconsin. He and his friends would spend summers backpacking in the Rockies and the Cascades. Our first vacation together was to Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada, and we’ve since spent time in the Alps, Great Smokies, and Sierras. For years he had the idea of moving to Montana near Glacier National Park, and still brings up that possibility from time to time.

I made my own escape, from a farm in upstate New York to Dallas after graduating from Cornell. While city life holds a lot of appeal to me (job opportunities, great restaurants, diverse populations), I have the need to be near large natural bodies of water. My astrology-minded friends would tell me it’s because I’m a Pisces. I grew up 10 miles from Lake Ontario, and a creek was down the road from my childhood home. My sorority had a killer view of Cayuga Lake. We’d often gather on the back porch or look out the windows at the sunset over the lake and West Hill. My grad school apartment, on the aptly-named Grandview Court, also overlooked the lake. [One of my undergrad classmates wrote and recorded the semi-official anthem, “Ithaca Sunset”,  many years ago.] Dallas and Greensboro don’t have much in the way of bodies of water. Dallas has two “lakes”, and the Trinity River is little more than a drainage ditch. There are two lakes on the north end of Greensboro, Brandt and Townsend. Even though we lived nearby, we never went up there. I used to walk around the ponds in Country Park, which was the extent of my aquatic views. We visited the coast twice, both times when we were looking to adopt our first male Russian Blue kitten, Jasper.

The Seattle area makes both of us happy, geographically speaking. We can be in the mountains in one or two hours. Mount Rainier looms over the skyline on sunny days. I’ve got Puget Sound and Lake Washington. The Sammamish in our back yard is a happy bonus. I think we’ll stay for a while.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/26/preferred-habitats/

May 25

Neli, Screen Addict

Neli can text, turn on iTunes, and play games on the iPhone. Yes, there are smart phone games for smart cats. For example, here is the one that Neli is playing in the above video while Julian is watching football. The object of the game is to catch and crush the animated bugs. She’s so addicted that she’ll come running if she hears the click when Julian unlocks his iPhone.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/25/neli-screen-addict/

May 19

Tunes for Menial Tasks

After I took the picture of the steamboats (see A Serendipitous Sight), I put the phone on the dining room table. Somehow Neli managed to get Siri to play my iTunes. She sat next to the phone and listened intently. This cat is WAY too smart for our own good,

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/19/tunes-for-menial-tasks/

May 19

A Serendipitous Sight

Sometimes serendipity strikes in the midst of menial tasks. I was attempting to scrape the schmutz out of the gas grill when I heard a steam whistle. Since Casa Sammamish is nowhere near an old railroad, it had to be the mini steamboats. I ran downstairs and grabbed the phone to take a picture. Last year a whole flotilla went past. I saw only three today.

The first two steamboats.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/19/a-serendipitous-sight/

May 17

Rolling the Dice

A Monte Carlo simulation is a statistical technique to determine the probability of an event. The analysis is done by computer, because it would be far too tedious to make 500 or more runs of the simulation by hand. It’s commonly used to predict how long your assets will last in retirement. I’ve discovered two lesser known predictive analytic methods named after casino towns.
The Las Vegas Simulation. This simulation measures how likely you are to fly home from Las Vegas with an empty wallet between gambling and buying tickets to Cirque du Soleil and Céline Dion shows.
The Atlantic City Simulation. This simulation assesses the probability of your casino going bankrupt even before you open it.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/17/rolling-the-dice/

May 14

For the Love of Bunny

[Sensitive souls might want to skip this post.]

Yes, I like bunnies. I like to eat them. I know that my appetite for rabbit is not shared by many Americans, some of whom were traumatized by the “pets or meat” scene in Michael Moore’s first film, Roger and Me. Below are three reasons why you might want to change your opinion.

Rabbit is a relatively lean meat. And yes, it does taste a bit like chicken.

Rabbits are very efficient at turning food into meat, which makes the meat a more sustainable choice than beef or pork. An article from Modern Farmer (link here) says that a rabbit can produce six pounds of meat with the same input of feed and water as it takes a steer to produce one pound of meat. They also grow and reproduce more rapidly than a steer.

Rabbits don’t need a heavy corn and soy diet to pack on the meat.

Finding rabbit meat isn’t easy here, although many upscale groceries will carry it in the freezer case. If you’re feeding a family, you may need more than one rabbit. It’s not cheap, as America doesn’t have mass rabbit feedlot operations the way it does for beef cattle. Many recipes for rabbit involve stewing because the meat is so lean. Most of the rabbit dishes I’ve eaten in France are stews. You can adapt any recipe for smothered chicken to use rabbit. I’ve also seen rabbit used in Creole/Cajun recipes. Hey, it beats nutria.

Probably the easiest way to consume rabbit is to order it off a menu. Last week at our neighborhood McMenamins I had a rabbit confit with pea shoots. It was quite tasty. Next time you see rabbit on a restaurant menu, take a chance and order it.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/14/for-the-love-of-bunny/

May 10

Another Feathered Fatality

We’ve had a male pheasant in the neighborhood for the last week. It’s roosted on our roof and wandered around the street. Saturday I was doing some work in the front yard and heard a strange squawk. It was the pheasant, hanging out in the driveway next door.
Alas, the pheasant died earlier this week. He collided into a neighbor’s window. The neighbors mourned over the corpse, and then took him to a field away from the condos so it could nourish the other wildlife hereabouts.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/10/another-feathered-fatality/

May 07

The Symbol of Bothell

Paris has the Eiffel Tower.  London has Big Ben.  New York has the Statue of Liberty.  Saint Louis has the Arch.

Bothell has the Chicken.

 

This proud monument to poultry towers (about 15 ft) over the entrance to Country Village, an old-timey-themed collection of shops on a landscaped site just north of downtown Bothell.  It is very much unlike the modern sterile malls throughout the US.  These are old wooden buildings, interspersed with planked walkways, creeks, and ponds with ducks and geese.  There are antique railway cars and boats, rigged as playground equipment for children.  It’s an attempt at evoking memories of small towns of the American past.  Pure kitsch, but on the cheap, with rough edges you would not see in Disneyland.

Country Village has fallen on hard times.  The millenials are not interested in this stuff.  We were saddened to learn that a developer purchased the site.  In a year, the shops will close, the bulldozers will arrive, and eventually all this lovely kitsch will be replaced by an apartment complex.

This creates a dilemma.  What to do with the Chicken?  We must save the sacred symbol of our home town.

There is only one solution.  Bothell City Government recently moved into a new (and very expensive) city hall.  This facility is purely utilitarian, utterly lacking any style or panache.  The front entrance faces a large empty plaza – a vast expanse of concrete with no purpose or soul.  This is where the Chicken must be.

Here is the City Hall, as it looks now.

 

Here is the improved version.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2018/05/07/the-symbol-of-bothell/

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