Oct 26
It was raining rather hard today, and I had nothing better to do on the bus than to stretch my haiku chops.
Seattle Fashion Plate
Today I’m wearing
A stunning ensemble of
Cashmere and Gore-Tex.
Bravado
Bring an umbrella?
I don’t need an umbrella.
“Drowned rat” is my style.
Snug as a Bug
I was so comfy
Sleeping to the sound of rain
Then the alarm rang.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/26/more-rainy-day-haikus/
Oct 25
Every year we bring a little of our East Coast roots to our Seattle friends by hosting Spiediefest. Often it’s during the summer; however, this year we postponed it to October. In previous years it coincided with visits from current Easterners such as my sister, or former housemates from my days at Cornell.
For the non-cognoscenti, spiedies are grilled kebabs of marinated meat or chicken served in hot dog buns. You’re served the kebab in the bun. You then pull out the skewer by squeezing the bun around the meat.Spiedies are native to Upstate New York, specifically the Binghamton-Syracuse-Rochester triangle. They originated in Binghamton. The Syracuse connection was established when the Salamidas opened their spiedie stand at the New York State Fair. A Rochester-based restaurant chain, Chef Italia, popularized spiedies in that city and in Ithaca when I was an undergrad. (My freshman roommate worked for Chef Italia’s upscale sister, The Vineyard, in Rochester.) The chain is long since defunct, but spiedies remain popular.
Truth be known, you need not buy special overpriced marinades for spiedies. Make a good homemade olive oil vinaigrette and add plenty of fresh or dried herbs and garlic. The lamb vinaigrette usually contains fresh mint along with basil, oregano, and parsley. For beef or lamb spiedies, use red wine vinegar. Chicken spiedies are made with lemon juice and/or white vinegar as the acid, with basil, oregano, and parsley. I also threw in some thyme and rosemary to add a little extra flavor. Marinate beef or lamb overnight. Some recipes will call for doing the same for chicken, but we prefer no more than 4 hours to keep the texture of the chicken from going pasty.
When it comes time to cook spiedies, thread about 5 chunks of meat onto a skewer. (If you use wood or bamboo skewers, soak them in water for a couple of hours so they don’t burn.) Fire up the grill, and cook until they are done. I use a meat thermometer and pull beef or lamb off at ~140°; chicken spiedies are done when the temperature reads 165°. You can garnish your spiedie with chopped onion. Often we set aside some marinade for drizzling on the cooked sandwich. (DO NOT use any marinade that’s been in contact with raw meat for this purpose.)
As I mentioned in one of my first posts, several of our friends have food allergies or intolerances. We can work around them for Spiediefest. One of our gluten-phobes actually found rolls at Whole Foods that have the taste and texture of wheat rolls despite being gluten-free. We marinate chicken and lamb chunks in garlic-free vinaigrette for our friend who has issues with alliums. The vegetarians can have tofu and mushroom spiedies. I don’t marinate those in advance, but dab some uncontaminated marinade on them as they cook on the grill. As with our other festivities, the point is to share laughs and good food.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/25/spiediefest/
Oct 25
I’m sure many of you are thinking that Julian and I have been together for WAY too long if my idea of a hot date is grocery shopping. One can always put twists into any mundane activity. We had to get some provisions for home and for the annual Spiediefest the following night.
Our errands started at the Everest Kitchen. This is an Indian-Tibetan-Nepalese restaurant that recently moved to a new location in the Lake Forest Park Town Center. This is a welcome addition, since the only other ethnic restaurants in this shopping center that contains 90% of the businesses in town (not to mention the post office and municipal offices) are in the food court next to Third Place Books. Everest Kitchen also wisely chose a location right next to the Lake Forest Bar and Grill, to snap up people who didn’t want to wait for a table.
After a meal of goat curry and mango chicken, it was off to Costco. We were in need of paper products, cereal, raspberries, and contact lens juice. We also got the leg of lamb for spiedies there. The sample folks were mostly hawking items that we would never buy, such as vitamin-infused bottled water. Even at Costco, this product is expensive and unnecessary. Just go to the vitamin section, buy a bottle of multivitamins, and wash one down every day with tap water. Save your money for the important stuff, kids, like ramen noodles.
Our final stop was Central Market in Shoreline. This is our go-to grocery unless Wegmans decides to establish a beach head in the Northwest. (Danny Wegman: Are you listening? We didn’t know how good we had it when we lived in Ithaca.) We got the chicken, beer, wine, and assorted other provisions for the week at Central Market. After a couple of healthy charges to our credit card, we headed home to get ready for Spiediefest.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/25/date-night-at-costco/
Oct 22
A ham steak can be a quick and easy weeknight dinner for us. We often make baked or mashed yams alongside the ham. Unfortunately, these days supermarket ham steaks are pumped full of water. This results in a soggy mess in the frying pan that prevents the ham from browning. The worst part of it is that we paid good money for all that water.
A couple of nights ago I made a ham steak with an apple-onion pan sauce. The recipe called for browning the steak before sautéing the onion. Once the ham hit the pan, it was if I’d wrung out a giant sponge. I must have poured off a good 1/4 cup of fluid out of the frying pan. And the fluid kept coming out. The ham eventually browned, but it took several minutes longer than it should have.
The next time this happens, I will contact the company that packaged the ham and raise some cain. I suggest other consumers follow suit. We don’t need to be paying ham prices for water.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/22/the-ham-rant/
Oct 18
I like the fact that Seattle is not a stagnant community. The unemployment rate is low, and new restaurants are opening all the time. Unfortunately, there are some changes that are not welcome. A few examples:
1. Hing Loon closed earlier this year. It was a Chinese restaurant in the International District that served the definitive clams in black bean sauce. There was a menu, but many items were posted on the walls in Chinese (with occasional English translations).
2. Sabra was a Mediterranean restaurant in Pike Place Market. The proprietor was a friendly woman from North Africa. It closed over the summer and was replaced by a Chinese sandwich shop, Country Dough. We had lunch there yesterday, and Julian was underwhelmed. My pet peeve about the place was that they served flavored teas for an outrageous price, twice that for a cup of coffee. No plain black tea was served. (See my rant about tea for my take on this faux pas.)
3. Yesterday we learned that the building that houses Julian’s go-to coffee shop, Caffe d’Arte, will be torn down next year. A 40-story building will go up in its place. The coffee shop will move to another location, but this means another soul-less high rise blotting out the Sun and views of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains for folks on the ground.
I’m not sure why HIng Loon and Sabra closed, but rising rents could be to blame. I lived in Dallas when escalating commercial real estate rent and damn-the-torpedos development were rampant. Just before I left for grad school, the bottom fell out of the oil market, savings & loans went bankrupt, and home values (including mine) plummeted. While Seattle’s economy is much more diversified than Dallas’s was at the time, another downturn could result in lots of folks losing their shirts.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/18/changes-not-for-the-better/
Oct 18
I was looking at yesterday’s college football scores and thinking, “Something is seriously amiss.” Perennial doormat teams such as Houston and Duke are in the top 25. Powerhouses such as Oregon and USC are going down to ignominious defeat by traditional underdog teams. Then I looked at the East Coast scores and was reassured that we were not in the End Times. Both Cornell and Columbia lost. Cornell lost to Sacred Heart–really?!? Back when I was an undergrad, often Cornell’s only victory in a season was against Columbia. I can hope.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/18/are-we-in-the-end-times/
Oct 18
My brother-in-law, Stan, retired last year. While he occasionally plays golf, he has plenty of other things to do. He’s clearing a spot on some property outside town for a new home. He keeps track of his father, who’s in an assisted-living facility in Rochester. He dotes on his two grandchildren. He tends a vegetable garden. In the fall he goes hunting with his cronies. And in the early spring he taps maple trees on his property and boils the sap for maple syrup. He gave us a pint of this year’s harvest when we were in town two weeks ago.
Do not confuse maple syrup with artificially-colored, artificially-maple-flavored, high-fructose corn syrup. The principal sugar in maple syrup is sucrose (table sugar). It takes up to 50 gallons of maple sap to produce a gallon of maple syrup. (Fun facts courtesy of Wikipedia.) This is why you pay significantly more for the real thing than the fake stuff. Someone has to pay for the fuel to evaporate off so much water.
So what do you do with maple syrup other than drizzling it over pancakes and waffles? I drizzle it into oatmeal along with dried cranberries. It can be used as a sweetener in breads, cakes, and other desserts. Canadians make a maple syrup pie (tarte au sirop d’érable). It’s similar to pecan pie, except walnuts are used and it’s often a two-crust pie. If you’re using maple syrup as a substitute for honey, be advised that the final product will be less sweet because fructose is the predominant sugar in honey. Fructose is sweeter than sucrose.
Most maple syrup sold in the US comes from Quebec, Vermont, and New York. Cornell University operates a field station for maple research and extension in Lake Placid. You can also find recipes for using maple products at this website. Once you use real maple syrup, you won’t go back to the imitation stuff.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/18/mad-about-maple-syrup/
Oct 17
Diners are a primarily Northeast phenomenon. You rarely find them in the South or on the West Coast. I’m not sure why this is. It could be due to the proliferation of fast-food and family restaurant (e.g., Applebee’s) franchises, where everything is prepackaged, portion-controlled, and lacking creativity. There’s also the cafeteria culture in the South that swamps almost everything else. (Word to the wise: When planning a trip to a Southern cafeteria for Sunday lunch or brunch, go before or well after the local Baptist churches let out. Momma and Granny deserve a Sabbath from cooking, too.)
The diner experience follows a particular pattern. Some diners resemble silver railroad cars; others are large freestanding buildings. The exterior is often festooned with neon lights (or LED’s, for the more eco-conscious). The decor is usually lots of red vinyl booths along the walls with tables in the middle of the floor. You can sit at the bar near the kitchen as well. A glass case featuring a wide variety of desserts greets you at the entrance, a blatant invitation to overconsumption. The menu features everything from breakfasts to burgers to full meals. There’s always a kids’ menu. The paper placemats feature ads for local businesses. Some of the waitstaff have worked at the same diner since The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. As a result, they can steer you to the right item on the menu. And, of course, they will counsel you to save room for dessert!
The epicenter of diner culture is downstate New York and New Jersey. Any self-respecting town will have at least one diner. We went to two on this last trip; one in Goshen and the other in Nanuet. Many diners in the area are run by Greek families. At the Goshen diner, I had a Greek omelet with feta cheese. Curiously, there were few other Greek items on that menu–and no baklava in the dessert case.
The closest thing to a diner I’ve found in the Seattle area is the Wedgwood Broiler, in our old neighborhood. It’s the anchor business at the north end of a strip shopping center, adjacent to the QFC grocery store. The Broiler is a throwback to the 1950’s, and the menu hasn’t changed much since then. The menu features diner standards such as liver and onions. No molecular gastronomy, no swizzles of sauce on a plate, or arugula in the salad. It’s just straightforward food that my grandmother would recognize as such. That may be the reason behind the staying power of diners in the metro New York area: After you’ve dined at some fancy expense-account restaurant in the city, you can relax with some real food.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/17/diners/
Oct 16
I disposed of the tomato and basil plants before we left on vacation, and I was sure that the pepper plants would be compost by the time we returned. Surprisingly, there were 6 peppers on the padron plant and several blossoms on the cubanelle. I tend to doubt that the latter will have time to set fruit before the first frost, but a woman can dream.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/16/the-energizer-pepper-plants/
Oct 12
The beauty of New York is that I know of two cookbook stores there to feed my fix. On Saturday we visited Kitchen Arts and Letters on the Upper East Side. I’ve been visiting them for nearly 20 years. Since Julian said, “You buy them, you schlep them”, I restrained myself. I saw a new volume by George Greenstein: A Jewish Baker’s Pastry Secrets. His Secrets of a Jewish Baker is one of my favorite books. Unfortunately, Greenstein died in 2012. His daughters and grandson constructed the newer book from computer files. Julian has already requested a babka out of the book.
On Sunday we went to lower Manhattan in search of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks. Bonnie deals mostly in used editions. Her store used to be on 10th Street in the West (Greenwich) Village, but she lost her lease last year. A fan of hers offered her a space on East 2nd Street, between Bowery and 2nd Avenue, for an unheard-of ten year lease. I got four books from her two years ago and had them shipped back to Seattle. This time I bought three books: The Cooking of Southwest France by Paula Wolfert; Dori Sanders’s Country Cooking; and Recipes into Type by Joan Whitman and Dolores Simon. The first was because of our trip to southwestern France in June. Dori Sanders is the originator of the One True Cobbler®, which was the topic of an earlier blog post. Finally, the last book should be required reading for anyone even pondering writing a cookbook or recipe blog. I have kvetched in another post about the sorry state of cookbook editing these days. When I approached the counter with my booty, Bonnie wisely asked, “Can I ship them for you?” How did she know? Now once we get home I need to figure out where to put these new tomes. Might be time for another cookbook cull.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2015/10/12/the-cookbook-store-pilgrimages/
Recent Comments