Archive for the ‘Food, Glorious Food’ Category
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
It’s possible I mentioned before that I got the cutest little gas grill on the planet - it sits just outside my back door on a concrete pad that acts as though it was made for back door grilling. I am quite enchanted with the convenience of it - the other day, I switched it on because I wanted to grill one single onion to include in our secret household recipe for hummus. I cooked up some exceptional chicken, after marinating it in mustard, olive oil, white wine, and sage leaves - I made sure the chicken was covered in leaves when I tossed it on the hot grill and it was, let’s just say this: “Oh yeah.” And this: “I love my gas grill.”
With the stubborn refusal of any kind of summer to arrive - it topped out around 54F today - backyard grilling doesn’t have much appeal. I am fighting it with all my might, though I am clearly weakened from lack of Vitamin D. We could probably use it in our water supply around here, Vitamin D, I mean, though in addition to making sure i eat right, I have recently added a multivitamin to my diet to make up for the lack of sunshine and for trying, trying, trying, to cut back on treats.
A slice of grilled orange is quite the luscious treat substitute, especially when it’s served up with halibut that’s marinated in orange juice, sweet chili sauce, and a splash of olive oil. Along with the oranges, we had a pile of sauteed kale, but it was a little disappointing, the greens had a bitter taste that subsided with a little salt. I cooked the halibut for about 10 minutes on the first side, a little less on the second side, basting it now and then with the leftover sauce in the bowl. I pulled it off just as it was starting to fall apart, about a minute too late. It was far from overcooked, the extra minute or two just meant that it was well cooked all the way through - I prefer to take it off the grill when it’s just short of done, that way it’s perfect by the time you stick your fork in it.
No complaints though, it was first rate, and pretty too, and the oranges, oh, they were something. Now I am psyched to grill a pineapple - that will be awesome with a sturdy white fish, and I’m eying the bananas in the fruit bowl thinking, huh, if I sprinkle them with sugar and then grill them, how mind blowing will they be on vanilla ice cream from Husky Deli? Or, oh my god, what if I got one of these griddle tops
and on one side, made pancakes, while on the other side, I was grilling up fruit to top them with over the open flame? Whoa.
I realize I’m sounding like a shill for Coleman, but really, it’s the good eating that I’m shilling. What I’m saying is that just because it’s an exceptionally crappy year weather-wise does not mean we also have to forgo eating food that makes us believe that summer will arrive some day.
Posted in Fish Wednesday, Food, Glorious Food | 7 Comments »
Monday, June 9th, 2008
It used to be I thought that any place north of the Montlake Bridge was full of sea monsters, I’d not venture there without the Sea Witch at my side to protect me with spells and amulets. I’m long over my provincial hangups, plus, people act like our West Seattle home is somewhere beyond Hawaii, so reluctant are they to make the crossing. We understand how you feel, far flung neighborhoods, and we won’t make fun of you anymore.
Today’s errands found us in Wedgwood and when we’re there, we like to snack it up at the Grateful Bread bakery on 35th and 70th. It’s right across the street from a newish Top Pot donuts, but while we can get our hipster donuts downtown, we can’t get our hippie lunches there, at least not in that “you might be in Eugene, Oregon but that doesn’t mean you have to eat vegan food” sort of way.
We shared the chicken and red pepper pannini - a mighty serving of sandwich it is, easily big enough for two - fresh and delicious, stuffed with plenty of greens and other filling, and on house made bread. We followed that with coffee and a cinnamon roll. My sidekick is on something of a quest to try every available cinnamon roll in the greater Seattle area. He’s given the green flag to hardly any of them, the Essential Baking Company version doesn’t have raisins in it, the one at the Original Bakery is actually more of a donut, the Grateful Bread one is too doughy, the only one that’s up to his exacting Austrian standards is the Bakery Nouveau rendition and they don’t have them in the case often enough.
Never mind. I like the quiche at Grateful Bread, it makes a nice lunch, as do their big sandwiches, and I like the way the staff is mellow even during the lunch rush. It’s almost always crowded in there, meaning you have to double up and share tables (this means you too, wi-fi users), and I like that too. Today we overheard a little girl asking her mom about the existence of pirates, which the mom denied. We had enough restraint to not dive in with horror stories of modern buccaneers on the high seas, but we wish she’d said that yes, pirates still exist, even if they’re only the Seafair Pirates.
Perhaps our decision not to breed was a good one. Our choice of lunch stop, though? Not bad at all.
Grateful Bread is on the corner of 35th and 70th.
Side note on wifi: For some time I’ve been pondering the issue of wifi users in cafes. I hate it when I go into a cafe and it’s all one person+laptop per table. “Double up, people!” I think, probably out loud. I have a possibly unpopular solution to this - rather than free wifi, I’d like to see cafes offer free Internet but at wired hub tables. That way, the non-social wifi users all hook up around a wired hub and they have to share space, leaving more real estate for, well, everyone. Or maybe just a sign that says, “Yo, wifi guy! Double up!”
Posted in Food, Glorious Food, Seattle | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
We don’t always dish up a plate of seafood for Fish Wednesday, sometimes, we actually put on our shoes and go look at fish in some kind of habitat. We are unspeakably lucky to be near Lincoln Park, a beautiful stretch of beach (and more) - it takes 20 minutes to walk from our front door to the edge of Puget Sound. And at this time of year, we live for the low tide days. The extreme low tides, like today’s, expose sea life we don’t usually get to look at or poke, I mean, um, gently, very gently of course, so gently as to be almost unnoticeable, I swear. (Kids, don’t poke the sea life, okay? Plus, some of it is toxic, no joke.)
On days when the tide is way out there, the Seattle Aquarium sends naturalists down to the beach to talk to the sea life poking visitors, sharing knowledge about what lives out there, telling us not to poke the sea life, and generally making us all a little smarter. Thanks to their help, I now know something about the Moon Snail, a big critter with a shell about the size of a baseball and a body that looks “like a giant wad of snot” according to the friendly guy that helped us understand our underwater neighbors. I also learned that those things you see everywhere are not “plungers washed up from a freighter that tipped over in the sound.” They’re actually moon snail eggs mixed with sand - they’re laid that way to create a sturdier, less appetizing place for the eggs to mature.
We saw chitons and several different kinds of sea stars, including the squishy orange ones with a zillion legs, anenomes that looked like someone hacked up an organ right there on the beach, big red crabs that would have made an excellent dinner had the gulls not got to them first, loads of rock clinging barnacle type things from very flat ones to pointy three dimensional ones…and that’s just the squishy sea life.
Birds were plentiful, tossing sea star legs around (it’s brutal at low tide), feeding on the tiny fish and shrimp that didn’t get the memo about clearing out before the tide turned, and generally feasting on the salad bar of the tidal zone. We even saw an otter scamper out of the water, hightail it across the beach, and disappear into the brush just the other side of the seawall. There was talk along the beach of an octopus sighting - Puget Sound is home to one of the largest species of octopus - and two legged critters, mostly of the smaller sized squealing with enthusiasm variety - were everywhere.
It’s a true wonder to get out there and see the breathtaking variety of nature in all it’s sticky, salty splendor. Low tide is high on the list of my hundreds of favorite things about West Seattle, even when the weather is less than ideal. It looks like the next super low minus tides are the first three days of July - if you want to join us for turning over rocks, peeling back seaweed, and generally oohing and aahing over the wonders of water dwelling critters, just drop me a line. Afterwards, we’ll go for treats at the Original Bakery down by Endolyne Joe’s.
A few more pics here. And the King County website has some pics of chitons and snails in Puget sound here.
Posted in Fish Wednesday, Playing Outside, Seattle | 3 Comments »
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
In spite of the shocking amount of nonsense information I keep in my head - the chord sequence to Roxy Music’s More than This, a good deal of the poetry in Alice in Wonderland, many, many one liners from The Simpsons, and a warehouse of shoe boxes stuffed with mental images from my travels - in spite of all that - um - detritus - I can not seem to find a place to store the contents of the Seafood Watch card. Plus, the card gets updated all the time, it’s not comprehensive, and those tricksters in the fish industry are often changing the names of fishes so’s to fool the educated into buying Chilean Sea Bass or some other endangered fish.
When you shop a good fish market, you are able to ask at the counter about the fish - getting good information at supermarkets can be trickier just because they’re so much busier than a fish only establishment. I’m pretty good at making sustainable choices, but sometimes I’ll come across something that I don’t recognize.
Today, it was the spearfish. I was suckered in not only because it was affordable - fresh salmon is 25 bucks a pound! - but because it was bearing a “Great for Grilling” sticker and I now have the cutest, shiniest, little red grill
that you have ever seen. We cooked chicken sausages and asparagus on it a few nights ago, today, we’re finding out if broccoli will give us the same yummy results when placed on the hot grill after being coated in olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt.
“D’ya think it’s the same thing as marlin?” I asked J, and he shrugged. The cashier was equally as informative saying that it looked “kinda sharky. The marlin is usually cut differently.” I looked it up pronto upon our return home and was relieved to learn that our choice was a good one. I really do wish the stores would label their sustainable seafood. It doesn’t mean every consumer has to buy that stuff, but I know I’d appreciate not having to do research to eat my dinner with a clean conscience.
The fish marinated in olive oil, garlic and herbs for a while and then spent a little time on the hot grill - side by side with the broccoli. The fish was moist and very flavorful, the broccoli a nice change from your usual steamed or sauteed state, still crispy but a little charred around the edges. I could do a lot of blowing my own horn here, but I’d rather quote my understated mate: “It’s okay, you can continue with the grilling.” This is high praise from a guy who doesn’t say much. Trust me, it was awesome.
Some pals of ours recently went grill crazy too, we had a very funny conversation about the manliness of grilling, shopping for grills, the size of your grill, manning it up about the hardware store, etc… I just went online, read some reviews, found one I liked, and clicked add to shopping cart. Our grill might be girlie as hell in its procurement methods, modest size, cute package and minimal needs for space, but I cooked up some kickass fish on it.
Tomorrow, we’re doing chicken.
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Blog note: I installed a bit of code that pulls old posts from the archives and publishes them on the home page. They’re updated daily. If you’re reading this in RSS or email, you won’t have the entertainment of seeing those old posts. It’s amusing to me - click through and maybe it will be amusing to you, too.
Posted in Fish Wednesday, Food, Glorious Food | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
I’m a sucker for an exotic cookbook. Our stunning variety of ethnic grocery stores means that here in Seattle, we are able to fearlessly ferret out the bizarre and nonstandard ingredients. And our diverse community means that even the local Safeway has quite an impressive selection of ethnic foods. A good thing, diversity is. I’m for it.
The Vivid Flavors Cookbook, a very exotic selection indeed, has been on my shelf for quite along time, since I picked it up from a remainders pile somewhere. The index in this collection of complicated oddball recipes is, well, crap. I keep saying I’m going to get rid of it, and then, I crack it open and while browsing through in a half-hearted way, dammit, I find something something in there I want to make. Every time.
Case in point, tonight’s dinner. Broiled salmon glazed with honey, lemon, and chili paste served over rice noodles with garlic, ginger, roasted tomatoes, and cilantro. A lovely combination of sweet and sour, and pretty, too, with bright green cilantro leaves against the orange salmon and the red roasted tomatoes. Cookbook, you live another day.
Typically, when browsing my books, I go straight for the index. I look for the items in my fridge and then, I see what the books tell me to make. Yeah, I know, the Internet, blah blah blah, but I like flipping through cookbooks, I like that they fall open to the pages I use the most, I like seeing notes from meals past scribbled in the margins - “never mind vegan, this would be awesome with CHEESE” or “not worth the bother of baking, make the sauce and pour it over pasta.”
The sauce for tonight’s fish was very simple - the juice of a lemon, a teaspoon of red curry paste, and two big tablespoons of honey. I’m absolutely making it again, it would be good on just about any sturdy fish - halibut, salmon, cod, you name it. By next Fish Wednesday, I’ll be the proud owner of a Road Trip Grill and I think halibut steaks marinated in the aforementioned sauce and grilled are going to be oh so good.
I’m excited that grilling season is finally here. We cooked some chicken last weekend on the old Weber kettle grill (slathered in sweet chili sauce) and it was mighty nice to sit in the yard enjoying dinner in the warm evening light. Fish isn’t a summer only food, but the best of it arrives in Seattle in late spring with the long days, so it tastes like summer to me.
My mom cleaned off her bookshelves a little while back and I inherited The Barbecue! Bible
. If the index doesn’t suck, maybe it will teach me a thing or two about how to cook fish.
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Side note: I got the new grill (partly) because I’m having a solstice party. If you’re in Seattle and you’d like to come, email me, I’ll send you an evite.
Posted in Fish Wednesday | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
In it’s pure dark form, chocolate has indeed been shown to be “heart smart,” with more antioxidants than black tea or red wine, as well as lots of magnesium, iron, and potassium (all vital to women’s health). It can also ease anxiety and depression, as it contains serotonin and theobromine, which act on brain receptors and have a beneficial influence on mood. –French Women Don’t Get Fat
Well, thank god for that. Because shortly before I received the PR copy of French Women Don’t Get Fat (revised with recipes), I received a bunch of chocolate from the PR folks for Green and Black’s Chocolate. The goodies from Green and Black’s came with a little educational pitch on how to hold a chocolate tasting, who knew?
Before I go any further, just so it’s perfectly clear: the chocolate and the copy of French Women Don’t Get Fat came from PR companies. Disclaimer enough? Okay.
Some people around my house are addicted to sweets, I ain’t saying who. And some people, in combination with their addiction, are terribly snobby about their sweets, making for a rather expensive habit. Others are not quite so discerning, they’re satisfied with a Snickers Bar or a Cadbury Fruit and Nut Bar. To them, I say, “Can I have a bite?” even while saying “Don’t you have anything better?”
In French Women Don’t Get Fat, there’s a whole lot of talk about quality, quality, quality. The French, it seems, have cornered the market on epicureanism and it’s their indulgence in the best stuff that keeps them from overindulging in anything - one ounce of quality chocolate is equal to snarfing down an entire jumbo sized Hershey bar. That’s the trick, apparently, to staying svelte.
I don’t happen to think that bit about the French being the pinnacle of epicureans is true though admittedly, I’m a total dilettante, my travels and living abroad have ruined me for a lot of things. I do prefer dark chocolate to milk, and I think white chocolate is beside the point and I don’t like it very much. In spite of the clear quality of the Green and Black’s I didn’t like their white chocolate any better than Milka white chocolate, which I’ve eaten too much of on accident because I “forgot” to give it away. I do like the Milka with whole hazelnuts, though once we got some Italian knock off brand at the Hofer (a sort of food clearance store in Austria) that was superior in all ways. I’ve intentionally stayed away from the chocolates at my local French bakery, more out of fear of addiction than fear of lousy quality - once when they were out of twice baked almond croissants I had the twice baked chocolate instead and oh, let’s just say that it was an immensely satisfying experience.
The Green and Black’s chocolate was awfully nice, even the milk chocolate preferring husband had to admit that it was damn fine snacking while I had to concede that the milk chocolate they make is better than anything from the choco-industrial complex. The Maya Gold, their “signature” was damn fine, you taste it with your whole mouth, instead of just this waxy sweetness, there’s so much more… it took everything out of me not to snarf the whole thing down in a frenzy, a very anti-French way of enjoying food, excellent quality be damned.
There are three bags of chocolate chips in our pantry, they’re waiting to be made into cookies, of course. Chocolate chip cookies are also anti-French, I think, but there’s few things that are so delightful - or American - as a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven, cool enough to eat but warm enough so that the chocolate is still kind of gooey. If we are to apply the French style moderation, we’d make them in very small batches out of the best possible chocolate chips. That’s probably not going to happen.
I tend to stay away from diet philosophy because I believe (perhaps wrongly) that we all know how to be thinner: Eat less nonsense and get more exercise. I also stay away because I really enjoy food so very much and I think that a life of deprivation is a waste. I think French Women Don’t Get Fat talks about food in very reasonable ways, but I also think it’s nothing new.
More attractively to me, the book includes a recipe for croissants. It takes three days to make them - with a lot of resting time for the dough - and I think I’m going to try it out. Then, I can eat them with the last of my Green and Black’s chocolate and a really good cup of coffee. THAT sounds French in the best possible way.
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Posted in Food, Glorious Food | 4 Comments »
