Peter's Mostly Food Blog

Falk Road Dog Owners

2011-02-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

When I've walked by this seems like a very sweet dog, and I don't know why its owners would allow it to be in harm's way all the time. This dog, and the little Collie who hangs out with it, and the black Lab down the block, all wander the road at all hours, including at night.

Washing Machine

2009-12-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

Dead washing machine. Grr. A "reliable" Maytag. Bah. And the people who sold it to me (Schmidt's) are, um, washing their hands of it, won't even attempt to fix it. Humbug!

BI Food Blathering

2009-10-21T16:15:00.000-07:00

Haven't blogged much. Lots has changed on Bainbridge Island...

A couple of cafés closed: Mud Puddle, much lamented by my daughter because it was walking distance from school, and Trios, across from the ferry terminal. Both were open later in the evening, so there's now kind of a late night café gap. Also a crepe place changed hands, then closed, and now the same spot (in the Safeway shopping center) does frozen yogurt. I used to like frozen yogurt, but then everyone changed from low-fat to non-fat about 20 years ago, and ruined the product as far as I'm concerned.

Winslow Way Café, which was more a bar/restaurant than café, closed. The space was renovated and reopened as 122 Winslow. Capsule summary: food is pretty good and has gotten better since it opened. I like the steak frites, the blue pizza is really pretty good, good burger. They used to close the kitchen kind of early, but they tell me it's now open and serving food until late, at least in the bar. Yay late-night food! Decor could use some softening--absolutely nothing on the wall but light fixtures. Staff are generally very nice and accomodating.

There's a new Italian place downtown, across the street from 122 Winslow. It's not bad, was open for lunch, now only open for dinner. It was called something or other and is now called Isabella's. Pizza, pasta, and a few salads--would these new Italian places consider serving something main-course-like? I can't eat a lot of pizza or pasta, and I'm not the only one...

Also there's a new Italian place, Penelope's, in the Pavilion. I tried it once. I had an antipasto plate that I thought was godawful--sort of like what you'd get for an antipasto plate if you only shopped in the "cheap cheese and luncheon meat" section at Safeway, and stayed away from the section near the deli that sold proscuitto and real cheese. Since I wasn't able to eat pizza or pasta at the time, I can't vouch for those. It is possible to get decent salumi around here...

Speaking of pizza, in my opinion the best pizza on Bainbridge Island is found at Real Foods in the Harbor Square complex. Perfect thin crust, good cheese, reasonably priced.

The Streamliner Diner has been open for dinner for a while. It's pretty good, vaguely Italian, and very friendly. Sometimes needs salt.

I've been to Four Swallows several times, and never blogged about it. Probably the best food on the island at this point (esp. since Madoka closed, and that was sometimes fab but kind of inconsistent). Sometimes you can get into a sonic blast zone, especially near the front, where it gets loud enough to be extremely unpleasant. So maybe don't take Grandma on the weekend.

Simon's, the Chinese restaurant in the pavilion that actually served worse food than you get at the Chinese takeaway counter at Safeway, closed. Allegedly a sushi place will be opening in that spot. Hope it's good!

Condé Nasty

2009-10-21T16:09:00.001-07:00

I just got the new edition of the Gourmet cookbook. On the front cover there's a sticker that says "A subscription to Gourmet magazine is included with this book." Haha. If I wasn't so lazy I'd call and ask Condé Nast for my $12.

Pintxos in Donostia

2009-05-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

This place was in the old quarter of Donostia aka San Sebastian. Pintxos restaurants in the U.S. tend to be run by culinary school graduates, and can be over-thought, precious and expensive. Here, they're just bars with a bunch of (good!) food on the counter. It doesn't take exquisite skill, just good ingredients and some tradition. This particular place had really good ingredients. I had one with smoked salmon and anchovy, and one with Iberian ham, roasted green pepper, and anchovy. Each item is generally betwee 1.50 euros and 2.50 euros. In some bars they hand you a plate and you take what you want, and in others, the bartender serves what you request. No table service, just take your food to a table if you don't want to eat standing up.

Duck: It's What's for Dinner

2009-05-25T12:17:00.000-07:00

Cooked rare and served with baby vegetables and a garlic cream. I had this at Le Chalet in Ax-les-Thermes. The amuse-bouche was a "creme brulee" of mushrooms with a parmesan crumble. For a first course I had white asparagus with morels in a light cream sauce. Local cheese (this is in the Ariege valley) for dessert. If you're ever in the area, the restaurant was excellent.

Perhaps the ugliest modernization ever undertaken

2009-05-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

In Ax-les-Thermes, France. The 19th century bath house gets an "upgrade."

Warm Goat Cheese Salad in the Pyrenees

2009-05-25T12:04:00.000-07:00

Wrapped in bacon with lardons, butter lettuce, pine nuts, apple, and mustard dressing.

Lightning over Donostia

2009-05-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Taken from my hotel window.

Dinner

2009-05-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

Turns out the tapas place at which I stopped for dinner is a small chain. The other two include the one I stopped at for lunch and another one just a block from the first one, so a very local chain. This time I had a salad of goat cheese, brown heirloom tomatoes, and sunflower seeds with a honey vinagrette. Then I had some Iberian pork with green pepper sauce, which was brown and flavorful, and grilled oyster mushrooms with Catalan sausages. The last dish was not bad, but the mushrooms could have used a bit of seasoning. The photos are taken with the iPhone, they look more appealing in real life.

There are several places in Europe where you can walk into what looks like a good restaurant and be almost assured of a good meal. Most of France is like that, and much of Italy (Venice excepted). But Madrid isn't like that--there seems to be a lot of indifferent tapas, taken out of a tin and put in a microwave. Next time I go I'd want to research things more. On the other hand, I haven't had anything disappointing in Barcelona. Of course my sample size is small, so it could just be luck. Last night I went to a little place where I had some white asparagus with mayonnaise followed by grilled rabbit. All very simple and reasonably priced, but the rabbit was seasoned and cooked just right--cooked but not dry, which is easy to do with rabbit.

Lunch in Barcelona

2009-05-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

At a place in El Born near the Picasso museum: grilled scallops with Iberico ham, trout eggs, and asparagus, along with bacalao croquettes.

Olive Tree

2009-05-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

Olive tree in Retiro Park, Madrid. This was on a path that spiraled up a smallish mound, planted with olive and cypress trees.

At the Museo de Jamon

2009-05-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

A starter of Iberian Ham and Melon at the Museo de Jamon on the Plaza Mayor, Madrid.

Pica on the Plaza Real

2009-05-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

On the Plaza Real in Barcelona: Almonds and Boquerones (anchovies in vinegar)

2009-05-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

Entrance to the Prado Museum, Madrid

txori

2008-04-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

txori on 2nd ave. in Belltown is a "San Sebastian-style" pintxos bar, where "pintxos" is the Basque more-or-less equivalent of "tapas," i.e. small plates, usually served at a casual bar.

The space is quite long and narrow and looks like it used to be a small retail space. There's a bar on the left as you walk in, with a refrigerator case containing some of the pintxos so you can look at them. The bar has a bunch of coat hooks below, and looks like it was designed so that one could stand at it, though nobody was going to the bar except the waitstaff. (We went kind of early--the curse of being a parent on a school night...) There are also some barstool-height tables and some regular-height tables. The design is quite modern--light wood floors, white walls, modernist furniture. In the back there are some french doors which right now lead to a dropoff of a few feet; I assume there's going to be a deck or patio there eventually.

The menu has pintxos, which are meant to be eaten individually, and raciones, which are meant to be shared. Some of the pintxos are indeed hard to eat except in one bite. There are two classes of pintxos, pintxos frios (cold) and pintxos calientes (hot). So now we've got the taxonomy of the menu down. The pintxos range in price from $2 to $6.

This is some of the best tapas/pintxos I've had. My gold standard for neighborhood tapas bars has been César in Berkeley, but I have to say I'd be quite happy if César had as much variety of flavor as txori offers.

Although in San Sebastian I gather one would eat a couple of pintxos with a glass of wine or sherry and then wander off to another bar, rinse, and repeat, then have "real dinner" later, we had our entire meal here. For cold pintxos, we had tortilla española, a nice little omelet slice on a slice of baguette, boquerones olivada, which consists of a couple of vinegared white anchovies (boquerones) on a toasted baguette slice with some olive paste, and ensalada de pato confitado, which was a duck confit salad with orange and romain lettuce, served in a spoon like you'd get for soup in a chinese restaurant. Hot pintxos we had included piquillo con morcilla, which was a piquillo pepper stuffed with blood sausage, which was amazingly good. We also had the pulpo da feira, which was a small bite of octopus on top of a slice of potato, with paprika and olive oil ("lagrima oil"). The octopus was perfectly tender. I think I also had the pintxo moruno, which is braised pork.

I had my favorite light dry sherry (La Gitana Manzanilla) to drink. Debbie had some Lillet on the rocks. They need to figure out that Lillet is an apéritif and should be poured in a portion of larger than 1-2oz. (An entire bottle is only about $12 retail.)

txori is open 11am-1am, 7 days a week. Seattle has always struck me as kind of an "early" town, so good to see more places serving good food until late.

Afterward we wandered into the McLeod Residence upstairs, and looked at some groovy art.

Rise of the Machines

2008-04-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

You can now get espresso drinks, aka McCafé, at the McDonalds on High School Road. That means that there is now drive-through espresso available on Bainbridge Island. It has that "custom brewed by an automatic espresso machine" flavor, i.e. no worse than Starbucks, and somewhat less expensive.

Fun with Datalogging

2008-03-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

It's pretty cool that for $40 you can get a USB fob (Lascar Easylog EL-USB-Lite) that will monitor temperature every 1/2 hour and let you upload and graph the data. I got a pop-up greenhouse, and here's a couple of weeks of logging from inside the greenhouse (the first bit was on my desk):

We can see that the greenhouse does a good job of getting the max temperature up, maybe a little too good (got to around 100F the other day, when it got up to about 57F outside), but the minimum temperature is slightly above the outside temp as measured by the weather station at Woodward via wunderground.com. So, time to put something with high volumetric heat capacity (water jugs? cinderblock?) inside the greenhouse, and open the vent on sunny days.

World Water Week and the TAP Project

2008-01-30T17:25:00.000-08:00

March 22nd is World Water Day, and for World Water Week (March 16-22) UNICEF has an initiative called the TAP Project. During that week, participating restaurants will solicit $1.00 for tap water, which will be donated to UNICEF to help provide safe drinking water for children. One $1.00 donation can provide drinking water to a child for 40 days. Restaurateurs can go to the TAP project website to sign up your restaurant. So far the following Seattle area restaurants are participating:

Moxie
Le Pichet
Cafe Campagne
Campagne
Artemis Café
cafe presse
Cafe Juanita

Crush

2007-12-04T22:08:00.000-08:00

We went to Crush on Madison at 23rd in Seattle recently. The space is a remodeled old house, with an open kitchen and modernist furniture, decorated tastefully.

We both had the tasting menu. Debbie had the wine pairing, and I wished that I had also, but I was driving, so thought I should use moderation. The wine pairing pours were moderate, so I probably would have been OK.

We had:

Salsify soup with oysters and paddlefish roe
Kobe beef tartare on potato blini with sea urchin roe and garrotxa cheese. This dish was absolutely amazing--the best beef tartare I've had.
Seared scallop in dungeness crab "chowder" with leeks and sliced black truffle. Every tasting menu seems to have a seared scallop, probably because they're so good and everybody likes them. I certainly liked this one.
Foie Gras two ways: seared on braised endive, and torchon on quince brunoise. The contrast between the warm seared foie and the torchon made it an interesting dish.
Saddle of venison with huckleberries, rye bread "stuffing", celeriac puree, port sauce, baby vegetables. This was a tasty dish. Venison was perfectly cooked (i.e. rare throughout). Good sauce that didn't overwhelm the dish.
Warm chocolate cake with cherry sorbet paired with Quelque Chose barrel-aged cherry infused beer. I've never had beer that was intentionally heated before. It was amazing. The waitress comped me the beer even though I didn't get the pairing, just because it went so well with the dessert.

This was probably the best restaurant meal we've had in Seattle. I had been despairing of finding a restaurant cooking food in this style (which I guess I'd call the "Modern American Chef " style) in Seattle that did it really well. Everything was first-rate, great service. I'd go back.

Cascadia

2007-09-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

We went to Cascadia last week. Cascadia is located on 1st Ave. in Belltown. Cascadia's physical space is lovely. It's open and airy, with large windows through which one can see slivers of Puget Sound. Our table, however, was kind of dark, which turns out to have been because there was a light bulb out way up in the ceiling.

We both had the three course "set menu." I started with a mozzarella and tomato salad, which was pretty good, and then I had seared scallops with lotus root, corn, and a ginger broth. The scallops themselves were tasty enough, but there were only two of them. I thought the thinly-sliced lotus root was extraneous, and the broth was almost without flavor. Debbie started with a melon soup, which was pretty good, and a proscuitto, rice and melon "sushi," which was extremely odd. For a second course she had thyme-smoked squab, which was OK. It was on a strange tasting sauce, with some nondescript polenta. For dessert, I had poached peaches with vanilla ice cream and rasperry sauce. The ice cream was fine, the peaches were somewhat better than what you get out of a can, and then there was a little dollop of raspberry sauce with a single raspberry on top of it. I didn't see the point of it. Debbie's dessert was lemon sugar beignets with I guess was supposed to be a perfect half peach. The beignets were OK, could have been hotter, and the peach was watery and flavorless. If you're going to put out a naked piece of fruit at a higher-end restaurant, it had better be spectacular.

After the main course was cleared, I realized that the somewhat sparse breadbasket had never been refilled. I was still kind of hungry, and so was Debbie. Dessert was puny and disappointing. We ended up having a snack elsewhere later.

Bainbridge Island Update

2007-09-02T13:01:00.001-07:00

I haven't blogged for a while, and in the meantime there's been lots of action on the local food front...so I'll do a quick recap of what I've found.

When I posted on BI BBQ in 2006, it was a deliver-only outfit. Since then, BIBBQ has opened a full-service restaurant, in a converted old house behind the building that houses Madoka. In fact, the owner, Greg Epstein is a certifiable nutcase, because he opened a restaurant, his wife had their first baby, and he had surgery all in the span of a couple of months. Somehow, he managed to pull it all off and still remain in his usual good spirits. The restaurant goes for the roadhouse BBQ vibe--bales of hay, restroom door painted like an outhouse, funky tables covered with vinyl tablecloths, linoleum floors, etc.. All it needs is a black-and-white TV with an antenna held on with tape at the front counter to complete the ambiance. The menu is expanded, but the big ol' BBQ rig is still parked out front, putting out slow-cooked meat. They still do delivery as well. So giddyup if you want a big pile of meat.

Casa Rojas Express is a new taqueria in the shopping center where the Safeway is, operated by the people who own the Casa Rojas restaurant in the Pavillion. The filling is either from steam-table bins or, in the some cases (carne asada, carnitas, machaca) comes from little pre-baggied portions that are then microwaved. It's not Roberto's, but the burritos are better than most you find around here.

The Living Room is a wine bar in the new Seabreeze development at Bjune Drive and Madison. The interior is fairly minimalist, with several groupings of modernist living room furniture (sofas, chairs, coffee tables). When we went a couple of times shortly after it opened, the menu was very limited, and I thought a bit uninspired. Their website claims a new menu, so we'll have to check it out, so consider my opinion on the food out of date... The wines are described as "eclectic," and that's a good description.

There are three other new food/drink-related places in the same development as the Living Room. First, there's August Moon Tea House, which is behind the Living Room. It's a Japanese-style teahouse, with a large selection of teas and a few food items like Pot Stickers, Pork Buns, and some housemade desserts. I thought the tea was on the expensive side ($4.95 for a pot of tea) but it was exquisite. The desserts are good, and the Pork Bun we tried was really tasty. It's open until 10pm, I think.

Then there's Adante, a coffee house that just opened, owned by the same person who owns Dancing Paint, the you-paint-it pottery studio next door. It has a very modern interior, with quite a bit of wood to make it warm and inviting. I think we went on the first or second night. My cappucino was good, but took forever to make. I'm sure they'll get quicker as they get some experience. Pastries, free wifi, a nice patio, and open until 10:00pm...what's not to like? I'm very happy about the trend toward later closing times.

Next to Adante on the corner of Bjune and Madison is Bon Bon, a candy store. My daughter and her friends are big fans of the place. Bon Bon sells housemade fudge, high-end confections, and hard-to-get old timey candy like Necco wafers that you can't find at the corner store anymore. Their fudge is really good.

Too much information

2007-02-08T23:09:00.000-08:00

Passed two pickup trucks on the freeway in San Jose, California today. They both had a company logo on the back, "Crime Scene Cleaners." Underneath, it said "Homicides - Suicides - Accidental Deaths." It struck me as odd to spell out the different possibilities like that... I also wondered what sort of calamity was requiring the attention of two trucks at a time.

Still Powerless

2006-12-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

We're into our third day of being without power, which is getting rather tiresome at this point, given the fact that we have electric heat. Right now we're at our friends' house in Poulsbo, enjoying the heat and net access.

I'm thinking the following might have something to do with it.

Debbie took this photo this morning (Sunday 12/17) on Falk Road, two streets over.

UPDATE 12/19/06: Power came back on at 2:20am this morning.

Around Scottsdale

2006-11-11T12:14:00.000-08:00

I was in Scottsdale last week for a meeting. I ended up going to the same restaurant two nights in a row with mostly different groups of people: Bloom, which serves what they call "New American Cuisine" in an upscale-moderne setting in a shopping mall. (Most of Scottsdale is a shopping mall, so this is not surprising). The place was very popular, and I was glad we had reservations. Someone who was there the week before said that it was almost empty the prior week--the migration of retirees apparently starts November 1. I was with a group of very nerdy people (we're color scientists/engineers), but they handled us well, even when on the first night everybody drank iced tea. The second night I went with more of the foodie/wine crowd, and that was a bit more fun.

On the first night, I had a glazed tenderloin of pork, which wasn't bad, but the glaze was a bit boring, sweet and not much else. For dessert I had the "bars of sin," which are really good: hazelnut praline cookie with a layer of chocolate mousse, covered in chocolate. On the second night I started with the lobster bisque, which was decent, followed by the ribeye steak on roquefort mashed potatoes and sauteed green beants. That dish was quite successfull. The steak was good, thick, and properly cooked (rare, like I asked for), and the potatoes had a roquefort flavor that wasn't overwhelming. For dessert I had a piece of rich chocolate cake, which had some guilt-inducing name. They have a fun wine list; I had a glass of Green and Red Zin with dinner.

Bloom is part of a "restaurant concepts" company, and does have a corporate sheen to it like those restaurants often do, but I thought everything was well done, and I'd go back if I were in Scottsdale again.

On Saturday night a few of us went to Char's, which is a blues club in Phoenix. We saw the Bad News Blues Band from Tucson, who were great. You can still smoke in a bar in Arizona, but the ventilation was good, so I didn't stink afterwards despite sitting behind a table of smokers. They have Fat Tire on tap. I guess you can get food, which they call out to the pizza place down the street.

Prior to going to Char's, I wandered around downtown Scottsdale (mostly sellers of turquoise jewelry and art galleries selling one of four genres--proud Indians, luminous southwest landscapes, cowboy sculpture, and not-abstract contemporary--I think abstract is dead in the storefront retail art mart, at least in Scottsdale...), and happened upon the Greek Festival going on at the civic center. They had the usual Greek music and a Greek dance company from Chicago. The weather was amazing--it was around 80 degrees as the sun went down and the moon came up over the stage. Yes, they do have food at Greek festivals, so I had some Saganaki (flamed cheese) for a starter, and then had a plate of lamb and rice for dinner, and some loukomades (fried balls of dough covered in honey and cinnamon) for dessert. Opa! I took some pictures with my phone; I'll upload them and post them if they're any good.

On Sunday morning, I went to El Encanto Mexican Restaurant in Cave Creek. Cave Creek is a town in the foothills north of Scottsdale that really plays up the cowboy town thing. If you look on the rental car map it looks like it's just a bit of a drive north, but you really do drive a while. That's OK, once you get past the Scottsdale sprawl the scenery is beautiful, as the desert foothills start rising.

El Encanto reminds me a bit of Fidel's in Solana Beach, California. It's a large, restaurant with a big outdoor patio surrounding a duck pond, and a lot of people make the drive on Sunday morning for brunch. The parking lot is large enough that I had no trouble parking. There was a wait for a table, but since I was alone and didn't want to wait the extra time for an outside table, I ate at the bar. The margarita was pretty good. For lunch I had a chile relleno lunch plate, which I think was $6.75 or something--very reasonable. In AZ/NM when you order a chile relleno it's a bit different than the California version I'm used to--the batter is a lot thicker and fluffier, which I prefer. I liked the food a lot, good atmosphere, I'd go back.

After lunch I visited the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. It's not a huge museum, and had mostly traveling and temporary exhibitions. I like the building a lot. It's not an over-the-top "statement" like a Gehry building or something, and fits into its context very well. I guess it was adapted from a cineplex, and the scale of the exhibition rooms reflect that. The Byron Kim exhibition was cool, as was the Border Film Project. After the soul-deadening experience of walking through the art gallery district, it was good to see work that had something behind it. If you do go, make sure you go down the little garden path by the entrance, which leads to the Knight Rise installation. I would have liked to have been there at sunset. Sunset was as I flew out, and it was one of the most amazing sunsets I've ever seen--the sky was blood red.

Flying Fish and Twenty-Five for $25

2006-11-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

This month is another Twenty-Five for $25 deal, where 25 restuarants offer a 3-course meal for $25 Sunday through Thursday, all month except Thanksgiving. Some of them offer a 3-course lunch for $12.50--a great deal. I decided to take last Wednesday off, so after the kids went off to school we took the ferry over to Seattle, and went to lunch at Flying Fish in Belltown. Flying Fish isn't a typical seafood restaurant--it's more of a bistro that serves a lot of seafood. It's got an industrial-y glass front, with an interior of concrete floors, open beams, and a mix of bright colors.

We both started with the smoked salmon cake. It's not like a crab cake adapted to salmon, but rather a patty of smoked salmon, dill, and scallions, pan-fried. It was juicy and good. It was served on a bit of fennel salad.

For a main course I had wok-blackened marlin served with a "risotto cake", wasabi cream, and baby bok choy. It was quite good. Debbie had tamarind-glazed tofu, served with a bunch of vegetables. It wasn't bad, but I wouldn't order it again.

For dessert I had a peanut butter-chocolate concoction which consisted of peanut butter cream or mousse with a layer of chocolate on top (like a ganache but harder, not sure what you call that). This dessert was great. Don't order it if you like huge desserts, because it's quite small, but rich. The chocolate and peanut butter mixed together to make a nice contrast of texture and flavor, like what you wished a Reese's was like. Debbie had the warm grappa-glazed chocolate brownie, which was good also.

A couple of people on the NWSource website didn't like the food. They also thought the $12.50 lunch had excessively small portions, but I have no idea what they're talking about. It wasn't huge pile of food, but it was certainly enough for me. I liked all of it, and the service was good. If you're expecting a "traditional fish house" go somewhere else, but if you want a moderately priced and interesting lunch, I'd try the one at Flying Fish this month.

Brisket Carbonnade

2006-10-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

For dinner, I made Brisket a la Carbonnade from the Gourmet cookbook. It's very easy, and turned out great. You end up with a rich brown sauce that's slightly sweet from the onions and beer. Brown the brisket in olive oil on all sides for about 10min, in a large ovenproof pot with a cover. Cook 2lbs of thinly sliced onions in the fat left behind from the browning (I added a touch more oil) until translucent. Leave half the onions in the pot. Put the brisket on top of the onions, and spread the other half of the onions on top. Add a bottle of beer (not dark beer, I used Alaskan Amber because it was in the fridge), a bay leaf, and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. The recipe also calls for a cube of porcini or beef boullion, crushed. I didn't have any, so I soaked a dried morel in boiling water for a few minutes, and added the liquid to the pot. Bring all that to a boil, then cover it and put it in a 350 degree oven for 3 hours. Let it stand a bit (the cookbook recommends 1/2 hour, but we didn't wait that long) when you take it out. Slice crosswise and pour the oniony sauce in the bottom of the pot over the slices.

J'Aime les Crêpes and Sweet Batter

2006-10-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

I first wrote about J'Aime les Crêpes one year ago. At that time, the owner, Paul, was planning to open a second branch in the building being completed at Bjune and Madison in Winslow (downtown Bainbridge Island, for my non-local readers). However, he and his wife had another baby, so they decided to slow down their expansion plans and concentrate on the one restaurant. Wonderful for them, but those of us on Bainbridge Island who enjoy their crêpes must continue to make the drive to Kingston.

In the meantime, as I mentioned recently, a crêpe café opened next to the drycleaners on High School Road on Bainbridge Island. I've now been a few times, and I still think the crêpes at J'Aime les Crêpes are better. David's crêpes are a little dry and heavy. Maybe cooks them too long, or doesn't have enough liquid in the batter, I don't know. Opinions on buckwheat crêpe (actually galette) batters differ: some people add oil, some butter, some just milk and water. They're not awful or anything, and I'll probably keep going because it's five minutes from my house. This week we drove out to Kingston, and confirmed that not only do we like Paul's crêpes a lot better, but David's prices about 50% higher.

We found out that Paul had read last year's post, including a comment answering a question where I noted that he only had one batter for both sweet and savory crepes, which spurred him to develop a different batter for sweet crêpes. Dessert crêpes are usually made either with a "regular" (white flour) crêpe batter, or with a dessert batter that has a bit of sugar added. Paul hadn't made a separate dessert batter previously because his restaurant's space is so tiny and he didn't think he had room, but figured it was the right thing to do, since the buckwheat tends to overwhelm sweet ingredients. I am pleased to report that his sweet crêpes are excellent as well.

The view from J'Aime les Crêpes out to the water is still lovely, due to the vacant lot where the Kingston Inn was until it burned down last year. There's a sign up advertising condos to be built on the lot. $1.2million for a 1900sf condo in Kingston? Yow!

Mushroomy morning

2006-10-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

There were lots of mushrooms out this morning.

These ones look like they're covered with honey.

These ones are growing out from a clump of ornamental grass.

I think this one got kicked over.

Solo and Carbonara

2006-10-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

Debbie picked up Joyce Goldstein's cookbook, Solo, which contains recipes scaled for a single person. We had intended to give it to my mom as a present, but somehow never quite got it in the mail. (Sorry, Mom!) In the meantime, I tried Goldstein's recipe for Spaghetti Carbonara, since she claims to have talked to people all over Rome until she got it right. It is the best version I've made--just like what you get in Rome. It scales up to more than one person just fine. I was fortunate to have guanciale from Salumi on hand, which I sliced into bacon-thick slices, and then into 1/4" pieces. The guanciale is then cooked in what seems like a lot of butter and olive oil (like 1 or 2 tablespoons of each) until it's cooked but not crispy. The spaghetti is cooked and then dumped into a mixture of eggs, egg yolks, grated parmesan, and ground black pepper. I think I used 4 eggs and 1 yolk for about 12oz of pasta, and maybe 1/2 cup of cheese. The pasta is tossed quickly to cook the eggs a bit but not dry them out. Then add the guanciale and some of the cooking liquid, and toss until it's creamy and the guanciale is well distributed.

Madoka, Jose, and Lunch

2006-10-11T09:25:00.000-07:00

Several people have asked me whether I've heard anything about Jose leaving Madoka. I didn't know anything about it until I showed up and he wasn't there. My sources only say "front-of-the-house drama," whatever that means. My other disappointment is that they stopped serving lunch, as it was my favorite lunch spot, and several other people I know have said the same thing.

Restaurants

2006-10-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in a while--been a little busy. Here's a summary of a few places we've tried in the last few months:

Dahlia Lounge--Tom Douglas's "flagship" restaurant, 4th at Virginia in Seattle. Honestly I think Lola, Palace Kitchen and Etta's are better. I started with a rather strange appetizer: crispy sweetbreads (which were good) paired with very thin slices of guanciale on a bed of what was billed as "carbonara" but which was small pieces of spaghetti in a bland white sauce. For an entree I had pork loin, which consisted of thick slices of pork with a somewhat flavorful crust, on a bed of diced vegetables. It came with deep fried slices of pig ear, which were good. The pork was OK but not great. Coconut creme pie for dessert was good as usual. My dining companions' dinner was also variable. E.'s salmon was good, but the plate itself was so hot that after a couple of minutes on the table, the sauce had separated. R.'s "Peking" duck was tasty. Debbie had crab cakes as a main course, and those were very good. The waitress kept touching E.'s back, as she leaned in to tell us about the many big groups that were delaying our meal. Don't touch the customer! Most people find it intrusive from a stranger.

Union, which is at 1st and Union in Seattle, was a very good meal. We went several weeks ago, so I don't remember everything we had, but the melon soup with crab meat was fantastic. The room is tasteful in a modern style with large windows to the street, and the food is all elegant and well-prepared. I'll go back.

Kabul is an Afghan restaurant in Wallingford. I haven't had decent Afghan food since Kybher Pass in San Diego. We enjoyed it very much. Debbie had aushak, which was good, and I had a kebab special that was good as well. Parking is a bit of a pain because the neighborhood has resident-only permit parking. Next time I'd take the bus.

C'est La Vie Crepes de Paris: Opened last month next to the cleaners in the shopping center on High School Road in Bainbridge Island. Run by a tall, exuberant Parisian named David. The first time we went was right after it opened, it was mobbed, and it took 20 minutes to make our crepes. They were disappointing, a bit too thick and dry. I waited a couple of weeks and went back, and that time the crepes were much better. The batter has a very strong buckwheat flavor. I still like the J'Aime les Crepes in Kingston better, but hopefully over time David will improve his product. One disappointment is that it's only open through lunchtime. I guess David wants to have a life or something, but I want my crepe for dinner! My other complaint is that he uses too many prepackaged ingredients.

BOKA is a flashy, high-concept bar/restaurant in the new "1000" hotel on 1st in Seattle. Plexi panels behind the bar and booths with changing colored lights behind them, large plasma monitors playing videos of impressionist art, lots of steel grills, etc. The bar has fancy cocktails like a lemongrass lemondrop, etc. I had one, and it was fine except for too many ice chips, because the muscle-man behind the bar shakes the hell out of it, occasionally spraying the patrons at the bar. The food is hit or miss. The crab "cupcakes" with creme fraiche "frosting" are cute but cloyingly sweet. The chicken "lollipops" were good. We had a tuna sashimi salad sort of thing that was pretty good, but had this savory-sweet layering thing going on that was a bit odd. Veal cheek risotto was pleasant. I had a lamb dish that was served with couscous, harissa and basil oil. It was oddly flavorless. I think a real splooge of harissa would have done it a lot of good, as opposed to red- and green-colored oils sitting prettily on the plate. If you want a trendy bar that's a block from where the ferry walkway ends, it's a fun place, though the bartenders should really be a little better. Maybe we got the dud; I noticed the other bartender wasn't shaking his cocktails to death.

Have you seen Sushi?

2006-09-03T22:14:00.000-07:00

Sushi is missing. If you see him, let us know.

Family Sushi Without a Boat Ride

2006-08-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

Sushi, as I've mentioned before, is the only food that everyone in our family will eat happily. Bainbridge Island is down to one sushi restaurant after BI Sushi closed down, and that remaining one isn't the sushi restaurant of my dreams. Their non-sushi food is pretty good, but their sushi is a little strange, like sushi made by Japanese hippies, using purple rice, squash, etc. It's also expensive, service can be slow and the servers sometimes seem irritated and put-upon, and often very crowded to the point where one can almost never get a table without a reservation. (I had the same complaints about BI sushi house, except that the sushi was good.)

A few weeks ago I was suffering the experience of being in the Kitsap Mall (nursing an injured knee) as best I could, and while my daughter shopped, I had coffee and hung out at some little cafe on the far end of the mall. I got to talking to the guy who worked there, and he mentioned that he was going to get some sushi after work. I asked him if there was anyplace good around there, and he said, yes, Origami Sushi in Silverdale. So, we tried it last week.

Origami Sushi bills itself as an "Asian Cafe," and has a large menu, with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese food. It's not high-end sushi by any means, but it's pretty good--better than Shima, a lot more low-key, cheaper, and the guy behind the sushi bar is friendly and engaging. The service in general is very friendly, and they went out of their way to make sure that our kids were happy. The sushi bar where we sat is small, but there are quite a few tables inside and out. It's going to be our default "the kids want sushi" restaurant, I think. Origami Sushi is at 9523 Silverdale Way NW in Silverdale, a couple of blocks south of the Kitsap Mall.

They're so cute

2006-08-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

Until they start muching away at your plants...

The Taste of Summer

2006-08-07T12:33:00.000-07:00

A summer lunch: Bucatini with local tomatoes from Butler Green Farms. Tomatoes, garlic from the CSA, just-picked basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper. It's best if you mix together everything but the pasta and let the flavors develop for 20 or 30 minutes, then add hot pasta and mix. Eat it outside in the sun--what could be better?

Little Videos

2006-07-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

Someone named Laura from a company called TurnHere spammed me with a link to their Pike Place Market video. Interesting idea: little free travel videos from all over the world, done by independent filmmakers with decent (if variable) production values. I liked this one, and here is where I grew up. They also appear to have some paid-placement promo videos.

Anniversary #19

2006-06-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

Debbie and I celebrated our 19th anniversary last Wednesday. We didn't know whether we'd have a place for our daughter to go in the evening, so we put off making any plans. We went to Madoka for lunch, which was delightful. We sat outside. We started off with some oysters on the half shell which were very refreshing on a warm day (thanks, Cat!) and I had the kobe beef burger (rare, natch) and Debbie had the farfalle with smoked chicken, yum. For dessert we shared the vanilla-black pepper ice cream with local strawberries in a balsamic sauce. It was fab. I managed to shear the arm off of the cheap resin dining chairs they have outside when reaching for my wallet. (Try these ones, guys, they're really comfortable and good looking.) After lunch I went and worked out with my trainer, Andrew. I had a little bit of a pulled hamstring, and should have stayed home--I ended up at the ER last night because it got really bad and I popped a fever, which the doc called a coincidence barring any more evidence to the contrary. So now I'm sitting around (can't lie down, slept in my chair) on Percocet.

Catherine managed to sleep over at a friend's house (thanks, Jen!) so we went over to the city for dinner. We went to Brasa in Belltown, which we'd never been to. Debbie started with a truffle-oil-drizzled carpaccio with parmesan, and then had the pizzetta with figs, serrano ham, and preserved lemon. I started with the spinach salad with shiitakes and bacon with a warm, creamy dressing. For a main course, I had Brasa's famous roasted pig, served in a cazuela with housemade chorizo, clams, smoked paprika and potatoes. It was really good, with everything swimming but not drowning in a paprika-y broth. It's been rosé weather, so we had a bottle of Rhône rosé. For dessert we shared the churros (listed as "spanish donuts"--doesn't everybody know what a churro is?) with spiced valhrona chocolate sauce. Life was good. Afterward we wandered around Broadway in Capitol Hill, where we picked up some soap and bath stuff at Bliss. Nice to be on a real urban street with people around in the evening.

Father's Day at Ivar's

2006-06-18T20:33:00.000-07:00

"We're going to Ivar's for brunch," I told the boy.
"Why aren't we going to Elliot's?" the boy asked.
"Because Ivar's has an all-you-can-eat seafood bar, and we've never been there. It's a Seattle institution."
The boy is perfectly happy to sit at the oyster bar at Elliot's and suck down one or two dozen oysters shucked by David Leck, who could be the best oyster shucker in the country. Dad is maybe slightly less happy to pay for it, but Elliot's does have pretty good food, especially for a waterfront restaurant that gets a large tourist business. The boy looked displeased. "They have freshly shucked all-you-can-eat oysters," I said. The boy looked happy.
Ivar's has been there since 1938. I suppose you can't tell the real character of a place by Sunday Brunch, or maybe you can tell the character of a restaurant all too well by what they're willing to put out on Sunday morning.
During brunch, the boy said, "that oyster shucker sucks." In fact, all of it pretty much sucked. The oysters were decent, though kind of ugly after the shucker was through with them. The peel-n-eat shrimp would have been better if someone hadn't sliced them up the back to expose the contents of the vein without bothering to rinse it out. The "traditional breakfast fare" was barely warm. The salads were mostly starch and dressing.
"Why didn't we go to Elliot's?" I asked afterwards.

Life got better on Bainbridge Island today

2006-06-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

The day after we moved to Bainbridge Island was our daughter Catherine's 9th birthday. We had dinner, and then we decided to go find someplace to have dessert. To our surprise, everything downtown other than sit-down restaurants and the 21-and-over pub is closed by about 6:00pm, so we picked up something at Safeway and went home, a little sad. Last week, we dropped Catherine at BPA at 7pm, and were to return for her performance at 7:30pm. All we wanted was a cup of coffee and someplace to hang out for 1/2 hour, and again, there was no place to go.

That changed today. Most Bainbridge residents are probably familiar with Mora ice cream, which is manufactured here on Bainbridge, in a small plant on Miller Rd. The owners are Jerry Perez and Ana Orselli, who are originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and wanted to create a community-oriented ice cream place like one can find in Buenos Aires or many cities in Europe. We first had Mora ice cream at their first store in a giant shopping mall, Bellevue Square. They have lots of fantastic flavors, including several variations on dulce de leche, gianduja, marron glace, pistachio, and on and on. They also make great fruit sorbets.

Today, Mora's second store opened on 169 Madrone Lane, just off of Winslow Way in downtown Bainbridge. The great thing is, they're going to be open in the evenings, every evening! Jerry told us that he'll stay open until at least 9:00pm, and he'll stay open until 10:00pm if there are still customers coming in. The store is quite attractive inside, and has tables and benches outside which makes it a very inviting space for hanging out. The parking lot of Madrone Lane is small and surrounded by trees and buildings, so it seems more like a square/plaza/piazza than a parking lot. (Think of the hundreds of little piazzas all over Rome, for example.) That helps you feel like you're in a real community space, not just a unit in a mall.

Opening day had the usual glitches--the register couldn't take credit cards, our gift card (we bought a year's supply at a charity auction last year) wouldn't go through the register, and of course, the staff was not quite smooth at putting together the various items on the menu--they had to look at the cheat sheet. I expect that'll be worked out in a matter of days. The place was packed at 7:30pm when we went, and the staff was still smiling gamely and kept on scooping out ice cream. Debbie and I shared the chocolate parfait, which was layers of chocolate mousse, white chocolate and dark chocolate ice creams, with chocolate shavings in between, covered with hot fudge sauce and whipped cream. It was fabulous.

As well as ice cream, various ice cream concoctions like shakes, parfaits, brownies a al mode, etc. they have good espresso (Illy) which I tried. Jerry is also proud of his selection of teas. In the evenings parking is absolutely no problem downtown, since nothing else is open! (Except Thursday nights, when some stores stay open until 8pm).

How great that we can now get a good cup of coffee and some great artisinal ice cream after dinner, which is when I think most people actually want to go.

(I apologize for the photos--I took them with my cellphone.)

Dinner

2006-06-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

For a simple dinner, I made steak au poivre. It's really easy. Take a small (6-8oz) filet mignon or other steak of your choice, dry it off, and crack peppercorns and push them into the sides and edges. I used a mixture of pink, green, and black peppercorns. Heat a frying pan (not non-stick) until it's quite hot, and cook the steak on both sides, and sear the edges, until it's done almost as you like it (I like it very rare, almost still mooing), and put it on a heated platter. Turn the heat down a bit and add some cognac. Add enough so that you think "that's too much cognac." Boil it and scrape the brown bits and cooked-on peppercorns in the bottom of the pan, and cook for a few minutes, until it reduces. Add some heavy cream (again, when you think "that's too much" you've probably got it right). Cook that down more, until it's thick and brown. Pour any accumulated juice from the platter on which the steak sat into the sauce. Add some salt to taste. At that point I added the steak back to the pan just to get it a little warmer on the outside, but that's optional. Put the steak on a heated plate, and whisk a pat of butter (unsalted if you've got the right saltiness already) into the sauce until it's melted and the sauce is smooth. Pour the sauce over the steak, and serve. You should end up with just enough sauce to cover the steak.

This was the first week of our CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) share from Persephone Farms in Indianola, so we also had some really amazing leaves (lettuce, arugula, etc.) with a tarragon-shallot vinaigrette that Debbie made. Olive oil, finely diced shallots, chopped tarragon (finally we've got some herbs growing in the garden!) and sherry vinegar. If you have time, soak the diced shallots in the vinegar first. Also, La Brea Bakery baguette, which up here is sold slightly underbaked, so put it in the oven at 350 until it's brown, about 10 or 15 minutes.

Treehouse Cafe

2006-06-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

We stopped by the Treehouse Cafe in Lynwood Center (Bainbridge Island) after seeing the 5pm showing of A Prarie Home Companion at the Lynwood Theatre next door. I won't say much about the movie, other than if you have listed to A Prarie Home Companion over the years, you'll enjoy it, and if you haven't, you'll probably think it's a bit goofy. I think we might have been the youngest people in the audience.

The Treehouse Cafe is a pleasant space that we'd been to once before, but I guess recently they redid their menu to add more varied food. They have a nice selection of beer on tap.

We started out with buffalo wings. I have to say, they're the only good buffalo wings I've had on the island. Not dry, good kick of flavor, tastes like Frank's hot sauce, served with a nice chunky blue cheese dressing and some celery sticks.

I gather the time to go is not right after a movie gets out. We were not the first into the restaurant, and we waited a while for our pizza.

It probably took an hour from when we ordered the pizza to when it came out. Several other tables had ordered, eaten, and finished by the time it came. I guess they must not have a huge pizza oven.

What finally came, though, was a really good pizza. We had the "greek," which had artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and sun-dried tomato. It was a nice thin crust, and not too much tomato sauce.

For dessert we shared a huge piece of really good carrot cake.

The food and atmosphere are good, and I would go back, but I'd avoid Sunday night after the early showing of a popular movie.

UPDATE: We went back on a Thursday night, not right ater a movie, and our pizza came right on time, and was great. We had the "Rockaway", which had lots o' meat and onions and peppers. Thin, crispy crust. We started with the artichoke dip, which was yummy, and enough for 4 people. Catherine had the kids' spaghetti, which wasn't spaghetti at all, it was linguine. She didn't like it, but she generally doesn't like spaghetti sauce that didn't come out of a jar. Maybe she'll like the BLT next time.

BIBBQ

2006-06-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, if I wanted BBQ, I'd go to Flint's in Oakland, CA. It was perhaps not on the nicest block in town, and you could smell it from blocks away. Inside the door, there was a formica counter with a broken black-and-white tv, and most of the back was taken up by the brick BBQ with iron doors. You'd stand in line (always a line, even at 2am) and when you got to the counter, a huge woman with arms the size of hams would say "next!" without turning her back. If you didn't bark out your order immediately, she'd yell "I said NEXT!" and maybe even turn around and glower at you. She wielded a giant meat cleaver, and cut up your ribs, sliced beef, chicken or hot links, "whack! whack! whack!" If you were consistently polite (as you were expected to be, yes ma'am) she might even give you a smile when handing you your order. The sauce came in three variations--mild, medium, and hot. The potato salad was fluorescent pre-packaged stuff. Newbies would be given two slices of wheat bread, but if you were known, they'd give you white bread. Sweet potato pie was available for dessert, but who could eat one after a plate of Flint's? You'd get your plate of 'Q, bread, and potato salad wrapped in a paper bag, and on the drive home you'd get your steering wheel and pants all greasy after sticking your finger in the bag and tearing off just a little, because it smelled so good. It was the real deal, best I ever had. I knew people from "famous BBQ" towns like KC who said the same thing. I think Flint's is still there, but Mr. Flintroy is long dead, and I think his relatives have all moved on, and sadly it's gone downhill.

Since then if I've wanted real BBQ I've pretty much had to make it myself, with best results by following Bruce Aidells' advice for cooking pork ribs and making "Oakland-style" sauce (I think he was in line with me at 2am), until now. If you've gone to the Saturday Farmer's Market on Bainbridge recently, you've probably seen (or smelled) Bainbridge Island BBQ's big ol' BBQ rig. Greg Epstein grew up on Bainbridge, and came back after working as a chef in Seattle and Santa Monica to start a local BBQ business. The difference between most BBQ businesses and Greg's is that he has no retail storefront other than at the Farmer's Market.

Greg makes a mean rack of pork ribs, slow-cooked until the meat falls off the bone. Pork ribs are always my litmus test for good BBQ. Anybody can make beef ribs, because you just cook them until they're done and make sure you don't burn them, but making good pork requires patience and the right amount of heat and smoke. Greg's are great. He also has beef ribs, chicken, and salmon.

There are two sauces available: Whiskey Brown Sugar, which is a sweet, dark sauce, and Chipotle Honey, which is a red sauce with a bit of kick. Sides available include a really great potato salad, cole slaw, pinto beans, and creamed corn. The salmon isn't served with sauce, but is just glazed and roasted, and it's very tasty.

Greg stands behind his product--last week we ordered salmon and some pork ribs, and Greg called back later to say that he wasn't happy with how the salmon turned out, and he'd give us a free one if we came by. I think he might have gotten a bad piece to try, because he made it with wild-caught copper river salmon, and mine was really great, with that buttery copper river texture that we all love so much.

By the way, if you make your own BBQ and don't feel like taking several hours to make sauce, the best store-bought sauce in my opinion isn't one of the fancy brands, it's Safeway Select Original. Add a little red pepper flakes and you're on your way.

BIBBQ - Delivery Tue-Sat 1-8pm (225-1215 or 842-RIBS)
9-1pm at the Farmer's Market.

Paella Cooking

2006-06-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

Mom's Book

2006-06-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

My mom's latest book, "Multiethnic Australia: Its History and Future" was just recently published, and Debbie and I put together a website for it. Check it out!

The Dangers of Green Tea

2006-06-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

I managed to knock over a full cup of green tea on my desk when answering the phone. It took me a while to realize that the space bar and "b" keys on my PC keyboard don't work anymore. They should put that on the warning label: "Warning! Contents may short out your keyboard if spilled."

Mother's Day Brunch

2006-05-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

I made Eggs Benedict for Debbie, except that I used smoked king salmon instead of Canadian (back) bacon. The recipe for hollandaise came from the recent Gourmet cookbook, which I'm finding is my most reliable source for the classics. It's never let me down. I used the yolks of eggs that our chickens laid earlier in the morning. The recipe is pretty straightforward: 3 egg yolks, 2 sticks of unsalted butter (I used Plugra, which has less water than the usual brands), 1 Tbsp of lemon juice, 1 Tbsp of water, and some salt and pepper. You melt the butter, let it stand for 3 minutes, skim off the foam. Whisk the egg yolks, lemon juice, and water over low heat until the mixture is just getting thickened, so that you can see the bottom of the pan in tracks left by the whisk, but don't let it curdle (i.e. cook). Then remove it from the heat and whisk in the butter very slowly, drop at a time, then teaspoon at a time, then tablespoon at a time. It was perfect in flavor and consistency. I've never figured out how to make a hollandaise that ends up much hotter than room temperature, but I'm paranoid about overcooking it. Some people suggest pouring it into a thermos right after it's done.

Poaching an egg without a poacher is easy if you have a large saucepan. Bring water to a simmer and add a little vinegar. Put each egg in a small bowl, and pour it into the water while holding it just above. I find that if you pour it fairly quickly, it clumps into a nice ball that flattens out into a perfect poached egg shape on the bottom of the pan. If you pour it slowly the egg white diffuses out a bit more, which isn't a disaster, but you have to gather it all up with a flat strainer. The eggs simmer 2-3 minutes.

The drink was, naturally, a mimosa. The table is in front of our almost-finished spa and water feature.

Bush Street

2006-05-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

Debbie took this in San Francisco:

Did you lose a rooster?

2006-05-02T09:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon a rooster showed up, poking around our coop with amorous intentions. Of course our son couldn't resist catching the thing, and it stayed in the dog crate on the porch all night. This morning, I suggested he let the poor thing out so it could wander home. He did, and then he let the chickens out, which of course meant that the rooster came back, looking for love. (It also means I have to take the chicken-eating dog outside on a leash. Grr...) Guess I need to ask around about who's lost a rooster, and that we'll be eating fertilized eggs for a while.

Update: The rooster belongs to Bay Hay and Feed. They seemed, uh, thrilled to get him back.

Indian Boil-in-the-Bag

2006-04-30T19:20:00.000-07:00

In the last couple of months we've tried a couple of ready-made Indian entrees which come sealed in a foil pouch. The first line comes from Kitchens of India, which are imported from India rather than made domestically. They're available locally at the T&C. They export 5 vegetarian entrees: Palak Paneer (cheese in spinach), Pav Bhaji (vegetable curry), Dal Bukhara (black gram lentil curry), Rajma Masala (kidney bean curry) and Pindi Chana (chick pea curry). They're all really good, and not too expensive. I think my favorite is the dal bukhara.

The second source of Indian Boil-in-the-Bag is Rangoli, which is a spinoff of Vij's next door in Vancouver, B.C. We brought these home with us on our last trip. We did declare them at the border and had no problem. These are amazing. They have to be refrigerated or kept frozen, depending on the dish. We had Garnet Yam and Green Chili Dumplings in a Creamy Onion and Tomato Curry (which is two separate dishes combined, as recommended). It was outrageously good. We also had Saag and Paneer, which was better than any I've had in the states. Next time I go to Vancouver, I'm tempted to bring a cooler.

Trader Joe's sells a few frozen Indian dishes. I tried one and I thought it was awful.

Living with Osgood-Schlatter Disease

2006-04-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

After taking my son to the doctor, I walked into the bedroom and told my wife grimly, "I'm afraid our son has been diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease."

Actually it's a common cause of knee pain in growing adolescents--the bone grows fast enough that the tendons don't have time to catch up, but it sure sounds serious when you say it right.

Lunch at Madoka

2006-04-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

Madoka is now open for lunch, Wednesday through Saturday. Debbie and I ate there last Thursday.

We started by sharing the chipotle red clam chowder. It was great. Lots of clam meat, rich flavor made more interesting with a bit of smoky chipotle and bacon. I think it's my favorite clam chowder ever.

For a main course, I had the American Kobe Beef burger. These photos were taken with my cellphone, so they're pretty low-quality:

The burger was served on a ciabatta bun. I asked for it rare, and they obliged. It had dry jack cheese, arugula, and a fruit chutney that I don't recall on top, and came with taro and yam chips. It was really yummy. $14

Debbie had the BLT.

It's also served on a ciabatta bun. The bacon is house-cured and smoked, and is fantastic--really meaty and flavorful. It's made with kurobuta black pork. I think I'd use sliced toasted bread (pain au levain or something) instead of the bun for this. You can either get chips or sriricha slaw, and Debbie got the slaw. It tasted a bit like kimchee but not so intense. I liked it a lot. $12.

For dessert we shared the coconut-ricotta ice cream with chocolate rum sauce, which was good--lots of coconut gave it an interesting texture, and it's served with a piece of rich, flakey shortbread.

Overall, the food was excellent, and the prices are reasonable--less than some other restaurants in town, for much better food. (I know, $14 for a burger, but it was "American Kobe beef", which is always pretty expensive. You'd pay $25 in New York...)

My only criticism of Madoka is that they might consider getting some better serviceware. They have a very elegant interior and then bring food on plates and silverware that look like they came from a diner. They don't have small spoons for serving with espresso, so you have to stir it with a teaspoon.

UPDATE: Had lunch there again. They really do have reasonable prices for lunch--pasta dishes for $10, and their take on a Salde Niçoise that I had was $12. The salad I had consisted of flash-grilled tuna that was cut into cubes, baby lettuce, green beans, and a not-quite-hard-boiled (whatever you call that) egg. As the weather gets better, the patio will be a good option.

Make Your Own Damned Salad

2006-04-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, we had lunch at Cafe Nola. I had a boring but edible chicken breast sandwich. Debbie had the Surf and Turf Salad, which is composed of heart of romaine, steak, shrimp, and shoestring potatoes. The problem is that they're into this post-salad-making riff on salad, i.e. "make your own damned salad." I'm sorry I don't have a picture. You get a large plate with a whole heart of romaine (i.e. a head of romaine with the outer leaves ripped off) in the middle. There's a bit of dressing sprinkled over it. Then you get some slices of steak, and a few grilled shrimp (which smelled to me like they could have been a bit fresher) on a skewer stuck into the heart of romaine at a 45 degree angle. Then you get a couple of puddles of what I guess was pesto in the corner. Then the whole mess is covered with shoestring potatoes. Oh so clever, these people, mocking our bourgeois salad sensibilities. So you have to first, push aside the shoestring potatoes strewn all over, then try to cut the head of lettuce sitting on your plate (stem-end pointed toward the customer, just to make the point) with a dinner knife, trying not to get it to fly apart and get dressing all over. Of course, the inside of the head of lettuce has no dressing, so you have to smear the lettuce around on the plate. I think it was $14.

Cafe Nola has sometimes been pretty good for dinner, but this was crap, and I'm not going back for lunch until they get some sense.

Vancouver Holiday

2006-04-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

We took the kids to Vancouver, B.C. for three days. Stayed at a hotel on Robson St. Weather was pretty good.

Getting everyone to agree on what to eat is always a challenge. Everyone agrees on Sushi. Our first stop for lunch on the way up was Richmond Sushi, which is an all-you-can-eat sushi and asian food restaurant in a small and crowded shopping center in Richmond, B.C. The menu is very limited, but the sushi you can get is really quite good. For nigiri they have tuna and salmon, nothing else. Then, tekka, kappa, california rolls, spicy tuna, and a few odd "big" rolls. Gyoza, siu mai, and other sorts of things are available as well. It's not a buffet, but the service is almost as fast. A waiter comes with a palm pilot, says, "ready to order", they punch it in, and sometimes within 30 seconds part of the order comes. They keep coming back asking if you want anything else. For lunch it was $9.95 Canadian, which works out to $8.66 U.S. at today's rates. Amazing! Richmond Sushi was in our GPS database, so that made the decision to drop in on the way to Vancouver pretty easy.

First night's dinner, we left the kids in the hotel with room service food, and went across the street to A Taste of India. As straightforward "standard-issue" Indian fare goes, it was done very well. Butter Chicken, Baighan Bartha, appetizer plate, and a nice local honey lager.

For lunch the next day we went to the Granville Island public market and kind of grazed. Don't go to the chinese place, it's as bad as any steam-table chinese food in the states. The perogies were good, as were the baked goods. Catherine had yet more sushi. I think Stuart wandered off and bought himself some smoked salmon and shrimp meat, and ate that for lunch.

Dinner was, once again, Sushi, this time at Tsunami, a sushi boat place on Robson St. Not the best I've ever had, but the kids liked it, and everyone was happy.

Next day we got cupcakes at the cupcake place on Denman St. Yum!

On the way home we stopped at Vij's Rangoli, which is the new next-door branch of Vij's restaurant. Everyone raves about Vij's food, and when we get to Vancouver without our Indian-food-hating children, we'll have to try it, but in the meantime, their new place next door serves a small menu at lunchtime, including takeout. We got takeout and McDo's for the kids, and ate it at Jericho Beach park. The food was amazing. We had a portobello mushroom and cheese curry, a lamb curry, some pakoras that were tasty and undoubtedly much better before the wait at McDonalds and the drive to the beach (should have eaten them in the car!), some dal, and some sort of chaat-y dish. We then drove home and were so full that we never bothered with dinner. Rangoli also sells frozen and fresh boil-in-the-bag entrees, which are sealed in foil pouches. We were able to take them across the border, so we'll eat them tonight and report back later.

Vancouver is the city we wish Seattle was. The city doesn't die at night. There are still families walking around, eating ice cream, whatever. It's not segregated into separate "nightlife areas" where drunken folk are allowed to go out at night but families do not tread, and "shopping areas" which totally close down, like in Seattle. I guess you're supposed to go home at night if you have a family in Seattle, or stay in the nice safe shopping mall. Some of my fondest memories as a child are wandering around Athens, Paris, Rome, and London in the evening with my mom and brother, and I'd like my children to have the same sorts of experiences.

Lola Again

2006-04-04T18:38:00.000-07:00

Went back to Lola, a somewhat-Greek restaurant in the Tom Douglas empire. It was as good as last time. We started with the "combo" which included tsatziki, red pepper spread, grilled squid on a skewer (yum!), olives, some house-cured meat, dolmades, fried chickpeas, and warm pita. We also shared a fondue, which was sort of like dipping pita in cheesy bechamel sauce, along with a fig-leaf-wrapped grilled fig--yum again. I had sliced leg of lamb and some brussels sprouts with hunks of bacon. Debbie had a lamb kebab. Everything was great, and I ate too much. Debbie had goat milk pie with meyer lemon marmelade for dessert, and I had the loukomades (they call them "yeasted donuts with honey and walnuts" or something).

More San Jose Eats

2006-04-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

I'm in downtown San Jose for about one of every 6 or 7 weeks, and am always trying to find decent places within walking distance of downtown to eat. Last trip I tried three inexpensive restaurants I hadn't tried before.

Poor House Bistro on Autumn street, a few blocks' walk from downtown, is in an old victorian house. It serves New Orleans-style food in a very casual (i.e. order at the counter) atmosphere. I had a fried shrimp po boy with remoulade and a side of red beans and rice. Red Tail ale on tap, and you've got yourself a meal. They also have gumbo and other standards, which I'm told are pretty decent.

Tandoori Oven is a small chain Northern Indian restaurant sort of like the many Pakistani/Indian restaurants in San Francisco and the East Bay, except that it's a bit more expensive, and maybe a little more corporate/designed. The food is pretty good, which is to say, better than most of the Indian restaurants in the area, especially at lunchtime where they offer mostly disgusting buffets. It's nothing great, but just a decent plate of chicken tikka masala, naan and rice for $10.

Up the street from Tandoori Oven (86 S. First St) is Smile Sushi, a small Japanese restaurant with fairly standard American Japanese restaurant fare. I wasn't expecting too much, but was pleasantly surprised--the prices were reasonable and the sushi fish was pretty good considering the prices. $10 bento lunch, which included agedashi tofu, sashimi, and three pieces of nigiri. They serve real green tea, not a cup of hot water and a teabag.

Manresa

2006-04-04T16:24:00.000-07:00

Manresa is a restaurant in Los Gatos, California that is always getting on various "top" lists, including one that claims it's one of the top 50 restaurants on the planet, and has been called a French Laundry without the difficult reservation. Well, high praise indeed, and since I find myself about 10 miles away about every week in 7, I figured I'd give it a try. My friend John joined me, and we went for a fairly late seating (8:30pm). Los Gatos is one of those towns in which if you're standing on the right corner you almost forget that you're in the sprawling wasteland known as Silicon Valley.

They claim to serve "contemporary French cuisine with modern Spanish flair," which means exactly what I'm not sure--French Laundry + El Bulli? I guess so. Anyway, if the whole table orders it, a tasting menu is available ($110, plus $72 for wine pairings), so we got the tasting menu. It was late, John was sick as a dog so he didn't get the wine pairings, and I've since gotten the same cold, so I haven't felt like blogging about it until now. So, I might not remember everything we had, because there were a lot of dishes. I've certainly forgotten most of the wines.

The restaurant is in a small one-story building down a narrow lane. It's done in a low-key California chic, with painted concrete floors, lots of wood (vertical-grain fir, I think), etc.

We started off with five amuses-bouches. The first was a tiny black olive madeleine and a red pepper gelées. The olive madeleine was billed as "savory", but was a little sweet. Next we had a martini glass with orange granita, some sort of gelatin (orange again I think), and some foam (for lack of a better description, what I'd call "culinary foam") on top. After that, an oyster in a clear gelatin with a dab of meyer lemon gelatin on the bottom, and then a barely cooked egg layered with various stuff which I didn't quite get, and some cream on top. (I didn't hear every dish explanation that was announced, and didn't feel like asking again.) Michael Bauer claims it's his "signature egg shell filled with soft eggs, maple syrup, sherry vinegar and a topping of cool cream." OK, that. Finally, they brought what they described as "croquettes" of foie gras, but I'd call a "foie gras popper": a little deep-fried cube with a liquidy foie gras center. We were instructed to eat it in one bite, as the center really is quite liquid, and would spurt out if you tried to bite it in half.

The subsequent courses are a bit of a haze. If I remember any more, I'll add them in later.

The first course pre-announced itself by having them bring me a bit of Sauternes. This usually means "foie gras is coming" in restaurantese. I should say the wine pairings were fairly small, which is fine given the number of dishes. This is for me better than some of the tasting menus I've has which would have left me puking drunk had I drank every glass to the bottom (and felt glad about leaving very expensive wine in the glass), but I can imagine many people might find it a little skimpy for $72. So the duck foie gras arrived, and was served in slices. It was mesquite-grilled, which is the first time I've encountered that. I guess they don't use much charcoal, so it heats slowly and the outside gets a heavy mesquite flavor without overheating the foie gras. The mesquite was an interesting complement to the rich flavor of the foie gras.

The first fish course was amazing. It was the "first of the season" fresh sea bream, along with some very fresh squid, and some other fish I didn't catch the name of, served raw in a bowl, onto which miso consommé was poured at the table. The consommé was not extremely hot, so the fish barely cooked. It was a really successful dish.
Next we had raw slices of freshly-opened scallops, covered with thin ribbons of "scallop tripe."

John and I agreed that the sweetbreads were the most successful dish of them all. One slice of sweetbread was served with some other stuff that I don't even remember now, in a bowl with a bit of consommé. The sweetbread was perfectly cooked, unctuous inside with a slightly crisp exterior

Next we had little slices of squab, and then some goat with curry spices. John thought the curry spices were a bit much in the context of the rest of the meal, which was pretty subtle.

The best dessert by far was a vanilla soufflée, which was an amazing little morsel in a tiny dish served with little bits of bourbon and vanilla ice creams. After that was a chocolate rice pudding that was pretty good. I think there were three desserts, but I can't remember the last one.

Finally, we had a chocolate madeleine and a strawberry jelly, which would have been fine but the waiter had to go and say "now, we come full circle," as if we were being beaten over the head with its Significance. Silly proclamations aside, the service was impeccable. I never felt uncomfortable or rushed or waiting longer than I wanted to for anything.

All in all, a very enjoyable meal. If I were to put it in my hierarchy of most enjoyable Bay Area dinners, I'd put it a notch below La Folie and downstairs at Chez Panisse, and right around the same level as my second tier that includes Jardiniere, Fleur de Lys, etc. It's certainly the best food I've had in "The Valley." We still haven't made it to French Laundry, because our few attempts at getting a reservation were fruitless.

25 for $25: Etta's

2006-03-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

Went to Etta's last night, on the first night of the 25 for $25 deal. For those of you who don't know, the deal is that 25 Seattle restaurants are offering a $25 prix-fixe dinner for a month (Fridays and Saturdays excepted).

Etta's is one of the restaurants in Tom Douglas Seattle restaurant empire, and like the others in his stable we've tried, maintains very high standards for food and service. Were it that all restaurant empire-builders could keep it together this well.

For starters, we both had the arugula, goat cheese (I think) and duck breast risotto. It was great. Rare slices of roasted duck breast on top of creamy risotto, with a little bit of greens mixed in.

For an entree, I had the Rubbed with Love King Salmon, which might have been my favorite Salmon dish ever. The salmon is cooked perfectly (i.e. still a bit pink and moist inside) and the rub/marinade gives it a slightly sweet flavor with not so much spice that it overwhels the salmon. It was served on top of cornbread pudding, which is what I always wanted cornbread to be. Atop the salmon was some shiitake mushroom "relish." There were some tasty greens on the side. Debbie had the pepper-glazed pork tenderloin, which was really good, with a sweet compote-y thing on the side, and atop some wilted pea leaves and tendrils.

For dessert I had the famous coconut cream pie, which is what you always wanted coconut creme pie to taste like--a good piecrust with whipped cream, shavings of coconut, and shaved white chocolate. Hard to beat. Debbie had a chocolate pistachio cake, which was also really good--a pistachio cake with chocolate-Grand Marnier ganache on the top and side (i.e. the back of the slice), covered with crushed pistachios on the back.

This was a great deal for $25--the salmon dish is $26 alone on the regular menu. We had some good pinot noir by the glass to go with it. Service was pretty good--the server apologized for the slow service owing to getting slammed by the 25 for $25 deal, but I thought it was just fine, really. The place was packed, so better reserve if you want to get in without a wait.

The evening was marred by a failed arrangement with a babysitter, so it was rather more stressful than it should have been.

Monsoon

2006-02-21T22:47:00.000-08:00

Monsoon is a Vietnamese restaurant in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. It's got a high-end look and sensibility to it, with a cool minimalist interior with lots of blonde wood, white walls, and a semi-open kitchen, and an interesting menu that combines traditional Vietnamese flavors with local produce and regional products. We had dinner there for the first time last night, and liked it a lot.

We started out with Beef with La Lot Leaves, which is a common item on a lot of Vietnamese menus. In this variation, the beef was wrapped around a stick of jicama, which gave it a nice crunch. I've seen beef wrapped around onions, where the onions squirt out as soon as you bite them, but this worked a lot better. La lot leaves are hard to describe. They stay fairly strong (in terms of shear strength) when cooked, and have an interesting flavor that's not quite minty but not quite something else. There were also some pickled shallots, which not too many Vietnamese restaurants in this area seem to serve, which is too bad because they're tasty. We also started with green papaya salad with grilled tiger prawns and rau ram. It was excellent. The prawns were not highly spiced, and were more of an undertone to the dish.

For entrees, we shared seared diver scallops, which were served with some rice and shallot nuoc mam (fish sauce). The sauce was somewhat sweet. This was a really good dish, great flavors.

We also had wokked venison with yellow curry, peanuts, and wood ear mushrooms. It was served mixed in with rice glass noodles. This was a good dish, maybe not as good as the scallops, but quite tasty, and the yellow curry was subtle but had a nice flavor and kick.

For dessert we shared a warm banana cake served with a coconut cream. The coconut cream was not sweet, but was instead salty, which was a nice contrast with the warm, sweet banana cake.

The wine list is pretty amazing. I never quite know what I'll like with this kind of food. They had a gruner veltliner available by the glass, which we both had, and it worked really well with the food.

It was full when we got there (7:30pm on a Monday night) so I was glad we made reservations.

Mexican Everyday

2006-02-21T22:09:00.000-08:00

We have a couple of Rick Bayless's cookbooks. If you want good recipes for authentic Mexican food, it's hard to beat them. Bayless does the classics well, and his more original creations are also great. But we don't use his books as often as we'd like, because the recipes can be a bit...involved. I've made tortillas by hand and made an adobo out of a zillion ingredients with spices ground by hand, but sometimes I just want a quick meal. I guess Bayless has heard this particular whine quite a bit, and noticed on recent trips to Mexico that real people don't cook in the way that his cookbooks describe except for special occasions, just like us. So, Bayless put together Mexican Everyday, which has much simpler recipes, sometimes even using prepared ingredients (*gasp*), but with the same attention to taste and flavor that distinguished his earlier works.

I was jonesing for some Mexican food, and the options around here aren't so great, so I put together a meal of Chipotle Beef Tacos with Caramelized Onions, Frijoles Charros Rapidos, and Jicama Salad with Watercress, Romaine and Lime-Cilantro Dressing.

The recipes were quite straightforward. You make the steak by taking one of those little cans of chipotle in adobo sauce and puréeing it, and then brushing it onto the steak--skirt or flank. I used flank, because the local market doesn't carry skirt steak (grr). Then you slice white onions 1/4" thick, and sautee them until a little caramelized but still a little firm. Then cook the steak on the same pan, about 5 minutes a side for flank steak, cut it up into edible slices, and serve with heated tortillas and some salsa. I used a higher-end store-bought chipotle salsa. I was going to make a caramelized tomatillo salsa in the book but got lazy.

The jicama salad was perhaps the best thing I've had with jicama. The jicama is peeled and julienned 1/4" (I think I did more like 1/2"), and added to some watercress (long stems removed) and 4 leaves romaine, chiffonaded 1/4". The dressing in the recipe makes way too much, so I cut it down by 1/3. It ended up being 1/4c olive oil, juice of 1/2 a lime, a bit of grated lime zest, about 1/4c cilantro leaves, and about 1/2 a chopped jalapeño. I blended it in the mini-food processor attachment to the stick blender. It came out nice and creamy. Toss and serve.

The "Quick Cowboy Beans" were amazing as well. I think they were the best version I've ever had, and were easy to boot. Cook 4 thick slices of bacon, chopped, in a saucepan until a bit crisp, add a couple of smashed garlic cloves and cook for a minute, then add 1/2 of a can of Muir Glen diced fire-roasted tomatoes (I used the ones with green chilis). Cook for a few minutes, add 2 15oz cans of pinto beans and simmer for 15 minutes. Add 1 seeded and chopped pickled jalapeño. You can sprinkle chopped cilantro on top. I used Hempler's bacon (the end bits, much cheaper) which really made the dish, I think. I don't know if it would be the same with Oscar Mayer bacon.

There's a recipe for Cochinita Pibil which looks great, and I'm going to have to try it. Instead of burying a pig in a dirt BBQ pit, which I'm just not going to do for a casual dinner (especially given how cold the ground is these days), you cook a pork shoulder wrapped in banana leaves in a slow cooker.

So far I'm impressed with the recipes--they are quicker but still capture what's compelling about a particular dish. The book was co-authored by Deann Groen Bayless.

Phở at Last

2006-01-04T16:02:00.000-08:00

I've been looking for a restaurant that sells good Phở in easy reach (i.e. without taking the ferry or driving all the way to Bremerton) of Bainbridge Island. Until today, I'd pretty much struck out, even getting desperate enough to make my own. The Chinese restaurant on Bainbridge tries to make Phở, but it's not very good, and they only have it at lunchtime during the week, so I can't take the kids.

I'm happy to report that there is now a pretty good Phở restaurant in Poulsbo, in the Poulsbo Village Shopping Center, across from KFC. This recently changed owners; the previous incarnation was not very good.

If you're an "everything" phở fan like me, the Phở T&N Special (#7) is what you want: rare beef, beef flank, tendon, and tripe. Good, hearty broth, the requisite plate of goodies (no mint or sawtooth herb though), and I liked the noodles. Prices are pretty reasonable: a small bowl of phở is $5.25, large bowl is $6.75.

We also had the goi con (spring rolls) which were pretty good. They could have used more herbs (mint, or maybe basil), but the wrapper was the right kind, not those thick, gummy wrappers they use at Phở Hoa.

They also have bubble tea, which will make my son happy.

Phở T&N
19641 7th Ave. NE
Poulsbo, WA 98370
(360) 394-1601

New Year's Eve

2005-12-31T23:23:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve at home. We're a bit tired out and lazy from travel. Dinner was a low-effort plate of good stuff to eat--prosciutto, gravlax, cheese, Acme bread we brought from Berkeley, along with some wine. I thought about making blinis this year, but didn't get around to it. Store-bought truffle cake for dessert. Catherine has a friend sleeping over, while the rest of her family has the flu. Stuart and I bought some fireworks across the bridge. He set off the mortar, the smiley-faced rockets, and some of the sparkly tank things. Fireworks are going off all around. Our 100-rocket barrage is set for midnight.

Happy New Year!

More Bay Area Eats

2005-12-31T21:23:00.000-08:00

Here are a few other food highlights from the Bay Area.

Naan 'n' Curry is one of the many Indian/Pakistani restaurants that are everywhere in the Bay Area. We got take-out from the one on College Avenue in Berkeley, across the street from King Yen (where the redundant Chinese restaurant was.) My brother and his wife did a survey of the low-end Indian joints in the area a few years ago, and this was the winner. Cheap, tasty, and they wrap the boxes containing the curries in plastic wrap, so they don't leak! Chicken Tikka Masala, Lamb Curry, Baighan Bharta, Palak Paneer (spinach w./ cheese), Naan, Rice. $32. Better than most Seattle Indian restaurants at any price.

Taylor's Automatic Refresher is a high-concept pseudo-retro-drive-in-nostalgia restaurant in St. Helena, which recently opened an outpost at the Ferry Building in San Francisco (with no drive-in at all). The concept is executed very well--everything is excellent, from the burgers to the fried calimari, and they have Anchor Steam on tap. Garlic fries like garlic fries should be, tossed in garlic butter and parsley. I was happy.

La Note is a Provençal restaurant on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley that serves a great breakfast. I had an omelette with ham and cheese. The only complaint anyone had was that the portions were too big. Cafe au lait in a bowl, natch. Richard said that the food is good in the evening; I've never tried it. It's always packed by 9:30am; we got there at 9 and had no problem getting a table. I gather it's harder to get a table on weekends. Parking meters only take 1 hour's worth, which is dumb for an area with restaurants.

Lunch at Pug's Leap Farm

2005-12-31T19:42:00.000-08:00

Our friends Eric and Pascal decided to quit their jobs a few years ago and make farmstead cheese on the land on which Eric's grandparents built a house something like 60 years ago. The land is a lovely slope overlooking Dry Creek Valley in Healdsburg, California, now called Pug's Leap Farm, named because Eric and Pascal have had pet pugs for many years. Here is their latest, Oriane de Guermantes, who was a rescue puppy that Eric describes as a cuisinart with legs, giving Catherine a kiss.

It's been fascinating to watch the process of creating a dairy and cheesemaking facility. It's a very small operation, with two people and about 25 goats in the herd, but they still needed the same kinds of permits and variances from the county that they would had they built a giant cheese factory. The goats are the sweetest you've ever met--our kids have known and loved these goats for a few years.

While Eric and Pascal were building up their herd and waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, they had a problem: they had a lot of goat milk, and not a lot to do with it, because they couldn't legally make cheese to distribute (not even to give away) nor even legally give away the milk. However, goat's milk is easily digestible by a lot of animals, including pigs. So, they got a few piglets, which very efficiently turned a diet that was heavy in goat's milk into hundreds of pounds of pork. The result of all of this pig-raising is that we had the best ham I've ever had for lunch during our visit. This particular ham came from a pig named George Bush. Eric and Pascal enjoyed being able to walk out to the pen and say, "George Bush, you are a pig!" every day until it was time for slaughter.
Along with the ham we had some amazing white beans, some brussels sprouts, a cheese course (of course!) and an Erica Torte that we brought from Katrina Rozelle bakery in Oakland. Also joining us for lunch was our friend James, who is staying in the little cabin behind the house while finishing his novel/history/self-help guide.

Eric and Pascal run a real farmstead goat cheese operation, using only the milk from the herd on the farm, so it runs cyclically through the year. Right now there's no cheesemaking going on, because the goats are dried off during the last weeks of pregnancy. In a couple of months there will be dozens of kids, most of which are bound for other farms. Then cheesemaking will start again.
This was the first year of commercial production. They started off selling cheese at the Healdsburg farmer's market. Later in the year their cheese was picked up for distribution by Tomales Bay Foods, which means that it's available in quite a few high-end grocery stores, and Eric and Pascal don't have to work quite as hard to sell all their cheese. If you're at the Cowgirl Creamery store at the SF Ferry Plaza or Point Reyes, or at the Healdsburg Farmer's market, check out Pug's Leap goat cheese!

Eccolo

2005-12-31T18:36:00.000-08:00

Eccolo is yet another restaurant started by a former Chez Panisse chef, in this case Christopher Lee, who was chef downstairs at Chez Panisse for a number of years. Eccolo is in the space formerly occupied by Ginger Island (and before that, Fourth Street Grill, back when there was very little on Fourth St.) in Berkeley.

The restaurant has been remodeled into a handsome space. For those who remember the godawful din that was Ginger Island, steps seem to have been taken to mute the echo a bit, which was certainly appreciated. The noise level would have been fine except for the very loud people sitting behind me.

For a starter, we shared an antipasto plate. This consisted of some prosciutto, some almonds, sliced parmesan, olives, and an unidentified fried green. I think the proscuitto was house-cured; it was certainly amazingly good.

For a main course I had a veal chop with marrow sauce and a potato gratin. It was a good sized T-bone of veal, cooked nicely, although it could have used a lot more salt. Debbie had butternut squash lasagna with pinenuts, brown butter, and sage, which was quite good. Debbie makes a similar lasagne that's even richer (with prosciutto and bechamel). Mom had the lamb with chard sformato and olive sauce. I think Mom was disappointed that she didn't get the veal chop. She misread the "grilled over grape vines" to mean "made with vine leaves", which didn't sound too good (and wouldn't have been!) Catherine had bucatini with tomato sauce off of the kids menu, which she seemed to like.

For dessert we all had chocolate zabaglione with crushed amaretti. It was creamy with a bit of a sharp bite.

I usually have high hopes for these Chez Panisse spinouts, and those hopes are sometimes fulfilled (c.f. Oliveto while Paul Bertolli was there and paying attention) and sometimes not. In this case, I thought it didn't quite fulfill that promise. The food was good, but not best-you-ever-had great like Chez Panisse achieves routinely. The service was fine, though our waitress had a funny sneer that I figure was just a character trait, not a voluntary demonstration of disdain.

Eccolo
1820 Fourth St.
Berkeley, California 94710
510-644-0444

Incanto

2005-12-31T18:18:00.000-08:00

Incanto is an Italian restaurant on Church St. in the Noe Valley district of San Francisco. We met our friends Richard and Elizabeth, who live nearby, at Incanto last Thursday night.

Incanto's interior is a very soothing palette of light neutral colors, with lots of stone and tile. The kitchen is open, but I didn't notice it being too loud. The emphasis is on "California Italian," taking advantage of whatever's locally available, rather than a regional emphasis.

The meal starts with a great fanfare about the water. They filter the local tap water (from Hetch Hetchy, which was according to John Muir as beautiful as Yosemite Valley before it was filled up in order to supply SF with water), carbonate it, and serve it. Richard used to make a joke about asking for "Hetch Hetchy" at SF restaurants when asked whether he wanted Pellegrino or Evian. The joke's on us now, evidently. Incanto also grows herbs on their rooftop garden.

The menu changes daily, though there are quite a few repeats. I started with a salt cod fritter, which was one of the best renditions of salt cod fritter I've had--perfect little cruchy spheres with a salt-cod-y center.

For a main course I had fresh bacon with beans. This was basically a big hunk of uncured bacon served on a pile of white beans. It was bacon-y good.

Debbie had a salad of goose confit, followed by pasta with duck and olives which was amazing. Richard had an agrodolce of branzino, which was disappointing. The sauce was unpleasantly sweet without a lot of balance.

For dessert I had a nut tart which was kind of bitter, and not all that pleasant, I thought. Debbie had olive oil ice cream with sea salt. We had better olive oil ice cream at L'Avant Gout in Paris, but this was pretty good.

They have a good selection of Italian wines, including quite a few available by the glass.

I thought the food was generally quite good, with a few misses, in a very pleasant atmosphere. Service was quite good, if a little rushed at the end.

Incanto
1550 Church Street
San Francisco, CA
415-641-4500

À Côté

2005-12-31T17:43:00.000-08:00

Last week we had dinner at À Côté in Oakland, California. Our favorite bartender Mike used to work downstairs at Oliveto, and when he moved to À Côté, we followed. We don't live around the corner anymore (*sniff*), but whenever we're in town, we try to make it to À Côté. It's my favorite "small plate" restaurant, serving food in a simple more-or-less French style. We had pancetta-wrapped shrimp served with romesco sauce, which was succulent and tasty, a flatbread (essentially an oval-plate-sized pizzetta) with pears and gorgonzola, not to be missed, a shredded salad of (I think--memory fails me) romaine and radicchio with a creamy caper sauce, and a tuna "confit" salad which was the least successful of the group. We had one (well, Debbie had more than one, but I switched to wine) of Mike's amazing Sangria Cocktails, which are made with spanish brandy, tempranillo (red wine), and citrus juices. For dessert we had the coupe à côté, which was the chocolate sundae of my dreams, along with another dessert that I don't remember at this point.

Unless you have a large party, they don't take reservations. There's almost always a wait for a table, but if you get a seat at the bar, you can have dinner there as well.

À Côté
5478 College Avenue
Oakland CA
510-655-6469

Christmas Day

2005-12-27T20:34:00.000-08:00

We flew down to Mom's house in Berkeley for Christmas day dinner. Mom made a prime rib with herbs from the recent Gourmet cookbook that I gave her for her birthday. Prime rib is best when it is not overcooked. The Gourmet recipe has one cook it to an internal temperature of 110degF, and then let it stand for 25 minutes. That results in that perfect pink color that one expects from prime rib. Dinner also included mashed potatoes, baby zucchini, a big salad, and some rolls. For dessert, Leila made a gingerbread cake in one of those bundt castle molds. She put whipped cream around the base and dusted it with powdered sugar, so it looked like a snowy castle. We laid siege on the castle, and I'm pleased to report that the castle was sacked. It was served with a compote of apricots, apples, and raisins that Leila said was a Russian recipe. (Perhaps she'll post it!)

Christmas Eve Dinner

2005-12-27T19:59:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I bought some duck foie gras from a woman from Périgord at the Salon Saveurs in Paris. What better time than Christmas Eve dinner to have some artisinal foie gras?

I toasted some baguette and spread some chilled foie gras on top. This was served with a 1990 Ostertag Epfig Sélection de Grains Nobles de Gewurztraminer, which I bought for Debbie's birthday years ago, and which survived our house fire. We were worried that it would be ruined, but instead it was amazing.

I was too lazy to get out the tripod, so this isn't the greatest picture. After having foie gras, what else could one have but something with truffles? After checking out a recipe from Richard Olney in the French Menu cookbook, Debbie and I went over to Pike Place market, and bought about 4oz of black truffles from the a woman who calls herself the Truffle Queen, at the all-things-truffle shop. Olney's recipe, for truffled egg pasta, calls for a good 1/2lb of truffles, but we felt that was a bit much. I was way too lazy to consider making fresh egg noodles like Olney would have me do, and couldn't find any fresh egg noodles at the market, so I used Rustichella D'Abruzzo dried egg fettucine, which worked quite nicely. The recipe is pretty easy: slice the truffles 1/4"-1/8" thick, rub a couple of garlic cloves inside a heavy poleon or casserole, put the pot on extremely low heat and put in 1/4lb of unsalted butter (just enough heat to melt the butter, but not enough to cook anything) and add the sliced truffle when the butter melts.

Add some salt, plenty of pepper, and 1-2Tbsp of Cognac. Let the sliced truffles bathe in the butter, tightly covered, for about 10 minutes, and then start cooking the pasta (which took about 5 minutes). The idea is to heat the truffles enough to infuse the butter with flavor. When the pasta is ready, drain it well, add to the pot, toss a bit, and leave it for a few more minutes. Then add another 1/4lb or so of butter cut in small cubes and toss together to bind it, and serve. Boy, was it good. Olney says that peeling truffles is a matter of personal taste. This was the first time I've cooked with fresh truffles. I have to say, next time I probably would peel them, because the skin is rather rough and crunchy. One can save the peelings to use in a Beef Wellington.

This particular menu in the cookbook is followed by a salad and then a dessert, but we had some Pannetone with candied chestnuts instead.

Christmas Shopping

2005-12-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

Seen on a sidewalk in Paris...

Prague at Christmastime

2005-12-14T16:20:00.000-08:00

Some of my friends and relatives thought I was a bit nuts to go to Prague in December, picturing a cold, bleak city. However, at this time of year, Prague explodes with lights and activity. The above picture was taken at around 9:30pm on the Old Town Square, after the crowds had died down a bit. But all over the city, there are lights, christmas trees, and groups performing, like this choral group performing on the stage at Old Town Square:

Wenceslas Square also gets totally packed with people, mostly locals going shopping. In both squares (and several others in the city that I saw) there are stalls selling christmas loot, from local crafts and foods to generic items like scarves and those orange hippie crystal lamps that seem to be sold at every flea market and farmer's market on earth in the last couple of years.

If you look closely at the following photo, you'll see a something that looks like an elongated donut on top of one of the stalls. I don't remember the name of it, but it's made by wrapping some dough around a cylinder, then rotating the cylinder (either cranked by hand, or in some cases using a motor, which is probably cheating) above an open flame. The resulting flame-baked pastry is then rolled in a cinnamon-sugar mixture. Update from abcprague.com: "It is called Staroceske trdlo (Old-Bohemian muff) and it is food from medieval times. And it’s great."

I gather it's a traditional Czech item--the people making it wear old-timey baker's clothes. I didn't get a close-up picture because I was too busy eating one. As you can also probably see from the photo, they're a popular item.

There are also at least half a dozen "Hot Wine" vendors on the square. This is a a great way to warm up on a cold evening. Another food item I liked was what a stand called "Bohemian Traditional Piglet", which was basically chopped roasted suckling pig on a roll.

Here's the view up Parizka, a high-end shopping street running north from Old Town Square into Josevof:

And here's a nativity scene made out of straw outside the St. Vitus Cathedral:

and another singing group at St. Vitus:

Rudolfinum

2005-12-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

I saw a performance at the Rudolfinum concert hall in Prague, which is an imposing neo-classical edifice, with columns soaring up to a very high ceiling. I saw Boris Krajny playing Beethoven's Moonlight sonata, Liszt's Apres une Lecture de Dante, Fantasia quasi Sonata, a couple of polkas and On The Seashore by Smetana, and a couple of mazurkas and Ballade in G Minor by Chopin. It was a good performance, although I've been on a funny jet-lag-induced schedule where I've been taking a nap in the afternoon, and then staying up late, and I didn't do that today, so if you can believe it, I started dozing off during the (very dynamic) Liszt piece. Nobody poked me in the ribs, so I guess I didn't sleep for more than a few seconds.

Beforehand I had a Czech meal: Duck, smoked pork and roasted pork, with red and white cabbage and bread dumplings. Afterward I had some hot wine from one of the stands at the old town square.

Black Light Theater

2005-12-10T13:28:00.000-08:00

I went to the Ta Fantastika Black Light Theatre. Black light theatre is a uniquely Czech artform developed in the 60s. I saw their performance called "Aspects of Alice," which is loosely based on Alice in Wonderland, though it uses that as a starting point and has a story about Alice coming of age. Live actors (mimes) interact with elements that are manipulated by puppeteers wearing black velvet, with a black background, so that you (generally) don't see anything but the elements floating in space. The lighting is a combination of black light and tightly controlled spot lighting. Scenic elements are rendered in fluorescent colors (in a wacky 60s style) and different parts of the scenic elements are distinct (such as buildings on a street) so they move and hover and dance into place. They also use candles quite a bit, a few puppets, and (presumably) some wires to make Alice twirl around in the sky. They also raise and lower black curtains quickly, to get elements to appear and disappear apparently instantly. There was also some animation projected onto the performance, either on translucent screens across the front or onto particular elements in the scene. The story is all visual and musical, there's no dialogue. The music is a combination of modern syntho-music and some Czech classical hits (The Moldau from Ma Vlast by Smetana, Slavonic Dances by Dvorak). The person next to me said, "well, that was different!" I had a good time.

Czech Lunch

2005-12-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

I had lunch at a restaurant in Josevof: Pork "sparrows" with red and white cabbage and bread dumplings, and a Pilsener Urquell. It's a lousy picture; it looked more appetizing than that!

Prague Jewish Quarter

2005-12-09T08:50:00.000-08:00

Today I wandered through the old Jewish quarter of Prague. There's a lot of history here. The first jews came to Prague just over 1,000 years ago. There are a couple of synagogues which have a history of the Jewish people in Prague and the Czech country.

This is Maisel Synagogue, which contains a lot of historical documents and artifacts.

The Spanish Synagogue was built in the 19th century. During WWII, confiscated Jewish possessions were stored here, with an eventual goal of building a museum of the exterminated Jewish race.

The Pinkas Synagogue, from the 15th centry, seen here behind the cemetary, now contains inscriptions of all of the Czech Jews killed in the Nazi concentration camps (77,297 names). The communists erased the names, then after 1989 they were re-written, then the floods damaged them, and now they've been rewritten yet again.

The Old-New Synagogue was built in the 13th century.

The cemetary is amazing. The Jews were only allowed to bury their dead in this one area, so they had to keep adding layers, and now their are 12 layers. The ground settled, so the tombstones are at all different angles.

The Czech Jews were finally given full rights in the mid 19th century (after about 800 years of persecution, pogroms, and evictions), and in 1897 the ghetto (all but the synagogues and graveyard) was razed and rebuilt in an Art Nouveau style. There were almost no Jews in Prague after WWII (only 10,000 in the whole country survived), and they say there are maybe 1,700 in the entire city at this point.

Mà Vlast

2005-12-09T08:19:00.000-08:00

Mà Vlast ("My Country") is a cycle of symphonic poems by the Bohemian composer Bedrich Smetana, finished in 1879. It is a metaphorical piece about the Czech homeland. If you ever listen to classical "hot hits" radio, you've certainly heard the second song, Vltava ("The Moldau"). Last night I attended the premiere of a new ballet of Mà vlast choreographed and directed by Jan Durovcik, ballet performed by the Prage State Opera Ballet, and with music by the Prague State Opera Orchestra conducted by Petr Vronsky.

I got tickets on the same day, which meant I could only get Kc100 (about $4) tickets. As nosebleed section seats go, these had a pretty good vantage point, to the side of the stage just above the boxes, but the seat had so little legroom that I literally could not sit in it. I had to sit on the top of the seat and lean over the railing. Fortunately we were below the lights, so there was nobody behind us.

The ballet adapts the themes of the music to Czech events of the 20th century, including the Nazi occupation, the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, and the communist years. The first movement goes in a whirlwind from the origin of man tothe falling of the iron curtain (a transparent screen covered with swastikas, hammers and sickles, crosses, stars, and some symbol I didn't recognize. The Moldau piece was lots of blood, writhing, and doing it. The central focus of the ballet is a couple, a German man and a Czech woman, who are torn apart when the man is forced to leave his wife in 1947. She suffers, alone with her children through the fourth song ("From Czech Meadows and Woods-Seen by a Child"). The fifth and sixth songs, Tábor - Totalitarianism and Blaník - Revolution move from communist housing estates through the revolution of 1989.

The use of fluorescent lights to represent the outward life of the communist era was pretty effective. When the light switches back to stage lighting, movement goes from regimented and drab to organic. Eventually, during forced demonstrations of loyalty, there is occasional dissent which is brought back into line, and then finally the red scarfs are thrown off, the fluorescent lights go out one last time, candles are brought out, and the totalitarian regime ends. The end.

Well, it was a bit heavy-handed, but I thought the staging and dancing were very well-done. Aside from a very uncomfortable seat, I enjoyed it immensely.

Prague

2005-12-08T03:47:00.000-08:00

I made it to Prague, but spent most of my first day in bed with some sort of stomach bug. (Too many sweetbreads, not enough sleep?) I'm staying in a really nice hotel, called the K+K Central.

For some reason "good" hotels in Paris always have lovely exteriors, elegant lobbies, and often rather dumpy rooms. Getting to the K+K Central was a breath of fresh air--the room is very nice, done in a modern style with cherry(?) wood and granite. It's small, but well-designed, and the staff are pleasant and helpful.

The first thing I did when I got here was buy some tickets to the Prague symphony. Last night I was supposed to see Maxim Shostakovitch (Dmitri's son) conduct, playing a couple of dad's symphonic works. Unfortunately I stayed in bed instead. There's lots going on, though. Tonight I'm going to see the premiere of a new ballet set to the music of Smetana's Ma Vlast done by the State Opera (I don't know how well those opera singers dance, though...)

This morning I wandered up through the town square, and over the Charles bridge. Here is a slideshow.

Le Coude Fou

2005-12-08T03:41:00.000-08:00

I noticed this restaurant as I was walking around the Marais on a day when I decided that all I really wanted was a falafel, and the falafel available on the Rue des Rosiers Paris is really amazing. A couple of nights later I came back for dinner. Le Coude Fou serves simple, classic food done well, in a rustic atmosphere.

For starters, I had the Terrine de Canard avec Figues (terrine of duck with figs).

Afterwards, I had Ris de Veau Grand-Mère, which is veal sweetbreads in a white sauce with vegables. The vegetables included carrots, snow peas, and wild mushrooms. These were the best sweetbreads I've ever had.

For dessert I had Nougat Glacé avec Coulis de Fruits Rouges. Nougat Glacé is a soft nougat that's been frozen somewhat.

L'Âge D'Or des Sciences Arabes

2005-12-08T03:37:00.000-08:00

I went to an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris called "The Golden Age: The Arab Sciences." It spanned the era from the 9th through around the 15th century, and was divided into several sections: Mathematics, Astronomy, Geography, Astrology, Medicine, Pharmacology, Engineering, Architecture, etc. As most of my readers probably know, during this era science in the west was mostly stagnant, and the scientific knowledge that came from the Greeks (and Indians, and others) was preserved and advanced in the Arab world during that period. I'm a sucker for old manuscripts, and Arabic manuscripts can be particularly beautiful. I especially liked the ones on astronomy, which had lots of intricate drawings with different colored inks. Photos were forbidden inside the exhibit, but the building which houses the institute is very cool--the south facing wall is all glass windows, with the inside of each covered with these mechanical irises that open and close with the light, and also reflect Arabic/Islamic design themes. The building is even more striking because it's next to some of the ugliest architecture in Paris, the University of Paris Jussieu campus.

ObFood: afterwards I was really cold and hungry and had a fairly generic steak-frites at a brasserie nearby.

Paris Slideshow

2005-12-06T02:03:00.000-08:00

Here is a slideshow of photos from Paris.

Update: I added more photos.

McEspresso

2005-12-06T01:53:00.000-08:00

I called home (using Skype) from the McDonalds on the Champs Elysees. Along with the usual McStuff, they have a counter where you can buy an espresso and pastry. The espresso comes with a little piece of 70% cacao chocolate.

Salon Saveurs

2005-12-06T01:47:00.000-08:00

Clotilde had mentioned that the Salon de Saveurs was going on this weekend. It's an exhibition of food and wine, targeted at the retail market (i.e. it's not an industry conference). I went on Monday afternoon, after having a nice lunch. This was by far the largest such event I've ever been to. There were maybe one or two hundred stalls, each mostly a single producer. There must have been at least a dozen producers of foie gras alone. There were also a few foreign food boards and agriculture groups, and some people selling cookware. Most of the stalls had something to taste. I tried several kinds of ham, various dry sausages (what usually gets called salami in the US, but there are dozens of kinds), beans, about 5 kinds of fig jam, pate de foie gras, a few different wines, oils, chocolate, macaroons, and on and on. I had just had a large lunch, so I wasn't starving, and didn't have too many wines, even though there must have been 50 wineries, distilleries, champagne houses, and brewers represented, all of whom were offering tastes. It was crowded, it was hot, I was sweating like a pig, but I'm glad I went.

Since I'm going back to the U.S., I couldn't buy anything fresh that I wanted to take home. I bought some canned paté de foie gras, some pays-basque pork paté, some dried organic tarbais beans (for making cassoulet), some fig jam, and a couple of gifts that I won't mention here. Unfortunately the only artisinal marron glacé (candied chestnut) producer was completely sold out, and that was one of the things on my list. If I lived here, I'd have gone to town.

I came back to the hotel totally exhausted. I was going to lie down for an hour and then go out, but I instantly fell asleep and woke up around 1am. Still a bit of jet lag...so I'm writing up blog text which I'll actually get to post tomorrow, unless I go downstairs and pay 15 euros/hr to use the hotel's stupid "internet terminal" (yeah, right). I wish I'd bought just a little saucisson, because it's 2am and now I'm hungry!

Lunch Chez Catherine

2005-12-06T01:43:00.000-08:00

I had lunch at Chez Catherine, a restaurant recommended by Clotilde, and of course run by a namesake of my daughter. I should have taken pictures of the food, but I'm still too self-conscious to whip out the camera when every dish comes. Unlike the U.S., there aren't that many female chefs in France.

Since black truffles are in season, I started with the salade de mâche et St. Jaques aux Truffes (mâche and scallop salad with shaved truffles). The scallops were raw and sliced thin. The mâche had a subtle dressing, and there were enough truffle slices that they didn't feel like a garnish. This dish was sublime.

For a main course I had carre d'agneau de cozere rôti, caviar d'aubergine, beginet de courgette, piquillo farci a la compote de poivron vert (roasted ribs of lamb with eggplant caviar, zucchini fritter, and piquillo pepper stuffed with green pepper compote). The parts of this dish worked well together even though they seemed kind of spread out haphazardly on the plate. The lamb had a bit of a brown sauce that had a deep, rich flavor. The parsley garnish was fried until crisp, a nice touch. I drank a glass of Chinon 2003 from a producer I whose name I didn't catch.

Dacquoise noisette, ganache caramel à fleur de sel (hazelnut dacquoise with caramel/fleur de sel ganache) was absolutely amazing. Fleur de sel is,as I understand it, the salt you get when you skim foam off of ocean waves and dry it out. It often comes from Normandy. Caramel made with fleur de sel offsets the almost spicy sweetness of caramel with a slight saltiness of the fleur de sel. This was probably the heaviest use of salt I've had, but it worked well. The caramel was made into a ganache, which was layered with a crunchy layer and a layer with cake and hazelnuts. There was caramel foam also on the plate.

Decor is tastefully modern, no tablecloths. Service was pleasant and efficient. Good coffee. The prices aren't bad, 45 euros for a starter, main dish, and dessert, plus I pad the 10 euro supplement for the truffle starter.

Paris, Day 1

2005-12-04T09:34:00.000-08:00

Flew all night, wandered around in a daze waiting for my hotel room to become available. Choucroute with Jarret de Porc at Brasserie Lipp for lunch, followed by Pierre Hermé Mille Feuille with Caramel for dessert. Hotel's "internet access" is a computer in the lobby with a little stool, 5 euros for 15 minutes. No thanks, McDonalds's has free wifi (or at least for the price of a soda...) so here I am talking to Debbie on Skype and posting this.

Photos tomorrow, I promise!

Update: After my McDonalds internet session, I wandered over to the Marais, and had a falafel on the street on the Rue des Rosiers, followed by a tarte aux pommes at a very nice bakery/café not far from there a bit later. This morning, I'm at a cafe near the Opéra, where I found some random wifi.

Comments

2005-12-01T09:01:00.000-08:00

Now that I've had the first (well, second, really, but the first was just too funny) case of someone calling me names in the comments, here's the deal: I write this blog primarily as a conversation between myself and my friends. You're welcome to leave comments disagreeing with me, but if you call me names I'll probably delete your comment.

Thanksgiving Weekend: Mole Poblano de Guajalote

2005-11-27T15:21:00.000-08:00

For about the last fifteen years, we've been having a pot of leftover Turkey Mole Poblano on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Since some of us had enough of elaborate cooking, we opted for the mole paste in a jar, this year using the Rogelio Bueno mole paste. The one that's most common in the supermarket is Doña Maria. The two sauces are similar, though the Rogelio Bueno is maybe a little lighter, and the Doña Maria is a bit darker and spicier. Just avoid the canned mole paste; it's not as good. (Or make your own, if you have a few hours.) The paste is fairly chalky when it comes out of the jar, with a bit of oil on top. Over heat, add about a quart of broth (we used Swanson's chicken broth) slowly to the paste, stirring and breaking up the paste with a wooden spoon, and then add sugar and salt to taste. The sauce should be thick but smooth. We shredded the leftover turkey and added it to the broth, and stir it in and heat it a bit.

We serve this with tortillas, salsa, and guacamole. This is also often used as an enchilada filling, but we like gathering around the table and making tacos and burritos around the table. Our friends the Rasmussens came over, and we all ate mole, drank wine, beer, and eggnog, and had such a good time that everyone forgot all about dessert.

Debbie picked up some very fresh oysters at the farmer's market yesterday, and we ate the small ones raw for lunch. Today I barbecued the larger ones outside, on a very beautiful sunny afternoon. Debbie made Hogwash, which is a mignonette variant using rice vinegar and jalapeños along with shallots.

Then Stuart shot some potatoes from his spud cannon. The potato goes about 100 yards.

We got the tree up and trimmed on Saturday,

And Sushi seemed to enjoy it.

Back to Madoka

2005-11-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

We went back to Madoka a second time. We didn't get there until around 9:00pm, after a long and exhasting day in Bellvue with the kids. I made a reservation, but needn't have. I should have blogged about it sooner, because I've forgotten some of the details.

The food was as good as last time. Debbie started with a really amazing crab salad, in which the crab was cooked almost like a crab cake and placed on a bed of greens. I had the American Kobe beef quesadilla, served with a tomatillo salsa. Using Kobe-style beef in a quesadilla seems a little over-the-top, but it was good.

For an entree, Debbie had scallops served with a basil ginger sauce and fritters (of what I don't remember) with a chipotle mayonnaise. It was fabulous. I had a red curry risotto with prawns, mussels, and salmon. Sometimes I worry when I order a mixed seafood dish with salmon, because it often turns out to be overcooked extra-pink farmed atlantic salmon with an off flavor (you all know what I'm talking about!), but this was a nice bit of wild-caught king salmon, just cooked enough to be translucent. The red curry worked really well as a risotto. The rice was cooked perfectly, i.e. not to the point of mushiness, and there was enough sauce to give it a creamy texture and good flavor without overwhelming the rice.

We shared a bottle of another very reasonably priced wine, this time a Riesling from Alsace.

For dessert, Debbie had the white chocolate creme caramel again, and I had apple pie with ginger ice cream. I was pleasantly surprised to get real apple pie; everyone seems to make little tarts with paper-thin slices of apple these days.

Thanksgiving

2005-11-25T14:26:00.000-08:00

There are three things that make this the best turkey ever, and therefore our family tradition. The first is to get a fresh, free-range bird. We got a Diestel from the Town & Country. The second is to brine the turkey for 24 hours using Alice Waters' recipe. Harold McGee has famously pooh-poohed brining, but I think he's wrong. The third is to cook and smoke the turkey on the grill. I use applewood for smoking when I can, but all we could find around here was mesquite and hickory, so we used the latter. I use the "indirect" method where the coals are on the side of the grill, and the turkey is in the middle, dripping down into a drip pan set between the racks that hold the coals. One must be careful that coals or wood don't roll down into the drip pan, which ruins the drippings (I've done that before!) I use a lot of coals and run the vents wide open (with the cover on, of course), which gets it up to around 450 or 500 degrees. This is contrary to a lot of turkey wisdom, but it gives great results, and goes quite quickly. Unless you have a really big grill, you'll burn the wings ends like I did. I suppose I could trim them ahead of time. Every 1/2 hour or so I add wood chips that have been soaking in water to the coals. This generates quite a bit of smoke. If you cook it this way, the skin will turn very dark, and the turkey, especially the dark meat, will get a deep, smoky flavor. The pan drippings also get rather smoky. Cook it until the thick part of the thigh is 165 degF. Some recipes will tell you to cook it until 180 degF, but I think that makes it too dry. Let it stand for a while before carving and the temperature will continue to rise up to 10 degrees. The Diestel website suggests cooking the bird breast-side-down for the first half of cooking, which I might try next time.

This year we visited our friends the Rasmussens in Poulsbo. Debbie and our daughter Catherine joined the Rasmussens in volunteering to help cook and serve Thanksgiving for a community organization in the afternoon. I showed up at their house afterward with the fully-cooked turkey. Debbie made her traditional Apricot-Grand Marnier stuffing from the Silver Palate cookbook, whipped sweet potatoes with brown sugar-pecan topping, really yummy cranberry-orange relish, and cranberry sauce. Demi mashed some Bainbridge-grown organic heirloom potatoes, a traditional sage stuffing, some potato dinner rolls, brussels sprouts with a balsamic sauce, peas with pearl onions, and for dessert, pecan pie. The eldest Rasmussen daughter made a fabulous pumpkin cheesecake.

We've been drinking Navarro Gewurtztraminer with our Thanksgiving turkey every year for almost 20 years, and continued that tradition this year. It's dry but has that gewurtz-y flavor which goes really well with the smoked bird. We also had a bit of Navarro Zinfandel later in the meal.

It was a fine meal indeed, and everybody had a great time.

Brouwers Cafe Redux

2005-11-24T09:23:00.000-08:00

I went to Brouwers just after it opened, and thought the food was so-so. Yesterday I returned for lunch, and I am pleased to report that it was much better this time. They're pretty empty at lunchtime, which is perhaps not surprising for a shrine to Belgian beer. I had a bratwurst (made by Uli's), served on a pile of warm sauerkraut mixed with coarse Dijon mustard. The bratwurst was browned but not overdone, and the sauerkraut had a good, homemade flavor. I also had a small side of fries, which were great, as one should expect at a Belgian restaurant, served with some garlicky aioli, much better than the aioli I had last time. The menu also has more choices than it did last time, including some stews which looked intriguing, so I'll have to go back and try those.

Let's Go to the Pub for a Pint!

2005-11-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

When I was younger, I spent some time with some friends who live in Glasgow. Pretty much every activity was followed by the suggestion, "let's go to the pub for a pint," which we did. The pub we usually went to was right around the corner, though sometimes we went to the pub a little farther away, which was at the forefront of the nascent (20 years ago) "real ale" movement. I assume by now most pubs in Scotland serve "real ale." One thing we didn't do much of at the pub was eat; the food was not very good.

To this day, Debbie and I will say to each other, in a bad imitation of a Scottish accent, "let's go to the pub for a pint," but now we end up at the Harbour Pub, which is right above Eagle Harbor in the town formerly known as Winslow, now downtown Bainbridge Island. It has lovely views of the harbor and out to Seattle beyond, and a fairly large deck for sitting outside during nice weather (though they recently installed a comically large umbrella on the deck, for some reason.) There's a fire burning in the corner, very pleasant on a cold evening.

Unlike the pub in Glasgow, this one does have good food. They use organic produce and natural, free-range, etc., meat. Great fish and chips, a nice big greasy bacon cheeseburger, along with some more interesting items, including the Killer (life affirming) Shrimp, and some good salads. Washington has its share of "real ale," and Harbour House has a good selection. They have a full bar, but I've never bothered with a cocktail.

It's 21 and over only, which is good and bad--we can't take the kids, but we don't have to put up with anyone else's kids either ;-) They also don't have two TVs on either side of the bar blaring out Sportscenter every minute of the day, which is kind of nice--if I want to watch TV I'll stay home. For "pub food" and the like in an all-ages format and still a killer view, Doc's down the street fits the bill. The food isn't as good, but it'll do.

Ghandi Redux

2005-11-12T12:19:00.000-08:00

My previous post about Ghandi, the Indian restaurant on Bainbridge Island, wasn't very complimentary. Michael, who works there, commented that the food and service had improved, so we gave it another try.

Now that they keep the place clean, the space is pleasant, nicer than a lot of Indian restaurants. Another thing I like is that they have a good selection of northwest microbrews, rather than just the usual Indian lagers. Whether I like the food still depends on what I order. I've liked the spinach with paneer, the koftas, the pakoras, and the samosas. The tandoori is not bad, but I still wish they wouldn't put cooked onions on top--they make it a little sweet and sticky. Twice now I've gotten Naan that was undercooked (i.e. the dough was raw), so that's something they need to work on.

If you're in the Bay Area, Ajanta in Berkeley is my favorite sit-down Indian restaurant, and Vik's is great for a snack or informal lunch.

Phở

2005-11-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

We wanted some Phở, and weren't willing to schlep the whole family across the sound, so I decided to make it. I used the recipe in Mai Pham's Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. It takes a while, but the result is a good, authentic-tasting broth.

It starts with 5 pounds of beef marrow bones and 2 pounds of beef chuck. You cut the piece of chuck in half, and then put it all in a pot of water to cover, and heat until boiling. At the same time heat 6 quarts of water in a stockpot. Then you boil for 5 minutes, and throw that water out, taking a lot of the inital scum with it. Then the bones and meat go into the stockpot, to which 1/4c of fish sauce and 3Tbsp sugar, a 6 inch piece of charred ginger, and 2 charred yellow onions are added. (You char and peel them over an open flame). This gets simmered for a while, skimming scum and fat. After 40 minutes or so take one piece of the beef chuck out, and put it in cold water to cover for 40 minutes. Then slice up the chuck and put it aside. Then the broth gets simmered for another 50 minutes, at which time you toast 6 star anise and 10 cloves in a pan until fragrant, put them in cheesecloth, and add them to the broth. After another 1/2 hour, skimming all the while, take out the spices and onions, add a tablespoon of salt, and it's ready. I simmered it quite a bit longer, because it was done before anyone was ready to eat.

Cook some pho noodles in boiling water for just until chewy(20 or 30 seconds) and then put them in a bowl with some thinly sliced raw sirloin (freeze it a bit first), and some of the cooked chuck. Bring the broth to a boil and add it to the bowl. Garnish with scallions, cilantro, and thinly-sliced yellow onion, and serve with the usual pho plate of goodies (thai basil, sawtoof leaf herb if you can find it, bean sprouts, sliced lime, vietnamese chili sauce, sliced peppers, hoisin). On the table, add your favorite goodies and eat quickly before the noodles absorb too much liquid. I like some of the other stuff they put in pho, like tripe and tendon, but Mai Pham doesn't tell me what kind to use or how to prepare it, so I'll have to look around.

The pho turned out great. I probably could have gotten the broth a little clearer. It was a lot of work, and it might be easier to get on the boat and go to Pho Hoa. The only trouble is, darling Catherine hates pho.

I also made goi cuon for an appetizer, which we ended up eating all of in the afternoon because they were so good.

Green Chile Stew

2005-10-31T21:19:00.000-08:00

Our friend Demi and her family came over to celebrate her birthday. One of the things Demi enjoyed the most from her college days in Santa Fe was the food, especially having a nice bowl of Green Chile Stew, so Debbie decided to make it for Demi's dinner. The place to start when making this dish is, not surprisingly, the green chiles--lots of them, and they should preferably be New Mexico chiles, not Anaheim chiles. Fortunately for the sake of our stew, the chile guy at Pike Place market had fresh green New Mexico chiles that he grows in eastern Washington. The first thing to do with them is to roast them. Some people roast them on the stove, but we like to do it over charcoal, both because it gives a nice flavor and because there are a lot of chiles to roast, and it would take forever on the stove.

They should be roasted until they blacken and blister. Once they're done, they should steam in a plastic bag for a little while, and then they get peeled and seeded. It was a beautiful afternoon on Saturday, so Debbie was able to do it all sitting outside in the sun.

Once that's done, the rest of it is pretty straightforward: brown some lean cubed pork (we used pork shoulder), cook some onions until soft, add some garlic, diced tomatoes, pork, diced potatoes, cover with water, and cook for about 3 hours.

We started by munching on some Mole Sausage from Salumi, and I made some Margaritas (in a martini style, i.e. shaken and strained--4 parts tequila, 1 part grand marnier, 1 part meyer lemon simple syrup, juice of 2 key limes.)

For an appetizer I made quesadillas. A real quesadilla is not just a flour-and-cheese sandwich. You start with 1lb of masa, which is the stuff you make corn tortillas out of. I was too lazy to travel across the seas to get fresh masa, so I made it using masa harina. Add 3 Tbsp flour, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1 Tbsp lard and knead it for about 5 minutes, then let it rest for 10 minutes. Make walnut-sized balls, flatten them out in a tortilla press until they're about 4" round, put a blob of filling on top, fold over, and seal. I decided to do something different, and filled most of them with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. The rest I filled with "mexican cheese mix" from Safeway, so that the kids might eat some. The filled quesadillas then get deep fried until they're golden. The dough was a bit fragile; I don't think I kneaded it quite long enough. The goat cheese and sun-dried tomato "California Quesadilla" was pretty good, although it's essential to get the quesadilla fully sealed, otherwise the sun-dried tomato gets fried, and it turns black and chewy. We served them with guacamole and salsa, though I kind of liked the goat cheese ones as they were.

For dessert Debbie made the world-famous Chocolate Ancho Chile and Orange Cake from the Chronicle cookbook. There's just enough ancho chile flavor to make the flavors really deep, but not enough to make it hot. Even the kids present loved it, except the youngest, who refused it on principle.

J'Aime les Crêpes

2005-10-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

J'Aime les Crêpes in Kingston has some of the best crêpes I've had in the states. Paul, the owner, got his authentic buckwheat-blend recipe from a woman in Bretagne. Everything is cooked fresh to order, which is more than I can say for most of the crêpe stands in Paris these days. A second branch is going to open in a building under construction in Winslow (the one at Bjune and Madison, IIRC) at some point hopefully soon. I can't wait!

Madoka

2005-10-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

Madoka is Bainbridge Island's newest restaurant, which just opened yesterday. We had dinner there tonight, on their second evening of full service. Since we just moved to the area this year, we never made it to chef Alvin Binuya's previous Seattle gigs, Ponti Seafood Grill and Axis, but I understand they were both well-regarded. Co-owner Jose Gonzales runs the front of the house. He's a really nice guy, and seems to run a tight ship, given how well things went on their second night--only slightly bumpy, nothing really to complain about.

Madoka is located in what used to be Bistro Pleasant Beach, on Winslow Way just east of Madison. The building has a parking lot to the side. They've done quite a bit of remodeling on the space, and it turned out really well--it's a very sophisticated and elegant space, with dark, rich colors and good lighting. The kitchen is open on one side, and not lighted too harshly. There is a terrace outside with tables, so hopefully once they open for lunch one could eat outside on nice days.

The menu hes been described as pan-Pacific, but that's really just a jumping-off point. We started off sharing the Ahi Poke and the Wild Mushroom Ravioli. The Ahi Poke is probably the best rendition of this dish I've had. Sometimes it can be sticky sweet, but this got a nice balance of flavor. The ahi was in approximately 1/2" cubes, mixed with some seaweed, and served with a little ball of wasabi granita and finely diced cucumber on the side, along with some crunchy sesame seed puffs.

The ravioli was made with chanterelles and I think a bit of lobster, with pine nuts and fried sage. They were very nicely flavored, with a simple sage butter. The fried sage leaves were perfect. Our only complaint was that the ravioli could have been a little warmer.

For a main dish, Debbie had the Cappelini with smoked duck, plantain-mango chutney, and basil. This was an interesting dish; the "chutney" was mixed around with the rest of the ingredients, and the basil was nicely wilted. The flavors were good, though we both agreed that the particular ingredients would do better on a different substrate than cappelini, like either in a bowl with a bit of duck-basil broth, or maybe on top of some couscous.

I had the braised lamb shank, which was served on top of a puree of potatoes and parsnips (I think), with some long and paper-thin plantain chips. The lamb was meltingly tender, as lamb shank should be, with a richly flavorful brown reduction sauce. We both agreed it was the best lamb shank dish we'd had.

The wine list is small but well put together, with interesting selections from all over the world. I understand Larry Davidson at Winslow Wine worked on the wine list, and he did a great job. The prices on the wine are really quite reasonable. We had a Morgan 2003 Pinot Noir "Twelve Clones" from the Salinas Valley, which was $35.

I understand that Chef Binuya's mom (who used to have a pastry shop on Vashon Island) is the pastry chef. I had a Valrhona bittersweet chocolate truffle tart, which was chocolatey good through and through. Debbie had the vanilla bean white chocolate creme caramel, which was silken and creamy, not excessively gelatinous like creme caramel can sometimes be.

A great start, hope it keeps getting beter.

Today's Rants: Worse than Instant?

2005-10-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

Rant #73:

Several asian cuisines have pastes that come in jars or tubs that can be used as the basis of a sauce if one is lazy. I've done this with Thai curries (green, red, yellow--sautee a bit, mix with coconut milk, stir, add meat and vegetables) and with different Indian food (tandoori--mix with yogurt, or different curries, also to be mixed with yogurt, marinate and grill for tandoori, just cook for curries). The results are not as good as when made from scratch, which I've occasionally done also, but those recipes do go on and on...(and you don't really want asafoetida in your house anyway because it stinks.)

So what continually amazes me is how restaurants can serve food with a straight face that is worse than one can make with one jar of paste, one can of coconut milk or tub of yogurt, maybe some marinading, and straightforward cooking. How is this possible? My only thought is that the pastes (especially the Thai ones) are usually as hot as they're supposed to be, and if your restaurant caters to people who don't like spicy food, maybe you can't use the premade pastes. Does that sound plausible? It could be the cost, I guess, but the Thai pastes especially are quite inexpensive per serving, and the Indian ones aren't too bad either.

Rant #73a:
There's a place that serves chaat next to an Indian grocery warehouse store in West Berkeley called Vik's Chaat Corner. It's an amazing place, as long as decor isn't what you're after. What I also found amazing is that the woman working behind the counter at the grocery store told me that their Indian frozen entrees were better than at most local Indian restaurants. I tried them, and she was right! (They were made by Deep in New Jersey). What's up with that?

Chanterelles

2005-10-18T20:07:00.000-07:00

It's feeling very autumnal these days. The leaves are turning, the blackberries have shrivelled up, and it's getting a bit chilly out. One definite upside is that Chanterelles (the trumpet-shaped wild mushroom seen in the photo above) are abundant around here this time of year. Chanterelles are a rare delicacy in a lot of the country. Where we used to live they were between $18 and $30 per pound in the supermarket if you could get them at all, and were often not very fresh. Not so around here--I'm told that they're all over the island right now, including the Grand Forest. The chanterelles pictured above are available at the T&C market for under $5/pound, which keeps me from stomping around the forest (bum knee and all...) My friend Richard never picks any mushrooms but chanterelles, because he claims that they don't look like any other mushroom, so he's pretty sure they're not poisonous. But still, do please ask a competent mycologist before you eat a wild mushroom you've gathered if you're not completely sure of yourself.

For dinner tonight, Debbie made an old fave to start, Chanterelles with Dried Apricots, Chives, and Shallots on Toast. Soak 1/2c halved dried apricots in 1/2c chicken broth, melt a tablespoon or two of butter, sautee some finely chopped shallots, add cleaned and roughly sliced chanterelles, sautee until somewhat soft, add the apricots and soaking liquid, and cook down until you get a bit of a sauce. Add some chives. Pour the mixture on top of a slice of toast.

The kids wouldn't go near this, which is sad because Stuart was all over this dish when he was around 2, saying "want more chanterelles..." Now he's a teenager, and sneers at it. He did eat the loin of pork with garlic and rosemary, though. Catherine ate toast.

Café Campagne and Richard Thompson

2005-10-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

My friend John flew up from Walnut Creek to see Richard Thompson at Benaroya (Nordstrom Hall, the small one). We were joined by John's friend Lynn. Sadly, our babysitting plans fell through at the last minute, so Debbie graciously offered to stay home with the kids.

We went to Café Campagne for dinner, because I knew it was the type of place that John would like. I can't figure out why it's not completely full every night--the food is great, and it's got an informal vibe that the upstairs restaurant doesn't (I found the latter a bit cold, even though the food was great.) We started with a couple of appetizers--the Brandade de Morue (salt cod purée) and the Paté de Campagne, which is one of the best I've had (though nothing beats my friend Pascal's homemade paté). I had a lamb shoulder served with a flatbread made of chickpeas. John had the Merguez sausage, and Lynn had the prix fixe with a salad, truite amandine, and a caramel pot de crème with a bit of fleur de sel sprinkled on top, which was to be mixed in. Lynn was kind of full, so we all shared the pot de crème, which was luscious.

Afterwards we went to the concert. We managed to sell the extra ticket to someone who thought they'd show up at the last minute to a sold-out show. John didn't want to bother, and he paid for them, but Lynn and I felt obligated to at least try. Of course, had we left it unsold, I wouldn't have had to sit next to a slightly annoying person who didn't enjoy the concert. The rest of us did. There was an opening act, Griffin something (Holt?) who played a 1/2 hour set. He strummed his guitar, whined that he didn't have the chance to get a beer before the show (which someone eventually brought him) and sang songs about relationships and one about being Judas.

Richard Thompson was accompanied by Danny Thompson (no relation), a stand-up bassist who is regarded as one of the best jazz bassists on the planet. They played about a 2-hour set, including encores. Richard Thompson is one of the most amazing guitarists I've ever seen, and a great songwriter, with a lot of wit. He's also got a very dry sense of humor. I think I figured out one reason I'll never be a great guitar player: we were sitting quite close (row D) so I could see that Richard Thompson's fingers are long enough that the first two segments of each finger, maybe excluding the pinky, can span the width of the fretboard, so he doesn't have to bend his hand around the neck like I do. The other reasons, of course, are lack of innate skill, and lack of study or practice. Thompson plays a bass line with a pick while playing really amazing lead lines with his fingers.

The show ended at 11, and by the time we got out of the hall it was about 6 past. I have an injured knee and leg from biking and paintball, so I hobbled as fast as I could to the ferry terminal, but missed the 11:15 by 2 minutes, so I had to wait around for the 12:45. Commuter Comforts saved the day again, though they pestered us into leaving around 12:10. A cab ride home with one of our barely functional Bainbridge cab drivers, and I was in bed by 1:40. A fine evening out, except for that hanging out in the ferry terminal for 1.5 hours bit.

Dinner with Friends

2005-10-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

We had a few friends over for dinner a week ago Sunday, and I'm finally getting to blogging about it.

We started with some cheese and olives and drank a bottle of Spanish Red (the name of which I no longer remember) that Kiyo and Peter brought, which was perfect with the cheese. Next we opened a Contra Costa County Old Vines Mourvèdre 1993 from Cline that Samantha and Barbie brought. It was fabulous.

For a main course, we had a lasagne made with pumpkin, leeks, prosciutto, bechamel sauce, walnuts, and parmesan that Debbie made. It was really good, and very autumnal. If anyone requests it, I'll post the recipe. With dinner, after we finished the Cline, we had a 1993 Pinot Noir from Alloro Vineyard in the Willamette Valley that was recommended to me by Alain at the T&C, and his recommendations are usually spot-on. He said it was his favorite Oregon Pinot, and I have to say I wouldn't disagree. Samantha made a salad of arugula with seared ahi tuna and a balsamic vinaigrette, which was fabulous. My son Stuart whined about the pepper on the ahi, so Barbie graciously carved off the outside of some slices for him.

For dessert we had a really great chocolate port nut tart that Kiyo made, à la mode. I wish I had some right now! Being Sunday night, nobody was quite up to having port with the tart, everyone remembering the ferry beckoning them at some ungodly hour of the morning. I left the pears and blue cheese for another day, because everyone was stuffed, and you really need to eat that while drinking port for the full effect.

After it rained a bit just before dinner, while we were standing around drinking wine and eating olives and Humboldt Fog, the sun started breaking through, and we got an amazing double rainbow. None of us thought to run and get a camera, because we all stood in the backyard and said "Ooh!" Other residents of Bainbridge, however, did manage a few shots.

After dinner, Samantha demonstrated the Martha Stewart magic Chinese Laundry t-shirt folding trick, and we were all awed. Two pinches, one fold, a third pinch, one shake, and one more fold, and you have a perfectly-folded t-shirt, in about 1/4 the time it used to take me to fold a rumpled mess. My life is transformed. (I wear a lot of t-shirts...)

Mor Mor Bistro

2005-10-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

We had lunch at Mor Mor Bistro in Poulsbo today. It had been recommended by some friends.

The interior is a bit uninspired--it looks like it was done without any professional design help. The service was fine, nothing to complain about. We started by sharing an "artisinal meat and cheese platter." I guess everything was decent enough--it comes with a few slices of mostly hard cheese, a couple of slices of salami and coppa and another meat product I didn't recognize. I had a Caesar Salad, which was not much better than you get at the Sizzler--the lettuce was almost chiffonaded, which I don't like in a Caesar Salad (and really isn't what it's supposed to be), and maybe not as pristine as it should be. The dressing was a bit on the boring side--I like it punchy and full of anchovies. I thought the parmesan cheese was perhaps grated too finely (they probably used a Microplane grater). It should have a bit of texture. The croutons were rock-hard. They did use mostly hearts of romaine, which is a plus--the sizzler uses the whole head. Next, I had a burger with their "famous" parmesan fries. The burger was pleasant enough, good slices of bacon and cheese, but perhaps nothing to write home about. The "famous" fries were just mediocre french fries with parmesan cheese grated on top, maybe too late to get it all melted. Debbie had three-cheese ravioli, which were OK, but not much better than what you'd get in the refrigerator section at Safeway. The sauce was a bit uninteresting.

All in all, a bit disappointing, nothing objectionable but nothing particularly inspiring either, and probably not worth the drive to Poulsbo. Maybe dinner is better (which happens at some restaurants, where the B-team makes lunch.)