Peter's Mostly Food Blog

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.