Category: Food

Four of us had a brunch at the House of Hong in Seattle’s International District on Sunday.  We had dim sum : serving carts that are brought by the table with all kinds of plates with bite-sized food items, and the diners select what they want.  We had turnip cake (mashed daikon radish mixed with bits of dried shrimp and pork sausage that are steamed and then cut into slices and pan-fried), shao mai (steamed pork dumplings), shrimp dumplings, buns with a Cantonese barbecued pork filling and gai lan. Gai lan is a leafy green vegetable that also goes by the name Chinese broccoli.   The tea served is an important part of the meal as well.  We couldn’t nearly figure out what kind of tea we had, then the waitress came by and explained it was actually a blend of three teas : Chrysanthemum, oolong and Puer (blank) tea.

Sriracha sauce is a hot sauce product by Huy Fong Foods, created by Chinese-Vietnamese founder David Tran.  Now 68 years old, he came to the USA in 1979, started out in Boston, found little climate comfort in the snowy winters there and soon moved his family to Los Angeles.  He created the sauce at first by grinding jalapeno peppers out by hand.  The original sauce that he made of jalapenos, vinegar, sugar, salt and garlic, has changed very little since that time.  His brand of sriracha – it is now a generic term like ketchup – has become shockingly popular in the USA.

So when I saw it on the grocery store shelf here, I bought a small bottle.  I squeezed just a little dab into my rice for dinner tonight, and it’s very hot for my taste buds, but I will hang in there and try it a few more times.

It feels like I worked day and night this week, so I was happy to come back to the hotel and relax for just a little bit this afternoon.  The weather here was really not bad at all – not much came of the ‘wintry mix’.   I took my Chevy Cruze to the Giant Eagle (grocery store) for a dinner from their hot buffet, and then I strolled through the store’s vast beverage selection to check out the beers from all over the world.

A group of nine of us went out to Von Trapp’s tonight : a new German-style bier and bratwurst hall right here in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district on 12th Ave.  The inside of the place is cavernous and comes complete will some bocce ball* courts as well.   *closely related to bowls/ lawn bowling

I washed down my bratwurst and sauerkraut with a pils (of course : it’s my favorite type of beer), and also had a roasted beet salad with it.  We all agreed that the food was not outstanding, but definitely worth coming back to.  The place was packed with people and noisy! .. but I suspect that’s what patrons of these establishments like. The noise makes for a buzz of excitement, to go with the buzz from one’s beer!

 

My lunch with my friend Doug on Wednesday was a chicken burrito from the Pesos Kitchen & Lounge in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood.

The place has a ‘cantina’ atmosphere and my Ranchero style burrito was delicioso.  The outside sign and doors and windows feature some cool cast-iron artwork.

I ordered a vegan burger at our favorite watering hole and pub grub place here in Seattle on Saturday night – the Elysian Brewing Company.  Soon after, the food server showed up with a burger with a strip of bacon on it.  No, this is not mine, said I.  What happened was that I said ‘vay-gen burger’ and the waiter heard ‘bacon burger’.  I should have known something was up when he inquired ‘How do you want that cooked?’ .. I said, well how it is normally cooked? and he said ‘Medium’. Medium it is, I said (LOL).  Veggie burgers are cooked only one way.   Anyway, they replaced the bacon burger for me, the veggie burger was very tasty, and went very well with my Zephyrus Pilsner beer (it’s a German pilsner beer).

It was a frosty Saturday morning in Seattle, but a bright and sunny day. On Saturday night I spotted a Bavarian ‘Ayinger’ beer in my local grocery store, the exact same one that I saw advertised  in Munich.  So of course I had to buy one.  (Confession : a nice colorful label gets me every time).  It is a very tasty beer, making a nice foamy head when poured.  Aying is a town south west of Munich – that is actually still in the Munich municipality.

Starbucks offers ‘Reserve’ coffees – coffee limited to a particular location’s harvest.  I like good coffee, but if I were to go for these ‘Reserve’ coffees it would be more the romantic appeal of the exotic location than the flavor and ‘notes’ of the coffee that would motivate me.  And better be prepared to pay up to 3 or 4 times the going rate for Starbucks house coffee.  Sip it slo-o-owly and do not knock over that cup!

 

Royal apricots, that is.  These are the last apricots of the season from the Montagu district, brought to us here in Stellenbosch by a family member.  Apricot trees are of the species Prunus armeniaca, which means they are a type of prune, and that they are believed to originate from Armenia (although I see some web sources say China).

 

One cannot miss the giant strawberries from the Mooiberge Farm Stall on the way from Stellenbosch to The Strand on the R44 road. They are in season here, and tourists can wander through the fields and pick them on Saturdays and Sundays, and pay by the kilogram.  I hope they go and check now and again if there’s still some left!  Meanwhile, CNN reported just today about strawberry plants in the southern town of Qaqoortoq in Greenland.  With the warming of the climate there, they are being tested there to see whether they will survive the harsh winter, and they seem to survive so far.  So quite possibly the Greenlanders will have strawberries of their own !

I see a 100°F/ 38°C for Friday in the weather forecast here! .. so best to lie low in the shade of a house or a tree, right?  And drink lots of water, juice and iced tea.

 

Winter does not stop the Seattle beer lovers from having one, and Friday night one of us (you know who you are!) had an Elysian Bifrost Winter Ale.  It weighs in at 7.5% alcohol by volume!  I thought ‘bifrost’ simply means doubly frosty or cold (which is certainly implied by the beer label picture).  But in Norse mythology Bifröst is a burning rainbow bridge that reaches between Midgard (earth) and Asgard, the realm of the gods.  So that explains the bridge that was shown in the movie Thor.

It’s 10 pm Mountain Time and I am at Salt Lake City airport waiting for my colleague to arrive from the East Coast so that we can share a rental car.   We may stop at the In-n-Out Burger with its ‘animal style’ burgers and others on from the not-so-secret menu. I think it refers to terms that the servers and customers started to make up – apart from the official items on the menu.   The In-n-Out is next to interstate I-15 on the way up to Ogden. I just had a banana and a piece of pumpkin loaf ‘bread’ (it’s actually cake!) from Starbucks – and I think that was dinner for me, though.

 

There was talk about the Hostess company and its popular Twinkie (sponge cake filled with cream) snack food even in Ogden last week when I was there.  The company is in serious financial trouble, and the news today is that it will declare bankruptcy.  (So the factory in Ogden will possibly close, with the loss of several hundred jobs there).   So if this American food icon would go away*, is it really a loss?  Steve Ettlinger points out in his book ‘Twinkie, Deconstructed’ that the little spongecake is fashioned out of at least 37 ingredients.  The website caloriecount grades Twinkies an F (the lowest score) for nutrition. One Twinkie packs 150 calories and has 13% of your daily saturated fat intake.

*It’s quite possible that another food company will buy the brand from Hostess.

As for who is to blame for the bankruptcy, here is business magazine Forbes’ take –  http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/11/18/hostess-twinkie-defense-is-a-management-failure/   Forbes also mentions the 1978 ‘Twinkie Defense’ incident where Dan White killed San Francisco‘s mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk.  The press labeled his defense the ‘Twinkie Defense’ because he claimed eating sugary junk food – like Twinkies – caused diminished capacity.  Amazingly the jury bought it, and convicted him of manslaughter instead of murder saying he really wasn’t responsible for his own actions.  An outraged city rioted.

 

There is no cafeteria here on site, so for those that did not pack lunch for work (me), the Mexican lunch truck (the ‘roach coach’ as we call it affectionately), shows up at noon.  It’s a big truck outfitted with a mobile kitchen, a food serving window and an icebox (for the mango flavored soda with real sugar).  Jarritos (‘little jars’) is a popular brand of soft drink in Mexico. The business was started by Don Francisco ‘El Güero’ Hill in 1950.

Our lunch truck driver is actually from El Salvador, but his wife is from Mexico.  Is the drug/ gang violence in Mexico getting any better? I asked.   No – if anything it’s getting worse, he told me.

We are staying in the town of Ogden north of Salt Lake City, close to our project location.  After work today, we stopped by the Shooting Star Saloon.  It is located in a little town called Huntsville (no, not Huntsville, Alabama!).  It’s a beer-and-burgers-only place that we were told is the oldest operational saloon west of the Mississippi, complete with Wild West shoot-outs and connections to Al Capone (he stored bootleg liquor in the basement during Prohibition).

Here is my Yuengling Lager beer I am having in the lounge in Pittsburgh airport.  I am heading back to Seattle, again via Denver.  It was sunny but cold here today.  I had to scrape a layer of frost from the rental car’s windows this morning.

 

I helped Anheuser-Busch put their SAP system in (this started in 1995).  A major article about the company and its beer just appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.   Taken over by InBev in 2008, the A-B company, its iconic Budweiser beer and its packaging have been targeted with cost cutting by 52-year old Brazilian-born CEO Carlos Brito.  As far as investors are concerned Brito has done extremely well.  For beer-drinkers and traditionalists, it’s a different story. No more Hallentauer Mittelfrüh hops from Germany for Budweiser, no more whole grain rice (broken rice will do), and out of business goes one of its two beech wood chip suppliers in Tennessee.  Check out this cool ’99 Beer Facts’ chart from the Bloomberg Businessweek’s on-line issue.

Don’t be too shocked, but I have never owned a rice cooker! So I picked up this little Black and Decker model that can cook all of three cups of rice. It went for only $16 on a department store sale. Put the rice and water in (a cheat sheet tells you how much of each), and switch the machine on.  And 25 mins later you have perfectly cooked rice.  How easy is that?! And how does the cooker know when to switch from ‘cook’ to ‘warm’?  Well, water boils at an even temperature (and the steam escapes through a hole in the cooker’s lid).  As soon as the water is gone, the temperature of the rice rises, the signal to the cooker’s thermostat to turn off the heat and switch to ‘warm’ mode.  And there it is, waiting for you – warm fluffy cooked rice.

P.S.  And here is the most famous South African brand of rice that I remember from my childhood.  ‘It’s so easy, a child can do it’, said the commercials on TV back then.  It is parboiled (partially boiled) in the husk before packaging, and takes less time to cook.  About 50% of the world’s paddy production gets this treatment.

The Great Eagle is a grocery store here in Cranberry township north of Pittsburgh, and what a bargain its hot food buffet is!  Get exactly what you want, without waiting for your meal in a restaurant after a long day of meetings.   The store also has an amazing collection of beers for sale from all over the world.