Category: Food

My friends and I went to Bent Burger in the Seward Park neighborhood for a burger and a beer. (No, the burgers are perfectly even and not ‘bent’. Bent is the family that owns the restaurant).   I had a turkey burger with yam fries : very good.

So fall season has started officially here in the Northern Hemisphere.  It was a little grey on Saturday morning and I decided it’s high time I baked some rusks again, from a recipe I got from my mom a long time ago (1996 says the date on the hand-written fax with the recipe).  Rusks are hard, dry biscuits that are twice-baked to dry them out completely.  The pictures show the progression and the final result.  It takes a little patience to dry the rusks out, and the whole house smells rusky and biscuity afterwards, but hey, that’s not a problem. I discovered that there is such a thing as aluminum-free baking powder, and got some. Supposedly it makes for a better taste of cookies or biscuits that are baked with it.

Our training is complete, three-hour exam and all (three essay type questions, and what a shock to write an exam in long-hand pen on paper!).  Here are some pictures from my Friday night walk-about.

I could not get myself to throw this cool aluminum can in the recycle bin, so it came home with me all the way from a vending machine in Tokyo!  And what would ‘gokuri’ mean?  It is a Japanese adverb, roughly meaning  (drink down) gulpingly or noisily.

Here is a limited edition blue  ‘Aape’ Pepsi can that I spotted here at work. (They come in brown as well, and yes, that is an ape face in the circle .. with several other faces floating around in the camouflage).  As far as I can tell the cans are marketed only in China.

It’s Rainier cherry season and I got some even though they are pretty darn expensive.   The cherries were cultivated back in 1952 in Washington State. They are very sensitive to temperature, wind, and rain. About a third of a Rainier cherry orchard’s crop is eaten by birds.

‘Blue is back’ says the box of Smarties chocolate bean candies (Nestlé’s version of M&Ms that I bought in South Africa).  Yes, but which ones are blue? I see periwinkle and lavender but no blue.  Must be the ‘no artificial colours’ that mutes the colors. Aww.  I guess Nestlé wants to avoid the situation that Mars candy company had some time ago.  Red M&Ms were discontinued from 1976 to 1985 after the FDA banned Red Dye No. 2 — even though M&M’s did not contain this dye.

Here is my acquisition of the day from the fruit market : a papaya (in Chinese木瓜 mù​ guā), which means ‘tree melon’.  Yes, papayas grow on trees with a single stem that can get 10m (30ft) tall.  Papayas have good stuff inside, with lots of vitamin A and vitamin C.

Here’s Friday night’s dinner menu from the newly remodeled Wild Seafood Restaurant across from the Sheraton Hotel.  We ordered all the items shown here except the chao fan (fried rice).  And we did have seafood – a big grey, flat fish from the restaurant’s fish tanks as usual – a little bit like a sole, which is cooked and served up with a soy-sesame oil-green onion sauce.

So! These are the biscuits that came out of the Especially Thick Biscuit box.  The biscuits are in the mold of ‘rich tea’ or Marie biscuits.   They are good and ‘super big’, but not thick in dimension.  It turns out the thickness refers to the consistency of the biscuit.

This cardboard box with the cute translation is from the grocery store at work.  I will see if I can find some of the ‘especially thick biscuit’ on the shelf tomorrow !

These are Chinese bayberries (yáng ​méi 杨梅) from the fruit market close to where we work.  They are about the size of a US quarter coin, sweet, tart, and have a round seed in the middle of the fruit.

The limited catch of wild salmon from the Copper River in Alaska arrived in Seattle on Friday.  ‘Copper River’ salmon is not a species .. the salmon from there could be King, Sockeye or Coho, as explained on the web site   http://copperriversalmon.org/facts/species

And check out this picture (from Associated Press) with the Alaska Airlines crew showing off a big old salmon that has just been flown in.  Makes me wonder if they had it on board inside the plane.  And better watch out! those uniforms may need to be sent to the cleaners immediately!

I have been battling a sore throat all week but felt well enough tonight to meet my friends for our weekly beer-and-a-bite at The Elysian Alehouse here on Capitol Hill.  No beer for me tonight, though – so I chose a cucumber flavored ‘dry’ soda (=has very little sugar) from Seattle-based DRY Soda Co.  It was quite nice!  And my dinner was curry chicken stew with cauliflower, rice and pita bread.

I had to drink a lot of yucky electrolyte before going to the clinic here in Seattle for a routine check-up today.  The pharmacist suggested that I could flavor the stuff with Kool-Aid if I wanted to.  So I bought some ‘Lemonade’ .. but the electrolyte on its own was not that awful and I didn’t need to flavor it after all.  But it made me look up where the phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ came from.

‘He drank the Kool-Aid’ suggests that the person has mindlessly adopted the dogma of a group or leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications (from Wikipedia).    And so it turns out the phrase refers to the infamous 1978 Jonestown Massacre where religious cult leader Jim Jones’ followers followed him to death in a mass suicide.  A shocking 909 people died in Jamestown that day.  All the Peoples Temple members drank from a metal vat containing a mixture of Kool-Aid (that some say was actually a different brand called Flavor Aid), cyanide, and prescription drugs Valium, Phenergan, and chloral hydrate.

I had a pizza and wine dinner Friday night with my friends Bryan, Gary and Christopher.  We were very French with the pâté we had for starters (should I say hors d’œuvres? I usually think of a shrimp cocktail when hear ‘hors d’œuvres’!).  The pâté was brought to us all the way from Paris, France, by Christopher.  Pâté is a mixture of cooked ground meat and fat minced into a spreadable paste.

P.S.  I know my readers COULD NOT WAIT for the solution to the math problem, so here it is below.  I hope I got it right!  It took much longer than it should have to figure it out.