Category: Food

We went to a pub called ‘Standard Brewing’ tonight, in Seattle’s Central District. It’s been there a few years, but it was my first visit.

The beers on offer are brewed on site, and I had a Helmut: a Munich ‘Helles’, a medium- bodied lager with a full malt presence and a clean finish.

King salmon is the most expensive of the salmon for sale here in Seattle (and the best), and Copper River King Salmon is even more pricey.  Shipments from this year’s limited catch have arrived on Alaska Air, and salmon fillets were available at Pike Place market this weekend – for $75 per pound. Yikes.

Just for fun, I compiled a list of other expensive foods – much more expensive, in fact.   [Source: much of the information gleaned from a list published on The Awesome Daily.]

I picked up a new guilty pleasure while in Germany & Switzerland recently: putting Nutella* on my bread or toast.   The convenience stores in the train stations there sell single-serve Nutella packets, and once I had a few slices of bread with the stuff on, I was hooked.

Nutella is widely available here in the United States, and comes from a factory in Brantford, Ontario, in Canada.

*Nutella is a chocolate and hazelnut spread and has been around since 1964, when it was first produced in Alba, Italy – an area known for the production of hazelnuts. [From Wikipedia].

Melktert, Afrikaans for ‘milk tart, is a South African dessert consisting of a sweet pastry crust containing a creamy filling made from milk, flour, sugar and eggs.  Monday marked the fourth ‘National Milk Tart* Day in South Africa.

*I’m not so sure ‘milk tart’ is in wide use and a proper translation.   I think even English-speaking South Africans say melktert.

I noticed today at the No 10 bus stop here on 15th Avenue, that Captain Haddock from the Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé, is featured on the local restaurant’s rotating menu (food from Belgium in this case).  I will have to go in and sample some of the food .. waffles, for sure – and is haddock (fish) a Belgian dish?

P.S. Fererer won in straight sets over Zverev. Yay!  In the final four he will now face fellow Swiss Stan Wawrinka.

I got a whole nutmeg from a friend, and so I cooked up some green cabbage on Tuesday, and grated fresh nutmeg onto it.

Nutmeg is commonly added to sausages, meats, soups, preserves, puddings, and fruit pies.

Three of us had a burger and a beer at a fancy-burger place called Katsu Burger, tonight. The burgers, fries and dipping sauces are described as Japanese American fusion.  My chicken teriyaki burger with fries and Japanese mayonnaise* was very good.

*Mayonnaise with (among other ingredients) hondashi powder.  Hondashi powder is made from a smoked and dried fish called the bonito.

We had a team dinner at the Roka Akor tonight – an upscale Japanese bar in the Financial District.

There was a fixed menu with items such as chicken teriyaki, tuna sushi roll, golden beets and spicy beef.

For dessert there was cherry blossom panna cotta.

My Facebook group ‘South Africans in Seattle’ held a bake-and-grocery sale in the Mount Baker Community Center on Sunday, and I felt compelled to go check it out.  Maybe they have those giant jars of Marmite, or Pronutro (breakfast cereal) or Mrs Ball’s chutney, I thought.

Alas – none of those items were on sale. Several other types of South African food were on offer such as curry (with ground beef) and rice, biltong¹, braaivleis² and sweet desserts such as koeksisters³ and and melktert⁴.  The space inside was very crowded and the lines were very long, though – and I was too impatient to wait in line for food.   I did chat to some friendly South Africans :).  Not many have been in Seattle as long as I have been.

¹jerky, but saltier and never sweet    ²barbecued meat    ³a sticky syrup-infused version of a doughnut   ⁴Afrikaans for “milk tart”, is a South African dessert consisting of a sweet pastry crust containing a creamy filling made from milk, flour, sugar and eggs.

Here’s a peek inside the hole-in-the-wall Mensho Tokyo (676 Geary St), one of Japan’s most acclaimed ramen (noodle) bars, this being the first one outside Japan.  I read online that the place has been mobbed, ever since it had opened in February.  About 50 people were patiently waiting outside on Wednesday night to get in, when I walked by.  The text on the wall describes katsuo bushi, a stock made from dried bonito flakes.  (Bonito is a medium-sized predatory fish in the same family as tuna and mackerel).

We walked down to the McMenamins Six Arms on Pike Street tonight : a bar and eatery in a wedge-shaped building.  The inside has old-fashined and seventies-style chandeliers, and they serve up pub grub and house-made microbrews – our kind of beer.  Life is too short to drink Bud Light.

Here’s a chart from a recent TIME magazine that shows how percentages of daily consumption much room there is for improvement in the American diet.  (The breakdown is by calories, not by volume or mass).  Yes, diets are very complicated ! .. but surely we should all try to eat much more veggies.  And no, pizza and packaged foods do not count as vegetables!

Here is the Super Six restaurant where we had a burger and a beer tonight.  We think the restaurant is located in a re-purposed gas station or automotive repair work station.  Super Six refers to a kind of intake manifold on 70s and 80s car engines. One has to wonder with oil and gas prices as low as they are again, if fossil fuel engines will ever go away and be replaced by electric cars or hydrogen fuel cell cars.   I see the Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car did start selling in California .. but at an estimated 3,000 cars that will be sold this year, it’s off to a slow start, for sure.

I cook my veggies with a little light olive oil and water with the lid on the pan, and I tried some red cabbage on Friday night.  I love green cabbage, but I see red cabbage has ten times more vitamin A and twice as much iron as green cabbage, so maybe I should stick with the red.

We don’t know where humans first started to cultivate cabbages, but it was most likely somewhere in Europe around 1000 BC. By the Middle Ages it was widely grown and eaten in the Middle Ages in Europe.

I discovered a Chipotle franchise near our office here, and now I go there at least once a week to pick up a Mission burrito.  These are also known as a San Francisco burrito or a Mission-style burrito and is a type of burrito that first became popular during the 1960s in the Mission District of San Francisco.   These burritos are bigger than the Mexican ones, and have additional ingredients beyond the basic rice, beans and meat.

I did stay up last night to watch the start of the new Late Show.  Host Stephen Colbert made fun of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s denouncement of Nabisco for closing an Oreo cookie factory in Chicago and moving the operation to Mexico.  (Oreos will still be made in three U.S. states).

P.S.  I can report that it is still high summer in California : it was 100 °F (38°C) as I got into my rental car at 7.30 pm tonight !  .. and I see the projected high for Thursday here in Walnut Creek is 106 °F (41°C).

A rusk is a hard, dry biscuit or a twice-baked bread, and Woolies is the nickname of Woolworths in South Africa, chain of retail stores modeled on Marks & Spencer in the United Kingdom. (The first store in South Africa opened in Cape Town in 1931).