Category: Food

Mondays start very early for me with the travel out to Denver – so I don’t want to spend too much time waiting for my food at a restaurant on Monday nights.  So that’s where the Vietnamese noodle (phở) place here on 16th Ave in downtown Denver comes in.  They serve up a quick, hearty bowl of noodle soup and I have already been there three or four times.

 

I like to go to Trader Joe every now and again even though I really cannot claim that I am a foodie. You go .. hey, what’s this? Ooh, let me try it. And this? Got to have some of that as well. They have all the stuff that’s in a regular grocery store, but just not with the mega brand names. So they have their own style of Oreo cookies, or potato chips, and never ever Starbucks coffee or Lipton tea. Those are corporate ‘evil empires’ that will never get their products on the shelves of Trader Joe.

Monday is probably the worst day of the week for a birthday.  But even though I left it very late to check in with my compadres, we did go out to a restaurant for a bite and a beer. The place is in the Madrona neighborhood, called St Cloud and bills itself as ‘contemporary comfort food in an urban neighborhood setting’.  On the way in we spotted a distinguished guest inside the restaurant : our congressman Jim McDermott.  We sat outside on a deck in what looked like a house’s back yard.  I had the garlic-fried chicken with mashed potato and broccoli (very good) and a white Belgian beer.

 

What the heck is quinoa? I wondered, but nevertheless bought a bag of rice with quinoa at the grocery store. I cooked it Thursday night for dinner. It’s good! and so I had to read all about it on Wikipedia. The plant was first domesticated by the Andean people some 3,000 years ago. It’s becoming very popular in the USA, China and Japan. In its natural state it has saponins, a mild eye and respiratory irritant.  Most of that is removed for consumption outside of its indigenous countries, though.  And finally, The United Nations declared 2013 is the International Year of Quinoa, in recognition of the ancestral practices of the Andean people.

Check out my fancy pants green tea that I bought on Monday, along with some black tea.  I’m trying to revive my liking and taste for green tea that I acquired in China.   The green tea is up against serious competition as my favorite hot beverage : black English Breakfast tea and Starbucks’ medium-roast coffee.  The green tea needs to be steeped for only a minute (or even for only 30 seconds).  It’s fun to let it cool down, and then swallow it in three or four big gulps. Its roasted rice/ green tea after-taste sits on your tongue for a while.

Uinta Brewing is named after an east-west mountain range located in northeastern Utah. I spotted their beers in the local grocery store.  ‘Earth, Wind and Beer’, says the 12 packs of Cutthroat Pale Ale and Golden Spike Heffeweisen.  The wind refers to their claim that Uinta Brewing has been 100% wind-powered since 2001 (according to their web-site).  I didn’t buy any; hopefully we will go out to eat some time, and then I will ask for one.

I ran out of my favorite oatmeal (McCann’s Irish Oatmeal), and had no luck finding it anymore.  The grocery stores in my neighborhood stopped carrying it.  So I was happy to find fresh supplies at the quirky grocery store called Trader Joe’s.  Yes, there are plenty of oatmeals to choose from.  Quaker (now owned by PepsiCo) makes a very nice oatmeal as well; just not the ones with maple syrup and apple and cinnamon and all that added.

I was well enough on Wednesday to get out of the house (I had to get out of the house!) and go have a beer and a bite with my friends.   The Oak is a new-ish, unassuming neighborhood pub and grub place in Beacon Hill, and we went there to try it out.   We liked the food and the atmosphere.  It’s not quiet, but we didn’t have to shout across the table to make conversation.

Whoah!  Check out the wasabi root – and how expensive it is! – I thought when I spotted it on offer in the vegetable section of the  Uwaji-maya grocery store in Seattle’s International District on Sunday night.  Wasabi root has an extremely strong flavor and in this form is finely grated BUT : it loses its flavor after just 15 minutes if left uncovered!  The plant grows naturally along stream beds in mountain river valleys in Japan, and is also cultivated, but it is difficult to do so.  Japan imports wasabi from China, Taiwan and even from New Zealand.   Wasabi is sometimes called Japanese horseradish, but horseradish is a different plant.

We are at it again this week with work sessions to get ready to construct the new SAP system that we will implement for our client company.

Back at the Marriott hotel across the street (very convenient), I picked an Iron City Beer to celebrate the end of the day. From the http://www.pittsburghbrewing.com/  web site : ‘Iron City Beer is a classic American lager established in the rich traditions of Pittsburgh, PA. Built on 150 years of brewing experience, Iron City Beer boasts scents of sweet corn and wheat, smooth crisp pale malt flavor, and a dry finish with very little bitterness.

On Saturday night we tried to get into the Rione XIII restaurant here on 15th Ave (a reference to Rome’s 13th district), but we were turned away.  We need reservations; they only keep two open tables, explained the host at the entrance.  So off we went, and ended up at Coastal Kitchen a few steps away. I  had a black bean burger and everyone else had something fishy with even a fresh oyster thrown in.

 

The beer! Grab the beer! says the guy in the leaky boat to his diving bud. ‘Lower de Boom¹‘ is an 11.5% strong a/v beer from the 21st Amendment Brewery² from San Francisco CA. (I didn’t drink any, just took the picture in the Giant Eagle grocery store here in the Pittsburgh area).

¹Belgian-born ship owner Cornelius DeBoom set sail for San Francisco in the fall of 1848 when the news of the discovery of gold in California arrived.
²The Twenty-first Amendment (Amendment XXI) to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 5, 1933.  The 18th Amendment had mandated nationwide Prohibition on alcohol on January 17, 1920.

I have facilitated two days of workshops with one more to go (yay), and by tonight (Wednesday) I feel that I can come up for air for the first time.   We have participants from Sweden and the UK that came in on Monday night, so while I felt the three hour time difference from Seattle on Tuesday, they had to deal with even more jet lag.  But everyone was in better shape today.

Wednesday night found four of us at the German-style beer hall Von Trapp on 12th Ave.  I had a pilsner and a chicken schnitzel sandwich (breaded and fried chicken on pretzel bread) with fries. I know it’s not the healthiest meal but hey! : this was an exception to all the veggies I cook and eat on all the other days of the week.

It feels like summer here in Seattle with the warm temperatures lingering into the evening after sunset. Saturday was also the official opening of Seattle’s boating season, and so the summery weather is a happy coincidence to that.

I like Kirin beer and when I saw an alcohol-free version of it in the Uwajimaja grocery store that carries products from Asia, I thought .. hmm, let me try it.  It’s no Moose Drool, but drinkable.  Kirin says it’s made from ‘an unprecedented new recipe containing barley malt and hops just like regular beer’.  It has only 37 calories in the 11.3 oz (334ml) bottle that it comes in.    I read on-line that earlier methods of making alcohol-free beer involved evaporating the alcohol from it, but tended to leave it with an ‘industrial’ taste.

There’s definitely a market for alcohol-free beers (pregnant women, beer-lovers on medication) .. but the market probably excludes college students out to getting their throats wet with the real stuff while they play beer pong!

‘I will have a moose drool, please’ said I on Wednesday at a ‘connectivity event’ after work.  Moose Drool is a brown ale made by the Big Sky Brewery in Montana.   And so I had to look up if we actually have moose in Washington State (we do, in the northeast).  The creatures are roaming all over Canada and Alaska.

 

There are so many ways to make one’s cup of joe in the morning – or at any other time of day.  I like the medium roast from Starbucks and I have a drip coffee maker, but it’s really difficult to make exactly one cup of drip coffee (which is of course why some of the other methods were invented.  See Wall Street Journal’s diagram that explains it all).  Starbucks CEO and coffee czar Howard Schultz uses a French press for his coffee.

‘I’d like to have some sushi for dinner’ said my brother on Saturday night, and Yelp.com came to the rescue with two restaurants near Pike Place Market.  The plan was to eat, and go check out the market with the remaining time that we had.

My brother had the sushi chef’s combination of items.  I steered clear of the sushi and had gyoza (Japanese pot stickers), and tempura vegetables (deep-fried in a light batter), with a Sapporo beer. Very nice! So a very Japanese dinner!*  The restaurant is cozy, with a nice vibe and a sushi bar.

*Can I call myself a Japanophile if I don’t eat sushi, though? Some people will say no! you cannot!

Happy Easter!   Yes, I know that 1. the Easter bunny is a very secular symbol for Easter, and  2. that I should not buy m&m candies to play with, because I will end up eating them all .. but hey, we all need a little fun and color in our lives, do we not?

It’s chocolate and it’s a rabbit, so I could not resist.  I will let the bunny sit on the counter for a few days and then bite its ears!  I couldn’t find Lindt’s dark chocolate ones this year.  At first I thought it is because cocoa and prices have gone through the roof, making the dark chocolate ones too expensive.  But I see that after climbing to a 32-year high in 2011, commodity market prices for cocoa has fallen 74 percent since then.