Eat All About It

It’s not our imagination. Rhubarb really is everywhere this year. After years of seeing its bright stalks shunned except in pre-digested pie form, this year every household seems to be trying rhubarb compote or cake or even pork ribs. (Hmm. Dana Cree of Poppy, @deensie, is behind two of those three recipes. How much of the rhubarb craze can we backtrack straight to her stove?) Now Allrecipes, in its latest data report, has a handy chart of how searches for fruits and vegetables have changed month to month over the past year. Of course, May and June are prime for rhubarb — and the 2009 rhubarb searches on the site, even adjusted for increased site traffic, are up 44 percent over 2008.

Here’s the chart, courtesy of Allrecipes — click on it to see the full-sized image. Peas are down, by the way, and blackberries are also seriously up.

Usually, when I write about Bill Marler, I’m talking about his work as the nation’s go-to lawyer when it comes to  food safety. E. coli in beef? Salmonella in peanut butter? He’s there. But if you’ve heard his name in the last few days, it’s for cleverly — at some personal cost — cutting through rhetoric and restoring Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, to Washington State University’s “common reading” curriculum for incoming freshmen. 

The plug had initially been pulled on the program, in a controversy the Spokesman-Review summarized this way:

“A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.

WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.”

The college had estimated the book program, which included bringing the author to speak on campus, could cost $40,000+, though that figure has been considerably disputed. (Pollan told The New York Times he could do a videoconference instead.)

Marler, a “Cougar through and through” and past president of the WSU Board of Regents, wrote a few days ago that he had an idea for how to show whether the decision was political or financial:

“To show that it was not political, I will pay to get Mr. Pollan to Pullman and find a place for him to speak – I’ll even introduce him.  My hope is that it was not political, because the following quote is what Washington State University – in being a “Coug” – is all about:

“It strikes me that the real value of the university is basically the way it serves the public, researches without fear and favor and being a place where issues can be aired, which are by nature controversial,” said Richard Law, the outgoing director of general education at WSU and a founding member of the common reading committee.

I have my checkbook ready.”

End of story? The university accepted Marler’s offer. The freshmen will read the book, and Pollan is coming. The eminently practical Marion Nestle wrote today that she hoped the program would cost Marler less than $40,000. Marler replied that it wasn’t about the money, it was about some issues being too important to walk away from. He’ll donate anything left over to the next speaker.

You can read that headline two ways, because the note I got about the new cooking classes for kids offered through Tom Douglas Restaurants came courtesy of the head kid herself, Loretta Douglas (that’s Douglas’s daughter, a.k.a. the Loretta in Etta’s).

The 4-hour kid classes will range from “Fruits, Vegetables, and Ice Cream” to “The Best Hamburger Ever,” and, fittingly for that last one, will be held at the Palace Kitchen. Palace head chef Sean Hartley will lead the classes, with the help of the entire chef team — including Loretta, who’s home on a break from Colgate University and is working as a marketing assistant and as a cook for the catering department. And she’s definitely been raised right when it comes to cooking and kids: “I say, start ‘em young!” 

Classes run $30 apiece, and are for children ages 8-12. The official aim: To “cultivate a love of healthier food, an understanding of the food chain, knowledge of the nutritional value of food, and to learn basic food preparation techniques.” Here’s the schedule and class descriptions:

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“Barbecue” is a fighting word in this city; there’s no way to express a preference for one place over another without hearing how (a) Seattle has no good barbecue, and (b) your favorite isn’t actually the best. I’m glad I don’t man Sunset magazine’s inbox after seeing the latest issue choose “10 best barbecue joints in the West”. Surprise! While the top honors went to BarBersQ in Napa, Seattle won two spots on the list . Washington was the only state besides California to score more than one spot.

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Julie Reinhardt’s bio says she’s “ready to talk pork butt with the most macho grillmaster.”

Really, though, she’s here to talk with the least macho audience, the women who have historically been the weaker half of the backyard family barbecue and grill. Here Reinhardt is with She-Smoke: A Backyard Barbecue Book
a thoroughly practical, well-researched new guide that manages to be fun but not patronizing.

It is, as advertised, a casually-styled, from-the-ground-up primer for those who don’t know their low from their slow. It explains how to turn on a gas grill (the book covers grilling as well as barbecuing), reviews the different regional styles of barbecue, and diagrams how to break down a chicken (the latter Reinhardt admits only learning at age 30, “out of sheer embarassment that I couldn’t do it.”) But Reinhardt’s expertise and enthusiasm comes through clearly enough to also satisfy ‘cuers who lick their chops at chapter headings like “Texas Beef Brisket: An In-Depth Study,” and would consider digging a pit for the salmon bake recipe she includes in honor of family summers on the Washington coast.

We talked with Reinhardt, co-owner of Smokin’ Pete’s BBQ in Ballard, just named one of the best barbecue spots in the West, for your Memorial Day mealtime pleasure. And if you’re planning your own barbecue this weekend, consider entering her contest (video above) to win prizes and fight hunger by creating “the largest virtual BBQ in the world.”

“I love the idea that barbecue brings people together,” said Reinhardt, a Seattle native with Alabama roots. We tend to think of “barbecue” as a noun, as a piece of smoked pork, say, but she loves the broader term that includes the event as well as the food. For her, it’s about the “down-home togetherness” of the cuisine and its history and roots.

Here are a few highlights from our talk and from the book.
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Successfully combining movie theaters with restaurants isn’t as intuitive as it sounds. Restaurants are social; theaters are the place for companionable silence. At the cinema, we expect quality on the screen but devour overpriced junk; at restaurants we want satisfaction for mouth and eyes alike. I’m encouraged, though, by a pre-opening talk with the folks behind Cinebarre, an 8-screen theater opening May 29 in the space that used to be the Regal 9 in Mountlake Terrace. (It’s 8 screens now because one theater was gutted and converted to a full kitchen.)

“We feel like we stand out,” said Jeff Martens, vice president of operations for the chain, which operates Cinebarre branches in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Colorado. On the theater side, he means that they show major first-run movies. On the food side, Cinebarre serves “casual dining sort of stuff,” he said, but the pizza dough is made daily from scratch, the hamburger meat is ground in-house. It’s not that nothing comes in frozen, he said, but “We make our own chicken fingers. We cut our own French fries.”
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Brad Wong covered business at the P-I, but it was always clear he had a natural inclination toward food writing, whether coming up with stories about a Seattle fortune cookie company, or sustainable sushi, or a food bank’s rice shortage. So let me present to you Brad’s new solo blog, “Tofu Watch.” It is, yes, a blog about soybean cake — among other “essential topics.”
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When the woman who helped make Seattle a serious place for desserts sits quietly at a corner table of your  shop, pinching a bit of vanilla cupcake between her fingers, judging the angle of the crown and tasting the pink frosting, this definitive reaction is what you want:

“It’s yummy!” Sue McCown said. “If I may say so myself.”

McCown has more than the usual interest in weighing in on Cupcake Royale, because the pastry chef — you remember her Sex Lies, & Apricot at Earth & Ocean and her “hot cocoa” pasta at the short-lived Coco la ti da — is responsible for a serious makeover of the cupcake empire’s recipe. The creative perfectionist baked dozens upon dozens of batches of Cupcake Royales in recent months, joining owner Jody Hall’s quest for a moister, tastier cake. 

McCown kept careful field notes on the results of changing the recipe’s leavening by a fraction, or substituting dried buttermilk for fresh, or altering the order in which ingredients were mixed. Struggling with one crumbly impasse, she would wake up in the middle of the night, debating what to try next. Her landlord, hearing this, told her “It’s just a cupcake!”

“No,” she said. “It’s not just a cupcake. It’s a really good cupcake.” 

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This contest giveaway thing is catching on. Next up is Boom Noodle/Blue C Sushi, offering $200 in gift cards to the winner of a contest to name the bar connecting its Bellevue Square restaurants. The 1,600-square-foot mezzanine lounge “is suspended above the Blue C and Boom Noodle spaces, and offers a birds-eye view of both,” if you haven’t been and you’re looking for inspiration. Besides food and drink, it’s got four Xbox gaming pods.

1. East meets Eastside? No.
2. Sky Slurp? No, no, no.
3. Drink+Ponder What Other Restaurants Are Loved By Both Marcella Hazan and Iris Amster-Burton? C’mon, everyone reading this has at least ten better ideas. Send them to nameourbar@bluecsushi.com until May 29. Winners will be announced June 1.

Why yes, this IS a mobile kitchen in the process of being transformed into a 34-foot by 14-foot driving pig. If all goes well, in less than a month’s time the metal beast will be “Maximus Minimus,”  bringing what owner Kurt Dammeier hopes is “absolutely the best pulled pork sandwich you’ve ever had” to the streets of Seattle.

The truck — also featuring a roasted veggie sandwich, nifty mixed veggie chips, and other offerings — is the latest and littlest baby of Dammeier’s Sugar Mountain, parent company of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, Pasta & Co., and Bennett’s Pure Food Bistro.

Why move from restaurants to Seattle’s suddenly burgeoning street food scene? And why pork?

Basically, Dammeier said, “I wanted to do a pork sandwich because I wanted to eat it…

“Me and Mr. Pig are very tight.”

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