Eat All About It

I don’t think I’ve ever met cookbook authors work as hard to connect with their audience as Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, authors of “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day” and, now, “Healthy Bread In Five Minutes A Day.” The very focus of their new book, in fact, came from the deluge of reader questions they got about making no-knead bread with whole grains.  (I remember being stunned by the volume of questions on that topic I got myself after writing about their first book. I passed every question along to Jeff and Zoe, and every one was answered.) I’ve watched the past year as they’ve answered reader questions via blog and Twitter… but, on Monday (Nov. 2), you can interact with them the old-fashioned way, on their book tour.

Zoe will sign books at the University of Washington Book Store at 7 p.m., and Jeff will be a guest at Foodportunity.

 I talked with them about “Healthy Bread in Five Minutes A Day” for Al Dente, and you can read the story here. One bit of news: They’ve got a third book in the works now, on pizzas and flatbreads from around the world.

Just when we were getting comfortable bragging about Seattle’s burgeoning street food scene, a winter hiatus has hit.

Maximus/Minimus, the roaming “urban assault pig” serving up pulled pork sandwiches (not to mention vegan sandwiches), will shut down after Oct. 31, with plans to return April 1. It will be back, “100 percent,” guaranteed Kurt Dammeier, owner of parent company Sugar Mountain. 

Meanwhile, Skillet Street Food, the daddy of this resurgence, has also gone on winter hiatus, though it’s still available for box lunches and for fans who can guarantee a baseline turnout of hungry people. Parfait Ice Cream  is done for 2009. The folks at Marination Mobile wrote me on Twitter that “we’re sticking it out… so far.” They bought a tent so their “fantabulous marination mob” can at least enjoy kimchi fried rice under cover. 

Dammeier told me today that his business is going well — especially on sunny days — but that he thinks street food is necessarily seasonal in this sort of climate. “The few really rainy, windy days we’ve seen, it’s pretty disastrous,” he said. A hiatus “just makes more sense,” partly because of the bottom line, partly because food quality will suffer if there isn’t a steady stream of business coming through.

Clearly, there’s still a pent-up demand for street food in Seattle, as we saw with hours-long lines at the recent “Mobile Chowdown”. Dammeier thinks we’re only going to see the number of carts increase — and he doesn’t see it as a negative to take the winter off. “I was in New York recently, and Shake Shack…a breakout, unbelievable, over-the-top-success with a one-hour line most of the year,” also started out with a winter shutdown.

(Note: Updated to reflect that Shake Shack originally shut down for the winter, but is now apparently open year-round.)

We don’t get a chance yet to eat at Emmer & Rye, the eagerly awaited new restaurant from Seth Caswell, but here’s a little appetizer: Caswell just started up a Tuesday night dinner series at Art of the Table, where he’ll be serving five-course dinners with pairings of wine or beer. (Cost: $65 for food, $25 more for alcohol, tax and tip included, cash only.)

Here’s the wrinkle I like best, from Caswell’s e-mail to his mailing list: 

“On Thursday of each week I will be sending out an email asking two questions: would you like to join me for dinner on the following Tuesday, and what would you like me to cook for you? The first question is pretty straightforward.  The second is going to require a little bit of your input. 

If you should choose to dine on the following Tuesday, I will send a list of 40-50 seasonal ingredients and you will pick out 3-5 that you’d like to have for dinner.  I will create a menu based on the first 20 responses I receive.  I hope to be able to include everybody’s choices each week and feature some inventive flavor and texture combinations.  Remember, I am a huge supporter of local agricultural and keeping food money in the hands of smaller, regional businesses. So don’t expect lobster and bananas, coconut and alligator, or ostrich and tamarind.”

(more…)

Our Foodportunity ticket giveaway is over, and our lucky winner of two tickets to the Nov. 2 event is entry #26, Natalie. Her choice for who she most wanted to meet in Seattle’s food scene was Tom Douglas, who proved a popular pick — he tied for first place, along with Maria Hines of Tilth. Douglas actually was at the last Foodportunity, serving up bites from an enormous roast pig, as was Thierry Rautureau, another top vote-getter. For those who chose Tamara Murphy or Ethan Stowell, you’re in luck — both will be at the event, speaking on the 6 p.m. panel discussion along with Kurt Dammeier. 

I’ve had the lucky pleasure of meeting most of the people listed — Matt Dillon, Jerry Traunfeld, Armandino Batali, and so on. For now, I’m most intrigued with the choice of the first commenter on the post, who wanted to meet Nathan Myrhvold. I’ve been hearing for years about the cookbook Myrhvold is developing out of his interest in molecular gastronomy, and David Chang recently told Brad Thomas Parsons that he expects it “will be the be-all end-all of cookbooks.”

Thank you, everyone, for playing, and thanks to food-loving event founder Keren Brown for donating the tickets. If you didn’t win but still want to attend, some are still available at Brown Paper Tickets here.

I wrote in Sunday’s Seattle Times about American macaroons vs. French macarons, as different from each other as Julie was to Julia.

I am a sucker for the easy, agreeably chewy coconut macaroons, as I’ve talked about here and here and here, but fooling around with egg whites and piping bags for the fancy French version was a great deal of fun. So was the chance to run questions past one of my baking heroines, Dorie Greenspan, and to talk with Seattle’s own Neil Robertson and  Franz Gilbertson. Greenspan noted that, although macaroons and macarons don’t have much in common, “the coconut cookies that we know as macaroons do have a French cousin, congolais or rochers a la noix de coco, both made with coconut, sugar and egg whites.

“There are centuries-old recipes for French macarons that look nothing like the modern treats although they use essentially the same ingredients. The early macarons (like macarons Nancy or even Mme. Blanchez’s macarons from St. Emilion) were flat, soft, crackle-topped almond cookies often made by nuns.”

I suspect there are masters theses on the word’s origin just waiting to be written or found, but in the meantime, here’s my very brief look at the treats. While it is hard to make perfect macarons, I found it not difficult to make imperfect ones, which are quite satisfying all on their own.

When I was invited to a casual meal with Patricia Wells a few years back, I expected the highlight to be, well, meeting Patricia Wells. As enjoyable as that was, though, it couldn’t compare to my delight at being introduced to another woman I had only known through her words: “You’re Viv? “Seattle Bon Vivant“? That Viv?” 

Bon Vivant, a Francophile and Seattlephile, was one of the group I think of as the original food bloggers (Accidental Hedonist was another), and her honesty, her striking photos, and delight in food and beauty made her a favorite. Along with many other readers, I was sad and even worried when she stopped posting for several months. Her mother, as it turned out, had been diagnosed with cancer — and even after “Viv” returned from helping her, she decided to put her energy into living instead of chronicling.

Twitter, as I’ve written before, brought her back to us, as did Flickr. She was deeply involved in the Canvolution. Now that I know where to look, I’ve had the pleasure of running into her at several places where good food was to be found.

And now, Viv is back at the blog. Lorna Yee has an interview over at Seattle magazine on her return. Me, I can’t say it better than Tea did: “It’s your lucky day Seattle, charming and savvy gal about town @bonnevivante writes again.”

The best place to find Starbucks gossip is, of course, on the Starbucks Gossip site. (I felt guilty for declining to buy VIA instant coffee after reading employee comments on the pressure they felt to sell it.) One of the site’s regular features, though, the “Juan Valdez” reviews of random Starbucks sites, is coming to a close. In his latest post, reviewing an Anacortes branch, “Juan” writes that his 50th review will be his last. That leaves him seven more to go, and he’s taking votes on which stores to visit within a 50 mile range of Seattle. Early recommendations include the store at 7th and Stewart, the Columbia Tower branches, and the University Village remodel. If you don’t have a store to recommend (either pro or con), or if you’re not interested in discussions on understaffing, attitudes, and store cleanliness, well, you can always join the debate about what a chair was doing in the Anacortes bathroom.

Gourmet magazine is dead (or was murdered, depending on your perspective), but Gourmet’s “Adventures With Ruth” TV show is still going forward, and the second episode will showcase editor Ruth Reichl’s trip to Seattle. She hung out with Jon Rowley, who she called “the man who knows more about seafood than literally anyone else in the country,” and “the master of the perfect ingredient at the perfect time.” The pair set out foraging, clamming, and salmon fishing. (Heads up: There is a fish-kissing scene. Neither of our heroes are involved, though.) 

The 10-episode series on public TV spanned the globe, and I’m glad Reichl spotlighted our city, recognizing it as “one of the richest food places” not just in America, but in the world. Other episodes in the first season took Reichl to Tepoztlán, Venice, England, and the Smoky Mountains. The series premiered last week, and the Daily News says a second season is in the works. (The Seattle episode is being shown on Saturday in some markets. Locally, KCTS will air the show at 1 p.m. Wednesdays, starting Dec. 23.) Meanwhile, here’s the preview of “Jon Rowley’s Seattle”:

The last time I was at a Foodportunity event, I hardly made it to the stage, because I kept running into people I wanted to meet and foods I wanted to taste. Keren Brown is throwing another one of her get-togethers at the Palace Ballroom on Nov. 2, where food-lovers both in and out of the industry meet up. This one will feature a panel discussion by top restaurateurs Thierry Rautureau, Ethan Stowell, and Kurt Dammeier, plenty of time to eat-and-greet your way around the room, and an optional “speed networking” session led by Julien Perry of KOMO. Cost: $30, including a glass of wine and nibbles from the panelists restaurants (Rover’s et al) as well as Tom Douglas Restaurants, Campagne, Joule,  La Spiga, and Lunchbox Laboratory.

Interested? Keren is graciously giving away a pair of tickets to the event to readers of this blog. To play, just answer this question in the comments: Which person involved in food in Seattle would you most like to meet? 

We’ll pick a winner using a random number generator at 6 p.m. PST on Monday, Oct. 26.

Please turn your dials to KUOW, 94.9 FM, at 9 a.m. Tuesday (Oct. 20) for Weekday. I’ll be on the show in the talented and delicious company of Shauna James Ahern (a.k.a. Gluten-Free Girl) and Molly Wizenberg (Orangette), talking with Marcie Sillman about food, blogs, and the combination of the two.