Eat All About It

One of the things that surprised me the most about the massive salmonella-related peanut recalls earlier this year was how many of the people we think of as “the good guys” got caught in the mess along with everyone else. Small, local companies, trying their best to source high-quality ingredients, wound up using the same nuts as the country’s biggest chains, from a company that reportedly knew it was sending out contaminated goods.

I wrote in the Sunday Seattle Times about how companies get caught in the national food distribution web, and how some locals are trying to disentangle themselves from it as best they can. We looked at why CB’s Nuts will never be another Peanut Corporation of America, and how Snoqualmie Gourmet Ice Cream is making its add-in ingredients by hand, from fresh caramel sauce to cookie dough. 

The full story is online here.

Sounds like Marination Mobile won that Good Morning America contest for the nation’s best street food cart! The crew is planning a celebration with the GMA cameras for a live shot just hours from now, at 4:15 a.m. Sunday (Nov. 22), with champagne, spicy pork tacos, and potentially spam ‘n eggs. All the early risers (or late-to-sleepers, as the case may be) are invited to celebrate with them, at Rex’s Garage by the Seward Park PCC, 5059 Wilson Ave S.

What’s that we were saying about street food cred? Marination Mobile, home of the kalua pork slider, is up for Good Morning America’s “Best Food Cart Challenge.” (Here the GMA cameras are, taping the truck in Fremont earlier this week). The winner will be chosen through a combination of online votes and a judging panel; you should be able to vote for the cart online tomorrow, Saturday, at this link. The GMA website is woefully short on details, but apparently Portland’s Garden State food cart also made the final four, and Marination says the other two are in New York and Virginia. (What? No KoGi?) We think Marination deserves our vote out of more than hometown pride: Who else, on getting the news, would tweet “We cry kimchi tears of joy!”

This is one of the saddest pieces of Seattle restaurant news I’ve heard since the Beeliner Diner and the Dog House closed: Jonathan Kauffman, restaurant critic for Seattle Weekly, is heading back to his old Bay Area eating grounds. Starting Jan. 1, he’ll take the critic’s job at SF Weekly.

Kauffman’s background as a cook, his knowledge, and his voracious curiosity for exploring all kinds of cuisine made him a must-read when he came to Seattle three years ago. He’s not just a must-read, he is a joy to read — perceptive, honest, and marvelously skilled.  (On top of all that, not only has he kept his relevance in this Internet age, he’s even retained his anonymity.) When I saw in 2007 that a food critic had won the Pulitzer Prize, and that his name was Jonathan, I more than half expected to hear Kauffman’s name follow. If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading his work, check out his takes on teriyaki, on what he saw at the pig slaughter, and Number One New York Pizza. 

Treat him well, SF, and feed him well.

As you know, there ain’t no such thing as one. But we do have some other attractive freebies coming up:

1. Celebrate the opening of Street Bean Espresso (2702 Third Ave.) with free drip coffee all day on Wednesday, Nov. 18. You might want to kick in some cash anyway, though, as the non-profit Belltown cafe, a partnership with New Horizons Ministry, is aimed at giving street kids job skills and steady work as baristas. Organizers said the cafe got its start through community help, with cash donations, with the owner of the Kroll Map Co. offering a year’s free rent in part of his building, architects and builders donating the remodel, and a carpenter and one of the employees building the tables. All this, and free Wi-Fi.

2. Pike Street Fish Fry (925 E. Pike), under new management, will have “Free Fry Friday” from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 20, giving away free boats of fries and selling $2 pints of Fat Tire and Mothership. They plan to continue the tradition the third Friday of every month. 

3. On Wednesdays, Grand Cru Wine Bar in Bellevue (1020 108th Ave. N.E.) is offering a free two-course dinner (a choice of selected starters and entrees) starting at 5 p.m. every Wednesday. The only catch (and it isn’t much of one); an 18 percent tip will be added to the entire bill, including the amount the free food would have cost.

4. And, through November, the Dahlia Lounge (2001 Fourth Ave.) is celebrating its 20th anniversary with daily giveaways. There are free prizes (e.g., a dozen free donuts one day, or a free duck entree the next), for the first 20 people at the lounge and the bakery each day to say “Happy 20th Anniversary Dahlia.” And, there are “golden tickets” distributed daily for fabulous prizes like a taco feed at your place, cooked by Douglas himself. I know, when it’s someone else’s birthday, are they supposed to be giving us presents? You can give back by contributing to Food Lifeline, one of Douglas’s longtime causes. Bring in a bag of food to donate with a $10 value, and — here go the presents again — they’ll take $10 off your tab. Full list of daily giveaways here.

Jeff Koehler is technically a native son, but Barcelona’s got him now — and, lucky us, it’s been his home base for travels around the Mediterranean to write about food. Don’t miss him in a rare Seattle appearance at The Elliott Bay Book Company at 2 p.m. Saturday (Nov. 14) to discuss his latest book, Rice Pasta Couscous. It’s a cross-cultural look at those staple ingredients, with Koehler sharing recipes from a broad swath of kitchens, from Syria to Valencia to Sardinia. To me, the stories in the recipe headnotes, the short descriptions above the recipes, are as vivid as the foods. I can picture digging into the Alexandria-Syle Amber Rice With Fish in the fishermen’s quarter of that Egyptian city, or admiring the “white-washed Tunisian village that clings to the cliffs” where he ate Lamb Couscous With Pistachios, Almonds, Pine Nuts, and Golden Raisins. I don’t ever expect to make Neretva-Style Eel and Frog Brodet, but I like the recipe anyway for the reply Koehler got when he asked his Croatian host how many frogs should be on the ingredient list: “As many as you can catch.”

I interviewed Koehler here on Al Dente Blog about his cookbook, his travels, and how you really make perfect couscous.

One of the first and best resources for eating local in the Northwest was Seasonal Cornucopia, chef Becky Selengut’s well-researched compendium of when local foods are in season. Most of us know when to expect fresh asparagus — and the site does include growing seasons for all the common fruits and vegetables — but for lingonberries, watercress, matsutakes, even sea cucumbers and sanddabs, it was the only place most of us had to turn.

I don’t mean to speak in the past tense, because Seasonal Cornucopia is actually entering a new era. Selengut just passed it on to John and Patricia Eddy of Cook Local, whose recipes and locavore resources were a logical match for her comprehensive database of fruits, vegetables, foraged goods, seafood, and more. They’ll be linking seasonal search results with Cook Local recipes, so that when visitors ask, say, when to expect apriums at the farmers market, they’ll also get some idea what to do with them. They’re excited about maintaining and even enhancing the site, “both regionally and technologically,” Patricia told me in an e-mail. (Cook Local already has a Bay Area branch site, which seems to me a logical spot for expansion.)

“It has always been our ultimate goal to connect our readers with the food that they eat and the farmers who grow that food,” Patricia wrote. “We had dreams of creating our own database, not necessarily to tell people when things were in season (since obviously SC did that very well), but to tell people where they could find everything. I wanted to have a database that told people that quinces were available from Mair-Taki at the U-District and Columbia City Farmers Markets in mid-October, or that if you wanted to make your own beef stock, you needed to talk to Eiko of Skagit River Ranch or Brent and Ang from Olsen Farms.”

Becky told me in an e-mail that she thought of Cook Local as “the perfect sister site to SC, in that it provided all the things that SC didn’t, up to date farmer’s market info, CSA stuff, and recipes. I respect their commitment to our local food and providers.” She thinks they’ll be able to bring the site to a more useful level, with photos, recipes, maybe even an iPhone application — all things she wanted, but couldn’t afford the time to do.  Selengut “sold” the site for $10 (and, if it were to make money, a percentage of revenue), but she’ll stay involved to advise and help the Eddys if they want or need it. And she says she’s thrilled to see it going strong.

 ”It was my baby and now it’s growin’ up and off to bigger and better things with my 100% support.”

The Steamy Kitchen book tour is coming to Seattle this week, and you’ve got three chances to meet author Jaden Hair.

I asked Jaden last week how Seattle wound up as a tour stop for her book on “101 Asian Recipes Simple Enough For Tonight’s Dinner,” in these days of pinched book budgets. Are we (I hope) such a hotbed of fish sauce, lemongrass, and soba noodles that we were a natural audience?  She told me it’s because she had so much fun on her last trip here.

You can find Jaden from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. Monday (Nov. 9) at the Admiral Metropolitan Market (2320 42nd Ave S.W.), then at the University Bookstore (4326 University Way N.E.) at 7 p.m. the same night for a book signing and food. On Tuesday, Nov. 10, she’s teaching a cooking class at 6 p.m. at Sur La Table in Kirkland (cost: $69, registration here).

My interview with Jaden is up here on Al Dente Blog, but here are some other highlights from our conversation:

One was that her speaking voice strikes the same fun, casual, best-friend tone as her blog. That’s hard to do. But it should work that way, Jaden said, because the blog is literally her voice. She writes using voice recognition software, talking through her posts instead of typing, for every part except the recipes. “I hate to write,” she said. 

She’s worked hard to get where she is today, moving in just two years from beginning blogger to author and photographer and TV personality. And now, she isn’t sure what to do next. “I’m at the point where I love what I do so much,” she said. The next big career step would be a regular TV show (she’s talked with the Food Network), one where “I would have a boss again,” she said. “I would have an editor, a producer, all those people who have influence on what I do. I don’t know if I’m quite ready for that yet. I want to sit back and relax and enjoy this. I can pick up my kids anytime from school, and they can hang out with me at home. If I want to cook pork chops on TV tomorrow, I can do it. I don’t have anyone telling me it has to be this style or this way.”

I also asked if her relationship with readers has changed as she’s grown from an unknown to a blog-star with a newspaper column and more Twitter followers than Ruth Reichl. Does that change her relationship with new readers, are people seeking her out now as a potentially powerful mentor rather than a blog buddy? 

She is getting a lot more requests from writers and chefs, asking how to promote their products, or saying something like “My publisher asked me to start a blog.” She tells them that blogging and Twitter have to be things they do every day. “It’s like, you don’t schedule time to brush your teeth, it’s something you do. You can’t say “I’m going to tweet for an hour tomorrow at two.” If you want to be successful at blogging, at promoting something, it’s got to be part of your life…it’s got to be all, or don’t bother.”

She can’t always answer questions one-on-one, but she was glad to do a recent phone-in forum with the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and said she’ d like to do more group talks like that. “I want to share the information (I have), because I got started because people were generous with their time with me.”

I renewed my lucky acquaintance with Christina Arokiasamy, The Spice Merchant’s Daughter, for an article in this month’s Sunset magazine. It doesn’t seem to be online yet, but I’ll update if there’s a link. For the story, Christina took me on a whirlwind shopping tour for ingredients used in Southeast Asian cooking, including a market I’d never visited before, Mekong Rainier in Columbia City (3400 Rainier Ave. S.). The exterior can politely be described as nondescript, I probably would have blown right past it on my own. When Christina took me inside, though, I found a wealth of inexpensive spices, supplies, and produce. I left with a loaded bag of palm sugar, oyster sauce, tamarind, Asian greens, and her favorite brand of rice stick noodles.

Every time I leave her company, I pledge to spend more time cooking dishes like hers, alive with lime juice and ginger and freshly ground spices. So I signed up, along with a few friends, for one of her hands-on cooking classes, where we learned to make an intense Massaman curry, a green papaya salad, and other specialties. I was assigned to grate the papaya, and she handed me a kitchen tool perfectly designed for doing so, one that easily shredded perfect, long neat lengths into the bowl. “What IS this?” I asked. “Oh, that’s a papaya twizzler,” Christina said, or at least that’s the word I heard.

“Where do you get them?”

“Oh, I got mine at Ikea.”

Pause.

“In Bangkok.”

When Cindy Mushet and her daughter Bella came to town to talk about Cindy’s new book, Baking Kids Love, I couldn’t resist asking them to come by my house and do some baking with my own kid. My 7-year-old does like cooking with me, but, with a professional in the kitchen, I wondered if we could take on a more challenging project than usual. And we did. I wrote about it here on Al Dente Blog, along with the recipe for the meringue cookies the kids whipped up and piped into Halloween-style “rattling bones and fingers”. The cookies can be made into any shape you like, though — alphabet letters seem like a natural favorite. Here’s a little video showing some of the highlights of our after-school cooking lesson. It struck me that it’s always easier to learn new techniques with experienced helpers — even when one of them is only in middle school.