Seattle Local Food

I’ve always been fond of Thai basil chicken.  The mixture of ground chicken, garlic, fish sauce, basil, chilis, vegetables and lime is outstanding. I’ve also always adored tod mun, little fried cakes (usually fish) served with dipping sauce in Thai restaurants. And finally, I’m developing a bit of a thing for breakfast sausage patties, but I don’t [...]

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I’m generally a fan of lightly cooked vegetables instead of soft ones, particularly in spring, but there are exceptions.  This dish is one of those exceptions.  The flavors meld together beautifully, especially as they absorb butter and cream. The most common gratin is a potato one: layers of potatoes absorbing cream and onion and flavor, [...]

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So, I’m slowly coming up for air after a month of travel and finishing up my MFA.  I have a few things left to do this week, and then the MFA is complete and I can focus on the MPH for the next year.  And, of course, get back to blogging! Today I displayed a [...]

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Hey everyone – I’ve been finishing my fiction thesis so I apologize for the delay in blog posts.  Interesting stuff coming up, including from some great conversations I had and things I learned at the Nutrition & Metabolism Society’s recent conference.  But for the next week or two at least, my thesis has first dibs [...]

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Ground lamb continues to be one of my favorite ingredients.  It’s fatty, versatile, delicious, available from local farms, and a compliment to great spices or a comforting flavor on its own. These breakfast patties are full of Persian-influenced flavors: cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, saffron, and parsley.  They’re great with yogurt or fresh sheep-milk cheese, with [...]

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Looks like raw milk at Madison Market isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  And, the word is, Dungeness Valley Creamery is going to be the third dairy whose milk will be sold there.  Yay, Madison Market!

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Have you walked into PCC lately and noticed the absence of raw milk? I have, and was disappointed to learn PCC has followed the steps of Whole Foods and halted raw milk sales. Their media blurb about the change is here. Nobody in Washington State has, to my knowledge, recently gotten sick from raw milk. [...]

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Joel Salatin, creator of Polyface Farm (featured in the Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food, INC) and author of many books about innovative, sustainable agriculture, is speaking at a few events in Seattle on April 20th. Frustratingly, they’re all pretty expensive. The following is a repost from the CAGJ (Community Alliance for Global Justice) email alerts. Joel [...]

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A few weeks ago, I made an enormous batch of nettle pesto, using probably two and a half pounds of fresh nettles. My freezer is well stocked with containers of green deliciousness. I spread some of the pesto on some broiled salmon for Passover this year, and await many future uses. But when I was [...]

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Locavores in Seattle will soon be able to get yet another staple of the day produced 100% locally: Their coffee. A partnership originally between Starbucks, Tully’s, Vivace and Puget Sound Fresh gained support from surprise partners Microsoft and Monsanto, meaning coffee beans will soon be growing right here in King County, both on the Redmond [...]

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Many years ago, my friend Karyn was in my kitchen.  This was shortly after Passover.  She looked up at my cabinet, where lurked what I thought was an innocuous-looking little brownish-grey, narrow-winged moth, and said, “That’s a kitchen moth.  They’re going to infest all your grains. This sounded implausible, and I made a joke about [...]

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Do you know about JHarvest? It’s a local Jewish community CSA (community supported agriculture) project, one of many around the country sparked by Hazon. Tomorrow at UW Hillel, 4745 17th Ave NE Seattle, WA, we’re having a potluck lunch to launch the start of the season. I’ll be judging dishes in the best use of [...]

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Clarification: I posted this yesterday, so by tomorrow I mean today, Tuesday March 16, 2010 Thanks to Beth for passing this on. I had no idea tomorrow was an election day, but it is indeed, for the board of supervisors of the King Conservation District. Because the election is handled privately, you won’t receive a [...]

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I was just reading in this piece that Whole Foods has indefinitely ceased the sale of raw milk. I called their national headquarters to see if it was true, and it is; they’ve decided to cease all raw milk sales until there are “national standards” instead of state-by-state ones. I gave them my opinion on [...]

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Celeriac, or celery root, is in the category of winter root vegetables that some people look at with glee and others look at with bewilderment. The latter reaction is pretty understandable; they look kind of like the shrunken heads of ancient, forest-dwelling beings in need of a shave. Or something like that. But there’s no [...]

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Just got word of a mini conference on sustainable food and do-it-yourself food production on Vashon Island this weekend.  Make your own sauerkraut, grow your own mushrooms, cheese-making, canning and all sorts of fun sounding stuff.  I can’t make it; I’m pretty swamped with grad school, but if you go please let me know how [...]

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There’s an article in today’s New York Times about ways human cultures have influenced our own evolutionary biology. It’s an interesting piece. Much of the article focuses on diet. There are some finer points on which the article does not touch, and some ideas in it with which I disagree. This is something I’m only [...]

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Sometime in the last few years I realized you could use greens other than basil for pesto.  It was a revelation.  Arugula, sorrel, or any stronger-flavored leafy green works beautifully. Nettles, which we talked about in the last post, are no exception.  The pesto has a rich, earthy flavor and is dark green. The only [...]

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The nettles are up!  In addition to dandelion greens, I’ve been harvesting nettles and making delicious things out of them. Nettle, or stinging nettle, is a general term for the genus Urtica, an invasive species with painful little stingers and medicinal properties.  You may have learned what nettles are the hard way, brushing against them [...]

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I haven’t been following the Olympics.  Not out of any lack of love for winter sports; I think they’re gorgeous, but I don’t have a TV and have been pretty busy writing a thesis and keeping up with grad school. So I was surprised today when my cousin mentioned over lunch that McDonalds was a [...]

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Along with the early spring, we’re getting lots of greens popping up ahead of schedule. I’m posting a simple recipe for dandelion greens today because I know a lot of people who are aware the greens are edible, but unsure how to use them or when to pick them, or simply never get around to [...]

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Sometime in February I usually start thinking about the fruit I put into my freezer last summer, and how I’d better start using it because fresh fruit will start appearing in the markets in just four months. February is just long enough from last summer, of course, that the fruit tastes extra good.  I was [...]

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I have an article about pastrami and David Sax’s book Save The Deli up at jew-ish.com today.  The beginning is: You know the old joke about Jewish holidays, how most of them follow the narrative, “They tried to kill us; they failed; let’s eat!” But I’m no longer sure which pillar of Jewish tradition this [...]

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Thanks to Jessica for sending this one in.  Local forager Langdon Cook is speaking tomorrow at Wide World Books and Maps on how to improvise delicious recipes out of wild, foraged foods, particularly those of our region. Considering the early spring weather we’re having, you’ll be able to try out some of these ideas right [...]

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Really good quiche should be creamy and moist, much less solid than standard scrambled eggs or frittata. The secrets are: cream and air. To make a creamy quiche filling that will fit in the crust of a standard sized pie plate, you only need two eggs, or three if it’s a really deep dish. I [...]

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Bone broth or stock, as I mentioned yesterday, feels like a perfect cure for colds and aches, especially on a wet winter day. There are commercially available stocks, and some are decent, but I make my own for a few reasons. First, homemade tastes better. Second, it’s full of nutrients from long-simmered bones of animals [...]

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Today is grey and rainy, the kind of Northwest winter day I’ll spend making a pot of bone broth while working and fighting off a cold. But this weather hasn’t been the norm lately. With apologies to our snowed-in friends on the East Coast, we’ve been getting a stretch of gorgeous, sunny weather lately, and [...]

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I’ve wanted to do this for two years. It finally happened. In January, I hosted my first Edible Literature Potluck. The idea is simple: Bring a dish, ingredient or drink mentioned in any work of literature. It can be high-brow, low-brow, children’s lit, poetry, drama, fiction, etc. Bring the passage in which the food is [...]

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Readers of this blog probably know that we ran into a technology hiccup in the fall when my hard drive died, taking old files of my blog with it. Sadly, I was using Apple’s iWeb program to design the site, which seriously limited my options for reviving the old site.  Luckily, I had two URLs [...]

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