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Tendy's Garden

04/11/05 - Tendy's Garden

We've only been home a few hours and haven't even written up our New York City notes, and we're eating Chinese take out food. We finally tried Tendy's Garden, and we liked it. Our favorites: General Tso's chicken and the crispy duck.

Keywords: restaurants, port angeles, food, new york city


Stewing Hen Page

03/01/05 - Stewing Hen

We've mentioned Dry Creek Farms and there wonderful eggs on our website before. And, we've mentioned our recent acquisition of three of their hens in our column on Too Much Poultry.

You can think of this column as a follow up to our Too Much Poultry column. We were talking with Harley at the Port Angeles Farmers' Market the other day, and he mentioned that he had sold a good number of his hens. We were telling him how delicious they were, and he recounted that one of his customers had found the bird to be too tough.

"How did they cook it?", we asked.

"They roasted it.", he replied.

"Well that explains it. Old hens are stewing hens. You have to braise or stew them for hours to get them tender. We cooked one of ours in red wine and it was stupendous."

We promised to provide him with a recipe or two, and we've posted our favorite online. Check out our Stewing Hen page for a great coq au vin recipe, perfect for the chicken of a certain age.

Keywords: food, farms, birds, port angeles, wine, farmers' market, recipe


12/21/04 - Too Much Poultry

Well, it has happened again. You may remember our special Kaleberg report, Too Many Oysters. We had too many oysters. Our challenge now is that we have too much poultry. How did we get into this predicament?  It wasn't easy, but it seems that like calls to like. To understand how this principle applies to our current fowl state, read our new special Kaleberg report, Too Much Poultry.

Keywords: food, birds, oysters


12/17/04 - Choucroute Meets Champagne

Tomorrow night is our Christmas party. It's an even year, so we're serving choucroute garni. That's French for garnished sauerkraut, and boy do we garnish. We've got four smoked pheasants, three pounds of ham, tons of weisswurst, bratwurst and smoked duck magret. It is all rather overwhelming.

You make choucroute by laying pork fat, duck fat and a few token vegetables in a matrix of well rinsed sauerkraut. We are using 6 of the 4 lb jars from CostCo, so we should have plenty. On the right you can see an early vegetable layer.

Champagne is one of the ingredients in choucroute, and you have to really pour it on. We'll probably go through four bottles on this batch alone. Click on the choucroute image to the right and see our little Quicktime movie: Champagne Meets Choucroute

Early stages of choucroute

Keywords: christmas, food, movies


The Cookie Tree

12/13/04 - This Year's Cookie Tree

The Christmas trees are up and our house is becoming one big grove. We held our cookie tree decorating party yesterday and now the air is full of pine scent and gingerbread.

We hold a cookie party primarily for children, but it is the adults who do most of the decorating. The children run around and play with our K'Nex. Some of them do decorate cookies, and this should cause great satisfaction to the grinders of extra fine confectioner's powdered sugar and the folks in the food dye plants.

Now, all we have to do is hang our stockings by the chimney with care and stuff all our presents under the tree.
 
Closeup Cookies Big Tree Closeup

Keywords: christmas, food, k'nex


12/03/04 - Hurricane Ridge in the Winter

Hurricane Ridge is once again open for cross country skiing and snow shoeing. This morning the road was open and there were five inches of snow at the "snow post" so we headed up to the ridge and checked things out.  The road was open and well plowed. The scenery was spectacular with an amazing lemon sky. We had to blaze our own trail, but with so little snow it wasn't much of a problem.  It was the true glory of the Northwest with white mountains and green trees. A great start for the winter season.

NOTE (for disbelievers): No, we did not Photoshop in that yellow. That is what you see. That is what our camera recorded. The sky really is yellow with notes of pink. This is a lemon sky. A buttermilk sky is similar, but the yellow is tinged with blue.

Hurricane Ridge View 1
Hurricane Ridge View 3
Hurricane Ridge View 2

Keywords: high country, atmosphere, food, hurricane ridge, winter, oysters


11/26/04 - Best Turkey Ever

Thanksgiving Update - The best turkey ever. We just feasted on our Heritage American Bronze bird from Heritage Foods, and it was spectactular. This is what turkey is supposed to taste like. The American Bronze breed is an old fashioned breed before they went nuts producing an infinite supply of white breast meat at the expense of flavor, texture and species viability.

We admit that this picture does not do the bird justice. In truth it LOOKS like just about any other bird, but the taste, the moistness, the texture, and the scent all outdid ANY commercial or organic bird we have tasted in years. No more woolen turkeys for Thanksgiving. Heritage birds forever.

Heritage American Bronze Turkey

Keywords: food, birds


Too Many Oysters?


11/23/04 - Too Many Oysters?

Is it possible to have too many oysters? Kaleberg Labs tries to find out. Read our special report.


Keywords: food, special report, oysters


11/05/04 - New York City Update

We have just returned from a visit to New York City, and we must admit that things are bustling there. The tourist trade seems to have recovered. Thanks to the weak dollar Europeans seem to be shopping again. We did some shopping ourselves. We loaded up on chili and curry powders at Aphrodisia in the Village, we bought some books at the Lenox Hill Bookstore, we found a new annular hat at Boyd's, and we got our building supplies at Home Front, a 7/24 hardware store and lumber yard not far from the Empire State Building.

First, we'll talk about the bookstore. There used to be a really nice little bookstore on Madison Avenue. Not the one owned by the IBM heiress by the Whitney, but the other one. It always had an interesting collection of literature and art books. Even when we didn't buy anything, the place always got us thinking. When it closed, we stuck with the Borders on 57th and the Barnes and Noble on Union Square.

Madison Avenue has been changing. It has always been upmarket, but it is going international. This means it is getting more and more mall like over the years as upmarket global vendors leave Fifth Avenue and move north and east. So, we've been spending more and more time over on Lexington Avenue, and the Lenox Hill Bookstore is our latest find. It's a homey little place crammed full of books, including a lot of good reading. They tend to stock fewer authors, but more titles from those that they do. The art book collection was full of interesting stuff, not just coffee table gifts. This is a sign that they know their customers. We bought a few things for the flight home and some Christmas presents.

As for HomeFront, the hardware store and lumber yard, we stayed for part of a trip at a relative's apartment, and there were a few deferred maintenance items, as they say in commercial aviation. We needed to buy a light switch, a door knob and mechanism, tapes, glues, a screwdriver and some other goodies. We have heard that there is a new Home Depot on 14th Street, but our favorite hardware store is on 29th Street off Third Avenue. They are open seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, and they stock a broad supply of electrical, mechanical and plumbing items. They also sell glass, lumber, steel plates, cleaning supplies and the like. It's a big place for Manhattan, with three floors and a basement, and the staff knows its stuff.

We had a less satisfactory experience at Magnolia Bakery. They still have the buzz, and the lines run around the corner, but the quality of the cakes has been slipping over the past year or two. Has this trend reversed? We couldn't find out. We ordered German chocolate cake, but our box contained spice cake. We wound up doing a forced march to Buttercup Bake Shop where the German chocolate cake is still excellent.

Since we are on the subject of cakes and confections, we should note that La Maison du Chocolat is in excellent form, and that our current favorite hot chocolate is Caracas.

We visited a number of our favorite restaurants including some old favorites like the Union Square Cafe, the Pearl Oyster Bar, Wallse and the Tabla Bread Bar. All were at the top of their form. The knockerle dessert at Wallse has really grown, and there is a rumor that the chef at Tabla may be producing a cookbook some time in late 2005. We can hardly wait.

On a side note, we often go over upcoming Claypool comics while having dinner with one of our Claypool friends. Comic book original artwork is oversized, so it is hard to be discreet.  One of the folks working at the Tabla Bread Bar noticed that one of us was in the business and dropped by to say hello. It turns out he was Daniel Miller whose Creased original graphic novel is soon coming out from Image comics. We haven't a clue about the book, but it shows that the comic book business isn't quite dead yet.

We liked Savoy so much on our last trip to New York that we went back twice on this trip. The big hit was the roasted cauliflower with hen of the woods mushrooms seasoned with a bit of five spice powder. We also loved the fava bean fritters. That, and everything else.

October, as it turned out, was New York State Wine Month, so we had a number of good glasses of New York State wine at our first meal. New York State wines are quite good, and a lot of them haven't bought in to the Robert Parker fruit bomb 20% alcohol thing, so you can still drink them with a meal. At our second meal, all the New York State wines were gone, even though it was still New York State Wine Month. The reason: lack of demand, and a variety of issues revolving around restaurant stocking mechanisms.

We tried two new restaurants. Spice Market, Jean Georges Vongerichten's new place in the trendy meat packing district, and Tia Pol, a little tapas bar in trendy Chelsea. Spice Market was a bust with bad service and mediocre Thai food. We were distinctly unimpressed. Tia Pol, in contrast, with its imaginative little Spanish dishes and well chosen wine list, excelled. It might be a hole in the wall, but the food was excellent, and they had a great neighborhood attitude.

The Lower East Side has been getting trendy, like so many other New York City neighborhoods, so we decided to check it out. We remember Katz's "Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army" promotion from the 1960s, but there have been a lot of changes since then. Katz's is still there, and you can now send a salami to Iraq. Walking around, we could not help but notice that the entire neighborhood, once the epitome of an overcrowded slum, has been moving upmarket.

This is happening one store front at a time.

In some neighborhoods gentrification comes in like a juggernaut. Entire blocks are rebuilt, store fronts are remodeled, traffic is rerouted, and if you didn't have a GPS you'd swear that you were somewhere else. On the Lower East Side the overall fabric seems intact, but here and there you will notice a boarded up store front or an empty shop with a building permit posted. That ratty looking place across the street is now selling designer clothing, and the designer is working at the shop. The menus in the window now feature foie gras.

It seems that the Lower East Side was always about retail, despite the "I can get it for you wholesale" bravado. It was a neighborhood of small shop keepers and pushcarts. We didn't see any pushcarts, but the small shop keepers were there in force. Still, we couldn't help thinking about a 1939 article in Fortune magazine about the New York City pushcarts. Apparently shop keepers used to fight to get the pushcarts on THEIR side of the street since they encouraged foot traffic and often meant 50% more business. Now, we gather, that shop keepers want the pushcarts elsewhere.

We'll keep checking out the Lower East Side and see what develops.

Towards the end of our trip, we checked out the new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The subway station and new escalators are great, but inside, it's a mall. That's right, it's just a big shopping mall. There was really not much reason to look around, since we knew what we would find, so we left. We really have nothing against malls, except that they lack serendipity. Maybe we should be thinking of it as the Suburban Embassy to New York City.

So, that was our trip to New York. We'd like to thank San Juan Airlines for making this all much more convenient with their $49 (each way) air taxi from Port Angeles to Boeing Field. At $98 a pop for the two of us it was only a little bit more expensive than the cab from Newark.

Keywords: food, restaurants, shopping, new york city, art, christmas, port angeles, wine


10/08/04 - Non-Alcoholic Cocktails

- We recently held our Kaleberg luau, so we're still full of "Polynesian" rum cocktails. Some of them are pretty strong, but they all have great names like Suffering Bastard and Planet of the Apes. We've been speculating on what to call the non-alcoholic versions. How about Suffering Unfortunate? See some of our ideas on this.

Keywords: luau, food


09/18/04 - Lacinato Kale

The lacinato kale is in at the Farmer's Market.

Since this is the Kaleberg web site, you have probably guessed that we are fond of kale. This is true, but our favorite type of kale is lacinato kale, also known as dinosaur kale. It gets this latter name from its wrinkly texture, probably because it is wrinkly like elephant skin and green like lizard skin, so it fits one model, most likely obselete, of what dinosaur skin would look like.

Lacinato kale has a much richer flavor, and is more tender, than the most common type of kale found in supermarkets. We usually rip the leaf from the thick stalk and just saute it with garlic, or we'll saute it with a little oil and break a few eggs into the pan and stir continuously to make a revuelto. You can blanche it, but you don't have to.

Lacinato or Dinosaur Kale
Another great way to serve it is deep fried in peanut oil. We used to do this in a pot, but the resulting mess when the wet kale hit the hot oil was rather hard to clean up and easy to slip on. So, we bought a little Fry Daddy frier and we can now deep fry kale with impunity. Deep fried lacinato kale is translucent, like stained glass. It is crisp and crunchy, and the kale flavor seems to get concentrated by the heat.

Deep fried kale is also very filling, so you can't eat very much of it. We actually consider it a diet food.

Keywords: food


09/06/04 - Seattle Notes

We were in Seattle yesterday, but we weren't going to the Huskies game or Bumbershoot. We sort of avoid stuff like that. Instead, we checked out Uwajimaya on 6th and Weller. This is the anchor store for the International District and includes a good Pacific Rim (and Pacific Middle, since it includes Hawaiian food) food court, a great fish store, a book store and it even has apartments upstairs. We were checking out stuff for our upcoming luau, so we bought some fresh gold label nori for the ahi tuna sushi, poked at the taro leaves wrapped in bundles and waved a few bunches of ti leaves about.

The real find though was in the pig department. If you were ever a Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel the Whatever fan, you may remember that the good guys often needed a reliable supply of blood to feed to friendly or captive vampires. Whenever we pass the blood distribution center on 68th and Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, we always think of this problem of feeding vampires. Only in New York City would they have a vampire friendly blood bank that delivers. How convenient can it get? If that new prima donna or best selling author has unusual culinary needs, all you have to do is call for take out. (Do they stuff menus under your door?)

Since Buffy and Angel were set in California, they couldn't just pick up the phone and order blood. They tended to use pig blood. This just gets us to the problem of getting pig blood, and that gets us to Uwajimaya where they sell it frozen. More importantly, they sell pig skin and sweet little pig's feet. It is surprisingly hard to buy pig skin. Even if you have your own pig slaughtered, the skin and feet are usually wholesaled or trashed since they requires a lot of processing to make them kitchen friendly.

So, if you do want to make a proper cassoulet, you can get pig skin and pig's feet at Savenors in Boston, Faicco's in New York City or at Uwajimaya in Seattle. A French housewife would be right at home.

We also made our pilgrimage to The Spanish Table at the bottom of Pike's Market and bought some really good paella rice. Did you know that paella rice is drier that Arborio rice used in risotto? We didn't, but now we do. In a sort of conservation of pig's blood rule, The Spanish Table was out of morcilla, black pig's blood sausage.

Then we tried out Tom Douglas's new restaurant, Lola. Lola has great Greek food, with kebabs and spreads, lamb and octopus, and all through it a bit of Tom Douglas's trademark Northwestern style. Why not salmon kebabs? Why not a real lamb burger with pickled green peppers? Go for the roasted potatoes alone.

Keywords: seattle, food, restaurants, fish, luau, new york city, salmon


08/23/04 - Feral Green Monsters

Check out these little green apples. You can't buy them in any store. They're tart and dry and perfect for a pie. You have to add water to them to make applesauce.

They might not look like much, but they are intensely flavored. Washington State may be famous for its apples, but let's face it, the "Delicious" apple is delicious in name only. It usually tastes like sugar and cardboard. Even Washington State farmers are now starting to pull out their Delicious orchards and putting in other varieties.

Our default supermarket apple is the Granny Smith, but even these can be more sweet than tart. When we lived in Massachusetts, we'd often try out other cultivars. Even Stop and Shop had a fairly good "apple festival" with a good dozen types to choose from. Baldwins and Northern Spies weren't too bad, but our favorites were the Gravensteins. There was an orchard in Littleton that had Gravensteins.

Out here in Washington, we actually found some Gravensteins at the Port Angeles Farmer's Market. They were pretty good, and we'll be looking for them again this season. Still, even Gravensteins pale in comparison with these feral green monsters.

Where do we find them? That would be telling, but they are on legally accessible land and not so far away that we couldn't carry back a pie or two's worth.

Great Green Pie Apples

Great Apples: Born to be wild and be green.

Keywords: food, port angeles


07/09/04 - Stuffed Salmon, CostCo Style

We were at the CostCo which was having their summer time fish market selling whole wild sockeye salmon among other goodies. We had to have a fish. The garrulous fishman got us a fish, and a recipe to cook it with.

He told us to filet the fish and then stuff it with chunks of peaches, chunks of walla walla sweet onions, fresh coriander and lavender. We had a five pound fish, so we used three nectarines, a whole sweet onion, several big fists full of coriander, two or three lavender flowers from our plantation, a half teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of pepper. We substituted nectarines for peaches since we found better nectarines at the store.

We slammed the fish shut around the stuffing and wrapped the filet in aluminum foil. When the fire was hot and ready on the grill we gave it about 15 to 20 minutes on each side. With a five pound fish, we'll recommend the higher number to get it cooked through for a total cooking time of 40 minutes.

The fish was delicious. The filling was basically a classical Caribean salsa, like one of our favorites made with mango, red onion and coriander, but this one had a true Northwest flavor, so it was perfect for salmon. Next time, we'll go for even more coriander.

Sorry about the lack of photos, but we were so hungry that we dined before getting out our camera.

Keywords: food, fish, flowers, salmon, recipe


07/08/04 - The Death Cake

The Death Cake was named for the Empire's ultimate weapon in the first Star Wars movie. If nothing else, the physical resemblance is striking, as you can see in the photograph to the right. The cake is also similar in mass to the original Death Star, which according to the movie, had a mass similar to that of a small moon.

Our Death Cake is full of devil's food cake and creamy orange icing, unlike the Death Star in the movie, which was full of evil robots and Imperial storm troopers. In fact, the Death Cake is in all ways superior to the Death Star, particularly with regards to the way it tastes. To find out more, check out our rather digressive recipe and further discussion with regards to the ultimate chocolate experience.

The Death Cake

The Death Cake

Keywords: food, recipe


06/18/04 - Salumi in Seattle

We found a new place in town. Salumi in Seattle has the best Italian salamis and other cold cuts we have ever tasted. Armandino Batali, Mario's father, runs a hole in the wall delicatessan not far from Pioneer Square, and the cured meats and sandwiches he produces are magnificent.

Keywords: seattle, restaurants, food


06/16/04 - Nash Huber's Farm Stand

A couple of the regulars at Nash Huber's farm stand started  a catering business, and since we like their attitudes towards food, and local food in particular, we told them we'd mention them on our web site if they gave us a card. It took a few trips to the Farmer's Market, and a lot of Nash's great coriander, before we got our card, but here is the poop on their catering business.

Keywords: food, nash huber


05/19/04 - Copper River Salmon Has Arrived

The Copper River salmon is in. We picked up a filet in Seattle and are going to grill it.

Also, we've been thinking about the old computer game of Dazzle Darts. It was one of those rather simple games, like Pong, that came out of the 1970s, except that Dazzle Darts seems to have vanished.

Keywords: food, fish, science, seattle, salmon


05/09/04 - Salmon Rollup

Here is another recipe we really like. This one is for a spicy, hearty salmon rollup made with bread crumbs and coriander seed. The sauce is sweet and sour, with honey and lime juice.

Keywords: food, salmon, recipe


05/08/04 - Pasta, Cauliflower, Parmesan & Pancetta

We made our old favorite, pasta, cauliflower, parmesan and pancetta today. Check out the pictures and the recipe. Did we mention capers? At Domaine Cliche this is famine food.

Keywords: food, recipe


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