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04/10/11 - Skate Wings

They had skate wings at Sunny Farms. They had just been caught the day before. We love skate wings, but rarely get to have them. We dredged ours lightly in flour then cooked them up with butter and capers. It's a simple dish, but it captures the richness and real flavor of the skate. If you like black cod, you will probably like skate. The only downside is the numerous gelatinous bones. Unless you are a big fan of duck's feet or cock's combs, you'll probably want to remove the bones carefully. (They are a good source of calcium though.)

Keywords: food

03/23/11 - Country Captain Chicken

There are all sorts of dishes that one hears about but never gets to try. They often have wonderful evocative names like Country Captain Chicken. This is a southern dish that gets its name from those sea captains who took their trading ships to the country of India, most likely because the dish contains curry. We used a recipe from Cold Weather Cooking. It's a three layer recipe:
  • Lightly floured and seasoned (with paprika) fried chicken thighs
  • Curried red and green peppers with bacon, red wine, tomatoes, currants, mango chutney, onions and garlic
  • A topping of coconut, almonds, butter and lime jice
The layers all bake together and get scooped out and served together. We used a really good, spicy curry. The dish was a tad sweet, but quite good. It's sort of a stylized version of a ten boy curry, a perfect casserole dish for the cold season.

Country Captain Chicken in all its glory

Keywords: food, recipe

03/14/11 - Hailey's Blue

We recently dropped by Dungeness Valley Creamery to pick up some of their milk. While there we also bought some blue cheese made with their raw Jersey milk. It is Hailey's Blue, and it was delicious, with a good bite backed up by the creaminess of the milk. It's made by Whiskey Hill Goat Dairy in Port Townsend which is turning into a local hotbed of cheesemakers. They opened in 2008, and we haven't tried any of their goat cheeses yet, but now we're curious about their goat based feta and cheddar.

Keywords: creamery, dungeness, port townsend, food

03/01/11 - Trufflestack

We've long been fans of Mount Townsend Creamery's Seastack cheese, and now they've made an even better version, Trufflestack. It's based on their creamy Seastack cheese, but flavored with local black truffles to give it an even richer flavor and a lot of deep truffle scent.

Keywords: mount townsend creamery, food

01/28/11 - Toga's Sandwiches

We finally tried Toga's in its new incarnation as a soup and sandwich shop. We had noticed the change over a few years back, but, as you know, it takes us a while to try new places. Toga's specializes in hot sandwiches, so we tried a few:
  • The Ultimate Reuben - This was a good honest reuben on toast with good caramelized sauerkraut, a well balanced cheese and fairly good corned beef. We're spoiled by the likes of Carnegie Deli and Katz's in New York, but it was a good enough corned beef by Seattle standards. All told, a nice hearty sandwich.
  • Toga's Original Schnitzel Sandwich - This was a lot lighter, with a lightly breaded, broiled pork cutlet, melted jarlsberg and some lettuce, tomato and red onion. This would make a good sandwich to pack for the trail.
  • Baked Dungeness Crab Panini - This sandwich has a nice helping of Dungeness crab with cheese, onions and, we gather, artichoke hearts. The caramelized onions were great with the crab, but this is another messy sandwich, so we ate it at home.
All told, we were pretty impressed. Toga's has some pretty nice sandwiches. They are open from 10 to 6 at 122 West Lauridsen Boulevard. That's on Route 101, just west of the Albertson's. They have a Facebook page - sorry, we don't link to Facebook for security reasons - where they post their specials, and we've posted their menu online here.

The reuben and the crab - It sounds like a fable.

Keywords: togas, reviews, food, port angeles

12/15/10 - Buddha's Hand

Buddha's hand, that's what they call this peculiar looking citrus fruit. In the monkey folk novel of China, Buddha's hand, when he is subduing Monkey who has challenged heaven, stretches to the far horizon. Clearly that was not the reference in mind when this fruit was named. To be honest, we're not exactly sure what they were thinking when they came up with that name.

As for the fruit itself, it has a wonderful scent, part lemon, part orange, tangy and fresh. We tried it with seafood, grating a fair bit on some sauteed oysters with garlic, parsley and butter. We were quite impressed. We also used it in a braided hoska bread along with the almonds, raisins, candied lemon peel and orange peel. It smelled great and it brightened the flavor. The fruit is all rind, so we're hoping to try to find a few more uses for it.

Keywords: oysters, food

12/03/10 - Duck Confit

We just finished the last of our first duck confit of the season. That's how far behind this web log is. We preserved four ducks in their own fat and ate every last scrap. We even used up all the fat frying potatoes and the like. All that is left is this picture.

Duck confit, duck fat fried potatoes and lacinato kale salad

Keywords: ducks, food, kale

09/06/10 - Crespiou

This has been a terrible year for the local vegetables. Usually, we can start making crespiou some time in July, but this year we have seen a dearth of vegetables. We finally gave it a try, in September, and we managed to scrape together five layers:
  • lacinato kale with anchovies
  • baby potatoes and onions
  • green beans
  • tomatoes, garlic, basil and pine nuts
  • zucchini with garlic, oregano, thyme and dry cured black olives
We usually go for six, or even eight. (In case you are wondering, each layer is a little two egg omelet, and they all get stacked together before being sliced like a layer cake.) It was a very nice crespiou, but 2010 was not one of our great crespiou years.





Keywords: food, kale

09/03/10 - New, at Least for Us, in Seattle

We were briefly in Seattle. We visited a few old haunts like Le Pichet, Trabant, the coffee house, and REI, and we discovered a few new places:
  • Melrose Market - This is a mini-mall of little food shops on Melrose Avenue between Pike and Pine. Rain Shadow Meats alone was worth the visit. There are quite a few interesting places cropping up between Pike and Pine, like Cascina Spinasse, Eliot Bay Books and now Melrose Market.
  • Belle Epicurian - This is a pastry place on Fourth Avenue between University and Seneca, and we nearly walked right by except for the wonderful scent of buttery baked goods. To be honest, we didn't try anything. Despite rumors to the contrary, we Kalebergs can only eat so much. Still, everything had the right look and scent, so we'll be back.
  • Seatown Snack Bar - This is Tom Douglas's latest addition to his empire. It has taken over the retro-1970s furniture store next to Etta's. (See our review below.)

Meat at Rain Shadow Meats

Cheese at Calf and Kid

Belle Epicurian

Seatown Snack Bar

Seatown Snack Bar - A Brief Review

We had a porchetta sandwich, which was almost as good as Salumi's. We also had an amazingly good beef short rib sandwich. They have a great potato salad made with a simple coarse Dijon mustard dressing. We also had a wonderful dish of thinly sliced octopus with turmeric cucumbers and a plate of heirloom tomatoes and avocado skordalia. We were quite impressed. Not only is the food great, and you can get a light snack or a full meal, but they serve all afternoon and into the evening.

Keywords: seattle, food, restaurants, kale

08/26/10 - Salmon a la Costco

We learned how to make this dish from the fish guy at Costco. This time, we used a sockeye salmon from WIld West. The dish is simplicity itself. Just filet the fish, then stuff it with nectarines (or peaches), purple onion and coriander. Bake it in the oven at 350F for 20=30 minutes, and there it is, or in our case, there it was.

Our fish

The stuffing

The stuffed fish

Keywords: food, salmon

08/20/10 - Luau 2010

We held the annual Kaleberg Luau a while back, but we didn't post any pictures. We've been holding the luau since 2002, so it really has become a tradition.

That's the spread. It's not a luau without a pineapple.

Our motto: served in a skull. Those are South Sea Bubbles served in the champagne flutes. That's pineapple champagne, pineapple gum syrup and bits of pineapple.

Godzilla - in the spirit

Hawaiian spice chicken, made with Indonesian spices

Watermelon salad with tomato, coriander, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar and mozzarella, adapted from Spago Wailea

Lau lau - in action

Those are mai tais made with blue curacao - don't ask - in the punch bowl in front of this year's cupcake heiau.

Keywords: hawaii, food, luau, kale

08/05/10 - Salmon Truck

The Rite Aid parking lot on Lincoln Street has a free market air. You'll often find someone with a pickup truck selling firewood, flowers or freshly caught salmon parked towards the main street. This salmon vendor was typical. It's one of the great things about living in Port Angeles.

A seasonal sight

Keywords: port angeles, food, salmon

07/27/10 - Moroccan Lamb With Okra

We recently made a new dish from Paula Wolfert's Moroccan cookbook, her Moroccan Lamb and Okra Tagine. As with so many things, it started at the Port Angeles Farmer's Market. The woman at the Family Farm had a tub of okra for sale. Okra looks like what you imagined pod people would look like, except smaller and green. It is also a hot weather plant grown in the American south and sub-Saharan Africa. This has been a cool summer, even by local standards, and Port Angeles is not known for its tropical heat. We have no idea of how she managed to grow okra around here. We eagerly bought a pound or two and broke out a shoulder of Romney lamb from Heritage Foods. The tagine, basically a Moroccan stew, is on the right. It is seasoned with cinnamon and turmeric. The red stuff on top is tomato. We wish we could let you smell it over the web, or even better, offer you a taste, but that will probably have to wait for HTML 6.

That's the dish, en cocotte.

Keywords: food, kale

07/09/10 - The Death Cake Returns

It's that time of year again. The Death Cake has returned. This is a chocolate cake so rich and dense that you can actually see it warping the fabric of space and time around it. The cake itself is fudge cockaigne. The filling is acid orange, not unlike the fillings of the gas giant planets. The icing is simply fudge, extra rich fudge.

The Death Cake in all its glory

Keywords: food

06/05/10 - Gaze In Horror

We had a sudden desire for an old fashioned dish, the kind that dominated the women's magazines of the 1960s but has long since vanished. In this case it was a dish of Moll's Untamed Enchiladas, done in the true 1960s style. It was called enchiladas, but it was actually more of a lasagna with layers of
  • meat with mexican spices, garlic, onions and regular green bell peppers - We substituted pork for beef.
  • queso fresco and some other cheese we had lying around the house
  • real, full fat sour cream and canned black olives
If you make this, be sure to use a regular green bell pepper, not one of those fancy mexican peppers, and use those canned olives, not those fancy Italian ones that come in bottles. That is, if you want the true 1960s taste.

We know it looks rather terrifying in the picture, but it was pretty tasty, though horribly rich.

Behold ye mighty ...

Keywords: food

05/14/10 - French Fry Folly

These may look like mild mannered french fries with ketchup, but appearances can be deceiving. They are actually strips of pound cake with some raspberry jam for dipping. The genius behind this conceit is a retired chef. Her big thing is pizza, and she's even produced a book on the subject. Sorry, we don't have her recipe for pound cake, but if you want to try this, consider using this recipe from Edna Lewis.

These are not french fries. No, they aren't liberty fries either.

Keywords: food, recipe, kale


Bay leaves with flowers

05/12/10 - Bay Leaves in Bloom

Our bay bush is in bloom, so now our bay leaves have blossoms on them. They are definitely prettier than just plain bay leaves.

Keywords: flowers, food

03/08/10 - Sefrina

Sefrina isn't the next town after Hilda. Sefrina is a Moroccan cholent, a great, easy to make Moroccan stew with a ridiculously long cooking time. We found out about it in Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. Aside from the six hour cooking time, it is an easy dish to make. That's right, it cooks for six hours total, but your oven does all the heavy lifting. Everything gets wonderfully tender, and the eggs develop an amazing creamy texture as they hardboil.

We made this version with a 3lb 10oz pot roast from the Clark Family Farm. It had a nice big marrow bone which you can see floating there in the photo. The potatoes were from the Johnston Farm and the eggs from Westwind Farm, so this qualifies as a Port Angeles Farmers' Market dish. We also used dried chick peas, but they weren't from the Farmers' Market. You can make this dish with canned chick peas, but this is obviously not a dish you can throw together in a hurry, so why bother with time saving conveniences?

Our Moroccan stew

The eggs get tan and creamy.
 The recipe:
  1. The night before, soak a cup of dried chick peas in water overnight.
  2. Start boiling six cups of water in a tea kettle.
  3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
  4. Take a big casserole with a lid and dump in the chick peas.
  5. Add 3 or 4 pounds of beef cut into big chunks. Pot roast is great, but it is better if there is a bone or two.
  6. Add six potatoes.
  7. Gently tuck six raw eggs into the ingredients so far.
  8. Chop up four cloves of garlic and sprinkle them on top.
  9. Sprinkle with a few pinches of salt, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon of saffron or turmeric.
  10. When the water comes to a boil, pour it on.
  11. Cover and put it in the oven for an hour.
  12. Lower the heat to 250°F and let it cook for another five hours.

Keywords: farmers' market, johnston farm, port angeles, food, westwind farm, clark family, recipe, kale


Yes, we smoked it in the snow.

12/06/09 - Smoked Steelhead

For the last few weeks Tuna Dan has had steelhead at the Port Angeles Farmers' Market, so that means we've been having smoked steelhead. We use brown sugar, black pepper, kosher salt and coriander seeds for our rub. We don't smoke it long, but that doesn't matter. We usually eat it pretty quickly.

Keywords: farmers' market, food

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