Friday 20 April 2012

Seattle forever in my belly... I mean heart! -- Part 1

Seattle. Space Needle. Pike Place Market. Yada yada yada, sights to see, just like any other city. But MAN can they cook down there!

Joe and I stayed at the very nice Westin Seattle, with a view directly towards the Space Needle, where we also had the chance to watch the sun set every night, had we stayed in our room. But no, we had eating to do!

The first night, the front desk person at the hotel recommended that we checked out Palace Kitchen, an open late type restaurant right next door. Palace Kitchen is owned by Tom Douglas. Mark that name, you might come across it again... Just sayin'.

Palace Kitchen has an impressive menu, with features I have certainly never seen on a menu after midnight! Hand crafted cheeses, oil poached tuna, oysters - oh my! They also do a late night breakfast of steak and eggs, all the way up until 1am! Now I'm a fan of breakfast, but even I don't call food at midnight breakfast... Lunch maybe, but not breakfast.

We didn't take any pictures from Palace Kitchen, because it was after all veeeery late, and we were veeeery hungry and veeeery tired. Nevertheless, their beet salad with pistachios and cheese and orange segments, was perfect. Just what I needed, with moist, juicy, fruity and earthy beets. Mmmmm... And I did pick at Joe's charcuterie... Sausages, pork belly and sauerkraut. Gotta get my protein from somewhere!

So Tom Douglas got another visit from us Friday morning, in his restaurant Lola. Get this - Lola serves an octopus, bacon, celeriac, leeks and eggs breakfast! It originally comes with a coriander yoghurt, but in my garlic free world, it comes with a side of plain greek yoghurt. Joe had the truffled crimini omelette, with smashed garlic potatoes.
Needless to say, octopus for breakfast wins, hands down, any time. The egg creates a sauce for the dish, as does the yoghurt. Mix it all up, the bacon is salty, the octopus has a nice char from the grill... Oh my. Lola, come to Vancouver! Or maybe it's good they're not here. It could get expensive!

We continued our culinary travels down towards Pike Place Market. What a vibrant place! Like your favourite farmers' market, with all your local artisans and hazelnut growers and t-shirt makers and fish throwers (ever seen the leadership training movie Fish! ? It's from here!), beautiful flowers and thousands of visitors per hour. You can taste test hot pepper jellies hotter than the hottest coffee from the first and original Starbucks across the street. Try some fresh fruits at the green grocers, or a stick of dry chocolate spaghetti from the pasta guy. Yup, you read that correctly, chocolate spaghetti. He claims it tastes just like chocolate. I'm thinking he's never had good chocolate...

Pike Place Chowder is in an alley right across the street from the market itself. They make a minimum of 6 different chowders every day, they even have two garlic free ones! :) Thanks for that! The chowders were good, rich, creamy, salty, fishy and just pure savoury goodness. With oyster crackers on top, and sour dough bread on the side. This goes to show that you don't need fancy plating (see the cardboard cup of chowder, the plastic spoon, the iron grate table and the plastic wrapped oyster crackers) for full on, repeatable flavour that will bring us back to Pike Place Chowder for a bowl of awesome whenever we return...
That's it for the 1st 24 hours in Seattle. There are another two installments to come, with a cracking good time at The Crab Pot, and superb dim sum in the International District...

Wednesday 11 April 2012

Norwegian to start, then...

So yes, I'm Norwegian. I learned lots in my mom's kitchen, she holds the award for best Norwegian waffles amongst all our friends and family, and she hated baking. I learned more than just cooking skills in her kitchen, whenever a cake would slip and fall, there would be colorful language to match her disappointment. My dad makes really good sour cream porridge, from scratch. He still has to teach me that.

Then I started moving around the world. Well, Europe and North America, if that qualifies as the world. Learned that a roast cooked in a full bottle of wine was the ultimate Sunday dinner while living in Germany, from a woman who cooked for 4 people as in the recipe book, no matter how many people, 2 or 8, were around her table. We went to bed hungry sometimes. Spaetzle is still my favourite German food though.

I studied in France for just over three months. So the end result unfortunately is not fluency in French, but it left me with an addiction to pain au chocolat aux amandes, which forces me to avoid bakeries at all costs. And don't get me started on buying bread in the grocery store! The last loaf of bread I picked up had three different sources of sweet, sugar, molasses and raisin pulp - so I bake my own breads now. They crumble too easily, so if anyone out there has tested and true recipes for good loaves or buns, please let me know. 

Estonia was different. I lived there for about a year and a half, and learned most of my Estonian language from the grocery store and the multilingual menus in restaurants. They have dairy products that I had never heard of in any other country, and one of the Tallinn tourist trap restaurants serves food as it would have been served way back in the Hanseatic times, around year 1400, with whole ancient grains instead of potatoes. They also serve bear. Not only beer, but bear. And boar. Growl!

I also lived in Scotland for four years. One of the years during university, I lived right above one of the many chippies in Edinburgh, which meant that every night at around 10pm, when they fried up a batch for tomorrow's customers, my room would stink. I'm not sure that the word 'stink' quite covers it, but it'll do, for now. They deep fry EVERYTHING in Scotland. Slices of pizza, black or white pudding, chocolate bars, cheese filled hamburger patties... But I do enjoy a good haggis, with neeps, tatties and gravy!

My summer interning in Michigan taught me about North American breakfast haunts, which is the inspiration behind my constant search for the best breakfast/brunch hidden gems. I'll share them with you, don't worry, just promise you won't tell anyone once I do. Michigan also told me that fresh seafood is to be served with a bucket full of melted butter. I politely declined and had the seafood as is instead.

Then in 2008, I finally moved to Canada, knock on wood, for good. No more country hopping. I'm here to stay. Poutines for the rest of my life - woohoo! And perogies. And ceasars, the liquid ones, not the salad ones. That's what I had for dinner on my 1 year anniversary as a Canadian resident, just in March. I woke up to this waiting that morning, red and white cupcakes and a whole array of buttons to wear to show off my Canadian pride:

And here comes the sad part... I can't have garlic. It hurts. I don't swell up and die, but it hurts and ruins the rest of my day. If you really want to be mean, serve me garlic for breakfast. Not being able to pick up most packaged foods from the store has made me a better cook though! I've been experimenting with spices and flavours for years, and I want to thank all the wonderful women who have been making me scratch made taco seasoned meat for taco salads from the bottom of my heart. It's still my go to comfort food, and cumin is my new best friend.

It's 2012 and I live in the West End of Vancouver, in beautiful British Columbia. I have a brisk walk to work at one of the best hotels in the city, and lots of temptations along the way. I have a favourite macaron joint, as all Vancouverites should have by now, and breakfast out a little too much. I live and cook with my boyfriend, who's ancestry is from Hong Kong, so we certainly have a favourite dim sum place too. My only problem when we go there, is that all the food is gone by the time I remember that we should have taken a picture... But I'll work on it, I promise!

So there you go, I think that about does it for background. I'll get writing about places you can go to eat now.

Monday 2 April 2012

Welcome to my new blog!

Hello, and thank you for stopping by my blog!

Expect to see restaurant reviews, recipe reviews and drool worthy pictures pop up every once in a while.

I have just come back from a weekend full of food in Seattle, so expect to see some reviews from there coming up real soon. Feel free to ask me about specific cities and recommendations.

Areas of expertise:
Whistler, BC
Vancouver, BC
Oslo, Norway
Tallinn, Estonia
Edinburgh, Scotland

With input from...
Seattle, WA
Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima, Japan
Hong Kong
Rome, Italy
Windsor and Toronto, ON
St Joseph, MI
and many more places.

Until then, eat well and rest up, there is plenty of food to come...