Wright Eats

We had perfect weather last Sunday for Dog Mountain Farm’s fourth farm dinner of the season – skies with barely a cloud in sight, and warm sunshine, but not too hot (which was nice since the dinner tables are not shaded!).  We were looking forward to this dinner, since we thought it might be a bit like the Outstanding in the Field dinner we attended back in 2005, which we really enjoyed.  This time, we had the chance to experience the dinner directly on the farm, whereas in 2005 we toured a farm in the Skagit Valley before heading off to eat at a different location nearby.

We arrived just after 3:00 and got ourselves situated with a cool glass of white wine as we wandered the orchard and gardens.  Cindy Krepky, along with her husband David, gave a tour of their farm gardens, duck and chicken coop, and greenhouse.  The variety of products they grow is amazing, given that this is such a small operation, and especially given the harsh weather farmers were faced with this spring.  They supply a number of local restaurants, like Cafe Juanita, Canlis, Andaluca, and the Latona Pub.  Cindy explained how the land is former Weyerhaeuser land that the company sold off when the trees were no longer in good condition.  They’ve been clearing the trees and reviving the soil since they bought the land about seven years ago, and now they have a beautiful view of the Cascades.

Erik Jackson was the chef for our meal, assisted by Chef Tony who makes pies at Serious Pie in Seattle.  We were impressed with the meal, which had all the right elements for a farm dinner in the height of summer – a beautiful poached duck egg from the farm served with brioche and anchovy aioli, a cotechino sausage made by the chef and served Napoleon style with puff pastry and sweet Tiny’s farm nectarines, a delicious refreshing cold green gazpacho, a flavorful pork chop with onion jam and Muscat peach sauce, and three melon sorbets with port syrup.  It was all quite tasty, but a couple people in our party thought there wasn’t quite enough food and left a bit hungry.  My only wish was that they had used a local pork, given that it was the main dish of the whole meal – instead, it was shipped in from somewhere in Iowa, which seemed like an odd choice for a Washington farm dinner.

Dinner was served at a slow leisurely pace, so we had time to wander off to visit the two Percheron draft horses, Ike and Zeek.  Beautiful, and huge, animals!  We fed them big handfuls of green grass, and managed to keep our fingers too.

They’re hosting two more dinners this year, and their web site says they each have six seats left.  All of the previous dinners have been sold out, so if you have a chance to, I recommend signing up soon!

To see more photos from the event, you can view our album.

Starting this week, Skillet Street Food’s weekly downtown location will be on the corner of Boren and Denny Avenue.  I think it’s safe to say that I’ll be working remotely on an upcoming Wednesday.

And if that doesn’t fit your schedule, you can stop by Skillet at the upcoming Pioneer Square Fire Festival on July 11-12.

We’ve been fans of Sitka and Spruce since it opened, so when we heard last year that chef Matt Dillon was opening his second place, The Corson Building, we could hardly wait.  Whereas Sitka and Spruce is generally first-come-first-served, The Corson Building is reservations-only.  They’re only open for dinners a few nights a week, usually Thursday through Saturday, but it varies – their web site lists the dates.  They host a number of other events (more on that later) and periodic Sunday Suppers, too.  We scored our reservation for their first Sunday Supper, which was last weekend.

The Corson Building sits below the Corson Street off-ramp from I-5, in Georgetown.  You’d think this would make it easy to get to, but instead the ramp deposits you a block or two beyond the building, so we wound up making U-turns and backtracking before finally finding the rustic brick two-story.  The front half of the lower floor is the dining room with the original ornate fireplace taking center stage, and in back, Matt was cooking in the homey kitchen filled with windows.  The dining room was empty this evening because the tables had been moved outside.  Tonight’s dinner was to be the first official dinner on the patio (Matt joked that the meal he served outside to his family the previous week didn’t count).

For the first half hour, we wandered the yard, admiring the edible garden, chicken coop, and doves.  We enjoyed iced tea and oysters on the half shell while Matt’s friendly and mellow dog Che ambled about, greeting guests. The urban soundtrack of planes, trains, and automobiles was completed with the railroad tracks out back and Boeing Field nearby, both active this evening.

Two dozen people squeezed in around the single long table, some in chairs, others on wide wood benches.  When we had arrived, there were place settings on the ends which were missing when we sat down, so we asked if we could wrap someone around the end to get a touch more elbow room.  It only made a difference for one side of the table, unfortunately.  This would be a cozy supper.

Three wines were available for purchase on top of the $50 per person for dinner – a good deal given that the regular dinners are $80, but the pours were small and the dinner long so we would have preferred to purchase a couple bottles instead.  The wines were chilled and just right for the hot day.

Dinner finally commenced when heaping plates of radish and fennel salad with prosciutto arrived at each end of the table.  The salad was a refreshing start, though with just two plates to pass, there was sadly little left by the time each reached the other end of the table.  For the next course, we filled our plates with clams, bacon, and chorizo, plus crostini with rabbit liver pâté.  Both were delicious and a few of us wished for bread at the table to sop up the flavorful clam broth.  Instead we dumped our broth into the shells to make way for the next course after it was clear that there would be no fresh plates for the salad.  The roasted tomatoes were intense and really made the romaine, cucumber, and tomato salad stand out.

Everyone had a break to stretch their legs before the main dishes arrived in quick succession:  King salmon with fava beans, rabbit leg poached in olive oil, lemon, and bay, with green goddess dressing, and Bluebird Grain Farms emmer with morels, carrots, and lovage.  (Dawn and I predicted tonight’s meal would include fava beans and morels – ’tis the season!)  The salmon was amazing, and the tender rabbit’s simple preparation let the delicate flavor come through – definitely one of the best rabbit dishes we’ve had.  The meal finished with muscat wine, a large plate of Pecorino-like cheese, and a huge bowl of fresh strawberries with 25 year old balsamic on the side for dipping.

Dinners are only half of the picture of what The Corson Building is about.  Matt has plans to make it into a community center for the Georgetown neighborhood.  He’s collaborating with the nonprofit Seattle Youth Garden Works, providing the kids with a plot of land just down the street from the restaurant to grow produce that he’ll buy from them.  They will be growing some of the more interesting and unusual items that he can’t easily get elsewhere.  SYGW provides jobs for underserved youth, and you may have seen them selling their fresh produce at the University District farmers market.

Then he plans to host visiting chefs at The Corson Building.  Not only will he provide the chefs a venue for hosting dinners or classes, but if they’re from out of town, he’ll let them stay upstairs in The Corson Building.  The first chef’s dinner is this Sunday with Justin Neidermeyer, who is about to open his new Piemontese-style restaurant Spinasse Trattoria in Capitol Hill, where he’ll serve his amazing handmade pasta.  Matt also plans to have Jerry Traunfeld in a couple times before he opens his much-anticipated restaurant Poppy in September.  They know each other well, since Matt once worked in Jerry’s kitchen while he was at The Herbfarm.  And Matt will also soon be hosting Amaryll and Lori from Boulette’s Larder in San Francisco.

Matt has visions for his own larder next door.  He already has space in the back half of the neighboring building and plans to develop it into a café and retail space, where you can purchase top-notch ingredients for a party or your pantry.  He says it’s the place where you’ll be able to go buy a gallon of chicken stock or maybe some stuffed quail for your dinner party.

He’s open to other ideas for using The Corson Building space, too.  Let him know what you’re thinking about and he’ll try to make it happen.  Matt’s vision of The Corson Building as a vibrant community center for all things food-related is exciting, and we look forward to seeing it develop over the coming months.

The Corson Building
5609 Corson Ave, Seattle
(206) 762-3330

We’ve purchased our tickets to Wednesday evening’s SIFF documentary Good Food.  This will be the world premiere of the film, but there is another screening Saturday afternoon, too.

This lively tour of various Washington state farms and ranches that have adopted healthier organic methods in raising their products offers several lucid arguments in favor of smaller, more efficient farms, and purchasing locally grown crops. Still, none are as convincing as the marvelous bounty laid before our eyes in this film.

We had been looking forward to the dinner all day.  Traffic was light and we arrived early for the 3rd annual Whole Beast Dinner at Lark last Monday.  We nibbled on marinated olives and Marcona almonds and sipped Cava while we read over the evening’s menu.  There were two different animals featured, one pig and two lambs, but the menu looked a little more manageable than the previous year.  We could hardly believe it then when veterans told us that the menu had been pared down from the first year.  We barely made it through three of the four waves of food!  This year’s menu didn’t look quite as intimidating. 

Several of the more interesting dishes were missing this year, such as the pork snouts, trotters, and lamb brains.  Michelle Magidow said that they had a little more trouble obtaining the “bits and pieces” this time around.  The Whole Beast Dinner is usually more involved than simply cooking the whole animals, since they actually need snouts from 50 pigs to serve a roomful of 50 people Pork snouts alla Milanese.

But they did bring back the pig ears.  These were served thinly shaved in a salad with watercress, green papaya, pickled chiles, and crispy shallots.  The salad was stellar and perfectly dressed with the right blend of heat and sweetness.

There were a number of other standouts.  We enjoyed the lardo that Lark served on toast with sweet mostarda di uva.  This is Lark’s own lardo, which they have been curing for six months so far; they expect to continue curing for another six months, but this dish was a preview of what’s to come.

We also really enjoyed the squid and chorizo skewers, along with the warm salad of lamb tongue with cauliflower and almonds.  Both dishes were prepared by David Hawksworth, who was the chef at West Restaurant in Vancouver until recently.  He’s working on a new venture now, renovating the Hotel Georgia to include a 6,000 sq ft. restaurant that will serve over 100 people.  After those two outstanding dishes, I’m certain we will be visiting after it opens.

Johnathan Sundstrom had invited David as a guest chef for the evening, along with Susan Vanderbeek, a venerable chef in the Pacific Northwest.  She recently sold her popular restaurant, The Oystercatcher on Whidbey Island, and is enjoying retirement by working at events like this dinner.  It was a memorable meal, and we’re already looking forward to the 4th annual dinner.

1st wave
Salumi and Fra Mani coppa and salami
Lark lardo on toast with mostarda di uva
Guanciale wrapped dates with Gorgonzola
Marcona almonds and marinated olives

2nd wave
Warm pork pate en croute with rhubarb, grain mustard and loganberry honey
Squid, chorizo, olive, confit tomato and grilled treviso
Lardo roasted white prawns with rosemary and Meyer lemon
Pig ears as a salad with watercress, green papaya, pickled chiles and crispy shallots

3rd wave
Lamb crepinette with pine nuts, fennel and pear
Warm salad of lamb tongue, duo of cauliflower and toasted almonds
Pork cheeks with spicy coriander broth, ramps and pineapple
Pan fried kidney with curry mustard, asparagus, dill and Basmati rice

Grapefruit Campari Ice

4th wave
Lamb sweetbread ravioli with peas, favas and mint
Pork tongue dolce forte
Grilled lamb kofta with spiced carrots, couscous and Mustapha’s olives

Dessert
Meyer lemon madelienes with custard sauce
Crackling chocolate cookies

Lark
926 12th Ave, Seattle
(206) 323-5275

Don’t miss this weekend’s edible plant sale, put on by the Seattle Tilth each spring.  We go each year to pick up plants for our garden (although we will unfortunately miss this year’s sale!), and we’ve learned that you’ve got to get there early for the best selection – the line starts a good half hour before the doors open at 9am on Saturday, May 3.  Bring some empty plant trays, boxes, or a wagon to carry your stash, if you want to bypass the line for purchasing trays.

If you don’t have a garden but have been thinking about starting one, now is a great time to do so.  How much closer to eating locally can you get than walking outside your kitchen door?  Michael Pollan actually had a great column in the New York Times a week ago about climate change and this very topic.  And if you don’t have a green thumb, or want to learn how to work with an edible garden, contact Amy Pennington at Go Go Green Garden.  Amy is a foodie who has recently started her own business doing veggie garden consulting.  I met her when the Dahlia Bakery first opened, when she was the bakery manager.  Now she’s helping people connect with their food by growing it in their own yard.  She can help coach you in getting started, or if gardening really isn’t your thing, she can even plant your garden and harvest the vegetables, leaving a basket of goodies on your doorstep.

For a list of what’s available at this weekend’s plant sale, check out the plant lists.  They’ve got great tomato starts, and lots of herbs which we love to sprinkle about our garden.  We also always make sure we’ve got rose geranium so we can make Jerry Traunfeld’s incredible strawberry ice cream.  The rose geranium isn’t a prominent flavor in the ice cream, but instead enhances the strawberries immensely.  Purchase the rose geranium this weekend and then make this ice cream when strawberries are in season this summer!  Not only is it among the best ice creams we’ve made, but it has no eggs and less fat content than most ice creams, making it a light summer treat.

Strawberry Rose Geranium Ice Cream
From The Herbal Kitchen, by Jerry Traunfeld
Makes 1 quart, 8 servings

2 cups half-and-half
1½ cups sugar
8 medium rose geranium leaves
1½ pints very ripe strawberries

Bring the half-and-half and sugar to a boil in a small saucepan.  Stir in the rose geranium leaves, cover, and remove from the heat.  After about 10 minutes, strain the cream and let it cool.

Wash and hull the strawberries.  Puree them in a blender or food processor until fairly smooth.  You should have 2 cups.

Stir the strawberries and infused cream together and chill in the refrigerator or over ice until cold to the touch.  Freeze in an ice cream maker.  Scoop the ice cream out into a lidded container and store it in the freezer until serving time.

I really like how the folks at Victrola take the time to share their passion for coffee with the public, whether it’s weekly coffee cuppings, or events like this mentioned on their blog:

If you’ve ever wondered what all these coffee roasters are doing when they “go to origin,” please come to the cafe and roastery on Pike and let us demystify! We’ll have our photo show up (well, it’s up now, but it’ll still be up on May 15th), some snacks and coffee from Guatemala, a slideshow presentation of our travels, and maybe a few other tricks up our sleeves.

We’ve attended a number of their coffee seminars in the past and found them to be interesting (and highly caffeinated!).

Thursday of next week is the annual event to raise money for AIDS, Dining Out for Life.  On April 24th, restaurants around Seattle will donate a portion of your bill to Lifelong AIDS Alliance.

The list of participating restaurants has gotten long over the 15 years this fundraiser has been going on, so there’s got to be a restaurant on the list for you.  My recommendations are: Quinn’s Pub, Cafe Presse, Red Mill Burgers, Tavolata, Cremant, and really, too many others to list.  And if you’re on the Eastside, Pomegranate Bistro and Shamiana are good options.

Eat Local is also participating this year, so you can dine in, or support the cause twice.  Drop by Eat Local on Thursday to pick up a dinner for the weekend, and then dine out at your favorite restaurant afterwards.  How to Cook a Wolf is just a half block away – last time we were there, we put our name on the list and then went shopping at Eat Local, stuck the food in our car, and returned 20 minutes later just as our table was ready.  Or, if you don’t want to wait for a table, Portage Restaurant across the street takes reservations and is also participating.

Last month, we mentioned that Txori was starting up a new monthly dining event called Txoko.  This past Monday was the first event, and we thought we’d do a follow-up posting as part of the first Seattle Restaurant Review 360 event.  The Herbivoracious blog started this new food blogger event, where bloggers around the city post reviews about the same restaurant on the same day.  Today is Txori’s day.

The Txoko dinner is quite different from the normal Txori experience (see our first posting for more on that).  Instead of tiny, bite-sized pintxo portions, the Txoko dinner is done family-style, for a fixed $45 price.  They advertised four courses when we signed up, but I guess they didn’t count the pintxo that they served as we sat down, or the pintxo-sized cheese course later – two added bonus courses!

The pintxo was the tortilla española from their regular menu.  I haven’t had this since back in November when they first opened, and I had forgotten how good it is!  Crisp bread topped with a warm slice of potato omelet.  Really tasty, and I’ll have to remember to order this again next time we’re in.

Next up were the family platters of beet salad.  Everyone at the table was enamored with this salad.  A colorful presentation of golden and red beets surrounding a green mâche salad, it was perfectly dressed.  The woman across from me commented how she never used to like beets, but she’s recently come to appreciate them.  It speaks for itself that she (and the rest of us) went back for seconds as soon as our plates were clean.

The soup course followed.  This was a hearty fish stew.  It was very flavorful, but I found it a bit too salty for my taste.  I still enjoyed it, but it was my least favorite course of the meal.

The showcase was the suckling pig, served with potatoes, spinach, pine nuts, and golden raisins.  They roasted a whole suckling pig, and after Chef Joey displayed it for the table, they took it back to the kitchen and pulled the pork to present it on huge platters with the potatoes and spinach.  A delicious dish!  The best part was the skin cracklings on top.

I really enjoyed the cheese course – a few pieces of Spanish cheese with quince and spiced nuts.  It sounds fairly standard, but it had a very nice presentation, with the quince layered above one of the cheeses, and the spice really went nicely.  Although it was diminutive (it was a pintxo, after all), it was just the right size to leave room for dessert.

The baked custard tart with dark cherries was a nice finale to the meal.  I’m a huge fan of Carolin’s desserts, and honestly think she’s one of the best pastry chefs in the city.  This tart didn’t quite shine like some other desserts that I’ve had at Txori and the Harvest Vine, but it was a sweet, light ending.

The part of dessert that was really great was my coffee drink.  They have lots of interesting cocktails and drinks on the menu, which you might expect from a bar, but they even have some interesting espresso drinks.  I had espresso with milk, caramel and cinnamon, topped with whipped cream.  Carolin first had a drink like this in Spain and enjoyed it so much that she knew she had to put it on the menu at Txori.  It isn’t as sweet as it sounds, and the cinnamon was nicely balanced.  I am definitely ordering this again next time!

We like this type of communal dining event because it’s fun to meet like-minded people and swap Seattle dining tips.  Sometimes it’s a mixed bag, depending on who you’re seated with (case in point: a wine dinner we once attended, where our table-mates planned Bridge moves on paper the entire evening), but we had a really great time on Monday.  Maybe you’ll see us at a future Txoko event.

pintxo de tortilla española
potato – onion omelet

ensalada de remolachas
baby beets – green salad

marmitako
fisherman’s stew – tuna – potatoes – peppers

cochinillo
slow roasted suckling pig
patatas panadera
potatoes – onions – olive oil
espinacas a la catalana
spinach – pine nuts

pintxo de queso
cheese

tarta vasca
buttery crust – baked custard – dark cherries

Txori
2207 2nd Ave, Seattle
(206) 204-9771

A date has been set!  Eric and I have been waiting to see when Lark would be hosting their next Whole Beast Dinner.  We went last year and had a really great time.  This year is their third annual Whole Beast Dinner, and it’s going to be on Monday, April 21.  They’re ordering a pig, a goat, and a lamb or two and will be coming up with a meal using these animals.

Here’s the menu from last year:

It should be interesting to see what they come up with this year.  Stay tuned to their web site for more details.

Lark
926 12th Ave., Seattle
(206) 323-5275

The blog postings are coming a bit fast and furious this weekend because Eric and I have been sick for weeks on end and realized that we haven’t gone out to eat much in the last couple months.  So now that we’re feeling better, we’re going a bit overboard this weekend making up for it.

Tonight was an early dinner at Txori (pronounced “choree” and meaning “bird” in the Basque language).  Txori is owned by the same folks as The Harvest Vine.  Both are Basque restaurants, but the new one is modeled after a traditional San Sebastian pintxos (tapas) bar.  Eric and I have been to San Sebastian twice (read about trip 1 & trip 2), and absolutely love this city, the perfect foodie mecca.  So we were thrilled when Txori opened last November, since Chef Joseba is from San Sebastian, and if anyone could pull off a pintxos bar in Seattle, it would be him and his wife, Carolin.

Txori would give the bars in San Sebastian a run for their money if it were there.  The food, the atmosphere, everything down to the napkins strewn on the floor give it an authentic feel.  The only thing missing is the chaos of people bumping against each other as they stand around the bar eating and drinking, since tables are what we expect here in the U.S.  However, Txori does reserve the front bar area for standing room only spots, like Spain, where you can eat and watch the chefs cook.

I haven’t had a bad bite to eat here.  Portions are tiny, following tradition.  In Spain, you eat a couple pintxos, then move on to the next bar, whereas here you’ve got just one bar, so you’ll need to order a number to assemble a dinner.  Expect two or three bites out of each one, or a bit more if you order raciones.  There’s a menu, plus daily specials on the chalkboard.

 
Chefs Joseba and Carolin serve the salad course at Txori’s Tamborrada feast in January.

If you’re looking for a bigger dinner experience, look out for their upcoming Txoko events.  Back in January, they celebrated the culinary feast of Tamborrada by hosting a reservation-only dinner in the back half of the restaurant.  The event sold out instantly and was a huge success, so they’ve decided to hold monthly Txoko dinners, on the first Monday of each month, starting in April.  Carolin will be sending the announcement shortly to those on the mailing list.  Txoko is the Basque word for a gastronomic society.  This one won’t be exclusive like a gastronomic society, however there will be only 16 spots available each month.  Should be fun!

Txori
2207 2nd Ave., Seattle
(206) 204-9771

It’s nearly that time again.  The month of March is Dine Around Seattle (formerly 25 for $25), where 30 restaurants offer three-course $30 dinners Sunday through Thursday nights.  In past offerings, we’ve found Nell’s to have excellent choices, almost a steal for the $30, so we’ll definitely have to try theirs again.  Campagne and Nishino have also been good in past years promotions.  Let us know which menus you like this year.