I wrote this in september and somehow didn’t post it:

She’ll be nine months in three more days. She’s currently eating: chicken, cheese (extra sharp cheddar), beans, zucchini, green beans, avocado, broccoli, sweet potato, plums, pluots, peaches, prunes, cheerios, yogurt, carrots, tomatoes. She’ll play with small pieces of stuff like cheerios, chicken, and cheese (one-finger method; I’ve tried showing her opposable thumbs but she’s not interested) while you shovel the mashed stuff into her mouth. She usually isn’t interested at first and will block but will eventually accept some food, if you start with something she likes (like vanilla yogurt, right now) and keep her occupied. Every meal takes at least an hour.

 

Our last day in Montreal was for Jewish food. We went to St. Viateur Bagels and walked down the street chewing on our bagels on our way to Cheskie Bakery for babka and rugelach and so on. We didn’t feel up to poutine, but we did stop at a Frite Alors! location for some yummy fries before going up to the mountain to see the view and then heading back to Vermont.

View Montreal Thursday 10/1/09 in a larger map

 

Our second day, we vowed to wander around eating as many different things as we could. We started by taking the subway up to the Jean-Talon Market, where we immediately fulfilled our vow by sampling a maple bar, a churro, some meats of various nationalities on sticks, and some local produce. We then sought out Chez Apo, renowned for its Armenian-Lebanese pizza, a sort of flatbread topped with spinach, feta, and zaatar and totally delicious. Then we wandered around and ended up at Sablo Kafe, where we had a tasty tandoori chicken sandwich, and sheltered from all the rain. Later that night we managed to get into Pintxo for great tapas dinner. We may have done something not food-related, but I don’t recall.

View Montreal Wednesday 9/30/09 in a larger map

 

We arrived in Montreal around midday and just headed out to wander around. We had a couple of articles and some ideas of streets to explore but no really clear idea of where to go. Which can be fun. We were staying in the old quarter, which was lovely but not really what we wanted to see, so we initially just headed up St. Laurent. Going that way you first hit the Chinese quarter, where we had lunch at Pho Cali, which was pretty good.

As you continue up St. Laurent, it gets kind of sketchy and red-lightish, but once you cross Sherbrooke, there are lots of boutiques and restaurants. We passed the infamous Schwartz’s of smoked-meat fame, which we didn’t manage to eat at this trip. We did stumble across a european grocery called “La Vielle Europe” which had impressive selections of cheese, meats, coffee, and chocolate — we weren’t able to escape without some salami and chocolate “for later”. After that we went in and out of several boutiques along the street, including m0851 and a place called U&I, where E tried on some great shoes. We eventually walked over to St. Denis and back to the hotel that way, not stopping a whole lot but enjoying the variety from block to block.

That night we had dinner reservations at Au Pied de Cochon, which I’ll review separately.

View Montreal Tuesday 9/29/2009 in a larger map

 

Seattle magazine organized a mobile chowdown for this past Saturday, featuring some of Seattle’s best food trucks. We met up with Cnote for it but it was ridiculously overattended. Long lines for everything, so we said screw this and wandered around magnolia until we ended up at Niko’s Gyros. It was okay, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it. Not sure about Yelp’s 4-star average. Anyway, so mobile chowfest, nice idea but jeez.

 

Since it’s essentially impossible to keep the floor 100% free of Nora-tempting dirt particles, why not just scatter the floor with crumbs of delicious, nutritious cheerios to decoy her away from the dirt?

 

My daughter will crawl halfway across the floor (a very large effort for her right now) to pick up and eat a piece of lint, and fight like a tigress to prevent you pulling it out of her mouth when you grab her with a horrified gasp, but she is not interested in the delicious pears, plums, chicken, cheese etc. presented to her at the dinner table and will turn up her nose at them in a frosty manner.

 

We’ve had the burger with donuts for buns and the burger with grilled-cheese sandwiches for buns and now the sandwich with fried chicken for buns.

But they must all bow before my invention: the recursive burger, the burger that has recursive burgers for buns. That’s right, each bun is replaced by a burger, each of whose buns is replaced by a burger, each of whose buns is replaced…

Luckily the recursive burger is available in two sizes: finite and infinite. In the finite burger, each bun is replaced with a recursive burger that’s been compressed to 1/3 the height. The final burger is therefore three units high (patty and bun are each one unit high). In the infinite burger, each bun is replaced with a full-sized recursive burger (or, really, a recursive burger of any size > 1/3 size) and the thing is unboundedly large. It’d be hard to make a business of selling infinite recursive burgers.

If you think the (finite) recursive burger sounds like an interesting and tasty concoction, consider this: it converges to a big pile of meat. If you’re having trouble visualizing it, consider this diagram:

Make it happen, Carl’s Jr.

 

Some new recipes up at my food blog: pad thai, berbere (the Ethiopian spice mix), and berbere chana.

 

Over on my food blog, a semi-successful cajun adventure: crawfish etouffee.

Mickey Pourke Sliders
Penelope Pockets
Slumcorndog Mustardaires
Frosty/Nixonaide
Robert Brownie Junior Mint Brownies
Cate's Caramel Corn
Sean Penne Pasta
Angiepasto
Brad Pitted Olives
Winslet's Gimlets
Wall-e Walla Onion Dip with Veggies

As I assume most of you know, we jews have our own traditions about this time of year. No, I don't mean chanukah, though that can be nice; I mean jewish christmas. What is jewish christmas? chinese food and a movie. that's all we ask, chinese food and a movie. it rules; the chinese restaurants are always full of chinese and jews, and that's it. there's something about chinese food that really cuts through the relentless schmaltz of this season. though I have to say in recent years you christ types have been really infringing on the movie part. it appears that everyone wants to get out of the house and away from family, because frankly I've been seeing too many garish reindeer sweaters at jewish christmas not to be suspicious.

So anyway, this year, the grinch (another name for jesus, I assume) tried his best to take away jewish christmas. first he dumped a ton of snow on us (screw you, bing crosby) and kept dumping and dumping, just to make it extra difficult and dangerous to actually go anywhere. what the hell, isn't that what canada is for? and next, if you can believe it, he closed the one good neighborhood chinese restaurant on christmas. closed! on christmas! what the hell kind of chinese are you anyway? I won't even go into the movie situation, which came down to the options of some three hour brad pitt epic, a mediocre children's movie about a mouse, or a will smith film that one reviewer called the most morally repugnant film he'd seen in years.

but jewish jesus came through for us in the form of the hop thanh market. bok choy, gai lan, chinese sausage, a bunch of leftovers, and a rice cooker -- and we had magic jewish christmas fried rice. sure, it's not quite as good as lounging around in a quality chinese restaurant while the christ types say their mass or whatever, but we ended up having a good time. and of course the best thing about jewish christmas is you can have it whenever you want. thanks jewish jesus!

Working off last week's pho rice soup, tonight I tried brown rice congee, using some of the delicious (and abundant) turkey stock E made thursday night. It came out really good, if I say so myself.

Okay, I think I'm throwing in the towel. My pho recipes have gotten increasingly complicated (and expensive!) and I don't feel like I've equalled even the mid-range of the pho you can get around here for a few dollars pretty much any time. It doesn't worth the time and effort. However, that doesn't mean the basic broth isn't useful; tonight we made pho leftovers rice soup.

I finally finished my reviews of restaurants we tried on Maui, including my opinions about the overall food experience (executive summary: avoid the "best restaurants" and eat a lot of ice cream and raw fish). yes there are photos from the trip, no I'm not done processing them all.

E and I are having fun thinking about our recipe repertoire in general (trying to develop a set of recipes that we can reliably make well any time), and our kid-friendly repertoire specifically. So last night we tried chicken nuggets. They came out great, and are the perfect vehicle for dipping sauces, which we also worked on (barbecue, spicy peanut, and wasabi-honey). Everything came out pretty good. The nuggets were great, the peanut sauce was tasty without being too oily, and the barbecue and wasabi both came out pretty well.

Once upon a time, Snappy Dragon was one of the better places to get decent chinese food outside of the ID -- not outstanding, but tasty and reliable, not too greasy. That was a position it shared with Black Pearl (also in northish seattle) -- which isn't surprising since, reportedly, chef Judy Fu had been involved with both.

However, Snappy Dragon just isn't what it used to be. I suspect this is partly to do with my tastes, which have evolved beyond wanting decent americanized chinese food. But I also think the restaurant has gone downhill, or is at least resting on its laurels. A takeout meal we got last week after a long day's kitchen-tiling is a typical example (I've gotten food there probably a couple times a year in the last few years, though this was probably the most disappointing experience). Ginger beef that was fairly good, if a little bland, with a sauce that was overly gooey. A bland and somewhat tough general tso's chicken featuring, again, a surprisingly gooey sauce that had apparently been liberally dosed with red food coloring. Rubbery hand-shaved noodles and vegetables that bordered on flavorless. And stir-fried string beans that lay limply and unappetizingly in a thick brown sauce, also bland. Oh, and I almost forgot: appetizer chicken wings that, rather than being the dry fried wings that chinese restaurants somehow excel at, were buried in a tso-like gooey sauce, also dyed red.

These days there are plenty of other choices for chinese food in north seattle. I don't know why anyone goes to Snappy Dragon any more, except past reputation. Put this thing out of its misery already.

San Jose, culturally speaking, does not impress. Granted, I only some of the downtown area, but what I did see was one of those highly artificial "hey let's make a walking area!" things, peopled with authentic local cuisine like PF Chang's, Johnny Rocket's, and Gordon Biersch. Fortunately, I had a little time to wander around and managed to find San Jose's apparent asian neighborhood, which stretches for about a block and features about three vietnamese or "vietnamese/chinese" restaurants. I wandered into one of them, Dakao, for lunch, and though it was too hot for my usual pho, I did have a banh mi and some rice paper rolls. The rolls were extra good; the rice paper tasted recently homemade, thick and fresh, and it was filled with grilled pork and other stuff, with a nice peanutty dipping sauce. The banh mi was pretty good; the baguette could have had a little more character -- it was kind of a generic baguette and could have been fresher -- but the fillings were good (and they have a bewildering variety of choices) and the price was super. So, there's at least one place to eat in San Jose.

Pho of Aurora was the first stop on my pho tour and at the time I gave it a good review. I finally managed to get back there this weekend. I suspected that I had gotten more demanding in my reviews after the first few, so I was eager to go back and see what I thought -- plus it's not far from home and I wanted to know for sure if I have a quality neighborhood pho joint. alas, my fears were confirmed; this time I found the broth unmemorable, somewhere at the mid-to-low end of the "pretty good" that most places scored. the meat was uninspired as well. now maybe they're just inconsistent, but I figure there's a good chance I overrated them on my first trip.

all of which leaves me without a really good neighborhood choice. I guess both Tic Tac and Vietnam are not too far away, though it's too bad there's no decent place right nearby, or at least along this strip of Aurora; I was hoping to be able to flash some 99 pride, but so far no deal.

dgirl1: i got super sick from fucking Cyclo
optic: how sic
optic: k
dgirl1: like felt totally unwell after eating and got home about an hour plus later, threw up and went to bed from 4:15 until 6:30 and finally got out at about 8
dgirl1: i feel ok now just drank a ton of water and ate an orange
optic: ugh
dgirl1: the basil looked old and the spring rolls were totally dry and kinda gross so i didn't finish
dgirl1: and they brought no water to anyone and the broth was extra salty - all in all - thumbs down
optic: weak
dgirl1: yeah you can quote me
optic: someone said they use a lot of msg
dgirl1: that may be why i felt like i was high in the door store combined with 2 hours at the gym