Hamantaschen

Toby gave a big talk last week, and I made some hamantaschen cookies to bring in for the audience. (He will reciprocate when it’s my turn later this year!) The cookies were excellent. The cookie part was flaky and dissolved in the mouth, and the fruit filling was a nice touch.

Hamantaschen are traditionally eaten during the Jewish holiday of Purim. I had never heard of them until Toby and I bought a giant one from a bakery in Midwood, Brooklyn, last time we visited New York. Then Marie sent me a link to one of the gorgeous blog Smitten Kitchen’s several hamantaschen recipes, and I had to try it. The recipe I chose was this one. The recipe’s cookies had poppyseed filling, which I would have loved to try, but we didn’t have any poppyseeds and we had lots of kinds of jam. So jam it was.

From left to right, the four fillings I used: peach freezer jam from 2010 (made by Toby), cranberry sauce from a few days ago (made by me), grape jelly from a few weeks ago (made by Joel and Marie), and blueberry jam (storebought; left over from an event).

I packed up the nicer-looking ones to bring in. They were all devoured.

But I’d saved the misshapen ones for us! Ha!

(I know there’s not a hugely apparent difference between the nice ones and the misshapen ones. The dough was hard to handle! I think I can make them look better next time.)

The cookies were quite small: I used a little cylindrical drinking glass to cut the dough into circles, and the circles were only about 2.5 inches in diameter. They were amazing. I adore this recipe and the cookies that resulted!

 

Bottleworks

Today I’d like to add a specialty beer store to the Guide to Seattle. Bottleworks is one of the best things — possibly the very best thing — about Wallingford.

Bottleworks
1710 N 45 St (map)
bottleworksbeerstore.blogspot.com
open daily

As I suggested above, this store is great. It has a giant selection of interesting beers. The first few refrigerated cases you see contain domestic brews, mostly but not always from the Northwest area. Then there are some cases of imported beers. Finally, rounding the store back to the counter, you find a small but decent selection of cider.

In the back of the shop is a bar with nine taps; they rotate what’s on draft. You can fill a growler here, or just buy a pint. (If you’re very, very lucky you might find Pliny the Elder on tap! It has happened before.) Also, you might happen across a tasting of beer or cider; these are lots of fun. You can check the blog on their website to see what’s happening next in store. Because of the bar and the tastings, Bottleworks is very much worth a visit even for people who are only in Seattle for a short time. (And you can buy exciting Seattle beer to bring home, too!)

The employees know a lot and are very helpful, so you should ask if you want a recommendation or help finding something. In case you’re thinking of stopping by and want a few tips, here are some neat beers they often have that I recommend:
• Pike Dry Wit, summer seasonal from the awesome Seattle brewery Pike
• Freya’s Gold, a kölsch-style from Seattle brewery Odin
• Dick’s Cream Stout (and all other Dick’s beers)
• Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel
• Duchesse de Bourgogne, for an unforgettable beer

…and, of course, Pliny the Elder, though they only occasionally have it and it sells out almost immediately.

 

Jhanjay

Last Thursday, Toby and I were planning to attend the Seattle Symphony with student tickets, but we ended up having a bunch of errands to run in the evening. We couldn’t make it downtown with enough time to guarantee that we would actually get tickets, and we didn’t want to leave empty-handed. So we walked over to Jhanjay to have a fun dinner instead. Jhanjay is a nice little vegetarian Thai restaurant in the main commercial center of Wallingford. (There is a second location in the center of Ballard, but I have never been to that one. It seems exactly the same, though.)

You’ve probably guessed that it’s time for another Guide to Seattle restaurant entry! (Some non-restaurant entries will show up soon, by the way.)

Jhanjay
1718 N 45 St (map)
Wallingford
jhanjay.com
Lunch and dinner daily

Seattle has a ton of Thai restaurants, but a lot of them seem very similar to each other and not very compelling. Jhanjay stands out to me because of its warm and cozy interior, open kitchen, and consistently delicious food. Their dishes are simple and heavy on the basil, eggplant, mushrooms, and peppers. They are completely vegetarian and therefore they use no fish sauce, yet their sauces are still really good. In summary, Jhanjay is not fancy or terribly exciting, but it is solid and delicious and fairly inexpensive.

The vast majority of Jhanjay’s menu seems to be the same throughout the year, but they do have seasonal specials. We just ordered a fantastic seasonal dish called Star Pumpkin. If you visit Jhanjay in the autumn, you should definitely get it. It’s basically a sandwich whose outsides are flaky, thin pastries and whose insides are a smooth, spiced puree of kabocha squash. It is cut into eight wedges and displayed in a star shape on the plate, with a bowl of delicious, runny sauce in the middle. The sauce is some kind of chili oil with chopped cucumber. At first it seems like there is too much sauce for the amount of pastry offered, but this is not true; you are just not using enough sauce.

(Incidentally, Jhanjay has a year-round version of this dish called Star Potato Puff, but it is not quite as good as the Star Pumpkin. The squash is just really good.)

After you greedily devour your Star Pumpkin (if it’s available), you should order the eggplant with black bean sauce off the “Jhanjay Specials” menu. The black beans are really fermented soy beans, and they add a lot of flavor to the dish.

The Star Pumpkin and the eggplant dish with a bowl of rice was a good amount of food for two people. The entreé portions are rather large, so be sure you’re hungry (or take some home with you). The best option, as always, is to come in a group and order several dishes to share. There are lots of curries and noodle dishes to choose from, and although I can’t remember which ones I’ve had, I do know that everything has been good.

 

End of September pictures

I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since Tilth! We’ve done a lot, and I’ll try to show you some of it in pictures below.

First, I was so inspired by the Tilth melon-and-cheese salad (mentioned in the last post) that I had to make my own. I had to use an orange cantaloupe (instead of a green “French melon”) and I had to put the cheese on top (instead of mixing it into the cantaloupe — I tried that first and it looked terrible!), but it was a pretty successful and very silly appetizer.

We bought more melons from the farmer’s market. The one on the left is an heirloom cantaloupe and it wasn’t very good, unfortunately. The little yellow one on the right was great.

Also, I had tuna for the first time! It was really weird, but very good. It tasted nothing like fish. First we marinated it in a pile of delicious things (including dill). Here’s what was left of the marinade:

Then we cooked it:

When we flipped it over, it had become totally opaque and differently-colored. I was surprised because I’m used to salmon, and salmon doesn’t do that.

Then we made some dill cucumber pickles with Marie and Joel and James. We found a bunch of delicious spices around our kitchen (like a random cinnamon stick I’d forgotten about, which I then expertly crushed with a pair of pliers) and made a pickling spice mixture.

Pickles!

Joel and Marie brought even more apples, so we made even more applesauce.

The Fremont neighborhood nearby hosts a big Oktoberfest thing each year, which is an expensive event ($25 or $30) where you can sample a few moderately exciting beers. We decided to skip the Fremont Oktoberfest this year and host our own Wallingford Oktoberfest, where the only admission is an exciting beer. We provided the snacks, and everyone brought an exciting beer or cider (or two).

Toby made some amazing sourdough bread for the party:

The whole point of the party was to take tiny samples of as many exciting beers as possible. To facilitate this, we provided tiny tasting cups.

The party was great fun. Our friends played along and brought really interesting, exciting beers. We had a nice group of people and many of the beers were delicious. The snacks were neat too. I really enjoy a good, relaxing afternoon party.

After the party, a few of us decided to get dinner from a dumpling restaurant hidden away in a Fremont alley. After that, we found some grapes growing over a sidewalk in Fremont and decided to pick them. Joel and Marie took them home and made several jars of not-very-sweet grape jelly. They gave one to us and I am really excited. It wasn’t sealed so we have to eat it right away, but honestly I’d have wanted to do that anyway. Yum!

 

An amazing dinner at Tilth

On Wednesday night Toby and I dressed up in our finest* and walked over to Tilth for a very exciting dinner.

*That is, a homemade dress for me and a pseudo-suit for Toby. Tilth is actually a very casual restaurant; we might have been the dressiest people there.

We’d already decided to get the vegetarian tasting menu with wine pairings, so we didn’t look at the menu too much — it was more exciting to be surprised with each of the five little courses. That our long-awaited Tilth meal took place in September was by design; since Tilth has a highly seasonal menu, we figured we’d get the most delicious haul of food at the end of the summer.

Just to warn you, the rest of this post is a detailed description of our entire meal.

Right away our server gave us a cute little amuse-bouche. It was a spoonful of cold sweet corn soup with a basil sauce on top. It was neat.

The first course was a cold cucumber soup, which came with a truly incredible piece of poppyseed tuile. The tuile was essentially a really buttery, thin, crispy cookie. The soup was really neat; it tasted like pure, smooth, rich essence of cucumber. There was also some dill for garnish. The wine pairing was a dry, sort of mineral-y Spanish white wine. I wasn’t sure if I liked the wine when I first sipped it, but it actually did go really well with the cucumber soup. The soup somehow made the mineral flavor less overwhelming. I began to believe in wine pairings.

The next course was really inspiring. It was a salad, made of feta cheese and two kinds of melon. There were watermelon rounds at the bottom, on the plate, and there was a cute little pile of a green melon (“French melon”?) with feta on top. There were also a bunch of salt crystals scattered throughout. I really adored the idea of a cheese-and-melon salad. I had never considered such a combination, and it was lovely! The wine was a much fruitier white wine that was easy to like.

Next we moved into the warmer main courses. First up was an amazing risotto, full of carrots, escarole, and pine nuts. It had a shocking amount of flavor: Toby and I discussed how we think of risotto as a sort of bland, rich dish to bury bitter things like beet greens into, but this risotto was no resting place for beet greens. I really want to make a flavorful risotto now. The wine was a delicious white wine that seemed to be a little bit fizzy.

The last dinner course might have been my favorite, but it’s hard to pick. (I loved them all, but I think this one and the melon salad stand out to me.) It was a bowl of small, incredibly creamy ricotta ravioli. The sauce had parmesan cheese, chanterelles, truffles, and cauliflower, and it was incredibly lemony. Wow, this one was good. It was paired with a wine I liked a lot, a pinot noir from Burgundy.

Finally, dessert! Dessert was a cute little white corn crème brûlée. It was rich yet corny at once, with a lovely crust of burnt sugar. There was a bit of fried hominy (weird! but good!) and a little smear of a delicious, yogurty-tasting corn creme on the side. But the real highlight of dessert was the wine pairing. It came with a Madeira wine, which is a Portuguese fortified wine (and possibly a subset of “port”; I don’t really know the distinctions).

Specifically, this one:

It was a really shocking beverage; I had never had anything like it. It tasted strongly of raisins and chocolate. It was incredibly delicious. We both can’t stop thinking about it. Highly recommended!

When our server brought the check, she included two tiny cardamom cookies with fruit filling. They were adorable and looked precisely like super-miniature Fig Newtons.

In summary, the tasting menu is amazing and is almost certainly the best way to enjoy Tilth. My feeling on the vegetarian vs. non-vegetarian tasting menu is that vegetarian food at nice restaurants tends to be more adventurous, so that menu is probably more exciting. (They are actually very similar, though; only two courses are different, and I’m sure the meat courses are delicious too. It’s Tilth, after all!) The wine pairings are neat and definitely recommendable. Tilth is a place to go for a really special dinner, and obviously we aren’t going to be doing this very often at all, but it’s very much worth it for a rare, incredibly exciting meal.

By the way, in case you’re curious (we were), the way wine pairings work (at Tilth anyway) is you get a half glass of the selected wine with each course. This works out to 2.5 glasses total for the 5-course menu, which was much more than I wanted, so I asked for small pours. I think I got about a glass and a half (and maybe slightly more) in total, which was nice.

 

Olive oil brownies

I made the New York Times olive oil brownies again, seen previously here and here. This time, in true Seattle fashion, I decided to fill them with blackberries! (The original version has coconut flakes inside and on top, which is lovely, but we ran out of coconut and have LOTS of blackberries these days.)

Just for fun, I took pictures throughout the process. But I had to use the flash on my camera because it was cloudy and the light was low, so beware.

First you chop the chocolate (above). Then you whisk in some water and oil.

The texture is fairly chunky and unpleasant, but when you whisk in the egg it becomes all smooth and lovely!

Add cup and a quarter of sugar (for half the recipe, which works nicely in an 8×8 pan):

To make the blackberry filling, I reduced a half-cup or so of berries in vermouth and a bit of sugar. The result was basically identical to jam.

I made three layers in an 8×8 pan: brownie batter, blackberry filling, and then brownie batter again on top. (I worried that blackberries on top would burn.)

These came out really gooey, so in my opinion they are best eaten straight from the freezer.

Last night we saw Higher Ground, charmingly reviewed in The New Yorker a couple issues back. We both really liked the movie. Tonight we’re having dinner at Tilth (which we’ve been anticipating since July) and we are super excited.

 

Northwest Tofu

Today in the Guide to Seattle I’d like to point you to a tofu factory that also happens to have a restaurant.

Northwest Tofu
1911 S Jackson St (map)
Cherry Hill/Central District neighborhood
Breakfast and lunch; closed Wednesdays

I’m cheating today because I actually already wrote all about Northwest Tofu in 2009, long before the Guide to Seattle. I am pleased to announce that everything I said before still stands (except that a block of tofu-to-go is now $1, not 80 cents), and the dishes I mentioned are still the ones to get. (I went there with some friends a couple months ago and verified it.)

So please allow me to point you to the review I wrote here. Here’s a summary: go there; order Mushrooms Foon, Hot and Spice Dry Tofu, and cold tofu pudding for dessert; and also be sure to pick up some cheap, delicious tofu to go on your way out. But really, just go read the whole thing.

 

Blackberry jam and sweet cucumber pickles

Yesterday we had another big canning day with Joel and Marie. The weather has been gorgeous here for several days, so we went to Discovery Park in Magnolia and picked some buckets of blackberries.

Here’s the view inside my blackberry bucket partway through the picking. The red, unripe berries are there by design: apparently they have extra pectin, which is good for making a thick and easy jam.

We used the recipe that I included on this blog way back here. We had 15 cups of berries, so we increased the sugar proportionally, and I increased the number of limes to 4 (from 2.5). I also zested the limes and threw that in too.

Our stove quickly looked like the scene of a murder as the jam bubbled away:

I let the jam get to about 222°, and then we canned it. It turned out really thick this time, much thicker than the jam I made in 2008. I think it’ll be OK, though; the scrapings at the bottom of the pan that didn’t fit in the jars (pictured below) were delicious and nicely textured.

Here are two finished jars. We ended up with 12 cups of jam, which is consistent with my suspicion that I cooked the jam down a bit more this time. (Last time I got 6 cups of jam from 6 cups of berries.)

Meanwhile, we made some bread and butter pickles from some cheap little pickling cucumbers I found at the market yesterday. We got six pints of these. I should have photographed the process because the pre-canning pile of cucumbers and spices was quite pretty, but you’ll have to imagine it.

After the canning was done, we relaxed with vegetables, bread, peanut butter, and the debut episode of The French Chef with Julia Child (boeuf bourguignon). Joel and Marie had brought an adorable plum and apple pie and some Earl Grey ice cream from Molly Moons, so we had a huge and delicious dessert too.

I stole this picture of the pie from Marie:

We have tentative plans for one more pickling extravaganza in the near future. Maybe dill pickles?

 

The last few days

I wanted to mention a bunch of things, but none of them are very big. So I figured it would be appropriate to combine them in a single post like this.

A few days ago we made a REALLY DELICIOUS stir-fry of eggplant and shrimp for dinner. We meant to get these awesome little Oregon shrimp but the store was out of them, so Toby chose a small package of giant, beautiful gulf shrimp. We chopped them up and they were perfect in the dish.

Then yesterday we went to the market and bought two melons. We have already eaten the striped one on the right and wow, it was the best melon either of us had ever devoured. Yum! After a disappointing cantaloupe experience (smelled great, tasted boring) earlier this week, we were relieved. I hold out hope for the cantaloupe in this picture, which we have not cut into yet. Why must melons be so inscrutable?

Also, pear season has begun! Here’s what was available. More will come later.

The orchid protuberance (definitely a root) continues to grow. Soon its tip will be covered by the planting material and I won’t be able to monitor its progress so closely. Incidentally, I have no idea why the root has that weird white stripe.

We also made dilly beans! Seven pints of them, to be exact. Now everything in the fridge smells faintly (or not-so-faintly) of dill.

Finally, we ate the best dinner ever last night: pasta with pesto and clams! It was outrageously delicious. I could barely stop eating it, and then I had the rest of it for breakfast this morning. We will definitely be making this one again. Every time I eat clams, I love them a little more.

Clams simmering in tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil:

The finished product:

Next time… blackberry jam and cucumber pickles!

 

Labor Day Weekend Day 3: Hike in the Cascades

On Monday we tagged along with Marie, Joel, James, and Alex on an awesome hike in the Cascades. We started at about 2800 feet and maybe made it up to about 5000 feet. It’s hard to say for sure because I don’t know exactly how far we were from the top!

The hike was about three hours up and three hours down. The first half of the uphill was a series of very steep, very slippery switchbacks up a hill full of pine trees. (The needles caused the slipperiness.) I definitely found this part of the hike to be the most difficult, both going up and going down.

But then all of a sudden the view opened up, and it was quite stunning!

We crossed a little creek, just downstream from a gorgeous waterfall.

We kept climbing up and up. Then, all of a sudden, there were little piles of snow and black rocky peaks everywhere.

We stopped to rest and eat at what we thought was the lake at the top, but actually there turned out to be a higher lake (or so someone told us). We didn’t care, since all we wanted at this point was to sit down and stuff ourselves with peanuts, cashews, dried cranberries, bread, crackers, hummus, cheese, chocolate, and olives for about 45 minutes straight, and then nap on the rocks for another 45 minutes.

Joel and Marie brought their dog Henry, who had the best day ever on this hike. You can see him wading in the frozen lake:

Then we turned around and headed down. The light had changed, so everything looked different. I mostly looked down as I hiked, though, because I was constantly worried about twisting or breaking my ankles. (Neither happened, but only because I have ankles of steel. I did keep stepping on them weirdly and causing them to roll in unnatural ways, but I was uninjured.)

The last part of the hike — going down the slippery switchbacks — was rather brutal for me. I had to step gingerly down, because my shoes had no traction and I didn’t want to fall. I finally made it down and was very relieved. Then my calves ached for four days. I could barely descend a stairway on Tuesday! By now, five days later, they finally feel almost normal.

Even though I am no good at hiking downhill, I still had a great time. I would love to do a hike like this again.