BlatherWatch

BlatherMunch30: poppy

(BlatherMunch is our Sunday foodish respite from political bias, media dish, snotty intenuendo, and liberal glee. For more essays on food & dining click here or 'BlatherMunch' in Categories).

Poppy 622 Broadway Ave. E., Seattle

It was the most hyped new restaurant since the French Laundromat. (Charlie Trotter's upcoming fast food joint).

Nationally worshipped Jerry Traunfeld, the gardening, food elf who shook the saute pans for 17 years at the sacred site in Woodinville, The Herbfarm finally got his own place; foodies were wet with anticipation.

In September, Traunfeld opened the 110-seat Poppy on Capitol Hill, named after his mom.

BlatherMunchems3: breast milk, meat hats, virgin sturgeons, matsutakes, canlis dessert glut; huckleberries, michael medved bombed, sarah palin 86

(BlatherMunch -- and Blathermunchems, are our Sunday foodish respite from political bias, media dish, snotty intenuendo, and liberal glee. For more essays on food & dining click here or 'BlatherMunch' in Categories).

~~ The breast is best! Suffering from lactose tedia? we are... so here's a way to kick the dairy blahs, help the earth and protect the cows from the factory farmers who squeeze the very life out of them so cruelly. In another poignant, and efficacious attempt to win the hearts and minds of America, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) sent a letter to Ben & Jerry last month urging them to replace cow's milk in their ice cream with human breast milk. A spokeswoman said: "PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves." PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health. B & J are expected to make the change-over in early 2010.

BlatherMunch29: she hates our salmon

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may not be the sharpest tool in Olde John's campaign toolbox, but as a tool of Canadian gold mining interests, she could cut steel -- and she wasn't above blatantly breaking the law to do it. 

Gov. Gidget was really fierce opposing clean water standards upstream of Bristol Bay, one of the world’s largest and most sustainable wild salmon fisheries.

It was a big defeat for the fishes, the fishers, the cooks, and the eaters of salmon. (which is what God eats on Sundays).

BlatherMunch28: villa victoria

(BlatherMunch is our Sunday foodish respite from political bias, media dish, snotty intenuendo, and liberal glee. For more essays on food & dining click here or 'BlatherMunch' in Categories).

Villa Victoria
3829 S. Edmunds St.
206-329-1717

 Villa Victoria was once a Madrona neighborhood gem, known only to the neighbors, the slavering critics, and to foodies who flocked from wherever it is foodies hang when they're not eating on something.

BlatherMunch27: will blog for food, or vice versa

(BlatherMunch is our Sunday foodish respite from political bias, media dish, snotty intenuendo, and liberal glee. For more essays on food & dining click here or 'BlatherMunch' in Categories).

You can never know the lengths BlatherMunch goes every week to bring you the penetrating food & dining coverage you've never actually shown that much interest in reading.

Yet we keep going -- at great financial cost and physical harm, we lift those forks, push those spoons, flap those chopsticks to bring food to mouths and to you our canny observations and fine-honed critique.

 

BlatherMunch 26: zucchini nights

OOOOOH! What a beauty, I've never seen one as big as that before,
Oh Oh! What a beauty, it must be two foot long or even more.
And it's such a lovely color, so big, and round, and fat,
I've never seen a zucchini grow quite as big as that,
Oh Oh! What a beauty, I've never seen one as big as that before.
           ~~ Tim Curry, The Zucchini Song

In Ferndale, our family scraped the weeds off the garden plot each Spring, got a nearby farmer to come by, plow and disc the dirt, then we planted in it, the ugliest and most un-designer of vegetables in the vegetable universe.

In this day when radishes have appellations like sauternes, this 1950's vegetable matter was hybred for maximum bulk.

There were beets, not golden ones, Chioggias, or babies, but beta vulgaris which we left in the ground until they were big as soft balls and as tasty. And carrots, not tiny, skinny sweet ones, but big orange horsefingers known as "dicers.")

BlatherMunch25: republican sidedish- power vagina with moose meat

You could look at it as bald-faced pandering to get women and the religious right to pay attention to him, or you can see it as another of Olde John's, 72, doddering follies.

(We speak of his new friend, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, 44, former beauty queen (Miss Waspilla 1984) and Miss Congeniality -- his choice for Vice President of the United States).

Or you can view Olde John's choice as I do: it's historic.

BlatherMunch 24: food

FOOD

It is always there. Man's real best friend
It never bites back;
it is already dead.
It never tell us we are lousy lovers
or asks us for an interview.
It simply begs,Take me;
Mush me all up, it says;
Whatever is you is pure.

~~John Updike

BlatherMunch 23: the spur gastropub

(BlatherMunch is our weekly (on Sundays) foodish respite from political bias, media dish, snotty intenuendo, and liberal glee. For more essays on food and dining click here or 'BlatherMunch' in Categories).

Spur/gastropub
113 Blanchard Street
Seattle

I've kind of known Dana Tough, and Brian McCracken for a while.

Both were veterans of the W Hotel's Earth & Ocean under diminutive superchef Maria Hines. In 2006, Hines catered an intercoastal dinnert to the foodly swells of Manhattan at the James Beard House, the foodly Greenwich Village shrine. I traveled East with the restaurant crew which included the two young cooks and wrote about it for The Seattle Weekly. 

Since then I'd run into Dana cooking at Tilth, his mentor's hugely hot Wallingford restaurant where he changed my life one evening by telling me how to crisp up pork bellies (I take my epiphanies as they come these days).

BlatherMunch 22: holy goat

Submission hold around my throat
Father, son and holy goat. ~~ Labrat

(BlatherMunch is our weekly -- on Sundays -- foodish respite from political bias, snotty intenuendo, and liberal glee. For more essays on food and dining click here or 'BlatherMunch' in Categories).

About the last thing I ever thought could become a name-droppable foodie food is... goat meat.

Elite foodists have made this edible Third World  flesh (AKA chevon, cabrito) as exotic and precious as once were such delectables as pheasant pearls, humming bird's tongues, and angel food cake.