By Kevin Finch on April 30, 2009
I stumbled across a cartoon I drew a while back that made me chuckle. I’d be interested to know if anyone shares my particular sense of humor or if this should remain a private Finch joke.
| Tagged cartoon, Clint Eastwood, fluffy, sheep |
By Kevin Finch on April 24, 2009
I read something in the Lexington column in The Economist this morning that struck me as true. The writer observed that over the last decade or so we have seen the “rise of a media industry based on outrage.”
Until I read it, I would not have been able to put words to it as concisely as the writer, but I’ve been struck by the same thing. So much of the news we consume has been pitched emotionally to produce outrage and this is done in large part by demonisation of those with whom we disagree.
Obama is the current focus of rage from the right end of the political spectrum, but the exact same rage from the opposite end of the political spectrum targeted Bush. And I see little, if any, good coming out of hate.
Instead it feels like outrage has gutted us like a fish at the very time when we sorely need to work together. The Lexington writer reaches the same conclusion: “This is not only poisoning American political life. It is making it ever harder to solve problems that require cross-party collaboration such as reforming America’s health care system or its pensions.”
Of course it is always easier to decry a problem than offer a constructive solution, but I for one would love to see us find a way to abandon a media industry based on outrage… maybe by simply refusing to listen. What am I missing here?
Posted in culture | Tagged anger, Bush, division, media, media industry, Obama, outrage, politics, pressure cooker, rage |
By Kevin Finch on April 23, 2009
At the Main Market Earth Day dinner last night I got my first swing of Spokane’s Family Farm’s milk. It is the first whole milk I’ve had for quite a while.
As a kid growing up in Montana we picked up our milk weekly from Lonnie and Theresa Haack, and when I was in high school and sporting a brand new driver’s license I ended up making milk runs out to the farm itself to collect our two glass gallon jugs. I can clearly remember, if not exactly put into words, the thick creamy smell of the milk room when I opened the door each week.
At home we would have skim several inches of cream off the top of each gallon with a bent tin measuring cup, and for years I just assumed that everyone ate their breakfast cereal and oatmeal with cream on top. Milk was for drinking, not for cereal.
Spokane’s Family Farm milk won’t require you to drive out past Airway Heights for your half-gallon jug. Rosauer’s, Huckleberry’s and Yokes are stocking the local jugs. This is good news for Family Farm owners Mike and Trish Vieira who are rolling out of bed seven days a week at 5 a.m. to milk their thirty cows.
Make a point to pick up a half-gallon next time you head to the store and read the label. Down near the bottom it reads… quite truthfully… “bottled by Mike and Trish.”
Posted in cooking, culture, play | Tagged cream, dairy, half gallon, Huckleberry's Fresh Market, local food, Mike Vieira, milk, Rosauer's, Spokane area producers, Trish Vieira, whole milk, Yoke's Foods |
By Kevin Finch on April 21, 2009
At the Mariners game last Thursday we couldn’t stop with just Garlic Fries. In the 5th inning we went prowling the concourse for more to eat and happened upon a lonely tortilla themed booth at the far end of the 300 level. Unlike nearly every one of the other stands we had passed, there was no line here. It also occurred to us that nachos might make a good chaser for the garlic fries and deep-fried mushrooms we’d already polished off.
We place our order just as one woman was going on break so a second woman with iron grey hair and a severe expression stepped up to fill our order. “Nachos?” she asked sharply.
“Yes.”
“Beef or chicken?”
“Chicken.”
“Black beans?”
“Yes.”
Actually we answered yes to almost every question that followed and could barely believe the mound of toppings that grew and grew on top of a fairly small bed of chips. If anything I would have expected her to be stingy with us. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I can’t say the nachos she handed us two minutes later were the best nachos I’ve ever had. They weren’t. But they just might have been the largest. And the molten cheese goop laddled on top didn’t stay there; it cascaded down over the sides of the basket into the larger drink container and through the holes to drip on the concourse. I think it took us the better part of an inning to excavate deep enough to find a chip.
Posted in culture, dining, play, travel | Tagged baseball food, baseball game, Mariners, nachos, Safeco Field, Seattle, tortilla chips |
By Kevin Finch on April 18, 2009
My sister informed me there was one sacred requirement during my first visit to Safeco Field in Seattle for a Mariners game. It had nothing to do with Mariners memorabilia. Nothing to do with the stadium or even baseball. I had to order (and eat) the “world famous” garlic fries.
Typically when I eat garlic I know I will be sleeping in the basement, but Karen wasn’t along on this particular Seattle junket so garlic fries it was. That would be RAW GARLIC fries for those of you not yet among the Safeco Field initiates.
Each order came… somewhat curiously… with two thin slices of fresh apple. I pointed this out to the woman in the concession stand and asked her what the slices were for. She looked at me with a crooked smile and gestured to her mouth before saying “You know… your breath.” I appreciated the thought, but one glance at the garlic on the fries told me that an apple slice or two would be woefully inadequate. Bingo. I don’t know if it was the garlic fry effect or the fact that the Mariners were playing poorly, but by the 7th inning most of the people around me were gone.
If you are a garlic fiend, one order might be enough to convince you to buy Mariners season tickets. If you are not, the very fact that the fries are a signature item for the stadium might make you decide to never set foot in Safeco. The reality for the rest of us is probably somewhere in the middle, but I confess my favorite description of the fries came from a friend, Peter Tobin, here in Spokane when he caught wind of my stadium dining choice. He called the fries “goopy, greasy, smelly, morsels of love.”
Thanks Peter. I’m betting you sleep in the basement a lot.
Posted in cooking, culture, play, travel | Tagged baseball, baseball food, concessions, french fries, garlic, garlic fries, Mariners, Peter Tobin, Safeco Field, Safeco Field garlic fries |
By Kevin Finch on April 10, 2009
It would be more in keeping with the general theme of my average post to report enthusiastically on the Shirred Eggs ($9) I ate for breakfast in a small black skillet at Sante. The Verdict: quite good (but eat fast if you like your eggs runny). The cast iron happily keeps cooking long after it arrives at the table. If you try to finish the story you started just before your skillet arrives, plan on those initially runny eggs becoming anything but within another minute or two.
But I digress. Instead of my typical food fixation, I’ve been musing on how my beloved computer seems to isolate me from those closest to me even as it provides some limited contact with people at a distance.
To set this in context I should note that I’ve taken pride in the fact that we have not installed television sets throughout our house. We have a single TV in the family room. Yet even as we have self-righteously looked down on the TV-in-every-bedroom crowd, we’ve been adding computers, phones, and IPods at a pace just behind that of the entire country of India.
Technically I can claim to watch very little TV, but “technically” is the key word. Rarely does a night go by when I’m not tempted to grab my laptop and pop in a movie or surf over to Hulu and (you guessed it) watch television shows over the internet. If I’m not self-involved with a movie or Hulu, I can easily chew up an hour or more working on clever Facebook posts or reading digital camera or cookbook reviews on Amazon.
And all of this is easiest alone. Even if the movie I’m interested in might be of interest to others in the family, my first instinct is to watch alone, and I find myself fighting irritation when Karen or one of our three truly wonderful children peeks in the door of my study and wants to talk.
Feel free to wade in with observations or suggestions, but my gut says this need to change. Too often our family (with me leading the charge) divide up the “screens” available and scatter to different corners of the house. Even books seem far less isolating. I’ve heard that books don’t make noise so it is quite possible to be in the same room reading (on the same couch even) and have some sense of connectedness even as you explore another world. Depending on your fellow readers, there might even be pauses for conversation.
Sarcasm aside, I’d very much appreciate any suggestions on ways to contain the isolating impact of technology or use tech to build community in the family rather than damage it.
But if you need a gander at the Shirred Eggs, here they are.
Posted in culture, dining | Tagged Amazon, computer, distance, Facebook, family, Hulu, isolating technology, isolation, laptop, Sante, Shirred Eggs, technology, television |
By Kevin Finch on April 7, 2009
In between the massive winery operations and the hobby mom-and-pop bottle-by-hand operations is Tony and his truck: a mobile bottling operation that rolls up to your winery to fill, cork, foil, and label thousands of bottles an hour.
I spent today in inside the Wino Semi (officially the “Signature Mobile Bottlers” truck) working with a crew from Robert Karl Cellars locally to bottle hundreds of cases of Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Rose, Merlot, and Syrah. From 7 am until 1:30 pm I loaded empty bottles onto the snake of a conveyor belt that runs up to the front of the semi trailer and back out. Along the way each bottle spins through a gauntlet and ends up shot full of nitrogen, pumped full of wine, corked, capped, spun, and labeled. Picture a semi full of shining metal equipment, and then add in the hiss of pneumatic pumps, the roar of machinery, and the almost deafening clatter of a hundred or so bottles banging against each other as they are funneled into a single bottle chute at the beginning.
I suspect I won’t be able to lift my arms above my waist tomorrow. I may have lost some hearing in my right ear (the one closest to the bottle chute). My hands are covered with paper cuts from manhandling cardboard bottle cases as fast I could for six and a half hours straight.
That said, I had a blast and I’d do it again tomorrow. Well, maybe not tomorrow. I’ve got a date tomorrow with Icy-Hot.
But today was a wonderful day.
Joe and Rebecca Gunselman produce great wine and after drinking a number of their bottles over the years it was a treat to help out. I wasn’t the only one. They pull together a crew twice a year to bottle wine. Fall is a massive operation focused on their Claret. The spring bottling puts up smaller amounts of the other wines offered by Robert Karl.
My station for the day, just inside the back of the truck was both the beginning and the end of the line. Empty bottles head in and the full bottles come back out to be packed into the cases so recently vacated by empty siblings. I got to work today with Karl (Joe and Rebecca’s teenage son), Mia, Gordon, and Ken. Karl, Mia, and myself kept the bottles headed into the mobile bottling beast while Gordon and Ken packed every single one of those bottles back up and sent the cases out of the semi and down another chute into a second truck to be carted off to storage.
Part of the fun of the day was simply understanding. Now I have a picture in my head of one critical step in the work of a winery. Hundreds of steps took place before bottling to make the wine worth the effort of the day, but that only made the process of getting the juice into glass that much more worthwhile.
If you haven’t yet tried a Robert Karl bottle, do so soon.
[caption id="attachment_394" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Part of the Karl Crew: Mia, Gordon and Ken"]
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Posted in culture, play, wine | Tagged Joseph Gunselman, mobile bottling, Rebecca Gunselman, Robert Karl, Robert Karl Cellars, Robert Karl Winery, Signature Mobile Bottlers, Spokane, Spokane winery, Washington state wine, wine bottles, winery |
By Kevin Finch on April 4, 2009
Last night a friend dropped me off at the SeaTac Doubletree at dinnertime. We had driven over for the Western Regional Conference of the American Culinary Federation, but he had a dinner appointment and I wasn’t on the guest list. On impulse I posted my dining dilemma on Facebook: “Kevin is in Seattle near the airport without a car. Any Seattlites up for dinner?”
I was curious if anyone would respond. Four did, including my cousin Ken who not only responded, but jumped back in his car with his two daughters and picked me.
I didn’t bother to look at the Doubletree room service menu, but I’m almost certain it didn’t list Pho Ga (Vietnamese noodle soup with chicken) or Phad Se-ew. Big money says they didn’t offer a Tapioca Pearl Smoothie in strawberry, and even the fried rice would probably have been at the bleeding edge of hotel restaurant fare.
Happily, all of these were on the menu at Best Pho and Thai in Renton not far from Ken’s office.
So we ordered them.
And got cream puffs on the house for dessert.
Thanks Ken, Marissa, and Allison for my first Facebook-facilitated dining hook-up to date.
Posted in culture, dining, travel | Tagged American Culinary Federation, Best Pho and Thai, boba, cream puff, Facebook, fried rice, Ken Clowers, pho, Pho Ga, Seattle restaurants, smoothie, tapioca pearl tea |
By Kevin Finch on April 1, 2009
People in the know will travel for hundreds of miles for a pizza at Moose’s Saloon.
Is it because you can’t get a better pizza closer to home? Probably not.
I’ve tasted better pizzas all around the country. But I still love Moose’s.
Maybe it is the sawdust on the floor. Or the thick frosty goblets for beer (or soda). Or the fact that most of the tables and booths set back from the bar exist in almost absolute dark.
The decades of names carved into the tables, walls, beams, and other wooden surfaces provide both character and reading material while you wait. I recommend a flashlight to ease your eye strain if you go looking for the name I carved into the beam above booth seven or eight during a bachelor’s party seventeen years ago, but squinting at the walls and table top is more than adequate for the casual student of saloon patrons with pen knives.
Maybe I keep returning because of the massive bag of peanuts still in their shells behind the bar that the bartender serves up in paper french fry baskets. I know I love the expectation you to throw the shells on the floor, and should note that this fact alone moved Moose’s to the top of the list of my twin boys’ favorite restaurants in the known universe.
And the pizza… competent bar pies with fairly standard toppings. It probably won’t put the kitchen up for a James Beard award, but it does stick in your memory as satisfying food.
No… the truth is that Moose’s is worth the pilgrimage to Kalispell Montana not for any one reason alone but because of the rare combination of many. I’ll most likely be back in a booth the next time I visit the Flathead and the next and the next. I may even let Peter order shrimp out of can on one half of one pie again. This most definitely is not for any defensible culinary reason, but simply because it has turned into something of a tradition and what pilgrimage doesn’t rest on sacred tradition… even if that is something as curious as shrimp in a can.
If you have a Moose’s story, please share. Or if you have a place that has inspired a culinary pilgrimage for you, do tell.
[caption id="attachment_377" align="alignnone" width="425" caption="Mr Cheese, Mr Shrimp, and Mr Canadian Bacon"]
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Posted in dining, drinks, play, travel | Tagged bar, beer, culinary pilgrimage, Kalispell MT, Montana restaurants, Moose's Saloon, peanuts, pizza, saloon |
