Traveling Feast

Spokane WA: I confess to being on a coast to coast gnocchi kick this summer.  It started with an ethereal version at Eleven Madison Park in NYC at the very end of May and included an almost polenta-like baked example at Tavolata in Seattle.  There have been several other fine variations along the way.

Yesterday I returned to Santé for a second run at Jeremy Hansen’s take on this Italian classic.  It is almost as different from both Eleven Madison Park’s and Tavolata’s as to be in a separate category, but it simply wonderful and one of the best entrees in downtown Spokane at $10.

Don’t count on it fitting well into a Weight Watchers plan, but please don’t let this stop you.  Bring a friend or two and share it along with a few other dishes: problem solved.  Sharing also means you’ll get to try a bit more on Hansen’s menu as a bonus.

I had a great chicken salad sandwich today.

The spot?  Christ Kitchen on Monroe.  If you’ve been around a while, you might remember the site as the former home of Taco Time.  Now the building houses something unique – an organization dedicated to offering hope to women in poverty.  They started with dry soup mixes with kitschy catchy names, but now offer more… including a great chicken salad sandwich with crunch from pecans and celery and sweet from Crasins.  A layer of sprouts is another welcome addition.

If you have a favorite chicken salad sandwich, let me know about it.  And stop in at the Kitchen any weekday but Thursday from 11 am to 1 pm to see how theirs measures up.

Kelowna BC: We were simply looking for something better than generic fast food and a place with a vegetarian item or two on the menu for Megan.  Following a reader poll in Okanagan Life we settled on Dawett, an Indian restaurant on Ellis Street.

The air conditioning was cranked too high for the evening.  I worked my way through four glasses of ice water waiting for the food.  And the portions, once they did arrive seemed disappointingly small.  But none of that mattered after the first bite of Lamb Vindaloo or Tandoori Chicken with a Butter Sauce.  The mushroom rice along with the nan and roti were noteworthy, but for me it was the sauce on the lamb and the butter sauce were in a class by themselves.

Either we stumbled onto the best restaurant in Kelowna in one shot or this is a town with a number of restaurants cooking at a level not normally seen outside a major metropolitan area.

I’m not quite sure what has happened this year: free tickets to Mariner’s games three times in four months.  Tonight it the tickets were even Suite tickets.

This meant FREE food and drinks throughout the game.

But I also had a mission.  After my recent Ivardog encounter I felt it imperative that I try the iconic sushi of the stadium: the Ichiroll.

$9 behind home plate buys you eight pieces of what is essentially is a spicy tuna roll with matchstick cucumber thrown in for good measure.  I’ve definitely had worse sushi, but that faint praise.  Our sixth inning sample was better than most supermarket rolls, but only barely.  It was dominated by an extra wasabi kick that took the spicy level up to the point that it was hard to taste the fish.  The rice was also gummy.

I love the IDEA of the Ichiroll as well as the name, but the execution significant room for improvement.  So far the Ivardog is clear front-runner in the Safeco Field concessions smack-down.  Yet I did get a tip via Facebook that the Kidd Valley hamburger from a stand out behind left field needs to be tried before an overall winner is selected.  I guess this means another visit to the ballpark.

While on the hunt for a great local gut-bomb burger in Ellensburg WA today we discovered Rossow’s U-Tote-Em - a unique drive-up burger joint that has been in the Rossow family for three generations and 40 plus years.

On the food front they serve up some fun shakes, a long list of burger and sandwich variations, as well a few funky items like deep fried cauliflower.  The menu is mostly grease and gut bombs, but this is LOCAL grease and gut bombs like the Ellensburger and the Awesome Rossow that you’ll only find at U-Tote-Em rather than in franchises at nearly every interstate exit in the country.  It also matters to me that the Rossows have been serving customers since the 1960s.

But there is another reason you need to stop at Rossow’s: indiscriminate use of apostrophes.  Here is one of the outside menu boards:

And a close-up:

Ah, the dread apostrophe strikes again…

And again…

And again.

Stop in, say ‘hi’ to Barbara, and order a burger and a shake.  While you wait for them to come up, count how much gratuitous grammar you can find.

Seattle WA: Last Monday night for dinner we slipped in for dinner at Tavolata on 2nd Avenue in Belltown.  Given the heat wave engulfing Seattle and the observation that air-conditioning had never been installed or wasn’t working, we opted for a table on the sidewalk out front and hoped for breeze.

Bingo.  Shade and vague air movement.

The parade of people past our table with different gaits and varied expressions turned out to be a bonus and a topic for conversation until the house focaccia from Columbia City Bakery ($2) arrived.  The focaccia received rave reviews from Megan, and held both of our attention unto the arrival of an Arugula Salad ($11) tossed with white nectarines, black cherries, almonds, and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Points for both: good ingredients, not over-wrought.

Then onto two of the house pastas: the Gnocchi alla Romana ($16) and the Spaghetti ($15) served with anchovies, chili, garlic, and Parmigiano-Reggiano.  The spaghetti struck me as a risk, and turned out to be acceptable but not life-changing.  The Gnocchi, on the other hand, was intriguing.  “It isn’t what you might be expecting,” our server warned.  “It is baked.”

Up until two months ago, virtually every gnocchi I’d tried looked basically the same.  Small divots of potato or ricotta mixed with flour and possibly a binder.  These would then be boiled, sauced, and served.  This formula held true until two months ago and the most expensive meal of my life to date in New York City.

Now Tavolata has further expanded the category of gnocchi at a price in the teens.

Not only is Tavolata’s gnocchi baked, each piece is relatively huge.  The kitchen appears to roll them out into tubes two to three inches in diameter, slices them into inch portion and sets six into a personal baking pan.  Then they drench the said six in a bright tomato sauce, top them with mozzarella, and pop them in the oven.  At least this is my imagined recreation of the scene in the back of the house.

I can speak with more authority about the front of the house experience: hot, bubbling, and delicious.  If you like baked polenta, you might be tempted to compare.  Don’t.  The gnocchi is more tender and the flavor more subtle, and the match with the sauce and mozzarella is close to inspired.  Two bites and I thought: “Brilliant.”  Three and I began to scheme: “How can I recreate this at home?”

I have a backlog of blog posts going back into May that include experiences in New England and New York as well as in some of my favorite spots in the Northwest: Oregon’s Williamette Valley, Portland, and Seattle.  Yet moving to the front of the line last night was my first taste of frog.

Snails are old hat.  Ate them.  Like them.

But frog legs are in a culinary corner all their own and far from ubiquitous on menus in the Northwest… or anywhere else I’ve been in the last few years including China.  I associate them almost exclusively with high French cuisine, but they appeared unexpectedly in among the appetizers at Syringa in Coeur d’Alene last night.

Not that Viljo Basso is your typical chef/owner of a Japanese restaurant.  His name alone is hardly what you’d expect for the proprietor of an Asian establishment, and the truth is that his culinary training is both in classical French and Japanese cooking.  This might explain another appetizer on Syringa’s menu: beef tongue.  Like the frog legs, tongue is not normally a headliner for a Japanese restaurant… at least in this country.   Neither are frog legs, but there they were just above the potstickers, poké, and tempura.

Some combination of curiosity and bravado spurred me to order them.  Our server, Sara, said “They taste like chicken.”

Not so much.  The texture of the meat is certainly reminiscent of stringy chicken, but the flavor of those we tried last night is almost all fish.  Blythe Thimsen, my editor at Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living, announced that “they taste like cod” and declined the offer of a second leg.  I don’t blame her; the curious texture/flavor disconnect is a bit disconcerting.

I worked my way through three, partly just to prove I could, but don’t feel the need to order them again anytime soon.  Much of this is mental: in addition to the texture/flavor issue there is also the visual effect.

Frog legs look like chicken legs stretched out on some medieval torture device, and they somehow give the impression of being more like the parts of an animal that they are and less like something we recognize as food.  This reaction would most likely go away if frog legs were served more often, but they’re not.  And, as such, they will probably remain little more than a Francophile favorite for quite some time to come.

After a week of heavy eating with some of the best chefs in the Northwest, I planned to simply order a glass of juice or a cup of tea at Café Presse this morning.  I’d arranged to meet Charles Drabkin there to follow up on a conversation begun over the weekend at the International Pinot Noir Celebration, and while food and cooking would inevitably be part of the conversation, I didn’t plan to eat anything.

But Drabkin spoke so enthusiastically about the food coming out of the kitchen that I felt a moral obligation to try something on the menu.

I looked for something cheap and noticed the omelette for a buck or two less than on any breakfast menu I’ve seen for quite some time.   I ordered one with mushrooms… not expecting much given the price… and when it came my expectations were met.  It was plain and completely alone in its dish.

But two bites into the omelette I started to wonder how in the world I was going to make it in for breakfast weekly given the fact that our home is on the other side of the state.

Most places use omelettes as a comatose-producing egg wrap for a mess of cheese, meats, and occassionally vegetables.  The perfect omelette at Café Presse is a study in simplicity.  You taste egg, perfectly cooked, and, in my case, mushrooms.  There was also a slight tang inside that I’m still trying to identify in the hopes that I might try to make something similar at home.  I hate to admit I couldn’t identify that third element immediately, but I’m willing to fess up in the hopes that one of you do know and will tell me.  Please.

It didn’t even occur to me to reach for the salt or pepper.  And Tabasco?  Not a chance.  You don’t mess with perfection.

I met Boka’s Executive Chef Angie Roberts this weekend in Oregon and after a taste of her amped up breakfast hash, I was very interested to find my way into her restaurant in Seattle soon afterwards.  Last night on the back end of a Mariner’s game  (we left BEFORE Ichiro’s game winning hit at the bottom of the 9th) we stopped by Boka’s sleek space in Hotel 1000 for appetizers and dessert.

But first the space…

Near the center of the room is a stand of glass bamboo.  Equally striking are the walls in the back reaches of the dining room:  they gradually change color throughout the evening.  Our server said these transformations are programmed along certain themes such as “sunset colors” but confessed that she didn’t know what the current for the night might be.  Whatever it was, it included a cool blue and a blood red along with white and purple.  Maybe the theme for the night was Patriotic Eggplant.

I seriously doubt I would ever be inspired to decorate my home to look like a cocktail lounge lifted out of the Jetsons, but it Boka’s version is a great spot to spend a few hours.  Good food certainly helps, and Boka throws in the food righteousness factor with a menu that is upwards of 75% organic and as local as possible.  Expect individual farm names on most of the dishes on the menu.

We opted for an heirloom tomato salad with fruit grown on Billy Alsott’s farm and a small plate of of goat cheese gnocchi served with smoked tomatoes (excellent), porcini mushrooms (meaty), toasted pine nuts and shaved parmesan cheese.  I  was enjoying myself and quite full before Sous Chef Andrew Pritchard appeared with the most memorable dish of  the night: a selection from the brand new dessert menu.

It is listed under a somewhat confusing name,”easy like sunday mornin’, but don’t let a little menu camouflage get in your way.  Megan start to eat while I talked with Pritchard, and I should have known that something was amiss when she didn’t stop.  Just seconds before Pritchard arrived at the table, she had said with conviction that she couldn’t eat another bite.

Easy like Sunday morning’ is technically a sundae, but unlike any I’ve encounter in recent memory.  Put together a remarkable graham cracker ice cream with a huge pillow of house-made marshmallow skewered on a stick of sugar cane and suspended over the bowl with a tiny pitcher of hot fudge sauce on the side.  I may not be able to eat another s’more again with thinking of Boka and beginning to weep silently.  Okay… that might be a bit melodramatic, but it truly was a treat… so much so that I completely forgot to pull out the camera until we’d almost destroyed it entirely.

Mark Hosack spent his birthday (today) riding herd on the International Pinot Noir Celebration kitchen with his monster mug.  Happy Birthday, Chef.

My new favorite taco truck in Spokane is adding a measure of authenticity in its daily special sheet.

I didn’t order the “Shrip Speasal” but took the spelling as a potentially positive indicator that English was a second language for whoever made the sign (and hopefully would soon be cooking my food). It turns out that Patty’s Tacos is turning out wonderful and quite authentic Mexican street  food despite the decidedly Anglo name and the dictionary difficulties noted above.

For the record, there are actually two different Pattys in the family that owns the truck: cousin Patty Pineda and sister-in-law Patty Ramirez.  Pineda was at the grill the day I stopped by and her Alambre taco ($1.25) approached the category of life-changing.  Think mini fajita with steak, grilled peppers and onions, and melted mozzarella on top.  Normally I would scorn a taco that didn’t come topped in more traditional Mexican cheese, but before you do the same, try Patty’s Alambre.  It was stunningly good.  The pork Adobada taco was also wonderful.

For those of you within driving distance of Spokane, put Patty’s Taco Truck on the top of your list.  The truck is open 10 am to 8 pm every day on North Division between Garland and Walton.