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Food

Year of the cookbook, part I

January 29, 2012
Food, Life
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As I write this, I’m sipping on a cup of orange-infused coffee from a local brunchery called Orange (imaginative, I know). I woke up with a hankering for it and a muted desire to make my own bean juice as per usual, and the discovery that they sell it to-go has started the morning on a particularly positive note.

I have a series of posts to write, since there are a few things I’ve meant to put up here since 2012 began. Clichéd as it is, a resolution of mine was to start using this thing again, and although it’s taken nearly a month, here we go.

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Alinea (spoiler-filled version)

August 9, 2011
Food, Life
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This is part two of a two-part series about a recent culinary adventure. Part one can be found here. 

If you’re planning on dining at Alinea yourself any time within the next few months, I would actually warn you not to read this. The discovery and surprise is a huge part of the experience I wouldn’t want to sully. A spoiler-free version of this post can be found here.

All photography is by myself and dining companion Hillary – I’m not going to individually credit each photo unless there’s demand (everything was taken with iPhones, and the only criteria between whose photo got used was which offered a better look at what was on the table).

I. Arrival

Our reservation at Grant Achatz’s Alinea was for 7:30 p.m. sharp. We were dining on the evening of August 4, but the reservation had been made a couple of months in advance – from what I understand, some manner of insider knowledge is required to know precisely when to call and make bookings. Fortunately, our dining crew is something of an erstwhile A-Team, so I believe Hillary would be Faceman in this analogy (courtesy of some speedy Wikipedia research).

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Field-testing a childhood allergy (and dabbling in hypochondria)

August 5, 2011
Food, Life
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This is part one of a two-part series about a recent culinary adventure. Part two will be available as soon as I write it.

I. A little background

When I was three years old, or four, or five (neither myself nor my parents can seem to really remember), I ate some crab at my grandparents’ house. They lived right on Puget Sound at the time, you see, and catching/consuming freshly-caught crab was something of a common occurrence.

I hardly remember this now (being three years old, or four, or five), but the next morning I woke up with what is technically called subcutaneous bleeding (in layman’s terms, bleeding under the skin). I felt fine, but as my parents recall, it looked like they’d taken a baseball bat to my back and shoulders – which they hadn’t, of course, but I can understand why that would be a troubling state of affairs.

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