Leila can’t eat veggies yet. Not unless they’re pureed. I thought felt food toys might be a cute way to teach her the names of some foods.

It’s never too early to get my kid hooked on junk food.

Felt Ravioli works for me.

Cute little anime egg tart.

Breakfast, Fruit, Pizza

The Cranberry Sauce kills me, and you’re selling a pattern?

Simple gift-giving involves giving something that is needed, but with extra meaning or a little flair. Even though I’ve known Mike for a very long time, I only recently found out that oatmeal raisin cookies are one of his favorites! So I told him I’d bake him a batch for Valentine’s day, and he said he’d cook me dinner.

Sausage and Linguine dinner. There was a *lot* of garlic! :)

Taking photos of food has made me more curious about presentation in general. How often is food morphed and enhanced into something delectable via photoshop and good lighting? Hard to tell. The result was me getting fed up with my perfectionist placement of cookies on a tray, and I just started snapping photos around the kitchen without moving anything. Here’s the result with a little explanation.

Leila’s sippy cup next to a ficus plant I bought last year made a nice contrast. She still needs to master drinking water, as it usually ends up all over her outfit. The wine bottles are usually kept next to the spice cabinet, as they are usually consumed within week.

I don’t have the time to catalog all of the drawers and cabinets, but almost every one in my kitchen is slightly askew. No matter how many times I close all of the drawers, they all just pop open or don’t line up properly. This glass-front cabinet is particularly naughty, as the one door always gets a bit in the way when I’m making coffee. How did I not notice when we were looking to buy our home? The kitchen is imperfect, but it definitely has personality.

To the right, just a bunch of notes and cards on the fridge.

Finally, and I suppose randomly, most parents will tell you that kids love to play with anything that isn’t actually a toy. Here we have Leila with a hard-boiled egg. No doubt its odd movement when pushed around is what kept her amused for 10 minutes.

I recently took a trip to Vashon Island to see Karen, one of my former coworkers. Karen offered to show us the best of the island, and I took her up on the offer.
I didn’t know much about Vashon, except for 3 things:

1) It’s very rural

2) You have to take a ferry to get on the island

3) Alex Borstein lives there

One of the highlights was a trip to the Monkey Tree Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant in the heart of Vashon’s small downtown. If you read the reviews on Yelp, there are lots of complaints about having to wait in order to get a table. This is true, but to be honest I find this to be a phenomenon with almost any good vegetarian restaurant, from East Coast to West. My theory is that there just aren’t a lot of really good vegetarian restaurants, which very simply leads to a bottleneck whenever it’s prime time for eating.

The waiter really cared about us. For example, I ordered the cherry soda. He said, I just want to warn you, it’s sweet. That’s cool, I said. He said, just checking, but it’s sweet, like cherry life savers sweet. OK, got it, I’ll take it! We had a theory that one other customer ordered it once and gave this poor guy a hard time.

I knew what I was going to order instantly. The fig and gorgonzola sandwich. Here it is:

Fig and gorgonzola sandwich

It was good. It showed thought on the part of the staff to try and come up with a good sandwich. However, there weren’t enough figs in the sandwich to balance out the cheese. (Could it be because fresh figs are expensive and were possibly out of season?) Gorgonzola is a very powerful cheese, so leaving it as the main flavor without other flavors to properly balance things out can be unpleasantly overpowering. But everything was very fresh, the salad crisp, and the soda sweet.

View from western edge of the island – thanks for the photo Mike!

When I asked if I could take photos and write about the place, I got a not-so-joking answer of “only if you write something positive”. I got the sense that the employees were somewhat weary of answering questions about the the stealth mode of this coffee shop. In case you’re not familiar with the issue, there are some powerful reactions to “test[ing] out marketing coffee with neighborhood-specific names rather than a slutty mermaid” and smaller coffee shop owners seeing “teams of Starbucks employees in [their] shop, making notes and actually placing them in folders marked “Observations.”".

At this particular Seattle location in Capitol Hill, the baked goods are from Essential Baking. That’s a wonderfully good thing. I’m not entirely sure if using local baking companies is a trend for the future or just an experiment. I’ve had stale pastries at Starbucks before and it’s horrible when you can tell a slice of cake was just defrosted.

The decor reminds me of the inside of an Anthropologie – everything was artfully thrown together. The furniture looked very nice, like it was antiqued rather than thrifted from Goodwill out of necessity. There were fresh flowers everywhere, from the tabletops to the shelves behind the baristas.

The coffee: good! There was a selection of about 10 different types of beans to choose from for my single cup of coffee. They’re taking part of the trend in single-cup brewing a cup of coffee to order, instead of creating an entire pot of coffee. Mighty tasty.

The music was decent, a blend of late 80s/early 90s alt-rock that was a lot more toe-tapping than the Barbara Streisand/Norah Jones background noise I usually hear in Starbucks lately.

Starbucks is the queen of ubiquitous chains. If they wanted to endear more people to their brand—especially in an urban area with great coffee and competition—it’s a good start. But can Starbucks afford fresh flowers, wood tea trays, and antique-shop furniture across all their stores across the USA? Probably not, but this is their experiment.

I purchased some Meiji “Kinoko No Yama” mushrooms on impulse at Uwajimaya, an Asian specialty super-store in Seattle. I thought they’d look adorable on a treat for Christmas! Some people gave the little mushroom guys quite a negative review (or a very close relative to what I purchased), but honestly they’re no worse than Hershey kisses in quality.

I got the recipe for some Dulce de Leche cheesecake squares off of the Smitten Kitchen blog, and had high hopes for it based on the description and the comments. The cheesecake itself had a very different, somewhat strange consistency. I think it’s the gelatin and the dulce de leche; the bite-size cakes had a custardy quality to them. It’s definitely creamy but perhaps doesn’t have the .. flake? .. I’m used to in a proper cheesecake. Perhaps I’m being too critical though – the husband said he’d love to eat the creamyness out of a big bowl if that was an option the next time I make it.

Seattle Pie in the Magnolia neighborhood is a cozy, spacious place to get that slice you didn’t want to have to spend 2 hours baking yourself. We tried slices from two of the pies – Apple, and the "Ultimate Crumb". Mike made a controversial statement to a dessert-lover like me – “You can’t mix your pies”. Or something along those lines. Anyway, I can kind of see his point now. I started with the Apple, which was amazing. But then when I had the Berry, it was so much sweeter that it made going back to the Apple kind of difficult. Oh dear Apple pie, it wasn’t your fault at all. The Berry pie just had that lil’ sumthin, I think it was the way the crust could be sold separately in a candy jar and probably pay most of the rent for the owners.

Tempting pie choices

Joe, one of the friendly employees

The Ultimate Berry-Crumb Pie

Sub-tropical clouds. Quite different from the kinds of clouds we get in Seattle.

Two days later, we were looking around for something less American, more simple. More European, in fact. We also wanted great bread. Our friend Jay raved a few times about Côté France, a cute little bakery in Boca Raton.

Pistachio Tart with mousse

Pineapple Tart with Grand Marnier

Most excellent fruit tart

One of the owners, Claudine, was extremely friendly and delved into complete explanations of each of the desserts I pointed at. The pineapple tart grabbed my eye mostly due to the marshmallow-like globs on the top. Claudine said the topping was a mixture of whipped cream and custard. She also said that they used Grand Marnier to add more orange flavor. Yum!

Charming Claudine

Jay pointed out that fruit tarts are done poorly very often. You can find them in most supermarkets, the glaze clammy from overnight hardening and the fruit usually under-ripe. But when done right, just right, the simple fruit tart can be the star of any dessert display. I like how the apple in this tart is sliced to remind me of a parrot’s ruffled head-feathers!

Today was the second of my now weekly treks to investigate new shops and businesses that make something sweet. With Leila again as my trusty sidekick, we armed ourselves with a puppy umbrella and were ready to stomp though the rain. We settled on someplace not too far from home, Curio Confections in the U-District.

I asked Maria, the proprietress at Curio Confections, about her candy selection. She apologized for the rather low inventory that morning, as well as for the fact that they had just run out of coffee. I was OK with those facts, except that I would’ve ordered some fruit jellies if they had been in stock. I took a quick look over what was in the glass display case, and ordered her gingerbread pudding and an orange spice tea.

Now here’s where I begin to fall in love with the place. Not only did Maria offer to top the gingerbread dessert with whipped cream, she offered to put it in the oven. I know that ovens are a very old staple of any kitchen, but they seem to have fallen out of regular use by those in the food trade looking for a quick warm-up. Believe me, please, restaurants and bakeries I frequent, the oven is superior to the microwave. Even though it takes longer, if given the choice between a beepy nuke and an oven, I’ll choose the oven every time.

Gingerbread Pudding

The rainy Northwest – as viewed from indoors

Although a bit grey, the above photo illustrates what I love about Seattle in the fall and winter months. Its quiet, slightly moody, contemplative side, punctuated with tall evergreens and ever-present sounds of droplets falling or wooshing wind. Cool, rainy weather is a great excuse to seek shelter and get cozy. Urban planning may dictate that our city’s future is UP rather than OUT, but I love looking out a window at a group of older, well-kept homes rather than more condos.

Here are some more cute photos of the shop’s interior:

This sanguine ship-shop has lollipops!

Perhaps we could convince them to make hot air pinatas?