Things I’m totally crushing on lately:

• I was excited when I finally got a Snuggie for Christmas (I think my brother was sick of me always talking about it, so he finally gifted me with one.  I’m wearing it RIGHT NOW.)  But then I saw THIS:

Hello perfect Valentine’s day present.

• When I was home for Christmas, I talked my dad into giving me his pressure cooker.  They don’t use it and I read one too many articles about how BPA in canned goods will kill me (or make me fat).  I was initially a little scared to actually use it- the idea of a kitchen appliance that could potentially blow up our house was a little bit intimidating- but then I made black bean soup from dried beans in 20 minutes and was instantly in love.

Tonight I used it to cook hulled barley (note: NOT that pussy pearled stuff).  Combined with collard greens, sweet potatoes, sausage and carmelized onions, I made the best dinner I’ve made in a week in 35 minutes.

So.  Freakin’.  Good.  Plus I have lunch for the rest of the week.

• Speaking of food, I have been obsessed with dates lately.  It’s a problem.  I can’t stop eating them.

I actually made a really good faux dessert the other day with chopped dates, cocoa powder and almond butter- it tasted like fudge and was less guilt-inducing than what I usually crave.  Unfortunately, while it’s completely delicious- it totally tastes like fudge- it also looks like poop.  So I can’t take a picture of it until I figure out how to make it look a little more presentable.

That’s all.  I’m off to bond with my Snuggie and eat some more poopie chocolate date surprise.  Night kids.

Trapped.  On.  Hill.  Want.  Off.  Now.  Thanks.

Everybody I know is starting to come a little unhinged thanks to the snow.  One of my coworkers is stuck out on Bainbridge Island with no electricity, our friend Muneeb was one of the 3,000 people stuck at the airport thanks to delayed flights, and everybody I know who lives on the hill… well, let’s just say that if one of us gets all The Shining on somebody’s ass, I won’t be all that suprised.

So what do you DO when you can’t leave a 2 mile square radius of your house?  You start cooking.

The week I’ve been working from home is a little dull to say the least, but it has given me a chance to remember how freaking much I love oatmeal.  Oatmeal is awesome.  I think I could eat it just about every day.  And considering the last time I went on a big oatmeal binge was when I was trying to eat 100 grams of protein a day, I am much more in love with it right now because I don’t have to pour scoops of protein powder into it (nasty) anymore.  (By the way, what did I learn from that experiment?  Processed soy is bad for you.  Take note.)

So for the past week, since I’ve had time to make breakfast, this has been my standard go-to meal:

Scrambled egg whites with a little bit of aged gouda (yum) and slow-cook oatmeal with vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, dried cherries, golden raisins and pecans.

On a related food note, Mike had said that he had a crazy craving for a burger tonight.  This probably has something to do with the fact that I make way too much chicken (since I don’t eat beef).  He was even open to the idea of trying to walk down the hill to Dick’s, which is Seattle’s not as delicious but locally iconic version of In N Out.  Unfortunately, the icy sidewalks + the steep hill were not making that happen.

So, after doing a couple laps around the neighborhood with Barrie (it’s the most activity we can get right now), I decided to be a nice wife and make him a burger.  I had some ground sirloin in the freezer already, so I figured I could whip together some sort of homemade burger type meal for him, even if I couldn’t taste it and really don’t know how to tell when a burger is done.

Once I was in Safeway, I realized that I was about to totally score!  Thanks to the crappy weather, perishables were totally on sale.  I got a bunch of chicken, bacon and sausage on a two for one promotion.  There were similar deals on beef, but I don’t know crap about that and decided to come back with Mike tomorrow.  I ended up only paying $45 for $70 worth of groceries!  Yay!  (I know, I’m old.  I’m excited about groceries.  Even sadder, I’ve already posted this on my local knitting board to share the joy.)

Oh, and the burger turned out “awesome,” according to Mike.  This is particularly vindicating because, as anybody who has ever seen him eat anything I’ve made, he is not particularly gentle on his reviews.  This culinary success goes towards proving Derek’s theory that I am indeed really good at making food that I can’t taste.

I approve of this past weekend, mostly because it was cash-flow positive.

On Saturday, Mike and I spent most of our day going through our rather large book collection and deciding which ones we could bear to part with.  We sorted through 18 boxes of books.

After we decided on 7 boxes of books that we would sell or donate, our remaining collection looked like this:

Still a lot of books, but much more managable.  Now we only have 11 boxes worth of books!

To reward ourselves, we went to Veraci’s Pizza, aka the best freaking pizza we’ve ever had.  Veraci’s has been a regular at the Seattle Farmer’s Markets scene for years, but they just opened a real restaurant last week.  They still don’t have the logistics of the ordering process down pat- only 1 cash register, long lines, etc- but the product makes it more than worth it.  Just look at how many people were waiting in line.  At a sit-down restaurant.

That line went out the door.  Delicious.  Plus, they messed up and gave us an extra half a pizza by accident.  Free breakfast!

Later that night, the garage sale mastermind herself and I met up for drinks and dessert to celebrate some recent good news.  It took our waiter about 10 minutes to greet us and take our order, so in order to preemptively apologize, he told us that our desserts would be free.  Score again!

On Sunday, Mike slept in while I schlepped books in front of Barrie’s building.  We manned the “store” until 2 pm, at which time I re-schlepped the remaining books back into my car and over to Half Price Books, where they were more than happy to buy what we couldn’t already sell.  Total take-home: $201!!!!

After I came home and collapsed for a bit, we went to grab dinner with our friends Kate and Max.  They are big fans of Ivar’s, where you may remember we earned ourselves a hefty gift certificate after a not-so-great review.  We didn’t want to pass up the chance to cash in part of our gift card, so we joined them and had a free dinner.  These two are a good fit for us to eat with- Max and Mike geeked out over car talk while Kate and I geeked out over yarn talk.  There was nary an awkward silence in sight.

Total take home this weekend: $201, 1 free meal, 1 free dessert and 2 free pieces of amazing pizza, and significantly more space in our garage.

I don’t feel like I was a very good host last week while Tony was here.  Mike was working late every night and I have been rather consumed with some projects of my own- looking for some work, getting the Handicraft Blog up and running, and finishing up a pattern for the site.  Thankfully, Tony is much cooler than Mike or I and managed to keep himself entertained (especially at night).

I did get to take him to one Seattle landmark (of sorts) before he left though: we ate at the glory that is The Skillet.

The Skillet is a traveling eatery that operates out of an Airstream trailer and serves “gourmet street food.”  Each day of the week they set up shop at a different location (you can check the calendar on their web site to find out where they will be).  Their menu rotates weekly, they only take cash, there is usually a line, and the food is AMAZING.

You walk up to the window and they take your order.  (I have no way to confirm this, but I think this guy was on the Pacific Northwest episode of No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, one of my favorite shows EVER.  Well, I guess I could prove it by searching out the episode and watching it again, but that’s a lot of effort.)

The menu:

Tony ordered the Kobe burger and fries.  I had the grilled cheese and tomato basil soup.  So good.  Their fries are ridonculously delicious.

The fancied up grilled cheese (Gouda and pesto on rosemary bread) was so rich that I couldn’t finish it.  I always order soup when I go there just for the delicious croutons.

Yum.  Delicious.  If you are ever in Seattle on a weekday afternoon, you have to eat at the Skillet.  Call me and I’ll join you.

Saturday was Amy and Derek’s last full day in Seattle, so we made it a point to pack in as many activities as possible.  I think we succeeded.  I was certainly exhausted by the end of the day.

The day started early, at least according to Mike time- we were all out the door before 11:00 AM.  Since Mike is a world champion sleeper-inner, Amy, Derek and I had already had time to walk down the street to grab some coffee and check out some pretty impressive foam art:

Once Mike was conscious and clean, we headed over to Pike’s Place Market, where we had a decent lunch with an amazing view at Lowell’s:

We also bought Mike’s mom a salmon (it’s the only souvenir she would ever actually use):

Once the Market was checked off our list, we made our way to another huge tourist attraction in Seattle, The Experience Music Project.  This was actually really cool- it features all kinds of cool stations where you can learn about Seattle’s musical heritage through every sense imaginable.  Plus, we took advantage of Mike’s fancy Microsoft Discount AND two free tickets he had gotten from a friend, so the whole afternoon only cost us $10!

The building was designed by Frank Gehry, if you couldn’t guess.

The tower of guitars is really impressive.

One of the most popular features of the EMP is a section where they have all kinds of musical instruments and tools for anybody to play, even if you have zero musical ability whatsoever (like myself).  We played with keyboards, drums, guitars and even a mixing board, but I was most excited about the turntables.

Um, needless to say, I couldn’t even successfully match the tempos on the pretend turntable.  I am officially the whitest white girl on the planet.

Mike did much better when he took over.  If we ever decide to become a musical duo of any sorts, I’ll just have to be the hype-man.  I can’t make music, but I am damn good at encouraging people.

Another section of the EMP is a compilation of thousands of hours of interviews and monologues of all kinds of people involved in the Seattle music scene over the years.  While poking around, I found Mike McCready’s interview and naturally had to take a picture with his virtual self:

Randomly, my mom is besties with his wife.  When he gave her a Pearl Jam CD, she told him that their music was okay, but she couldn’t understand what their lead singer was saying.  I love my mom.

Right next to the oral history compilation, Mike found his favorite thing in the entire freaking museum, the egg chair:

After we finally wrested Mike from the grips of the very soothing musical egg chair, we finished our tour of the museum and checked out the Science Fiction Museum, which is attached to the EMP and included with the price of admission.  There were some cool/kitchy alien and robot stuff, but we didn’t get any pictures because they are really strict about photography.  Boo to them.

We then spent some time wandering around the Seattle Center.  We were all too cheap to go to the top of the Space Needle, but we did take pictures in front of it:

We finished the day with dinner and drinks at Boom Noodle in Capitol Hill.  I had gone there with Justin the week before, and we liked it.  Derek is a conisseur of ramen, so I wanted to take him there to try it.  It’s not the most authentic ramen in the universe, but it’s decent, and they have really good gyoza and a cute, modern decor.

I had mussels for the first time.  They look scary but taste delicious.  Yay mussels! I also made Amy stick the pretty pink sake bottle in her purse so I could bring it home and use it as a vase.  I’m nothing if not classy.

We finished the night by going home, where we got our domestic on by making homemade Nilla Wafers and eating ice cream.  Cookies are always a good way to finish a day.

Since we’ve moved to Seattle, I’ve been cooking up a storm.  Not a perfect storm, but a storm nonetheless.  In fact, I’ve been cooking so much that we’ve cut our usually frequent habit of eating out down to once or twice a week.  It’s generally a good thing- my food has gotten better and it is much cheaper.

However, since our friend Justin came to visit us last Thursday, all that has gone out the window.

Having somebody from back home visit us has been an excuse to try all kinds of deliciousness that we’ve put off in the past couple of months, as well as revisit a few favorites.  It’s been fun, because as Justin and I have discussed at length, food up here is awesome.  We can’t figure out if it’s the general lack of chain restaurants or the general emphasis on quality ingredients, but there is definitely something wonderful about eating in Seattle.  Here is a summary of what we’ve devoured since Justin arrived:

• Dinner at Peso’s: This Mexican/tapas place is down the hill from us.  It’s a little clubby/yuppie feeling, but they have a great late-night happy hour.  We dug the crab cakes and sangria.  Yum.
• Beecher’s Handmade Cheese: Best Mac and Cheese I’ve ever had.  And I love cheese.
• Ramen at Boom Noodle: Ramen + Happy Hour = delicious.
• Dinner at Flying Fish: Good seafood, great wine.  Mike had a black coconut risotto that I wanted to crawl inside of and eat my way out of.
• Pho Viet Anh: Our new pho place.
• Dad Watson’s: I didn’t love my Mac and Cheese here, but Justin liked his stuffed burger so much that we took a picture of it:

• Thai Kitchen in Queen Anne:  Everybody loved the Panang Curry.  This was a fortunate accident, since we had originally intended to go to a different Thai restaurant near our house, but they closed early.  Bad for them, good for us.  I think this is when Mike first declared that he could eat Thai food every day if he had to.
• MAD Pizza: We wandered in here on a whim before exploring the giant REI.  The pizza was good, but the so-called “half salads” were even better.  A pleasant surprise.
• Chinoise Cafe: This is an odd little restaurant that has a little bit of every kind of Asian cuisine.  If you can’t decide what you want to eat, you can come here, have a bowl of pho, some fried rice, walnut shrimp and a side of kim chi and be incredibly happy.  When the bill came, we were all pleasantly surprised at how little it cost.  This is the kind of restaurant you would want right by your house.  In our case, it is right by our house.  Awesome.
• The Other Coast Cafe: Justin said this was the best hot sandwhich he had ever had.  Enough said.
• Phuket: Yes, more Thai food.  We can’t help it, there is a glut of Thai food in this city.  Mike loves this place because the Pad Thai isn’t too sweet.
• Skillet Street Food: I was sooo excited to finally eat at this roving gourmet food truck.  Best french fries I’ve ever had, plus everything was really reasonably price.
• Ivar’s Salmon House: Eh, this was a little disapointing, especially because it was our last meal together before Justin goes home tomorrow.  The highlight of the meal was when we found out that Mike, not wanting to offend our waiter, had tried to hide all of the fish and chips that he didn’t eat:

This is one of the reasons I love him.  Weirdo.

So, since I currently don’t have a job for the first time since the age of 15, I have actually had time to cook, which makes me happy.  I wouldn’t say I’m a great cook, but I really enjoy feeding people- I’ll happily cook almost anything, even red meat, which I’ve never actually eaten, if I know that people are going to appreciate it.  (I have been told that I cook things I don’t eat better than food that I do, and I have no idea why.  Even Mike, who is always eager to tell me what is wrong with a dish “so I can learn more” says that my meatloaf is the best he has ever eaten.  I have no idea what it tastes like.)  But in normal life, things  get hectic and I get lazy, so if we eate at home 3 times a week I considered it a home run.

Lately though, we’ve been eating home-cooked dinners 5 or 6 nights a week, which I consider a small miracle, because in order to feed Mike, I have to make at least 2 side dishes to go with any main course.  He is really passionate about side dishes.  Not only have I been good about actually planning out meals ahead of time, which really does slash our grocery budget, but I’ve been producing fairly successful fare lately, so much so that Mike actually told me that the goat-cheese stuffed chicken breast I made tonight was “as good as restaurant food.”  This is huge.

I can’t take all the credit though.  I may be getting a little better with practice, but the real star of our food lately is the fact that we are living in a wonderland of produce.  This week, the veggie-palooza got even better with the addition of this:

You see, last week, at the reccomendation of a friend in my knitting group up here, I signed up for a CSA, specifically, the one run by New Roots Organics.  It’s amazing.  When I opened up the bin this morning, I was so excited that I did a little happy dance outside our door.  It’s filled with fresh, locally grown, delicious, organic produce, including red leaf lettuce, crisp fall apples, big ears of super sweet corn, beets (Mary, what are beets made of?), and super sweet ridiculously yummy peaches, among other good stuff.  Thanks to this magic vegetable delivery service, I’ve been able to up the ante on the required side dishes and teach Mike that he likes far more vegetables than he ever knew- yesterday, he asked for MORE LEEKS and tonight he destroyed a pound of green beans (I helped a little, of course).  If you asked him last week, he would have told you that he didn’t like either of these things.

The best part of this whole thing is that it’s ridiculously inexpensive.  The bin we’re getting is the smaller size (I may upgrade later to the regular size), it’s only $25 per delivery, and you can choose if you want it every week or every other week (I signed up for every other week, but I may end up bumping it up to every week, we’ll see).  If I went to say, Whole Foods, and bought this much produce, I’d be out twice that much money.

So yes, I recognize that I just wrote an entire blog post about how awesome vegetables are, but I’m really excited.  We may have moved to a strange city where it is going to be dark and grey and rainy for half the year, but at least I can spend my time swimming in an ocean of organic spinach.

By the way, any suggestions on what to do with the beets?

YAY: Saturday I successfully slept in almost as late as Mike.  This is a major accomplishment for my unable to sit still self.

BOO: We didn’t get out of the house until 1:00 pm, which means we wasted half of what is probably one of the last really nice weekends of summer here.  We suck.

YAY: We made it to the grand opening of the Colonnade Mountain Bike Skills Park.  (I think they should have called it a “Skillz” park.  ::groan::).  It was really cool- well built, much bigger than I would have ever imagined, and only 2 miles from our house.

BOO: Mike’s bike is still broken from his last trip to Mammoth.  Something tells me that will get fixed soon.

YAY: The mountain bike park has an off-leash dog park!!

BOO: I still don’t have a dog because my husband doesn’t really love me.

YAY: We found a really awesome Thai restaurant down the hill from our house.  Yum.

BOO: We have to walk back up the hill after we eat there.

YAY: Mike actually went to the farmer’s Market with me in Ballard Sunday morning.  Total food Pr0n + somebody to help me carry stuff.

YAY: I made a ton of progress on a lace scarf I am knitting.  I just started this on Tuesday:

BOO: My stupid wrist is still hurting when I knit or bike or lift things.  I think I’m going to end up having to do physical therapy.

YAY: We saw Burn After Reading on Sunday night.  It was pointless and self-mocking and it entertained me so much that I actually stayed awake through the whole thing- yeah, that’s right Ben, I stayed awake during an entire MOVIE!

BOO: Mike got so frustrated trying to park downtown before the movie that he ended up driving to a mall outside the city to see it.  We both agreed that it’s time to conquer our deep-rooted Orange County-born-and-raised fear of public transportation and start using the bus system.

YAY: All the new TV shows are **this close** to actually starting full-force.  Gossip Girl and Bones have already come back to us (squeeee) along with a handful of new shows: 90210 2.0 (eh), Fringe (has some definately nerdy X-Files-ish potential) and Privileged (I don’t think Mike has seen this yet, but it might end up being cute).  I know it’s lame and low-brow, but I love TV.  Mike and I are the best at lying around and watching TV.  We would totally medal if watching television while knitting (me) and looking at car forums (Mike) was an Olympic team sport.

BOO: TV definately limits productivity.  But I love it anyways.

BOO THE SEQUEL: Speaking of Gossip Girl, Blair is putting out an album:

Hi!  It’s me!

I haven’t posted in 3 days and I’m sure that anybody who knows me assumes that I just got bored with this blogging thing.  But no, I promise, my short attention span is not responsible for the lack of recent posting.  The blame for my virtual absence lies entirely with another one of my (many) flaws: my infamous clumsiness.

We had high hopes for the weekend: finish getting the house in order Friday and Saturday, then spend Sunday exploring more of the city.  We made our 3rd trip to Ikea since moving here Friday evening, but after returning one pair of desks, we found out that we couldn’t fit the desks we did want in either of our cars, so we left, extremely dejected.  We were mightily cheered up though by our first taste of Pagliacci’s Pizza, which is pretty much iconic in Seattle, and deservedly so.  Delicious pizza, pasta salad and blackberry gelato restored us to our normal, jovial selves.

SaturDAY was good.  We slept in, went back to Ikea (4th trip- damn you Ikea!), found a desk solution we could live with, and then went to Bed Bath and Beyond, where, thanks to one of those fabulous 20% off coupons and the culmination of YEARS of whining, we finally got a Dyson:

Seriously, he was soooooo happy.  The boy loves vacuuming.  Which is good for me, but bad for our finances- we already have a Roomba, a handheld Dyson and a Swiffer Vac thing.  Not to mention the fact that we left a Shop-Vac and and older non-Dyson upright vacuum in Anaheim for the boys.  ::shaking head::

Anyways, at approximately 8:30 pm, disaster struck.

This is the staircase that I dropped my beloved 4 year old Dell Inspiron laptop.  Stupidly, I had rested it on the banister while I was cleaning, so me knocking it down was inevitable.  You would think that I would know better, but no, I don’t.

This was the physical damage:

Obviously, it would no longer turn on.

At this point I went a little catatonic.  Mike spent 5 minutes trying to reassure me that the hard drive was fine and it wasn’t really a big deal, but then quickly remembered that I’m totally unreasonable (true) and let me sulk while we set up the office.  At some point I took a Xanax and went to sleep.

By noon on Sunday, we were at the Sony store buying a replacement.  Then we drove to Renton and visited Fry’s (talk about feeling like we were home again) to get whatever Mike needed to rescue the contents of my poor hard drive.  While we were in the ‘burbs, we called our friend B, who met us at Ratcha Thai for a late lunch.  The food was a little “eh,” but dessert more than made up for it:

Oh tart yogurt, how I love you, and how I miss your excessive availability back home.  ::sigh::

We came home.  I turned on my new laptop.  It worked.  I squealed.  Mike restored everything from my old hard drive in about 10 minutes.  I squealed louder and danced a little.  He told me to stop.

All in all, everything is back to normal at our house.

(I know you’re looking at this extremely flattering picture and thinking, ‘God, Mike is a lucky, lucky man.’  You’re right.  He is.)

Today I went to the Queen Anne Farmer’s Market. This is one of the things that I really like about Seattle- there are farmer’s markets every day of the week (each in a different neighborhood) during the summer. I loaded up on cherries ($3 / lb for organic Ranier Cherries!!), zucchinis, summer squash, peaches and lettuce. Now that I can lift things with my arm, have access to my pots and pans, and have some free time, i’m starting to get my cooking mojo backand I’m loving the fresh, affordable produce all around (the term “cooking mojo” is on loan from Zona).

Oh, and because I’m easily amused, I bought this onion just because it was HUGE! And it reminded me of my friend Kris, who loves onions more than any other human I’ve ever met.

I have no idea what to do with this much onion though now. Any ideas?