What every your reason for enjoying another season of snow up at Snocrummy…er…Snoqualmie…er…Summit West, now you can.

Available at any number of szechuan restaurants in the city (Sichuanese Cuisine and 7 Stars Peppers, both at the corner of 12th and Jackson are two), you will recieve a pot of boiling broth minutes after you order. You need no other dishes, no apps, no sides, just the hot pot. The two sides of the dish hold the spicy and unspicy broths, the peanut sauce on the side will cool down your steaming food after it comes out of the hot pot. You will be served slices of beef, lamb, chicken, tofu. Noodles, cabbage, you name it, it is there. The fun of the meal is the dipping of each item, letting it cook right in front of you, then eating.

For those who have no interest in turkey sandwiches, who lack the drive to transform their turkey feast into a 7th meal, I reccomend giving the anti-thanksgiving a try.

I won’t declare Mexican food saved in Seattle, but let me tell you, this place is getting it on that track. This is not La Carta de Oaxaca high falutin’ small plates, this is some truck stop Mexican food, and I was impressed. The TV played the Seahawks game and the water never let my bottles of Sol get low, nor the BF’s draft Dos Equis. I was dissapointed they were out of the Chicharrones (mmmm…fried pork skin!), but I was happy to settle for the chilequiles. The menu covered every region of Mexico, with mole (Oaxaca), Huaraches (Vera Cruz), Tortas (DF), and Pepian (Southern, I’ve mostly had it in Guatemala). They had a lot of standard Mexmerican food, but they also had about all the traditional Mexican options one could want. And the balls to put fried pork skin on the menu.

Both my and my BF’s meals were reasonably good and big enough to feed a small army (I reccomend splitting one dish). I wouldn’t reccomend our individual meals, neccisarily (he had the combinacion tres valedores), but I do reccomend the restaurant as a whole. Why? The chips were clearly made in house, I know they used local tomatoes in the salsa because while the salsa tasted great, it also felt a bit like late fall tomatos. The food tasted like Mexico, even if it was portioned like America.

And the number one reason I want to shout the name “El Tajin” to the hills? Instead of coming with sour cream, as most Mexican restaurant meals do here in Seattle, they were served with true Mexican Queso Crema. Sigh….

We were at the bar at Maekawa, when my eye was instantly drawn away from conversation. These eyes don’t miss pork belly. Nor does this nose or tummy. It was flying by and I caught barely a glimpse, accompanied by a hard boiled egg. Searching the menu desperately for pork belly, I found this entry: Kakuni: Chunks of pork stewed with hard boiled egg. Hardly sounding appealing on the menu, I ordered it nonetheless. Luckily I was right and what was served to me was in fact two squares of pork belly, about 2in x 2in, braised to melting perfection and served with a dollop of spicy horseradish or mustard that cut the sweetness of the sauce. This pig clearly gave his life for a good cause.

Pork Belly sounds intimidating, but in reality it is just bacon, before it is cured–where the deliciousness comes from, because let’s be honest, everyone loves bacon. While the dish can be found on many fancy restaurants for 3 times the price (Cremant serves quite a lovely one), the meat itself is quite cheap (available at Uwajimaya and HT Mart for less than $3 a pound). However, cooking it takes a long time (braising overnight works well) so why not save yourself the effort and eat the version at Maekawa? (In the International District)

This came up today because as I walked to work through Volunteer Park, I noticed a lot of fallen chestnuts. I told a friend of mine that I wanted to pick them up on the way home and make roasted chestunuts and other wonders of the chestnut worl, and he informed me that the kind that grows in North America are poisonous. Is this true? I picked them off the ground in Vermont, and I’m not dead, but that isn’t really the kind of logic I like to adhere to when it comes to this. So what say you Seattle, can I eat the chestnuts?