Via the Seattle PI

Looking to bring more fresh, local, seasonally grown foods into your family? We have a challenge for you.

It’s the second annual Farm Fresh Family Challenge, sponsored by the Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance. The alliance is looking for a Seattle-area family willing to buy most of its fresh food from farmers markets between June and November this year, and to write a weekly P-I-sponsored blog during that time.

The first Farm Fresh blogger, Kathleen Whitson of West Seattle, found inspiration experimenting with farmstand eggs, debating when she would choose organic over conventionally grown produce, discovering the different body and taste of a pasture-raised Thanksgiving turkey, and figuring out how to tell her husband why it no longer felt right to make an apple pie in July.

If that’s your sort of food for thought — or if you have your own take on what a Farm Fresh Family should be — here are the details:

# Candidates must be willing to buy most fresh foods (vegetables, fruits, meats, shellfish, fish eggs, cheese, etc.) from one of the seven Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance markets (Broadway, University District, West Seattle, Phinney, Magnolia, Columbia City or Lake City).

# They must write a weekly P-I-sponsored blog, track the prices of the products they buy each week, and be willing to occasionally host a local chef in their home kitchen to share shopping and cooking tips.

To apply, send an e-mail to nfma@seattlefarmersmarkets.org with a description of your family (how many members, ages, etc.), where you normally shop for food, how much you spend on groceries in an average week, how often you cook at home, and what prompted your interest in buying local, sustainably grown foods. Deadline to apply is May 30.

The Alliance will provide the family with assistance, including personal market tours, introductions to farmers, canvas shopping bags, shopping tokens to get started, recipe ideas and more. Photos of the family will be featured in the alliance’s quarterly newsletter and will be posted at all market information booths.

I told you the other day that Molly Moon’s Ice Cream was opening in Wallingford. Well, several Seattle MetBloggers visited during their opening and we had a rather lively discussion about ice cream afterward. Now, for your reading pleasure, I present parts of our discussion. Note: Dramatic license has been taken with some of the comments and names have been changed.

Sylvie: I wasn’t impressed.
Theresa: Really? I thought the Balsamic Strawberry was great and the Vivace Coffee ice cream was out of this world. I did think the scoops were a bit small though.
Sylvie: I tried a number of flavors and none of them really screamed out wow, yummy ice cream. Plus, they were ridiculously small. So small that I thought I mistakenly got a child sized scoop.
Theresa: Well, I do agree the scoops were small. The pints were well priced though at $5.00. The Thai Iced Tea flavor tasted exactly like Thai Iced Tea - weird but cool.
Emily: Ooooh, I missed this place. Where is it? I found a great ice cream shop during the artwalk in Greenwood/Fremont.
Theresa: It’s in Wallingford. My favorite ice cream shop, by far, is The Scoop at Walt’s in Sunset Hill. Amazingly large scoops of Snoqualmie Ice cream and great waffle cones. I’ll definitely go back to Molly Moon’s in a few weeks and hope that they were just giving small scoops because it was opening weekend.

thanks to [BrittneyBush] for the above photo of the 2007 cheese festival plucked from our [flickr pool].

If you missed the glorious news replete with cheesy puns in our local newspapers, the Seattle Cheese Festival is this weekend (May 16-18). In its fourth year, the festival seems to be trucking on with all the great highlights I’ve come to expect:

• Completely free, but very crowded cheese concourse? Check.
• Wine Garden? Check.
• Truckle roll? Check.
• Cute kids’ events that I’m going to completely avoid? Check.
• Chef demos? Check.
• Cooking Classes and Educational Seminars? Check.

Let’s talk about these seminars for a minute. If you are like me and crowd averse, but still want to participate in the festival, these are the events for you. The cooking classes are held at the particular chef’s restaurant and are a mere $50 per person which, of course, includes your food and wine. Currently only Chef Tinsley’s (Osteria La Spiga) and Chef Hetherington’s (TASTE) classes have availability left. The seminars on the other hand are held at the Top of the Market and include cheese and wine pairings along with the talk. I consider the seminar I attended last year the deal of the festival century. This year’s cost is up to $40, but I still think it’s highly worth it. Pre-registration is required, seating is limited, so do so early.

The changes they’ve made this year are notable as well. They’ve made some arrangements to spread events out to alleviate the clustering and crowding. New additions include the results of their grilled cheese contest, children’s costume parades, and a fresh mozzarella making demo (you’ll be astounded how easy it is).

I love farmers market season! Finally, there’s a weekday farmers market open! The Wallingford Farmers Market opens today!

From their website, it appears that they are really planning to expand the market this year. I always found it a very pleasant market, a little more laid back than the busy weekend markets like Ballard and the University District. Though the vendor list was definitely shorter last year. From cooking demonstrations to honey, meat, fish, and even garden art, the market appears to be going strong and growing steadily. I’ll be there today grabbing some fresh veggies for dinner. See you there!

Wallingford Farmers Market
Wallingford Center Parking Lot
3-7pm

Erin is right- the U-District Haagen-Dazs is serving up some tasty scoops from now until 8 p.m. There wasn’t even a line when I scurried down at 4 p.m., but I suspect that may have something to do with the weather.

Still, they’re giving away free ice cream, bee-friendly flower seed packets, there’s a local beekeeper on hand with a tiny apiary, and the whole staff is dressed up like extras from a Blind Melon video. Go get some- it’s pretty tasty!

Today from 4-8pm Haagen-Dazs is offering free 4oz samples (in a cup, sugar cone or cake cone) of their new Vanilla Honey Bee ice cream flavor.

I’ve checked with the University District location (4301 University Way NE) and they are indeed participating.

Apparently there is a honey bee crisis where honey bees are disappearing at an alarming rate, and Haagen-Dazs is trying to raise awareness. When you purchase a pint of any of their honey bee-dependent flavors they will donate funds to support sustainable pollination research. For more information check out Help The Honey Bees.

This was my experience of the new tequila bar in Capitol Hill.  

-Went to The Saint on Friday night. It was early, maybe around 10ish. There were about 15 people inside, including my clan of 4.

-Paid $19 (not including tip) on one shitty drink and one good one. Personally, I think this is too expensive for drinks, but I hardly drink so I have no idea how pricing goes these days.

-The shitty drink was the Mojito. When I asked for it, the bartender gasped. She told me she really wasn’t sure how to make one properly, but gave it a go anyway. This is not something you want to hear when you’re about to pay $8 on a drink, but I waited to see what her concoction would be like. It was shitty.

-She then noticed my hatred for her shitty drink and had someone else make. Someone who was, as she quoted, a “Mojito Master”. I tried it again. It was still shitty. I decided to shut up and drank my shitty $8 drink in peace.

-The margarita was better. Get that.

-We wanted desert. We did not want flan. They ran out of all their deserts (at 10ish pm!) and only had flan. We did not get desert.

-The colors and motif were nice, refreshing and cool (not cool as in rad, cool as in the paint was blue and white, giving it a breezy, beachy feel, not a matador, killing bulls feel).

-The matador themed pictures seemed out of place somehow.

-The price of the food looked expensive. I just had oxtail an hour earlier, so I didn’t waste my money on overly priced tacos. When I went outside and a drunk girl asked if this place was expensive, I said yes. Especially the tacos. She then tells me that Tacos Gringos is the way to go. I haven’t been to this place, but I’m skeptical (especially with the Gringos part). I don’t think I’m willing to go behind Rancho Bravos back just yet. I have some values after all.  

-I secretly wanted wings.

-I wasn’t overly impressed, but could see myself coming back because it wasn’t too loud or jampacked. This could either mean it’ll be a good date place after eating at Dinette. Or it’ll become something else in 6 months.

After much delay at the border I arrived in Seattle just as the last of the rush hour traffic was dying off. Driving via memorized Google guidance, I leave the I5 in search of my hotel The Roosevelt. As I’m checking in I get upgraded from a single room to a queen, which upon inspection seems to simply mean that my bed is larger because the room itself is tiny.

I debate phoning down to the front desk to inquire as to which Roosevelt the hotel is named after, I need to know these things if I’m going to dress appropriately for the evening since Franklin and Theodore are very different styles. A Google search lets me know that it is Theodore, so I don’t bother unpacking my monocle.

My friend, also named Jeff, meets me about an hour later. We’re friends from high school, and he’s one of the few of my friends who’ve made a move to the United States and managed to make it stick. He works in Redmond, but lives in Seattle so I trust him with our evening plans.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have, we end up at Von’s a fake New York style bar that’s attached to the hotel. Yes, my local Seattle Sherpa had guided me to the hotel bar.

(more…)

I’m not confident that it’ll last, but at least right now the sun is shining where I am. So this weekend for me is all about the outdoors. There’s the University District, Ballard, and West Seattle Farmers Markets of course, as there have been all year. But this weekend the Broadway Farmers Market comes back! If you tried Trevani Truffles after reading about them here, they are moving to the Broadway Farmers Market soon, so get over there and get yourself some amazing chocolate!

If you missed the Seattle Tilth Plant Sale last weekend, you’re not out of luck for your summer gardens. The Friends of the Conservatory Plant Sale is Saturday from 10-3pm. You can also enjoy a wide variety of indoor plants as well. There will be experts on hand to help you resurrect any plants you might have languishing at home.

And last, Daily Candy reports that a new artisan ice cream shop is opening in Wallingford. Molly Moon’s looks to be my kind of ice cream shop. And with flavors such as Balsamic Strawberry and Salted Caramel, and the possibility of a local celebrity or two showing up, it just might be the place to be this weekend.

These strawberries are resting against my 1/2 cup measuring cup. These are from Pike Place Market (as stated in my earlier post). I challenge you to find a bigger bunch of strawberries. I will buy the winner a drink at our next Metblogs Meetup (projected to take place on May 15th, 17th, or 18th. Details to follow).