Forget your five fruits and vegetables a day. Sometimes, weeks will go by where the only fruits and vegetables I see are the ones on top of my pizza (unless they’ve started stuffing vegetables into my ramen packets). Every year, spring comes around, things start greening up, and I start thinking about eating more fresh fruits and vegetables.

You folks over in Seattle are pretty lucky to have Pike Place’s perpetual farmer’s market, and truth to tell, I could have that too, if I wanted: Pike Place has a Community Supported Agriculture program which delivers all over the place. And they aren’t the only ones.

Farmers have a pretty hard life, I reckon — out in the elements all year long, but somehow a lot of the farms in our immediate vicinity have managed to come up with time to make websites advertising their bounty. CSA lists are available from King County, LocalHarvest, and of course, Seattle Tilth Association.

Everyone does it all a little differently, but here are my top four picks for those of us stuck on the Eastside.

Pike Place has a May 1 deadline. They have a separate Flower share. And with all the various people involved with the market, they’ll probably have the most variety. They toss in honey and vinegar every once in a while — you can’t beat that. You can pick up at the market, or at a distribution center near you. If you’re downtown, they even have a special Downtowner Basket — rightsized for urban households. Aww, cute.

Dog Mountain Farm tempts me with its offers of flowers, honey, jams, goat cheese, starter plants, and an egg share. Mmmm…. fresh eggs. And they have a spring, summer, and winter season. Keep watching them: they JUST paired up with Thundering Hooves over in Walla Walla, so they can offer meat pretty soon! You can pick up at the farm, or they seem to be able to deliver.

Jubilee Farm are similarly evil: in addition to fruits and vegetables, they are prone to throwing in a loaf of bread(!!!!) and eggs (probably for a little extra charge). And they offer bananas! (Bananas happen to be one of my staple fruits. If I forget about them and they go black, I can still use them in banana bread.) Jubilee has several different seasonal CSAs — right now they are just about to start their Late Spring season — hurry! Best of all, they have some six-week commitment seasons, which is one of the shortest ones (other farms will rope you in for 20). They even try and be a little flexible, and if you need to miss a week, you can usually sweet-talk them into letting you go over into the next season. The only trouble is that during the summer, you need to go pick up at the farm (during the other seasons, they have other distribution centers). Remember what I said about farmers having a hard life?

Lastly, I have Full Circle Farm. I know Full Circle Farm isn’t much to look at when you compare it with the others — no egg shares, no little perks, but what it does have is *flexibility* (say it with me). You can sign up for a weekly basket of goodies, or a twice-monthly basket. They’ll let you skip a week if you need to, and just tack one on at the end. They email you at the end of the week to let you know what’s coming to your door, and then let you go online to make substitutions! When I saw that, I almost died and went to heaven RIGHT THEN.

So in the aftermath of yet another Earth Day, make a pledge to support your local farmer, and buy a share in a farm today.

Farm share not for you? King County and LocalHarvest will also give you a line on your nearest farmers market.

Then King County goes one better with its Puget Sound Area Farm and Crop Finder. Need to find a place to pick strawberries in June? They can direct you right here.

image:
goldwellusa.com

For those looking to freshen up their look for Spring

fired:
from stockroom to boardroom, Alex folds [y!]

On week fourteen of a televised “job interview” with Donald Trump, “book smart” Seattleite Alex [y!] finally got the axe on tonight’s episode of the Apprentice. Apparently Trump made a last minute decision that no amount of flying under the radar and narrowly avoiding being fired could make up for losing track his win-loss record. When Alex forgot that he’d lost twice as project manager, Tana’s decision not to market to art collectors in favor of a trip to Staten Island (“hella far” according to Alex) to pick up Bedazzler beads just melted away.

On his exit cab ride, Alex appeared to be freed by the firing. He claimed to be “leaving with 10 business ideas” and said that he couldn’t wait “to go home and start a new life.” Keep an eye out for ridiculous office filing system, designer T-shirt, or promotional graffiti shops to open around town any day now.

related:

• Alex’s personal website, AlexThomason.com, just in case you want to send your condolences directly.
• Official Apprentice 3 site [nbc]

Once again, a roundup of what’s going on in the weeklies. Happily enough, this week’s issues have different themes and different news stories, making this week’s rundown of the highlights a little less tedious.

the Stranger	Seattle Weekly
major themes (news)
the Stranger is in full “Anti-Discrimination Bill Failure Fallout” mode [#, #]. With four stories on the topic , they are still riding the high of being cited by the New York Times. It sort of makes one wish that someone had set off the alarm bells before the bill failed.The most interesting is the conspiracy theory suggesting that the fake democrat whose nay caused the vote to fail isn’t even a a legitimate member of the state senate [#]. Also meta-interesting is the paper’s decision to bring in a liberal ‘blogger (short for Web Logger) to write a column to suggest an appropriate liberal response to Microsoft [#]. Although the Sharansky column goes unread every week, the impulse to add a conservative to the paper’s pages for “balance” is understandable. That the editors felt that the liberal perspective needed additional representation is entertaining. Also: people in a neighborhood are unhappy about something, 96.5 goes from alternative classic to canned pop.	The Seattle Weekly focus is also on Olympia, but in a different way. Skepticism about Democrats and taxes [#] and yet another cleverly titled in-depth feature [#] about the neverending 2004 election dominate the news section. For those who have stopped paying attention, it’s a decent summary of why and how things got so messy. However, there are some weird and surprisingly angry sentences. In the midst of passages on technical difficulties, Rick Anderson lashes out about the quality of the candidates (e.g. “others … assigned votes to … unannounced candidates — perhaps, understandably, because they were sometimes faced with choosing the lesser liar on the ballot.”) In 5 pages, no one investigates the reason that  counters are required to hold the questionable ballots up to the light to determine voter intent. With the recent trend toward recounts, one might imagine that a market for a less strain-inducing alternative might exist.
solipsism watch
A third week about Jonathan Safran Foer and the reading sponsored by the Stranger. While Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close may be the most heartbreaking and beautiful important novel of the year and smart, funny, charming Foer is  deserving of the attention, another article celebrating the event borders on (self-aware) overkill and is a really strange read [#].	No stranger to self-promotion (or special! pullout sections!), the Seattle Weekly devotes a 35-page section to this weekend’s Seattle Weekly Music Awards Showcase [#]. Why does it seem that this event — featuring 50 bands on one night for one price — would seem a lot more exciting if it wasn’t happening in Pioneer Square?
arts/culture
This week’s winner is Sean Nelson who has two compelling reviews: one for the new Todd Solondz film,  Palindromes [#], and another of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation [#] (a preview of her free appearance tomorrow at Elliott Bay). Also: Erica C. Barnett’s news coverage of the Stolen Art Show is completely fascinating [#].	An intriguing story about NSF, a retro-futuristic art collective’s exhibit [#] at the Frye, part of its apparent shift from conservatism in its collections. With sentences like “Much of Irwin’s art is about turning this kitsch [e.g. huge images of antlered deer] back against the state” Andrew Eagleson’s review is convincing evidence that it might be time to check out the museum.
obvious news with occasionally surprising angles
Eli Sanders has two feature pages about the difficulty of biking in Seattle [#] in which we learn that the Fremont bridge is the most heavily traveled bridge by bicyclists in the state and in which the debate over access to bike lanes is framed in the context of a civil rights movement. Suddenly the Critical Mass rides make much more sense.	In a story about how many Americans don’t like to order wines that are hard to pronounce, Roger Bowney uses the “sips” column [#] to detail the history of Gewürztraminer’s crazy name and advocates for a shorter, more Australian, easier on the lounge name for this undemanding wine.
overlapping picks?
Both papers agree: you should be at the Purple Rain Sing-Along (Egyptian / Saturday /  Midnight)

Sick of Subways and chain sandwich shops and delis? Well I’ve got one Hell of a spot for you! One you’ll never get tired of; always find something new and exciting to try. Best of all the food is dirt cheap for very nice size portions. Let’s be honest, what often stops us from trying something new? The idea we may not like it and have wasted time, money and effort. Here

image:
internationaldistrict.org

I love all Seattle Center activities for five simple reasons

basking in the afterglow

Hundreds of dance fans converged upon Westlake Center this evening to witness the ultimate confrontation between Fankick! and Streetbeat. Brought together by the power of the Stranger, the two duos went head to head in a multi-stage competition. With so many spectators that it was often difficult to see the performers or hear the music the event was an astonishingly popular. Neither team had a shortage of adoring fans, whose cheers were used to determine the champion.

Ultimately the male team had more (or louder) fans, crowning Streetbeat with the title. The boys are now basking in the glow of Seattle’s dance heroes, but they’d better watch out: even Breakin’ had an Electric Boogaloo . . .

(more pictures behind the cut)
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image:
internationaldistrict.org

Many exciting things are happening in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District neighborhood. There’s a fresh wind of developments and bustling energy around the area that’s dynamically revitalizing the district. Yesterday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s front cover story featured the article, “Old Chinatown attracts new money: Developer, museum step in to renovate four historic buildings.” Link:http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/221639_chinatown26.html

There are heaps of activities to do in the International District (or “The I.D.” as what the community in the neighborhood fondly calls the area). Some suggestions are the following: [universally, we all love food, right?] eat an assortment of delectable dimsum (food-wise dimsum means “snack”— though the word literally means “touch the heart”) at countless appetizing Chinese restaurants or dine at numerous delicious Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Korean, Filipino, and Japanese restaurants in the District; get your boba tea-on at oodles of bubble tea joints in every block; sip some soothing afternoon tea at the beautifully-restored peaceful surroundings of the Panama Hotel Tea & Coffee House; shop and support the cozy mom & pop grocery markets or frequent Uwajimaya— an Asian megastore of culinary goodness with an extensive international food court; walk down to the connecting blocks heading to Little Saigon (around 12th and Jackson)— there are tons of small markets and great restaurants in the area; take a morning or afternoon stroll around Hing Hay Park or the International District Children’s Park; play some hoops or volleyball, or take a relaxing yoga class at the International District/Chinatown Community Center— a City of Seattle Parks & Recreation Center; have fun and sing karaoke belting it out at the Bush Garden’s karaoke bar; stop by various dedicated and hard-working community organizations and social service nonprofits serving the Asian Pacific Americans in our city/state; and be sure to take a tour and view the compelling special and permanent exhibitions at the Wing Luke Asian Museum— the only pan-Asian Pacific American museum in the country dedicated to engaging the public in exploring issues related to the culture, art and history of Asian Pacific Americans; and also visit the Carlos Bulosan Memorial Exhibit at the Eastern Hotel— a memorial dedicated to the labor movements and the Filipino American history in the Northwest.

Seattle’s historic Chinatown/International District is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, rich with history and culture. For many years, the Chinatown/International District has served as the cultural hub for Asian Pacific Americans in the region. [Map and directions]

I proudly work in the International District and the neighborhood is a great place to be. The progressive close-knit and warm neighborly environs of the District is a wonderful community to be a part of.

For more on dining, shopping, and community services at the International District, visit http://internationaldistrict.org/community.asp. For further information about the history and cultural diversity of the International District, visit http://internationaldistrict.org/.

Visit the International District often and welcome to the neigborhood!

real life inspiration? [bbc]

[for other recaps, see seattle.metblogs.com/archives/media/greys_anatomy]

Perhaps it’s time to break down and get a Tivo. Several technical difficulties stood in the
way of this grey’s anatomy recap report, but after much perseverance, it was possible to secure a copy of the episode just
to make sure that everyone knows what happened in the fictional halls of
Seattle Grace Hospital this week.

Dedication to recapping was appropriate given this week’s theme: responsibility (and how
much it sucks). The episode kicked off with a monologue sure to inspire confidence in
anyone considering surgery. Basically, Seattle Grey whines through her morning routine
about how being an adult, despite the great shoes and hot sex, is much less fun than being
a kid and thinking about cookies and bikes. Meredith’s life is especially sucky because
she has to deal with taking over her Alzheimer Mom’s estate and has to hold on to people’s
hearts during surgery. Also, adulthood sucks because you have to pay rent (unless you live
in Dr. Mom’s fancy house and collect rent from your friends).

After the jump, the rundown on the all of the swirling responsibility-filled subplots!
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In a world filled with a multitude of Chinese restaurants just where are you going to go to satisfy those late night cravings? Answer? Honey Court Seafood Restaurant! Located in Seattle’s international District this place was alive and hopping when I stopped in at 2:00 AM last night for some good hot food! Having just arrived here from DC I’d never heard of it before. My friend had raved about the place and I was able to see his raves were more than well justified. We began the meal with honey-glazed prawns that were so incredible I was ready to hold the chef at gunpoint to get the recipe for the sauce!

I was told the restaurant has been around for quite awhile and has quite the following of loyal patrons. The late night element makes for an even more attainable level of high numbers as well. During the week they are open from 10:00 AM until 2:30 AM and on the weekends remain open until 3:00 AM. The lack of artwork on the muted orange walls is of no concern for you can’t take your eyes off the plate of what you’re ingesting or of the festive shirts the attentive, speedy servers wear.

There’s something about late nights out that often reminds one of the nitty gritty, greasy food or drunk, pissed off people. In the midst of all that it was wonderful to come across a warm, fun place to get some incredible, moderately priced food, with quick speedy service with a smile! This place ranks up at the top of my list of new favorite restaurants to go to here in Seattle! A definite must have!!