Mrs.Jenner

I live near Cremant and some of the pieces I have read about the place say the food is incredible. I am keen to go. I am pregnant so I can't eat certain things at the moment which absolutely drives me insane at times. I have this whole fantasy about when the baby is born I am going to eat my weight in unpasteurized cheeses, barely cooked meat and drink a whole lot of wine. But back to Cremant I looked at their menu http://www.cremantseattle.com/menu.pdf and it looks so seductive and equally cozy.

It is interesting that a lot of the focus is on children in inner-city neighborhoods when things are often just as bad -if not worse in rural areas when it comes to the eating choices children make and the grocery choices available to parents on extremely limited incomes in small towns. I think of my own experience of growing up in a very small town where 90 percent of the kids in school were eligible for free/reduced lunch and most would go for the empty starches and sugars. In fact as I recall the school breakfast served (and I am not making this up) cocoa puffs, applejacks and lucky charms. So the school was instantly failing right away. When I was quite young my Mother had no car and had to do her shopping via the bus and it was incredibly hard taking care of the groceries with a 1 year old and a 5 year old to keep track of. And there were two grocery stores in town and that was it. Essentially she had to make those food stamps last. My Mother was pretty creative when it came to creating original meals but also one gets the urge for things like potato chips. Yeah one should eat well and varied but quite frankly you have to give a little now and then. It is the little things that are the difference between grim survival and living. I recall that for a number of years as a child we couldn't afford to have milk. We could have powdered milk sometimes -but only for our cereal. Often in rural towns people are limited to what is offered and a lot of people have poor diets. I recall in my hometown the rate of obesity, diabetes, and heart attack was fairly high. There is a scene in the book, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" that I have always recalled -where the Mother allows the children to dump their coffee and condensed milk down the drain as their form of luxury. Sure the milk and coffee could have been saved but she let them have something. Often for some people the cookies and cakes are their small luxuries. Unfortunately it becomes their everything.

If that is all that it takes to have a cooking show by bobbing your head and saying, "ooh that is really good." Then I should have my own show. I can do that. I can even tie my shoes. Heck I can even peel a boiled egg. I know that the Food Network is developing a close relationship with Sur La Table (I worked at corporate so I can amuse my friends with the sordid gossip) and quite frankly it isn't helping either one. I think what helps Food Network is when they encourage people to step out of their comfort zone and to say, "of course you can do this."

I have long held the belief that the Food Network could really improve itself immediately if they handed a number of their chefs/hosts a thesaurus or two. You can describe food as "excellent" and "awesome" only so many times. I admit I like to turn on Food Network after I have had a few drinks with friends. I turn down the sound and make up my own commentary.

I think one of the other issues that is kind of difficult to face is that while the kids may be learning this in school -most eating habits are formed at home fairly early on. If their parents don't encourage them to eat in a well-rounded manner it makes it an uphill battle to change the mindset and diet. I know plenty of parents who feed their kids pap because for many it is a quick-fix and they don't have to argue with the kid. They hand out chicken nuggets, white rice and macaroni and cheese and anything else that keeps the children calm. It is an easy route but also a dangerous route in the long run. My Mother inlaw used to cook three different dinners for her sons just to get them eat. The idea of that just boggles the mind. I am curious if Alice Waters plans on working with parents as well. Of course I grew up with a Mother who had an exceedingly strong will and refused to give in to our requests for empty starchy foods. Of course at the time I did not want to eat squid, herring, polenta, green beans or broccoli. But I did. I do have to thank her for it.

I think my Grandmother kind of owns this thread for her stories about eating ketchup on crackers for lunch and dinner because there was nothing for anyone to eat. (this was during the depression) For breakfast they would have a corn mush. The adults went without and had chicory. Now that is a sign of desperation.

Le Pichet is rather appealing and not too loud. It has a rather intimate and cozy setting and I have never had a bad meal there.

Szechuan Noodle Bowl is probably one of my favorite places in the ID just for their scallion pancakes alone. My favorite nights are when the ladies are making dumplings and pancakes at a table near by. There is something so cozy about the experience. A good noodle bowl, some pancakes and dumplings. I used to go there with my two geeky roomates who would spend all of their discussing the "subtle art" of how to hold chopsticks and how if they trained to be assassins they could do a lot of damage.

One summer when I was about 19/20 years old I hung out in a small town in Oregon with a couple of friends who had a slummy apartment. We had absolutely no money and hardly any food. We had flour, yeast, water and some so-so oil and I baked a lot of bread. Once we ran out of that things began to get a little crazed. One day my friend Nick and I managed to scrounge a dollar in change from within the couch and we bought some ramen and we decided to hold out on our other friend so we took to hiding the ramen in the closet of a bedroom and when our friend would go to sleep we would make ramen to eat at 3 am. There was something faintly entertaining about this kind of Anne Frank-style pilfering. Next we returned some bottles for cash and Nick had about 5 dollars in his bank account and bought us some blood oranges. We took them and bicycled all the way to the Willamette River in the middle of a heat-wave (it was about ten miles of hard bicycling) and threw down our bikes, grabbed our small bag of blood oranges and proceeded to tear into them like savages. People sunning by the river looked at us like we were freaks. We might have been but we didn't care. We hadn't really eaten in several days. I turned Nick and said, "we must never speak of this to anyone. ever." We then took our bit of money we acquired from turning some bottles and went to the 24 hour taco shack and bought two large questionable-looking burritos. We stood there in the parking lot -again like savages, just tearing into the damn things. We then came home and our friend asked us, "hey where did you go?" Nick looked at me and then at him and said, "no where." About a week later a friend introduced us to dumpster-diving and we found ourselves eating stale bagels from Noah's bagels and watermelon from the grocery store. Usually this was done at three am. I now know how raccoons feel. This was also about the same period where I found myself drinking grape soda and eating tzakiki sauce at six am while watching the local news. Slightly shameful but hilariously exciting.

I sometimes feel like one of the few natives left in the city. (everyone else left when it became too expensive) I have a couple of books written by a local author that were published in the forties and she talks about food in the book and she writes quite a bit about the seafood that was/is available. She even shared some recipes for clam fritters and clam chowder. Those are two things I grew up eating quite a bit of -that and fish and chips. It is really all about the clam-digging and harvesting oysters and mussels. I was even able to change my Mother inlaw's mind about raw oysters. She is English and the last time she touched them was about 1974 in a restaurant somewhere near Canterbury and she thought they were awful. But then English cuisine wasn't exactly at its acme so it is understandable that she might be a bit wary of such things.