Placebo

I fought a pitched battle with meal moths for a couple of months last spring. Every once in a while if my kitchen is too messy for too long a few will return but I can generally get them under control pretty quickly. Moved a lot of products to glass jars. Apparently bay leaf keeps them away as well. Irritating little bastards though.

I suddenly feel an intense need to go back to India (rather than just my usual gnawing desire).

Mmm.. yes, the Market Grill. I love their salmon sandwich and will try the halibut next time. Their cole slaw and spicy fish stew are really excellent as well (and they're damned swell folks too).

I think we do most of our aging around 45 degrees, though I'm not sure what the actual state laws are off-hand. Malarky - I thought that was you popping by the other day. GLad you liked the butter. I love the stuff - now I just wish I had time to actually cook.

I will preface this by saying that I'm not particularly a sandwich connoisseur and I'm sure there will be those who disagree but here are my rpefered sammich places. The Deluxe makes pretty decent burgers, a tasty ground lamb sandwich and a portabello burger type sandwich with blue cheese that is quite good. Il Forno, the tiny pizza shop in the wedge on Olive just above I-5) makes (or at least made the last time I was there a couple of years ago) a simple tasty artichoke heart salad sandwich. On the other hand I have yet to see a deli sandwich that didn't dissappoint horribly no matter how low I set my standards. I finally tried Roxy's recently and oy, so weak. Granted, I used to spend a lot of time near Katz's before I moved here so the bar has been set pretty high for me as regards pastrami.

I've greatly enjoyed Shiner when in Texas and look forward to cracking open my first Shiner Bock in years right here at home.

I was in the midst of a fairly involved reply to this when my egullet window vanished. Sorry for the delayed response to this thread - work, school and an upcoming photo show (next door to beecher's) have limited my internet time quite a bit. It's true, the store gets pretty crowded pretty easily and while the furniture arraqngement is probably not optimal for crowd flow the fact is that it's a long narow space and the issue will be one we'll likely be dealing with for a long while. That said I'll pass along to the folks above that it's a big enough issue that it puts people off from coming in or sticking around long enough to try and buy stuff. The products we make ourselves at this point are as follows: - Jack: Very flavorful and rich - much moreso than what I'd been used to as jack before. We offer it plain and in chipotle, asian black bean and jamaican jerk flavors (I'm particularly fond of the later). - Havarti: We're still refining our making process for this so we've only been releasing small batches of it but we're expecting to make a lot more very soon. For now it's only available plain but there'll be some flavored versions coming down the pike as well. - Fromage Blanc: We make this fresh as needed. It comes in plain, dill & chive, tapenade, pesto and honey flavors at the moment. More will very likely be added over time. - Fresh Cultured Butter: Again, we make this as needed in the store. It's quite flavorful and carmelizes beautifully. I've stopped using supermarket butter since we've started making it. We also have a cheddar-style cheese that we're aging out for a year before selling so look for it around Thanksgiving. The cafe section has fresh curds (plain and flavored), mac and cheese, scallopped potatoes, sandwiches and soups. Personally I'm particularly fond of the roast beef sandwich and the tomato soup. We'll be making fresh ice cream as well starting probably in a couple of months. We've also got a nice collection of, I think, about two and a half to three dozen artisan cheeses, mostly from the PNW though there's some from Northern California and a few from Colorado. I believe we'll be expanding our cheese case selection a bit more over the next few weeks. My personal favorites are as follows in no particular order: - Bingham Hill Sheepish Blue: A sheep milk blue cheese from Colorado - it's super smooth and tasty. I only just tried it for the first time last week and I just love it. - Pedroza Black Butte Reserve: A raw-milk gouda style cheese from Northern California I think. Very rich. - Fiscalini Bandage Cheddar: Another Northern California cheese - I like both the 18 and 30 month old versions. - Wynoochie River Blue: I think we're actually out of this right now but it's very very good and hopefully we'll have more in soon. I think that everything in the store is free of additives and preservatives (no nitrites in the meat for the sandwiches even) and our house crackers are free of hydrogenated oils as well. As for staff knowledge of the cheese case, the person who waslacking knowledge was probably just starting her cheese case training (thus the presence of the much more knowledgable woman working with her). For the sake of full disclosure, bear in mind that I work there as the apprentice cheese maker (you'll see me working over vats of goodness wed-sunday on the production floor) and the opinions above are mine and not reflective of store policy and suchlike. The store is still very new so expect continued evolution over the next year as we solidify ourselves and then start to rpepare for the spring and summer market rush.

Is this for home use or for a commercial facility? What sorts of cheeses will you be storing? For home use a small refrigerator set to an appropriate temperature (probably around 50 degrees though it'll depend on the cheese(s) to be stored) with a way to control the humidity (pan of water in the bottom or something more complex). This is something I've been podering as well. Additionally, depending on what sorts of cheese you're storing and how they will be wrapped you may need to take precautions against molds and bacteria from the rinds contaminating other cheeses. After all, while blue mold is great in Roqueforte you don't want it spreading to your fine aged gouda or the like.

Whenever folks come out here from NY (or whenever I visit NY) much Katz's pastrami is schlepped back, along with bagels and Black Chocolate Stout if it's in season. If only I could find a way to properly get a Grimaldi's pizza back here and still have it taste fresh from the oven...

Meskel used to be my favorite and I'm glad to hear that they'll be re-opening. Lailibella is perhaps even better than Meskel and is up on Cherry and MLK. The place on 12th somewhere between Madison and Marion is pretty weak. There's a few other places ariound that neighborhood that I still need to try out.

I'm not actually sure if we carry citric acid or not. I'll try and remember to check tomorrow (someone else asked me on Saturday for the same reason). We do have the New England Cheese Company's 30 minute mozzarella kit and I'll probably try it at home sometime to familiarize myself with it. That said, I'd love to join in a mozarella-making gathering. The cheddar you made sounds more like a colby. At work today we made a little havarti and the better part of 900 pounds of jack (made essentially like our flagship cheddar-style except that we stirred and then washed the curds instead of cheddaring and milling them). Both should be ready to eat in about a month and a half. I suspect that I'll be doing a lot more home cheese-making projects starting in January when I have a bit more time on my hands.

Salmon fillet seared in fresh butter (churned this afternoon) with a few sprigs of thyme and then steamed by the addition of several generous slugs of Lillet (and the lid being put on). The butter-Lillet reduction is amazing - I will never again cook with inferior vermouth. Dear lord.

Oooh - that sounds excellent. I'd love to hear more about how you made the various cheeses. Did you give the nozzarella a good solid stretching with lots of hot water dunkings between pulls? MMm.. cultured buttwr - I think we're gonna fire up the dasher at work in the next couple of weeks. Did you cheddar the dheddar or was it mainly aiming at generally being the same sort of flavor and texture as a young cheddar? I'll send her some mail about our supplies. We have a lot of the stuff from the New England CHeesemaking catalog (no presses though) though we won't have cultures until probably the end of next week. Sounds like a great class - I should check it out as I'm curious to see what other cheese-o-philes are doing in the area.

Excellent - what sorts of cheeses did you make? My original inspiration for cheese-making was a mention of a workshop in Northgate (maybe at the community center or community college) last spring. We'll eventually be offering home cheesemaking classes at Beecher's, once we get a bit more settled in (and have a bunch of the New England Cheese Company gear in stock in the store). I've finally found a source of good goat milk and will be doing more home chevre experiments over the winter. Now if I could just find sheep's milk...

Yes, POM is indeed tasty. Mixes well with vodka and I've used it with great results in a reduction sauce for seared duck breast and in a vinaigrette dressing for a green salad with fresh chevre, walnuts and port-soaked fig slices. I will need to investigat ehe Knudsen's juice as a bunch of stores around mecarry a wide range of their stuffs.

The hours will be 9-6 or so, initially (I think). THere'll be some adjustments as we see how business flows. The market as a whole seems to me to open way too late and to close way too early. The fact that it's not fully up and runnoing till 10, really, and then is half-closed by 6 seems just plain stupid to me. This is the first job I'll have ever had that will allow me to actually go to the market on non-weekend days. While the open hours are swell for tourists (I guess) they are pretty useless for people who actually live here. It seems to me that 8-8 would work a *lot* better. People could actually shop after work even if they don't work right there (and those who do, should they have to work even a little late, are unable as well). I mean honestly, how many tourists are going to buy produce or half a fresh salmon? Why not aim at being an area where people can relax after work while waiting for traffic to abate? A place where people who live in Seattle can actually shop for produce and meat and fish even if they have day jobs. It just makes no sense to me. Admittedly, I moved here from essentially a 24 hour city and Seattle's generally early shut-down hours have irked me from the start. I don't know how much of it is market association politics - I've already heard from other shop owners the most ludicrous stories of petty political power-mongering by those folks. Anyway, sorry for the rant - it's been on my mind a lot lately now that I'm spending so much time there. It just seems like such a waste to have such a great resource int he middle of the city and to feel like its crippling itself for reasons I can't begin to even guess at.

Yup - we made cheese for the first time yesterday. It was a bit hectic as we ran into couple of problems with some equipment but there's no way to fully test the process without actually making cheese. It'll get a lot smoother over the next couple of weeks as we get our work flow down and determine how and where to store various supplies to best make things available as we need them. We started with nearly 9000 pounds of milk -- most of it became curds for our flagship cheese (tune in a year or so from now to try it :) plus some curds to be sold in the store (mm.. curds that were still grass 2 days ago) and some fromage blanc that will be ready today. The actual cheese-making was hard hard work but the day just sailed by. My big lessons of the day were to eat a good breakfast and make sure to have a bottle of water on hand to drink from as I think I was able to steal a total of 5 minutes of time to grab a drink from the retail side. The last few days feel like the first honest work I've done in years. This will definitely get me into better shape. Lots of hard work, lifting, washing, etc. I'm finding that I'm in bed before midnight (usually closer to 11) every night, which is strange for me as I tend to be a night owl. It was a little disconcerting, at first, when we cheddarred for the first time this afternoon and I looked up to see the window inside lined with faces. I'm already acclimating to it, though there'll be another period of adjustment on Thurday when we take the paper off the outside windows and people start watching from the street as well. I think this job will do great things for my skin too - lots of milk, steam and salt. I'll post a description of a full run through the cheese-making process once I've done it a few more times and feel like I have a better handle on it. We've had the cheese-maker's father in this week (who ran the Bandon cheese company for, I think, around ten years) to help out - it's been fun workign with this father and son cheese-making team. Makes me with I'd gotten to taste their cheddar before Tillamook took over and moved the manufaturing operation to their factory. The place does look really amazing. If you'd asked me a week ago I'd have told you I wasn't sure we'd be ready in time but the amount of ass-busting that's gone on has been tremendous. The cheese case looks fantastic - there's a whole bunch of goodies that I'm looking forward to trying. I think that at the moment there's a couple dozen artisan cheeses in stock. I'm not sure when we'll start making butter - the dasher is already in, though. Ice cream is likely a few weeks off yet. Yesterday and today are essentially test openings for people who've been making the whole thing happen. Thursday we pull down the brown paper and open up to the public. [edited to add butter and ice cream info]

My neighborhood tends to be strewn with shopping carts. It's pretty hilly so I guess people just don't like carrying their groceries home. When I was unemployed a couple of years ago I thought about taking my copious spare time and using it for something extraordinarily pointless - namely tagging and tracking the migration patterns of the local shopping cart population. The idea was to go very Marlin Perkins Wild Kingdom with it - tag each cart I find, determine it's store of origin and then note each time I ran into it again (they do seem to have migratory patterns around the neighborhood at times). I thought about videotaping the "capture," tagging and release of a couple carts as well. I wound up getting ajob instead. Perhaps som eother time as the stores around here don't appear to have implemented any hobbling of thweir carts yet (apart from Uwajimaya, the Japanese super store). This is what happens when I have too much free time on my hands.

Slab of raw ahi, sliced, dipped in soy and wasabi paste.

Seared duck breast in a wine and pomegranate reduction served with a balsamic/evoo-dressed mixed green salad with fgresh herbed chevre and port-marinated figs. Drinking a $10 Rhone.

So here's the scoop on the place. It's called Beecher's Handmade Cheeses and is opening in the market in the old Seattle Garden Center space on or around Nov. 20. The guy running the operation is a career cheese-maker. He and his dad owned and ran the Bandon cheese company until Tillamook bought it up and moved production to their main factory. There seems to be a goodly amount of money behind it and they seem to have their priorities in order. We'll be starting with all cow cheeses of mostly popular american styles, (a cheddar, a jack, etc) along with farmer's cheese and spreads. I think the flagship cheese will be a chedder but it'll be another year before the base version of that is even ready. Along with handmade cheeses it looks like we'll also be making butter (mmm... fresh butter) and ice cream. Along with the cheese-production there'll be a retail space selling the cheese as well as sandwiches and other cheese-oriented prepared foods. I'm hoping, once I'm down witht heprocess, to source goat and sheep milk and try making some non-cow cheeses. It sounds like they're prertty open to the idea (hell, it's in their best interests to run with our enthusiasm). As cheese-makers go there's the lead guy and then two of us assistants (or apprentices as I like to think of it). Depending on how the workload ends up being there's the possibility of a 3rd assistant being brought on. I'm incredibly excited. Anyexperience, books or thoughts people have on cheese or ice cream making would be great. Once things get a bit more steeled there I'll see about putting together an eGullet event there. Thanks for all your support.

Just to update, I got a call today from the head cheesemaker and they want me to come in tomorrow so they can make me an offer. So, as of tomorrow I suspect I will be a professional cheesemaker. More info once it's all confirmed.

Seared duck breast with a duck-sage-triple sec deglazing sauce and string beans in padella on the side.

I just had duck breast for dinner mere moments ago. Scored the skin and then pan-seared it as described in earlier posts. Deglazed with triple sec, added duck stock and a couple sage leaves to the pan and reduced to make the sauce. Served with string beans in padella (i.e. blached and then finished ina pan with olive oil, crushed garlic, crushed red pepper, salt and pepper). Deeeelicious. Even better, I still have 2 duck breasts left in the fridge (got 2 ducks the other day, removed the legs for confit which will be made this weekend, the breasts fir eatin and turned the rest into stock).

The Rikki Carol book is great - I've made a chevre from it that was quite delicious and will be trying more recipes over the next month. You might get the goat starter set from her site (www.cheesemaking.com I believe) which has bacterial starter cultures, molds for forming, rennet and instructions for a couple goat cheeses. Actually, with luck in a couple of weeks I will become a professional cheese-maker. We shall see.