Wonton wrappers, wonton wrappers, what shall I do with the rest of you?  I am quite certain I’m not alone in this predicament; those packets the size of my pinkie seem to yield a bottomless supply of paper-thin panes and a girl can only eat so many wonton crisps with her Ahi Poke.  As is regularly the case with my culinary creations, I decided to adopt a fused approach.  Wontons are from China, so let’s go with Italian pastry cream infused with Cardamom- primarily an Indian spice (I realize this is debatable).  Throw in some chocolate from Belize and the Dominican Republic packaged by a UK company and you’ve got your next United Nations Convention dessert settled.  Top it all off with Mexican dulce de leche made from goat’s milk called cajeta and garnish the plate with kiwi berries grown in Oregon (of all the places to miniaturize a kiwi!) and you’ve got a dessert that can take you around the world for a lot less than the cost of the plane ticket. 

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The title is erroneous right off the bat, but Clippertrip just doesn’t have the same ring to it as roadtrip.  The Clipper is the nautical vessel one takes from Seattle to Victoria. It is essentially a high-speed shrunken version of a ferry, though it feels eerily like an airplane inside.  In any case, the whole fam hopped the Clipper for the two hour jaunt up to Victoria for the weekend as I had a half marathon to run on Sunday.  We spent Saturday tooling around Victoria- this is a city I could really get into.  I pictured it as a quaint little burg lost in time. It actually was very cosmopolitan and wore the inevitable rustic charm that comes with being a seaside tourist town known for High Tea with understated cool.  Off the main drag, the shops were edgy and on-trend and the locals could not have been nicer. 

There were no dearth of dining options; however it being marathon weekend I knew I wanted to steer clear of the herds clamoring for plates of linguine in all the Italian joints, so I chose French.  This may not have been the wisest meal to consume the night before running 13.1 miles, but I was very happy with my time so I’ll leave carbo-loading to those who wish to indulge in bland potatoes and limp noodles.  We selected Matisse based on its reputation as one of the finer French restaurants in town, and we came away quite pleased. 

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We were waiting for our burritos to come up at the neighborhood taco truck when we noticed a curious business operating out of a van parked next door.   It turns out that every Saturday some local Vietnamese farmers load their chicken coop into the back of their van and park on the corner of Martin Luther King Wy and Othello St. They vend live hens, cocks and turkeys, leaving the neck-wringing up to their grateful patrons.  Jonas wanted to take a peek just so he could show Bentley the furry fowl, but I had other designs.  I started eating meat six years ago after a 20 year hiatus.  I decided when I was a small child and my father slaughtered my beloved pet cow, Slobber that meat just wasn’t for me.  In my early 20’s I started relaxing my rules, first with the introduction of fish, then chicken, beef, and just in the last couple of months, pork- the final frontier.  I still have huge reverence for animals and I really appreciate meat when I eat it, but I’ve always been a “take the bull by the horns” kind of girl, and I feel that buying a nicely-packaged disembodied chicken breast at Whole Foods is sort of a copout.  If I’m going to fully embrace this whole meat thing, I should be comfortable going from farm to table, right? 

To make a long story short, we drove home with a live chicken pecking her way around my trunk.  I posted a quick video on facebook of the chicken purchase and asked my friends if anyone had any experience with the inevitable next step.  I was shocked at the squeamishness of many folks who I know to eat meat on a daily basis.  It really reaffirmed what I was doing- if the animal is going to give their life for my pleasure, the least I can do is be able to stomach the process, and if I cannot, perhaps I don’t belong amongst the carnivorous denizens after all. 

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