I have been staring at the images of this dish for three days attempting to come up with a cohesive explanation for why my mind works the way it does. This is how it happened- I hope you enjoy your stroll through the moldy catacombs of my mental avenues.  Come, let’s take a journey through the process of recipe development. Read more

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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I had the opportunity to dine at Artisanal Brasserie in the newly-minted Bravern in downtown Bellevue last night.  During this first two weeks, which they’re considering a “soft-opening,” there are obviously some kinks to work out.  Because it is early days still, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to judge based on infinitesimal details, but rather, to evaluate whether the concept and its execution will become a ray of hope in Bellevue’s embarrassingly franchised dining scene.  While the Bravern itself is a source of hot contention among naysayers who feel this economic climate was not the appropriate time to introduce such opulence to Bellevue, projecting that negativity to Artisanal by association is thoroughly misguided.   Besides, West Bellevue is a freakish anomaly of the economic crisis in terms of its relative resilience to strife, so I would urge the Negative Nancy’s of the 425 (and the 206 as it were) to give the place a chance before stooping to blog-bashing and Yelp-yapping that just brings us all down in the long run.  Read more