I have been remiss in posting here on Salty Seattle because I’ve been giving birth to a book. The Nudie Foodies book, that is. If you haven’t heard about it yet, please pop over to the Nudie Foodies website- the book will be available for purchase there on Monday, June 20^th and we are looking for a few new nudies to take part in a fun contest involving doing good while nude with food, dudes.  Because of all the last minute work that birthing a book entails, I haven’t spent as much time in the kitchen as I would like, but I have been farming snails.

The first time I ate snails I was a vegetarian. I reasoned that they weren’t really animals because they lacked fur, legs and arms. It was in a restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho called the Sandpiper. This was the place to be if you wanted to shed your BUM Equipment sweatpants (predecessors of the Juicy Couture-style butt-hugging trend) and put on a nice polyester-taffeta blend dress from the Deb Shop in the Magic Valley Mall. Many a prom, engagement and birthday was celebrated at the Sandpiper, which had the basic layout of a Sizzler but lacked the make-your-own-sundae bar. Instead it had a DIY salad bar with fancy dressings like Roquesomething and fancy toppings like alfalfa sprouts that came from an alfalfa sprout farm where I worked my very first job as a sprout seeder and packager when I was 13. 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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