Cookies for President!

I'm not one to do cartwheels for cookies. For that matter, I probably won't pirouette for pies or tremble for tarts. I will, however, use a lot of annoying alliteration to tell you that I usually prefer the savory over the sweet.

But. BUT. Things have changed. A single cookie recipe has altered my normal opinion of dessert. Day after day, night after night, I walk Zombie-like into the kitchen to eat just one – okay, maybe two... Alright! I'll have three! cookies until every last crumb is gone. The extra dough doesn't last long in the freezer.

As for the recipe, it's origin is a bit embarrassing to me. You may have heard it before. It's the Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. Ring a bell? The recipe comes equipped with a cheeseball story – that may or may not be true – and is at least 20 years old.

The tale goes that some lady asked the department store for the cookie recipe, and was falsely charged $250 – instead of the $2.50 she expected. But boy did she get her revenge! She decided to distribute the recipe to everyone she knows, and asked all of them to keep passing it along. Boy is she fierce!

Dumb.

But the fact of the matter is – the cookies are amazing. They are chewy and nutty and perfect – and you must make them.

Addictive Chocolate Chip & Pecan Cookies

Makes about 35 cookies

2 1/2 cups oatmeal – blended into a powder
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
12 ounces chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups pecans (or whatever nut you like)

*I added a big handful of shredded coconut to my batter and it was delicious!

-Cream the butter and both sugars in a big bowl
-Add eggs and vanilla
-Mix in flour, blended oatmeal, salt, baking powder and baking soda
-When it's all blended together, add chocolate chips, nuts, and coconut if you know what's good for you
-Roll into flattened balls, and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet.
-Bake for 9 minutes at 375 degrees.
Roll leftover dough into logs, wrap in plastic or parchment paper – and store in the fridge or freezer. You can cut off thick slices whenever you crave a cookie, and bake for 10 minutes.

The cookies will be very soft, and appear a bit raw after baked. Don't panic! Don't bake them longer! They will firm up when they cool.

Sushi & Jewshi

It's not polite to brag. I know this because my mother taught me manners. But I haven't lived with my mother for 11 years - so fuck it! I'm gonna brag!

Look at my beautiful homemade sushi!

I have no witty clever things to say about the sushi that I rolled last week. I'm not particularly in the mood to give you instructions on how to roll your own. I just really wanna show off the photos.

And I wanna say that I wanna make sweet love to Uwajimaya. This amazing and massive Asian grocery store, with its rows upon rows of tofu and noodles and frozen dim sum and what-the-heck-do-I-do-with-this produce is the perfect spot to gather sushi making materials. I was literally bouncing and skipping through the fish department. Fish excites me!

You can buy schools of sashimi-grade fish by the slab or, far more affordable, just a few savory slices. You can buy a small fan of seared tuna, a chunk of locally smoked salmon, a single octopus tentacle, and a healthy hunk of unagi.

And if you celebrate Hanukkah, you can roll up a batch of Jewshi. Sushi for Jewish people! Get it? Get it? Skip the bagel and create a smoked salmon, cream cheese and green onion roll. The adventurous should utilize the ultimate Jewshi roll filling: gefilte fish! Served sans wasabi, but with a squirt of horseradish of course.

Garbage Gourmet

They say one man's trash is another man's treasure. But I'm pretty sure the bloke who wrote that line wasn't imagining me shoving dumpster dived baguettes into a garbage bag at 11pm on a Tuesday night.

That's right, dumpster diving! Something I've been dying to do for years!

I happen to think there are several appealing aspects to rummaging around a big metal dumpster looking for a bit to eat. First off, the adventure! It's like searching for buried treasure. Plus you have to go when its dark and you can wear all black and a ski mask if you really want to get all dramatical. Second, I despise waste. I reuse tin foil and scrape the mold off my cheese. I don't need to remind you how much perfectly edible food Americans absentmindedly fling into the bin each day. And third, this food is free! With our collapsing economy, dumpster diving is as sensible as dropping J Crew for JC Penney.

I know what some of you are doing right now. You are making a snooty little wrinkled up sourpuss face. You are throwing up juuuust a little bit in your mouth. You are about to call and tell me you “have come down with SARS and can't possible make it to my dinner party Saturday night.”

But you should stop your sneering! Diving for dinner doesn't have to be disgusting. I didn't go snorkeling through your grandma's trash can, looking for a half-eaten Entenmann's cake. No sir. Hours after America voted to elect its first black president, three garbage giddy gals and I pulled up to one of Seattle's best bakeries. A bakery that charges about $5 for a loaf of it's organic artisan bread. A bakery whose name I am hesitant to mention, because I don't want it to start locking it's dumpsters!

And what delightful dumpsters they are! Lift a heavy metal lid, hop in the bin, and you will be knee deep in delicious bread; still securely tucked into paper sheathes. We plucked up round, crusty loaves of rosemary bread sprinkled with sea salt and squishy-soft sweet potato bread laced with pecans. There were long swords of sourdough and bags of dainty dinner rolls. Three garbage-free dumpsters. Piled with bread. We hardly made a dent.

I was scrounging for pleasure, but there was also some do-gooder diving on that historic night. Two of my freegan friends were gathering grub for Food Not Bombs, a grass roots organization that feeds the homeless with food that would otherwise go to waste.

The next morning at home, as I munched on slices of fragrant rosemary toast with butter, I decided this was only the beginning. Adventure! Less waste! Free food! I will scour every last dumpster in Seattle until I find the makings of a complete meal! And if I have to dramatically don an all-black outfit and a ski mask to do so. Well...so be it!

Guinea Pig: Peru's Other White Meat

Americans aren't too hip on eating their pets. They cower at cat consumption and look down on dog dining. If it's fluffy, furry or fetches, chances are they aren't interested. In fact, they are downright appalled!

I say they because I have never included myself in this camp. Yes, I love cats to an embarrassingly mockable degree, but given the chance, I might take a taste of a Tabby. No offense to adorable animals everywhere, but when it comes to cuisine, I wanna try everything! Which is why I couldn't wait to eat in Peru. A country that makes no excuse for its love of the guinea gig. Guinea pig on a plate, that is.

Called cuy, the rascally rodent usually only shows up on more expensive restaurant menus, and is considered a sort of delicacy.

It was Day Two of our five week trek around Peru, and we could wait no longer. Even my boyfriend, who as a child adored his guinea pig named Whinnie, was eager to try the pet on a plate. We grandly ordered up a cuy, along with an alpaca steak, in the charming city of Arequipa.

But even I was not prepared for the crisp, brown, tooth-to-tail animal set before me. He came with teeth, and claws, and hair!

His little guinea pig arm rested stiffly in my mashed potatoes.

He was also no picnic to eat. Fork and knife were abandoned for fingers, and once I managed to peel off his difficult layer of thick, rubbery skin, there was not much meat underneath. What meat there was tasted strong, gamy and...well, rodenty. Much more of a novelty than a delicacy, if you ask me.

A delicacy you can look in the eye, and even scratch behind the ears, if you stroll through some of Peru's amazing open air markets. At a street market in Calca, a quaint community in the Sacred Valley, guinea pigs squeak their days away in cages, oblivious to their dinner plate fate.

And oblivious to the luxurious lives their guinea pig pals are living up north.

America! Where the pets are just for petting.

MSG for You and Me!

There are so many ideas and inventions that I wish I woulda come up with. The film House of Yes starring Parker Posey (and Tori Spelling, but could ya just hush up about it)?

"Dammit!" I cursed, shaking my fist as the credits rolled up the screen, "Why didn't I pen that script?"

Bacon? Already invented! Hoods on sweatshirts? Done. Mail order brides? Trazillion dollar industry. All the good ideas have already been claimed, and I find it absolutely maddening!

But the true, gut wrenching, "Why didn't I think of that?" pain came when I stumbled across another Seattle food blog: MSG150. The brave knights behind this blog have embarked on a truly delicious quest: they have 365 days to eat at every single restaurant in the International District. They will tackle tofu, joust with ginger, mingle with MSG and their veins will run salty with soy sauce. It's a dream come true for Asian food fanatics.

Normally I would pout and cry, then viciously egg the homes of the inventors who have stolen the ideas that I might have eventually come up with. But in this situation I took the high road. I decided to use this "Why didn't I come up with that?" blog to navigate my way through the ID.

You see, I have scraped my chopsticks across many a Seattle plate, but have yet to find my favorite Chinese restaurant.

Growing up, my family exhibited a fierce and unflappable loyalty for the First Hunan Chef Wong. Tucked into a shopping center, in a tree-lined Bay Area suburb, we spent decades gorging ourselves on double mushroom chicken with bok choy and slippery chow mein noodles; always brought to the table by the perpetually peppy, suspiciously straight, wife-owner who sported a butchy bowl cut and called my dad "Boss."

Now, every time I open a Chinese menu, I think "This will be the one! My new favorite place!" But alas, the soup will be bland, the chow fun too greasy, and the garlicky Chinese greens nonexistent.

But thanks to the good folks at MSG150, I was lead to Shanghai Garden. It was a weeknight, but every table was crowded, and a hungry mob was not-so-patiently waiting in the small lobby. As the waitress lead us to our table, I noticed that nearly everyone was eating the same dish: green fettuccine-shaped noodles that turned out to be a house specialty: barleygreen hand shaved noodles.

My Partner-In-Asian-Food-Crime (PIAFC? There has got to be a better acronym!) and I share a passionate love for cushy hand shaved noodles, so we eagerly ordered this dish, along with a surprisingly pricey veggie dish that I have been craving ever since. Sixteen bucks will get you a platter of stunningly green and toothsome pea vines, a scattering of hearty shitake mushrooms and thin, silky sheets of bean curd. It's a celebration of textures, and my very first encounter with a bean curd sheet.

A thick soup packed with seafood, chicken, veggies and more shitakes introduced my PIAFC and I to yet another new item: additively squishy, disc shaped, rice noodles that look exactly like water chestnuts.



As for those hand shaved noodles, I've had better (Seven Stars Pepper Szechuan's are dreamy) . These were green, but they lacked the requisite cushy and comforting qualities that keep me up at night.

But, the good news is, Shanghai Garden has renewed my faith in Seattle Chinese food. AND, even more exciting, my giant brain has finally thought up an amazing idea of its own:

Those adorably American Lil Smokies that I am too snobby to buy, but will eat the shit out of if you serve them in a crock pot at your House Warming party? Hows about I invent some Lil Smokies BUNS? Teeny tiny little buns, in which to tuck your teeny tiny wieners! I'm tellin' you. This time next year? Lil Smokies buns will be the next bacon.

Cone Head

Did you know it takes an average of 50 licks to demolish a single scoop of ice cream?

Oh, um...you did? Dammit! How did you know that?!

Well, Mr Know-It-All McSmartypants, I bet you don't know THIS: despite the rain and the gloom and the gray, Seattle is one of the top three ice cream consuming cities in the country! We boldly walk the rocky road, not letting a measly drizzle or drip stand in the way of our favorite arctic addiction.

I first learned this little nugget of knowledge from Molly Moon, founder, owner and namesake of Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream Shop in Wallingford. A hip, young, ice cream loving gal fresh off a career in politics, Ms Moon noticed that our fair city was only home to a single locally run, homemade ice cream shop. So she put on her cookies-n-cream cape and came to the rescue, just in time for the summer ice cream rush.

Cocaine snorting disco ballers waited in line at Studio 54, and Seattleites are waiting in line for ice cream. The words "local" "homemade" and "organic" harmonize with flavors like Thai Iced Tea and Honey Lavender, creating an irresistible siren song that has them lining up out the door, and sometimes around the corner.

After several cones on several occasions, I decided it was time to share the love with my friend and fellow foodie blogger at www.franticfoodie.blogspot.com. She melted over a scout mint scoop, packed with pieces of Thin Mint girl Scout cookies. I stuck with my standard: strawberry balsamic. I am by no means a creature of habit, but after tasting every single last flavor at MM's, I declare this sweet and savory combination to be my absolute favorite.

But there might be a new favorite in town! In just a few sweet hours, I will be in White Center to sample ice cream and Popsicles at an even newer establishment. If the words horchata + ice cream make you gasp with delight...you may wanna stay tuned.

Va Va Va Vegan!

Hi. My name is Rachel, and I'm addicted to the Internet.

It's true! But I had no idea how much I depended on the World Wide Webby Poo (I figure an adorable nickname is suiting since we do spend so much time together) until I found myself computerless. Hence the lack of new blogs. Hence you crying on your pillow every night.

But all that time previously spent Googling Celine Dion's shoe size, has now been devoted to filling my face with delectables from Seattle restaurants that I have never tried before!

Where have you been eating, you ask? Well, for one, Hillside Quickie up on Capitol Hill. I have read reviews and passed by this vegan sandwich (yeah, that's right, more sandwiches) shop a baker's dozen times, but never stopped in. For two reasons:

1.) When it comes to vegetarian and vegan food, I prefer creative combinations of real veggies, legumes, tofu, pasta and rice, as opposed to those creepy curtains of wrinkly fake meat.

2.) Vegan food, especially sandwiches, tend to be B-L-A-N-D. Blandwiches, if you will.

But boy did I feel sheepish after taking my first bite at Hillside Quickie! After spending a secretary's lunch break deciding what to order ("Ooooh, look at that one! Fire roasted yam sammich?! Jamaican spiced tofu wrap?!") I finally settled on the Purple Haze:

Cushy rosemary focaccia managed to bookend an absolutely enormous sandwich filled with smoky slabs of soft eggplant, seitan steak, sweet grilled onions, and barely cooked, crisp bell peppers. This was a vegan sandwich with FLAVOR! With DEPTH! It was messy and drippy and threatened to disassemble at any moment, which are all the signs of a superb sandwich.

I am often lured into ordering a main course based on the sexiness of its side dish, and at Hillside Quickie my seitan stack was not accompanied by plain-old ordinary chips or potato salad. No sir. Piled up beside my teetering sandwich was a lovely lump of creamy risotto. It seemed to maybe possibly perhaps be made out of quinoa, and it seemed to be much better than the sticky, gooey "risottos" I've tasted at fine Seattle restaurants over the past year.

So the next time you accidentally drop your laptop in the toilet, or get busted for pilfering your next door neighbors Internet - seize the opportunity! Don't mope! Eat! Eateateat! Even if you're scared of potentially wrinkled up fake meat.