thanksgiving in seattle

my first thanksgiving in seattle was a quiet success. my parents came out for a few days and declined our cozy guestroom for the beautiful pan pacific hotel. this hotel is pretty darn fancy and in a great little complex in the south/west lake area. it's located in a very convenient location and is attached to a whole foods and starbucks. what could beat that? one of the hotel restaurants is seastar, where we lunched one day. this place is probably the most formal restaurant i've been to in seattle. recently, i've taken to constant dressing down (i know, a pity) to fit in with the casual seattle style (not to mention my shopping budget of $0). so, of course i showed up to lunch in jeans and a waffle shirt. i told my parents (dad donning tie and sport coat and mom wearing lipstick) that they were too dressed up for seattle, and my dad pointed out that everyone in the restaurant was dressed up (bow ties and all). attire aside, the food was excellent. i highly recommend the coconut pie for dessert. so good that it made my mom unable to eat for 2 days. no sarcasm here. we literally gorged ourselves on that pie (i focused on the filling of course!). thankfully she was able to eat again just in time for the thanksgiving feast!

i decided to go pretty traditional this year, as it was my first "solo" attempt at cooking the entire meal. it is important to note than anthony was a tremendous help, thus the "solo." my proudest achievement was baking my very first pie from scratch! too bad i don't like pie! the rest of the menu included carrot soup, blue cheese and walnut biscuits, deviled eggs, herb-roasted turkey, thyme and parmesan mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce with orange zest, and gravy to top it all off. the pie was a twist on a classic: pumpkin swirled with dark chocolate. here are some pics of the pie process:

we're now trying to figure out how to spend our first new year's eve in the northwest. but first, stay tuned for christmas in seattle!

it's been too long...

i think about this blog almost every day, but just haven't put the time into it that i should be. so here i am, trying to play catch up.

halloween: this year we did halloween in style at the seattle symphony. we went to benaroya hall for the first time to watch the symphony play along to alfred hitchcock's psycho. isn't the auditorium beautiful? the movie was played on a big screen while the musicians played throughout the show. it was pretty incredible and hard to believe that they were playing live.

the next evening we went to "trolloween" in our very own neighborhood. apparently the fremont troll's (a huge stone troll that lives under the aurora bridge) birthday is on halloween, and this year he turned 20! we somehow ended up in a parade through the neighborhood and saw some interesting sights. this creature had huge bat-like wings and was on stilts. this was particularly impressive as there were hundreds of people marching along in the parade up and down the hills of seattle.

birthday: the weekend after halloween was anthony's birthday, and his mom came out to join us for the festivities. we had the amazing opportunity to attend the show at cafe nordo. chef nordo travels the country with his actor/servers, celebrating the life and death of the chicken. don't call it dinner theater; apparently nordo cringes at the thought. you MUST read this article about "the modern american chicken." here, in seattle, the theo chocolate warehouse (theo is a blog post all in its own right!) was turned into a little cafe/farm/psychedelic stage. each course was based on a life stage of a chicken, and each was fantastic. the actors were each assigned a table and were very interactive. i was chosen to be the chicken carver of our table and ended up dropping the chicken in the center of the table. wonderful. dessert was a rather morbid interpretation of bloody gizzards, but was delicious none-the-less. at the end of the evening they brought out baby chicks that were just too cute to resist! i later learned that they were destined to become soup. i'm leaning towards vegetarianism with each passing day.

it's still autumn here, but i'm starting to get the idea that the winter will indeed be cloudy and rainy. we get a sunny day at least once a week still and many days have at least an hour or two of sun. i try to get out during those times. it's been nicer that i expected, but it's only november. i hear that by february i'll be clamoring to get out of here. stay tuned for my winter distractions.