Events
- This weekend marks the seventh annual Seattle Cheese Festival at Pike Place Market. It includes cooking demonstrations, a little Mozzerella making and, of course, some cheese tasting. The event runs from 10 a.m .to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday with cheese tasting in the market’s main thoroughfare and demonstrations nearby.
- Chowder lovers can get their fix at the 15th annual Seattle Waterfront Chowder Cookoff. For $5, you get taste-tests at nine establishments along the waterfront, (yes, including Ivar’s). Tasting goes from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Also on the waterfront will be the Seattle Luxury Chocolte Salon, which runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center.
- For those who are in love with some of the new flavors traveling around cities on four wheels, Elliott Bay Books and Richard Hugo House on Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. will co-host several food trucks as part of a meet-and-greet for food author Heather Shouse, who recently wrote “Food Trucks; Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels.” The trucks — Maximus Minimus, Skillet, and Hallava Faladel — will be at the Hugo House parking lot at 1634 Eleventh Avenue
Longest Book Wait?
Foodies may have heard that the Seattle library wait for “Modernist Cuisine” was long. At a cost of nearly $500 ($461 on Amazon.com) the five-volume compilation of photos, recipes and modern cooking techniques, few beyond wealthy foodies or serious chefs can afford to purchase the buzzworthy set. But it appears the wait is more than just long. It is a decade long, according to Seattle Eater. I have no idea what the longest wait time is for any book (Google was little help), but 10 years has to be close, right?
As a local note for those of us in Kitsap, though the local libraries do have a long list of cookbooks, Modernist Cuisine is not among them because of the high cost ($625 for the library) and its weight (46.3 pounds) makes it impractical, according to the library’s nonfiction materials selector.
History of Food Blogs
Saveur magazine recently compiled a timeline of food blogs, including snippets from what may be the first posts of such classics as Seattle’s Orangette, and Gluten Free Girl and many others.
Check Please
According to Slate.com, a Palo Alto, Calif. company has created a tablet to let you order and pay for your meal. The company is targeting chain-style restaurants, the not-so-fancy but better-than-fast-food type.. The story describes it thus:
“The Presto aspires to be the food-services version of the airline check-in kiosk or the ATM or the self-checkout at your local pharmacy. It makes a person’s job a computer’s job, and that cuts costs. Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table—making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.”
While I can understand that the usually low-profit restaurant market could benefit from a boost in profits, and while I can admit to the occasional annoyance of servers with one too many pieces of flair, I’m not so sure about this idea. Can the app really be smart enough to let me ask for my dressing on the side? Who will answer all my mundane questions? So, I’ll wait and see.
