A day off.

When I was five, I took ballet classes, like just about every other girl my age. After ballet class my mom would often take me to the Wallingford Center, a small shopping center in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. (Or perhaps after kindergarten classes were done for the day and the rest of the afternoon was still before us. After more than twenty years, it is hard to remember all these details). In those days (when I was tiny and cute and had bangs, none of which applies now) the Wallingford Center was as big as a world, big enough to get lost in for hours. I have not been back for many years, and it is with a shock that I find it to be so much smaller than I remember. Now it seems that there are only a handful of shops (selling fancy yogawear and children's toys and the sort of vaguely Asian home furnishings that people buy for extraordinary amounts of money so their houses look like they belong to someone cultured and well-traveled). The past rolls over me like a wave, and for a moment I am so drowned in memories I want to sit down and weep.

But I am hungry, and it is lunchtime, and I leave the past behind, heading downstairs to the Indian restaurant for buffet. There are only a handful of tables occupied in the large room; it is nearly one in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Two buffets are laid out; one with salads and other cold things, another with the hot foods. There are curries and rice dishes, all sorts of things in drippy sauces that I can't identify, flat half-moons of naan. I grab some chicken korma and vegetable biriyani, soupy dal and tiny beef meatballs in some creamy sauce, add some naan to sop up all the sauces. I eat my lunch - it is all very good, even if I am not sure of what I'm eating - and listen to the conversations around me, and watch the food network on the tv hanging over the bar. But the real reason for my pilgrimage to the Wallingford Center - not a visit to my past, not Indian food, not buying vast armoires made of dark wood and detailed with brass fittings - is upstairs. Cupcakes, from Trophy Cupcakes and Party.

Facing the entrance on the main level is Trophy, open to the main hall and another outside exit in the rear, a gleaming counter that curves around to display trays of cupcakes of all kinds. There are a handful of choices that are available every day - vanilla with chocolate icing, chocolate with vanilla frosting, red velvet, and triple chocolate - and another rotating roster of flavors, and I am dizzy with choice. I choose one peanut-butter-and-jelly one for myself, and a vanilla-frosted chocolate one for C., and then, impulsively, choose two tiny ones to eat immediately, a green tea one, and a chai-cardamom one. There are old-fashioned diner tables and chairs (upholstered in pale aqua) behind the racks of cards and party favors and games (they sell party supplies as well as cupcakes), each table sporting a little nosegay of fresh flowers.

The green tea and chai cardamom cupcakes are wonderful, one cool and with the slight dustiness of green tea, the other sweet and a little spicy. The cakes are moist and the frosting creamy but not too rich. I have to struggle to save the other cakes for later. It is not until after dinner that I give in and eat my peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcake, which has a plain yellow cake, with a dab of jelly and peanut butter at the bottom, and peanut butter frosting capped with jam frosting. Heaven. I wish I had not told C. that I would bring her a cupcake tomorrow. But I have had enough, perhaps more than is good for me. I will just have to go back again for more.

Saturday Lark.

Just before lunch today, the sizzle and smell of frying radish-cake (made with shredded Daikon radish, rice flour, and bits of ham or sausage) was filling the air, making me drool. I stuck my head around the door to tell my boss that the thing I will miss most when she moves out of the living quarters attached to the lab (long story) and back into her remodeled home is when her cleaning lady makes lunch for us. She laughed. But it's true. I will miss lunches of brown rice and stir-fried vegetables and those soft squares of radish-cake with a crisp, fragile crust seared on in patches from the hot pan. It's different from the radish-cake (or turnip-cake) you get at dim sum restaurants, lighter and crisper and less greasy, and instead of a few squares to be shared with the rest of the table, there is a mountain of it, enough for you to eat as much as you like, but not too much, because there is still dinner ahead.

And then it is time for dinner, as always, at Lark. I have time to run home and change into something marginally more presentable, to exchange my backpack for a handbag, to grab the grocery list so I can go shopping afterwards. K. is not there. F. remembers that I was there for the Whole Beast dinner some weeks ago, asks if I liked my dining companions. I told them that they were wonderful, and he tells me what I have only recently begun to understand, that the company is as important as the food. It is true. Fifteen courses would have seemed an eternity if I had been seated with stuffy bores, or arrogant assholes, but the people I had dinner with that night were lovely, warm and friendly and vastly entertaining.

One of the specials that night was a twist on shrimp cocktail, shell-on shrimp served with a trio of sauces, half a pound or a whole pound. The shrimp are small and sweet, some still filled with their roe. The sauces are ginger lime, saffron aïoli, and freshly made cocktail sauce. The ginger lime is a little spicy and a little sweet; the aïoli is creamy and intensely fragrant from the saffron - so intense it seems to seep straight into my skin - and the cocktail sauce is, well, cocktail sauce (but very good, house-made). I fling bits of shrimp shells far and wide, it seems, until J. rescues me with a damp napkin. It feels vaguely gluttonous to sit here with a plate of shrimp all to myself, but then, that is the triumph and the tragedy of dining alone.

For my main course I choose the gigli pasta, frilled on one side and straight on the other, curled around fat green English peas and shreds of duck confit, with tiny caramelized onions and a creamy sauce. Perhaps the sauce might have been better had it been less creamy; it overwhelms the other ingredients with its richness. Still, it is very tasty, perhaps better than very tasty, and I eat every last bite of pasta, every last shred of duck confit, chasing the fat green peas around the bowl with my fork. Time for dessert.

For once I can't make up my mind, whether to have the chocolate madeleines - the memory of those lemon ones still lingering in my mind - or the lemon parfait, or the malt ice cream. But I go for the coconut sorbet. It is thrilling, a little creamy, but not too creamy, and very smooth, atop shaved coconut, crunchy sweet black rice, tiny cubes of fresh mango, capped with a paper-thin slice of dried mango, crisp and tart, against a background of exotically colored and therefore unidentifiable sauces splashed across the plate. I'll be back for more, soon.

This bread will change your life.

It started with an article in The New York Times, back in the fall of 2006. Mark Bittman had (and still has) a column entitled The Minimalist; what could be more minimalist than bread? Flour, water, some sort of leavening, salt, and time. And yet I never made bread; I don't have the patience, I hate kneading, and I hate messing about with yeasts and warm water and worrying whether the water was too hot or too cold, or if the bread would rise or not. Any bread-making experiment tended to leave every surface of the kitchen scattered with flour and a mountain of dirty bowls in the sink. I would run over to the rising dough (left on the dining-room heater; the radiators in our house were covered with wooden cases that made convenient benches and places to pile magazines and clothes) every ten minutes or so to see if anything was happening. Besides, artisanal bakeries were opening all over Seattle. Why make it at home when you could get a crusty loaf just about anywhere, even the supermarket?

Mark Bittman's recipe, adapted from Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery, promised no-fail bread that produced a golden, crusty round loaf with a stupefyingly simple recipe that combined a very wet dough, a very long rise, and absolutely no kneading. It seemed easy enough. I had a Le Creuset french oven, which would work for baking the bread (the recipe calls for any cast-iron, enamel, ceramic, or Pyrex covered pot). But somehow I never got around to it. Other recipes appeared, in Vogue, in Cook's Illustrated. I started taking the idea of making bread seriously. But it was Nancy Leson, of The Seattle Times, who wrote about her version - the Cook's Illustrated version - and told her readers to go forth and bake this weekend. And this time, I did.

I went to the grocery store Saturday night after dinner, ticking things off my list, fruit, vegetables, bacon, sausages, juice, flour, yeast. Ice cream. I came home and began measuring flour into a bowl, water in a measuring jug. Whisked the flour together with yeast and salt, poured in the water, stirred it all with a spatula. It came together in a shaggy mass, just as the recipe said it would, and then gathered itself into wet ball of dough. I covered it with plastic wrap, set it in a warm corner near the water heater, and went to bed. In the morning it had started to bubble and spread out in the bottom of the bowl; when I came home in the afternoon (some eighteen hours after I had first mixed it together) it had swollen into a loose, bubbly mass. I turned it onto a floured wooden board and folded the wet dough over onto itself a couple of times, pulled it into a ball and somehow scraped it onto a towel. It was fun. The bread rose for a second time, dusted in flour and wheat bran, covered in a towel, this time on the warm windowsill for almost two hours. I preheated the pot in the oven, which alarmed me a little, since the plastic knob on the lid isn't supposed to withstand anything higher than 400º, and I had the oven cranked up to 450º. Never mind. I poured the dough into the heated pot and slashed a big X on the top, gingerly replaced the lid, and shoved the entire thing back into the oven.

The smell of baking bread, of toasted wheat bran and flour, filled my apartment. The timer went "ding," and I ran to check. It had formed a perfect round loaf, with a crisp, golden crust, and I put it back to bake without the lid until it had browned further. I let it cool for at least twenty minutes before I could stand it no longer and sliced the bread open. It was perfect - a thick crust, an airy, white interior with a light crumb. The bread was soft and warm and the crust crackled between my teeth; I ate one slice, then another, and then a third. It could have been higher; I could have used more salt, added whole-wheat flour. Next time it will be even better.

Thursday Quinn's.

I often wind up at Quinn's on Thursday evenings. They open for dinner at 5, which means I can swing by after Pilates for a burger or fish-and-chips or their gnocchi with oxtail before heading home. Already I have eaten there so often it seems like I could walk there with my eyes closed, find my way through the door, past the bar, to one of the tables downstairs or in the upstairs mezzanine. The menu is full of familiar things, the tasty homemade pretzel with cheese sauce, the wild boar Sloppy Joe. It feels like this wood-lined, airy space with large windows onto the street has stood on this street corner for as long as I can remember, even though it has only been about six months since my first dinner here. I wonder if I should try something new, or if I should go back to one of my old favorites. Then I notice the rabbit pot pie on the menu, and I feel myself waver. My server tells me that it is fantastic, and she is so enthusiastic I believe her.

The rabbit pot-pie arrives in a white ramekin on a long, rectangular plate, the pie capped with a biscuit that is like no other biscuit I have ever seen. Less like a biscuit and more like a golden puff of air. Sprinkled with sea salt, it dissolves into golden flakes as I bite into it, and I turn instead to the savory rabbit stew beneath. It is a little like the rabbit shepherd's pie I had at Lark recently (only at Lark the pie was topped with mashed potatoes instead of biscuit), the same creamy sauce that seems to have a little mustard in it, only here the rabbit is cut into chunks instead of shreds. I wish I had some bread to dip into the sauce, or perhaps another biscuit, but I am distracted by the baby vegetables arranged like a still life on the other side of the plate. There is a spear of asparagus and some cauliflower florets and baby carrots and what appear to be radishes, gently roasted until just crisp-tender.

Meanwhile the dining room has been filling up with other diners, steady regulars and newcomers, and the din rises, as it always does. I have finished my rabbit pie but don't feel like something sweet; instead I order a pretzel. I love their pretzels, soft and chewy, sprinkled with coarse salt and served with a cheesy beer sauce, or a beer-y cheese sauce. I break apart my pretzel and eat it, dipping each bite into the cheese sauce, listening to the different threads of conversations around me, invisible to others, tucked into my corner table. I have a book but leave it unread in my bag; I don't need it. I can be alone with my food, and be happy.

This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about.*

I woke up to sunshine and clear skies; it is a perfect day to drive up to the Skagit Valley to see the tulips while they are still in season. I drink my tea and eat my breakfast (ok, so I ate the last brownie from Wednesday's batch) and gather my things, wallet and keys and tissues, two digital cameras and my cell phone, a scarf and a jacket in case it gets cool. Not likely on such a beautiful day. It is just me and my car (which seldom gets driven these days) and the freeway ahead of me. The traffic is light, the music is good, the gas tank is full (after a gaspingly expensive fill-up before I set out), and even though I only have the vaguest idea of where I am going, I am not worried. I'll find the tulips. Or they will find me.

There is no traffic, just the freeway ahead, and I see familiar exits flash by as I drive on, farther than I have ever driven by myself before, the exit for my old high school, the exit for the ferry for Whidbey Island, the outlet mall where we go on our biannual shopping expeditions. Eventually I see signs for the tulip fields, and pull off towards the town of Conway, which sports various general stores and cafés and a pub and several antique stores. Little signs point the way to "Tulip Info" and I follow one into a sort of antiques/auction barn where a helpful woman highlights a free map and circles various fields. There are guided tours and helicopter rides and markets, and I thank her and head back out on the road. It is a beautiful drive, winding roads leading over wooded ridges and wide expanses of fields; a clear day means that I can see the Cascade mountains in the distance. I pass a grocery store attached to a little café, the shelves of the store filled with exotic canned foods and imported cookies and crackers, all sorts of things like smoked oysters and tinned pâtes and pasta in fancy shapes.

Large roadside stands proffer potted plants and organic fruits and vegetables and fresh seafood, but I press on. I pass an endless field of daffodils, from a distance a blur of dazzling yellow, and know that I am nearly there. Across the road from one of the main tulip fields is a nearly-empty parking lot, so I stop there instead of the crammed lot next to the field. And then the endless fields of tulips stretch before me, a sea of purple and pink and red flowers planted in neat rows that seem to stretch all the way to the mountains at the far end of the horizon. Knots of people pause to take pictures of each other kneeling between the rows of tulips; small children run around until they are told to pose adorably, shoulders just above the nodding heads of the flowers. I make my way clear across a patch of pink tulips before I reach the main path and notice the sign that says "PLEASE DO NOT WALK BETWEEN THE ROWS." Oops.

After I take about a hundred pictures of tulips from different angles, I head off to find some lunch, and wind up eating bread and soup at a little French bakery in Anacortes. I head to the wine shop recommended by the couple I sat with at the Lark Whole Beast dinner last week (it is owned by their son) and am immediately greeted with the offer of some Cava, which I decline because I still have to drive back to Seattle and my navigational skills are fuzzy even when unclouded by alcohol. This is a serious wine shop, stocked with a dizzying array of Washington state wines, as well as offerings from Oregon, California, France, and basically any place that produces wine. Or so it seems.

On the way back I stop at something called The Pie Barn. They have all kinds of pies, rhubarb and strawberry rhubarb and peach and apple and blueberry, baked and ready to go, or frozen for you to bake at home. But what I want is ice cream, chocolate brownie or lemon or Spumoni or Blackberry Revel or Huckleberry cheesecake. I am torn between the latter two, but the kind lady behind the counter advises that I go for the cheesecake. I choose that one, and she scoops a bit of the blackberry on top as well, so I can taste it. It is very good, but the cheesecake ice cream is better. After I finish my ice cream, it's time to head home. I get stuck in traffic, but it is a beautiful day and I have a pile of cds to listen to, and it is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about, which is not exactly true. I have plenty to think about, like how next time I will come earlier in the day, and figure out ahead of time where to have lunch so I don't wander around indecisively at two in the afternoon, but how it was a beautiful day, the perfect day for a long drive.

*with apologies to Modest Mouse for appropriating the title to one of their albums.

Dining Out For Life. Quinn's Pub.

Tonight is the fifteenth annual Dining Out for Life event, where participating restaurants across the nation donate a portion of the day's proceeds to benefit AIDS charities. In Seattle's case, today's event benefits the Lifelong AIDS Alliance, a local organization that helps people living with HIV/AIDS. Lifelong's headquarters are in my neighborhood; I walk past every day on my way to and from work (and often buy books at their thrift store). When I pass the poster in the window at Quinn's Pub, I know that on April 24th I will go there for dinner. I don't really need any excuse to eat there, but knowing that a portion of my bill will go to Lifelong is just a little extra incentive.

When I walk in just after five, there seems to be a bit of a buzz in the air; usually it's still quiet when I have an early dinner. Most of the tables downstairs are filled; by the time I order my dinner all the tables are taken, and there are only a few seats open at the bar. I order a pretzel with a Pétrus rarebit sauce and fish and chips, the fish and chips I've been craving for more than a week now. As I wait for my dinner I see plates coming out to other tables, laden with mysterious things I don't recognize, many involving little haystacks of salads and piles of toast, white porcelain bowls filled with pâtés and dips, heaps of house-made chips. My pretzel arrives, resting atop a small dish of rarebit sauce, cheesy and slightly alcoholic. I break off bits of pretzel and dip it into the sauce, although the pretzel is so good it doesn't really need the sauce. On the other hand, the sauce is so good I could probably eat it straight from a spoon.

I see that the woman a few tables away has also ordered the fish and chips, along with a dish of sautéed spinach, which seems like a good idea to me, so I order one too. The fish and chips arrive, one huge piece of golden-crusted fish lightly sprinkled with sea salt. There is malt vinegar, and aïoli sauce (which disappoints me, because I like tartar sauce with my fish and chips), and ketchup for the fries. I eat all my fish and spinach, and some of my fries, because I have reached that horrible point in my twenties when I can no longer eat fish *and* chips, much the way I can no longer have a burger and fries, which is a very sad feeling indeed. One of the servers tells me that the fries stand up pretty well in the fridge, and boxes them up for me - that's lunch for tomorrow sorted - but I think I have a little room left for dessert.

I order the panna cotta, and when my server brings it, she says that she told the chef that plated it, This looks like an 80's Trapper-Keeper! The panna cotta anchors a white rectangular plate swirled with a lime-basil balm and a rhubarb sauce, bright green and rosy pink, scattered with tiny cubes of intensely bright mango; the flavors of the sauces and fruit against the creamy panna cotta are as vivid as the colors. I think I did have a trapper-keeper that looked like this plate. Pink and green were the colors in the late eighties. I do remember a sweater patterned in pink and orange and green, possibly hints of aqua and black, that I wore with black leggings and Keds.

Those were the days.

The Whole Beast Supper. part two. (scroll down for part one).

By now, we are halfway through dinner, but none of us shows signs of flagging. The third wave brings tender pork cheeks in a spicy broth with ramps and cubes of pineapple, which are sweet and hot at the same time. Slices of lamb tongue are tossed with finely shaved cauliflower - a technique I remember from the asparagus salad that came with a rabbit loin last spring - and crunchy sliced almonds. This method of preparing cauliflower, as with the asparagus, gives it a different dimension, changing its flavor and texture into something unexpected; its sweetness is intensified with the sharp acidity of capers. We each have a crepinette - a round, flat sausage of lamb and pine nuts wrapped in caul fat. There are slices of kidneys - which kind, I am not sure - laid across a bed of basmati rice with tender green asparagus. A ten-minute recess is called, and people get up to walk around a little. Strangely, I am satisfied but not stuffed. But there is one more wave to go.

First, there are tiny espresso cups with a grapefruit-Campari ice to cleanse the palate. It it an electric deep orange, and goes to my head like a jolt of espresso, settling my stomach like a good digestif. It reminds me of my first meal at Rover's, more than a decade ago, where they served a red wine sorbet flavored with herbs, and what a revelation that had been. I resolve to buy a bottle of Campari and experimenting with different juices, to start my own tradition of a cocktail hour at the end of the day. (It will probably never happen). There are only three more dishes, and then a dessert. People who were complete strangers three hours ago seem like old friends; one thing alone has brought us here together - a love of food - but we are finding all sorts of other interests in common, besides a sense of adventure and a profound trust in the chef. We eat at the same restaurants, but come here most often. At Lark, there is a sense of warmth and friendliness, of inventiveness grounded by consistency in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else. It isn't enough that the food is good, or even that it is consistently fantastic; part of the pleasure of being here is the relaxed ambiance, the complete lack of pretension, the obvious passion for food carried by everyone here. It's why I come back again and again; I always find something new, but it's always the best version I've ever had, whether it be a rabbit shepherd's pie or osso buco or a simply grilled fish.

The final wave begins with lamb kofta, tiny meatballs with carrots of all colors floating on a cloud of couscous. The couscous is as light and delicate as it was the last time I had it here, soaking up all the juices on my plate. The lamb sweetbread ravioli are basically much bigger versions of the agnolotti I had a couple of dinners ago, but with sweetbreads instead of ground veal. Somehow, miraculously, the sweetbreads are crisp-chewy inside the pasta dough; the fat green peas and pinky-nail-sized fava beans tell us that despite the cold weather, it is spring. The last dish is pork tongue dolce forte, pork braised in wine with prunes and goodness knows what else. The sauce is rich and dark and tangy with something I can't figure out, and I want more. The fact that I am now full is completely immaterial.

Before dessert the chef and his staff come out to rapturous applause. Everyone has worked on the menu together, and you can see influences from all over the world, which gives the whole meal a certain unpredictability; there was a certain lightness to it, but each element was tied to the next by the consistent precision of a group of chefs who really know what they're doing. A plate of crackling chocolate cookies comes around, chewy and dark and dusted lightly with powdered sugar. Warm lemon madeleines arrive wrapped in a napkin, with a creamy custard sauce on the side, and they are perfect, sweet and golden with molten centers. Having been severely traumatized by a plate of very stale madeleines some years ago, I have not been able to eat lemon madeleines since. Until now.

I pay my bill - it is the most expensive dinner I have ever eaten without someone else paying, and I am glad my parents are not here to witness my gluttony; after all, they taught me to enjoy food, so it is mostly because of them I am here tonight - and say goodbye to my new friends. We'll see each other again.